BIG CHANGES AT THE CHRISTIAN COALITION-- NO ONE BELIEVES IN THEIR BULL ANYMORE BUT BUSHCO (AND THEY'RE ONLY MAKIN' BELIEVE)
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Religionist fanatics are mad at their man Bushie because his clearly anti-choice nominee for the Supreme Court, to the seat that could change "the balance," is not clear enough or loud enough or so wild-eyed and crazed that she could spark a serious backlash-- however unlikely-- from the quiescent Democratic wing (+ the 3 or 4 "moderates" left in the GOP) of the ruling corporatocracy. And they just may get their way! There is more and more talk about the Regime flushing this one the same way they flushed Flanigan.
The irony of all this is that the hardcore religionist right is losing influence, credibility and power everywhere EXCEPT inside the Bush Regime. Pat Robertson has become a punchline on late night TV and his every statement is an embarrassment for serious ministers and people of actual faith. The Christian Coalition, which he founded, is two steps ahead of a myriad of collection agencies for unpaid bills. Their annual income has plummeted worse than Bush's poll approval numbers-- from a peak of $26 million in 1996 to just over a million in 2004 (with a $200,000 deficit for the year). The "Red States" are all a lot redder from the Coalition's unpaid bills blanketing the whole former Confederacy. They're being sued in courts all over the country by dozens of vendors and creditors for non-payment of debts. No wonder they and their front organizations were so eager to get their paws on taxpayer dollars meant for Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi and Louisiana!
Apart from Robertson, who resigned as President in 2001, the other famous Christian Coalition personality, former Executive Director Ralph Reed, is now getting even more famous for his crooked dealings with indicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff whom Reed helped bilk millions of dollars from several Indian tribes. The Christian Coalition's problems go deeper than pernicious political hacks like Robertson and Reed. When 10 African-American employees who filed a racial discrimination lawsuit because they were forced to enter the office by the back door and eat in a segregated area, the Christian Coalition paid them $300,000 to prevent the suit from going to court and to stop the bad publicity. Meanwhile they're being sued by everyone from their former landlords, who they bilked for over $75,000 to Pitney-Bowes, Federal Express, several direct mail firms, audio and lighting vendors for a DeLay rally they put on, lots of unpaid ex-employees, and even their longtime (former) law firm, Huff, Poole & Mahoney, which has already won an uncollected judgment against them.
Meanwhile the chairman of the Christian Coalition of Oregon, Louis Beres, has joined a long list of pious hypocrites on the religionist right charged with child molesting. Beres, who was also the chairman of the Multnomah County Republican Party, molested at least 3 female members of his own family, one of whom was in elementary school at the time, may escape prosecution on a technicality. According to Beres' nephew, when law enforcement authorities were told that Beres was molesting children-- for over two generations-- his family was made to go through "hell. Lives have been ruined. Those of us who have come forward have been ostracized, verbally abused and the victims of character assassination." And that, sadly is what the Christian Coalition is all about today: staying ahead of the bill collectors, molesting defenseless children and, of course (no change here) preaching hatred and GOP politics and scaring the hell out of people.
5:30PM UPDATE-
By the way, I'm not trying to say that the only people who sexually molest small children are Republican leaders in Oregon. Oh, no. Republican leaders in Kentucky need to be kept away from kids too. WYMT ran with an interesting little story about the Republican Party's ex-leader in Floyd County, Bobby Stumbo (a recently defeated GOP candidate for Kentucky's House of Representatives). He was charged with sexually abusing a five year old boy. I know Republicans have trouble relating to other human beings on an equal, one-on-one basis... but a FIVE YEAR OLD CHILD??? I mean even for a right-wing loon, this is a bit much!
Police testified it all started when the boy returned home from his father's house and sat down with his mother. "He kissed her, and when he kissed her, he stuck his tongue in her mouth. She asked him where he learned that, and the child told her Bobby did that to him, talking about Bobby Stumbo," Detective Byron Hansford said. Police say Stumbo lives with the boy's father, but he was alone with the child at the time. Stumbo, in true Republican fashion, denies everything, of course. A judge doesn't agree and the case is moving forward. Stumbo is out of jail, but he is not allowed within one thousand feet of the five year old boy but that doesn't protect other 5 year olds-- or 4 year olds.
posted by DownWithTyranny @ 11:25 AM
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I feel icky just reading about those wackos and loons at the Christian Fascist Coalition.
Be thankful you don't have to live among them in some scary red area!
