Ralph Reed: From Purgatory to Power

By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company

01 September 12

ILL MOYERS: Welcome. If you watched the Republican Convention in Tampa only on Primetime television you would have missed the story we're about to report. And it's the one that could make the biggest difference on Election Day in November. On the seventh day, we're told, God rested. But not Ralph Reed. There he was, the Sunday before the convention opened, speaking at a rally of his Faith and Freedom Coalition.

RALPH REED: We're here today not just to celebrate faith and freedom but to pray for its survival. And unlike the other side, we haven't gathered in this city this week to anoint a messiah, because you see we already have a messiah. And we're not looking for one here on earth.

BILL MOYERS: Reed's message was directed to conservative Christians Mitt Romney must convert to his cause if he's to be elected president. Romney is a Mormon, a faith many on the religious right consider a cult, even a heresy. There's no love for Romney among these people, but they are united in their loathing of Barack Obama. And that's where Ralph Reed comes in.

RALPH REED: Four years ago, we heard a lot of talk about hope and change. People were fainting at campaign rallies. There were Che Guevera posters hanging in dorm rooms. There was one candidate who stood in front of Greek columns and vowed to heal the planet and cause the oceans to recede. But you see our hope is in something this world doesn't fully understand. We hope for a kingdom yet to come. The hope of a new heaven and a new earth, in which dwelleth righteousness. A place where every tear will be wiped away. And every broken heart will be healed. And all the pain and brokenness and poverty and injustice of this world will be gone.

BILL MOYERS: But first there's the devil to chase.

NEWT GINGRICH: I believe that Barack Obama is a direct threat to the survival of the country I grew up in.

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY: Dear friends, our religious liberty is at stake in this election, because Obama is at war with all religion in any public place, any public square , any public school.

TED CRUZ: For the first time in centuries the president of the United States has officially declared himself an enemy of traditional marriage between one man and one woman.

BILL MOYERS: You are witness to a modern tale of resurrection. A second-coming. The Bible speaks of Lazarus, raised by Jesus from the grave to walk again among the living. Ralph Reed, too, has been returned to life, political life. But he goes Lazarus one further. Lazarus was a poor man. Reed is rich, and he just keeps getting richer from mixing religion and politics. And that's a story you don't want to miss.

At age 33, Ralph Reed was the Christian Right's wonder boy. Anointed in a 1995 Time Magazine cover story as the "right hand of God" for spinning the trust of conservative Christians into political gold. It was Reed who built the Christian Coalition of televangelist Pat Robertson into a powerful arm of the Republican Party.

RALPH REED: As religious conservatives we have finally gained what we have always sought. A place at the table, a sense of legitimacy and a voice in the conversation that we call democracy.

BILL MOYERS: In 2000, Reed helped put George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Ralph Reed is with us, he's the southeast regional chairman.

BILL MOYERS: And four years later he corralled true believers for their re-election. But Reed fell from grace in 2006 after he was implicated in the biggest Washington scandal since Watergate. His pal and colleague, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, pleaded guilty to defrauding clients of millions of dollars. Some of which had landed in Reed's pockets as well. Reed's exile in political purgatory was cut short in 2008 by an event he said left him feeling as if he'd "been hit by a truck" - Barack Obama's victory:

BARACK OBAMA: If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible […] tonight is your answer.

RALPH REED: As I prayed about it, and I thought about what can I going to do, I'm not ready to give up on America. I realized that God's not looking for perfect people, because there's only been one perfect person in the history of the human race […] He wants people who will come to him just as they are with all their fears and all their failures and all their foibles. And just utter one simple line. And that is: here am I, send me. And that was my prayer.

BILL MOYERS: Reed got his answer. Not from an angel whispering in his hear but from a more familiar, earthbound messenger, Sean Hannity, Fox News anchor, talk radio host and Reed's old friend.

RALPH REED: This was probably three weeks after the ‘08 election. My phone rang, and it was Sean Hannity, and he said Ralph, we can't let this happen again, you've got to do something. And I said, well Sean I've been thinking about it and I've been praying about it, I said, but I want to know that this is not me; I want to know that it's not any ambition of mine; I want to know that I'm doing this for the Lord, and that's the only reason why I'm doing it. And he said Ralph, God is speaking to you through this phone line right now and he's using me to deliver the message.

