Free Republic

In addition to major telecommunications firms aiming to influence the public debate on net neutrality, there’s the Ford Foundation, the second-largest private foundation in the world. “If you are a foundation for justice in the world, and you don’t understand that the Internet is going to be a major battleground in this century, and you’re not engaged in that fight and supporting people who are concerned about access and security, you’re going to be left out of one of the most important justice issues of the day,” Foundation President Darren Walker told the Council on Foreign Relations this summer. “And...

Media Matters employees are furious that their bosses are trying to keep them from unionizing. A union-organizing committee at the liberal group released a statement Monday slamming their employers for “the unexpected and unexplained path our leadership has taken in response to our efforts to unionize,” adding that “the actions of Media Matters executives have placed employees in the impossible position of continuing to produce content espousing pro-labor values for an employer who is challenging our right to unionize.”

Now that Byron Williams has been convicted of attempting to murder four California Highway Patrol officers during a July 2010 shootout on a freeway in Oakland, it’s time to talk about Glenn Beck. No, Beck wasn’t charged with the shooting, nor — as he told his audience shortly after the incident – did he encourage it. But Beck had been regularly denouncing the Tides Foundation, a low-profile, liberal San Francisco nonprofit, for months before the 45-year-old Williams set forth from his home in Tuolumne County in his mother’s pickup truck, with a supply of guns and a suit of body...

George Soros Funding Anti-Israel Evangelical Group January 26, 2014 by Daniel Greenfield Demographics is the enemy of the left. And the left fights it with aggressive immigration and aggressive reeducation. When they are faced with traditionalist religious movements that create their own educational systems or student groups, they resort to infiltrating them. And so Evangelical Christians are targeted with entities like Telos and Orthodox Groups with entities like Avi Weiss’ Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. The endgame is leftist steering and infiltration. George Soros, that old collaborator who stated that he never had as much fun as in his Nazi days, has...

The other day I saw “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” which I thoroughly enjoyed. In it, the wizard Gandalf laments the growth of the “Power of the Shadow” and how the forces of good had been blind to its resurgence. That same week, Organizing for Action (President Obama’s political army) tweeted “On one side: Shadowy groups spending millions to obscure the facts.” I realized there was a connection between the two. OFA is right, the power of shadowy groups grows, and dark money spreads across our body politic. Yet many have been blind to the destructive power these groups...

Yesterday in this space, the focus was on the latest wrinkle in the Left's developing strategy for dealing with dissent. It began with using the IRS regulatory power to suppress conservative, Tea Party and evangelical dissenters. The new wrinkle is expanding the tax agency's activity to impose new restrictions on permissible activities of 501(C)(4) nonprofit advocacy groups and to require reporting the names of donors and the amounts they contributed. The avowed purpose of these initiatives is to put an end to what is known throughout the politically correct precincts of the mainstream media as “dark money.”Dark money is funding...

For more than a decade, there has been a complex international effort to stymie the oil industry in Canada. It’s called the Tar Sands Campaign and the main sources of funding for this campaign are the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Sea Change Foundation, the Tides Foundation and other charitable foundations, most of which are based in California. By my calculations, these foundations have provided at least $75-million for campaigns and land use planning initiatives that thwart the development and export of Canadian oil. Until now, little information has been available about...

A founding member of the Ready for Hillary PAC’s Finance Council is a member of George Soros’ progressive donor network, The Democracy Alliance, and has links to controversial progressive organizations Media Matters for America and the Tides Foundation. San Francisco environmentalist Susie Tompkins Buell is one of the key founding members of the Finance Council for Ready for Hillary, a super PAC that hopes to build a strong coalition of donors and online supporters in preparation for Hillary Clinton’s expected 2016 presidential campaign. …Buell, a co-founder of the Esprit clothing line, is a member of the Democracy Alliance, a secretive...

Watchdog.org reported: Thanks to your generous support, the New York City-based People’s Rights Fund has been able publicize the great work of Karl Marx and dictators Kim Jong-Il, Hugo Chavez and Saddam Hussein. Don’t remember writing that check? If you paid federal taxes after 1997, some of your money went to Tides, a San Francisco-based clearinghouse that collects and distributes about $251 million every year to hundreds of leftwing organizations. Much of the money flowing into Tides comes from wealthy benefactors who use Tides as a clearinghouse — a way to help finance left-liberal organizations without leaving any fingerprints. But...

If you head down the beach this week, or wander along the edges of San Francisco Bay, you may just be witnessing California's future. The ocean is getting closer. --snip-- The gravitational tug of the moon and sun, not climate change, is responsible for the extreme tides. But volunteers with cameras across the state are using the event to document what California could look like in the coming decades as the warming earth continues to raise sea levels.

