Snake Oil

Patrick Michels

True the Vote's crowd gathered in Austin Tuesday.

Tucked between a grassy hillside on the University of Texas at Austin campus and Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library, a group gathered to welcome Attorney General Eric Holder Tuesday afternoon, and to ask for his resignation. Or for his impeachment, over his role in the Fast and Furious gun-running imbroglio.

Holder was in town to announce the Justice Department’s get-tough approach to new requirements for voters to show photo identification at the polling place, and other new state laws that might run afoul of the 1965 Voting Rights Act—in short, a “war on the war on voting”. The demonstrators with True The Vote, an election integrity project tied to the Houston tea party group King Street Patriots, huddled up to preemptively declare war on that.

Bunched around a podium and an organizational chart of the Justice Department, around 130 of the True The Vote faithful heard from a lineup of tea party regulars about how the folks trying to beat back voter photo ID laws are the real racists, and socialists as well.

The message mixed assurances that election integrity is a universal cause that knows no partisan lines, and predictions that President Obama’s reelection would doom Americans to communism, slavery or both. Speakers asked the crowd to keep their cameras rolling, to catch every moment that the lamestream media surely would neglect. (Even if the Austin American-Statesman, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The New York Times did end up covering it.)

Ahead of the 2012 elections, True The Vote has mounted a nationwide effort to recruit one million volunteer poll watchers, building on their work in Harris County in 2010, when hundreds of their volunteers signed on as poll watchers and election judges to root out trouble in mostly black and Latino neighborhoods. They filed 800 complaints with county officials—none of which the county pursued in court—and drew complaints of their own, of trying to intimidate voters and election workers.

Some True the Vote veterans in the crowd Tuesday said they were genuinely concerned about election fairness, and were glad to have a way to help. Shirley Andries said she’s volunteered as a poll watcher, then an alternate election judge, at Harris County polls. “Last year, there was animosity to us, like, ‘What is whitey doing here?’” she said, but the community was more welcoming last month when she volunteered in Houston’s Clinton Park neighborhood.

Andries said it’s just important to have conservative eyes on the polls in a Democratic stronghold where nobody’s been watching before. “Not to say there was anything going on—but the system is set up to make sure both sides are present.”

In the shade under a huge tree branch, set off a respectful distance like unwelcome funeral guests, representatives from a handful of progressive groups looked on, waiting to share another message with the press: that Holder, and his concerns about Texas’ new voter ID law, were welcome in Austin. “We’ve been ignored in Texas for so long,” said Laurie Vanhoose from Common Cause Texas, so it’s time the Justice Department protected voter rights here. Carlos Duarte from Mi Familia Vota urged that Texas focus on increasing voter turnout, not stripping people off the rolls. Both were promptly swarmed and interrupted by True The Vote faithful.

Though True The Vote’s poll watchers all registered as Republicans in 2010, Catherine Engelbrecht, who founded the group last year, told her audience that election integrity shouldn’t be the subject of partisan bickering. “We can talk until we’re blue in the face,” she said, but nothing will change “until the citizens are willing to stand up.”

She said she doubted the media would be reporting on True The Vote’s rally outside Holder’s talk, but she asked any reporters who were there to put this down in all caps: “WE, TRUE THE VOTE, SERVE REGARDLESS OF PARTY, REGARDLESS OF SKIN COLOR.”

To illustrate her point, she introduced a series of five speakers, diverse in a way the crowd was not, who had plenty to say about partisan causes, and even more to say about race.

Anita Moncrief, introduced as an ACORN whistleblower, said she has 55,000 documents to prove the group broke the law to get Obama elected in 2008. It was appropriate that Holder wanted his speech to invoke the legacy of LBJ, “the father of the dissolution of the black community, and the black family.”

After decades of liberal welfare programs and social services, she said, “they’ve taken race, and they’ve turned it into something unrecognizable,” said Moncrief, who is black. She said complaints that voter ID laws would hurt minority turnout were just more posturing.

She said she grew up poor in Birmingham, Alabama, where the only place people cashed their paychecks was the liquor store—and where, of course, they’d need to show an ID. “You can’t do anything in the black community without a photo ID.”

