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Sunday, March 09, 2003
Take the Jerry Bowyer challenge....
A few weeks ago I wrote about radio host Jerry Bowyer and his connection to lunatic right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife. MR bowyer took exception to what I wrote as seen by this email:
Subject: how could you possibly get it so wrong?
A simple Google search on the words “Bowyer” and “Scaife” would have led you to plenty of articles that would demonstrate that your ‘facts’ are way out of date. I am not the President of the Allegheny Institute – that info is three years out of date. I do not get any Scaife funding of any kind, and never will. In fact a little checking could have yielded the relevant information that no only am I not Dick Scaife’s “sock puppet” but Dick and I had rather public (therefore easily found by a conscientious fact checker) disagreement. Just for the record (although I doubt you will be interested in correcting the record): I disagree vehemently with what my party did in the 1990’s running over the cliff into crazy conspiracy theories about Clinton the mass-murderer, Clinton the drug runner, Clinton the Foster-cide, etc. I think Clinton’s blow-job in the white house was none of Ken Starr’s business, nor that of the US Congress and I rank Bill Clinton in the top quarter of US Presidents in the 20th Century. I have said these things hundreds of times publicly over the years. Fronting for Scaife? You oughta call that theory into my radio program sometime, you’d be laughed out of town by my liberal callers alone.
Regards,
Jerry
I went ahead and took the Bowyer challenge and here is what I found. First link in Google:
Scaife has been donating to big think thanks for four decades, but he recently launched a new kind of policy group in Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, which describes itself as "devoted exclusively to the study of local issues" in western Pennsylvania. In just five years it has become a forceful advocate for conservative alternatives to traditional city and county policies in areas ranging from education to trash removal and economic development.
The institute earned political influence by leading a campaign against a proposed half-penny increase in the sales tax to finance civic improvements, including new stadiums for the Steelers and Pirates. To the surprise of Pittsburgh's traditional ruling circles, voters defeated the tax in a November 1997 referendum. The losers blamed a public relations campaign orchestrated by Jerry Bowyer, president of the institute, which opposed the referendum as a fat cats' use of tax money for inappropriate purposes.
Bowyer has cast himself as an effective gadfly, appearing regularly on talk shows – including four he hosts himself – to promote his agenda of more privatization, more reliance on "faith-based social service organizations" to deliver help to the needy. He is now accepted as a civic leader in Pittsburgh. Just six years ago he was leading the National Reform Association, a branch of the Calvinist Reformed Presbyterian Church, crusading for creation of a "theocracy" in America – "Christocracy, the rule of Christ over the nation," he called it once.
...and Bowyer is correct. The article is dated May, 1999. So does this mean that Bowyer is no longer in the employ of R.M. Scaife? Could be. We have no proof that he is currently on the payroll....but as Peggy Noonan once, so memorably, said:
Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.
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