CONTACT: Alex Oberley, 608-260-9713, Alex@PRwatch.org
Madison -- Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has taken the unprecedented step of asserting that a state legislator cannot be held accountable for refusing to disclose public records in response to a lawful open records request by the Center for Media and Democracy.
George Zimmerman -- the Florida man who shot teenager Trayvon Martin to death -- has landed in the news again, after a panicked 9-1-1 call Monday from Shellie Zimmerman in which she told a police dispatcher she was "really scared" because her husband had threatened "that he's going to shoot us."
Sallie Mae has dropped its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) after a student-led campaign demanding that the nation's largest student loan lender cut ties with the controversial organization. Sallie Mae is the 50th corporation to publicly drop its ALEC membership in the past year-and-a-half as the organization has come under increasing public scrutiny.
The Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas has filed a brief with state Attorney General Greg Abbott in support of the Center for Media and Democracy's request for records pertaining to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and further refuting ALEC's effort to declare its communications immune from the state public records law.
A Republican-dominated committee voted Thursday to recommend a half-million-dollar grant for promoting hunting and fishing to a group with no record in outdoors training, but with plenty of lobbying experience and close ties to outgoing Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder. The group, United Sportsmen of Wisconsin, will spend most of the $500,000 in taxpayer dollars on salaries for Tea Party leaders who have long railed against government spending.
A small GOP lobby shop tied to the Tea Party and David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, and which was active in the state's recent recall elections, was awarded $500,000 in taxpayer dollars in what some are calling a backdoor, sweetheart deal cooked up by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) State Chair, outgoing Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder.
"The task is not done, the journey is not complete," said Martin Luther King III on Saturday's 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington.
"The vision preached by my father a half-century ago was that his four little children would no longer live in a nation where they would judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," he said.
-- by Scott Klinger, Institute for Policy Studies
In these closing days of summer, a growing number of news stories have interrupted our final days at the beach and asked us to pause and remember the 50th Anniversary of the historic March on Washington that occurred on August 28, 1963.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) had its 40th anniversary meeting in Chicago, Illinois, at the posh Palmer House (a Hilton Hotel) from August 7-9. ALEC claims that 1,200 people attended its meeting this year; the conventioneers included state legislators, corporate lobbyists, and right-wing operatives. ALEC was greeted by more than twice as many protestors, who came out to speak out against ALEC's regressive policies.
The Wall Street Journal's latest defense of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), penned by WSJ Editorial Board Member Stephen Moore, fails to disclose Moore's deep ties to ALEC.
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