It began with Apr. 15 Tax Day protests as thousands rallied in a number of cities across the country.

It continued on into the summer with raucous town hall meetings and gun-toting anti-Barack Obama demonstrators, and appeared to reach its apex with a Sep. 12 march on Washington, which drew nearly 100,000 participants.

Now, however, some in the so-called Tea Party movement are turning their attention toward becoming a force during the 2010 congressional elections.

Several reports on the Sep. 12 event noted it was a nearly all-white crowd and some demonstrators carried an assortment of “homemade” anti-Obama posters, declaring that “The Anti-Christ Is Living in the White House”, and calling the president an “Oppressive Bloodsucking Arrogant Muslim Alien”.

Despite the fact that it doesn’t have a clear identity, and serious questions about the movement’s character remain to be answered, the Tea Party movement has been one of the most intriguing political developments of the past year.

Is it a grassroots movement, or has it been organised and funded by Washington-based conservative groups? Could it be both? Is it mainly concerned with economic issues (government spending, taxes, deficits) or are the Christian Right’s traditional social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) of interest to tea partiers?

Are there several – possibly competing – ideological tendencies within the movement?

While tea partiers made a lot of noise this past summer, doing their best to put the kybosh on health care reform, is there a future for the movement?

A recent Rasmussen Poll suggests that there very well might be.

In theoretical three-way congressional races between a Democrat, Republican and Tea Party candidate, the Tea Party candidate outpolled the Republican. Democrats attracted 36 percent of the vote; the Tea Party candidate received 23 percent, and the Republican finished third at 18 percent, with 22 percent undecided.

(According to the Rasmussen Reports website, “survey…respondents were asked to assume that the Tea Party movement organized as a new political party. In practical terms, it is unlikely that a true third-party option would perform as well as the polling data indicates. The rules of the election process – written by Republicans and Democrats – provide substantial advantages for the two established major parties.)

Interestingly enough, in an effort to build the movement, some Tea Party organisers have taken to “studying the grassroots training methods of the late Saul Alinsky, the community organizer known for campus protests in the 1960s and who inspired the structure of Obama’s presidential campaign,” the San Francisco Chronicle recently reported.

Tea Party groups are also using “Tea Party: The Documentary Film” as an organising tool. In a pre-premiere press release, the filmmakers claimed that the film would deal with the “allegations of racism”.

And that indeed appears to be the issue that could stymie the movement’s growth.

While Tea Party events have become a safe haven for people carrying racist anti-Obama signs, people of colour have stayed away in droves. Members of white nationalist organisations openly participate in Tea Party events and view the movement as a fertile recruiting ground.

Questions about the overlap between tea partiers and anti-immigration activists might be answered when an immigration reform bill is taken up next year.

Are the openly-racist elements within the Tea Party movement an aberration scorned by most Tea Party participants as John Hawkins, who runs a website called RightWingNews, insists, or are they more firmly entrenched than tea partiers would care to admit?

“The tea parties themselves are made up of a diverse bloc of different political elements, and white nationalists have chosen to make a stand inside the tea parties,” one expert, Devin Burghart, told IPS.

For the past 17 years, Burghart has researched and written on virtually all facets of contemporary white nationalism. He is currently vice president of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, which monitors and publishes on the activities of white nationalist groups.

“The exact extent of the racist element inside the Tea Parties is difficult to quantify, because they are not a static phenomena, and it depends on who shows up,” he explained. “That said, it’s enough of a factor to attract the attention of a significant portion of the white nationalist movement.”

“It’s not a matter of how many African-American or Latino/a folks show up at these tea parties, it’s about the content and character of the arguments made at them,” Burghart added.

Not only have “tea partiers have turned up with overtly racist signs and slogans” at rallies from coast to coast, he said, but also many participants “cling to the belief that our first African-American president is not only un-American, he was not even born in the country”.

Unfortunately, Burghart noted, “There’s little evidence to indicate that tea party leaders are doing anything to address the racism in their ranks.”

Burghart said that he was not surprised that “tea party activists would deny their racism”. After all, “racists have been denying their racism even before pro-secessionist bigots couched their arguments in bogus claims about states’ rights”.

However, he added, “To anyone with any degree of sensitivity to the issue, the tea parties have clearly shown themselves to be racist, in the lineage of George Wallace – who when he campaigned up North eschewed talk of racial segregation in favour ranting against ‘elites.'”

In an article at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights’ website, Leonard Zeskind, the organisation’s president and author of the recently published “Blood and Politics: The History of White Nationalism from the Margins to the Mainstream”, pointed out that the anti-Obama “opposition” contains “many different political elements”.

These include “ultra-conservative Republicans of both the Pat Buchanan and free market variety; anti-tax Tea Party libertarians from the Ron Paul camp; Christian right activists intent on re-molding the country into their kind of Kingdom; birth certificate conspiracy theorists, anti-immigrant nativists of the armed Minuteman and the policy wonk variety; third party ‘constitutionalists’; and white nationalists of both the citizens councils and the Stormfront national socialist variety.”

If Tea Party activists can ferret out racists and white nationalists from their ranks – and not become a mouthpiece for Christian Right ideologues – it could become a legitimate force on the U.S. political landscape.

Meanwhile, a host of groups, operating under assorted Tea Party banners, are working to influence the 2010 mid-term elections.

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

Two movies with doomsday scenarios highlight this year’s pre-holiday releases – “2012”, a special effects spectacular, is based on the Mayan calendar, whose end date – not to be confused with the end of the world, most scholars agree – is Dec. 21, 2012.

In its first weekend at the box office “2012” took in 225 million dollars – 65 million dollars domestically and 160 million internationally. The other film, “The Road”, is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic novel.

“Like a lot of great literature, ‘The Road’ is open to interpretation,” Rob Boston, senior policy analyst with Americans United (AU), which works to uphold the constitutional principle of church-state separation, told IPS.

“In some ways, the book could even be read as a humanistic parable. The world depicted in ‘The Road’ is so nightmarish and unpleasant that one is tempted to ask, ‘Has God abandoned humankind?'” he said.

“The boy (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) and his father (played by Vigo Mortensen) are left to rely on one another, and the bond between them speaks to the undying love parents have for their children – a message that resonates with atheist parents as much as Christian ones,” Boston pointed out.

“I suppose one could read the book as a metaphor for God’s love for his creation, but to me that message was in no way obvious in the book. Literal-minded fundamentalists are not likely to make that reach,” he added.

Even if the R-rated film contained “more overt religious messages”, Boston could not envision “conservative Christians flocking to the multiplexes to see a movie about an apocalyptic wasteland populated by shell-shocked cannibals and somehow seeing that as an affirmation of God’s awesome power.”

However, for A. Larry Ross, president of A. Larry Ross Communications – a high-profile Christian media company – the film provides an opening for church leaders to “participate in a robust spiritual discussion”.

Ross was asked by the movie’s production company to take “The Road” to the faith-based community. He believes with the film generating buzz and Oscar talk, Christians should get in on the action.

The film presents “a unique entry point for those in the faith community to share the hope of the Gospel in a hopeless world”, Ross said.

To that end, Ross has been instrumental in organising “advance screenings for church leaders nationwide.” A website featuring “free sermons and discussion guides” has been produced, and “a special trailer with extra scenes underscoring the film’s moral message” was developed, Entertainment Weekly recently reported.

Why did the film’s producers call on Ross? “Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a greater emphasis on popular culture – especially film – at events like the ‘Values Voter Summit,'” said AU’s Boston.

“Clearly the Religious Right wants to use the medium of film to spread its message of how society and culture should be ordered,” Boston added. “They want to go back to the days when movies were ‘wholesome’ and religion was never portrayed in a negative light – think 1950s with Spencer Tracy playing a friendly priest. The Religious Right used to rage against Hollywood; now they want to co-opt it.”

Over the past few years, A. Larry Ross Communications (ALRC) has been involved with pre-release publicity for several movies. While some have not fared particularly well at the box office, others far exceeded expectations.

“Left Behind”, a film based on one of a series of mega-best-selling apocalyptic novels by longtime Religious Right leader Tim LaHaye and his co-author Jerry Jenkins, fell flat at the box office. It did, however, sell more than three million videos. “Evan Almighty”, starring Steve Carrell, was a high-budget film (175 million dollars) that grossed 170 million worldwide.

