Freedom's Watch May Spend Up To $250 Million In 2008 Election

[Purveyor]

Group founded to support Bush's surge in Iraq and encourage military action against Iran gearing up for November

In early December, Freedom's Watch, the well-funded conservative lobbying group founded by former White House staffers and extremely wealthy longtime Republican donors, fired its first shot in Election 2008. Founded last year, and making its public debut with a $15 million dollar advertising campaign in support of Bush's "surge" in mid-August, the group recently funded a series of ads in a northern Ohio special congressional election.

The advertisements, called "aggressively negative" by the Washington Post, branded the Democratic Party candidate as being soft on illegal immigration. According to the Washington Post, "Behind a blood-red foreground, the group's ad showed Latinos hurrying under fences and being frisked by police as a narrator accused Democratic candidate Robin Weirauch and 'liberals in Congress' of supporting free health care for illegal immigrants."

Republican Robert Latta won the House seat representing the district around Bowling Green, Ohio.

Freedom's Watch (website) was founded by Bradley Blakeman, the organization's president and a former assistant to President George W. Bush and Presidential Appointee to the US Holocaust Museum, Mel Sembler, a millionaire former Bush ambassador to Italy, and Ari Fleischer, a former Bush press secretary. Much of its financial support so far has come from Sembler and billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino executive who is one of the richest people in the world.

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"While initial reports suggested a budget of $200 million, people who have talked to the group in recent weeks say the figure is closer to $250 million, more than double the amount spent by the largest independent liberal groups in the 2004 election cycle," the Washington Post reported. "There is a sense among those contributing to Freedom's Watch that MoveOn powerfully filled a void in the left, that rallied support in the left, that raised money from the left, that mobilized the left," Fleischer told the Post.

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http://www.mediatransparency.org:80/story.php?storyID=227

[YOY]

1. Perhaps the most poorly misnamed organization on the planet

n/t

[MidwestTransplant]

2. Let's see who gives money to Moveon? We do. Who funds MAF? Self interested billionaires

who want to repeal the estate tax.

[fascisthunter]

3. More Like Freedom's Enemy

more Frank Luntz Orwellian naming by conservative cowards....