BILL MOYERS: So Ralph Reed was called back up to the major leagues. But he was short on what the people of the Good Book used to call "manna from heaven." In this case, the cold, hard cash that's the elixir of politics. Miraculously, no doubt, it arrived as a gift from an undisclosed donor - a half a million dollars. Which, in 2009, Reed used to launch his Faith and Freedom Coalition. Because it's designated by the IRS as a 50lC 4 non-profit, Reed can conceal the identity of his funders from the public, which, indeed, he has done. But he makes no secret of his goal.

RALPH REED: Beginning right now, today, we are going to take our country back and we are going to end the Obama agenda forever.

BILL MOYERS: By the end of 2010, according to tax returns, Reed had raised almost five and a half million dollars. Watered by more secret funds, he now has a budget of $10 million, and continues to pass the collection plate. He says he intends to build the 21st century version of the Christian Coalition, with an annual budget of $ 100 million, five million members, full-time lobbyists in all 50 state capitols, and an enormous database. And while he counts all this as God's blessing on his calling, he also acknowledges his debt to the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court who paved the way:

RALPH REED: We've now got the Citizens' United case. […] We can, where we so choose, within the parameters of whatever regulations the federal elections commission ultimately promulgates, engage in express advocacy. That is advocating the election or defeat of candidates, same as a corporation or labor union.

BILL MOYERS: So that's just what he's doing, as he told the faithful gathered in Tampa:

RALPH REED: We've identified 17 million faith-based voters in 15 states, living in 11 million households. Every one of those households is going to be contacted by this organization seven to twelve times. We're going to mail them, we're going to text them, we're going to email them, we're going to phone them, and if they haven't voted by November 6 we're going to get in a car and we're going to drive to their house and we're going to get them to the polls.

BILL MOYERS: Reed claims credit for a string of victories leading up to the big showdown with Obama this November.

BILL MOYERS: When Republican Bob McDonnell won the race for governor of Virginia in 2009, Reed's brand new Faith and Freedom Coalition was there.

RALPH REED: Do you want to hand these out…

BILL MOYERS: Contacting, he said, every social and fiscal conservative voter an average of seven times. Enough, he also said, to make the difference.

JOHN BOEHNER: Thank all of you, God bless you, and God bless…

BILL MOYERS: After Republicans swept into control of the House in the 2010 mid-term elections, Reed called a press conference in Washington the very next day to claim bragging rights:

RALPH REEED: It was the most ambitious, the most comprehensive, and the most effective voter contact and get-out-the-vote effort aimed at the conservative faith community in modern American political history, or at least as long as I've been doing it, which is 30 years. Sixteen million voter guides. Eight million pieces of mail. Three pieces of mail to every social conservative household in certain areas. They received an average of three phone calls, and many of them received a knock on the door.

BILL MOYERS: They're also the voters Reed says he reached in Wisconsin earlier this year.

SCOTT WALKER: Thank you Wisconsin! Thank you, God bless you, God bless the great state of Wisconsin.

BILL MOYERS: When Republican Governor Scott Walker beat back the effort to recall him from office, Ralph Reed totaled up the numbers and announced that his Faith and Freedom Coalition had contacted over 600,000 voters.

Reed's funders - whoever they are, for they're cloaked in secrecy - are obviously buying into his promise that Wisconsin was batting practice for November.

FEMALE: I'm calling from the Faith and Freedom Coalition…

BILL MOYERS: When the Faith and Freedom Coalition claims it will reach 27 million conservative voters - from the ranks of both the Religious Right and the Tea Party brigades -- with all the tools it can muster.

NARRATION: And just in case you haven't figured this out, there's one sure fire way to deal with elected officials who attack Christian beliefs and ignore the First Amendment: vote them out of office. On every government level: national, state, city, community, we'll have the opportunity to take our beliefs and values into the voting booth on November 6th and to vote accordingly.

BILL MOYERS: Earlier this summer, at the "Under God, Indivisible" rally in Texas, Reed told the crowd of six thousand to beg the Almighty's forgiveness for the state of the country...

RALPH REED: Then I believe in November, God is going to have mercy on our land and we will have a Renaissance of the values that made this country great.

BILL MOYERS: Music to Mitt Romney's ears.

MITT ROMNEY: Wow, look at this! This is an old-fashioned revival. I wore my jeans. Look at that, I wore my… […] Ralph Reed is doing a great job here with the Faith and Freedom Coalition. This is going to make a big impact across America, and I appreciate the work that you are doing here.