However, the success of actor/director Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” – whose budget was 30 million dollars and which took in more than 600 million dollars worldwide – trumps all the others, setting the stage for Ross’s deeper engagement with Hollywood productions.

In light of the success of “The Passion”, “some major studios saw there was money to be made by reaching out to religious audiences and producing more films with religious themes,” Boston pointed out.

While Christian-based PR firms aren’t new phenomena, Ross’s group is among the few that have risen to the top in a crowded field. And while the groups, campaigns and individuals represented by Ross’s client list are prestigious, it is “the Kingdom of God itself [that] is a client of sorts,” the New York Times pointed out. “Publicity, marketing and branding are his ministry. So the real question becomes, Why does God need someone to sell him?'”

During any given week ALRC churns out numerous press releases – via Facebook, Twitter, as well as more traditional venues – for myriad evangelical Christian clients: it recently promoted “good, clean fun” in “The Cheesy Adventure of Captain Mac.A.Roni”; questioned health care reform on behalf of the Joni and Friends (JAF) disability ministry and its public policy initiative, the Christian Institute on Disability (CID); flacked for the Kentucky-based Creation Museum; and touted a series of websites run by Global Media Outreach (GMO) “dedicated to share the good news of Christ with the branches of the U.S. armed forces.”

American United’s Rob Boston allowed that he was not surprised to hear about the production team’s plans “to promote” ‘The Road’ to a Christian audience. “They would pitch ‘Saw V’ to a Christian audience if they thought they could make money. The studios want as many people as possible to see any film.”

And while Boston admits to not being “a film critic”, he is “sceptical” that “The Road” “can be pitched successfully to a fundamentalist audience. Fundamentalist tend to be literal minded. They enjoyed ‘The Passion of the Christ’ because it was the straight-up passion narrative with all of the blood you could stand. I’ve read ‘The Road,’ and while there are biblical references in it, they are nuanced and cloaked in metaphor.”

According to Entertainment Weekly, after watching an early cut of the film, Cormac McCarthy had “no doubt about” the film’s “spiritual resonance.” The film’s director John Hillcoat said that McCarthy had only one comment: “He said, ‘It would be great to hear the word God one or two more times.”

Earlier this month, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon went to Washington to introduce “As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen”, his autobiography that, according to the Moon-owned Washington Times, “recounts the joys and challenges, the teachable moments and the monumental experiences of his life – much of it spent as a spiritual leader.”

The newspaper reported that Moon received “congratulatory greetings” from Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and former President George H.W. Bush, “hand-delivered by his son Neil Bush”.

The younger Bush, who has a long track record of working with Moon-sponsored organisations, told the audience of 1,300 that “Rev. Moon is presenting a very simple concept. We are all children of God.”

In January, Moon will turn 90, and while he’s alive and apparently well, he is deeply involved in charting his group’s future.

Last year, Moon named his Harvard-educated youngest son, the 30-year-old Hyung Jin Moon, as the president of the World Unification Church. Another son, Hyun Jin Moon, Moon’s oldest, is also in the mix. Whenever he dies, Moon’s death will nevertheless usher in a major period of adjustment.

Moon founded the Unification Church in the 1950s, and it remains a controversial, powerful, and misunderstood enterprise to this day.

To many observers, Moon’s activities – including accusations of cult-like practices, his imprisonment for tax evasion, the prayer vigils for a Watergate-afflicted Richard Nixon, his support for right-wing death squads in Central America, the strange spectacle of mass weddings, the church’s close ties to the Bush family, and legions of stories about de-programmers trying to reclaim Moonified souls – may seem so twentieth century.

The Unification Church has been a religious, business, political enterprise, and there are a number of routes it could take to the future: It could grow like The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), it could remain controversial similar to the path of the Church of Scientology, it could try to become just another church among many – in other words, more mainstream.

While the Moon organisation has been prepping for transition to younger leaders for quite some time, Frederick Clarkson, a journalist who has written widely about the church, including in his 1997 book, “Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy”, told IPS that “even with the passing from the scene of the man many believe to be the Messiah, the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

“Many of the Moon offspring and the children of other members of the inner circle have been very well educated and have been given experience in running the core operations,” veteran journalist Robert Parry told IPS. “I think the business aspects could be rather smoothly transferred. And with the money goes the political influence.”

“There also is an element of ‘The Godfather’ in this, as the second generation may try to further sanitise the organisation’s history,” said Parry. “That could make the political influence-buying even safer, though it is hard to know whether the second generation shares some of the right-wing politics of the elder Moon, even as that repressive ideology is disguised under the happy-sounding phrase ‘world peace.'”

In addition to the myriad Moon-sponsored conferences and events that always seem to be taking place somewhere, it might surprise you to learn that the Unification Church recently sponsored a major soccer tournament in Spain.

And while most of the matches didn’t draw huge crowds, the media gave it extensive and generally positive press coverage, a longtime Moon watcher told IPS. One of the major purposes of the tournament was to mainstream people’s acceptance of Moon and his organisation as simply “one religion among many”.

According to Hyung Jin Moon, garnering favourable press coverage is an important part of the organisation’s mainstreaming strategy as it moves forward. He recently proudly noted that there had been some 85 major articles on the Unification Church in Korea last year and none were negative.

Hyung Jin Moon grew up in the states and as such, appears to be interested in introducing some new practices into the organisation’s culture.

“His background means he has already been exposed to a wide range of religious traditions and seems unafraid to introduce aspects of how other faiths worship into Unification Church services,” Christopher Landau pointed out in a recent BBC report.

For example, a recent service attended by Landau started off with “contemporary mainstream Christian songs written in the U.S.” instead of “one of the movement’s own hymns”.

Perhaps the most notable cultural/religious change being considered revolves around the issue of marriage.

For years, Moon presided over mass wedding ceremonies – like the one held earlier this month at the Sun Moon University campus in Seoul, South Korea – involving hundreds of couples, most of whom had never met prior to their wedding day and were chosen by Moon himself.

While the public was fascinated by these ceremonies, they were mostly a big turnoff. Hyung Jin Moon told Landau that those practices were under review.

Founded as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, in the 1990s it became the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. According to Landau, “The emphasis now seems to be shifting back to conceiving of the movement as a church, and using that clearly defined religious status as a way to campaign for the freedom of its followers.”

Rethinking its policies regarding marriage and the introduction of popular Christian music into church services appear to be aimed at making the church less idiosyncratic and more acceptable to the public.

However, the piece of the puzzle left unexplored by Landau, and most other mainstream journalists reporting on Moon’s operations, is the recognition of the organisation’s political power and influence both in the U.S. and abroad.

At the heart of Moon’s political project in the U.S. is the Washington Times, a newspaper that, according to some reports, has cost Moon more than three billion dollars since its founding. However, the importance of the Times to the conservative movement far outweighs its expensive price-tag.

The newspaper recently announced that in collaboration with the powerful Washington-based think tank, the Heritage Foundation, and several other organisations, it was launching TheConservatives.com, “a Web site with technology that allows activists to talk up to ideological and party leaders and interact in innovative ways”.

“TheConservatives.com creates a cutting-edge new marriage between the social publishing world of bloggers and the social networking world of Twitter, YouTube and the like,” said John Solomon, executive editor and vice president for content of The Times.

“Most opinion sites today enable thought-leaders to talk down to the masses, but TheConservatives.com empowers users to change the direction of that dialogue, allowing the Joe the Plumbers of the world to speak up to major thinkers, like Newt Gingrich,” he said.

“Using the Washington Times as a propagandist for the Reagan-Bush crowd, Moon sanitised himself as much as anyone could ever imagine,” Parry pointed out. “By investing smartly in the American conservative movement – and thus gaining influential defenders of his own – he also intimidated much of the U.S. news media and U.S. government investigators from discussing his real history or looking too deeply at his curious funding methods.”

“As a business model for a corrupt money-launderer, which is essentially what Moon’s organisation has been, Moon could have taught the Corleone family a thing or two,” he added.

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

By Bill Berkowitz
OAKLAND, California, Sep 29 2009 (IPS)

A little over 38 years ago, when Daniel Ellsberg released the “Pentagon Papers” to The New York Times and other newspapers, it set off one of the 20th century’s most important battles over government secrecy and freedom of the press.

