EXCLUSIVE: Dick Armey Dishes On FreedomWorks' Deals With Beck & Limbaugh

JOE STRUPP/Media Matters for America:

Former FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey says the conservative outlet that helped launch the Tea Party paid Glenn Beck at least $1 million last year to fundraise for the organization, an arrangement he said provided "too little value" for the money. 

"The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air," Armey, the former House majority leader, told Media Matters Friday. "I saw that a million dollars went to Beck this past year, that was the annual expenditure."

Armey, who left the organization this past fall after a dispute over its internal operations, said a similar arrangement was also in place with Rush Limbaugh, but did not know the exact financial details.

"I put it down now as basically as paid advertising for FreedomWorks by Beck," Armey said, calling it a mistake.

Media Matters contacted Armey after Mother Jones magazine published a leaked copy of the document FreedomWorks prepared for its Winter 2012 board of directors meeting. That document alluded to "embedded media programs" for fundraising that featured the two conservative radio hosts and claimed that fundraising efforts featuring them raised nearly $1.3 million in 2012, not including event ticket sales from third-party vendors. 

From the leaked FreedomWorks document:   

Mother Jones further reported that the organization "plans to continue its financial support for Glenn Beck's media enterprise, including sharing a TV studio with and leasing office space to the Washington bureau of TheBlaze, Beck's website and TV network."

Armey said he was told of the Beck arrangement when it first began, but that it would only cost the organization about $250,000 a year. "Once that was approved by the trustees, it then took on a life of its own, it got bigger than we understood it to be. All of a sudden it was we are paying Limbaugh as well as Beck." FreedomWorks did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Beck has been reading on-air appeals for FreedomWorks since at least April 2010. In June of that year, Media Matters reported that the organization was using Beck's endorsement to raise money. Politico highlighted the relationship as an example of a conservative group "paying hefty sponsorship fees to the popular talk show hosts" in exchange for "regular on-air plugs." The FreedomWorks document leaked to Mother Jones states that their fundraising relationship with Limbaugh began in 2012.

According to Armey, such programs are ineffective.

"If Limbaugh and Beck, if we were using those resources to recruit activists and inform activists and to encourage and enthuse activists, that's one thing," Armey explained. "If we are using these things to raise money; one, it's a damned expensive way to raise money; and two, it makes raising money an end on to itself not an instrumental activity to support the foundation work that our organization does."

Armey also said the relationship with Beck expanded to include rallies that were co-sponsored by Beck and FreedomWorks, and included appearances by FreedomWorks President and CEO Matt Kibbe.

Armey said he objected to these events, dubbed FreePACs, because they often charged admission to FreedomWorks activists.

A review of promotional information for the events found $20 was a standard donation requested at some of the locations, while a Dallas, TX., FreePAC last summer charged prices as high as $971.

"You don't charge activists to attend rallies. I would consider that wholly inappropriate behavior," Armey said. "There was a lot of resentment on the part of the activists. They would naturally expect that they are providing the activist power and think that they have a right to attend."

"The principal value to anyone from the relationship with Beck was Matt Kibbe, who got to share Beck's stage with him," Armey said, adding that he found out about the July 2012 Dallas rally after his name was already being used to promote it.

"They put out an email under my name that had more information than I had," he recalled. "That is why when I resigned I had them cease and desist using my name."

Armey said he began looking into the specifics of the Beck and Limbaugh arrangements last year after hearing from others in the organization that such activities were being done without his knowledge.

"I had come to the point where I don't know how much we are spending on Beck and Limbaugh, but we are spending too damn much and we are getting too little value out of it," Armey said. "It was something I only found out about after inquiring into the affairs in September or October.

"Starting in January of last year, in that general neighborhood, what we had was a pattern that Kibbe got into a pattern of consistently working out arrangements with people without telling me what he was doing," Armey added. "They had people issue directives, 'don't tell Armey about this.' I had people close to me saying there is something fishy here, you better look into it."

Armey pointed out that any reports of revenue raised through the Beck and Limbaugh arrangements does not take into account the money paid to them in the deal.

"It is like federal budgeting," he said. "We count the receipts we get from people who have sent in money, and we, meaning they, I am not a part of it anymore, do not count what the funds that are laying out are. They don't say, we paid Beck a million dollars and we had this program where we raised $300,000, you had a net cost of $600,000, or whatever the numbers are."  

But don't expect those payments to end: FreedomWorks' leaked 2013 budget plan includes "Glenn Beck Radio Ads," "Blenn Beck TV," "TheBlaze Action Center," and the "Rush Limbaugh Contract."

