I received an interesting campaign mailer today, called the “California Public Safety Newsletter and Voter Guide”. It was interesting, in that it had some rather curious ballot initiative endorsements.
The curious initiative endorsements are:
- No on 30
- Yes on 31
- Yes on 32
These are all the opposite of how the public safety unions in California look at those ballot initiatives. The “Yes on 32” one is particularly strange, considering it’s supposedly from public safety employees.
There is a clue to who is really behind the mailer, in small print, where it says: “California Public Safety Voter Guide is a Special Project of the Policy Issues Institute”
Who are the “Policy Issues Institute”?
Well, they are a 501C4 “charity”. They also operate under the names:
Impeach Obama Campaign
PII
United States Investigative Unit
White House Watch, The
Who runs the “Policy Issues Institute”? A guy named Floyd Brown. Who is Floyd Brown? I was not familiar with the name, but the Wikipedia article has some interesting information on him. Some of his greatest “hits”:
Creating the “Willy Horton” ad
Co-founding “Citizens United”
pushed the bogus Whitewater “scandal”
a website called “ExposeObama.com”
At the bottom of the Wikipedia article, there are some amusing quotes about Brown:
USA Today: “[Brown has] established himself as one of the nation’s dirtiest political strategists”
George Stephanopoulos: “Floyd Brown is a slimy thug for hire.”
I think that last quote pretty much sums up this guy, and his “newsletter”.
[ cross-posted from Daily Kos ]