Brennan Justice Center Financed By George Soros

by Judy Kent


Washington, DC - A new report from the National Center for Public Policy Research finds the Brennan Center for Justice - one of the country's loudest opponents of voter integrity measures - to have a history of bias-driven research.

The report also discloses that the Brennan Center has received millions in funding from George Soros.

The report is the latest entry in the National Center's GroupSnoop.org series.

"The Brennan Center is on a mission to undermine support for voter integrity measures, claiming that state-level voter ID provisions will disfranchise millions of voters and that voter fraud rarely occurs. However, some of its major reports concerning voter ID measures and voter fraud are wrought with bias and have been refuted by election scholars," said National Center General Counsel Justin Danhof.

GroupSnoop.org is an educational website launched by the National Center in 2011 to provide candid, documented analysis of influential public policy-oriented non-profits. In the national debate over voter integrity measures, the Brennan Center is a prominent opponent of efforts to curb voter fraud and protect voters against identity theft. This new GroupSnoop.org profile shines some much-needed light onto the inner workings, funding and motivations of the Brennan Center.

The profile shows that the Brennan Center has a history of cherry-picking data that aligns with pre-determined conclusions that voter integrity measures, such as requiring a photo ID to vote, are actually efforts to disfranchise specific voting blocs. The Brennan Center appears to ignore or severely downplay data that are inconvenient for its theses.

For example, in November 2006, the Brennan Center published a widely cited report, "Citizens Without Proof," in which it claimed that 21 million adult Americans lack a photo ID, including 25 percent of black Americans. Election scholars with the Heritage Foundation evaluated the report and concluded that "[b]y eschewing many of the traditional scientific methods of data collection and analysis, the authors of the Brennan Center study appear to have pursued results that advance a particular political agenda rather than the truth about voter identification."

The Brennan Center profile on GroupSnoop.org also exposes the advocacy group's close ties to George Soros, known for his prolific funding of explicitly left-wing organizations. Soros has a history of making contributions intended to influence American policymaking and elections. Soros reportedly spent an estimated $27.5 million during the 2004 election cycle in a failed effort to oust then-President George W. Bush.

"Further clouding the Brennan Center's reputation is that convicted felon George Soros' Open Society Foundations have funneled over seven million dollars to the Brennan Center since 2000," said Danhof. "It is no wonder the Brennan Center works so hard on a daily basis to provide intellectual ammunition to those fighting voter integrity measures."

Despite the Brennan Center's best effort to paint voter integrity measures as racially-charged barriers to voting, the American public strongly supports democratically-enacted voter ID laws at the state level to protect the value of their vote. In a recent Rasmussen poll, 73 percent of Americans supported voter ID laws.

As the Brennan Center continues its campaign against voter ID, a simple and effective way to protect against stolen votes, it is troubling that the media - which increasingly seeks to "fact-check" political speech - is not reporting that the Brennan Center is an advocacy organization. This need for scrutiny is increasingly important given that the Brennan Center is willing to say that lawmakers supporting ballot protection legislation do so out of racial animosity and political maneuvering.

This new GroupSnoop.org profile should change that narrative.

"Brennan Center work should be presented as opinion - if it is considered at all," said Danhof. "The Brennan Center is a George Soros-funded extreme advocacy group that appears willing to fight all meaningful efforts to combat voter fraud. It should be regarded as such."


East is East & West is West

by Major General Jerry Curry, USA, {Ret. Chaplain}


The great British poet Rudyard Kipling, understanding todays situation in Afghanistan better than our State Department wrote, "I have eaten your bread and salt. I have drunk your water and wine. The deaths ye died I have watched beside. And the lives ye led were mine."

There are two points the President and the Secretaries of State and Defense may want to keep in mind as they evaluate future problems in the Middle East and how to successfully address them. Both are easiest illustrated by real life happenings.

Many years ago I attended the Infantry officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia. Probably ten percent of the students attending that ten month course of instruction were from foreign countries. For about half of the course my table mate was an Arab. We studied together, completed homework assignments together, got to know each others families and generally enjoyed each others company.

