The Public Notice, Now an NPR Sponsor!
In my last post I made a mistake. I referred to an enhanced sponsorship spot as one dealing with "tax". I was wrong. In my fury sparked by Morning Edition's "news" I conflated the stories on taxes with the actual agency providing NPR with money.
As I noted in the addenda, this morning I got an email from a KUOW employee correcting my misunderstanding:
I think you may be looking for this:
Public Notice, an independent organization dedicated to reducing
government spending. Learn more at The Public Notice dot org;
So The Public Notice doesn't deal with taxes at all. They deal with spending. That's so very different.
What happens when we dive a bit into this agency? What, for example, would we learn from their Mission Statement?
Our goal is to provide Americans with clear, unbiased, and useful information about key economic and fiscal issues. Because America's future should rest in the capable hands of a knowledgeable people.
How laudable. And who are the people behind such a fine mission? From their About page, we learn:
Public Notice is an independent non-profit dedicated to providing facts and insight on the economy and how government policy affects Americans’ financial well-being.
Through education and awareness projects, Public Notice engages Americans on today’s policies, to avoid tomorrow’s problems.
Americans, empowered with the facts, can lead Washington to be better stewards of the nation’s economic and fiscal future.
When I stumble on words like "unbiased" and "independent", I immediately look for the bias and control. I've seen far too many of these non-profits to assume otherwise. They are almost all fronts for some very biased and control-oriented people. So I went to a site on DailyKos that step-by-step shows how to find the funders. Sadly, the instructions outline how to follow the money of a specific type of organization somewhat unlike The Public Notice.
Burrowing into the Press Releases The Public Notice offered, though, I learn that "Gretchen Hamel, Executive Director of Public Notice, said the following:". Now we have a name. Google should provide the rest.
The Overlordess Herself
Talking Points Memo delivers:
A former Bush administration PR specialist has launched a new non-profit designed to raise the alarm about what it sees as "over-spending" in Washington -- but is staying mum on how the group is being funded. . . .
Public Notice's funding source remains obscure. In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Hamel -- who served as the Bush administration's top spokesperson on trade issues, and as press secretary for the House Republican Conference -- said Public Notice had "dozens of donors across the U.S.," but declined to identify them. "We will not be disclosing our donors," she said. "We want to protect the anonymity of our donors," she added, noting that other organizations of all political stripes take a similar stance.
So "dozens of donors" are able to pony up anonymous cash for a slick PR foundation to release press pieces and produce videos all bemoaning the behemoth that has become the federal government . . . and force NPR -- an agency partially funded by the federal government -- to promote this activity.
That September 8 Morning Edition spot might as well have said:
Funding for this public radio programming comes from The Public Notice, an agency that would like to kill and bury public radio.
The Public Notice is, folks, just another right-wing Overton Window shifty agency following Lewis Powell's now infamous script. Had they been truly non-partisan, they would have been formed back when federal spending got truly egregious and out of control . . . under Reagan.
Furthermore, let's face the most obvious problem with The Public Notice's tactics: They completely ignore the alternative to cutting federal spending; raising taxes to levels that can sustain the spending. Funny thing, so did that pair of stories on Morning Edition.
And I have yet to hear about restoring that NPR Planet Money piece where just about everyone asks about taxes in Denmark says they are a good thing. Strange that almost all of it should so conveniently disappear, isn't it? I'll give the national ombudsman a few days to catch up on what is probably a deluge of letters just like mine . . . perhaps generated for the same reasons.
As I noted in the addenda, this morning I got an email from a KUOW employee correcting my misunderstanding:
I think you may be looking for this:
Public Notice, an independent organization dedicated to reducing
government spending. Learn more at The Public Notice dot org;
So The Public Notice doesn't deal with taxes at all. They deal with spending. That's so very different.
What happens when we dive a bit into this agency? What, for example, would we learn from their Mission Statement?
Our goal is to provide Americans with clear, unbiased, and useful information about key economic and fiscal issues. Because America's future should rest in the capable hands of a knowledgeable people.
How laudable. And who are the people behind such a fine mission? From their About page, we learn:
Public Notice is an independent non-profit dedicated to providing facts and insight on the economy and how government policy affects Americans’ financial well-being.
Through education and awareness projects, Public Notice engages Americans on today’s policies, to avoid tomorrow’s problems.
Americans, empowered with the facts, can lead Washington to be better stewards of the nation’s economic and fiscal future.
When I stumble on words like "unbiased" and "independent", I immediately look for the bias and control. I've seen far too many of these non-profits to assume otherwise. They are almost all fronts for some very biased and control-oriented people. So I went to a site on DailyKos that step-by-step shows how to find the funders. Sadly, the instructions outline how to follow the money of a specific type of organization somewhat unlike The Public Notice.
Burrowing into the Press Releases The Public Notice offered, though, I learn that "Gretchen Hamel, Executive Director of Public Notice, said the following:". Now we have a name. Google should provide the rest.
The Overlordess Herself
Talking Points Memo delivers:
A former Bush administration PR specialist has launched a new non-profit designed to raise the alarm about what it sees as "over-spending" in Washington -- but is staying mum on how the group is being funded. . . .
Public Notice's funding source remains obscure. In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Hamel -- who served as the Bush administration's top spokesperson on trade issues, and as press secretary for the House Republican Conference -- said Public Notice had "dozens of donors across the U.S.," but declined to identify them. "We will not be disclosing our donors," she said. "We want to protect the anonymity of our donors," she added, noting that other organizations of all political stripes take a similar stance.
So "dozens of donors" are able to pony up anonymous cash for a slick PR foundation to release press pieces and produce videos all bemoaning the behemoth that has become the federal government . . . and force NPR -- an agency partially funded by the federal government -- to promote this activity.
That September 8 Morning Edition spot might as well have said:
Funding for this public radio programming comes from The Public Notice, an agency that would like to kill and bury public radio.
The Public Notice is, folks, just another right-wing Overton Window shifty agency following Lewis Powell's now infamous script. Had they been truly non-partisan, they would have been formed back when federal spending got truly egregious and out of control . . . under Reagan.
Furthermore, let's face the most obvious problem with The Public Notice's tactics: They completely ignore the alternative to cutting federal spending; raising taxes to levels that can sustain the spending. Funny thing, so did that pair of stories on Morning Edition.
And I have yet to hear about restoring that NPR Planet Money piece where just about everyone asks about taxes in Denmark says they are a good thing. Strange that almost all of it should so conveniently disappear, isn't it? I'll give the national ombudsman a few days to catch up on what is probably a deluge of letters just like mine . . . perhaps generated for the same reasons.