Heartland: Ashamed to be right (wing)

A few months ago, I wrote a piece on right wing think tanks and gave brief mention to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank. Go ahead and check out their website -- it'll give you a better idea of what I'm talking about.

The Heartland Institute was founded by David Padden, who has served as a director of the right-wing Cato Institute. Funding comes from the Koch, Olin, Bradley, and Scaife Foundations, which are all in the business of promoting conservative ideas. Their board is populated by a number of fellows and board members from other notorious right-wing think tanks, such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and AEI.

I'll grant that the views of Heartland's members are not entirely uniform, but here is a sampling:

They support the Constitution Restoration Act of 2004, which is a court-stripping bill that would make it illegal for the courts to hear cases on church-state separation; judges who do so would face impeachment. The author of the linked article is an economist; he must be a follower of that "Supply-Side Jesus" I've been hearing about.

They tout the Enron collapse as proof that unregulated free markets work. Um, because the fraud created an unsustainable imbalance, and the markets corrected it by wiping out the company. The fact that it also wiped out a lot of innocent people is, I guess, a small matter.

Global warming? Who cares what the scientists say... it's pure fiction. (Did I mention that they get money from ExxonMobil?) Second-hand smoke? ... Not harmful at all! Smokers can wheeze a sigh of relief.

One of the oddest things I found out about The Heartland Institute is that among the list of "legislative advisors" are quite few Democrats who would usually be against everything The Heartland Institute stands for. One of these was my very own representative in the Illinois General Assembly, Harry Osterman. I sent him an e-mail, asking him what his role was with Heartland. A few days later, he called me on the telephone.

It seems that when Mr. Osterman was just starting out in politics, he signed up with The Heartland Institute to receive policy papers from them. He figured there was no harm in getting different points of view, and you can't fault him for that. Otherwise, he has had no involvement with the organization.

Before I contacted him, Mr. Osterman was unaware that The Heartland Institute was advertising him as a legislative advisor. He did some investigation and decided that this was not something he wanted to be associated with, and so he has contacted them to ask that he be removed from their roster.

I suspect Mr. Osterman's situation is not unique and that many of the Democrats are listed without their knowledge or consent. And I suspect that The Heartland Institute does this to give the organization a veneer of nonpartisan legitimacy. The first thing they say in their FAQ is: "The Heartland Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization" (emphasis added). But their positions are pure movement conservatism, and they seem to be a little embarrassed about it. Otherwise, why would they feel a need to claim as members those who are against their agenda?