Part of that time we students were immersed in reading about, researching and discussing wars and problems of the Middle East. By this time my Arab classmate and I had, I thought, become close friends. A question popped into my mind and without evaluating it I said, "I have a question to ask you, but you may find it a little impertinent or, perhaps, offensive."

"That's quite alright", he replied. "We know each other well enough to be honest with each other. So go ahead and ask your question."

"Well", I began. "Each time you Arabs start a war with Israel, they beat your socks off. Why don't you learn your lesson and quit making war on them?"

The words hadn't passed my lips before I knew that I shouldn't have asked that particular question. But I was wrong. My Arab officer friend didn't get angry. He didn't even think before replying.

"My dear friend", he said in his British accent, "You are absolutely right. Each time we attack the Israelis they whip our asses. But have you noticed that with each loss we get better. We get whipped not as badly as in the war before."

Then he got a faraway look in his eyes, pounded on the table and said, "Sometime in the next thousand years¦ we will win!"

Up until then I had never thought in terms of a thousand years, and I dont think I'm very good at it today. But for those formulating foreign and defense policy for the nation, it is worth making the effort. For it is difficult to think in terms of the immediate future while negotiating with a nation whose leaders are thinking in terms of hundreds or thousands of years.

Point two: during the first Gulf War U.S. and Arab forces fought side by side and some of the officers became close friends. When the war ended in victory there was a celebration in the officers club with everyone congratulating each other. A lot of handshaking and hugging was going on. It was a time of displaying real brotherly love. Seeing this, one of the senior Arab generals felt the need to set the record straight. "Look", he said to a small cluster of American generals. "We have fought together and some of us have died together. I know you feel that makes us brothers. But that is not the way it is in my world."

He looked around the circle making eye contact with all of them. "I don't want to see you hurt so I need to share this with you. There will be no tomorrow for us jointly. No matter how much you have helped my country and you came and helped us when we desperately needed your help and no matter how friendly you feel toward us, we are still Muslims and you are still Christians. That means that in our eyes, we can never be brothers. I'm sorry but to us, you will always be Infidels!"

And so we Infidels have liberated Iraq and Afghanistan, but we have not made their countries nor their people depositories of freedom and liberty. No matter how hard we work to rebuild their governments, infrastructure, educational and medical institutions, and no matter how desperately they need our help as the Arab general pointedly noted we can never be brothers to each other.

Also, I learned what Kipling meant when he wrote, "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."

He was pointing out to the western world that to Muslims, we Christians will always be infidels!

How a Sebelius judge saved Planned Parenthood

by Jack Cashill {WND.com}


With her first appointment to the Kansas Supreme Court as governor in 2003, Democrat Kathleen Sebelius chose the proudly “third-wave” feminist, Carol Beier. It was a timely choice.  That same year, Republican Phill Kline took office as Kansas Attorney General.  From Beier’s perspective, Kline represented a serious threat to the “reproductive freedom” that she, Sebelius, and other third-wavers espoused.

As Kline sensed before taking office, the state’s two dominant abortion providers, Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri (CHPPKM) in suburban Kansas City and George Tiller’s Women’s Health Care clinic in Wichita, were ignoring state restrictions on late term abortion, Tiller flagrantly.  What Kline discovered only after a multi-year fight with Sebelius’s people to get access to relevant records was that both clinics were grossly ignoring mandatory reporting laws on child rape.

Of the 166 abortions performed on girls under-fifteen in the years 2002 and 2003, the clinics reported only three cases to the state department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. They should have reported all 166.

Kline was prepared to press charges against both Tiller and CHPPKM. For reasons of ideology and campaign finance, Sebelius could not let this happen.

To begin, Sebelius persuaded Paul Morrison, a popular Republican district attorney from Johnson County in suburban Kansas City, to change parties and run against Kline in 2006. The state abortion industry invested nearly $2 million to help the local media defeat Kline.

To the dismay of the abortion industry, however, Kline was elected to fulfill the remaining two years on Morrison’s term as Johnson County DA. From that position, he was able to continue the investigation into CHPPKM he had begun as attorney general.

In October 2007, Kline filed 107 counts, 23 of them felonies, against CHPPKM. District Court Judge James Vano found “probable cause” of crimes having been committed and allowed the case to proceed.

