Monday, October 6, 2008

Obama Served on Anti-Second Amendment Foundation

Protein Wisdom has details from a David Hardy article on how Obama was part of the Joyce Foundation and their attempt to gut the second Amendment:

During Obama’s tenure, the Joyce Foundation board planned and implemented a program targeting the Supreme Court. The work began five years into Obama’s directorship, when the Foundation had experience in turning its millions into anti-gun “grassroots” organizations, but none at converting cash into legal scholarship.

The plan’s objective was bold: the judicial obliteration of the Second Amendment.

Joyce’s directors found a vulnerable point. When judges cannot rely upon past decisions, they sometimes turn to law review articles. Law reviews are impartial, and famed for meticulous cite-checking. They are also produced on a shoestring. Authors of articles receive no compensation; editors are law students who work for a tiny stipend.

In 1999, midway through Obama’s tenure, the Joyce board voted [.pdf available at link] to grant the Chicago-Kent Law Review $84,000, a staggering sum by law review standards. The Review promptly published an issue in which all articles attacked the individual right view of the Second Amendment.

The details of how scholarship was "bought" via payoffs for law review articles are appalling. If a drug company bought research like this for their drug study results, it would be a Federal offense; for a lawyer like Obama to tolerate this shows a willingness to bend ethics drastically for 'the cause'. The foundation did more:
The Joyce Foundation board (which still included Obama) responded by expanding its attack on the Second Amendment. Its next move came when Ohio State University announced it was establishing the “Second Amendment Research Center” as a thinktank headed by anti-individual-right historian Saul Cornell. Joyce put up no less than $400,000 to bankroll its creation. The grant was awarded at the board’s December 2002 meeting, Obama’s last function as a Joyce director.

Obama was involved in a wealthy foundation’s attempt to manipulate the Supreme Court, buy legal scholarship, and obliterate the individual right to arms. And now, the products of that foundation are engaging in ads for Obama, as noted by a comment at Protein Wisdom:

The American Hunters and Shooters Association, an astroturf PR effort funded by the Joyce Foundation as a faux alternative to the NRA, has been running saturation radio ads in SW Virginia trying to convince gun owners that Obama is no threat. Of course, they give no specifics on Obama’s views on the Second Amendment and rapidly devolve into a diatribe on economic policy. Yet somehow this is supposed to an independent ad, not coordinated with the Obama campaign.

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