BILL MOYERS: Romney needs Reed's blessing, because Romney's a Mormon. And a recent poll says his religion makes one in nearly every four white evangelicals uncomfortable. Romney can't lose them and still win in November. So Romney must bond with the Christian right.

MITT ROMNEY: Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman.

BILL MOYERS: In Tampa, Reed called on the flock to do their part.

RALPH REED: Register the unregistered. Educate. The bible says my people perished for lack of knowledge. Let's give them the knowledge they need. Thirdly vote. And fourthly pray for the next 72 days.

BILL MOYERS: Ralph Reed was in his glory in Tampa, his reincarnation in full swing. But there are some other things you need to know about Ralph Reed. First when he bailed out of the Christian Coalition in 1997, only two years after his big TIME magazine cover story, he had driven the organization into the ground. It was nearly bankrupt, under investigation by the Federal Election Commission, and facing charges from its own financial officer that Reed's cronies had ripped off almost a million dollars.

BILL MOYERS: Despite that record, Reed went on to flourish in the early years of George W. Bush. Until it was disclosed that the "Right Hand of God" had his other hand out to his old friend, the super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and was raking in the cash. Reed's allies today say they're not bothered by all that: "Ralph has a great track record," said one. Reed's ties to Abramoff are quote, "largely in the rear-view mirror." Perhaps. But the view from the rear-view mirror can be quite revealing. Let's take a look.

JACK ABRAMOFF: Senator I respectively invoke the privilege as previously stated.

SENATOR KENT CONRAD: And I'd say to you Mr. Abramoff, shame on you.

BILL MOYERS: It was 2006. Abramoff's empire of greed and fraud was collapsing. My colleague Sherry Jones and I produced the documentary "Capitol Crimes," piecing together what was happening. She and I had been tracking money in politics for 30 years, but corruption on this scale took our breath away. The story began in 1984 when a young Jack Abramoff was introduced at another Republican National Convention:

SPEAKER: One of the ever-growing lists of young people who have joined in the Republican cause, the chairman of the College Republican National Committee, Jack Abramoff.

BILL MOYERS: A self-described "rabid right winger," Abramoff headed the organization that launched the careers of many Republican power brokers, including Karl Rove and the crusader against taxes, Grover Norquist.

JACK ABRAMOFF: Fellow Republicans, I come before you today representing American students, the future of our Republican Party.

BILL MOYERS: It was as college students organizing campuses for Ronald Reagan that Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed first met.

RALPH REED: Good morning. My name is Ralph Reed. I'm the executive director of Students for America…

BILL MOYERS: Reed was a junior from the University of Georgia and a $200 a month intern with the College Republicans. He and the other young pols embraced the spirit of the Cold War against Communism and applied it to domestic politics. In war, their aim was to destroy the enemy.

SAM HARBEN: It was very simple, very black and white. We used army metaphors. We talked about being ‘hard core'.

BILL MOYERS: They dreamed up headline-grabbing stunts in the shadow of the Capitol, and sent volunteers out to organize the grass roots. The young recruits were ordered to memorize the famous opening speech from the movie PATTON, but to substitute the word "Democrats" for the word "Nazis." "Spill their blood," they were instructed.

JACK ABRAMOFF: If we're the party of composure, and not the party that ducks disclosure, then we're riding our wave. If we equivocate, capitulate, accommodate, negotiate…."

BILL MOYERS: Abramoff chose the young Grover Norquist as his right-hand man. They intended, said Abramoff, to remove their opponents from power, "permanently."

JACK ABRAMOFF: And so it is to our party that they come. It is with us that they trust their dreams. And it is in us that they place their hopes.

BILL MOYERS: By November 1994, ten years later, Republicans won eight new Senate seats and a whopping 52 seats in the House. The conservative revolution imagined by the College Republicans was embodied in the new Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich . And at the center of the action was Grover Norquist.

Norquist had created Americans for Tax Reform, which he turned into the movement's nerve center. Once a week, Congressional staff, party activists, and rightwing think tankers held strategy sessions in his office. It was Norquist who concocted a grand scheme to turn Washington into a Republican company town by making sure only Republicans were hired as lobbyists and lobbyists contributed only to Republicans. He dubbed it The K Street project, after the lobbyists' main drag downtown. It paved the way for Jack Abramoff. "What the Republicans need," said Norquist, "is fifty Jack Abramoff's." "Then this becomes a different town."