Texas Tea Party Leader On Obama: He ‘Might Be Muslim’

By George Zornick

On MSNBC this evening, Chris Matthews hosted two representatives of the Tea Party to analyze its influence in Washington: FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe and Phillip Dennis of the Texas Tea Party. Matthews asked Dennis if he thought President Obama is a Muslim, and Dennis immediately launched into a diatribe that ranged from offensive to confusing, but was outlandishly dishonest throughout. He first replied that he “didn’t know” if Obama was a Muslim, but then criticized Obama’s attendance in the Christian church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dennis then complained that Obama has a “soft spot in his heart” for Islam because he “changed our history saying that Islam has always played a major party in this country.” Dennis noted he had a “big problem with Islam” and concluded by saying Obama “might be Muslim”:

DENNIS: One thing is that President Obama certainly has a soft spot in his heart for Islam. You know, he’s gone back — his first speech was in Egypt, he’s reached out to the Muslims moreso than any other President in the history of the world. He’s even changed our history saying that Islam has always played a major part in this country, when everyone knows that’s not true. You didn’t see our Founding Fathers — weren’t Muslim, they weren’t breaking for prayers five times a day. But this is the type of thing that he’s done, is reaching out. Bowing to the leaders —

MATTHEWS: Where are you on Islam?

DENNIS: … Oh, I have a big problem with Islam. I think that it, uh, they call itself the religion of peace, when every day around the world it continues to show itself to be anything but. So I think those people have a right, certainly it’s understandable that they might have a problem that our President might be Muslim. Absolutely.

Watch it:

Dennis is a fairly major player in the Tea Party movement. He founded the Dallas Tea Party and is the Texas state coordinator of Tea Party Patriots. He is also an adviser to the National Tea Party Coalition. Aside from frequent appearances on Hardball, hewrites for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site and has also written for CNN about the “real Tea Party.” He has previously said that “the Tea Party does not focus on the pigment of people’s skin,” but apparently it does focus on people’s religion, as his bizarre rant indicates. (For the record, President Obama has never said that James Madison faced Mecca five times a day.)

UPDATEDuring a segment on Hannity earlier this week, GOP strategist Frank Luntz interviewed a panel of Republican voters in Iowa, and half said they believe Obama is a Muslim. Watch it:

M.C.L Comment: Let me translate tea bag here

Phillip Dennis: I don't like Obama because he's a Negro. And Iowa Republican voter: Having a black president makes me feel funny.

They should be honest their main beef with President Obama is due to the fact he's black and he's not that stereotypical black man that lives in their heads. Ask your tea bagger friend did he supported George W.Bush? Be warned some of them are smart enough to know this is a trap question and they may change the subject, if that question fails ask Mr. or Mrs.Tea bag what did they thought about Ronald Reagan? These people didn't care about government spending or taxes when their guys were in charge, the tea party movement is about hating a black president nothing more and nothing less.

FreedomWorks CEO Goes To Bat For BP, Calls Oil Spill ‘A Natural Disaster’

By Ben Armbruster

During an interview today with FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe on ABC’s Top Line, host Karen Travers noted that the cover of his upcoming book — Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto — says “lower taxes plus less government equals more freedom.” Travers then asked, “How does that less government sentiment square with this massive government effort down there in the Gulf to contain the spill?”

In response, Kibbe was able to kill two birds with one stone: deflect criticism from BP and his own personal philosophy by saying that he expects government to act “when there is a natural disaster”:

KIBBE: Well I think if you look at what’s happened down there, it’s a sad story of government incompetence as well as negligence on the part of BP. And I think what you have to look at is when there is a natural disaster like this we do expect our government to do some things and to do them well. And the whole point of limited government is you want the government to be competent at those few things that we need it to do and this is an example where the government was asleep at the switch and there’s a series of regulations that led to deep drilling as opposed to more economical and safer options.

Watch it (starting at 4:00):

Of course, natural disasters are uncontrollable events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Tens of millions of gallons of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico due to an oil company’s negilgence and misconduct does not qualify. In fact, just last year, BP opposed stricter safety and environmental rules proposed by the U.S. Minerals Management Service. A BP executive tried to fight off the new regulations on Capitol Hill, saying that drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) has been shown to be “both safe and protective of the environment.”

Even though Kibbe lobbed the obligatory “negligence” charge at BP, what he didn’t explain is that he might have an interest in deflecting blame away from the oil giant. As ThinkProgress reported last month, FreedomWorks worked with BP to build grassroots support for opening up large sections of both the East and West coasts to new oil drilling. BP listed the group as part its “significant grassroots supporters” on a PowerPoint slide at a presentation by the BP-funded front group “Consumer Energy Alliance” at a conference in 2007.