There are many who think former Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed's doomed campaign for Georgia Lieutenant Governor could sink the whole Republican ticket there, including the re-election bid of Sonny Perdue who was originally elected the GOP way-- fixing the electronic voting machines. Reed's close ties with the Abramoff-DeLay money machine (which includes, bribery, threats, bilking of American Indians, slave labor in the Marianas, gambling enterprises galore and even murder!) are making him toxic in Georgia electoral politics. Today Jim Galloway and Alan Judd did a story in the ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION that goes into Reed's very shady dealings. I thought you might want to look into an examination of a high-profile Republican leader, circa 2005:
Ralph Reed, who has condemned gambling as a "cancer on the American body politic," quietly worked five years ago to kill a proposed ban on Internet wagering — on behalf of a company in the online gambling industry.
Reed, now a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia, helped defeat the congressional proposal despite its strong support among many Republicans and conservative religious groups. Among them: the national Christian Coalition organization, which Reed had left three years earlier to become a political and corporate consultant.
A spokesman for Reed said the political consultant fought the ban as a subcontractor to Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff's law firm. But he said Reed did not know "the specific client" that had hired Abramoff: eLottery Inc., a Connecticut-based company that wants to help state lotteries sell tickets online — an activity the gambling measure would have prohibited.
Reed declined to be interviewed for this article. His aides said he opposed the legislation because by exempting some types of online betting from the ban, it would have allowed online gambling to flourish. Proponents counter that even a partial ban would have been better than no restrictions at all.
Anti-gambling activists say they never knew that Reed, whom they once considered an ally, helped sink the proposal in the House of Representatives. Now some of them, who criticized other work Reed performed on behalf of Indian tribes that own casinos, say his efforts on eLottery's behalf undermine his image as a champion of public morality, which he cultivated as a leader of the religious conservative movement in the 1980s and '90s.
"It flies in the face of the kinds of things the Christian Coalition supports," said the Rev. Cynthia Abrams, a United Methodist Church official in Washington who coordinates a group of gambling opponents who favored the measure. "They support family values. Stopping gambling is a family concern, particularly Internet gambling."
Reed's involvement in the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act of 2000, never previously reported, comes to light as authorities in Washington scrutinize the lobbying activities of Abramoff, a longtime friend who now is the target of several federal investigations.
The eLottery episode echoes Reed's work against a lottery, video poker and casinos in Alabama, Louisiana and Texas: As a subcontractor to two law firms that employed Abramoff, Reed's anti-gambling efforts were funded by gambling interests trying to protect their business.
After his other work with Abramoff was revealed, Reed asserted that he was fighting the expansion of gambling, regardless of who was paying the bills. And he said that, at least in some cases, his fees came from the nongaming income of Abramoff's tribal clients, a point that mollified his political supporters who oppose gambling. With the eLottery work, however, Reed has not tried to draw such a distinction.
By working against the Internet measure, Reed played a part in defeating legislation that sought to control a segment of the gambling industry that went on to experience prodigious growth.
Since 2001, the year after the proposed ban failed, annual revenue for online gambling companies has increased from about $3.1 billion worldwide to an estimated $11.9 billion this year, according to Christiansen Capital Advisers, a New York firm that analyzes market data for the gambling industry.
Through a spokesman, Abramoff declined to comment last week on his work with Reed for eLottery.
Federal records show eLottery spent $1.15 million to fight the anti-gambling measure during 2000. Of that, $720,000 went to Abramoff's law firm at the time, Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds of Washington. According to documents filed with the secretary of the U.S. Senate, Preston Gates represented no other client on the legislation.
Reed's job, according to his campaign manager, Jared Thomas, was to produce "a small run of direct mail and other small media efforts" to galvanize religious conservatives against the 2000 measure. Aides declined to provide reporters with examples of Reed's work. Nor would Thomas disclose Reed's fees.
Since his days with the Christian Coalition, Reed consistently has identified himself as a gambling opponent. Speaking at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington in 1996, for instance, Reed called gambling "a cancer" and a "scourge" that was responsible for "orphaning children ... [and] turning wives into widows."
But when the online gambling legislation came before Congress in 2000, Reed took no public position on the measure, aides say.
In 2004, Reed told the National Journal, a publication that covers Washington politics, that his policy was to turn down work paid for by casinos. In that interview, he did not address working for other gambling interests.
Some anti-gambling activists reject Reed's contention that he didn't know his work against the measure benefited a company that could profit from online gambling.
"It slips over being disingenuous," said the Rev. Tom Grey, executive director of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, who worked for the gambling ban. "Jack Abramoff was known as 'Casino Jack' at the time. If Jack's doling out tickets to this feeding trough, for Ralph to say he didn't know — I don't believe that."
A well-kept secret
When U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) first introduced the Internet gambling ban, in 1997, he named among its backers the executive director of the Christian Coalition: Ralph Reed.
In remarks published in the Congressional Record, Goodlatte said, "This legislation is supported ... across the spectrum, from Ralph Reed to Ralph Nader."
But Reed's role in the ban's failure three years later was a well-kept secret, even from Goodlatte. That's in part because Reed's Duluth-based Century Strategies — a public affairs firm that avoids direct contact with members of Congress — is not subject to federal lobbying laws that would otherwise require the company to disclose its activities.