MICHAEL WALLER: They were probably about as inseparable as two political people can get. Jack had left Washington. He didn't have the day-to-day contact with his networks. So if Grover vouched for him, then Abramoff was fine.

BILL MOYERS: Abramoff had gone to Los Angeles, but he returned to town to work for a prominent firm, which announced his hiring by touting the lobbyist's ties to the Republican National Committee, the new leaders of the House, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, and the Christian Coalition now headed by his buddy Ralph Reed. But no one was more indispensable to Abramoff than Norquist.

MICHAEL WALLER: If it wasn't for his relation with Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff would never have been able to become the super lobbyist that he came. And to charge the huge rates that he charged because he had this unique relationship with certain Republican leaders.

BILL MOYERS: The hefty fees would enrich Abramoff, who in turn would direct his clients to enrich the right-wing's political machine. One of those clients was the wealthiest gambling tribe in America, the Mississippi Choctaw. To keep their huge casino earnings from being taxed, the tribe needed help in Washington. So Abramoff turned to Norquist, who had just what the tribe was looking for: an organization dedicated to opposing all tax increases. So the two old college comrades framed the casino tax as a tax increase that conservatives should on principle oppose. Activists at Norquist's weekly meetings suddenly found themselves discussing Indian tribes.

MICHAEL WALLER: We didn't know one tribe from another. So what. Let them have their casino. We didn't know. Nobody knew they were multi-billion dollar entities. It's not something anybody paid attention to.

BILL MOYERS: But Norquist was paying attention. And to lobby for their cause he had the Choctaw put up the money to organize anti-tax groups across the country.

MICHAEL WALLER: Why in the world would Grover Norquist care about, care so deeply about Indian tribes, unless there was something else going on. We all suspected something pretty fishy.

BILL MOYERS: The Choctaw became a major contributor to Norquist's organization. And Norquist, in turn, was moving some of that money to the third member of that old College Republican troika, Ralph Reed. As the pious head of the Christian Coalition, Reed publicly opposed gambling.

RALPH REED: This reflects what we believe is one of the greatest cancers growing on the American body politic - and that is the scourge of legalized gambling.

BILL MOYERS: But by the mid-1990s, after leaving the Christian Coalition, Reed had set up his own political consulting firm. He sent an email to his old friend Abramoff, who was now known on K Street as "Casino Jack." This is what Reed wrote:

RALPH REED: "Hey, now that I'm done with electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts! I'm counting on you to help me with some contacts."

BILL MOYERS: Abramoff came through. He and Reed teamed up in a campaign to protect the Choctaw casino against competition from other tribes. The scheme called for Reed to organize his fellow Christians to oppose new casinos on moral grounds -- without ever revealing to them that his own client, "Casino Jack" was in the gambling business, too. Emails between them make clear where the money came from. When Reed pushed for a ‘green light' to organize Christians in Alabama against gambling, Abramoff said approval would first have to come from the Choctaw, and demanded:

JACK ABRAMOFF: "… get me invoices as soon as possible so I can get Choctaw to get us checks asap."

BILL MOYERS: Reed wrote back with a list and a total:

RALPH REED: "We have fronted $100K, which is a lot for us."

BILL MOYERS: Abramoff promised to do what he could.

RALPH REED: "Any chance that a wire from Choctaw directly would be OK?"

BILL MOYERS: Just days later, Reed tells Abramoff:

RALPH REED: "…We are opening the bomb bays and holding nothing back."

JACK ABRAMOFF: "Yeaaaa baaabby!!!"

BILL MOYERS: To conceal the source of the money being paid to Reed from the trusting believers he had recruited, Abramoff once again turned to their accomplice Grover Norquist, who used his anti-tax campaign as cover. In turn, when Norquist needed money for his own organization he turned to Abramoff.

GROVER NORQUIST: "What is the status of the Choctaw stuff. I have a $75K hole in my budget from last year. ouch."

BILL MOYERS: In a reminder to himself, Abramoff Notes:

JACK ABRAMOFF: "Call Ralph re Grover doing pass-through"

BILL MOYERS: And then tells Reed:

JACK ABRAMOFF: "I need to give Grover something for helping, so the first transfer will be a bit lighter."

BILL MOYERS: With the next 300,000 dollars, Norquist took a taste of the action. When he did it again, Abramoff noted his surprise.

JACK ABRAMOFF: "grover kept another $25K!"

