NYT: Billionaire George Soros Financing Dems' Voter Rights Lawsuits

Billionaire philanthropist George Soros has agreed to spend as much as $5 million on Democrats' court battles against voting laws passed in recent years by Republican-controlled state governments such as in Ohio and Wisconsin.

"We hope to see these unfair laws, which often disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in our society, repealed," the Hungarian-born investor has said about the legal battles, describing himself as being "proud" of his involvement, reports The New York Times. 

Soros political adviser Michael Vachon said the billionaire has given $1 million so far this year to the liberal research super PAC American Bridge. 

Backers of Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has made the voting laws a cornerstone of her campaign, have been pushing Soros to commit millions of dollars to her super PAC.  Soros has not done that so far, the Times says.

The lawsuits against the states are being led by attorney Marc Elias, who is the Clinton campaign's general counsel, the newspaper reports. 

This is not Soros' first involvement in voting issues. His first major push in American politics included the America Coming Together voter-mobilization drive in 2004, in an effort to defeat President George W. Bush. 

The lawsuits include attacks on voter ID requirements, time restrictions on early voting that make it difficult to cast ballots on the weekend before Election Day, and rules nullifying ballots that are cast in wrong precincts. 

The Times reports that Soros was in contact with Elias in January 2014, while the attorney was exploring federal lawsuits before the midterms and before the 2016 cycle, said Vachon, Soros'  adviser, Michael Vachon. Elias himself refused comment Friday about the lawsuits' funding.

Soros is supporting lawsuits filed in Ohio and Wisconsin last month, and is helping finance a case Elias and other groups filed in North Carolina last year.

Clinton and Democrats argue that the states' voting laws affect poor, minority, and young voters, but Republicans say the new laws, enacted since 2010, serve as protection against election fraud. 

Via NewsMax

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Drag a Hundred Dollar Bill through a School of Journalism

James Carville once shockingly demonstrated the left's disdain for the morals of the poor, saying, "Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find." In truth, you can buy whatever you want much more easily if you drag that bill through a School of Journalism.

CNS reports that George Soros has seeded such schools at the University of Southern California and the University of Wisconsin to create shock troops for the now shelved FCC plan to monitor (bully) the media into acting as even bigger megaphones for the administration and Democratic Party than they already are:

 Two schools were working with FCC on the project, according to Byron York of The Washington Examiner. The University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Communication and Democracy, were tasked by the FCC with coming up with criteria for what information is "critical" for Americans to have. The FCC study would have covered newspapers, websites, radio and television, according to The Washington Post.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison got a whopping $1,672,397 from Soros between 2000 and 2012. The university also offers OSI-sponsored grants, scholarships and fellowships. Friedland also heads Madison Commons, a liberal journalism group "powered by" the university's School of Journalism. Madison Commons, in turn, is a project of the university but supported in part by American University's J-Lab. AU, including its Cairo campus, has received $588,395 from OSF since 2008.

On top of the 1st Amendment problems with this proposal, the schools involved have strong ties to liberal billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundations and have gotten more than $1.8 million from the organization since 2000.

The journalism programs at these schools have even more ties to Soros besides their funding, including faculty members writing for university-based publications allied with Soros-funded outlets.

The schools have collaborated on this project going back at least to 2012. Lewis A. Friedland, who was a "principle investigator" for the FCC on this project, also directs the Center for Communication and Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He gave a presentation at Annenberg in Feb. 2012, on "communication ecology." This was just four months before the schools presented their findings to the FCC.

Via: American Thinker
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The Predators’ Moll Column: Hillary Clinton (D., Goldman Sachs)

Two recent events organized by the investment bank Goldman Sachs featured a special guest. Goldman arranged to have one of the most successful investors in the world make remarks at last week’s AIMS Alternative Investment Conference in Chicago. And at this week’s Builders and Innovators Summit in Marana, Ariz., the same guest responded to questions from Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chair and CEO. I hope the audience took notes.

Where else, after all, can “emerging and seasoned entrepreneurs from a diverse set of industries” hear the story of how a Yale law student turned an investment of time and energy into a marriage to a serial philanderer, a successful career in politics, and a fortune estimated above $100 million? For lessons in how to succeed in business by really trying, in how to manipulate the levers of government, finance, and philanthropy for massive personal gain, there is no better teacher than Hillary Clinton.

The New York Times  reports that Clinton brings in around $200,000 per speech, so in the space of a single week she made enough money to put her in the much-derided top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers. But in this case I am less interested in her earnings than in the institution that booked her. There was a time, oh about a year ago, when a political figure would not have been able to associate with a symbol of rapacious capitalism such as Goldman Sachs without paying a price. And there was a time, oh about a year ago, when Wall Street had had just about enough of the Democratic Party and the redistributive egalitarianism it represents.

But those days clearly are over. Preparations are well underway for Clinton’s inevitable presidential candidacy: George Soros, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Rahm Emanuel are all on board; David Brock is at his battle-station; a well-placed leak reveals that Senate Democratic women have pledged their allegiance to the former secretary of state. One of Clinton’s few remaining tasks is to win over Wall Street, and out-raise and intimidate potential opponents.

Via: WFB

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SOROS-FUNDED GROUP PLANS 'FLY-IN' TO PUSH HOUSE REPUBLICANS ON AMNESTY

The George Soros-funded National Immigration Forum (NIF) is organizing a “fly-in” of what it calls conservatives from across the country aimed at lobbying House Republicans for an amnesty bill.

According to USA Today’s immigration beat writer Alan Gomez, NIF is planning to organize the fly in with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Partnership for a New American Economy.

“The fly-in is being organized not by conservative groups, but organizations that have focused on legalizing millions of people who are in the U.S. illegally and changing the legal immigration system to bring in more foreign workers,” Gomez wrote on Monday. He noted that the 300 activists for an immigration grand bargain were looking to make what he described as a “conservative pitch” for amnesty.

Gomez noted NIF’s Executive Director, Ali Noorani, who “has advocated for changes in immigration law to help legal and undocumented immigrants for three decades," claimed "the broad collection coming to Washington represents 'the conservative base of the Republican Party.'"

The event will take place on Oct. 28, coinciding with President Barack Obama’s and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s renewed push against House Speaker John Boehner for amnesty. Now that Obama, Reid, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are publicly pushing for amnesty after many mainstream media outlets declared it dead earlier this year, Soros’ groups are trying to make it appear as though conservatives support immigration legislation like the Senate-passed “Gang of Eight” bill. Ultimately, the left’s goal is to get the House to pass a series of piecemeal immigration bills and then combine them with the Senate bill in a conference committe

Via: Breitbart

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