Rick Goldsmith Credit: Courtesy of Rick Goldsmith

The nation was stunned by the revelations, and he became one of the most reviled and admired figures in the United States. The Richard Nixon administration was apoplectic; it targeted him through warrantless eavesdropping and ransacked his psychoanalyst’s office to gain access to his medical records.

An exhausted anti-war movement was buoyed by his courage and audacity. And yet, despite the uproar, the Vietnam War lasted several more years.

Ellsberg was arrested and tried for espionage and conspiracy, and faced life imprisonment. The charges were later dropped due to the Nixon administration’s misconduct.

The saga began in 1969 when Ellsberg, a former Marine Corps officer, was given access to classified documents regarding the conduct of the Vietnam War, in his capacity as a U.S. military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation, a government-sanctioned corporate think tank.

As reported by Stanford Unger in his 1972 book “The Papers & The Papers, An Account of the Legal and Political Battle Over the Pentagon Papers”, Ellsberg and his former RAND Corporation colleague Anthony Russo secretly photocopied 7,000 pages of what was to become known as the “Pentagon Papers,” officially titled “United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense.”

The Papers were a top-secret history of the U.S.’s political and military involvement in Vietnam during that period, commissioned in 1967 by then Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara.

After failing to convince several anti-war senators to release the papers on the Senate floor, Ellsberg leaked the documents to New York Times correspondent Neil Sheehan.

In mid-June of 1971, after initially publishing the first of nine excerpts and commentaries, the Times ceased publication after the Nixon administration got a court order. Ellsberg then leaked the documents to The Washington Post and 17 other newspapers.

By the end of the month, a landmark Supreme Court decision – New York Times Co. v. United States – permitted the paper to resume publication. Realising that the FBI might assume that he was responsible for the leak, Ellsberg went underground for 16 days. He then turned himself in on Jun. 28, 1971.

This month, a new documentary film which tells the story of those extraordinary times, “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers”, co-produced and co-directed by Rick Goldsmith and Judith Ehrlich, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to rave reviews.

The film will be shown in New York City at the Film Forum, in Los Angeles, and at the Vancouver International Film Festival and Mill Valley (California) Film Festival in October.

Before the film’s Toronto debut, IPS correspondent Bill Berkowitz interviewed Goldsmith, who also produced and directed the Academy-Award nominated documentary feature “Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press”. Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: Why did you and Ehrlich decide to do a film about Daniel Ellsberg now? RICK GOLDSMITH: We came to it independently. I had interviewed Ellsberg for my film on George Seldes. In 2002, I wrote Ellsberg about the possibility of doing a film about him and the “Pentagon Papers.” I sent him a short outline which even then was titled “The Most Dangerous Man in America”. He didn’t reply and I didn’t follow up. A few years later, Ehrlich approached me and suggested doing a film on Dan Ellsberg. We took it from there.

We both had done films about people of conscience who stood up for their beliefs and dared challenge the status quo. By 2004, we were in the middle of an immoral and disastrous war in Iraq started by a president who lied us into the war, and we had a Congress and a public who seemed either uninterested or powerless to stop it.

Ellsberg’s story had parallels that were all too apparent; we both felt it might have something to say to audiences today, especially anyone under 50, who wouldn’t have personally remembered or even known about the “Pentagon Papers”.

IPS: Where does the title “The Most Dangerous Man in America” come from? RG: Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security advisor, was widely quoted as saying – shortly after Ellsberg was identified as having leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, and was thought to have copies of Nixon’s Vietnam war plans – “Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America and he has to be stopped at all costs.”

IPS: The release of the “Pentagon Papers” was an example of great personal courage, a test of the media’s right to publish, and a battle over the public’s right to know. How does this relate to today’s political climate; secret CIA hit squads, Blackwater (now named Xe – pronounced zee); assassination teams? RG: After Ellsberg’s released the “Pentagon Papers”, he was tried under the Espionage Act and faced 115 years in prison. The publication of the Papers by The New York Times and other newspapers could have subjected them and their reporters and editors to criminal prosecution as well.

So you might say that June of 1971 was a high point in “civil courage” – a phrase Ellsberg likes to use. All the key players believed that as a democracy, this country functions best if the Congress, the courts, the press, and the public are outspoken and involved in the decisions of our government.

While presidents will try to shut those voices down in times of crisis, they have to struggle to get the truth out. But since 1971, there has been a slow and steady erosion, not only in Congressional, press, and citizen involvement, but in the notion that we have a right, a responsibility, to challenge the president and his administration.

During the first Gulf War, in 1991, CNN foreign correspondent Peter Arnett (who has a cameo in our film) was branded “unpatriotic” and even a “traitor” because he tried to put a human face on Iraqis. The notion that because we’re at war, it is treason to report on the effects of war or to criticise the president is absurd.

Congress and the news media have become more timid, so stories about torture, assassination, and using mercenary enterprises like Blackwater to fight our wars with no accountability are rarely reported and when they are, horrendous abuses are pushed under the rug.

The [George W.] Bush administration said “no pictures of body bags” and the news media complied. Reporters were embedded with the troops made it near impossible to report independently and without censorship.

When the “Pentagon Papers” were published, the central issue was “national security vs. the public’s right to know.” Today, the present administration – and this is no less true with [President Barack] Obama and Afghanistan than it was with Bush and Iraq – the public has an extremely difficult task even getting the facts, the true story.

IPS: The story of the Pentagon Papers has been told a number of times. What new things will viewers learn? RG: If you’re young, you’ll be entertained by a gripping story about American government, secrecy, lies and power that you couldn’t have imagined in your wildest dreams. If you’re older, you’ll discover that what you thought you remembered about the “Pentagon Papers” and Watergate is not the whole story.

You’ll get the inside dope from most of the principals of the time – Ellsberg and his “co-conspirator” Tony Russo, Ellsberg’s family, journalists, anti-war activists, government insiders, Nixon White House officials, and, through the Nixon White House secret tapes, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger as you’ve never heard them before.

IPS: Over the course of your filmmaking career, you’ve interviewed some very impressive individuals, including the iconic journalist George Seldes. What have you learned about the struggle for truth, peace and social justice? RG: George Seldes and Dan Ellsberg were men of conscience, who took risks to address the biggest social injustices of their day. In both of the films – Seldes in one and Ellsberg in this film – reflects on a personal revelation, a turning point, where he comes to the conclusion that war, which he has participated in and championed up until this moment, is in actuality murder and a crime that has to be stopped.

Their lives are changed forever – they never again “go along to get along”. What unfolds in each film is a story in which the viewer comes to see that stopping war, stopping injustice, may take an incredible about-face to your belief system, an enormous personal commitment to doing something, and the realization that it is a lifelong struggle.

IPS: What do you hope the film accomplishes? RG: I hope that audiences might begin to examine the world around them in a different way; to question authority, to consider that their president, their boss, their parents, whoever, doesn’t have all the answers. That taking risks for important issues can be liberating, uplifting, and can make a difference in the world around them.

I think we all face periods of discouragement, maybe even live “lives of quiet desperation” and that it is a common experience to ask the question “why bother?” Maybe this film can help answer that question.

Excerpt:

Every year during August recess, many members of the U.S. Congress go back to their districts and hold town hall meetings to get a sense of what their constituents are thinking about, and to apprise them of upcoming legislation.

This year, instead of the usual sparsely attended events, town hall meetings across the United States have turned into raucous free-for-alls as opponents of President Barack Obama’s health care reform proposals have taken to shouting down a host of senators and congresspersons.

Over the years, one could slice and dice just about any period of U.S. history and determine that a “civility” project might have been useful. During the past few decades, however, churlish and bombastic invective has often prevailed over carefully calibrated discourse.

When former Republican Party vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin recently commented about Obama’s health care reform initiatives, she claimed that his “death panels” would decide who would live and who would die.

Palin was not only playing to the Republican Party’s wired up base, she was clearly displaying a lack of civility (she later reversed course and came out in favour of civility).

Mark DeMoss, a long-time Christian Right/Republican-oriented public relations expert who believes that today’s political landscape is completely out of whack, has launched “The Civility Project”, an attempt to provide guidelines so that political opponents can disagree without being disagreeable.