"We were not aware that Reed was working against our bill," Kathryn Rexrode, a spokeswoman for Goodlatte, said last week.
Several large conservative religious organizations, with which Reed often had been aligned before leaving the Christian Coalition in 1997, joined together to support the legislation. Those groups included the Southern Baptist Convention, the United Methodist Church, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council — and the Christian Coalition.
In addition, four prominent evangelical leaders signed a letter in May 2000 urging Congress to pass the legislation: James Dobson of Focus on the Family; Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition; Jerry Falwell, formerly of the Moral Majority; and Charles Donovan of the Family Research Council.
Among the other supporters: the National Association of Attorneys General, Major League Baseball and the National Association of Convenience Stores, whose members are among the largest lottery ticket sellers.
Opponents, in addition to eLottery and other gambling interests, included the Clinton administration, which argued that existing federal laws were sufficient to combat the problem. In a policy statement, the administration predicted the measure would open a "floodgate for other forms of illegal gambling."
To increase the measure's chances of passage, its sponsors had added provisions that would have allowed several kinds of online gambling — including horse and dog racing and jai alai — to remain legal.
Thomas, Reed's campaign manager, said in a statement last week that those exceptions amounted to an expansion of online gambling: "Under the bill, a minor with access to a computer could have bet on horses and gambled at a casino online."
Thomas' statement claimed that the Southern Baptists and the Christian Coalition opposed the legislation for the same reason as Reed.
Actually, the Southern Baptist Convention lent its name to the group of religious organizations that backed the legislation. But as the measure progressed, the convention became uncomfortable with the exceptions and quietly spread the word that it was neutral, a spokesman said last week.
As for the Christian Coalition, it argued against the exceptions before the vote. But it issued an "action alert" two days after the ban's defeat, urging its members to call Congress and demand the legislation be reconsidered and passed.
In fact, the letter signed by the four evangelical leaders indicated a bargain had been reached with the Christian Coalition and other religious groups. In exchange for accepting "minor" exemptions for pari-mutuel wagering, the evangelicals got what they wanted most — a ban on lottery ticket sales over the Internet. Other anti-gambling activists say the exceptions disappointed them But they accepted the measure as an incremental approach to reining in online gambling.
"We all recognized it wasn't perfect," Abrams, the Methodist official, said last week. "We decided we weren't going to let the best be the enemy of the good."
"Any little thing," she said in an earlier interview, "would have been a victory."
Plans to expand
Founded in 1993, eLottery has provided online services to state lotteries in Idaho, Indiana and Maryland and to the national lottery in Jamaica, according to its Web site. It had plans to expand its business by facilitating online ticket sales, effectively turning every home computer with an Internet connection into a lottery terminal.
The president of eLottery's parent company, Edwin McGuinn, did not respond to recent requests for an interview. Earlier this year, he told The Washington Post that by banning online lottery ticket sales, the 2000 legislation would have put eLottery out of business. "We wouldn't have been able to operate," the Post quoted McGuinn as saying.
Even with Abramoff and other lobbyists arguing against the measure, and Reed generating grass-roots opposition to it, a solid majority of House members voted for the measure in July 2000.
But that wasn't enough. House rules required a two-thirds majority for expedited passage, so the legislation died.
In addition to hiring Abramoff's firm to lobby for the measure's defeat, eLottery paid $25,000 toward a golfing trip to Scotland that Abramoff arranged for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) — then the House majority whip, later the majority leader — several weeks before the gambling measure came up for a vote, according to the Post. Another $25,000 for the trip came from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, an Abramoff client with casino interests, the Post reported. The trip, which is under review by the House Ethics Committee, was not related to DeLay's indictment on a conspiracy charge last week.
The campaign against the Internet gambling ban was one of several successful enterprises in which Abramoff and Reed worked together.
The Choctaws paid for Reed's work in 1999 and 2000 to defeat a lottery and video poker legislation in Alabama. In 2001 and 2002, another Abramoff client that operates a casino, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, put up the money for Reed's efforts in Louisiana and Texas to eliminate competition from other tribes. Reed was paid about $4 million for that work.
Abramoff, once one of Washington's most influential lobbyists, now is under federal indictment in a Florida fraud case and is facing investigations by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and the Justice Department into whether he defrauded Indian tribes he represented, including those that paid Reed's fees. Reed has not been accused of wrongdoing.
Reed and Abramoff have been friends since the early 1980s. That's when Abramoff, as chairman of the national College Republicans organization, hired Reed to be his executive director. Later, Reed introduced Abramoff to the woman he married.
In an interview last month about his consulting business, Reed declined to elaborate on his personal and professional relationships with Abramoff. At one point, Reed was asked if Abramoff had hired him to work for clients other than Indian tribes.
Reed's answer: "Not that I can recall."
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