Philly Connection to New Astroturf Pro-War Group

Via Laura Rozen, Mike Allen at Politico:

A new group, Freedom’s Watch, is launching Wednesday with a $15 million, five-week campaign of TV, radio and Web ads featuring military veterans that is aimed at retaining support in Congress for President Bush’s “surge” policy on Iraq.

I saw one of the ads on the local Fox station tonight - I gotta say, try harder, guys. They put on some poor woman who lost her husband in the WTC and a son in Iraq. She's obviously out of her mind with grief; I even listened to the whole spiel. It isn't enough to lie and link al-Qaeda to Iraq. What is this, 2004? You gotta drop the pretense and start calling people who oppose the war traitors. That'll light your phones up.

Freedom's Watch aims to do for the GOP what the MoveOn political action organizations have done for Democrats. [President and CEO Bradley A.] Blakeman, who was a member the White House senior staff in Bush’s first term, said Freedom’s Watch is designed as “a never-ending campaign – a stable, credible voice of reason on generational issues that won’t rise and fall with election cycles.”

Right. Sure. Credible voice of reason. When's that gonna start? And, the never-ending campaign? My prediction is that this outfit will be defunct as of the end of the Bush presidency.  So, who is Freedom's Watch when it's at home?

The board consists of Blakeman; [Ari] Fleischer; Mel Sembler, a Florida Republican who was Bush’s ambassador to Italy; William P. Weidner, president and chief operating officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corp.; and Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

The donors include Sembler; Anthony Gioia, a Buffalo businessman who was Bush’s ambassador to Malta; Kevin Moley, who was Bush’s ambassador to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva; Howard Leach, a former Republican National Committee finance chairman who was Bush’s ambassador to France; Dr. John Templeton of Pennsylvania, chairman and president of the John Templeton Foundation; Ed Snider, chairman of Comcast Spectacor, the huge Philadelphia sports and entertainment firm; Sheldon Adelson, chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. and ranked by Forbes magazine as the third-wealthiest American; and Richard Fox, who is chairman of the Jewish Policy Center and was Pennsylvania State Chairman of the Reagan/Bush campaign in 1980.

(Link and emphasis supplied.)

Richard Fox is local. Comcast, as the article says, is right here in Center City Philly. So Philly is subsidizing pro-war propaganda. Wonderful. The Templeton Foundation is located in a Philadelphia suburb, and has a right-wing track record:

A 1997 article in Slate Magazine noted that the Templeton Foundation had given significant financial support to groups, causes and individuals considered conservative, including gifts to Gertrude Himmelfarb, Milton Friedman, Walter E. Williams, Julian Lincoln Simon and Mary Lefkowitz, and referred to John Templeton, Sr., as a "conservative sugar daddy". The Foundation also has a history of supporting the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, as well as projects at major research centers and universities that explore themes related to free-market ideology, such as Hernando de Soto's Instituto Libertad Y Democracia and the X Prize Foundation.

If it were George Soros spending $15 million on anti-war ads, the right would be savaging him. And it's strange, isn't it, how these libertarians seem to come out in force for such big-government operations like massive military occupations of countries with major oil reserves?