So if you were DeMoss, and you were starting up something as high-minded as “The Civility Project”, would you start off by bashing gays and lesbians?

Recognising society’s division and polarisation, and concerned “about the hate and animosity being aimed at men and women with whom we may disagree on one issue or another”, DeMoss, a conservative Southern Baptist whose clients have included the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, recently “reached out to some people from various political, racial and religious backgrounds to see if we could join our hearts and minds together in calling others to civility”, he wrote in a statement titled “Welcome to the Civility Project.”

Unfortunately, DeMoss started out by attacking gays and lesbians. “I had spent about two years volunteering for Mitt Romney, and I saw a lot of ugly rhetoric and behaviour aimed at Mormons and then at me,” DeMoss said.

“And then the results of the Proposition 8 vote in California [the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that passed last November’] contributed to my thinking – when you saw gay activists responding to the… vote by vandalizing churches and temples,” he claimed.

DeMoss’s comments were an odd way to get started in the civility business. Over the past several decades, the Religious Right’s fortunes have in part been built on demonising gays and lesbians. By recognising that history, DeMoss might have started out on better footing.

DeMoss is the president of a public relations outfit called The DeMoss Group, which, on its website claims that it is “the largest PR firm specializing in faith-based organizations and causes.” The DeMoss Group focuses on communications, media relations, marketing, non-profit management, and crisis management.

According to its website, “The Civility Project [is] a collection of liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, and people of various faiths – or no faith – who agree that even in sharp disagreement we should not be disagreeable.”

“I decided to launch a project where I would talk not about unity, not about tolerance, not about getting along, not about compromise, but just about civility,” DeMoss said.

Participants are invited to “Take the Civility Pledge”, in which signatories agree to: “Be civil in my public discourse and behavior; be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them; stand against incivility when I see it.”

The key Democrat supporting The Civility Project is Lanny Davis, a tough political combatant who has been a longtime adviser to the Clintons, and who has served three terms on the Democratic National Committee.

According to CitizenLink, a news service of the conservative group Focus on the Family, “DeMoss was so impressed with Davis’s civil tone [while he was involved in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign] that he wrote him a letter:

“I suspect that politically you and I may have nothing in common,” DeMoss wrote. “But as I’ve watched you conduct yourself in the public arena, I’ve always appreciated how you handled yourself, how you handle your adversaries, how you show respect for those who disagree with you, and for modeling civility in an increasingly uncivil town.”

Davis said the letter came as a surprise: “I’m getting all this hate mail, and I get this amazing letter from a perfect stranger who identifies himself as an evangelical Christian. I always try to give deference to somebody who disagrees with me. That is the point Mark made in his letter, that he noticed that about me, that I always try to be respectful of people who are of a different opinion.”

Writing about the Civility Project at Religion Dispatches, Candace Chellew-Hodge pointed out that perhaps the religious right was “taking its cue from George Barna’s book ‘UnChristian,’ which calls for conservative Christians to be kinder [and] … soften their rough and often hateful rhetoric, especially toward gays and lesbians.”

“DeMoss has no intention of learning about the person on the other side of the issue,” Chellew-Hodge maintained. “He’s not interested in tolerating them, or finding a place of common ground where there can be unity, or compromising on his principles, or even getting along – it’s simply about being polite to one another – to not yell at one another, but to still push our own agendas.”

“In short, DeMoss has no interest in dialogue. He has no interest in learning about what those who oppose him think or believe, or even how they arrived at that thought or belief. He just wants them to smile, slap him on the back, and get out of his way while he pursues his agenda,” she asserted. “If they don’t, then he can paint them as the ‘uncivil’ person or group who is obstructing his progress.”

Many questions remain as to the efficacy of The Civility Project.

How will the third point in the civility pledge, the one about “standing against incivility when I see it”, manifest itself?

Does it mean that when former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gives a speech, Ann Coulter writes a column, Rush Limbaugh broadcasts, and Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs take to the air, Civility Project folk will be monitoring their speech?

Thus far, the project has not issued any statements condemning the current Republican/insurance lobby-sponsored tactic of aggressively breaking up town hall meetings in districts of Democratic Party Congressional representatives.

Is DeMoss sincere with his plea for civility, or is he reading the political tea leaves (the Republicans and the Christian Right have hit low points in public opinion polls)?

Candace Chellew-Hodge characterised DeMoss having started out by gay-bashing as an example of “bigotry with manners”.

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

Pastor Rick Warren would never be described as laid back. However, since delivering the invocation at President Barack Obama’s inauguration in late January, he’s been somewhat on the down low.

It’s not that he’s disappeared from the public spotlight – at any given time he’s liable to be speaking somewhere before some prestigious organisation. It’s that he hasn’t been making his business public on the cable news networks.

A few months back, there was the flap over what his level of support for Proposition 8 – California’s anti-same-sex marriage initiative which passed last November – had been during the campaign. Gay marriage supporters pointed out that he was a vocal supporter of the gay marriage ban (and they had the video to prove it), while Warren maintained a “not so much” stance. However, that denial infuriated many of Warren’s Christian conservative colleagues.

Now, Warren, founder of Saddleback Community Church, a megachurch in Orange County, California, and the author of “The Purpose Driven Life”, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, has stirred up a hornet’s nest among Christian conservatives with his recent appearance at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

This year’s convention theme “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, “was a call for pluralism and bridge-building between different faith communities in the U.S., symbolized by ISNA’s selection of perhaps America’s top Christian leader as the keynote speaker,” Frankie Martin, the Ibn Khaldun Chair Research Fellow at American University, reported on the ISNA website.

The Indiana-based ISNA brings together Muslim groups from across the country, and its annual convention reportedly draws more than 30,000 people.

On its website, ISNA maintains that it “In addition to building bridges of understanding and cooperation within the diversity that is Islam in America, ISNA is now playing a pivotal role in extending those bridges to include all people of faith within North America.”

While Warren’s appearance may not have been calculated to once again raise his public profile, it came only two months shy of the launch of his next national project – in association with Reader’s Digest – called the “National Life’s Healing Choices Campaign”.

Seeking some measure of “common ground”, Warren told the several thousand convention attendees that “the two largest faiths on the planet” needed to work in concert to bust stereotypes and deal with a myriad of global issues.

“Some problems are so big you have to team tackle them,” Warren said.

Over the past few years, Warren has had an uneasy relationship with longtime leaders of the Christian Right. While he claims that he is not of that movement, he is vehemently opposed to abortion and he has consistently opposed same-sex marriage. The Associated Press pointed out that he “has a record of upsetting fellow Christian conservatives by calling old-guard evangelical activists too partisan and narrowly focused”.

Recognising that his appearance at the ISNA event would be controversial, Warren told the crowd that “It’s easier to be an extremist of any kind because then you only have one group of people mad at you. But if you actually try to build relationships — like invite an evangelical pastor to your gathering — you’ll get criticised for it. So will I.”

Blogger Eric Barger said that “Rather than trying to see how much we have in common with them [Muslims], concerned Believers might better spend their time pointing out the stark difference between Islam and Christianity.”

Steve McConkey, president of 4 WINDS, said in a press release that, “Speaking at interfaith meetings should not be done if a person does not tell the listeners that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven – period. By not doing this, a person is saying that all ways lead to God by works… By Warren’s silence on the exclusive claims of Christ, he led his Muslim audience into believing that works will save a person.”

A few days after his appearance, OneNewsNow, a news service of the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, featured a story headlined: “Warren panders to Muslim group, omits gospel”. It reported that Jan Markell, founder of Olive Tree Ministries, a Messianic Jewish ministry, roundly criticised Warren: “I’m sorry, that kind of a ‘let’s all get along’ [solution] is not possible – and what he needed to do was tell them the truth,” she said. “But that is not what Rick Warren does. He does not tell the truth, at least not when he’s outside of his Saddleback Church.”

Erick Stakelbeck, idetified as a CBN (Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network) News Terrorism Analyst, pointed out that Warren’s appearance as ISNA “wasn’t the first time he has spoken before a controversial Islamist group.”

