Posts Tagged ‘Frank Luntz’

Matthew Vadum

Citizen Soros: Funding Anti-American Film (Part 3 in a Series)

by Matthew Vadum

(Continued from yesterday)

Recap: Radical funder George Soros’s $1 million gift to Media Matters, a left-wing character assassination machine, underwrites its campaign to stigmatize conservative ideas. For weeks Eric Boehlert of Media Matters attacked Glenn Beck because a disturbed viewer plotted to shoot up the offices of the left-wing Tides Foundation. The shooter, Byron Williams, failed, but in December when a fan of Media Matters, the late Florida school board shooter Clay Duke, wreaked havoc, Boehlert and Media Matters remained silent.

Soros is also bankrolling a documentary that celebrates left-wing terrorists who plotted to napalm Republicans at the 2008 GOP convention in Minnesota. Even worse, you too are bankrolling the film through your taxes.

A trailer for the left-wing film Better This World suggests that it depicts David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder as idealistic activists who, according to the official blurb, “set out to prove the strength of their political convictions to themselves and their mentor.” In fact McKay and Crowder are convicted domestic terrorists who manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

You can be sure that if it was right-wing terrorists who were plotting to attack the Democratic National Convention, whoever foiled the conspiracy would be immortalized in film, literature and song as a savior of democracy.

“If you flip the equation around and it had been a group of conservatives threatening to use force to prevent those on the Left from meeting, everyone would expect the government to infiltrate them and they would also expect the FBI to stop them and charge them with crimes,” said Brandon Darby, who helped the FBI thwart the planned attack. (Darby’s essay on political violence appeared on Big Government over the past weekend. Read it here.)

The movie, which is expected to be released this year, attacks Darby, a true American hero who undermined the conspiracy by alerting the FBI. Filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega twist the facts to argue that Darby, a former revolutionary activist, manipulated McKay and Crowder into becoming would-be mass murderers.

It’s an easily disproved lie. During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis went out of his way to make a specific legal finding that McKay obstructed justice by falsely accusing Darby of inducing him to manufacture the incendiary devices.

McKay and Crowder had made homemade riot shields and were ready to use them in St. Paul to help demonstrators block streets near the Xcel Energy Center. The goal was to shut down the democratic process by preventing GOP delegates from participating in the convention. The shields were discovered and confiscated.

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Matthew Vadum

Citizen Soros: Suppressing Conservative Ideas (Part 2 in a Series)

by Matthew Vadum

(Continued from yesterday)

Recap: Radical philanthropist George Soros gave $1 million to Media Matters for America, a well-funded slander shop that roots out “conservative misinformation.” It’s all part of his campaign to suppress conservative ideas that stand in the way of pushing America even farther to the left.

The left has been hyperventilating about Beck ever since he moved from CNN to Fox News in early 2009 and quickly became the Obama administration’s most vociferous high-profile critic. In particular, liberals could not abide Beck righteously fulminating against the shadowy Tides Foundation, a pass-through entity that allows wealthy individuals to give to radical causes anonymously.
Eric Boehlert, a so-called senior fellow at Media Matters, seized an opportunity when a deranged would-be shooter named Byron Williams jumped into the headlines last year. After a shootout with the California Highway Patrol, Williams said he had been on his way to shoot up the San Francisco offices of Tides in hopes of sparking a revolution. Williams was never actually much of a threat to Tides. When police pulled him over on a Sunday when the Tides offices were closed, the inept insurrectionist was drunk.

Media Matters argued that Beck had blood on his hands because Williams claimed Beck’s program was one of his favorite TV shows. Boehlert blogged that Beck “has routinely smeared the low-profile entity [i.e. Tides] for being staffed by ‘thugs’ and ‘bullies’ and involved in ‘the nasty of the nastiest,’ like indoctrinating schoolchildren and creating a ‘mass organization to seize power.’” Williams “wasn’t able to open fire inside the offices of the Tides Foundation, an organization ‘nobody knew’ about until Glenn Beck started targeting it.”

Aside from the rhetorical flourishes, Beck had provided a more or less accurate picture of the Tides Foundation, its sister groups, and many of its grant recipients.

As Trevor Loudon wrote in the October 2010 Foundation Watch, “The Tides Foundation and Tides Center are the radical left’s best kept secret. Together they provide tens of millions of dollars annually to some of the most extreme, destructive charities in America. Their money has gone to an assortment of questionable groups including ACORN, Media Matters for America, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.” (The Center was profiled in the September 2006 Organization Trends.)

According to David Horowitz’s online encyclopedia of the left, DiscoverTheNetworks.org, the Tides family of foundations has also funded the violent anarchist group known as the Ruckus Society, United for Peace and Justice (a group headed by pro-Castro activist Leslie Cagan), the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), three of whose executives have been indicted for terrorism-related activities, and the National Lawyers Guild.

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Matthew Vadum

Citizen Soros: Manipulating the Media (Part 1 in a Series)

by Matthew Vadum

He has conquered the world of finance and remains firmly on top of it. He writes bestselling books. He dominates leftist philanthropy. He co-founded the Democracy Alliance, an ultra-secretive billionaires’ club that wants to transform America into a European-style socialist state – or worse. He owns the Democratic Party. Now George Soros, who also fancies himself a philosopher, is positioning himself as a media magnate in order to continue his assault on America’s values and institutions.

