There are a few honest and decent conservatives out there who have drank neither the neocon nor the know-nothing kool-aid.  There just aren’t enough of them.

As far as I can determine, these rarest of birds are limited to the staff and readers of The American Conservative magazine.  

Pity, that.  We might have actual honest discourse in this country if there were more of them and fewer Freepers, but I’ll take what I can get.  And this week, they give me Ward Connerly’s hypocritical head on a platter.

I have gone after him a couple of times on this blog.  Last winter I warned readers not to sign a deceptive petition he was circulating and this spring, as the deadline for signature collection loomed large, I wrote about his desperate last-minute attempt to gather signatures by importing hatemongers-for-hire by bringing in Minutemen to collect signatures.  At least one of his out-of-state goons was wanted for voter fraud in other jurisdictions.  

Connerly, for those who may not know, is a (black) California businessman and anti-affirmative action zealot who decries the practice of mandated level playing fields, while cleaning up thanks to them.  (It’s the republican way!)

American Conservative put it this way:

The Right’s point man on affirmative action doesn’t need political successes to be a success. While his plans sputter and his former achievements are overturned, Connerly is still being handsomely rewarded. Once he received favored status from the conservative movement, his future was guaranteed. As an activist, Connerly has made millions opposing affirmative action. As a businessman and consultant, he has also made hundreds of thousands in large part because of it.

Between 1999 and 2005, Connerly’s nonprofits, the American Civil Rights Institute and the American Civil Rights Coalition, didn’t challenge a single affirmative-action law. Yet donations climbed to almost $2 million per year. The share that Connerly paid to himself, or to his private for-profit consulting firm, Connerly and Associates, also dramatically increased. In 1998, 22 percent of his nonprofits’ revenue was paid to Connerly in salary or to his firm. By 2001, Connerly’s salary and the fees charged by Connerly and Associates ate up 49 percent of the nonprofits’ combined revenue. Most of the money paid to the firm was listed on tax forms as “speaking fees.” In 2006, when Connerly took up a concrete goal in political activism-ending Michigan’s affirmative-action policies-the cut of nonprofit revenue paid to him and his firm rose to 66 percent of total receipts, nearly $1.6 million.

Connerly’s nonprofits employ him for 30 hours a week and two others full time. The nonprofits then hire him from Connerly and Associates to make speeches. In 2003, ACRI and ACRC paid him $314,079 while he managed two people. By comparison, that year the National Action Network, which receives about $1 million in public funds, only paid Al Sharpton about $4,000. The Claremont Institute, a neoconservative think tank in California, paid its top executive $132,000, and its staff is 9 times the size of Connerly’s. The Heritage Foundation paid its president $292,000 to manage a staff of over 180. The primary financial responsibility that Ward Connerly had at his nonprofits that year was paying his firm over $400,000 for Ward Connerly the consultant, Ward Connerly the speaker, Ward Connerly the political maven-and occasionally a security detail to guard him.

Is this illegal? The IRS makes clear in its statute that nonprofit organizations cannot be used to enrich one individual or company, but few of these cases are prosecuted. In 2006, during the heat of Connerly’s Michigan push, Congressmen John Conyers and Charles Rangel asked the IRS to look into his dealings. An IRS spokesman said that he could not comment on a case under investigation. Connerly defended himself by saying that he avoids any trickery on his IRS forms and dutifully pays taxes on all the money he receives.

Not long after the Sacramento Bee and the House members began inquiring about his compensation, Connerly changed procedures at his nonprofits. They now have a board that reviews his salary. He says, “It’s based on a formula that is devised by our auditors and accountants-a base salary of $300,000 and then compensation for speeches and things.” Connerly no longer has his private company invoice his nonprofits: “I pay Connerly and Associates for those services out of funds I receive for ACRI, so they [Connerly and Associates] in fact became a sub-contractor to me.” If this explanation seems convoluted, that’s fine by Connerly.

In Missouri, we got the word out and he and his minions skulked away with their collective tail between their neutered hind legs, and some of us have been bugging the hell out of our state representatives and senators ever since to get a common-sense statute on the books that anyone collecting signatures for ballot initiatives in Missouri be registered voters in this state.  

We are, thankfully, a stubborn lot, no matter what our political leanings, and don’t like outsiders meddling in our “family bidness,” so to speak. Case in point: One of my relatives agreed with the sentiment of the initiative but refused to sign the petition because it didn’t originate with Missourians.  “If Ward Connerly wants to move to Missouri and pay taxes here, I’ll think about signing his damned petition, but not until,” was the standard mantra he told the signature collectors who approached him.  