When Adryana Boyne, a Hispanic conservative leader who heads the group VOCES Action, asked anyone in the audience without a photo ID to raise their hands, nobody did—no card-less socialists in this crowd. She followed by delivering a message in Spanish, to voters who wouldn’t be hearing it from the mainstream Spanish-language media.

George Rodriguez, president of the San Antonio Tea Party, played up the scary political divisions even more: “What they want is an egalitarian society where we’re all gonna share our money with each other,” he said. “It’s not racism to protect our borders. It’s not racism to ask for a photo ID. It’s not racism to ask somebody who looks like a terrorist when they’re getting on a plane.”

But the most pointed race talk came from C.L. Bryant, a popular speaker at tea party rallies nationally, who, as Engelbrecht said by way of introduction, “wants us to free this enslavement and run to toward the blessings of liberty.”

“The past is the past, and now we must press forward to a bright American future,” Bryant told the crowd. “I remember a time when, in Louisiana, even if you had an ID, you couldn’t vote—because of the color of your skin.”

Byrant is a former president of a local NAACP chapter in Garland, but said today, the “once-venerable organization” has been “hijacked.” Exhibit A: the NAACP’s petition to the United Nations human rights council complaining of voter suppression efforts in the U.S. (In fliers for the rally, the group asked, “Are you ready to have UN blue helmets outside your polling place?” Many of the protesters turned up in ironic blue helmets.)

“It’s a lie that the NAACP speaks on behalf of black people,” Bryant shouted. The group, he said, is only being used by liberals to drum up fear. “If the NAACP wants to speak on behalf of black people, then they need to challenge why millions of black and Hispanic babies are murdered at the altars of abortion every year.”

“Socialists are plotting now to destroy the fundamentals of this country,” he said, and it’s all up for grabs in the 2012 elections. “We must not fail,” he said. “If we fail, it will enslave all Americans.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxGrOLE7aXI&feature=youtu.be

UPDATE (11:49 a.m.): The board approved the plate by a 4-3 vote this morning, after considering an online poll in which 116 of 120 users opposed it.

POSTED EARLIER: It’s been a big year for fights over what does and doesn’t belong on Texas license plates.

“Choose Life”? OK, said the Legislature. Confederate flag? Not so fast, said the state Department of Motor Vehicles board.

Both of those calls came only after big, nasty controversies, but tomorrow the board will decide whether to let Texas issue plates featuring three crosses on a hill, and the odds are good it’ll do so quietly.

One woman hoping to change that is Susan Pintchovski, state co-chair for the National Council of Jewish Women. In November, Pintchovski issued an alert over Facebook, hoping to drum up opposition to the plate, which has been dubbed the “Calvary Hill” design.

Overwhelmed by folks who’d come to comment on the Confederate plate, the board put off its vote on the “Calvary Hill” plates until its next meeting, which is tomorrow. Once again, Pintchovski has been rallying the troops to come tell board members that the state shouldn’t be in the business of printing plates with with Christian imagery.

“This is a very important issue, especially here in Texas, because we’re always struggling with the [State Board of Education] and crossing those boundaries,” she says. “This one’s pretty clear cut—it’s a violation of the First Amendment.”

You can already buy a plate for your car that says, “One Nation Under God,” but this one, with the crosses on a hilltop and the slogan, “One State Under God,” gives too much preference to Christianity.

“That is absolutely giving preference,” she says, “and the best way to protect religious freedom is to stay away from all matters of faith.”

I first wrote about the plate in October, for the American Independent. Matt Rocco, one of the guys behind the design, told me then there’s really no constitutional problem here, at all.

“There’s people in Texas that are passionate about their faith, and this plate may appeal to them. If it doesn’t appeal to them, then don’t buy the plate. That’s how I feel,” Rocco said. “Based on the market research that was done on this plate, it’s something that should be popular.”

Rocco is CEO of Etech, the company that partnered with the state to help sell more custom plates at MyPlates.com. He’s also a board member at Glory Gang Ministries, a Nacogdoches youth ministry whose name doesn’t appear on the design, but which will get a cut of the profits from any of the plates sold.

