CONTACT: Brendan Fischer, brendan@prwatch.org
The following is the Center for Media and Democracy's response to Senator Leah Vukmir's statement regarding CMD's public records case and her claim that she has "fully complied" with CMD's public records request. The following can be attributed to CMD General Counsel Brendan Fischer:
This week's cover story in the Nation Magazine features two friends of CMD, John Nichols and Bob McChesney, writing about the Dollarocracy, the title of their new book by Persius Books. Also this week, the authors start their Dollarocracy vs. Democracy book tour which entails hundreds of appearances across the nation.
Freedom Partners (FP) -- a funding group previously unheard of before it shared exclusive and highly selective details about itself with Politico last week -- has extensive hidden connections to Koch Industries and to charities connected to Charles Koch, according to new research by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
CONTACT: Alex Oberley, 608-260-9713, Alex@PRwatch.org
Madison -- Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has taken the unprecedented step of asserting that a state legislator cannot be held accountable for refusing to disclose public records in response to a lawful open records request by the Center for Media and Democracy.
Sallie Mae has dropped its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) after a student-led campaign demanding that the nation's largest student loan lender cut ties with the controversial organization. Sallie Mae is the 50th corporation to publicly drop its ALEC membership in the past year-and-a-half as the organization has come under increasing public scrutiny.
Last week, CMD reported that a small GOP lobby shop tied to the Tea Party and David Koch's Americans for Prosperity group was awarded a $500,000 grant in a backdoor, sweetheart deal cooked up by ALEC leadership in the State Legislature and sanctioned by the Walker administration.
The Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas has filed a brief with state Attorney General Greg Abbott in support of the Center for Media and Democracy's request for records pertaining to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and further refuting ALEC's effort to declare its communications immune from the state public records law.
A Republican-dominated committee voted Thursday to recommend a half-million-dollar grant for promoting hunting and fishing to a group with no record in outdoors training, but with plenty of lobbying experience and close ties to outgoing Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder. The group, United Sportsmen of Wisconsin, will spend most of the $500,000 in taxpayer dollars on salaries for Tea Party leaders who have long railed against government spending.
A small GOP lobby shop tied to the Tea Party and David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, and which was active in the state's recent recall elections, was awarded $500,000 in taxpayer dollars in what some are calling a backdoor, sweetheart deal cooked up by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) State Chair, outgoing Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder.
"The task is not done, the journey is not complete," said Martin Luther King III on Saturday's 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington.
"The vision preached by my father a half-century ago was that his four little children would no longer live in a nation where they would judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," he said.
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