3 Big Lies in Religious-Right 'Voter Guide' Hitting 13 Million Cell Phones 26SEP12

THERE has to be somebody in a leadership position in the Christian Church who can address the issue of Christians deliberately lying about political candidates they oppose or support, and about Christians distributing election information about candidates that are filled with deliberate lies, deception, and misinformation to manipulate the Christian vote. Protestant denominations that allow distribution of such material to their congregants are tarnishing the reputation of Christianity and the leadership of each individual church that allows such material to be distributed in their church, to their members, is committing the same sins as those who have produced this material. The God I grew up believing in and that I still believe in has never asked anyone, and will never ask anyone, to lie for HIM. This from AlterNet...

The Bible tells us not to bear false witness against one's neighbor. Ralph Reed apparently never got the memo.

  

 Intent on making good on his post-2008 election promise to "never get out-hustled on the ground again," Ralph Reed, who leads the right-wing Faith and Freedom Coalition, this week unveiled the organization's ostensibly "non-partisan" presidential election voter guide, which will be inserted into church bulletins throughout the nine battleground states in which the November election will be won or lost. 

In his Christian education, though, apparently Reed never learned that it's a sin to tell a lie. His voter guide contains three big ones, in its characterizations of President Barack Obama's positions on Medicare, environmental regulation and abortion.

 

Reed's voter guides resemble the handbills distributed by the Christian Coalition in the 1990s, at that time delivered by that quaint operation known as the U.S. Postal Service, when Reed ran the organization for the Rev. Pat Robertson. 

 

While the Faith and Freedom Coalition says it will mail 2 million of the hard-copy version to churches and social conservative voters, it's also invested in high-tech methods of delivery, services provided by a subsidiary of Reed's own for-profit consulting firm , Century Strategies. (When I reported on the relationship between Reed's non-profit Faith and Freedom Coalition and Century Strategies, Reed did not return my phone calls requesting information on whether or not he was personally profiting from the arrangement.)

 

For example, the guide is available in PDF form for individuals or churches to download and print out -- and it also contains a nifty little bar code for scanning into one's smart phone that prompts a video to play, offering more spin on the candidates' positions. There are also order forms for churches to request thousands of the hard-copy guide, free of charge.

 

But it doesn't end there. As AlterNet reported in July, the Faith and Freedom Coalition also intends to send out text messages with links to the voter guide embedded in the message, and claims to have on file the cell phone numbers of 13 million social conservatives. As David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network notes, the Obama campaign, known for its social-media and high-tech prowess, had only 8 million cell phone numbers in the 2008 campaign.

 

But the biggest difference between the Reed operation and the Obama campaign is the sheer mendacity of several of the claims in the Faith and Freedom Coalition voter guide. Here's our own little guide to the three big lies being pushed by the holier than thou.

 

1. The "Medicare cut" lie. We thought we had dispensed with this one when AlterNet's Joshua Holland so thoroughly debunked it , but that didn't stop both Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and running mate Paul Ryan from repeating it often. And now Reed is serving it up as gospel in his voter guide. 

 

The guide features two columns, one under a photo of each candidate, with an angry-looking Obama occupying the left-hand column, and a benign-looking, smiling Romney on the right. A center column lists a highly spun set of 10 issues, with the word "Yes" or "No" under the photo of the respective candidates.

 

Issue #5 reads "Cut Medicare $716 billion." Under Romney's name, it reads "No;" under Obama's it reads "Yes."

 

The truth is that, in the Affordable Care Act, some $716 billion in cost savings were made to Medicare, with no reduction in benefits to those who receive it. There is no "cut."

 

But the irony is that Paul Ryan offered up a Medicare plan that also cut Medicare costs by the same amount, and applied them to the budget deficit.

 

2. The "cap-and-tax" lie. It it was up to right-wing leaders such as Reed and Americans For Prosperity President Tim Phillips (who happens to be Reed's former business partner in Century Strategies), there would be no environmental regulation at all. Why? Because their billionaire bankrollers, such as David Koch and Foster Freiss, don't want it. So, they're trying to convince everyday Americans that regulations that limit the amount of toxins a polluting entity can emit into the air and water amounts to a "tax."

