OMB Watch has called the Administration's assault on liberal nonprofits a "death by a thousand cuts." The accompanying federal windfall for the Christian right could mark the rebirth of a movement by a thousand grants.
I haven't seen any diaries on this issue, but it deserves discussion. We need to work out ways to keep these liberal organizations alive until we become the majority again.
More below the fold
"The Bush administration came along just in time to save many of these pro-family organizations. Four more years of a Gore administration--of being on the outside--and I think a lot of them wouldn't have made it."
...When Bush political adviser Karl Rove was asked by The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann how he defined the Democratic base, Rove responded, "someone with a doctorate." And so, according to the ruthless logic of Rove's "strategery" shop, mainstream scientific, professional and policy organizations, whose constituencies tend to lean Democratic, have been removed from influential federal advisory positions and replaced by ideologues. The American Medical Association no longer advises US delegates to UN summits on children's issues; Concerned Women for America does instead. Experts from the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, no longer sit on the presidential AIDS advisory council; they have been replaced by a former beauty queen who lectures on abstinence and an antigay evangelical barnstormer from Turning Point ministries. Screening by the American Bar Association of judicial nominees has been replaced by advice from the far-right Federalist Society.
The Administration has used prosecutions, financial audits and obscenity investigations against organizations bucking its policies or protesting them too publicly. Greenpeace.... Labor unions.... After Planned Parenthood and two sex-education groups, SIECUS (the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States) and Advocates for Youth, launched a privately funded "No New Money" campaign to oppose on abstinence education, all three groups received multiple federal audits.
Not a quick read, but worthwhile.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=kaplan