Here is hoping that the American Conservative starts a groundswell and Connerly falls out of favor, if not off the face of the earth.  But on the meantime, lets hit the ground runnong in January and get a petition gathering law through both chambers for Governor Nixon to sign.  We may not dodge the next bullet he fires at us.  

Updated Below

Missouri voters, stop signing petitions.

There are too many outside interests that think they have a right to influence our state government, and that p*sses me off most righteously.

What the hell business does  Ward Connerly have interfering in our state government?  He lives and pays his taxes in California, but he has a bit in his teeth and wants to outlaw Affirmative Action in Missouri.   This pompous jerk thinks he has the right to tell us we should amend our constitution!  And I gotta repeat – he is not a Missouri taxpayer, so where the hell does he get off?

With the May 4 deadline for signature collection looming, Connerly is downright desperate to collect enough signatures to get his wet-dream on our ballot in November.  So desperate, in fact, that he is recruiting “members and friends” of the Minuteman xenophobes to come to Missouri and collect signatures.  

The trip is being pitched as a “1-2 week paid ‘vacation.'” Travel and meals would be paid for. And like professional circulators, Minutemen would receive a small fee for each signature they collect.

Of course, organizers know it’s not money that drives Minutemen. The activist group, comprised of private citizens, has been monitoring the U.S.-Mexico border for illegal immigrants since 2005.

“The tie-in with immigration issues is very strong,” Minutemen organizer Stuart Hurlbert e-mailed his fellow members last week.

“About 3/4 of all immigrants and probably more like 90% percent of illegal immigrants, are immediately eligible the minute they cross the border or get off the plane, on the basis of their ‘race,’ for preferential treatment by all sorts of federally mandated programs.”

Connerly is also pushing a similar agenda in Arizona, but he isn’t recruiting hate-mongers to gather signatures there.

“Why not?”  you may ask.

Because, dear reader, Arizona has a common-sense law on the books that prohibits petitioners who are not registered voters in the state from circulating and collecting signatures.

Missouri needs a law like this.  Fortunately, the people in my part of the state had the good sense to send Jolie Justus to the state senate, and she is on the case, working to get similar legislation passed right here in Missouri.

Please contact your state representative and state senator and encourage them to support legislation that would close our referendum process to outside interests pushing personal agendas.

UPDATE  —  8:15 p.m.

Via that other blog devoted to the correct (left) side of Missouri politics, we learn that one of Ward Connerly’s minions, a fellow named John Wynne,  was interviewed by police in Wentzville when he ducked monitors who intend to assure that signature gatherers are honestly representing the petitions they are collecting signatures for.  

In the course of conducting their interview and investigation, the Wentzville police learned that Mr. Wynne is wanted in three states on misdemeanor voter fraud  warrants.  He has quite a history of misrepresenting the position of petitions he gathers signatures for.  

Because the charges are not extraditable, he was not arrested and so far as anyone knows, he is continuing to duck the monitors and collect signatures while misrepresenting the petition he wants Missourians to sign.  

Have you called your state congresscritters yet to put a stop to petition gatherers like this creep?  

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Sunday afternoon as I walked in to the Plaza branch of the Kansas City Public Library I was asked by an elderly black gentleman if I was a registered Missouri voter, and when I answered in the affirmative he asked me to sign a petition to “get civil rights legislation on the November Ballot.”

I did what I do before I sign anything – I read it.  Then I declined to sign.  It is racist, anti-affirmative action claptrap – and they are collecting signatures using the very people such a measure stands to harm the most.  The most-excellent Fired Up! Missouri website calls the proponents of the measure Wolves in Sheet Clothing – and they have been on these fools for a while now.

Even the Kansas City Star is shaking off it’s cloak of slumber and speaking up.   (I know!  Will wonders never cease?)

Voters should skip this petition

Missouri voters could face a tricky situation when they go to the polls Tuesday: They might be asked to sign a petition supporting “civil rights” in the state.

The trick is that the petition has nothing to do with the civil rights movement. Instead, the petition seeks to place an amendment on the November ballot that would gut state-supported affirmative action programs.

Supporters of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative claim they’re just seeking a level playing field for all residents. But they deceptively use the language of Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1960s civil rights movement in an attempt to deny minorities, women and other disadvantaged groups the opportunity to gain equal status in employment and business.

Supporters of the initiative mistakenly believe that affirmative action, an extension of the real civil rights movement, was not or is no longer necessary. But even King saw its necessity: “What America has done to the Negro, it must now do for the Negro.” That goes for other minority groups and women as well.

Yes, many women and people of color have made political and economic gains in recent decades. The race for the Democratic nomination for president illustrates that perfectly. Yet studies show that disparities still exist in the workplace and in the awarding of contracts. If Missourians really want to protect civil rights in the state, they will ignore this particular petition.