In 2008, Warren spoke at the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s annual conference. “MPAC’s rap sheet may not be as bad as ISNA’s or CAIR’s, but they ain’t exactly the Girl Scouts, either,” Stakelbeck wrote. “Question: who does background research for Warren before he agrees to appear at an event? And was he aware of MPAC’s and ISNA’s dubious track records, associations and ideologies beforehand?”

Shortly after 9/11, US law enforcement agencies looked into ISNA’s – as well as a number of other U.S.-based Muslim groups – activities. Two years later, the Senate Finance Committee’s investigation concluded and no action was taken.

Committee chairman Charles Grassley said, “We did not find anything alarming enough that required additional follow-up beyond what law enforcement is already doing.”

At ISNA’s website, Frankie Martin pointed out that in addition to Warren, Yusuf Islam (the entertainer who formerly recorded under the name of Cat Stevens) was also convention attendees.

“In his speech,” Martin noted, “Warren appealed for Muslims and Christians to work together to solve common problems which he said was possible without ‘compromising my convictions or your convictions’.”

Martin described the convention as having an “evangelical-like atmosphere”: “The sound system, giant video screens, and slick mass production values recalled America’s Protestant mega-Churches.”

Martin was in attendance in part to promote “Journey into America”, a film he made with anthropologist and Islamic scholar Akbar Ahmed of American University and a team of young Americans.

“Journey into America” “depicts a nine month journey we took to over seventy five cities and one hundred mosques to study how Muslims were fitting into American society and to promote better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.”

Warren spoke of his PEACE Plan which is aimed at dealing with spiritual emptiness, corrupt leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic diseases, and illiteracy and lack of education. (PEACE stands for promote reconciliation, equip servant leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation.)

He also made it clear that he was “not [just] interested in interfaith dialogue.” He said he was more “interested in interfaith project.”

“There is a big difference,” Warren said. “Talk is very cheap. You can talk and talk and talk and never get anything done. Love is something you do. It is something we do together.”

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

A recent report issued – and later withdrawn – by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis warned of the possibility of an up-tick in violent activities by right-wing extremist groups.

The assessment pointed to a number of factors, including the election of the country’s first African American president, the economic crisis combined with escalating unemployment, and conservative-initiated rumors that the Barack Obama administration would advocate stricter gun control regulations, that might fuel a growth in “right-wing extremist groups”, and homegrown terrorist incidents.

Titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” it drew immediate criticism from conservative pundits and media personalities, but one “key finding” was particularly seized upon.

“Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists,” read the section “Disgruntled Military Veterans”. “DHS/I & A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.”

“The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today,” the report said.

It pointed out that a 2008 FBI report on the white supremacist movement had noted that “some returning military veterans” from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had “joined extremist groups”.

While many claimed to have found those passages offensive, the DHS warning reflected the changes in military recruitment policy guidelines. By loosening its standards, the military has allowed “large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists” into the service, a July 2006 Southern Poverty Law Centre report pointed out.

“Since the launch of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has struggled to recruit and reenlist troops [and] as the conflicts have dragged on, the military has loosened regulations, issuing ‘moral waivers’ in many cases, allowing even those with criminal records to join up,” Matt Kennard recently pointed out in Salon.

In addition, the military appears to have turned a blind eye to previous regulations that rejected members of hate groups.

“The lax regulations,” Kennard wrote, “have also opened the military’s doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and gang members – with drastic consequences. Some neo-Nazis have been charged with crimes inside the military, and others have been linked to recruitment efforts for the white right.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an Alabama-based group that tracks the activities of hate groups, neo-Nazi groups such as the National Alliance, whose founder the late William Pierce was the author of “The Turner Diaries” – a best selling book among white nationalists and the novel that was said to have inspired Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building – have infiltrated the military.

“We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad, and that’s a problem,” the SPLC quoted a Defence Department investigatory report as stating.

An SPLC report on the subject of white supremacists in the military also quoted Scott Barfield, a Defence Department spokesperson, who said that “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don’t remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members.”

The change in recruitment policy – at least surreptitiously – appears to have materialised at a time when the military was finding it more difficult to keep up its recruitment quotas.

“They don’t want to make a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists,” Barfield said.

In 1996, the Pentagon “declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups”, the New York Times reported in July 2006.

The “crackdown” came after “revelations that [Timothy] McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his [Oklahoma City] bomb plot,” the Times reported.

“Those revelations were followed by a furor that developed when three white paratroopers were convicted of the random slaying of a black couple in order to win tattoos, and 19 others were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.”

According to Matt Kennard, “Today a complete ban on membership in racist organizations appears to have been lifted – though the proliferation of white supremacists in the military is difficult to gauge. The military does not track them as a discrete category, coupling them with gang members. But one indication of the scope comes from the FBI.”

“There will undoubtedly be a up-tick in violence because these guys [veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan] have been over there and solving problems with guns over the past few years,” Leonard Zeskind, author of the recently published “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream”, told IPS in a telephone interview.

“However, most of the way that it is thus far manifesting itself is in a rising number of suicides and domestic violence. The cases of post-traumatic stress disorder are overwhelming,” he said.

In reality, Zeskind added, the Department of Homeland Security “presents only a very thin sliver of the issue of returning veterans in the report”.

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

She’s a politically savvy history student at the University of California, Los Angeles who is appearing on countless conservative talk radio programmes and cable television news shows.

She was given the 2008 Person of the Year Malachi Award, by the longtime anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, and received a 50,000-dollar grant from an anti-abortion philanthropist.

On her campus, she is campaigning to urge the administration to cut ties with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a national provider of sexual and reproductive health services.

Meet Lila Rose, 20, the president of Live Action Films, and the new face of the anti-abortion movement.

Rose’s emergence onto the national stage comes at a time when President Barack Obama, who supports the legal right to abortion, is nevertheless seeking “common ground” on the issue.

Recent cabinet appointments, particularly the naming of the pro-choice former governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, have infuriated movement activists. An invitation to the president to speak at the University of Notre Dame, a prestigious Catholic university, sparked an enormous controversy.

Now, anti-abortion activists are gearing up to battle Obama’s first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor.

The anti-abortion movement has been buoyed by a recent Gallup Poll that found that U.S. citizens appear to be shifting their views on abortion: 51 percent now call themselves “pro-life” and 42 percent “pro-choice”. This is the first time since Gallup began polling on the issue in 1995 that a majority of U.S. adults are identifying themselves as pro-life.

Rose’s attack on Planned Parenthood has inspired anti-abortion activists all across the country. One fascinating aspect of her story is how quickly she has become connected to the broader Christian conservative movement, receiving legal and public relations support, education training, philanthropic grants, financial awards, and a tonne of publicity from longtime conservative media operations.

Since 2006, Rose has been going into Planned Parenthood clinics pretending to be a young teenager impregnated by an older man. She described her work by saying that she goes into these clinics in order “to illustrate the abuses and the lawlessness that goes on inside these clinics regularly.” Rose tries to entice a Planned Parenthood staff or volunteer to violate the law by telling her to lie about the ages of their adult boyfriends.

A boiled down – and dramatically enhanced – version of her videos is posted on Rose’s LiveAction.org website and You Tube. While surreptitious encounters at Planned Parenthood clinics in Indianapolis, Indiana, Memphis, Tennessee, Los Angeles, California, and Tucson, Arizona may never garner Susan Boyle-type numbers, nevertheless, they could have an effect on the operations and future government funding of Planned Parenthood.

“There is this stereotype of who we pro-life leaders are, and for the most part it would be white middle-aged religious men trying to impose their will on women,” said the Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition. “So now with Lila, you bring this young, fresh college student that completely blows any stereotypes away. No one is going to accuse Lila of being mean, vindictive and harsh.”

Rose’s work “is an update of an old tactic invented by Mark Crutcher of the Denton, Texas-based group Life Dynamics, whose efforts were carried out by telephone and the conversations were primarily with receptionists,” Frederick Clarkson, a longtime researcher into the anti-abortion movement, told IPS.

Rose grew up in San Jose, California, was home-schooled and later attended a part-time Christian school and a junior college. She founded Live Action when she was 15 years old, giving anti-abortion presentations at schools and to youth groups. Over the past few years, she attended workshops at the Leadership Institute, a Virginia-based educational foundation that teaches conservatives how to polish their communication skills.