BILL MOYERS: The money spigot was now wide open. Abramoff was being paid millions as a lobbyist. Reed was being paid millions to dupe his fellow Christians. And Norquist was feeding cash to his political operation by acting as their front. The one-time college Republicans had turned the conservative revolution into a racket.

SENATOR BYRON DORGAN: "What's the basis for your tribe making a donation to Americans for Tax Reform?

BERNIE SPRAGUE: "I have no idea, Senator. I did not understand it then. I opposed it and I don't understand it today."

SENATOR KENT CONRAD: "Did you, Mr. Abramoff ,you and your partner, your colleague, Mr. Scanlon, give $4 million to Ralph Reed?"

JACK ABRAMOFF: Senator, I respectfully evoke the privileges previously stated."

BILL MOYERS: Despite Abramoff's zipped lip, Senate investigators were able to expose even more chicanery Yet another tribe, the Coushatta in Louisiana, hired Abramoff and partner Mike Scanlon to stop rival tribes from opening competing casinos across the border in Texas. Again they turned to Ralph Reed, who said he could use his Christian connections to stir up the religious folk in Texas to oppose the new casinos. And once again, Reed didn't tell his fellow Christians he was actually working for gambling interests right next door in Louisiana. Abramoff's partner Mike Scanlon informed the Coushatta that paying Reed was crucial to success in Texas:

Email of MICHAEL SCANLON: "Simply put we want to bring out the wackos …The wackos get their information from the Christian right, Christian radio, the internet, and telephone trees."

BILL MOYERS: "I do guerrilla warfare," Reed once boasted. "I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag." In Texas, his weapons of mass deception included bogus Christian front groups that the "wackos" would believe to be the real thing:

SUZII PAYNTER: It had the earmarks of guerrilla activity, not from a do-gooder faith, commitment perspective, but all the earmarks of just big corporate business and how they operate when they decide to try to smash something.

BILL MOYERS: Reed's e-mails to Abramoff were insistent. He needed money and he needed it now. At one point, Abramoff responded:

Email of JACK ABRAMOFF: "Give me a number."

Email of RALPH REED: $225K a week for TV; $450K for two weeks of TV."

Email of JACK ABRAMOFF: "Ralph, they are going to faint when they see these numbers…"

BILL MOYERS: But Reed claimed he was worth it.

Email of RALPH REED: "We have over 50 pastors mobilized, with a total membership in those churches of over 40,000…."

MARVIN OLASKY: We have one of our reporters based in Dallas who did a lot of calling around and just asking pastors, "Well, were you involved in this?" And lo and behold, no one was.

BILL MOYERS: Marvin Olasky suspected something was fishy. The editor in chief of the World, a national journal of the evangelical right, had his team dig into Reed's involvement with Abramoff:

MARVIN OLASKY: There was a lot of fooling going on -- Abramoff, in a way, was manipulating Ralph Reed, Ralph Reed was manipulating others, but perhaps Ralph Reed was manipulating Abramoff and saying, "I'm accomplishing these things," whereas he wasn't. So, you know, there were millions of dollars changing hands, there were actually hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in this whole thing.

LOU DUBOSE: You know, there's something ironic and amusing in all that, is that while Abramoff was shaking down these Indians, it's quite possible that Ralph Reed was shaking down Jack Abramoff.

BILL MOYERS: They were now turning on each other. When Mike Scanlon quizzed his partner,

Email of JACK ABRAMOFF: "…did Ralph spend all the money he was given to fight this - or does he have some left?

BILL MOYERS: Abramoff replied:

Email of JACK ABRAMOFF: "That's a silly question! He would NEVER admit he has money left over. Would we?"

Email of MICHAEL SCANLON: "No - but…"

Email of JACK ABRAMOFF: "He is a bad version of us! No more money for him."

SUZII PAYNTER: You know, I think when I read that phrase about Ralph Reed, that he's a ‘bad version of us,' I've got to tell you my heart hurt. That you could really just disregard the values and the rules that you've played by. And for what? We all come to the edge of that shore at some point in our lives and have to ask ourselves, "Am I going to step over that? And for what? For money? For you know, raking off money for my own political gains or whatever. That's what it - that's what it said to me, that Ralph Reed had stepped across some kind of moral line - even Jack Abramoff would say he's a bad version of ourselves.

