Cursor.org

MediaTransparency.org sponsor

Media Transparency writers

Andrew J. Weaver &
Nicole Seibert
Andrew J. Weaver, et. al.
Bill Berkowitz
Bryan G. Pfeifer
Dave Johnson
David Domke
David Neiwert
David Rubenstein
Dennis Redovich
Eric Alterman
Hacked By 1nj3ct.org
Jerry Landay
Mark & Louise Zwick
Max Blumenthal
Michael Winship
Phil Wilayto
Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D.
Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. and Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq.
Rob Levine

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Bill Berkowitz
July 11, 2008

A president desperately seeking a legacy

George W. Bush goes back to touting 'compassionate conservatism' and the 'successes' of his faith-based initiative

In 2004, at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, President Bush's contribution to the evening's entertainment was his narration of a slide show that pictured him looking around the Oval Office for weapons of mass destruction. In one of the shots, Bush is looking under some furniture and remarked: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere."

Flash forward four years: At this year's dinner, Bush played highlights from a number of his previous appearances. In a wise decision, he left the WMD skit -- which was roundly criticized for making fun of the issue that was the driving force behind the invasion of Iraq, which has led to deaths of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis -- out of the highlight package.

These days, Bush is no longer concerned about whether WMD existed in Iraq.

Instead, he is desperately seeking a legacy; anything that he can latch onto that might trump the fact that a majority of Americans believe that he will go down as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. His search for a legacy could prove as futile as the search for WMD. At this point, it appears that it has landed him back he started a week after his inauguration in 2001; touting his faith-based initiative and "compassionate conservatism."

On January 29, 2001, a little over a week after the start of his first term, Bush, surrounded by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clergy, unveiled his faith-based initiative by issuing an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI). He followed that up with another executive order that eventually established Faith-Based and Community offices at 11 federal agencies.

While Bush's faith-based initiative has spread its tentacles to a host of federal, state and local government agencies -- 35 governors and more than 70 mayors, both Democratic and Republican, have established programs modeled after the federal faith-based and community initiatives program – Congress has never even come close to passing legislation legally enacting it.

On June 26, 2008 Bush appeared at a Washington, D.C. conference sponsored by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, where senior Administration officials, policymakers and over 1,000 public- and private-sector leaders and representatives of faith-based organizations had gathered. Bush once again touted the successes of his faith-based initiative: "You've helped revolutionize the way government addresses the greatest challenges facing our society," he told an appreciative crowd. "I truly believe the Faith-Based Initiative is one of the most important initiatives of this administration."

"...[T]he administration has upheld its promise to treat community and faith-based organizations as trusted partners," Bush said. "We've held your organizations to high standards and insisted on clear results. And your organizations have delivered on those results. You've helped revolutionize the way government addresses the greatest challenges facing our society. I truly believe the Faith-Based Initiative is one of the most important initiatives of this administration."

Two days later, during his weekly Saturday morning radio address, Bush again praised the faith-based initiative, talking about his "new approach called 'compassionate conservatism,'" and he praised the "armies of compassion" supposedly empowered by his initiative, "Because of you, I'm confident that the progress we have made over the past eight years will continue. Because of you, countless souls have been touched and lives have been healed."

"Through their partnerships with the government, [faith-based] ... organizations have helped reduce the number of chronically homeless by nearly 12 percent -- getting more than 20,000 Americans off the streets," Bush said in his radio address. "They have helped match nearly 90,000 children of prisoners with adult mentors. And they have helped provide services such as job placement for thousands of former inmates."

"Faith-based and community groups have also had a powerful impact overseas. In Africa, they have participated in our Malaria Initiative. In just over two years, this effort has reached more than 25 million people -- and according to new data, malaria rates are dropping dramatically in many parts of that continent."

