Bashing Arizona Immigration Law Supporters

Bashing Arizona Immigration Law Supporters

Posted By Mark D. Tooley On May 3, 2010 @ 12:04 am In FrontPage | No Comments

The Religious Left has discerned that Christianity and Judaism demand virtually open borders by the United States, if not by other nations.  So naturally, many liberal church elites have quickly and angrily lashed out at Arizona’s new immigration law, ascribing to its backers the contempt that much of the Religious Left seems itself to have for many average Americans.

Arizona’s Episcopal Bishop Kirk Smith huffily declared:  “Today is a sad day in the struggle to see all God’s people treated in a humane and compassionate manner.”  And he tut-tutted:  “It seems that for now the advocates of fear and hatred have won over those of charity and love. Arizona claims to be a Golden Rule State. We have not lived up to that claim.”

It’s doubtful that the Episcopal Church in Arizona has been very successful in broadening it’s WASPy flock to include many immigrants.  Still, Bishop Kirk presumes to be their spokesman and moral leader on behalf of the Golden Rule:  “We will continue to work as hard as we can to defeat this law and to work toward just and fair laws that protect the rights of all human beings. We all know that our immigration system is broken, but it cannot be fixed by scape-goating the most vulnerable of those among us.”

Not content to defer to the local bishop, the Episcopal Church’s lobby office in Washington, D.C. also irritably chimed in against the Arizona law, bemoaning that the “lack of fair and humane immigration reform opens the door to misguided and divisive state and local attempts to address immigration enforcement.”  Of course, the Episcopal lobbyists want a national amnesty that would override state attempts at immigration enforcement:   “We urge Congress to provide a solution to a broken immigration system that separates families, spreads fear and keeps millions living in the shadows. Every day, members of our congregations see the unacceptable consequences of our broken immigration system.  We urge the Senate and House to enact bipartisan immigration reform that reunites families, protects the rights of all workers, and provides an opportunity for undocumented immigrants to earn legal status.”

Of course, like the rest of the Religious Left, the Episcopal lobbyists simplistically portray their open borders policy as “Christians…[who] are called to embrace the stranger and to find Christ in all who come to us in need.”  And like the Religious Left, they assume that solutions to vast social problems can be solved by sweeping legislation.  “With strong leadership in Congress, we are confident we can solve the broken immigration system.  We encourage members of Congress to join faith leaders to stand up for immigration policies that renew the dignity and human rights of everyone.”

But what if the open borders and amnesty that the Religious Left typically advocates in fact do not “renew the dignity and human rights of everyone” and instead only create more social disruption whose chief victims are ultimately low income native born and immigrants who lack the economic privileges of most Religious Left elites, especially Episcopalians?  In typical fashion, the Religious Left does not ponder unintended consequences and instead assumes that good intentions and political correctness are sufficient.

Evangelical Left Sojourners chief Jim Wallis wants evangelicals to follow the old Religious Left in distilling the Gospel down to the Left’s latest political demands and prejudices. “The law … is a social and racial sin, and should be denounced as such by people of faith and conscience across the nation,” Wallis intoned. “It is not just about Arizona, but about all of us, and about what kind of country we want to be. It is not only mean-spirited — it will be ineffective and will only serve to further divide communities in Arizona, making everyone more fearful and less safe.”

Arizona’s new crack down on illegal immigration may or may not have faults, but will it make lawful Arizonans “less safe?  Security and effective law enforcement are not typical strong emphases for Wallis or the Religious Left generally.  Instead, they often prefer name calling and charges of bigotry. “This legislation feels reactionary and hateful,” claims Church World Service chief John McCullough, who heads the National Council of Churches’ relief arm.  “It is a clear representation of the politics of division and exclusion.”

Even more hyperbolic was National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference chief Samuel Rodriguez, who has also successfully pressed the National Association of Evangelicals to adopt a liberalized immigration agenda.  “Today, Arizona stands as the state with the most xenophobic and nativist laws in the country,” he pronounced, almost as a curse.  “We need a multi-ethnic firewall against the extremists in our nation who desire to separate us rather than bring us together. Shame on you Arizona Republicans and shame on you Senator John McCain for endorsing the legislation.”