 

Listed on line #6 of the Faith and Freedom Coalition voter guide is "Cap and Trade Carbon Tax," which bears a "Yes" in the Obama column and a "No" in Romney's. At issue is a proposed program known as "cap and trade" that would regulate pollutants by issuing permits to polluting businesses allowing for prescribed amounts of emissions of certain toxins. Businesses, however, would be able to buy and sell units of these pollution permits to one another, meaning that if a power plant did not have the capacity to reduce its emissions, it could buy additional permits from a business that wasn't using its own allowable units of emissions. That's not a tax . In fact, it's not so unlike passing a regulation and then fining an entity that violates the regulation.

 

But don't get those billionaires started on regulations...

 

3. The government-funded abortion lie. Right-wing leaders obviously know they can't win their no-abortion-under-any-circumstances with a majority of Americans; why else would they need to promote lies about abortion? So, on line #7 of the Faith and Freedom Coalition guide, we find the words "Taxpayer Funded Abortion," with, predictably, a "Yes" under Obama's name and a "No" under Romney's.

 

One assumes this stems from the trope peddled by right-wingers to this day that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., Obamacare), contains government funding for abortion. It does not. What it does is allow women to purchase, at their own expense, supplemental women's health coverage that may include coverage for abortion -- in states that permit the purchase of such coverage through government-managed exchanges. 

 

That's right -- states are permitted to restrict the use of their own health-care exchanges for the purchase of such private coverage. (And when you think about it, from a women's rights point of view, that's pretty horrible, considering the fact that women have a legal right to abortion. But that's what it took to get the bill passed.) In fact, an   article by Timothy Stoltzfus Jost in the Catholic magazine, Commonweal, states that the Affordable Care Act "may be the single most prolife piece of legislation ever adopted by Congress."

 

Right-wingers also claim that the Democratic Party platform endorses taxpayer-funded abortion because it affirms a woman's right to choose "regardless of ability to pay." But less than a week ago on 60 Minutes , Mitt Romney endorsed the idea of making hospitals treat critically ill uninsured people, regardless of ability to pay, but no one assumed he was telling government to pick up the tab.

 

* * *

Just as these so-called voter guides hit the Sunday bulletins in evangelical churches in those all-important swing states, voter registration forms will be hitting the sanctuaries -- at least if Gary Marx, Reed's right-hand man at the Faith and Freedom Coalition, has his way. At a training session conducted at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. earlier this month, Marx suggested to activists that they lay those registration forms right in the pews, and collect them from congregants before they leave the church, leaving as little as possible to chance.

 

h/t Peter Montgomery

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington correspondent. Follow her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/addiestan

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/3-big-lies-religious-right-voter-guide-hitting-13-million-cell-phones

 

Tea Party Jesus: Koch's Americans For Prosperity Sidles Up to Religious Right for 2012 Campaign

 
"Oppressing the poor in order to enrich oneself, and giving to the rich, will lead only to loss."
- Proverbs 22:16