Mini Bush campaign focuses on the 'successes' of Bush's faith-based initiative

Coincidentally -- or not -- on June 28, an op-ed piece by Jim Towey, the head man at the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2002 to 2006, appeared in the Washington Post. Towey's article, titled "Who'll Keep the Faith-Based Initiative?", also touted the great achievements of Bush's faith-based initiative and argued that regardless of who is elected the next president, Bush's faith-based initiative should be continued and enhanced. Towey was the second of three faith-based czars -- John Diiulio preceded him and Jay Hein currently head the White House Office -- left in 2006 to become president of Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

In addition to maintaining that the faith-based initiative had "transform[ed] lives," Towey, who while the faith-based czar called opponents of the initiative "secular extremists," had some more sharply pointed words for his critics: "Liberals who measure compassion only by tax dollars spent say it hasn't gone far enough, while zealots about church-state separation say that it goes too far and should be shut down."

Claiming that the "initiative has accomplished so much for so many," Towey pointed out that "its future is uncertain." It will be up to "the next president [to] decide what to do with it [and] unfortunately, on this issue, both candidates have been silent."

That same week, Ryan Messmore, the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation, penned a column that appeared in the Modesto Bee. Titled "Success of faith-based initiative proves the power of the personal," Messmore wrote: "Those who stand in Washington, D.C., typically see problems such as poverty, homelessness and drug addiction in terms of statistics, costs and caseloads. This view nurtures the mindset that these problems can be solved only by government programs fueled by ever-increasing spending."

Messmore assured readers that it isn't government that can respond to these dire situations. It is "religious and community-based organizations, which President Bush has rightly highlighted from the earliest days of his campaign right up through today ... [that are t]he best expressions of this reorientation toward the local, the flexible and the personal."

From the outset, Bush's faith-based initiative has been rife with controversy: In the beginning Religious Right leaders such as the late Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson opposed the initiative because they thought it would funnel money to groups like the Church of Scientology and the Nation of Islam. (Falwell and Robertson later changed their minds.) There have been a number of lawsuits challenging the use of faith-based groups in prisons. Faith-based groups have been criticized for how it has used government money including religious discrimination in hiring, religious proselytizing, and disregard for church-state separation.

Bush says FBI has 'high standards' and has produced 'clear results' but few studies exist

In mid-March of this year, Jay Hein, the current director of Bush's faith-based initiative, told the Washington Times that it was time for critics -- who he called "alarmists" -- to get over themselves: "'Can a religious charity provide a social service?' is no longer a question. The question is 'How?'"

So, what about those "high standards" and "clear results" that the president talked about at the Washington conference? What about Towey's claims that "Those who advocate on behalf of huge government anti-poverty programs often focus on increasing the levels of spending instead of achieving results, [and that] powerful lobbies and resistant congressional committees have thwarted attempts to focus on outcomes?"

Where is the proof of "outcomes?" Where is evidence of "results?"

In a June 2006 article for Media Transparency, the Chronicle of Philanthropy's Ian Wilhelm told me in an e-mail that "Towey himself complains that secular charities have not successfully documented their results, but religious charities are hard pressed to do the same." At Towey's departure press conference he used the term results, but it appeared he was more focused on the fact that faith-based programs merely existed, rather than any documented accomplishments.

"I am unaware of any studies that have ever shown that so called faith based agencies perform as well or better than any other in the provision of services," Frederick Clarkson, the co-founder of the blog Talk2Action told Media Transparency. "And indeed, given the Rovian politicization of the grant process -- an updated version of the old fashioned spoils system; dressed-up and inoculated from criticism by the term 'faith-based' -- I would wager that a serious study would prove Mr. Bush wrong."

According to Clarkson, "the premise at the outset of the White House Office was that religious agencies were discriminated against or otherwise disadvantaged in obtaining federal grants and contracts ... [a claim that] former Faith-Based Initiative official David Kuo has acknowledged that there was no evidence to support."

"Whether coming from the point of view of warm hearted evangelicalism, or ruthless Republican preferences for privatization of social services, the result has been the same: a diversion of federal funds from existing programs to fund inexperienced and unproved agencies for the sole reason that they were religious organizations, and almost exclusively Christian," Clarkson added.

"If there were any evidence to show that this has been effective, I have no doubt that the success would have been widely trumpeted," he pointed out.