Rodriguez claims to represent virtually all Hispanic evangelicals, and naïve Anglo evangelical churchmen obligingly accept his claims, not considering that many Hispanic and other legal immigrants also have concerns about law enforcement, security, and open borders’ impact on their own ability to advance economically.  Instead, the Religious and Evangelical Left idealize immigration as merely a bumper sticker social justice issue dividing forces of light from bigoted forces of darkness.   Contrary to their claims, the Almighty has not directly revealed His preferences for U.S. immigration policy.  But traditional Christian and Jewish moral teachings about human nature and statecraft offer better guidance than the slapdash pseudo-thinking of the Arizona law’s seething religious critics.

Max Baucus on Obamacare’s hidden agenda – redistribution of wealth

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Democrat Max Baucus Gives The Game Away

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 5:08 PM

Max Baucus is the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and the Democrat most responsible fo Obamacare’s final shape other than Nancy Pelosi.

In an unusual speech on the Senate floor moments ago, Max Baucus declares that the “healthcare bill” to be  “an income shift, it is a shift, a leveling to help lower income middle income Americans.”  Baucus continued, “[t]oo often, much of late, the last couple three years the mal-distribution of income in America is gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle income class is left behind.  Wages have not kept up with increased income of the highest income in America.  This legislation will have the effect of addressing that mal-distribution of income in America.”

Max Baucus on Obamacare’s hidden agenda – redistribution of wealth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY4Qbv7gPbo&feature=player_embedded

Baucus’ candor is appreciated, though the fact that he waited until the bill passed to announce the real agenda behind the massive tax hikes isn’t a profile in courage.  And the seniors on fixed income who are about to lose Medicare Advantage would laugh at Baucus’ pseudo-populism.

Top Ten Skeletons in the Left’s Closet

Top Ten Skeletons in the Left’s Closet

By Daniel J. Flynn
FrontPageMagazine.com | 5/16/2008

When the Left writes its own history, the past gets rewritten to suit the needs of the present. This is why I wrote A Conservative History of the American Left, to conserve not only fascinating figures now forgotten but to retrieve from the memory hole all that the Left has tossed down it. What is the history of the American Left that leftists want you to forget?

10. Ayatollah Khomeini, Leftist Hero

Reflexive anti-Americanism initially moved the Left to embrace the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Mother Jones, for instance, in 1979 predicted that “if Khomeini or his followers take power” then “democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutional government” would follow. The Nation, Michel Foucault, and other pillars of the Left similarly projected their ideals upon Khomeini and company.

9. Manson Family Values

“I fell in love with Charlie Manson the first time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on TV,” hippie guru Jerry Rubin professed. “His words and courage inspired us.” Weatherman hoisted “Charles Manson Power” banners, adopted a spread-fingered greeting to symbolize the fork with which the Manson murderers impaled a victim’s stomach, and even boasted a cell nicknamed “The Fork.” Weatherman matriarch Bernardine Dohrn infamously proclaimed: “Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

8. Gay Activists Sue to Block AIDS Test

Today, homosexual activists blame Ronald Reagan and the clergy for the spread of AIDS. But in the mid-1980s, the National Gay Task Force and the Lambda Legal Defense, citing civil-liberties concerns, actually sued the federal government to stop the AIDS test. Thankfully, they lost and scores of lives have been saved as a result.

7. Murder Chic

The easiest way to become a hero on the Left is to kill another human being. John Brown, the Molly Maguires, the Haymarket Square Bombers, Joe Hill, Huey Newton, and Mumia Abu-Jamal—murderers all—have been venerated by the Left in song and on screen. The people they murdered are not even an afterthought.

