Carson Comms Director Gave Big Bucks To Democrats
By Neff at DailyCaller: A top aide to Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson gave thousands of dollars to Democrats and none to national Republicans in the last few years.
Doug Watts works as Carson’s communications director, and statements from him can be found in countless of stories about the candidate, Politico reports. But in recent years, when Watts gave money to politicians, it has been to California Democrats. He gave $1,000 to Jerry Brown in 2006 when he ran for attorney general, then another $2,210 when he ran for governor in 2010. Also in 2010, he gave $1,000 to help Barbara Boxer defeat Carly Fiorina, now one of Carson’s rivals for the Republican nomination. In 2004, he gave $1,000 to Democratic Rep. Jim Costa.
It’s not simply a case of Watts being a dyed-in-the-wool Dem his whole life, though. Early in his career, he worked extensively in California GOP politics, helping run Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential campaign in the state and also working for Republican Gov. George Deukmejian. In 1998, he gave $250 to the campaign of Republican Al D’Amato, a senator from New York.
Watts’ donations could be identified because donations under that name included his affiliation with Urban Media Group, a company he’s been president of since 2004.
Top Carson Aide Wants Taxpayers To Fund Farrakhan
By: Evan Gahr at Daily Caller:
Ben Carson says a Muslim should not be president.
But his key adviser, Armstrong Williams, has, unbeknownst to the good doctor’s supporters, been praising Louis Farrakhan — even urging Chicago to hire Nation of Islam security guards to fight crime.
Quite the Farrakhan aficionado, Williams had promised to broadcast his radio show live from the hate monger’s 20th anniversary Million Man March last Saturday, recalling to the Washington Times that, “It was a moving experience [in 1995], so I want to be there again.”
In a little-noticed Times column the day after the march, “To Curb Chicago Violence Bring in Nation of Islam,” Williams argued that only NOI toughs can help stem the tide of killings there and temper other inner-city pathologies by fostering greater self-respect among residents.
The Hill published Williams’s piece on October 6 under the headline, “The Nation of Islam Could Be Chicago’s Savior.”
If taxpayers foot the bill, of course.
Williams, apparently a big fan of government contracts since he received $240,000 from the George W. Bush Department of Education to promote “No Child Left Behind,” argued that the “NOI brings to the table things other private security firms and the police don’t — credibility within the community. The NOI is one of the few community-based organizations that actually recruit in prisons and also offer transitional services to ex-offenders.”
Williams opined that starting in the late 1980s NOI guards, known as the “Fruit of Islam,” successfully patrolled housing projects in New York, Chicago and Washington. The Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the Fruit multi-million dollar contracts but they were eventually nixed after a nationwide controversy and congressional hearings in the mid-1990s.
In 1995, “HUD abruptly canceled an NOI-affiliated firm’s contract to secure Baltimore public housing buildings — citing bidding irregularities and other violations that were widely viewed as a smoke screen for a political battle over the group’s anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
Uh, yeah, Armstrong, what about all that hateful NOI rhetoric? Never mind Chicago residents. It seems that journalists, whites and cops are the ones who need guards—to protect against Farrakhan.
The hatemonger famously tried to incite his followers to kill the Washington Post reporter who exposed Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown” slur in the 1980s. More recently, Farrakhan urged blacks to “rise up and kill those who kill us” unless the federal government intercedes on their behalf.
In a rhetorical sleight of hand, Williams writes that, “Extremist elements of the NOI should be sternly and unequivocally condemned.On the other hand, more moderate Muslims have made it a point of standing up for their communities”
OK. Sounds plausible at first. Williams is probably the most deft practitioner of sophistry on the political scene since the US-born Soviet Union spokesman Vladmir Pozner, who famously went on television and made the USSR downing a Korean civilian jetliner with hundreds aboard in 1983 sound justifiable.
And Williams contention, if read quickly, also seems reasonable. Just stay away from the Nation of Islam “extremists elements” and stick with the moderates. But are there any other “elements” in the Nation of Islam besides “extremists?”
For Williams, what counts as non-extremist elements of the Nation of Islam? Do the moderates disagree with the late Farrakhan aide Khalid Muhammad that Jews are “blood suckers?”