Like the protagonist in the classic Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane, Soros can never have enough power. But unlike Charles Foster Kane, the haughty, imperious fictional media mogul, Soros views himself as much more than a mere leader. With a straight face he told reporters, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” (The Independent – UK, June 3, 1993)

Although markets have helped make him a billionaire several times over, Soros has declared war on capitalism. He blames markets and something he calls “market fundamentalism”— and not the suffocating regulations and high taxes his funding of left-wing groups promotes – for the current economic slowdown. “The entire edifice of global financial markets has been erected on the false premise that markets can be left to their own devices, we must find a new paradigm and rebuild from the ground up.”

“The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do it,” Soros told the Financial Times in 2009. In an interview with Der Spiegel the previous year Soros said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful – but also very harmful to our society.”

Only in the twisted messianic fantasies of this octogenarian billionaire whose demeanor is that of a James Bond villain could such phantom armies of marauding free market fundamentalists wreak havoc on America. Perhaps these were the same laissez-faire legionnaires who brought us Sarbanes-Oxley, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government bailouts of private industry, farm subsidies, ethanol mandates, smart growth, and the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act in recent decades.

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Morgan Warstler

The New GOP Agenda: GOV2.0

by Morgan Warstler

Right off the bat, hear my barbaric yawp: “Less Government!”

I want to strip the bark off and tenderize the tough meat of Uncle Sam until he heels without so much as a cross look from likely voters.   I want to make government our bitch.

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So to those who are terribly angry – relax, I’m on your side.   That said, it is time for Republicans to start talking about a new theory of government.

Listen up, Luntz!  The phrase we need to drumbeat is GOV2.0.

Republicans need to stand for MODERN GOVERNMENT.   Breathe.  Don’t freak out.  Supporting government in any form right now is not heresy, and acting like it…  is political suicide.   We have to put forward plans that work, plans that will save Medicare, plans that can save Social Security.   This is the way to win deep gains in purple districts, lock in the elderly votes in FL, and get the young urban turks to stop and take notice of the GOP.

Ask yourselves:

  1. Are private sector unions strong in MODERN AMERICA?  No.
  2. Have massive productivity gains reduced headcount (and prices) in MODERN COMPANIES while increasing value?  Yes.
  3. Can we find jaw dropping savings in MODERN GOVERNMENT? Yes.

This is not “waste, fraud, and abuse.”   This is not John McCain going over the budget line by line.   We need to laugh at those concepts.   Ho-ho, Barry. No, we’re talking about firings.  Reducing headcounts at government agencies, bringing in new web based technologies, outsourcing public services to non-union private contractors.

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Capitol Confidential

The Democrats’ Orwellian Attempt to Bully Republicans and Takeover the Rest of the Economy

by Capitol Confidential

Democrats’ collective fixation on Frank Luntz’s memo on Financial Reform misses the point entirely but it is very telling.

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The now famous Luntz memo makes strategic recommendations based on an aggregation of voters’ responses to being informed about various portions of the Dodd Blank Check Bailout bill in factual, common sense, simple language.  The public spoke and Luntz recorded it. He didn’t make up the fact that there is a $4 trillion dollar bailout in the bill. Its right there in black and white.

But what has Democrats completely possessed is that what the public said is inconvenient to their Orwellian plan to dupe America into believing that up is down, black is white and that the Dodd bill will end “too big to fail”, contains no new bailouts and will possibly save endangered animals.

Their plan is a two step process: First, use oblique language about “protecting consumers” and “ending too big to fail” to convince the public that the Dodd bill is somehow “financial reform”. Then, bully Senate Republicans into voting for Dodd’s government takeover bill by portraying them as against said “financial reform.”

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Publius

More Bailouts? Forever? Not So Fast

by Publius

Pollster Frank Luntz has confirmed what conservatives, Tea Party activists and, well, every other American not affiliated with Wall Street banks have known all along — voting for bailouts is a political death sentence.

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Big Government has obtained a copy of a new poll conducted by The Word Doctors that should send shivers down the spine of proponents of the Financial Reform bill that passed the House of Representatives in December.  The legislation created a $150 billion bailout fund for future bailouts for banks and corporations and authorizes the Fed to spend up to another $4 Trillion.

Luntz’s poll asked whether “you would be more or less likely to vote for your member of Congress if they voted for a Financial Reform bill that contained a fund to bail out banks and Wall Street?”  The results:  5% more likely.  79% Less Likely.  An incredible 52% of respondents said that they would be “much more likely” to vote against bailout supporters.  A copy of the Luntz poll can be found here:

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Pam Meister

What Was Missing from the SOTU Address

by Pam Meister

Wednesday nights, I usually watch “Ghost Hunters” on the SyFy Channel. Yes, I am one of those geeks. But this week, I set the DVR so that I could watch President Obama give the annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress and the American people.

I might as well have watched a bunch of people using high-tech gadgetry to try to make contact with the other side, because I certainly didn’t learn anything new in this world.

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Anyone who has paid even scant attention to Obama over the past year or two has heard it all before. We heard about the need to act “boldly” and “aggressively” in a crisis, the need to pass climate change legislation, the need to pass the health care boondoggle, the requisite bashing of banks and Wall Street, and, lest we forget, blaming Bush for everything except ABC’s cancellation of the show “Ugly Betty.”

In the private sector, constant passing of the buck gets you fired. In government, it earns you points with your base.

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