6. Jonestown Kool-Aid

Before orchestrating the murder/suicides 900+ people in Guyana, Jim Jones was the darling of the San Francisco Left. Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and Willie Brown embraced a man who killed more blacks than the KKK. Democrats Rosalynn Carter, Walter Mondale, and Gerry Brown made campaign visits to the Peoples Temple’s “comrade leader.” The mayor of San Francisco even rewarded Jones for his activism by appointing him chairman of the city’s housing commission. “The temple was as much a left-wing political crusade as a church,” The Nation reported in 1978. Unfortunately, as the years progressed, more Americans gulped down the Left’s Kool-Aid that Jones was of the religious Right and not an atheist leftist.  

5. Concentration Camps, American Style

A year before Hitler came to power in Germany, Margaret Sanger called for a vast system of concentration camps for the United States. The Planned Parenthood founder demanded “a stern and rigid policy of segregation or sterilization” for “dysgenic” Americans who “would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.” The 1932 speech concluded that “fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense—defending the unborn against their own disabilities.”

4. Heaven on Earth

American intellectuals looked upon the hell on earth that was post-revolutionary Russia and saw a heaven on earth. The New Republic credited the Russian Revolution with providing “the most democratic franchise yet devised in our world,” while The Nation found that “the franchise is more democratic in Russia than in England or in the United States.” Lincoln Steffens marveled after a visit to the Soviet Union, “The revolution in Russia is to establish the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.”

3. Eugenics

Even before the progressive era when most states instituted eugenics laws, the American Left had agitated for state controls over procreation. John Humphrey Noyes’ Bible Communists lamented that freedom of marital choice “leaves mating to be determined by a general scramble, without attempt at scientific direction” and devised the first eugenic experiment in the U.S.—“stirpiculture”—that produced dozens of children and prevented hundreds more. In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy dreamed of “race purification” to “preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out.” Other proponents included Margaret Sanger, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously decreed in Buck v. Bell, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” State governments ultimately sterilized upwards of 60,000.

2. Assassinating Presidents

Three of the four presidential assassins have been left-wing radicals. Bible Communist Charles Guiteau murdered President Garfield, anarcho-communist Leon Czolgosz murdered President McKinley, and Soviet Communist Lee Harvey Oswald murdered John F. Kennedy. Rather than own that history, the Left has invented conspiracy theories that absolve leftists from responsibility.

1. Nazi-Soviet Pact

The Left switched from pacifists to warmongers overnight once the Nazi attack upon the Communists dissolved the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Communist Party USA chief Earl Browder, who had dubbed WWII “the second imperialist war” during the pact, so thoroughly switched course when the Nazis attacked the Communists that he embraced conscription (after his opposition to it led to jail in WWI), endorsed a ‘no-strike’ pledge for labor unions (after encouraging strikes to impede the war effort), and kicked out Japanese Americans from the CP (after ostensibly championing civil rights). The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League ceased operations during the pact. The Communists’ New Masses panned the anti-Nazi Watch on the Rhine when it appeared as a play during the pact only to praise it when it appeared as a movie when Hitler and Stalin were again enemies.

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Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas and A Conservative History of the American Left. He is also the editor of www.flynnfiles.com.

Flying imams lawsuit update: Leave the John Does alone Update: Imams backing down?

http://michellemalkin.com/2007/08/01/flying-imam-lawsuit-update-leave-the-john-does-alone/

Hey you, shut up about jihad terrorism

I got this from Say Anything, who got it from Gates of Vienna.

John Doe update: Not dead yet

http://michellemalkin.com/2007/07/23/john-doe-update-not-dead-yet/

Don’t let the Dems kill the John Doe amendment

http://michellemalkin.com/2007/07/19/dont-let-the-dems-kill-the-john-doe-amendment/

Indoctrinate U — analyzes political correctness on college campuses

Indoctrinate U
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 19, 2007
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Evan Coyne Maloney, an early pioneer of video blogging. He is currently working on a project – Indoctrinate U – that analyzes political correctness on college campuses. His website is Brain-Terminal.com.

FP: Evan Coyne Maloney, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

 

Maloney: Thanks a lot for the opportunity. 

FP: Tell us a little bit about how your first short video, “Protesting the Protestors,” and how it helped get you started.  