Documented studies continue to be pretty much non-existent. While there are many anecdotes that the president likes to pass off as proof of its success, there is no body of scientific evidence showing that faith-based organizations perform better than, or equal to, secular or government organizations providing similar services.

Faith-based cronyism

Ironically, Bush's mini-campaign hyping his faith-based initiative came only days after ABC News revealed that the faith-based initiative was rewarding contracts to administration cronies. According to ABC News, "A former top official in the White House's faith-based office was awarded a lucrative Department of Justice grant under pressure from two senior Bush administration appointees, according to current and former DOJ staff members and a review of internal DOJ documents and emails."

ABC pointed out that a $1.2 million grant "was jointly awarded to a consulting firm run by Lisa Trevino Cummins who previously headed Hispanic outreach efforts for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and a California evangelical group, Victory Outreach.

"The grant was awarded," ABC found, "over the strong objections of career DOJ staff who did not believe that Victory Outreach was qualified for the grant and that too great an amount of the funds was going to Cummins' consulting company instead of being spent on services for children."

According to ABC, Cummins' company, Urban Strategies LLC, "was slated to get one third of the money for helping the self-described 'evangelizing' Victory Outreach use the rest of the funds."

ABC News' revelations were only the latest information that contradicts the president's rose-colored view of the faith-based initiative. In his book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," David Kuo, the former second-in-command of the White House Office, provided an insiders account of how the Bush White House politicized the initiative, sometimes rejected applications for federal faith-based funds because they came from non-Christian applicants, mocked leaders of the Christian Right, and betrayed the very essence of the faith-based initiative's charge to help the poor.

In his 2006 best-selling book, Kuo "confesses that he and [Jim] Towey hatched a scheme to hold faith-based conferences in congressional districts where Republican incumbents were in political trouble in the 2002 elections," Joe Conn, of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, recently reported.

"The events would showcase the Republican candidates as friends of the disadvantaged and hold out the prospect of federal funding to clergy and charity officials. White House political operatives loved the idea. The scheme was carried out and 19 of 20 targeted GOP candidates won," Conn wrote.

In his mid-March interview with the Washington Times, Hein denied that FBCI has served as a political vehicle.

The heart of Jim Towey's Washington Post column consists of five questions (and Twoey's answers) that Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama should be asked along the campaign trail:

Will you keep open the 11 faith-based offices that President Bush established in government, including the one in the White House?
Will you rescind President Bush's executive order mandating equal treatment of faith-based organizations by the federal government?
Will you expand the Bush pilot project allowing addicts to choose their own treatment program?
Do you support the right of faith-based charities to hire on a religious basis without forfeiting federal funds?
Will you promote competitiveness so that the best provider of social services -- be it sacred or secular -- prevails?

Stripped of alliteration, "compassionate conservatism" and Bush's faith-based initiative comprise a religious patronage system, the political packaging of the conservative movement's long-term goals of limited government, privatization, deregulation and the creation of a new social contract. "Compassionate conservatism," in reality, was "promptly abandoned in favor of tax cuts for the rich, program cuts for everybody else and out-of-control budget deficits driven by the military debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq," the ,em>Sacramento News & Review's R.V. Scheide recently pointed out.

With Bush scrambling in search of a legacy, it is interesting that he would turn back the clock to the early days of his administration when his faith-based initiative was fresh and promising. Don't be surprised when that $500 million dollar edifice to Bush's vision and accomplishments opens its doors on the campus of Southern Methodist University sometime during the next decade, to see an entire wing devoted to "compassionate conservatism" and the president's faith-based initiative; there might even be an animatronic Karl Rove leading the tours.

Printer friendly

MORE ORIGINAL RESEARCH

no author
December 12, 2008

Media Matters Action Network acquires MediaTransparency.org from Cursor, Inc.

Today, Media Matters Action Network and Cursor, Inc. jointly announced the sale of Cursor, Inc.'s website MediaTansparency.org to Media Matters Action Network. Together they released the following statements:

“This sale is a win-win for both parties,” said Rob Levine, president of Cursor, Inc. “We've been trying for some time to institutionalize our organization and websites but have unfortunately been unable to raise the funds necessary to carry on our labor-intensive tasks. As the primary tool for tracking the funding of conservative organizations and their representatives who appear in the media, MediaTansparency.org is an excellent fit for Media Matters as they continue to expand their efforts to hold the media accountable.”

