You’ve no doubt heard liberal Members of Congress and other interest groups calling the Tea Party movement “Astroturf,” a play on the term grassroots.  Like our good friend Nancy, for example…

Or the liberal pro-net neutrality group Free Press, which has an entire section on its site devoted to “outing” so-called Astroturf operations.  This page includes a handy-dandy widget with a graphic of large corporations pulling the strings of Congress. Pretty clever, really.

They claim that the whole movement is the invention of a bunch of Beltway insiders backed by piles of corporate cash.  For them, it simply does not compute that ordinary Americans could be fed up with trillions of dollars in debt, tax hikes, and runaway regulation.  It MUST be the orchestrations of rich puppet-masters in DC, right?  Instead of spending hours debunking those claims, I’ll point to a post I made on the National Taxpayers Union’s old blog after the massive 9/12 March on Washington.  Several hundred thousand people from all across the country, none of whom were paid, will do a better job of dismissing these silly claims than I could here.  Instead, let’s focus on liberal activists employing exactly the kind of shady strategies that they accuse us of using.

So, that group I mentioned, Free Press?  The ones that have a page on their site to expose “Astroturfing?”  Last week, they were outed as being the true authors behind a letter supposedly written by Congressman Jay Inslee (D-WA).  The letter is being passed around to various Congressional offices to solicit support for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s radical effort to thumb his nose at the limits of his regulatory authority, which I blogged about here recently.  But the properties of the electronic file itself show that the real author of the letter was not Mr. Inslee or a member of his staff, but none other than Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott!

(more…)

Federal stimulus spending may evoke images of hard hats and road construction, but around $14 million has been allocated for projects at Montana State University that range from researching volcanic action in the Andes mountains and treatment of periodontal disease to funding to assist with productions of Shakespeare.

A total of $14.38 million in federal stimulus funds has been allocated for about 35 different projects to date at Montana State University, according to university officials. The grants are funded by the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed by Congress in February to spur economic growth and create jobs.

Critics of the funding say it misses the mark of the goals set by Congress and amounts to wasteful spending. Supporters say the research does have an economic impact and will produce numerous long-term positive benefits.

The spending was criticized by National Taxpayers Union Vice President for Politics and Communication Pete Sepp. He said many taxpayers think of stimulus spending as long-term job creation in the private sector and not “expeditions to the Andes or, more up close, expeditions into people’s gums.”

(more…)