While a freshman at UCLA, she and James O’Keefe came up with the idea to infiltrate clinics. O’Keefe was the founder of The Rutgers Centurian, a conservative magazine published at New Jersey’s Rutgers University.

Rose’s work is having an impact. Earlier this year, legislators in Tennessee said they “would seek to end a 721,000-dollar contract with Planned Parenthood, citing outrage over what they saw in a [Rose] video,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

That video, from July of last year, has Rose posing as a 14-year-old who was impregnated by a 31-year-old. A Planned Parenthood staffer tells her: “Just say you have a boyfriend, 17 years old, whatever.”

The Orange County (California) Board of Supervisors also “voted to suspend a grant worth nearly 300,000 dollars to Planned Parenthood that was earmarked for sex education, not abortions… [after] a conservative Tustin businessman raised the issue with Supervisor John Moorlach after meeting Rose and seeing her videos,” the Times reported.

According to Clarkson, co-founder of the blog Talk2Action, “health workers trying to be compassionate and helpful towards a young person in trouble find themselves in a tricky situation; exploited in order to produce antiabortion propaganda.”

Clarkson pointed out that “In the previous campaign, activists tried, with little success, to get district attorneys to investigate. No charges were ever brought anywhere in the U.S. Law enforcement came to understand that the entire enterprise was a political publicity stunt. However, the new effort is to demagogue the issue to get states and localities to terminate grants and contracts to Planned Parenthood, and this has apparently already met with some success.”

These days, Rose, who has received considerable publicity from anti-abortion media outlets, is surrounded by a veteran group of conservative supporters. Last September she was a featured speaker at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit.

The Alliance Defence Fund, a Christian legal group, has given her free legal advice; she is receiving support from the Washington, D.C.-based CRC Public Relations, a conservative PR firm that played a role in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that targeted Democrat John F. Kerry during the 2004 presidential race.

Earlier this year, Rose received 50,000 dollars as a winner of the Gerard Health Foundation’s inaugural Life Prizes awards. The foundation is a Massachusetts-based charity founded by Raymond Ruddy, a Catholic businessman who has funded antiabortion campaigns and abstinence-only sex education projects.

Rose’s efforts are “unfair of course, because no actual crimes have been committed, and it is entirely for propaganda purposes,” Frederick Clarkson pointed out. “We can contrast this with the actual sex crimes committed by Catholic priests against children. No one has demanded that the government end grants and contracts with Catholic agencies such as Catholic Relief Services or Catholic Charities over this.

“In addition, surveys show that Planned Parenthood has an excellent reputation. This is problematic for the anti-abortion cause, and so there have been attacks over many years to damage Planned Parenthood’s public image, and I fully expect them to continue.”

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

Reports vary about how many people actually showed up at Tax Day Tea Party rallies in dozens of cities across the United States on Wednesday, Apr. 15 – the deadline for paying taxes in the U.S.

OneNewsNow, the news service of the conservative Christian evangelical group, the American Family Association – one of the chief sponsors of the Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Parties – reported that “tens of thousands of protesters” showed up “to tap into the collective angst stirred up by a bad economy, government spending, and bailouts.”

Other reports estimated that crowds at events in such cities as San Antonio, Texas, New York City, Cincinnati, Ohio, Atlanta, Georgia, Kansas City, Missouri, and a number of smaller towns across the country, were small but enthusiastic.

(Added all together, however, the numbers of Tax Day protesters did not come anywhere near the number of people that attended anti-Iraq War demonstrations in the winter of 2002-2003, during the run-up to the invasion.)

“The events of Apr. 15 turned out to be pretty weak tea, considering the enormous resources that went into promoting them by conservative groups, the GOP [Republican Party] and Fox News,” Frederick Clarkson, the co-founder of the blog Talk2Action, told IPS.

“From the perspective of the history of American political protest, including recent national protest rallies, this one is way down the list,” he said, “and for example, does not even compare to the national gay and lesbian protests in the wake of the passage of Prop 8,” California’s anti-same sex marriage constitutional amendment which passed last November.

While the focus of the Tax Day Tea Parties was mainly on taxes, the debt and government spending, many attendees took the opportunity to bring in other issues as well directly attack President Barack Obama.

One sign in the crowd in Madison, Wisconsin, compared him to the Antichrist; at a Tea Party in Slidell, Louisiana, a woman held a sign that said “As Obama Thrives Democracy Dies”; a person at a Montgomery, Alabama, Tea Party carried a sign that showed the president with Hitler-style hair and mustache and said, “Sieg Heil Herr Obama.” Other protesters called Obama “a socialist,” “a fascist,” and “a communist.”

“The effort has also aroused, incited and arguably helped legitimise some of the ugliest strains of the far right who rallied strongly to the cause,” Clarkson pointed out. “These elements were last seen on the national stage with the militia movement and anti-abortion clinic violence during the Clinton administration. It is extraordinary to watch conservative political leaders who are long on advocating respect for authority when they are in power, seek to rally the most extreme forms of anti-government feelings when they are not.”

Although politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties were told that while they were welcome to attend the rallies, they were not welcome to speak, nevertheless, several Republican Party pols used the opportunity to rev up their own political campaigns.

In New York, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose organisation, American Solutions for Winning the Future – which calls itself non-partisan, yet takes in millions of dollars from longtime Republican Party donors – had early on endorsed the gatherings, addressed a small but enthusiastic crowd in front of City Hall that chanted, “We are America!” After his speech, passers-by yelled, “2012, Newt!” and “Run for president!”

But when asked about a run, Gingrich shook his head emphatically and said, “I’m just part of a citizen movement.”

In Texas, Governor Rick Perry, who is facing a potential gubernatorial challenge from current Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, had the crowd in the palm of his hand when talking about opposing the federal government. Some started chanting “Secede!” Later, answering news reporters’ questions, The Dallas Morning News reported, “Perry suggested Texans might at some point get so fed up they would want to secede from the union, though he said he sees no reason why Texas should do that.”

In Atlanta, the main draw was the Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, who broadcast his programme from a rally outside the Capitol.

Although enthusiastic, the crowds were eerily reminiscent of the type of audiences that turned out for McCain/Palin rallies during the presidential campaign – overwhelmingly white and middle-aged.

Although Tax Day Tea Party organisers have claimed that the rallies were organised by ordinary citizens concerned with runaway government spending, liberal bloggers pointed out that in addition to the Fox News Channel’s team of reporters and political pundits who talked up the Tea Parties for days and fanned out across the country to report on the events, several longtime Republican politicians played a significant role in the day’s events.

The Washington-based FreedomWorks, a conservative group led by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, who is now a lobbyist, was an early Tea Party supporter.

On Wednesday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, pressed to comment on the Tea Parties – one of which was happening outside the White House – said that the president had just recently passed a “tax cut that covers the most people in the history of this country”.

“The president promised significant tax relief for working families of this country, and in the first month of the administration delivered that to the American people,” Gibbs said.

While one of the mantras of the Tea Parties was “Taxed Enough Already,” in reality, 95 percent of all U.S. families – which likely included the vast majority of those attending the Tea Parties – received a tax cut from the Obama stimulus package. And, while thousands took to the streets, an early April CBS News/New York Times poll found that nearly 75 percent of the U.S. public supports Obama’s proposal to roll back the Bush tax cuts for those earning over 250,000 dollars to Clinton-era rates.

On Monday, Apr. 13, a Gallup Economy and Personal Finance poll found that 48 percent of U.S. citizens say “the amount of federal income taxes they pay is ‘about right,’ with 46 percent saying ‘too high’ – one of the most positive assessments Gallup has measured since 1956.”

Were the Tea Parties a hoped-for springboard to relevance for a demoralised Republican Party? Were they an opportunity for a core group of bitter former McCain/Palin supporters, who still can’t get over the idea of the country having elected Barack Obama president, to voice their anger?

Were the rallies a chance for Religious Right organisations to get back in the game? Were they a potential recruiting ground for white nationalists, the near-dormant militia movement, and a host of anti-immigration organisations?

“Based on the interviews with participants I saw in the media, I’d say these TEA events consisted mainly of the farthest fringe of the far-right, people who seemed only dimly aware of what they were protesting,” Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told IPS.