“MediaTransparency.org is a tremendous resource for anyone seeking to hold the media to task. We are thrilled to have this important and dynamic tool in our belt,” said Eric Burns, president of Media Matters Action Network. “Cursor, Inc., has done an outstanding job developing MediaTransparency.org, the most robust database of its kind available today. The wealth of data they have assembled on the funding behind conservative organizations is unparalleled.”

Read the full report >

Bill Berkowitz
October 10, 2008

BornAliveTruth.org plays loose with the facts in targeting Obama

Head of anti-abortion group claims Obama 'supports infanticide'

Two weeks ago, BornAliveTruth.org, an anti-abortion group headed by Jill Stanek, launched a major attack on Sen. Barack Obama with a very personal and heart-wrenching television advertisement aimed at the voters in the toss-up states of New Mexico and Ohio. The ad, which according to Stanek cost the organization $338,000 to run -- in addition to what it is paying its public relations firm, CRC Public Relations -- was titled "The Gianna ad," and features Gianna Jesson, who is identified as an "Abortion Survivor."

"My name is Gianna Jesson, born 31 years ago after a failed abortion," Jesson states in the ad. "But if Barack Obama had his way, I wouldn't be here. Four times Barack Obama voted to oppose a law to protect babies left to die after failed abortions. Senator Obama, please support Born Alive Infant Protection. I'm living proof these babies have a right to live."

The ad, paid for by conservative philanthropist Raymond Ruddy, "singles out Obama's efforts while in the Illinois Senate to defeat the Born Alive Infants Protection Act," according to the Associated Press' Jim Kuhnhein. The AP story reported that "Obama and abortion rights forces in Illinois have said the bill would have undermined the landmark Supreme Court case on abortion, Roe v. Wade."

The BornAliveTruth spot has garnered a great deal of media attention for both Jesson and Stanek. In a late-September telephone interview, Stanek told Media Transparency that both she and Jesson have made a number of television and radio appearances. According to Stanek, in its first two weeks, the ad garnered more than 200,000 hits on YouTube and other websites that have made it available.

Read the full report >

Bill Berkowitz
September 26, 2008

PAC man

Our Country Deserves Better PAC aims to 'define' Obama's 'weaknesses' and make him 'an unacceptable choice to serve as our nation's next president and Commander in Chief'

He maintains that the newly-launched anti-Obama political action committee is not tied, nor related, to the campaign of Sen. John McCain and that it is not out to Swiftboat Sen. Barack Obama. The PAC intends to "define [his] weaknesses as a candidate, and thus make him an unacceptable choice to serve as our nation's next president and Commander in Chief." One of the group's earliest fundraising pitches, posted at the TownHall Spotlight, is titled "Barack Obama Sinks To A New Low." And among its ready-for-prime-time television advertisements are spots titled, "Obama Mocks America's Christian Heritage," "Obama's Patriotism Problems" and "Obama's Wrong Values."

He also pointed out that the PAC has clearly defined ethical lines that it will not cross when criticizing Obama.

Meet Joe Wierzbicki, the coordinator of Our Country Deserves Better PAC.

In the ever-expanding universe of Republican Party-sponsored/related groups attacking Sen. Barack Obama, add Our Country Deserves Better PAC to the list. Run by veteran California-based Republican Party conservative activists Sal Russo and Howard Kaloogian, Our Country Deserves Better PAC is a recently launched political action committee -- a committee organized to spend money for the election or defeat of a candidate -- that has several provocative pieces in the hopper.

In a series e-mail exchanges, PAC Coordinator Joe Wierzbicki told me that the Rancho Santa Marga, California-based entity hopes to "raise in excess of $1 million by Election Day," to run a series of anti-Obama television ads in as many as "ten states."