Maloney: In the run-up to the
Iraq war, there were a lot of peace protests getting a fair amount of media attention. But what I noticed was, none of the reporters bothered to look at the extremist organizations organizing these protests. The Workers World Party, the International Socialist Organization and International ANSWER are rather extreme groups, yet I didn’t see anyone in the media looking into their involvement with the protest movement.

If the K.K.K. sponsored rallies in
Washington, and tens of thousands of people showed up, media coverage would undoubtedly include some mention of the extremism of the people who set it up. Yet these organizations are every bit as extreme as the K.K.K., and their involvement was being ignored.

I also noticed that the media refused to cover the radical element that did show up. There were people who were openly supporting suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. There were people comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler, and nobody was questioning it. You don’t have to like President Bush, but if you think he and Hitler are one and the same, then I think you’re pretty ignorant of history.

So I decided to pick up a video camera and cover the element of the protesters that the media was ignoring, and the result was Protesting the Protesters.

It got e-mailed around so much that it became one of those Internet phenomena. Within a day of posting that video, my relatively obscure website, Brain-Terminal.com, was getting mentioned by Rush Limbaugh and national television newscasters like Brit Hume. 

FP: You mention the protestors who openly support suicide bombings against Jewish civilians. The Left thinks of itself as being a progressive force that cares about justice and humanitarianism etc. Yet in this terror war, the Left has ended up being on the side of an ugly totalitarian ideology – an ideology that is based on hatred of pluralism, hatred of women, hatred of minorities, hatred of homosexuals and hatred of almost everything else on earth.  What is the psychology of the Left in this context do you think? 

Maloney: That’s what boggles my mind. Women are second-class citizens in a large part of the world, treated as property, and it is not only acceptable for their husbands to beat them, but it is expected. Rape victims are stoned to death in “honor” killings while gang-rapists face no punishment. And yet the West’s feminists are silent. In a large part of the world, gays can be jailed and subject to chemical treatments in an attempt to change their gender preference. They are hanged and beheaded simply for being gay. And yet the gay rights activists in the West are silent.

I really don’t get it. There are very severe offenses against humanity occurring all over the world, and yet the left ignores them. It seems they are constitutionally incapable of recognizing any injustice unless they can somehow blame it on the West, on white males, on Christians or Jews, or on the
United States.

FP: Zilla Huma Usman, a Pakistani minister and woman’s activist, was, as you know, recently shot dead by an Islamic extremist for refusing to wear the veil. There wasn’t one peep about this from the Left in general and from the feminist left in particular. Just a deafening silence. I think this serves as a hint of what the Left really cares about and what it doesn’t care about at all.  

So what short videos have you produced since “Protesting the Protestors”?

 

Maloney: I’ve produced a total 14 short videos that are all freely available on Brain-Terminal.com. 

FP: Your interview with Michael Moore set you on the path of being a full-time documentarian, correct? Can you share the experience with us and how it set you on the road you are on?

 

Maloney: It was after McCain-Feingold became law, and it occurred to me that the campaign finance laws had a huge loophole in them, what I call the Michael Moore loophole. Whereas private citizens like you or me could not buy airtime to express our views within 90 days of a general election–it would be illegal–
Hollywood was exempt. So people in
Hollywood would have a huge megaphone with which to promote their views, while people like us–people who didn’t have access to the
Hollywood distribution machine–are shut up and shut out of the process.

I didn’t think it was fair that Michael Moore could put out a two-hour political ad in the form of movie, but I as a private citizen could not buy airtime to express my own views (not like I could afford it anyway, but it was the principle of the thing).

So I decided I would try to find Michael Moore to ask him what he thought about that. I staked him out for four days, and ultimately, I got him on camera. The discussion was a little contentious at first, but he did admit that
Hollywood should be more inclusive of different views. He encouraged me to continue working in documentary film. And he even admitted that there’s a market for documentary films other than what
Hollywood typically puts out. Now all I need to do is convince all the folks who put out films like his that he is indeed correct.