“These mad hatters may try to host more confabs, but I doubt many Americans will choose to sample their fetid brew. Religio-political extremism has never been this country’s cup of tea,” he said.

The Tea Parties “seems more like a beginning than an end, as the GOP and the conservative movement seek to reinvent themselves after the debacle of the Bush era, and historic losses in the last election,” Frederick Clarkson added. “The conservative movement, both inside and beyond the Republican Party, finds little on which it can agree these days. The tea parties seem designed to find a rallying point. I think it succeeded in that.”

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

In December of 1773, colonists in Boston – then a town in the British colony of Massachusetts – protested against the British government after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain.

The protesters boarded the ships and tossed the tea into Boston Harbor. The action became a signature event of the nascent American Revolution.

Now, more than 235 years later, a number of conservative organisations are resuscitating the “tea-party” concept. On Apr. 15, Tax Day in the U.S., organisers are hoping that thousands of people will turn out in cities across the country to protest the Obama administration’s “wasteful spending”.

Desperate to turn their flagging political fortunes around and aiming to take advantage of the public’s anger over government bailouts, and the bonuses handed out to executives at American International Group (AIG), several longtime Republican Party operatives, religious right groups, a 25-year-old free market advocacy group, and a newly formed coalition of previously unknown groups are organising “tea parties.”

On Mar. 21, at a rally sponsored by a group called Floridians United, between 3,000 and 5,000 people showed up at the Lake Eola amphitheater in Orlando, Florida, to not only rail against “wasteful Washington spending,” but also to call for the impeachment of the president.

One local television station reported that Floridians United “staged a Boston Tea Party-style protest, hoping to make it loud and clear to politicians that they were tired of bailouts and what they called a push toward the socialisation of America.”

“These ‘tea parties’ apparently seek to build on the outburst from CNBC reporter Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago mercantile exchange, when he lashed out at the ‘losers’ who had gotten in over their heads on mortgages and rallied the traders into booing President Obama’s efforts to reduce the number of foreclosures,” Robert Parry, a former AP and Newsweek reporter who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s, told IPS.

“Santelli’s rage, which was highlighted by other NBC news programmes…became known as the Chicago Tea Party. Overnight, Santelli became a folk hero on the Right and the ‘tea party’ emerged as a way of denouncing Obama’s liberal reforms,” Parry added.

Last week, former House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future – an organisation that bills itself as non-partisan, while raising millions of dollars from top-shelf longtime Republican Party donors – announced that it was endorsing the Nationwide Tax Day Tea Party, a series of events scheduled in over 150 cities and towns across the country on Apr. 15.

The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition was set up a month or so after the Obama inauguration by the Dontgo Movement, Top Conservatives on Twitter, Smart Girl Politics and now includes American Solutions.

“The goal of the Tax Day Tea Party is two-fold,” Juliana Johnson of Urquhart Media, who is doing the PR work for the coalition, told IPS via e-mail. “The first is to show the president and members of Congress how upset we are and that we will not sit idly by while they destroy our country. The second is to rally conservatives together and build strong coalitions in every state.”

Despite the signs at the Florida rally, impeachment “is not one of our goals,” Johnson said.

Several other groups, including Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, are also sponsoring their own tea-parties.

For the American Family Association, “TEA stands for ‘Taxed Enough Already,’ and is meant to invoke the Boston Tea Party,” Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told IPS via e-mail. “It’s actually a fairly clever media overture, and in the hands of some of the more sophisticated right wingers, it might get some traction.”

“But it fails for two reasons: The overwhelming majority of Americans got a tax cut under Obama, and the project is being run by Wildmon’s AFA, a group that people long ago stopped taking seriously.”

“It’s hard to say how effective any of this will be,” said Robert Parry, who is currently editor of Consortiumnews.com, a 13-year-old investigative news Web site. “Because the Right has a large news media apparatus…it can spread and popularise its outrage quickly.”

“But the protests often have an awkward quality to them, like the renamed ‘freedom fries’ before the Iraq War or the crushing of Dixie Chick CDs after their lead singer criticised George W. Bush,” he added.

“On the other hand, the crude personal attacks on the Clintons – which also started early in that administration – combined with the relentless verbal abuse from Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Savage and Fox News helped to undermine Clinton’s legitimacy in the eyes of many voters.”

Rob Boston noted that these events are the perfect vehicle for Newt Gingrich, who “is trying to forge a new alliance between the Religious Right and the far-right ‘all-taxes-are-evil’ crowd. I’m sure he [sees himself as a] lead[er of] this movement and regain his rightful place in American political life and perhaps even run for president.”

Gingrich’s new group, Renewing American Leadership, “has been working on the TEA rallies with the AFA and other organizations,” Boston noted. He also “has a history of exploiting Religious Right groups to advance his political career.”

Overall, Boston doesn’t see the tea parties as being the vehicle that will transform the rage the U.S. public feels over the various bailouts and bonuses into a coherent movement: “The Religious Right has spent years backing the GOP and the Republican candidates whose economic policies have brought us to this point. For these groups to now pretend that they are suddenly standing up for the little guy who is feeling the squeeze is simply beyond belief.”

“These days, Obama has a very high approval and it hasn’t changed much over the past month. I don’t believe the Religious Right attacks on him and the TEA rallies are having any effect. Most Americans don’t even know about them. The people attending these events are the same lunatic fringe that always turns up for events like these. Most of them are probably dividing their time between attending these rallies and filing lawsuits claiming that Obama is not an American citizen.”

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

During a recent appearance on the Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends” programme, Mike Evans accused former President Jimmy Carter of everything from helping overthrow the Shah of Iran to causing the Russians to invade Afghanistan and provoking the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

He also had words of warning for President Barack Obama: listen to Carter at your own peril. “Jimmy Carter has an ideological belief system that Obama has to understand because if he plays that game we are going to have hell to pay for it,” Evans said.

The long hard slog that former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld often talked about in reference to the war in Iraq has been fully embraced by Evans. However, he is primarily consumed with Israel, the Palestinians and Iran.

The media-savvy, well-connected and well-traveled conservative evangelical Christian Zionist – with several bestselling books to his name and a bent for the hyperbolic – has for years opposed Bush’s road map to peace in the Middle East, a two-state solution, and a divided Jerusalem. He has also been warning the world about the danger that Iran poses and the necessity of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities by either the U.S. or Israel.

These days, as the world awaits the formation of a new Israeli government – likely to be headed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and possibly in partnership with Kadima’s Tzipi Livni – Evans has honed in on another of his favourite targets: former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Evans has written a new book titled “Jimmy Carter: The Liberal Left and World Chaos” – the only book thus far published by his TimeWorthy Books – which is a sharp rebuke of President Carter’s efforts at working for a peaceful solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Evans maintains that his new book “helps you connect the dots and understand how we have come to this crisis,” the promotional materials at the book’s Web site states. “More importantly, the book tells you how it can be resolved. It contains information that has never been revealed by diplomatic sources worldwide. It divulges the agenda of Jimmy Carter and the Liberal Left to sell America and the Bible Land to the highest bidder.”

In a recent article, Evans, the founder of an organisation called The Jerusalem Prayer Team (JPT) and the Corrie Ten Boom Foundation, stated that Carter’s “solution is straightforward; Israel should embrace the Quartet” – a plan for dealing with the Middle East crisis crafted after Hamas’ parliamentary victory three years ago by the U.N., the U.S., the European Union, and Russia.

“The plan,” writes Evans, “is backed by a group simply known as The Elders, an idea formulated by British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson and musician Peter Gabriel to create a world council of elders to tackle issues such as peace in the Middle East.”

Carter is a member of The Elders’ Middle East team. “How,” Evans wants to know, can Carter and friends “ask the Jewish people to embrace a group known as The Elders?” in light of the virulently anti-Semitic book, “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.”

Carter’s new book, “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work,” was released on Jan. 20, the same day as Evans’ book.

Although Mike Evans has never had the name recognition of Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, the Rev. Pat Robertson or the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, he has been a steady presence in the Christian Zionist fold. Over the past few years, his successful self-promotional efforts have yielded several bestselling books and numerous appearances on radio and television talk shows.