BILL MOYERS: By 2004, the jig was up. Senate hearings exposed the story of front groups, secret kickbacks and political payoffs at the heart of Abramoff's empire. Twenty-two people received criminal penalties - lawmakers, lobbyists, Bush administration officials and congressional staffers. Abramoff and his partner Scanlon pleaded guilty to charges they had bilked their Native American clients out of nearly $40 million dollars. They both landed in prison - Abramoff served almost four years before being released in 2010. Claiming redemption, he has written a memoir, he blogs as an advocate for cleaning up corruption in politics, and has a talk show on satellite radio.

Grover Norquist escaped scrutiny and is still riding high, threatening Republican politicians with defeat at the polls if they dare vote to increase taxes. Most Republicans in Congress have signed Norquist's pledge just as Joe Kaufmann, running for Congress from Florida, is doing here, at a conference sponsored - surprise - by Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition.

GROVER NORQUIST: This is a commitment to the people of Florida that Joe will not raise their taxes, tax reform is a good idea, tax changes that are a Trojan horse for tax increases are not a good idea. So this is a pledge tax reform yes, tax increases no.

BILL MOYERS: Ralph Reed was a central figure in the Jack Abramoff scandal, according to the bipartisan senate committee that investigated and detailed more than $5.3 million dollars Abramoff had paid Reed. But Reed was never charged. He had double-crossed his trusted followers and made them pawns in a power game. But it isn't necessarily a criminal offense to be a phony. A false prophet out to make a profit.

The scandal did derail Reed's hopes for public office in 2006. It broke while he was running in the Republican primary for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. His Republican opponent made political hay with the Abramoff mess.

ADVERTISEMENT: Ralph Reed took millions from convicted felon, Jack Abramoff, to help casinos. And reed worked with Abramoff to deny women and children legal protection from sweatshops in the Marianna Islands, a U.S. Territory. Even though our government warned that women on the islands were subjected to forced abortions and children were coerced into prostitution. Ralph Reed, his values are for sale.

BILL MOYERS: Reed remains unapologetic. He was confronted by a blogger last year who posted this footage on YouTube.

BLOGGER: Mr. Reed You've got a reputation for integrity and morality with thousands of supporters. Do you have anything to apologize for regarding the Indians and the Abramoff double-dealing?

RALPH REED: No. I don't think so. That was thoroughly looked at and it was thoroughly investigated and I was never accused of doing anything wrong.

BLOGGER: Have you visited him in prison?

RALPH REED: I did not.

BLOGGER: Have you written to him?

RALPH REED: Um, I did not. But I prayed for him constantly and I wish nothing but the best for him and his family. And I believe that God can cause something really good to come out of all of this.

BILL MOYERS: That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, "The "Right Hand of God," still mixes politics, religion, and money for party and profit. Still covers his tracks in a fogbank of secrecy, complexity, and sleight-of-hand. Still says to his flock, "Trust me."

You heard Reed boast earlier about how his Faith and Freedom coalition reached out to 600,000 voters to keep Scott Walker from being recalled. The organization's tax forms show no compensation to Reed. However, the Washington bureau chief for Alternet.ORG, Adele Stan, found that the non-profit coalition did hire a for-profit company to help turn out the vote. That for-profit company is Millennium Marketing, a division of Century Strategies, whose founder and CEO is Ralph Reed.

Reed is again armed for "guerrilla warfare" with millions of dollars that are almost impossible to trace. It's reported that some of the money has come from billionaire Bernie Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot, and some has come from a nonprofit partly funded by the billionaire Koch Brothers. The brothers also have their own tax exempt vehicle, Americans for Prosperity, a 501c4 nonprofit-- which allows them to raise money without revealing the source. It is run by Tim Phillips, Ralph Reed's former business partner.

It's an incestuous world they have created, and much of the money travels in secret subterranean pipelines from donors whose identities and agendas remain hidden. We may never find out where Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition funds are coming from. The "right hand of God" doesn't have to reveal what the left hand is doing.

RALPH REED: We're going to endure the ridicule and the attacks and the insults. If we have to, we're going to crawl across broken glass, but we are coming and when we come we're going to have the biggest victory we've had for time-honored values in the history of this country. That's what's getting ready to happen.

Romney, Ryan Speeches Make Me Miss George Bush

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

01 September 12

didn't watch Mitt Romney's acceptance speech last night. I can't do it: even under normal circumstances, watching politicians of any stripe talk about anything at all makes me unable to sleep. And a convention speech, which is almost always a deeply schizoid address authored by 38 different infighting political consultants and amplified by the heaviest possible doses of network TV's goofball effects and nuclear-powered stagecraft, is generally the most unwatchable of all political performances. So I try always to watch such speeches the next morning, and am just now taking in the Romney address.

