Right set to fight back on town hall protests
Source: The Hill
For the past three weeks, Democratic protesters have swarmed Republican town hall events across the country, booing, shouting down and trying to embarrass GOP lawmakers seeking to gut ObamaCare.
In the coming weeks, grassroots conservatives will be fighting back.
FreedomWorks, the Tea Party-aligned outside group, beginning next month will be organizing rallies and urging its nearly 6 million activists to turn out at town hall events to ensure members of Congress are also getting an earful from ObamaCare detractors.
There will be more grassroots hand-to-hand combat than weve seen in Washington for a long time, FreedomWorks President and CEO Adam Brandon said Monday during an interview in his office near the Capitol.
Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/319314-right-set-to-fight-back-on-town-hall-protests
Do you hear that? The Koch Brothers's funded astroturf group, FreedomWorks, is going to be out there in force to show that the American people hate health care, want to build a wall, keep out Muslims, want to privatize schools, end Medicaid, and abolish the EPA.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/freedomworks-rich-donors-armey-kibbe-super-pac
FreedomWorks bills itself as a grassroots outfit, but it's bankrolled mostly by big-money donors.
FreedomWorks, the national conservative group that helped launch the tea party movement, sells itself as a genuine grassroots operation, and for years it has battled accusations of "astroturfing"posing as a populist organization while doing the bidding of big-money donors. Yet internal documents obtained by Mother Jones show that FreedomWorks has indeed become dependent on wealthy individual donors to finance its growing operation.
Last month, the Washington Post reported that Richard Stephenson, a reclusive millionaire banker and FreedomWorks board member, and members of his family funneled $12 million in October through two newly created Tennessee corporations to FreedomWorks' super-PAC, which used these funds to support tea party candidates in November's elections. The revelation that a corporate bigwig like Stephenson, who founded the Cancer Treatment Centers of America and chairs its board, was responsible for more than half of the FreedomWorks super-PAC's haul in 2012 undercuts the group's grassroots image and hands ammunition to critics who say FreedomWorks does the bidding of rich conservative donors.
Big donations like Stephenson's are business as usual for FreedomWorks. According to a 52-page report prepared by FreedomWorks' top brass for a board of directors meeting held in mid-December at the Virginia office of Sands Capital Management, an investment firm run by FreedomWorks board member Frank Sands, the entire FreedomWorks organizationits 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) nonprofit arms and its super-PACraised nearly $41 million through mid-December. Of that total, $33 millionor 81 percent of its 2012 fundraisingcame in the form of "major gifts," the type of big donations coveted by nonprofits and super-PACs. (FreedomWorks' nonprofit components do not have to disclose their funders.)
Well-heeled individual contributors ponied up $31 millionor 94 percentof those major gifts, according to the FreedomWorks board book. Eight donors gave a half-million dollars or more; 22 donated between $100,000 and $499,999; 17 cut checks between $50,000 and $99,999; and 95 gave between $10,000 and $49,999. Foundations contributed $1.6 million in major gifts, and corporations donated $330,000. Corporations once accounted for more of FreedomWorks' hefty donations. In a memo included in the report, David Kirby, FreedomWork's vice president for development, and senior adviser Terry Kibbe wrote, "This year continued our trend of relying less and less on corporate support." At the same time FreedomWorks expanded its small donor ranks from 41,794 in 2011 to 81,081 in 2012. More than 30,000 of those small donors gave between a dollar and $99 this year.
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...from Social Security, Education and Medicare:
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef017742efed55970d-pi
What the fuck. 