They don’t see a market for documentaries unless they hew to the Michael Moore/Al Gore worldview. But I’m going to prove them wrong.

 

FP: What is the Michael Moore/Al Gore worldview?

 

Maloney: To me, it’s a worldview that believes that the solution to all human problems is for more government and for greater subservience to government. That the world would be utopia if only we willingly handed over control to a group of hand-picked experts who would be responsible for running things. And that this utopia can be brought about through social engineering if only the will of the individual could be suppressed enough to allow this to happen. 

FP: And it’s a worldview that spawned hell on earth every time it achieved earthly incarnation. 

Tell us about “Brainwashing 101” and its sequel. What responses were there to these films?

 

Maloney: It’s funny. We had a great response from the audiences who saw the short films “Brainwashing 101” and “Brainwashing 201.” Both films won awards at film festivals, and we got a great reception from the students who got a chance to see them. Even a number of professors were supportive.

But school administrators were another story. It is in their best interests to limit the flow of information leaving campus to glossy admissions brochures and warm-and-fuzzy alumni newsletters designed to encourage graduates to open their wallets. Anything beyond that is a problem for them, especially a film that exposes the dirty little secrets of higher education.

In producing “Indoctrinate U”, we had the police called on us about a half-dozen times. And when we were screening the short film “Brainwashing 101” at

Bucknell
University–my alma mater–the head of security was brought in to threaten me with arrest in front of an audience assembled to watch my film.

I never thought my own alma mater would try to shut down the career of one of its own alumni. It was pretty eye-opening.

 

FP: So share with us your current project: ”

Indoctrinate
U.” When will it be released?

 

Maloney: We’re going to have a media screening for the film at the end of April, at the

Tribeca
Film
Center here in
New York. (For more information, see the film’s website.

 

Unfortunately, it’s a little difficult to predict when the film will be released. You see, films are like new cars. The minute you drive them off the lot–or in the case of a film, hold public screenings–they lose significant value. Distributors like to “own the premiere”; they want virgin films. So we’re holding off on any timetables until we’ve exhausted all our options with distributors. And if we still can’t find a distributor, we’ll put it out ourselves. But we’re still trying to give
Hollywood a chance to prove that they’re not the same one-party state that campuses have become. 

FP: Why do you think that
Hollywood and the academic campus are one-Party states?  

Maloney: If the question is why do I perceive them that way, the answer is pretty simple: ample evidence demonstrates them to be that way.

When you see
Hollywood celebrities expressing their political opinions, very rarely do you see anyone express anything other than a left-wing worldview; it almost never happens. Similarly, when you take a look at the documentaries put out by
Hollywood, to whatever extent they contain a political perspective, it is also invariably left-of-center. Quite simply, that is the default position in
Hollywood.

As far as higher education, there have been several studies showing that academics are much further to the left than the rest of society. The fact is, when political speech is suppressed on campus, it is almost always (not always, but most of the time) right-of-center speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-partisan civil rights organization that defends the free speech and free thought rights of students and professors in academia, states that most of the cases they receive are of conservatives who’ve had their rights trampled on campus. And FIRE is an organization that defends all comers. So the slant of the cases they receive is a symptom of the overwhelming slant in academia.

Now, if the question is why Hollywood and academia are that way–i.e., how did they get that way–that is a question that I could probably spend decades studying and only begin to approximate an answer.

In a general sense, I think that communities tend to be self-reinforcing, and that when any community passes a certain threshold of uniformity, the self-reinforcing nature of the community becomes exaggerated and more extreme. People who, as individuals, would never think of trying to punish someone simply for their political perspective become much more willing to stand by and let that happen if it appears that such a thing is what the community desires. And as the community becomes increasingly extreme in how it treats dissidents, people who simply stood by when it happened in less extreme cases become afraid to speak out against the increasing extremism, lest they be punished or cast out of the community themselves.

It’s simple group dynamics, and I don’t think any particular part of the ideological spectrum has a monopoly on groupthink and the negative consequences to which it leads. It is a human frailty, not a liberal or conservative thing. 