The Republican convention in general has been a strange affair. The vibe around Republican politics in general was much happier in the days before the Bush presidency cratered. Republican politics before Bush imploded was a confident brew of guns, Jesus, and Freedom.

A Republican politician's job back then was, if not easy, pretty clear: you bashed welfare queens and free-riders, told tearful stories of fetuses composing operas in the womb, and promised to bomb America's enemies back to the Stone Age. You didn't have to split hairs or hedge bets: you got up on stage, took a baseball bat to liberals and terrorists and other such perverts, and let the momentum of the crowd carry you to victory. You were like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove, riding high with a nuke between your legs, waving your ten-gallon hat at and going out in a blaze of yeeee-hah!!!s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcW_Ygs6hm0

Republican politics used to be fun. Even I sort of got into it. When I was undercover working for George W. Bush in a campaign office in Orlando back in 2004, it was a much easier acting job than I expected it to be. You went into the campaign office, sat with the other volunteers, and talked about all the Hollywood actors you wished would keep their damned mouths shut. Any liberal who claims there isn't lots of fun to be had making fun of liberals is a goddmaned liar. Anyway, one of my fellow volunteers back then gave me a copy of Shut Up and Sing - not the Dixie Chicks documentary, the Laura Ingraham book - and that quickly replaced Lawrence Taylor's Over the Edge as my go-to bathroom reader. It was crazy, paranoid stuff, but that sort of politics had a reassuringly simple quality to it; it was dependable, like a rock.

But today's Republican politics are totally confused. The Romney-Ryan speeches were a bizarre exercise in tightroping and hair-splitting. Ryan's speech weirdly went after the Democrats for a plan to cut Medicare that he himself had rejected for not cutting enough - and then in the same speech went after the Obama vision of society that is a "dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us."

The Ryan VP pick was clearly a calculated gamble. Like the Palin pick, it was intended to fire up the base by bringing in a young, fresh-faced politician with hardcore conservative credentials. That would help bring out the red-state die-hard vote for Romney, a onetime pro-choice creator of a state-run health care program who struggled with exactly those voters in his primary battles against the likes of newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

But Ryan's conservative cred derives almost entirely from his strike-hard-strike-first-no-mercy-sir reputation as a ruthless chainsawer of all government-funded "waste," including sacred-cow entitlements like Medicare. If he was coming on board, surely it was to preach the gospel of budget bloodbaths.

So what does Ryan the Vice-Presidential candidate do? He goes to Tampa and spends half his speech doing a Ted Kennedy impersonation, talking about the "obligation we have to our parents and grandparents," pitching his party as the defender of a beloved government entitlement program! "The greatest threat to Medicare," he said, "is Obamacare, and we're going to stop it."

Then, like the Unknown Comic, who used to switch bag-faces mid-routine, he moved right back into his young-Barry Goldwater act, bashing entitlements and the "supervision and sanctimony of the central planners."

Are you confused yet? I was. Is the move here dog-whistling an unspoken promise to the base to slash "entitlements," while somehow retaining Medicare? Or is it dog-whistling an unspoken promise to the base to slash "entitlements," including Medicare?

I couldn't tell. Ultimately I think the answer was actually behind door number three, as in:

My fellow Americans, whatever Barack Obama is doing with Medicare, it's bad, and we promise to reverse it!

APPLAUSE)

And not only that, we'll go even further in cutting wasteful entitlements from our bloated government budget!

(APPLAUSE)

Does that make logical sense? No. Does it make political sense? Sort of - if your voters either have extremely short attention spans, or they are themselves comfortable with certain minor rhetorical contradictions.

If they're like the Tea Partiers whom I watched in Kentucky lustily cheering Sarah Palin from their Medicare-funded wheelchairs as she railed against government entitlement programs, then a speech like Ryan's works well enough. It just doesn't work quite as well as a speech that doesn't have any contradictions at all - like George Bush's 2004 acceptance speech, cleverly set in post-9/11 New York, in which he promised that electing anyone but himself would result in terrorists running free down the smoldering wreckage of Your Town, U.S.A., followed by prancing sets of gay married actors from Hollywood.

Anyway, when Ryan had the Goldwater side of his paper bag turned to the audience, he railed against Obama's health care program, calling it "two thousand pages of rules, mandates, taxes, fees, and fines that have no place in a free country."