In a profile of Evans, Right Web – a project of Political Research Associates – pointed out that in a 2007 article for his own online publication, Jerusalem World News, Evans criticised efforts aimed at a two-state solution: “The acceptance of this vile plan would turn Israel into a living hell. The Jewish people would be forced to live next door to a state controlled by Islamic fanatics such as Hamas.”

“I am reminded over and over of the scripture in Psalm 83:2-5: For behold, Your enemies make a tumult; and those who hate You have lifted up their head. They have taken crafty counsel against Your people, and consulted together against Your sheltered ones. They have said, ‘Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more.’ For they have consulted together with one consent; they form a confederacy against You.”

Over the past several years, Evans has been a major advocate of military action against Iran.

Before last November’s U.S. presidential election, in an early September e-mail to his supporters, Evans claimed that he had received information from a number of Iraqi and Israeli leaders that Iran was “planning a major surge in the next 30 days to kill as many American troops as possible. They believe in doing so they can undermine the success of the U.S. surge and John McCain’s hopes of becoming President.”

Evans, the head of a group called the Jerusalem Prayer Team, the publisher of the online Jerusalem World News, and the author of a number of books including The New York Times bestseller “The Final Move Beyond Iraq,” maintained that “Muqtada Al-Sadr’s, Iran’s Shi’ite subcontractor in Iraq and head of the sixty-five thousand member Mahdi army (terrorists), are going to attempt to make Iraq a living hell in the next 30 days by killing as many people as possible.”

How to deal with Evans’ startling revelation: He suggested that the best thing his supporters could do would be to head over to “Amazon.com right now and purchase as many copies of ‘The Final Move Beyond Iraq’ as possible.”

Why rush to Amazon.com? “Because this is the only book that reveals Iran’s plans in Iraq. More importantly if you can drive the book to Amazon’s Top Ten bestseller list, the network shows will be calling and inviting me to speak to tens of millions of people. I need to wake up the American people and government so they can pray and prepare for this attack that is coming. You can save American lives by helping me get on the major networks.”

Despite the bluster, and Evans’ certainty, there was no discernable Iranian surge. How many books were sold is unclear.

These days, Evans’s “Book Wars” is continuing: In a series of e-mails, Evans has encouraged his supporters to let their fingers do the walking on over to Amazon.com, where they can both buy his new book and provide it with a five-star review. “If my book hits #1 on Amazon, the networks will call,” Evans was once again telling supporters.

As of Feb. 19, the book seems to have received a bump in sales from Evans’s recent appearances on the Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends” and “Fox News Strategy” programmes, as it moved up to #145 at Amazon.com.

Of the 75 recorded reviews, 71 gave Evans’ book a 5-star rating. (On the same day, Carter’s book ranked #1,377 and had received 54 reviews, of which 31 gave it a 1-star rating.)

While the alleged Ponzi scheme of New York investment manager Bernie Madoff has claimed significant chunks of the fortunes of a number of well-known charities, celebrities and not-so familiar millionaires, over the years another outfit appears to have left a trail of a different sort – the broken dreams of thousands of wannabe entrepreneurs who were left with garages full of dust-gathering products, motivational tapes and how-to-get-rich-quick books.

Those who watched television over the winter holidays may have wondered why there seemed to be so many commercials for a company called Amway Global. Were these ads for the same company that has over the years been widely accused of running a pyramid scheme, had paid nearly 20 million dollars in fines in a Canadian criminal fraud case 25 years ago, and whose image with the public in recent years soured faster than a carton of cottage cheese left standing in the sun?

More recently, two former Amway/Quixtar distributors filed a class-action suit in federal court in California, charging Quixtar and several of its high-level distributors with fraud and racketeering.

Despite these controversies, Amway – which is temporarily being called Amway Global – appears to be heading back home. Can the company, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year, stage a successful comeback in the U.S., or are they throwing a very desperate Hail Mary?

Eric Scheibeler, author of “Merchants of Deception”, a highly critical look at Amway, told IPS that the controversies stalking the company continue to this day.

Scheibeler said that he had “worked with local victims and initiated a UK government investigation in which the DTI/BERR (Department of Trade and Industry/Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform) took legal action against Amway and is waiting for an appeals court decision to potentially ban them from the country.”

According to Scheibeler, a high level “Emerald” Amway member who uncovered fraud and deception within the company and was ostracised for it, “UK Justice Norris found in 2008 that out of an IBO [Independent Business Owners] population of 33,000, ‘only about 90 made sufficient incomes to cover the costs of actively building their business.’ That’s a 99.7 percent loss rate for investors.

“The scheme appears to be falling apart in the U.S., UK and Australia hence the beefed up prime time ads in the U.S.,” he said.

IPS spoke with an Amway Global public relations person who provided some corroborating background for this article. However, questions focusing on the British lawsuit and Amway’s political activities – which the company required to be submitted via e-mail – were never answered.

Amway – an abbreviation of “American Way” – was founded in 1959 by two high school buddies from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Richard DeVos and the late Jay Van Andel. In 2000, it became part of an umbrella company called Alticor Inc., which does business as Quixtar in the U.S. and Canada and as Amway Corp. throughout the rest of the world.

In the intervening decades, Amway has become the second-largest direct-selling company in the world. In 2007, Amway Global and other companies under under Alticor umbrella reported sales of 7.2 billion dollars for the year ending Dec. 31, 2007, marking the company’s sixth straight year of growth.

Van Andel and DeVos became major financiers of Republican Party candidates and Religious Right causes. According to Progress for America, Amway’s founders contributed four million dollars to conservative groups in the 2004 election cycle.

In April 2005, Rolling Stone magazine reported that DeVos was connected with the dominionist political movement in the United States and that DeVos was had given more than five million dollars to the late D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries.

Despite the controversies and legal challenges the company continues to face, it never went out of business; instead, it shifted the bulk of its efforts to overseas markets. These days, its three current growth hotspots are Russia, China and India.

“In the late 1980s, about three-quarters of our business was here in the U.S.,” Steve Van Andel, Alticor’s chairman and co-chief executive and the son of one of Amway’s founders, recently told the Associated Press. “Now about 80 percent of it is outside the country.”

The privately owned company, which is called Amway Global – it intends to revert back to Amway in about a year – has several goals, including reacquainting the public with the company’s extensive product line – which includes health and beauty items and homecare products, jewelry, water purifiers – and refurbishing its tarnished image.

While times may be tough economically for a sustained rebirth, company officials “hope to repeat in the United States the kind of growth they’ve seen abroad in the past – and to revive the mystique that helped the company spread throughout the Midwest and, by the mid-1960s, the rest of the U.S. Amway’s hundreds of thousands of distributors dreamed of getting rich by selling cleaning products and by recruiting their acquaintances to join the fold,” AP reported.

According to AP, the company is still “operating on that basic model, including prices that tend to be higher than those of their competitors”.

While there is no question that the Amway story is a unique Horatio Alger-like U.S. success story, what makes it even more fascinating is that along the way, the company’s founders – and their progeny – have become political kingmakers.

In October, former Amway Corp. chief Dick DeVos held a private fundraiser featuring President George W. Bush, to raise money for the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee.

For nearly 40 years, the DeVos family has been a major benefactor of both the religious right and the Republican Party. Shortly before the 1994 election, the Amway Corporation gave the Republicans 2.5 million dollars which, at the time, was “the largest political donation in recent American history,” the Washington Post reported.

And in 1996, the company donated 1.3 million dollars to the San Diego Convention and Visitor’s Bureau “to help fund a Republican cable TV show to be aired during the party’s national convention,” the Associated Press reported. The program featured “rising GOP stars as ‘reporters,'” and aired on the Family Channel which was owned by Pat Robertson.

In 2006, former Amway President Dick DeVos ran for governor of Michigan, as a Republican against Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. DeVos, soundly defeated by 56 to 42 percent of the popular vote, recently announced that he would not run again in 2010. “Although Bernard Madoff allegedly swindled 50 billion dollars from about 8,000 victims, he seems to be an amateur in comparison to Amway,” Eric Scheibeler noted.

“Amway has brought in far in excess of that amount from tens of millions of consumers who invested in ‘their own Amway business’ and it seems near all did so and continue to do so at a loss. The difference is that the Madoff pipeline is shut down, while you may be recruited to an Amway meeting tomorrow.”

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.