FP: Share with us some of the innovative things you are doing to make yourself a force that 
Hollywood can’t ignore.

Maloney: I don’t really care whether I’m a force in
Hollywood, and a lot of  things in
Hollywood would have to change before someone like me could  be considered a force there.

But we are doing a few innovative things to prove that there are lots of people interested in the topics we’re covering in ”

Indoctrinate 
U.” On our website, we’ve got a Google Map where people can type in their zip codes to express an interest in seeing the film near them. And when they plug in their zip codes, it puts a pin in the map, showing graphically that there’s interest all over the country in seeing this film. Already, without spending a single dime promoting the film, we’ve had nearly 150,000 page views on our website, and we’ve got thousands and thousands of towns with pins in them. And we haven’t even spent a dime promoting the website yet.

 

So, while we have far to go before this grassroots campaign is noticed in
Hollywood, the fact that we’ve gotten this far this fast is very encouraging.

Of course, we need the help of everyone who cares about free thought in higher education, and we need the help of everyone who wishes Hollywood would every once in a while put out a documentary that speaks to them. If people get involved, I think we can help them bring about a lot of positive change.

 

FP: So what are some ways people can get involved and help?

 

Maloney: Right now, our biggest hurdle is convincing
Hollywood that there is a market for a different kind of documentary film, one that doesn’t necessarily have the same old perspective that the industry routinely churns out. And that’s where people can help.

If people visit our website and plug in their zip codes, we can prove that a market exists for this film. If they watch the trailer and forward a link to all of their contacts, I think we can get over 100,000 people to punch in their zip codes. And if we do, I think we can get mainstream distribution for this film.

That’s what is needed to help open
America’s eyes. I think many people suspect that these problems exist within academia, but I don’t think they have any idea just how pervasive or severe the problem is. No level of academia is immune, nor is any particular geographic region. Most colleges and universities in
America seem to be this way, and it is important that Americans begin to question the environment on campus and address the problem.

FP: Evan Coyne Maloney, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview and we wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.

 

Maloney: Thank you very much.

 

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“Compassion” and the Decline of America

“Compassion” and the Decline of America
By Dennis Prager
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 20, 2007
This past weekend, a friend of mine attended his 13-year-old son’s baseball game. What he saw encapsulates a major reason many of us fear for the future of America and the West.

His son’s team was winning 24-7 as the game entered the last inning. When he looked up at the scoreboard, he noticed that the score read 0-0. Naturally, he inquired as to what happened — was the scoreboard perhaps broken? — and was told that the winning team’s coach asked the scoreboard keeper to change the score. He and some of the parents were concerned that the boys on the losing team felt humiliated.

In order to ensure that the boys losing by a lopsided score would not feel too bad, the score was changed.

As is happening throughout America, compassion trumped all other values.

Truth was the first value compassion trashed. In the name of compassion, the adults in charge decided to lie. The score was not 0-0; it was 24-7.

Wisdom was the second value compassion obliterated. It is unwise to the point of imbecilic to believe that the losing boys were in any way helped by changing the score. On the contrary, they learned lessons that will hamper their ability to mature.

They learned that someone will bail them out when they feel bad.

They learned that they do not have to deal with disappointment in life. Instead, someone in authority will take care of them. (This is how reliance on the state for personal problems — the worldview of the Left — is formed early in life.)

They learned that their feelings, not objective standards, are what society deems most important.

They learned that they are not responsible for their behavior. No matter how poorly they perform, there will be no consequences — sort of like tenure for university professors.

They also learned to think in the feminine — with an emphasis on feelings — rather than to cultivate their innate masculine sense that winners win and losers learn to deal with it and move on to the next game.

At the same time, the boys on the winning team learned not to try their best. Why bother?

Building character was the third value trumped by compassion. People build character far more through handling defeat than through winning. The human being grows up only when forced to deal with disappointment. We remain children until the day we take full responsibility for our lives. Our increasingly feelings-based society has created a pandemic of immaturity in our society. And there are fewer and fewer maturity-creating institutions in our society. Indeed, the opposite is more often the case. Schools, for example, keep young people immature, none more so than college, which serves primarily to postpone adulthood.

