University of Wisconsin Professor Joel Rogers wants to build a lefty alternative to the ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. He recently hit up some of his students for help with the project, while they were waiting for their grades in his class.

This from our first article in an ongoing investigation conducted by the MacIver News Service. Future stories will focus on any official reaction we receive from the University and an indepth look at Rogers’ Center on Wisconsin Strategy.

Joel Rogers Says College Credits May Be Available to Those Who Help Build Liberal Alternative to ALEC

[Madison, Wisc…] One of the University of Wisconsin’s most renowned liberal professors attempted to recruit his students to work on an elaborate private political project while final grades in their class were pending, the MacIver News Service has learned.

At the conclusion of his end-of-the-year email to his UW Law School students, Professor Joel Rogers wrote: “I think I mentioned a little project I’m doing now — which thus far involves professors from such crummy law schools as Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Virgina [sic] and elsewhere, but thus far, beyond your lonesome, NOBODY from UW — to build a partial counter to ALEC. It’s going to involve a lot of law students. If you’re interested in helping out with that (no money, but possible credit), or know of somebody else who might be, please let me, or even better, “Nate Ela” <nela@cows.org>, a lawyer and now sociology grad student, know. Project description attached.“

Rogers is the Director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, educational, and charitable organization. COWS was founded in 1992 by Rogers, a professor of Law, Political Science, and Sociology at UW-Madison and a longtime commentator on economic development and democratic institutions. COWS is based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Social Science Building.

(more…)

According to a Poll Position survey conducted in late October, 45 percent of Americans said “No” when asked whether the U.S. government should stop helping to fund NPR; 39 percent said “Yes.” Only those respondents identifying themselves as Republicans favored, by a 54 percent to 28 percent margin, ending taxpayer support for NPR.

Given that the federal budget is more than $1 trillion in the red and that deficits extend into the future as far as the eye can see, federal subsidies to public broadcasting understandably are on the table.

The just-released report of President Obama’s deficit-reduction commission recommends diverse measures to put Washington’s fiscal house in order, including a $100 billion reduction in defense spending, a substantial increase in the federal excise tax on gasoline, ending of the tax deductibility of home mortgage interest payments and eliminating all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Federal funding of public radio and television seems to be comparatively small potatoes in the larger budget picture.

This year, for example, congressional appropriations for CPB, the primary channel through which tax dollars are funneled to PBS television and NPR, amounted to $422 million.

At a time when economic stimulus programs, financed primarily by borrowing and the Federal Reserve’s recently announced second round of “quantitative easing,” total in the trillions, who could object to spending a mere few hundred million dollars to support the production and distribution of public programming? Well, I do!

(more…)

The left-wing architects of the subprime mortgage collapse have yet to be called to account.

Much has already been written about the possibly criminal conduct of Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who relentlessly gamed the political system to clear the way for their friends at government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make billions at the expense of taxpayers, but very little has been written about the role that their liberal friends and allies in the private and nonprofit sectors played in bringing the U.S. economy to its knees.

Funded by huckster John Paulson and predatory lending kingpins Herb & Marion Sandler (who also gave generously to ACORN through the years), the inappropriately named Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) laid the foundation for the current financial crisis.

The media seems barely to have noticed that CRL’s puppet, Eric Stein, is now leading the Obama administration’s push to Sovietize the American banking system. Stein, who is now the U.S. Treasury’s deputy secretary for consumer protection, was previously a vice president at CRL.

(more…)

Attorney General Eric Holder has made it abundantly clear he has absolutely no interest in investigating his radical friends at ACORN.

Holder’s Justice Department released a legal opinion last week that allows the Obama administration to ignore the will of Congress which has voted overwhelmingly to suspend federal funding of ACORN until at least Dec. 18. He’s also ignored the 88-page report on ACORN’s systemic corruption and flagrant racketeering activities that was issued this summer by Republican investigators on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Apparently, public outrage at the continuing antics of the corrupt radical advocacy group that used to employ President Obama and White House political director Patrick Gaspard counts for nothing.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (center) with ACORN ally Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (left), and former California Gov. Gray Davis (right).

But Americans really shouldn’t be surprised that Attorney General Holder is bending over backwards to help his radical friends at ACORN.

(more…)

We’ve always given at least bit of credence to the theory that the most interesting stories in the Washington Post and New York Times run on Saturday, when editors try to dump any real reporting that happens to slip through their filters. This Saturday, the Washington Post added another data point supporting this theory with decent reporting on ACORN’s troubles with its big donors:

The liberal political organizing group ACORN, battered by the release of embarrassing videos and allegations of financial mismanagement and fraud, has also been losing support from several major foundations.

The Ford Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Bank of America have stopped funding the group and its affiliates over the past year and a half.

Read the whole article here.