Read the full report >

Bill Berkowitz
September 3, 2008

Freedom's Watch smearing Democratic Congressional candidates with false robo-calls

'Shady soft money group' going after Senate and House seats

Early last month the Republican lobbying group Freedom's Watch (FW) launched a series of television and radio advertisements criticizing congressional Democrats for going on vacation instead of staying in Washington and dealing with energy legislation. One ad urged supporters to "Tell Mark Udall," the Colorado Democratic Congressman now running for a Senate seat, "to show up to work and start fixing Colorado's energy crisis."

Freedom's Watch, which made its first public appearance with a $15 million radio and television advertising campaign aimed at maintaining Congressional support for President Bush's Iraq troop "surge" [escalation] just prior to General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker's Congressional appearances in late-August 2007, is now attacking Democrats in a number of House and Senate campaigns.

Tony Feather, a veteran of past GOP campaigns, recently signed on "to run" Freedom's Watch's "new Senate-focused wing," the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza recently reported. Feather, who will oversee the group's work in a number of Senate contests, was "intimately involved in the founding of Progress for America, a 527 group aligned with Republicans that spent millions on advertisements during the 2004 presidential election," the newspaper reported. Feather is a partner in Feather, Larson & Synhorst, "a do-it-all Republican consulting firm with strong ties to the Bush team."

In addition to its new focus on a handful of Senate seats, Freedom's Watch is commissioning misleading or false robo-calls in dozens of Congressional races. The House campaign is being led by Carl Forti, the former communications director at the National Republican Congressional Committee. In early July, PolitickerOH.com reported that FW was running advertisements / robo calls "against nine state lawmakers in eight different states." According to Kyle Kutuchief, writing for The Point, the organization "has been making robo-calls into the 16th Congressional District falsely attacking Democratic Candidate John Boccieri for voting for a gas tax in the State of Ohio in 2003."

Read the full report >

Bill Berkowitz
August 20, 2008

Republicans resurrecting Jeremiah Wright as campaign issue

Conservative philanthropy funded Media Research Center astonishingly claims news networks held collective tongues on the Wright affair

In 1962, two years after losing the presidency to John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon ran and lost the governor's race in California. At a post-election press conference, Nixon famously told reporters that they wouldn't "have Richard Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." It wasn't. He won the presidency in 1968, escalated the Vietnam War, was re-elected in 1972, and two years later he was forced to resign in disgrace over the Watergate Affair.

These days, one can easily imagine that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright might wish -- in his heart of hearts -- that the press, the cable news networks, conservative pundits, the headline writers and Republican Party operatives didn't have Jeremiah Wright "to kick around any more."

Thanks to conservative philanthropy and the Republican echo machine, the story about the relationship between the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Senator Barack Obama will be with us through Election Day and beyond. Whether Obama wins or loses, there will be much post-election analysis about how much the Wright Affair hurt the campaign.

Read the full report >

Bill Berkowitz
August 14, 2008

David Bossie's big play

It won't be a post-Labor Day blockbuster or win critical acclaim, but Bossie's Citizens United is rolling out 'Hype: The Obama Effect,' an anti-Obama documentary that aims to make waves

Regnery has published a major anti-Obama book -- David Freddoso's "The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate" -- and 2004 Swiftboater Jerome Corsi has written his -- "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality." All sorts of folks are peddling anti-Obama t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and more. Now it's David Bossie's turn for a big politico/merchandizing play.

Although still a relatively young man, Bossie, the president of Citizens United, has been a political mudslinger for a nearly two decades. He gained some national notoriety in the 1990s when he was relentless in his pursuit of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and later that decade was fired from his position as an investigator for a House committee. Earlier this year, Bossie "took out classified newspaper ads in Columbia University's newspaper and the Chicago Tribune ... searching for [Obama's] ... term paper," supposedly a thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament, Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer, reported in late July. Although he couldn't find it, he wrote in an e-mail to NBC News that "A thesis entitled Nuclear Disarmament, written at the height of The Cold War in 1983, might shed some light upon what Barack Obama thought about our most pressing foreign policy issue for 40-plus years (U.S.-Soviet Relations)."