The fourth value that compassion denied here was fairness. It is remarkable how often compassion-based liberals speak of “fairness” in formulating social policy given how unfair so many of their policies are. It was entirely unfair to the winning team to have their score expunged, all their work denied. But for the compassion-first crowd, the winning team is like “the rich” who earn “too much” and should therefore be penalized with a higher tax rate; the winning team scored “too many” runs to be allowed to keep them all.

Compassion in social policy almost always produces unfair results. Compassion for murderers allows them to keep their lives after taking the life of another. Compassion for minorities leads to affirmative action, which means that individuals who are not members of a designated minority will be treated unfairly. Compassion for immigrant children led to bilingual education, which subsequently prevented most of those children from advancing in American society.

Compassion as the primary determinant of behavior is effective in personal life. In making public policy, it is a morally and socially destructive guideline. In fact, it is so bad that thinking people must conclude that its primary purpose is to enable policy makers who are guided by compassion to feel good about themselves.

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Tides Foundation — Leftist funding fountain

Tides Foundation P.O. Box 29903 San Francisco, CA 94129-0903 Tides Center P.O. Box 29907 San Francisco, CA 94129-0907 Phone :415-561-6400(F) 415-561-6300(C) Email :info@tides.org (F&C) URL :http://www.tides.org/ (F&C)