HOW sad that so many Christians are turning to those who are able to pervert scripture and the teachings of Jesus Christ to justify their lust for power, their greed for more, their neglect and abandonment of the least among us and their prejudices and voluntary ignorance. The teachings of Christ are clear, we have a moral responsibility to provide for those in need, and to concentrate not on accumulating wealth here because we  can't take it with us, but to keep in mind the rewards of Heaven. These Christians, voluntarily, knowingly "duped" by the political operatives of the rich and corporate America need to ask themselves how they will answer the question as Christ himself presented the scene in Matthew 25 
¹⁴ "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne,and all the nations ¹⁵ will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.'Then the righteous ¹⁶ will answer him and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?'And the king will say to them in reply, 'Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.'¹⁷ Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.'¹⁸ Then they will answer and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?'He will answer them, 'Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.' And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."
This from Alternet....
Jesus, it seems, is a fiscal conservative. Make that a tax-cut-loving, labor-union-busting, supply-side fiscal conservative. How else to explain the presence of Tim Phillips, president of the Koch-funded Tea Party astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity, as a presenter at the Awakening conference sponsored by the religious-right group, Freedom Federation?
Now effectively in the employ of the libertarian David Koch, who founded Americans for Prosperity and chairs the board of its foundation, Phillips has deep ties to the evangelical Right, most notably with Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, who now heads a new entity, the Faith and Freedom Coalition. Reed and Phillips go way back; the two were partners in Century Strategies, the political consulting group through which Reed played a role in the Jack Abramoff bribery scandal. Now, it seems Phillips is partnered with Reed and other Religious Right leaders in a much greater conquest: a merger of the Religious Right and the ostensibly secular Tea Party movement to create an electoral juggernaut that will determine the outcome of the 2012 Republican presidential primary.
It’s not new for Religious Right leaders to embrace conservative economics. Back in the 1990s, Ralph Reed, then at the Christian Coalition's helm, endorsed Newt Gingrich’s "Contract with America," calling taxes a “family values” issue. Reed shrewdly calculated that the Religious Right would gain more influence within the Republican Party if it set its sights beyond a focus on abortion and gay rights. Now Reed is back in the game with his Faith and Freedom Coalition, a kind of hybrid Religious Right/Tea Party get-out-the-vote operation.
Reed, who promises to mobilize a massive conservative evangelical vote in 2012, has been organizing in Iowa, whose party caucuses mark the opening of the presidential campaign season, for more than a year. According to David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Faith and Freedom Coalition has a database of 20 million evangelical voters. Last month, Reed's FFC hosted the first major Iowa gathering of a motley group of GOP presidential contenders, each eager to appeal to both religious and economic conservatives.
But there’s something more at work here than just good coalition politics. Movement strategists, such as Reed and Phillips, want to fully co-opt or merge the Religious Right, its organizing infrastructure, and its activists into the Tea Party wing of the GOP. So conservative Christian voters are being told that a radically limited federal government is God’s idea, and that right-wing economic policies are mandated by the Bible. That could be effective in places like Iowa, with its crucial early presidential caucus, where conservative voters are mobilized through evangelical churches and home-schooling groups. According to Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times, “There is no comparable network for fiscal-minded or moderate Republicans.” Not even the impressive organizing prowess of Americans for Prosperity can match it.
This political strategy – claiming a biblical foundation for the anti-government agenda of the Tea Party and its corporate backers – was on full display last weekend at the Lynchburg, Va., campus of Liberty University, founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, where the Freedom Federation’s Awakening conference took place. In a video message, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., a heroine in both movements and possible presidential candidate, hit all the Religious Right and Tea Party high points: abortion, gays, “anti-family” health care reform, and the “immoral” and “fundamentally evil” national debt. She praised Iowa voters for rejecting three state supreme court judges in a protest against the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples in the state.
“Do you see what we can do when we all work together?” asked Bachmann, who is also a popular speaker at Americans for Prosperity events. “It’s that kind of unyielding stand that I know each of you is willing to make,” she said, segueing immediately into one of her favorite Bible passages, “about a woman who also laid it all on the line.” Recounting the story of a woman who was criticized for pouring an expensive fragrant ointment over Jesus’ head, Bachmann said “[w]e should pour ourselves out for Jesus” and recounted, in what had the feel of a campaign speech, the many ways she personally has done so. Before the conference ended, Bachmann would win the Awakening’s presidential straw poll with 22 percent of the vote.
Bachmann didn’t make her scheduled appearance in person because Congress was consumed with the last-minute budget brinksmanship that ultimately averted a government shutdown. But former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose presidential positioning is increasingly focused on appeals to religious conservatives, did make it to Liberty, where he spoke to an invitation-only “leadership luncheon” alongside prominent “birther” Joseph Farah.
The thrice-married Gingrich began taking up the God cause about five years ago, as he sought to reclaim his place in public life after he was forced to step down as speaker and his adulterous affair, with his current wife while still married to his second wife, was exposed. His 2006 book, Rediscovering God in America, makes the case that the nation’s founders intended the Christian God to occupy a central role in the work of the republic. In 2007, Falwell offered this justification for inviting the less-than-pure Gingrich to speak at Liberty University’s graduation: “Gingrich has dedicated much of his time to calling America back to our Christian heritage,” Falwell wrote in an op-ed.