They just think Jews get too many transfusions? Centrist members of Farrakhan’s quasi-cult disagree with their leader that Hitler was a “great man?” They just think he was an o.k. guy?
In his column, Williams cites as an example of a moderate the Nation of Islam member David Muhammad who received nationwide media attention by filming drug dealers and customers in Chicago. Muhammad could not immediately be reached for comment but there is nothing online to indicate he ever condemned Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism or incitement to violence.
Regardless, any money the Nation of Islam were to receive from contracts would be controlled by Farrakhan, not the so-called moderates.
Williams — who has sparred with this reporter and deemed his description of Carson in a freelance piece for The Daily Beast as “conservatives’ great black hope” highly “offensive” — did not respond to repeated emails. He was asked to provide the names of Nation of Islam moderates and whether Carson supports his proposal to have Farrakhan feed at the public trough.
But Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein called for Carson to disassociate himself from Williams’s proposal and possibly send him packing.
“I am really surprised that somebody as respected as Armstrong Williams would urge the government to use a racist, anti-Semitic and anti-white group for anything”, he told the Washington Gadfly. “Ben Carson should condemn these remarks and say he should say nothing to do with this. Ben Carson should denounce this ludicrous policy and make sure he has nothing to do it. [Carson] should reconsider whether Armstrong has the type of judgment that he wants around him.”
There is yet another matter regarding Ben Carson that where alarm bells should be sounding:
Ben Carson Jumps Shark: Open to Federal Control Over State Elections
By J. Christian Adams, PJMedia: Ben Carson is a good guy. He’d make a great secretary of Health and Human Services. But after what he told CNN today, no constitutional conservative should support him for president.
For a change Jeb Bush was right and Ben Carson was dead wrong.
Carson told CNN that he is open to reviving federal control over state elections through the Voting Rights Act. CNN:
Ben Carson said Thursday that he wants the Voting Rights Act protected, adding he’d like to hear Jeb Bush explain why he does not support its reauthorization. “Of course I want the Voting Rights Act to be protected. Whether we still need it or not or whether we’ve outgrown the need for it is questionable,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “Maybe we have, maybe we haven’t. But I wouldn’t jeopardize it.”
This is precisely what the racial-interest groups and the Democrats want — giving an attorney general like Eric Holder revived power to block state election laws by edict, as they did to Texas and South Carolina voter ID and citizenship verification in Florida and Georgia.
To recap, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced 16 states to obtain federal approval for every election law change no matter how big or how small. When a polling placed moved from a school library to a school gym, Washington, D.C., had to approve. The Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 ruled that such federal oversight upset the constitutional balance by using circumstances from 50 years ago to justify federal intrusion into state power, and the Court extinguished the oversight.
Since then, the institutional left has sought to reassert federal power because it helps Democrats win elections. For example, prior to the 2012 presidential race, the Justice Department stopped Florida from checking for noncitizens on the rolls. In 2009, the DOJ blocked Kinston, North Carolina, from having non-partisan elections because, as the DOJ said, if the word “Democrat” is not next to the name of the candidate, black voters won’t know for whom to vote.
This is the madness that Carson is open to resurrecting.
Perhaps he doesn’t know that the entire Voting Rights Act is still in force, save for the federal pre-approval rule struck down by the Supreme Court. I’d wager that Jeb Bush and the other top-tier candidates know that.
Carson was already suspiciously naive about the role and agenda of racial-interest groups regarding electoral issues. Earlier this year Carson appeared at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention.
The National Action Network is a racial-interest group of the first order, routinely stoking racial tensions and dividing Americans along color lines. Some have indicated that Carson sought to sway minds, but that explanation only exacerbates the questions surrounding Carson’s understanding of these issues. Anyone familiar with the National Action Network knows how immune it is to being swayed by opposing viewpoints.
Carson said he “has the same goal” as Sharpton. Really? Either Carson is frightfully naive, or conservatives should be very concerned about Ben Carson.
Perhaps Carson will walk his comment back about federal control over state elections. Perhaps he will explain that he didn’t fully understand the issue. That’s precisely the problem. Being receptive to empowering bureaucrats to block state election laws is a nonstarter for constitutional conservatives, especially ones who have been paying attention to the abuses of Eric Holder’s Justice Department.
