default – The Progressive Midwesterner

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I have made edits to the blog post and title to accurately reflect Nation Consulting founder Thad Nation’s use of a 501(c)(4) organization to give money to right-wing organizations and Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chairperson candidate Jason Rae’s employment by Nation Consulting.

I’ve found information that proves that Thad Nation, Wisconsin Democratic chairperson candidate Jason Rae’s boss at Nation Consulting, has provided money to at least seven right-wing organizations, including at least four that are funded either directly or indirectly by the Koch Brothers. Nation himself was listed in a 2012 IRS 990 filing as the principal officer of Coalition for the New Economy (CftNE), a 501(c)4 organization that opposes government-run broadband internet services in areas where private-sector firms currently provide broadband internet service. CftNE has also given money to at least several right-wing political groups that have actively opposed Democratic and liberal political candidates, have actively supported Republican and conservative political candidates, and/or have advocated for far-right policies that would have a negative impact on America. Here’s the organizations that CftNE has given money to, according to page 17 of the 2012 IRS filing by that organization:

$15,000 for “general support” to the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), a right-wing anti-tax organization that has, among other things, effectively supported allowing the U.S. federal government to default on the national debt. NTU has received a total of $32,500 from the Koch Family Foundations from 1998 to 2008, including $5,000 from Charles Koch’s own foundation in 2008.
$5,000 for “general support” to the Center for Individual Freedom (CIF), a right-wing organization that spent $1.9 million in television advertising in an attempt to help Republicans win U.S. House races that were seriously contested by both major parties in the 2012 elections. CIF spent a slightly larger amount of money on a similar effort in the 2010 elections.
$5,000 for “general support” to Americans for Prosperity (AfP), a far-right political organization founded by the Koch Brothers themselves. In Wisconsin, AfP spent $866,000 in ads designed to help Scott Walker win the 2014 Wisconsin gubernatorial race and approximately $2.9 million in ads in opposition to the 2012 recall effort against Walker that was strongly supported by Wisconsin progressives.
$10,000 for “general support” to FreedomWorks, a far-right organization that has, among other things, ran several anti-union campaigns in states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and supported far-right extremist Chris McDaniel, who, among other things, blamed rap music for many of our country’s problems, in his unsuccessful 2014 Republican primary challenge to U.S. Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi.
$5,000 for “general support” to Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), a right-wing organization that was founded by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) and, among other things, opposes taxation and supports privatizing Social Security. IPI has received $35,000 from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is identified by the Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch as one of the four Koch Family Foundations. IPI is the only one of the organizations listed in the CftNE filing that is a 501(c)(3) organization; all of the others are listed as 501(c)(4) organizations.
$15,000 for “general support” to the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA), a right-wing organization that has, among other things, attacked the federal government over the proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, two of the largest cable television providers in the country.
$14,740 for “general support” to the 60 Plus Association (60 Plus), a right-wing organization funded by Koch Brothers-funded organizations like Freedom Parners and American Encore as part of a complex web of Koch Brothers-funded organizations. In Wisconsin, 60 Plus ran this advertisement attacking now-Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin for supporting the Affordable Care Act (ACA), federal legislation that provided millions of Americans with health insurance.

That’s a total of $69,740 that Thad Nation has, through CftNE, provided to right-wing organizations that have supported Republicans like Scott Walker, ran smear campaigns against Democrats like Tammy Baldwin, and have supported far-right policies that would make America a much worse place to live. Thad Nation is also the same person who employs Jason Rae as a senior associate at Nation Consulting, and Rae is running for Chairperson of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. If Rae is elected DPW Chair, it would be at least an apparent conflict of interest for someone like Rae to be the head of a state-level Democratic organization if he were to remain employed at Nation Consulting, because the founder of that organization was the head of a 501(c)(4) organization that gave money to groups that support Republicans and their destructive far-right agenda.

Let me finish this post by saying two things about Rae and his supporters. One, Rae’s supporters are some of the most vile people I’ve ever interacted with online. Two, Rae completely lacks the temperament to be in a Democratic Party leadership position of any kind.

From top to bottom: normal color setting, blacklight, candle, halogen light, mercury vapor light. Photos taken by webcam built into laptop computer using ManyCam free program; various lighting settings are actually various ManyCam color settings.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I use a laptop computer that runs on the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system.

I recently downloaded the free version of ManyCam (you can download it here; you’ll need a webcam either built into or plugged into your computer in order to use the program), and I was experimenting with the wide array of color settings that ManyCam provides.

What I did was take five webcam selfies in a dark room, one with a normal color setting, one with a color setting designed to mimic a room lit by a single blacklight, one with a color setting designed to mimic a room lit with a single candle, one with a color setting designed to mimic a room lit by a single halogen light, and one with a color setting designed to mimic a single mercury vapor light. You can see the results on the right side of this blog post.

I got the various RGB color codes for each of the lighting settings from this webpage. However, since the ManyCam color settings, located in the image tab at the bottom of the program window, utilize a set of four sliders (saturation, red, green, and blue) to adjust the color of the picture and doesn’t allow for entering RGB codes in order to adjust the color, I set the saturation to default by clicking the three-colored symbol to the left of the top-most of the four color sliders in the bottom right corner of the program window (if the four color sliders don’t appear, click the “image” tab on the left-hand side of the program window about two-thirds of the way down from the top of the window, and they should appear in the bottom right corner of the window), I made sure that the red, green, and blue sliders (each of these are marked with a small circle of the respective color to the left of the slider), are set to default (in order to check this, click the little circles to the left of the sliders). Next, I clicked on the “text” tab that is located four tabs to the right of the image tab and unchecked the “show ManyCam logo” (if this is already unchecked, leave it unchecked). Next, I set the photo/video option to photo (this is located immediately below the left-hand side of the webcam preview display located on the left-hand side of the page below the video/effects/gallery tabs, the photo button is to the right of a slider with a video button on the left end and a photo button on the right end) Next, I clicked the “image” tab again in order to display the color settings, which should appear in the bottom right part of the program window.

I then took a picture with the default color settings (in order to take a picture, click the big snapshot button immediately below the center of the webcam preview window). Next, I adjusted the color sliders to approximate a blacklight setting (the RGB code for that is 167, 0, 255, so I kept the blue slider at the default value, set the green slider as far left as it will go, and set the red slider approximately 65% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position), and then took a picture. Next, I reset the color sliders to their defaults, and then adjusted the settings to approximate a candle setting (the RGB code for that is 255, 147, 41, so I kept the red slider at the default value, set the green slider approximately 58% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position, and set the blue slider approximately 16% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position), and then took a picture. Next, I reset the color sliders to their defaults another time, and then adjusted the settings to approximate a halogen light setting (the RGB code for that is 255, 241, 224, so I kept the red slider at the default value, set the green slider to approximately 95% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position, and set the blue slider to approximately 88% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position), and then took a picture. Finally, I reset the color sliders to their defaults one more time, then adjusted the settings to approximate a mercury vapor light setting (the RGB code for that is 216, 247, 255, so I kept the blue slier at the default value, set the green slider to approximately 97% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position, and set the red slider to approximately 85% of the way between the left-most slider position and the default slider position), and then took a picture.

Again, you can see the results I got above.