Funder Profile: –> Net Assets: Tides Foundation – $144,299,585 (2004); Tides Center – $36,696,785 (2004) Grants Received: Tides Foundation – $71,164,955 (2004); Tides Center – $55,233,367 (2004) Grants Awarded: Tides Foundation – $74,101,866 (2004); Tides Center – $10,017,642 (2004) Established in 1976 by California-based activist Drummond Pike, the Tides Foundation was set up as a public charity that receives money from donors and then funnels it to the recipients of their choice. Because many of these recipient groups are quite radical, the donors often prefer not to have their names publicly linked with the donees. By letting the Tides Foundation, in effect, “launder” the money for them and pass it along to the intended beneficiaries, donors can avoid leaving a “paper trail.” Such contributions are called “donor-advised,” or donor-directed, funds. Through this legal loophole, nonprofit entities can also create for-profit organizations and then funnel money to them through Tides — thereby circumventing the laws that bar nonprofits from directly funding their own for-profit enterprises. Pew Charitable Trusts, for instance, set up three for-profit media companies and then proceeded to fund them via donor-advised contributions to Tides, which (for an 8 percent management fee) in turn sent the money to the media companies. If a donor wishes to give money to a particular cause but finds that there is no group in existence dedicated specifically to that issue, the Tides Foundation will, for a fee, create a group to meet that perceived need. The Tides Foundation promotes a multitude of leftist social agendas, as evidenced by its assertion: “We strengthen community-based organizations and the progressive movement by providing an innovative and cost-effective framework for your philanthropy.” Among the crusades to which Tides contributes are: radical environmentalism; the “exclusion of humans from public and private wildlands”; the anti-war movement; anti-free trade campaigns; the banning of firearms ownership; abolition of the death penalty; the right to receive government-funded abortion-on-demand; and radical gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender advocacy. In recent years the Tides Foundation has strongly supported the National Lawyers Guild, the Council for American-Islamic Relations, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, and People For the American Way – the latter of which started as a Tides Foundation Project in 1981. Tides also runs a tax-exempt “alternative media source” called the Institute for Global Communications (IGC), a leading provider of Web technology to the radical left. Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response.” Tides later replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was financed in large measure by the Open Society Institute of George Soros, who has donated more than $7 million to Tides over the years. Tides also set up a Peace Strategies Fund and an Iraq Peace Fund, the latter of which has granted money to such groups as MoveOn.org, the National Council of Churches, the Arab-American Action Network, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the pro-Castro groups United for Peace and Justice and Center for Constitutional Rights. In addition, Tides funds “A Better Way Project,” which coordinates the activities of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War Coalition/Keep America Safe Campaign. In the environmental realm, the Tides Foundation has recently made grants to such groups as the Ruckus Society, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Environmental Working Group, Environmental Media Services, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Mothers & Others for a Livable Planet, and the Wilderness Society. It also supports the California Wildlands Grassroots Project, an organization that advocates “permanent protection of intact wildlands on both public and private [emphasis added] lands” in that state. Tides and the organizations it supports interact closely with one another on a regular basis. For example, Drummond Pike sits on the Board of the Environmental Working Group along with David Fenton, founder of Fenton Communications. The Tides Foundation is a member organization of the International Human Rights Funders Group, a network of more than six-dozen grantmakers dedicated to finaning leftwing groups and causes. In 1979 the Tides Foundation created, with a $9 million seed grant, a separate but closely related entity called the Tides Center, also headed by Drummond Pike. The Tides Center functions as a legal firewall insulating the Tides Foundation from potential lawsuits filed by people whose livelihoods or well-being may be harmed by Foundation-funded projects. (These could be, for instance, farmers or loggers who are put out of business by Tides-backed environmentalist groups.) In theory the Foundation’s activities are restricted to fundraising and grant-making, while the Center focuses on managing projects and organizations; in practice, however, both entities do essentially the same thing. The Tides Center’s Board Chairman is Wade Rathke, who is also a member of the Tides Foundation Board. Rathke, who serves as President of the New Orleans-based Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union, is the founder and chief organizer of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). One particularly notable donor to the Tides entities is Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Senator John Kerry. From 1994 to 2004, the Heinz Endowments, which Mrs. Kerry heads, gave the Tides Foundation and Center approximately $8.1 million in grants. Until February 2001, Mrs. Kerry also served as a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which has given Tides numerous six-figure grants. Between 1993 and 2003, at least 91 foundations made grants to the Tides Foundation. These included the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Annie E. Casey Foundation; the Arca Foundation; the AT&T Foundation; the Barbra Streisand Foundation; the Bauman Family Foundation; Ben and Jerry’s Foundation; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the Blue Moon Fund; the Bullitt Foundation; the CarEth Foundation; the Carnegie Corporation of New York; Changemakers; the ChevronTexaco Foundation; the Columbia Foundation; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; the Energy Foundation; the Fannie Mae Foundation; the Ford Foundation; the Foundation for Deep Ecology; the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation; the Heinz Family Foundation; the Hoffman Foundation; the Homeland Foundation; the Howard Heinz Endowment; the J.M. Kaplan Fund; the James Irvine Foundation; the JEHT Foundation; the Jenifer Altman Foundation; the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Joyce Foundation; the Lear Family Foundation; the Liberty Hill Foundation; the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; the Ms. Foundation for Women; the Nathan Cummings Foundation; the New World Foundation; the Open Society Institute; the Pew Charitable Trusts; the Ploughshares Fund; the Proteus Fund; the Public Welfare Foundation; the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund; the Righteous Persons Foundation; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Roberts Foundation; the Rockefeller Family Fund; the Rockefeller Foundation; the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy; the Stern Family Fund; the Stewart R. Mott Charitable Trust; the Summit Charitable Foundation; the Surdna Foundation; the Threshold Foundation; the Turner Foundation; the Vanguard Public Foundation; the Verizon Foundation; the Vira I. Heinz Endowment; the W.K. Kellogg Foundation; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; and the Woods Fund of Chicago. Surprisingly, the Tides Foundation and Tides Center also receive grants from the U.S. federal government. Between 1997 and 2001, these grants included the following: $395,219 from the Department of Interior; $3,350,431 from the Environmental Protection Agency; $3,487,040 from the Department of Housing and Urban Development; $208,878 from the Department of Agriculture; $39,550 from the Department of Energy; $93,500 from the Small Business Administration; $10,986 from the Department of Health and Human Services; and $84,520 from the Centers for Disease Control U.S. Agency for International Development.