In its effort to help raise money for the state, MyPlates.com has already done plenty to lighten up your car’s mid-rear bumper. You can argue that Dr Pepper has some claim to such prime real estate on a state-produced tag, but what about RE/MAX?

South Carolina’s attempt to print license plates with a cross was successfully challenged in federal court two years ago, and a proposal for an even more Jesus-y design failed that year in Florida’s legislature.

But the public-private partnership that heped put a Mighty Fine Burger on some of our license plates could do the same with the cross.

The State Board of Education approved eight new charter schools back in September, but only one of them came backed by the star power of Prime Prep Academy, with an emotional presentation by former Dallas Cowboys great Deion Sanders.

After telling the board how nervous he was—more than he was before those Super Bowl and World Series appearances you might remember him from—he recounted how plans for the school were born. “This all started as a dream, but yet a dream while I was still awake,” Sanders explained, relating a vision he’d had three years ago. “Could you imagine, educating kids of all socialities and different social statuses—white, black, Hispanic… Asian?”

Well, Sanders could—and he’d decided to leverage his considerable fundraising power to help make it happen, with two new campuses in North Texas. Prime Prep Academy would serve inner-city kids in Fort Worth from grades K-5. Sixth to 12th graders would get a separate school in Dallas, and both would be built on a combination of academics and sports.

The most novel aspect of these charters, though, may be the private funding sources they’ll depend on to round out their $10 million-a-year budget: not usual suspects like Bill and Melinda Gates or the Walton Family Foundation, but big brands Sanders has endorsed or worked with over the years, which he name-drops regularly when talking about the school.

Sanders says Prime Prep is a natural extension of TRUTH, a sports-and-study program he’s run for the last few years, that has received money from many of these sponsors already. The school’s leadership team told the state it had secured pledges from a few of those companies already, but when contacted, many said they hadn’t, in fact, pledged money to the school—at least not yet.

When the time came for the board to vote on approving the school’s charter, two members, Thomas Ratliff and Mavis Knight, said they weren’t sure how to feel about Sanders’ role with the school. “I don’t want this process to turn into the celebrity of the month club,” Ratliff said, and while Knight said Sanders’ celebrity was a downside for the application, she felt those concerns were outweighed by his fundraising power. “Actually, there were probably more resources coming to that school because of his involvement,” she said.

That’s the argument Prime Prep made in its application, too. The school’s academic plans are based on an online curriculum developed by the state and already in wide use. (They’ll supplement it with a new online study portal, Prime Study Hall, that’s password protected and wasn’t available for the SBOE to review.) Strategies common among high performing charters—long hours, extended school years or tough disciplinary policies—aren’t included in their plans.

What Prime Prep’s leaders stress is unique about its plans are its emphasis on sports along with academics, its dedication to serving inner-city kids in low-scoring school districts, and, of course, the big money that Deion Sanders’ friends at big brands will throw at the school.

As D.L. Wallace, the school’s chief executive officer, told the board back in August, that’s where Prime Prep will truly stand out:

All of hte children that we’re serving are trying to get to a finish line, and that finish line at some point is going to connect with colleges, and it’s also going to connect to the corporate community. We’re in a very unique position where we have ties to them both.

One of the great benefits of Deion Sanders’ presence and deep-seated involvement is that we are connected to tons of corporations, and we now hold those corporations accountable.

I heard Ken [Mercer, an SBOE member] say earlier that we cannot mandate parental involvement, and Ken, you’re exactly right. But what we can do is mandate that the corporations that are connected to us, that want to have an impact on kids, we can mandate that they do certain things in conjunction with us.

The SBOE approved Prime Prep’s application 8-4.

While Sanders isn’t on Prime Prep’s board, the application details how he drummed up excitement among companies like Under Armour, Campbell’s Soup and DirecTV. When Sanders courted them at a meeting before this year’s Super Bowl in Dallas, the application says, “All in attendance agreed that such an initiative has the ability to enhance the educational landscape for families in the inner city with limited options.”

Sanders elaborated in an interview later with KDAF-TV:

“The State of Texas gives us enough money to put on a nice public school, but we want to give our kids the best experience, so we`re calling on the private sector to assist us in a lot of our endeavors,” he said.