That line drew genuine cheers from the crowd, especially since it coincided with the ejection of much-despised Code Pink demonstrators from the stadium. But I could swear the cheers were tempered just a little bit at the end when the audience members - even these audience members, even that ridiculous lady wearing the red-white-and-blue "America" vest - slowly remembered that Ryan's running mate had not only proposed but implemented an extremely similar health care program in Massachusetts.

Which brings us to Romney's speech. Romney spent a lot of time talking about his various successes as a businessman. But the only reference to his government experience - his most relevant qualification for this office, remember - came in a moment where he reminded the audience that as governor, he "chose a woman lieutenant governor, a woman chief of staff."

He left out the part where he ran for governor of Massachusetts as a pro-choice centrist who supported the teaching of evolution and the banning of assault rifles. He completely omitted any mention of his own health care program and in fact said exactly two things about health care in the entire speech: he repeated Ryan's line about Medicare, and then promised to repeal "Obamacare."

On the other hand, he mentioned all the women he hired as governor, and in general spent an enormous amount of time talking about women's issues. Which would be great, if it were not for the fact that the reasoning behind this rhetorical decision is so transparent - Romney added to the traditional Republican weakness among female voters when he chose Ryan, whose other major claim to fame as a hardcore conservative is his uncompromising stance on abortion. Ryan's history here is similar to his history on budget cuts: he made himself famous by going further than other pols were willing to go.

He co-sponsored legislation with Todd Akin (who is about as popular with women right now as flesh-eating streptococcus) called the "Sanctity of Human Life Act," which would have given a human fertilized egg "all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood." (I imagine that before Akin's gaffe, the next planned bill would have stripped those same fertilized eggs of Miranda rights). Moreover, Ryan supported the notorious "Let Women Die Act," which would have refused women access to abortion even if her life is in danger.

So to recap: the candidate himself used to be pro-choice, spoke glowingly of his mother's support of abortion rights in his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy, then suddenly became anti-choice in 2006. The VP candidate has been firmly anti-choice his whole career. Yet neither candidate went anywhere near the abortion issue in his speech.

In fact, you could build a walking bridge across the Bering Strait with all the major stuff the two candidates didn't bring up in their speeches. Romney's signature achievement as a politician was his health-care program. Ryan's claim to fame was his budget. But they spent most of their time in their speeches slithering, Catherine-Zeta-Jones-in-Entrapment style, around their own records.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX2_LCUkhDs

So what did they talk about? The line that astonished me most from Mitt's speech was this one, where he talked about the changes Americans "deserved" and should have gotten during Obama's presidency:

You deserved it because you worked harder than ever before during these years. You deserved it because, when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out moving lights, and put in longer hours. Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour, benefits, you took two jobs at $9 an hour…

Are you kidding? Mitt Romney was the guy that fired you from that $22.50 an hour job, and helped you replace it with two $9 an hour jobs! He was a pioneer in the area of eliminating the well-paying job with benefits and replacing it with the McJob that offered no benefits at all. One of the things that killed him in the Senate race against Ted Kennedy were Kennedy ads that reminded voters that Mitt's takeovers resulted in slashed wages and lost benefits. He was exactly the guy that eliminated that classic $22.50 manufacturing job, like in the case of GST Steel, where Bain took over with an initial investment of $8 million, paid itself a $36 million dividend, ended up walking away with $50 million, and left GST saddled with over $500 million in debt. 750 of those well-paying jobs were lost.

What kinds of jobs were left for those fired workers to look for? Well, in the best-case scenario, you might have found one at Ampad, another Bain takeover target, where workers had their pay slashed from $10.22 to $7.88 an hour, tripled co-pays, and eliminated the retirement plan.

So a guy who eliminated hundreds of $22 an hour jobs and slashed hundreds more jobs to below $9 an hour blasts Barack Obama for not giving you the better life you deserved, after you lost your $22/hour job and had to take two $9/hour jobs. Are we all high or something? Did that really just happen?

Just a lame pair of speeches, overall. They made me miss George Bush. At least the Bush/Cheney/Rove era offered a clear ideological choice - and some pretty passionate, ingeniously-delivered political theater, comparatively. Where's the blood and guts, the bomb-‘em-till-they're-crispy war calls? Where are the screw-the-poor tirades, the "you can pry it from my cold dead hand" guns-and-liberty crescendos? This stuff is pretty weak beer compared to those days.