Here’s another thing to watch for this campaign season: front groups that attack Democrats from the left.
The Pennsylvania Senate race has provided a case in point. TPM Reader TC, who lives there, sent us a scan of a mailer he received Saturday. You can see it here. The mailing purports to be from a group called The Progressive Policy Council, which, according to the mailer, “is a not-for-profit organization seeking to educate the public and to advocate for progressive public policy solutions for contemporary social issues,” and provides bullet points to show that Democrat Bob Casey and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) are both against gay marriage, stem cell research, and “common sense gun controls.”
But as TC wrote us, there’s something fishy about the group:
I live in PA and received this mailing Saturday. I can’t quite make sense of who it is from. The organization listed has no info online about it. The website returns an access forbidden error and google and whois searches turn up nothing.
It smells to me like a Republican suppress the vote effort, as I cannot see a progressive organization mailing something like this out this close to the election. The underlying message seems to be: why bother voting for Casey.
Maybe you can make more sense of this or find out where it is from. Sorry for the quality of the scan – my wife ripped the mailing in half before I could get to it. I understand the impulse.
Indeed, the url on the mailer, www.progressivepolicycouncil.org, leads nowhere. And the group, despite its stated purpose to get the message out, definitely does not want to be contacted.
Whoever is behind the group, which was formed in mid-June, has taken care not to leave any public traces.
The site’s registration information on WHOIS only provides the phone number for Register.com — the operator there told me that the group had opted to keep their identity hidden.
The same is the case with their corporate registration. The group is registered with the state of Virginia, but instead of listing directors, a registered agent, any other identifying information, only CT Corporation is listed. A woman at CT told me that they had a confidentiality agreement with their clients and could not provide me with any information.
The mailer only provides a P.O. Box in Arlington, Virginia.
And though the group claims to be a not-for-profit, they appear not to be registered with the IRS.
So — have any other TPM readers received this mailer or any others from the Progressive Policy Council?