This new video shows exactly how the Moon will look to us on Earth during the entire year of 2013. While the Moon always keeps the same face to us, it’s not exactly the same face. Because of the tilt in its axis and shape of its orbit, we see the Moon from slightly different angles over the course of a month, and the year. Normally, we don’t see how the Moon “wobbles” in its orbit or as it moves closer and farther away from Earth. But seeing the entire year compressed down to 5 minutes, we can see the...

A few short years after his release from federal prison a convicted terrorist bomber who has been embraced by the activist Left got a grant from the George Soros-funded Tides Foundation. "Speedway Bomber" Brett Kimberlin (see mugshot above) is a director and founder of the Justice Through Music Project, a seven year old Bethesda, Maryland-based 501c3 nonprofit entity. (See its latest IRS Form 990 [tax return] here.) Kimberlin, as blogger Liberty Chick previously reported, spent nearly 17 years in prison after being convicted of launching a week-long bombing spree that terrorized the residents of Speedway, Indiana in the late 1970's....

Three Minnesota environmental non-profit advocacy groups have received nearly half a million dollars in out-of-state foundation funding to oppose the Keystone oil pipeline project, according to a Freedom Foundation of Minnesota analysis. The California funding to state groups comes as a surprise, since Keystone’s proposed route does not include Minnesota....The Tides Foundation, based in San Francisco, has distributed nine grants totaling $439,500 to three Minnesota non-profits through 2010, according to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and grant disclosures listed online. No records were immediately available for 2011, when the campaign targeting the pipeline picked up momentum. Five grants totaling $269,500 were...

Peter Lewis, one of the Democracy Alliance’s founding billionaires, has dropped out of the influential liberal donor network... Lewis, the eccentric and reclusive founder of the insurer Progressive Corp., is one of the biggest donors in Democratic and liberal politics. He invested $25 million in the failed effort to oust President George W. Bush in 2004, making him one of the biggest donors in American political history. He coordinated his giving that year with billionaire George Soros, who gave $50 million.

Although a collision with a vast tower of ice ultimately brought the passenger liner to its sticky end, it was a freak lunar event three months earlier that put the obstacle in its path, a new study claims. An incredibly rare combination of astronomical factors including the closest approach of the moon to Earth in 1,400 years caused an unusually high tide in January 1912, researchers found. This once-in-a-lifetime swell would have swept a vast field of icebergs from their normal resting place off the coast of Canada and caused them to drift further south. It would have taken them...

George Soros has donated more than $8 billion globally to his Open Society Foundations. Couple that with decades of investing around the world and it would be easy to assume Soros in a figure of global popularity. Only he isn’t. He’s almost the polar opposite. Soros made headlines recently warning of increased economic problems, the growth of Occupy Wall Street and government repression what he characterized as “strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order.” In short, the kind of chaos helped foment in the old Soviet Union and elsewhere.In his book “Open Society,” Soros credits his foundation with “mobilizing civil...

The actual title is: Now Media Matters is tied to MoveOn, ACORN. See who is one of the biggest donors to anti-Fox News activist group It's too long to fit in the space for the title. One of the single largest donors to the embattled Media Matters for America is a controversial far-left clearinghouse that funds groups like MoveOn.org, ACORN and a litany of antiwar organizations, KleinOnline has learned. The organization in question, the Tides Foundation, is funded in part by billionaire George Soros, himself a prominent Media Matters donor. Tides functions as a money tunnel where major leftist donors...

Whenever Barack Obama makes a key decision, it always seems to benefit special supporters. 80% of the money Obama threw away on "green energy" programs went to his big donors. It's become painfully evident that crony capitalism has its fingerprints all over other Barack Obama decisions. Last year Barack Obama softened up Warren Buffett by awarding Buffett the Medal of Freedom, which Obama felt was appropriate for Buffett having accumulated more than $40 billion in personal wealth. In return, Buffett has become a cheerleader for Obama, voicing his support of Obama's Buffett rule. WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday will...

Greens say President Obama has no choice but to kill Keystone XL pipelineBy Andrew Restuccia - 12/28/11 12:20 PM ET Republicans who lobbied aggressively for a measure to force President Obama to make a speedy decision on the Keystone XL pipeline have ensured the project’s demise, environmental groups say. The activists said Obama will be forced to reject the pipeline — which would carry oil sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast — under a measure in the two-month payroll tax cut extension that requires the administration to make a decision on the project within 60...

Left-wing financier George Soros is at it again. While he may claim he’s not behind the Occupy Wall Street protests, funding from his foundations says otherwise. Soros threw his support behind the movement at a United Nations panel on Oct. 3, “I can sympathize with their grievances.” But he does more than just sympathize, his foundations funded groups that back the protests and steer their “progressive” message..... it is hard to ignore the concerted effort by liberal groups, unions, and other Soros-funded entities that prop-up and fuel the Occupy movement. An echo-chamber of left-wing blogs and news sites that receive...