Planned Parenthood and new AG Morrison sued Kline to derail the prosecution.  When the case reached the Kansas Supreme Court, the justices grudgingly ruled in Kline’s favor and allowed his case against Planned Parenthood to go forward.  If the facts supported Kline, Judge Beier clearly did not. “His attitude and behavior are inexcusable,” she wrote for the majority , “particularly for someone who purports to be a professional prosecutor.”

Associated Press writer John Hanna uncritically described her summary as “a public tongue-lashing.” A Topeka reporter termed her opinion “a searing condemnation.” The Kansas City Star headlined its story, “Kansas Court Rebukes District Attorney Kline.” And remember, Kline won the case.

If the media were blind to what was happening, then Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice, Kay McFarland, was not.  She called Beier’s opinion “ the very antithesis of ‘restraint and discretion’ and . . . not an appropriate exercise of our inherent power.”  McFarland scolded Beier and the majority for attempting “to denigrate Kline for actions that it cannot find to have been in violation of any law and to heap scorn upon him for his attitude and behavior that does not rise to the level of contempt.”


McFarland may have suspected that Beier’s hectoring of Kline was not spontaneous. Earlier that year, in fact, Beier co-authored a provocative paper that endorsed a strategy very much like the one used to defame Kline.  The paper was written for the Feminist Legal Theory and Feminisms (sic) Conference sponsored by the University of Baltimore School of Law and dealt with what is called third-wave feminism and its effect on parenting law.


The article’s closing quote by Gloria Steinem captures the spirit of this radical feminist incarnation. “We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned,” said the feminist icon and all-purpose leftist. “We are really talking about humanism.”  Understanding that tradition is not easily discarded in a state like Kansas, Beier and Walsh cite approvingly a strategy suggested by feminist law professor Bridget Crawford.

Write the authors, “Crawford posits that the third-wave’s reclamation of feminism through engagement with the media is powerful ‘cultural work’ that may be a necessary pre-condition to an evolution in the law.”

According to Crawford, “The media are tools to produce cultural infrastructure, without which even the best intentioned and artfully designed legal reforms are ineffective.”  Beier knew something about the media. Before going to law school, she worked several years for the Kansas City Times, the then sister publication of the Kansas City Star.

The Star proved to be the most useful of all media “tools” at Beier’s disposal. Indeed, the paper won Planned Parenthood’s top 2006 national editorial honor for its work defeating “anti-choice zealot” Kline and attacked him relentlessly thereafter.  So powerful was the media’s “cultural work” that in May 2007 Sebelius had no qualms about letting Planned Parenthood celebrate her birthday at a big Kansas City blow-out.

Leading the “conga line around the concert hall” was Peter Brownlie, the local CEO whose abortion clinic was then at the center of Kline’s investigation.  The partiers “sure know how to have fun!” enthused the Planned Parenthood newsletter.  With the cultural infrastructure so well established, Kline lost his re-election bid and was forced to leave the state to find employment.

Wanting to make an example of Kline lest some other prosecutor challenge Planned Parenthood in the future, the activists on the Supreme Court prompted an ethics investigation into Kline’s handling of the abortion cases.  Ironically, one of the charges was that Kline did not share the scope of his investigation with Sebelius. This was true. Kline feared her people would hamper the investigation and possibly destroy evidence.

As it turned out, they did both. Planned Parenthood will likely escape prosecution because Sebelius’s health department and her attorney general’s office separately destroyed key evidence.  Last week, as the decision in the ethics case neared, Kline filed a recusal motion showing that Beier’s 2008 opinion was “flagrantly dishonest in its presentation of facts.” After reading Kline’s motion, four other justices decided that they too had previously complained about Kline’s behavior and recused themselves, as did Beier.

In doing so, the justices gave Beier cover. A public airing of the Beier-led assault on Kline would have seriously damaged the court’s reputation and Sebelius’s.  Planned Parenthood stood to lose over $300 million in federal funding if CHPPKM had been successfully prosecuted. Sebelius protected Planned Parenthood’s interest in Kansas and now oversees its funding as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The ladder goes up, Kathleen, but the circles go down.