Sometimes I get sucked into projects that overwhelm as they evolve into endlessly bifurcating wormholes enough to justify a team of researchers, but I have none, just me doing the best I can, with what I have, then my time's up and I must run off. My recent excursion into Charlie Kirk’s Koch front group “TP USA” has turned into another such hideous, if enlightening, journey into the paranoid hostility saturated mind-scape of our Republican neighbors.
Seems that Republicans can’t see anything but an enemy in ‘the other’ - Unfortunately if that’s all you want to find, that’s all you’ll ever see.
Seems that Republicans believe any information or facts they disagree with can be labeled a lie and dismissed without consideration. - They call it Free Speech.
Worse Republicans seem to believe that Free Speech means that it’s okay to misrepresent others and to fabricate fictitious facts to fill in where the real objective facts don’t fit into their power/profits driven agenda. - Come on, can we get real, can we grow up? Were does such an attitude leave constructive learning or sane communication between people?
What does this sort of Republican hate-mongering do for the United States of America and We The People? Why do Trump’s most enthusiastic followers sound like they want a civil war more than they want to work towards a functioning society ready to deal with the realities of the future heading at us?
Where does that leave objective evidence gathering, fact finding, assessing the data at hand?
What about respecting serious bona fide experts and the knowledge they bring to the discussion? - What about keeping it real? To hell with the sort of distracting Science By Slander a la Dr. Singer and his “think-tank” protégées whom Republican politicians have been hiding behind in order to ignore reality.
Focus on observations and facts, acknowledging and learning from mistakes, keeping alive a sense of “Fair Play” and honest all around skepticism - that would include a healthy skepticism towards our own selves, rather than dogma driven unidirectional skepticism.
In any event, reading through TP USA’s ‘dossiers’ of professors on their hit list, I was thinking now why don’t some groups start tracking the utterances of right-wing nuts who are teaching out there.
Or, more importantly right now , I firmly believe there should be an emergency effort made to build a website dedicated and organized to “Track Trump” and his administration’s attacks on Civil Liberties, American institutions, public lands; public and worker protections, natural resources and environmental protections; Earth monitoring agencies such as NASA, NOAA, etc., etc.
It would serve as a real-time depository for such information, news stories, legislative bills, Presidential decrees and such, one that can be organized into it’s particular ‘threads’ and then stories added as they develop and play out. With time this exercise would create an invaluable database for tracking and assessing the true impact of the coming years. This is something that can’t be done in hindsight.
NOW! it would be relatively simply to build the framework, BEFORE the onslaught begins - while folks have time to think through it’s organization and structure, which would be thee challenge, but still relatively straight-forward. Any mistakes could be learned from and adjustments made moving forward as an authoritative reference source develops.
Open up the web site and simply start sorting, cataloging, tracking as the news starts pouring in and overwhelming most with more immediate reoccupations. The rest will develop with time.
It would be an activist’s research tool and a historian’s gold mine - and there is only one window of opportunity! Right now, these next days and weeks. After that life is going to get too harried. That’s it. Some learned people simply need to see the importance - and do it.
But I digress. I was intending to introduce my big find of the day, but since I’ve already rambled enough and they do a very good job of explaining themselves, I’ll leave it to ConservativeTransparency.org to finish.
About Conservative Transparency
Conservative Transparency is an interactive database that tracks the flow of money among conservative donors, advocacy groups, political committees, and candidates.
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Contributions from private foundations and other nonprofit entities are based on a review of publicly available Forms 990 filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
Contributions from individuals to super PACs, party committees, political action committees, and federal candidates are based on information from Political Moneyline and the Federal Election Commission. (A number of isolated donations are sourced to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.)
RECIPIENTS
Although most nonprofit organizations are required by law to report their outgoing grants to the Internal Revenue Service, they do not have to disclose the sources of their funding. As a result, the transactions in Conservative Transparency are based on information reported by the donors and exclude “dark money” raised by the recipients from unknown donors that are not in the database. The totals in each recipient’s “financial record” are based on a review of the recipient’s publicly available tax documents filed with the IRS.
For more information, please contact us: info@bridgeproject.com
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FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL
Conservative Transparency is an interactive database that tracks the flow of money among conservative donors, organizations, and candidates.
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for some more background:
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Also:
Bridge Project is dedicated to opposing the conservative movement’s extreme ideology and exposing its dishonest tactics.
Utilizing comprehensive research, video tracking, and rapid-response communications, we aim to dismantle false attacks on progressive policies and shine a light on the moneyed special interests behind the conservative agenda.
In recent years, conservatives have made a strong push for ideological purity within their ranks. The result is a conservative movement beholden to the Tea Party, blind to empirical evidence, and fiercely opposed to almost any form of compromise. Even Republican officials have acknowledged that President Ronald Reagan would not satisfy the rigid standards of today’s conservative movement.
This shift has coincided with a rapidly increasing flow of money to conservative advocacy groups. For many years, contributions from wealthy individuals and private foundations to conservative think tanks and political organizations largely escaped scrutiny. But many right-leaning nonprofits have become nakedly partisan and heavily involved in elections, while lax campaign finance and disclosure laws have propelled conservative political giving to unprecedented levels. In the 2012 cycle, conservative outside groups spent more than $800 million to elect their chosen candidates in federal elections.
Unlike political candidates, the advocacy groups and donors driving the conservative agenda do not disappear after an election. That is why Bridge Project is committed to keeping a watchful eye on the conservative movement, pushing back against extreme ideology, and following the money behind policies that would take America backward
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Published on Nov 24, 2015
Col. Tom Moe, US Air Force Vietnam POW discusses Donald Trump's rhetoric and what it bodes for America unless all Americans get involve in political dialogue, not only with our politician, but also with each other.
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