Gingrich appears to derive much of his God-and-country rhetoric from the revisionist “Christian nation” history of David Barton, a Religious Right “historian” and GOP operative who has reached millions of Americans with his frequent appearances on Glenn Beck’s soon-to-end Fox News television show. According to Barton, Jesus himself is also opposed to progressive taxation, the capital gains tax, the minimum wage, and even collective bargaining.
That sounds like the kind of Jesus that David Koch, not known for his religiosity, could get behind. Koch, the billionaire who, with his brother, Charles, leads Koch Industries (the second-largest privately held corporation in the U.S.) recently gained additional notoriety for his role, and that of Americans for Prosperity, in fomenting the anti-labor actions of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
But long before the current battles over the budgets of states and nations, the strategists of the Right were plotting the merger of the Tea Party and the conservative evangelical movement. In 2009, the Freedom Federation, an umbrella group, was launched by a constellation of right-wing groups, and described as a collaboration among religious groups. Federation members include familiar Religious Right political groups like the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, and Concerned Women for America, as well as dominionist “apostolic” groups that are increasingly being embraced by the Religious Right, such as Generals International and Morningstar Ministries. But also among the founders was Americans for Prosperity, which may account for the fact that the Federation’s "Declaration of American Values" not only proclaims the groups’ allegiance to the social agenda of the Religious Right but also to a system of taxes that “are not progressive in nature, and within a limited government framework, to encourage economic opportunity, free enterprise, and free market competition.”
Today, Republican officeholders in Washington and state capitals across the nation are trying to keep both economic and social conservative voters happy by simultaneously pushing attacks on government and on women’s access to reproductive choice, linking the latter to government spending on women's health programs.
During the weeks of public debate over various short-term continuing resolutions to fund the federal government -- leading up to the recent last-minute budget deal that kept the federal government operating -- Religious Right groups called budget cuts a moral imperative, so much so that Daniel Burke of the Religion News Service wrote in February that the debt had become the “new hot issue for evangelicals.”
“America’s growing debt is not just a financial issue, it’s a spiritual one," Jerry Newcombe of Coral Ridge Ministries told Burke. "The Bible is very clear about the moral dangers of debt.”
In Lynchburg, speaker after speaker at the Awakening conference pounded that theme. The Family Research Council’s Kenneth Blackwell argued that the debt is a moral issue because it amounts to “intergenerational theft.”  Evangelical leader Samuel Rodriguez, often regarded as the Right’s bridge to Latinos, equated “big government” with “the spirit of Pharaoh,” referring to the Egyptian ruler who enslaved the Jews in the biblical Book of Exodus before God sent Moses to deliver them to freedom.
AFP’s Phillips hosted a panel on what he claimed was a looming economic disaster. In introducing Blackwell, Phillips praised the Family Research Council as “one of the best organizations in the country,” saying FRC “does so much work, protecting our values, our faith, our freedom.” Also on the panel were former Reagan official Marc Nuttle, who serves on the board of the dominionist Oak Initiative, and Grover Norquist, the fiscal conservative who is one of the best-known figures on the secular right. Nuttle stayed to the weekend's script, calling big government an “idol” and warning that failure to get the nation’s fiscal house in order in the next two years could lead to “1,000 years of darkness” on the earth, while Norquist spoke in secular language.
Under normal circumstances, Liberty University would be a strange place to find Norquist, who last year joined the board of the right-wing gay Republican group GOProud, whose participation in the Conservative Political Action Conference led to a boycott by some religious conservatives. But his value as an anti-tax zealot -- best known for saying his goal was to shrink the federal government until it was small enough to drown in the bathtub -- appeared to win him a dispensation.  (Norquist seems to have a drowning fetish: at Awakening he joked that an economic recovery plan would be to put all the trial lawyers in a bag and throw them in the river.) Norquist's group, Americans for Tax Reform, according to a report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, has received $60,000 in funding from the Claude Lambe Foundation, which is headed by Charles Koch.
Norquist was there to support Tim Phillips’ push for religious and economic conservatives to work together on “limited government” and electoral victories. Blackwell and Norquist engaged in a bit of indirect jockeying, with Blackwell warning that economic conservatives would not be able to win the future if they try to marginalize social conservatives.
Norquist did not address the point directly, but described the whole of the conservative movement as a coalition grounded in a desire to be left alone by the government -- a libertarian characterization that rankles many Religious Right activists. But under Phillips’ watchful gaze, they were on their best eye-on-the-prize behavior; when asked about their differences, they declined to criticize each other and instead talked of how their followers needed to work together to win.
Norquist suggested there are no major divisions among the conservative on “vote-moving issues.” But Blackwell struck a warning: “There is no way that we can win this battle, culturally or economically, if we don’t take a stand -- for marriage, for the family, and school choice and religious liberty,” he said.
Just a few days after Bachmann, won the Awakening straw poll, Ralph Reed tweeted an upcoming appearance of his own: “Can't wait to see Tea Party friends in Orlando & Tampa on 4/15 for tax day rallies!” In Orlando, Reed will share the stage with Tea Party favorites Marco Rubio, the freshman U.S. senator from Florida who is already being touted as a potential future president, and Herman Cain, the prospective presidential candidate with strong ties to AFP. As could be said of Bachmann and Cain, that Tax Day Rally is co-sponsored by Americans for Prosperity.
Peter Montgomery is a senior fellow at People For the American Way Foundation.

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