Boehm. Ken

The NLPC was founded in 1991 with a pump priming injection of $100,000 from Richard Mellon Scaife . The principles clearly have a sense of humour, since they claim that their organization is "non-partisan" and "anti-corruption" — and their logo carries the sub-title"Promoting Ethics in Public Life." Later they add the rider that "NLPC sponsors the<font-color dd2222="dd2222">"Corporate Integrity Project"" .</font-color>

Ken Boehm is a far-right-wing Republican lawyer from Colorado (the home of Joseph Coors) while Peter T Flaherty is a long-time Reagan Republican fund-raiser and think-tanker. In 1991 they co-founded the NLPC with Boehm becoming the full-time 'Chairman' and Flaherty the 'President'.

Most of the actual research work at the NLPC is contractd out or done under the direction of Flaherty who is backed by a staff of ten or so, while Boehm is the public face of the organisation. Given the group's enthusiastic use of the lawcourts to harrass liberals, this is a full-time job for all dozen staffers involved.

These two are old friends. Flaherty ran the lobbying group Citizens for Reagan with Ken Boehm as Chairman (later it became Citizens for the Republic ) in the early-to-mid 1980s. This was closely associated with the Funds for a Conservative Majority (Jack Kemp, Paul Dietrich, Ken Boehm) which was a major fund-raiser for the Ronald Reagan for President campaign during the same period.

Both were Californian-based in the early years, then shifted to Washington after Reagan's successful Presidential campaign. Citizens for Reagan later became a major fund-raiser for Ollie North during the Iran Contra scandal.

The NCLP appears to be modelled both on the Citizens for Reagan and on the FCM, in terms of its use of litigation. It attempts to use law suit harrassment as a weapon against the Democrats by attacking their funding sources and annoying their supporters with frivolous charges. The NCLP carries on these grand old GOP traditions.

Like all good PR operation, it is not always glaringly obvious in its partisanship — and it makes some efforts to pretend it is balanced. On the positive side of its activities, it does attack earmarking in Congress (both Republican and Democrat), and it does have the resources (roughly $1m a year) to identify and expose corrupt activities in Democratic organisations and among certain 'liberal congressmen'.

It achieves a fascade of bipartisanship by occasionally slapping the wrist of a few Republican trough-hogs in public, but it doesn't take them to court. The Democrats are usually slapped with a law suit.

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Boehm now appears regularly on the program Conservative Roundtable with Howard Phillips , another Republican apparatchik who also specialised in attacking the LSC. Boehm has also taken on the role of climate sceptic, attacking a 60 Minutes special "Dire Predictions on Global Warming" as "unilateral" and 'misleading" and questioning the show's motivations for allowing such a piece to air. He is clearly an expert on this form of media distoriton ... so his views deserve respect!

Peter Flaherty co-hosted a NE