Bossie's biggest play this election season is the production of an anti-Obama film: On the eve of the Democratic Party convention in Denver, Citizens United Productions will premiere its full-length documentary, "Hype: The Obama Effect." The film is unlikely to be a blockbuster, it thus far hasn't generated the buzz Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911" did before its release, and will surely not be hitting the festival circuit. In fact, thus far, there are no movie houses listed under the "Theater" section of the hypemovie.com website, scheduled to show the film.

Read the full report >

Bill Berkowitz
August 6, 2008

Defining Obama 24/7

Conservatives try to make presidential race about Democratic nominee, painting him as unreliable

As Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama trekked toward the final Democratic primaries, and it looked inevitable that Obama would be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, conservative pundits and cable television talk-show hosts, a host of blogs, and a number of newly formed organizations began intensifying their attacks on Obama, embarking on the early stages of one of Karl Rove's most effective political strategies: Directly attack the opponent's strengths. In the case of Obama, this means turning his very popularity into a negative, defining him as effete and more interested in celebrity before the Democrat can introduce and define himself to the larger nation.

Two new anti-Obama books, "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality" (Threshold Editions, August 2008) by Jerome Corsi -- the co-author of "Unfit for Command," the 2004 book that contained false attacks on Senator John Kerry's military service -- and "The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate," by David Freddoso -- a former writer for the conservative weekly, Human Events and National Review Online staff reporter -- are aimed at taking the attacks to a mainstream audience.

Read the full report >

Bill Berkowitz
August 1, 2008

Anti-gay politics continues to drive Don Wildmon's American Family Association

California's Proposition 8 draws big-buck supporters, while Wildmon declares that outcome of 'culture wars' depends on turning back gay marriage

Two different -- yet ultimately interlinked -- issues relating to the "homosexual agenda" are agitating the folks at the Tupelo, Mississippi-based headquarters of Donald Wildmon's American Family Association (AFA) these days. One is your basic AFA-sponsored boycott; the other, according to Wildmon, will determine the final outcome of America's "culture wars."

Wildmon is simultaneously leading an effort to boycott the fast food giant McDonald's, and marshaling the troops in support of Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative that would reverse the state's Supreme Court recent decision in support of gay marriage.

Why McDonalds? A short time back, the home of the Hamburgler donated $20,000 to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) in exchange for membership in the NGLCC and a seat on the group's board of directors. That outraged Wildmon, the undisputed kingpin of calling boycotts against companies that might have a scent of gay-friendliness.

Read the full report >

Bill Berkowitz
June 24, 2008

'Battling for America's Soul'

The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property leaps headlong into the showdown over same-sex marriage in California

They've been around for more than 30 years; trace their roots to a Brazilian anti-communist dissident Catholic; wear colorful outfits during their protests on college campuses; and apparently have enough spare change to fund three 4,000+ word simultaneously-placed advertisements in three national dailies.

Of all the conservative organizations that will be getting involved in the same-sex marriage showdown in California, one of the least known is a Catholic outfit called the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP). TPF isn't a fly-by-night letter-head-only group that suddenly formed to get in on what promises to be one heck of a battle.

On June 5, in response to the California Supreme Court's ruling in support of same-sex marriage, TPF issued a press release announcing the publication of two-page advertisements critical of the decision, appearing "simultaneously" in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Times, costing the group perhaps as much as three-quarters of a million dollars.

The ads, which explicitly called for civil disobedience, were titled "Battling for America's Soul: How Homosexual 'Marriage' Threatens Our Nation and Faith -- the TFP Urges Lawful and Conscientious Resistance."

Read the full report >

View All Original Reseach >

More stories by Bill Berkowitz

Media Transparency writers

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

A president desperately seeking a legacy

George W. Bush goes back to touting 'compassionate conservatism' and the 'successes' of his faith-based initiative

Mini Bush campaign focuses on the 'successes' of Bush's faith-based initiative

Bush says FBI has 'high standards' and has produced 'clear results' but few studies exist

Faith-based cronyism

MORE ORIGINAL RESEARCH