This petition is a product of anti-affirmative-action zealot Ward Connerly and the petition is to get an initiative on the November ballot that would, if successful, amend the Constitution of the state of Missouri to outlaw affirmative action.  I wish we were at a place where, as a society, we didn’t need it, but we aren’t there yet.  Sorry, but until you show me it isn’t necessary…

Connerly’s  group successfully got an initiative on the ballot in Michigan – which passed – in spite of a court finding significant voter fraud in the signature gathering process.  (They deceived people of all races, so the fraud wasn’t in violation of the Voting Rights Act.  Seriously.)

The Michigan initiative was openly supported by the freakin’ Ku Klux Klan.  You remember the Klan, those progressive vanguards in the fight for racial equality…I’m soooo sure a “level playing field” is exactly what the Klan is primarily concerned with.

Missouri voters can visit We Can Mo!  for the latest actions that are being taken to push back  against the Connerly disinformation franchise with solid information and grassroots organization.  I would encourage anyone  signing any petition to read carefully what they are signing, and do not sign anything that you disagree with, or that you don’t understand.  

And when someone asks you to sign a petition – ask yourself if the issue even deserves to be on the ballot?  If the answer is no – or if you would vote against the initiative – decline to sign.

For any number of reasons, ballot initiatives are here to stay, but I resent it when an out-of-stater bankrolls one as a means of monkeying with the governor’s race in Missouri.

Ward Connerly, pictured at left with Fred Thompson, is pouring money into five swing states to support anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, which would eliminate affirmative action for women and minorities in university admissions and in the awarding of state contracts. The results wouldn’t be pretty: because of the one Californians passed, state contracts to women and minority owned businesses dropped by 50 percent.

Besides being a mean-spirited piece of work, this initiative will, come election day, bring out the racists and those biased against women in business, in other words, people likely to vote for Matt Blunt and whichever presidential candidate the Republicans are forced to settle for.

So far, however, no signatures have been collected in Missouri, and that’s because our Secretary of State objected to the Orwellian Newspeak rhetoric of the petition title–the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative, if you can believe the chutzpah of its framers. Nowhere did the petition say that it would eliminate affirmative action. What it said was that the initiative aimed to “ban discrimination based on race or gender.” These people could have come up with Orwell’s gem, war is peace.

So anyway, Carnahan added to the petition the relevant information about eliminating affirmative action and rewrote another section of the petition. The framers sued. They won on the second of those points, but the court battle was well worth the effort because the petition’s proponents were, thank you very much, delayed by months in starting to collect signatures.

Meanwhile, as soon as the word about the petition surfaced, Senator Rita Heard Days set about forming a coalition called WE CAN to keep this constitutional amendment from becoming reality. A major reason such amendments passed in California, Michigan and Washington state is that activists there did not prepare sufficiently. We’re prepared.  

Public education in the form of large hearings will be part of the strategy. Believe it or not, the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, as well as the RCGA and Civic Progress in St. Louis, are working to bring in nationally known figures to chair the hearings. Even those conservative groups recognize what a backward idea this initiative is.

The other prong of WE CAN’s strategy is to use workers from Jobs with Justice and ACORN, who are experienced at opposing ballot initiatives, to prevent petition gatherers from obtaining the signatures they need. WE CAN will post its people near signature gatherers and urge voters to “decline to sign.” Our guys will first of all try to keep the other side honest, prevent them from saying, for example–as they did in California, honest to god–that this is a petition about lowering the price of gas.

Our workers will also urge people to think twice before signing. They’ll say something like: “Do you know what you’re signing? Think before you sign, because this is a constitutional amendment. It’s a big deal.” That sort of drag on signature collection can reduce their rate by 50 percent. And if Missouri progressives make it tough enough to get the signatures, the effort may fold here and focus in some of the other four states.

Signature gathering will start any day now, because it must be completed by the first Tuesday in May. Petition proponents will focus first on small cities like Fulton and Chillicothe, places where voters will be most likely to sign, rather than starting in the major metro areas. Keep an eye peeled and call this hotline number if you see people collecting signatures: 1-800-644-0466.

It’s critical that we stop this petition before it gets on the ballot, because once it’s there, it’s  difficult to defeat. In Michigan, for example, the initiative polled dead even right up to election day–and then won by 16 percent. People don’t want to be perceived as racist, so they’ll tell pollsters that they intend to vote against the measure, but in the privacy of the voting booth, they vote what they really think.

We need to put up such a stiff resistance in Missouri that Connerly et.al. decide to push their regressive agenda elsewhere. Not only does this measure not deserve to pass, we don’t need another item on the ballot that’ll motivate more of the wingnuts to vote.