( - promoted by phillip anderson)
There have been many insightful diaries, on the front page and elsewhere, about the too-close-for-comfort lead that Scott Murphy has over Jim Tedisco in Tuesday's nationally significant 20th Congressional District special election, and what that means.
So, in looking for a new angle, I clicked on Planet Albany, the blog of longtime, though evidently laid off last November, Schenectady Gazette reporter Bob Conner, who is a Tedisco supporter.
And I found a story that flew under the local media and national blog radar -- 50 or so home-schooled Christianists, most too young to vote and many from out of state, worked tirelessly for Tedisco over the last four days.
Presumably because their parents believe Tedisco shares their belief in a Christian nation whose laws and public policies should be based on the inerrancy of every word in the Christian Bible.
Since this isn't Alabama, that bit wasn't mentioned at all in Tedisco's campaign.
Who those Tedisco kids at the doors were, below. |
| Back on March 15, I wrote a diary about Conner's critical take on Tedisco's negative campaign, and kept checking in, since Conner was pretty close to Tedisco and reported on many Tedisco events.
So, Conner was naturally at Tedisco's Election Night party, and he ran into a student from Patrick Henry College who bragged about how much he and his kids had helped Tedisco.
Conner writes:
According to Jason McGuire of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedom [the mini-Christianist lobby outfit in New York], "The ground game was phenomenal." I talked to one of McGuire's socially conservative allies, Willie Deutsch, a 19-year-old college student from Virginia who had been working with 50 home-schooled high school-age students from Generation Joshua. They had been hitting 4,000 homes a day since Saturday, mostly in Clifton Park, which is in Saratoga County, where Tedisco did best.
As Butch said to Sundance, I wondered, "Who are those guys?".
The Google had the answers.
Generation Joshua is part of the wingnut Christianist complex, organized by home-schooling evangelist/profiteer Michael Farris, that includes Patrick Henry College in Virginia and the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA).
Generation Joshua sponsors Student Action Teams, with children as young as 11, that do field work for Republican Christianist HSLDA-endorsed candidates like Tedisco.
Here's how they describe their "mission":
Student Action Teams (SATs) are groups of young people that volunteer to Get Out the Vote (GOTV) for a candidate endorsed by the HSLDA PAC and organized by Generation Joshua staff.
Action is our middle name. Since 2003, we have had Student Action Teams working actively to help strong pro-life, pro-family candidates. In 2006, the last big election year, we had over 1,000 participants in twelve states.
Here's some bits from the press release about their "huge success" in the 2008 election:
Generation Joshua Student Action Teams (SATs) were successful this election season. From October 31 through November 5, over 800 Generation Joshua members worked in 14 states across the United States, making contact with voters through phone banking and going door-to-door. Over half a million voters were contacted by Generation Joshua teens.
snip
Working on an SAT is the high point of the Generation Joshua program. Throughout the year Generation Joshua teens are encouraged to learn about their role in civil society and to participate in order to influence the culture.
Generation Joshua plans to hold SATs in coming years, including the 2010 midterm elections.
This year, Generation Joshua participated in seventeen congressional races for candidates that were endorsed by the HSLDA-PAC.
Some of the candidates that these little wingnuts had a "huge success" with last year included losers Bob Shaffer (CO-Senate), Marilyn Musgrave (CO-4), Jack Hoogendyk (MI-Senate), Tim Walberg (MI-7), Steve Pearce (NM-Senate), Andy Harris (MD-1), Steve Chabot (OH-1), etc.
Well more than half the candidates these brainwashed kids worked for lost, most by landslide proportions.
Their few winners included uber-kook Michele Bachmann (MN-6) and carpetbagging wingnut Tom McClintock, who barely beat our friend Charlie Brown in CA-4.
More from the Google, the kid Conner met at Tedisco's party, Willie Deutsch, is a Patrick Henry College student who has a blog titled VA Social Conservative.
Where he posted this about NY-20:
This week I am campaigning in New York 20 in the special election for Jim Tedisco. I am here with a team of over 40 Generation Joshua students, working on grassroots GOTV work helping win the election for the GOP. The race is very close, and it is all about turnout, however today we knocked on more doors than the campaign thought it would be possible for us to hit, and they are expanding their GOTV work. Between GenJ, Huck PAC, other people from around the state, and the hard work of local New Yorkers, I think we stand a very good chance of winning this race. If we can win we will show the country that the bailout, and President Obama are not universal favorites, and add one more seat to the House Republican Caucus. If for some reason we do lose, it will be because of the highly negative adds produced and aired by the NRCC.
Patrick Henry College is less than 10 years old, and has less than 300 students, most of them "graduates" of Christianist home schooling.
It's an overtly Republican place, which had placed a remarkable number of students as interns or graduates in the Bush administration and with Republicans in Congress.
This "college" also organizes children to canvass for simpatico wingnuts like Tedisco.
And one of its prominent students brags about it.
Unlike MD-1, for example, this is a close election, and these Christianist children from outside the district presumably had some GOTV effect on the result.
Scott Murphy needs help from us to pay for the necessary expenses of a recanvass/absentee verification operation.
Please do whatever you can here. |
