ok tell me about the heritage foundation

[JohnKleeb]

my new neighbor works for them and the wife was wearing a bush t.

[CO Liberal]

1. They're an Ultra Right Wing "Think" Tank

Funded by Pete Coors and his family.

[wuushew]

3. Indeed..check out the board of trustees it a veritable who's who's of evil

http://www.heritage.org/About/Departments/trustees.cfm

[KG]

2. you should shun this neighbor.

stoning would be better, but not legal.

[JohnKleeb]

6. I am a shy person, I can shun easily.

[nosmokes]

4. if you're at this website

you can rest assured that the heritage foundation doesn't have your best interests at heart.

[JohnKleeb]

7. I know they're right wng

[patrice]

5. They produce pseudoscientific research supporting right wing

political agendas for consumption by right wing columnists and websites which then gets picked up by right wing TV as "news".

Read all about them and all of their buddies, who works for whom from the time of Nixon to the present in David Brock's book The Republican Noise Machine.

Be sure you have plenty of Tums on hand because this book will make you sick.

[Warpy]

18. Worse, they groom media talking heads

..and shop them around to all the networks as "experts" on a variety of subjects, just to get their propaganda disseminated on "mainstream" news outlets.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

[Kathy in Cambridge]

8. RW Think Tank

have you though of raising hell with your neighbors? Egg their house on Halloween? Toilet paper their trees?

Exactly what anyone who works for a propaganda organ deserves...

[salin]

14. Funny thing - in their early years (for about 10 or more) no one

considered them a "think tank". When I worked in the Hill in the mid eighties it was always considered just a right wing policy house. The difference is in legitimacy - Brookings took scholars - and they conducted serious research - serious methodology serious scholarship, etc. WHile Heritage (at least in the eighties) just spun out partisan position papers. They called their folks "fellows" - but they were political hacks - meaning they didn't do research. They just wrote positions based on ideology (no real data.)

That impression was confirmed for me as reality by two things - first was David Brock's description (he was a "fellow" in the early eighties) which is more of a propoganda mill than a "think tank". And later worked professionally (not in the same org. but in the same field) with a guy (shallow, religious right, incapable of intellectual thought, let alone scholarship) who used that to go work on political campaigns to try to push school voucher legislation.

I have also worked with someone from Hudson - where they did real research and policy work (even if it is biased right). And ran across folks and work done at Hoover - also engaged in real scholarship (even more biased right than Hudson.) No comparison to Heritage. I don't get the impression that Heritage has improved over the years and suddenly become scholarly or respectable. I always cringe when they are refered to as a "think tank".

[CO Liberal]

22. That's Why I Put "Think" In Quotes

I don't believe anyone at the Heritage Foundation is CAPABLE of thinking!!!

:-)

[Sapphocrat]

9. How much time ya got?

You may as well just re-read everything you've already read about PNAC -- the HF is just another tentacle of the same big octopus.

A few short examples (some links may not work -- this is from my big file of PNAC notes):


By the end of the Reagan Administration, neo-conservatives had become dominant or extremely influential in a number of such conservative groups. Not only at Commentary and The Public Interest, but also at National Review, The American Spectator, and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, as well as at the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and other leading conservative think-tanks, neo-conservative influence became routine. ...

Samuel Francis
Neo-Con Invasion
The New American
August 5, 1996
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no16/vo12no16_invasion.htm



"The victories we're celebrating today didn't begin last Tuesday," Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner Jr. told a meeting of supporters in 1994 just after the Republican sweep of the House of Representatives. "They started more than 20 years ago when Dick Scaife had the vision to see the need for a conservative intellectual movement in America. These organizations built the intellectual case that was necessary before political leaders like Newt Gingrich could translate their ideas into practical political alternatives." ...

Among Scaife's acquaintances at this time were Glenn Campbell, head of the conservative Hoover Institution, and Frank Barnett, a shadowy figure with links to the CIA. With their encouragement, Scaife began directing the vast resources at his disposal -- most particularly the donations of his family's trusts and foundations -- to fight the "Soviet menace." Later, joined by a number of younger conservatives, some with ideas, others with money, Scaife would become the biggest funder of the New Right, spending millions of dollars a year to help establish the Heritage Foundation and a host of other think tanks focused on marketing conservative ideas both to Congress and to the public. ...

Karen Rothmyer
The man behind the mask
Salon.com
April 7, 1998
http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/07news.html



Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and CSIS are conducting discussions about privatizing Iraq's oil industry. Some of them have put forward detailed plans outlining how Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other nations could be forced to open up their oil and gas industries to foreign investment. ...

Robert Dreyfuss
The Thirty Year Itch
Mother Jones
March/April 2003
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/10/ma_273_01.html



Wolfowitz studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago under - you guessed it - Albert Wohlstetter, and is another registered Democrat turned neoconservative. ... In 1992, he wrote a draft of a U.S. defense policy statement that said the U.S. goal in the post-Cold War world should be to perpetuate U.S. global predominance, to preclude the rise of any power that could challenge it and to prevent "untrustworthy" states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction -- by preemptive military action if necessary. ...

Within days of the 9/11 attack, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld advocated overthrowing Saddam as part of the U.S. response, despite a lack of evidence connecting the dictator to the hijackings. ...

