Secret Pastors’ Briefings Seem To Have Partisan Purpose (Huckabee)

[Pale Blue Dot]

http://blog.au.org/2008/01/18/under-the-radar-secret-pastors-briefings-seem-to-have-partisan-purpose/

But there’s another wrinkle to this that is more problematic: These groups keep scheduling Huckabee to speak to them – Huckabee and only Huckabee. And Huckabee doesn’t seem to want it to be known that he’s speaking. The events don’t appear on his public schedule. They are not open to the media. Attendees say little or nothing about them in public.

Events were held in Iowa before the caucuses there, and now some are being held in South Carolina with others planned for Florida. Eve Fairbanks, a writer for The New Republic’s blog, tried to crash one in Columbia recently at the Metropolitan Convention Center. She was not successful but did note the pro-Huckabee slant of the event’s speaking roster.

“One lonely Romney surrogate, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, will give some remarks this afternoon,” Fairbanks wrote. “Besides him, though, the schedule is a roll call of prominent Huckabee backers: There’s Dr. Laurence White, a pastor whose writings are posted on Huckabee’s campaign blog, doing most of the introductions and welcoming remarks; he founded the Texas Restoration Project, a drive to organize pastors for a gay marriage amendment. There’s Tim LaHaye, the author of the “Left Behind” books, and his wife Beverly, founder of Concerned Women of America, both big Huck boosters. There’s former Ohio congressman and pro-family speaker Bob McEwen; he helped host a Huck fundraiser in November. Don Wildmon, the influential family-values warrior at the head of the American Family Association who gave Huckabee his nod, isn’t speaking, but he apparently takes the lead in putting the Renewal Project conferences together. Dr. Mat Staver, a member of Huckabee’s “Faith and Family Values Coalition” and the head of an organization that advises churches how to legally get more political, has shown up to give the conference’s final address.”

<<snip>>

More questions arise: Who started these groups? Where did they get the money to put on glitzy events in fancy venues for hundreds of pastors and their spouses? In Texas, the Texas Freedom Network investigated the Texas Restoration Project and found that its funding was being laundered through another non-profit group and that most of it came from a handful of wealthy businessmen who used the organization to line up pastors behind Gov. Rick Perry’s 2006 re-election campaign.

[Catshrink]

1. It doesn't say that actual churches are involved in politics

but... the implication of speaking to pastors is evident. If they get into politicking at their churches, isn't their IRS tax exempt status at risk? Oh right. The folks who enforce the law are of that ilk.