Friday, November 17, 2006
Friday Morning News Roundup
-- Milton Friedman on Katrina victims: Let them eat vouchers! (Just one reason why I'm not sad to see the old reactionary greedhead go.) -- Big surprise (NOT): The bankrollers of the anti-affirmative-action movement are all companies and CEOS who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into hiring non-whites. For example:
Castle Rock Foundation Coors Brewing Co.'s support for anti-gay groups led to a 10-year boycott led by AFL-CIO in 1977. Pressured to reform, Coors began funding black and Latino groups through the Adolph Coors Foundation and became one of the first companies to offer domestic-partner benefits to employees in 1995. In 1993, the Coors family created Castle Rock to separate the Coors name from its conservative agenda. The Castle Rock and Adolph Coors Foundations have the same board of directors, the same staff and the same address. Coors co-owner Joseph Coors founded and financed the conservative Heritage Foundation, which later received most of its support from Richard Mellon Scaife. Coors was a Heritage trustee until March 2003. Ambassador Holland Coors, President Reagan's appointment to the National Year of the Americas, has been on the board since 1998. Major grant recipients include the Heritage Foundation, the National Association of Scholars and the Institute for Justice, which was founded by anti-affirmative-action leader Clint Bolick, a disciple of ultraconservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Castle Rock gave PLF $340,000 between 1985 and 2005.-- As a caution to people not to get all worked up over the race for House Majority Leader, David Kurtz notes the following in yesterday's TPM News Digest e-mail:
But it's easy to overstate the significance of the race. For instance, in 1998, then-Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) faced an uprising in his own caucus and didn't win re-election as majority leader until the third ballot. Does anyone remember who challenged him then? I had to look it up. Reps. Steve Largent (R-OK) and Jennifer Dunn (R-WA) Just goes to show you. The intensity of the moment can fade rather quickly.Funny thing: I don't recall the media back in 1998 spinning Armey's re-election difficulties as a sign of weakness or division in the GOP, do you? (And things only got worse for the House GOP when Bob Livingston -- their pick to replace Newt Gingrich as Speaker when Newt was scapegoated for the Republicans' impeachment drive backfiring at the ballot box to the tune of five House seats -- was himself shot down by Larry Flynt.) [UPDATE: And even as the media is already pronouncing Pelosi's speakership to be "doomed" because of a typical leadership battle, they aren't trying to spin the revival of the titanic Boehner-Blunt Majority Leader rivalry in the House GOP as evidence of the GOP House Caucus's allegedly fragile state.]
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