Heritage Foundation fellow John C. Hulsman says that "Wolfowitz is critical," and that "He's the link between intellectual neocons like Kristol and the world of decision-makers."

Tracking Neocons and the War Party
neoconjob
April 15, 2003
http://neoconconjob.blogspot.com/

[JohnKleeb]

10. god have mercy on my young soul

thanks.

[SoCalDem]

11. Is that you, Carlos??

:evilgrin:


Don't forget www.google.com

[Sapphocrat]

12. LOL! n/t

[TahitiNut]

15. <guffaw> GMTA

:evilgrin:

[JohnKleeb]

24. heh nope

[cosmicdot]

13. Richard Mellon Scaife

a major 501(c) tax-exempt so-called "think tank" which is part of the GOP political apparatus ... they help disseminate the agenda on behalf of the GOP, and its candidates ... give $2000 to *; give much more to the Heritage Foundation ... serves a similar goal ...

Heritage people are frequently guests on spin shows as "experts" to give 'commentary' and analysis; and/or, quoted in articles ... this helps to advance ideology into the mainstream; and what people get from their sound bite TV gleanings ... the Media is just too willing to throw fair and balance out with the bath water by using Heritage as a resource ...

http://www.heritage.org

IIRC, Lynne Cheney works there; as does Justice Thomas's wife ...

check out their trustees ... very white ... extremely wealthy
http://www.heritage.org/About/Departments/trustees.cfm


"Some of the finest conservatives in America today do their work in the Heritage Foundation. For those of you new to all this, The Heritage Foundation is America's leading conservative think-tank."
– Rush Limbaugh


Similar organizations:

Council for National Policy
American Enterprise Institute

:hi: JK

go to http://www.mediatransparency.org find their fund-o-meter
http://www.mediatransparency.org/fundometer.php
enter the heritage website http://www.heritage.org
and see what comes up ...

http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/info_on_any_recipient.php?recipientID=153

[patrice]

16. I forgot to mention that the Heritage Foundation and all

of their buddies fund this research that they know it is all a load of crap. They know that the "scientific methods" are phony, but they don't care. Actually even an amateur such as I can see the flaws. The point is the cumulative effect all of it has on people who are "insecure due to lack of respect to their values by upper-class 'prestige givers.'" These lieing hate-mongers are responsible for catche phrases like "liberal media" and most negative references to "elite" anything.

Heritage and a bunch of others are funded by the Olin Foundation, Coors, Koch family foundations, Bradley Foundation, and Richard Mellon Sciafe.

Their effect upon the right-ward lunge in political discourse in this country is anything but co-incidental accident.

[Dirk39]

17. Hi JohnKleeb

I allow myself to quote a DU post from about 3 weeks ago.

"NightTrain (1000+ posts) Thu May-06-04 02:05 AM
Original message
PROTESTERS AMBUSH CONSERVATIVE THINK TANK



May 5, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PROTESTERS AMBUSH CONSERVATIVE THINK TANK
Speaker applauded for lambasting Bush

At the Heritage Foundation's annual Resource Bank meeting in Chicago last Friday, protesters masquerading as a right-wing think tank took the stage and announced that in light of Bush's shortcomings, they were nominating former Reagan Attorney-General Ed Meese for president.

The audience applauded for nearly ten seconds. Meese, eating at a table just feet away from the podium where Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men made the announcement, grimaced and shook his head in surprise.

Heritage is the most influential think tank in Washington, spending over $25 million annually to influence policy. Just as the wildest anarchists aim to "smash the state," Heritage hopes that "the liberal welfare state can be brought to collapse," in the words of its current president.

The Yes Men registered for the Heritage event as "The Society for
Socioeconomic Stability" and spent two days mingling among the 650
participants before approaching the microphone during a lull in the
closing luncheon.

Echoing sentiments expressed by others throughout the event, Bichlbaum condemned Bush as an inadequate free-markets candidate. But while others had condemned Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program as "socialistic," Bichlbaum focussed on the administration's war in Iraq, calling it "crony corporate welfare" and "market distortion on a fairly gigantic scale."

"The Iraq war was history's biggest illegal trade subsidy," said Yes Man Mike Bonanno, who was also in attendance. "One thing we'll be trying to do in the months ahead is lodge an official complaint about this with the WTO in Geneva."

"In a free market, companies like Halliburton and Exxon should be funding their own market expansion projects instead of depending on the Federal government for it," said Louise Smith, another Yes Man attendee.

Please see http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/bush/heritage.shtml for
pictures and video.


The Yes Men are best known for having "represented" the World Trade
Organization in a number of venues; a movie about these adventures will be released by United Artists this coming August:
http://www.theyesmen.org/movie/"

I love the Yes Men!
Hello from Germany,
Dirk

[patrice]

19. Yay!!! Thanks for cheering me up! - eom

[drdigi420]

20. nutball right wing group, like the KKK and christian coalition

[kskiska]

21. Due to organizations such as the Heritage Foundation

the Repugs will never again have to worry about a loose cannon Supreme Court Justice such as Souter. Now, all their candidates and judges are vetted and filtered through these organizations and they know exactly what they're getting.

[Az]

23. Everything that is wrong with this country can be traced to this group

They are at the center of the system that has enabled the right to dominate this nation. Their campaign to take control of the media is the center of the spiders web. Scaife would be the spider but the Heritage foundation would be the center of the web. It doesn't get any more powerful than this group.