Exactly where Sanders and his star power comes in.

“We met with Direct TV, with Van Heusen, we met with Procter & Gamble, we met Under Armor, we met with the NFL on assisting us with in endeavors and they did a cartwheel,” said Sanders.

In its charter application Prime Prep also listed $186,000 in donations that had already been pledged “upon approval of the charter school,” including a pair from Walmart and the NFL Network worth $50,000 each.

But as enthusiastic as Sanders said they all were, most of the companies on the list told me this week that they never did pledge money to the school. The other three either didn’t return calls or didn’t have an answer ready.

“Someone left a message, but we haven’t talked to anyone,” said Main Event Entertainment’s Amy Johnson, who Prime Prep lists as the contact for their pledge. Home Depot spokesman Steve Holmes said they were “unable to find any record of” the pledge. Renee Mallonee, the contact listed at Monitronics, said they did, indeed, donate $10,000 to Sanders’ cause—last year, to buy equipment for his youth football program.

“I can tell you that we do not have a pledge to them of any dollar amount,” said Aleta Stampley, the contact listed beside Bank of America’s $25,000 pledge to Prime Prep. “A few years ago we did give them some money for a sports camp—it was may be $2,500, so there may be a misprint somewhere.” Stampley says she hasn’t been in any conversations with Sanders or Prime Prep about donating more.

Walmart spokeswoman Kelly Cheeseman said they did give $25,000 each to a pair of causes tied to Sanders two years ago, but hadn’t pledged any to a new charter school.

Asked to comment on the discrepancy, Wallace, says it was just a mistake—they accidentally listed old grants given to Sanders’ other charities. “It wasn’t intentional. It was an oversight,” Wallace says now. “We emailed the companies about the error, and to a man, they all said we’re glad to say we’ll help.

Sanders, who was also on the call, said it’s all chump change anyway, compared to the real deals he’ll be securing for the school soon. “These are my personal deals—on the sheet, it was like a meaningless $15,000 pledge,” he said. “I have so many business partners, that all these people are going to play ball. All these kids deserve the best, like the kids in Plano, Frisco and Southlake.”

Under Armour donated uniforms for his TRUTH youth sports squads, and they’ll be on board with Prime Prep too, he said. Van Heusen, another brand Sanders endorses, has close ties with JC Penney, a major supplier of school uniforms around the country. So guess who’ll be donating Prime Prep’s uniforms, Sanders says.

And his presence isn’t just about having nice things, either.

“With my notoriety, we are attracting some of the best teachers in the country, not just the state. My people know we’re going to have ultimately close to 100 jobs.” In October, Sanders told KDAF they’ve already got a waiting list 2,000 kids long.

Wallace and Sanders say, for now, they’re hard at work getting school plans ready for all of them. He says he’s selling his house so he can move closer to the Fort Worth campus; he says his own kids will be attending Prime Prep next fall. They’ve got a few more weeks to answer questions for the state while their approval is still provisional.

Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe says Prime Prep’s list of pledges doesn’t matter much to their application. “Even if a charter applicant says they have pledges for land or services from various corporations or entities, we don’t let them count that as revenue unless they have a signed letter from the donor.”

But while the SBOE grilled other applicants about where they’d be getting startup cash or grants to augment state funding, Prime Prep seems to be running entirely on star power. The only signed agreements in its application at first—a $1,000 loan from a Fort Worth real estate firm and a fundraising agreement with a group called PrimeTimePlayer—were dropped because Wallace and other school officials were aslo in leadership roles at the companies that stood to profit, as the Austin American-Statesman reported last month.

Today, Wallace says they never needed those other deals anyway. “We included anything we thought could help our charter in any way, shape or form,” he says. “There’s nobody that can market products and services better than Deion Sanders can.”

Deion Sanders pitches the State Board of Education on a truly corporate-backed charter school, joined by the school's CEO, D.L. Wallace

The State Board of Education approved eight new charter schools back in September, but only one of them came backed by the star power of Prime Prep Academy, with an emotional presentation by former Dallas Cowboys great Deion Sanders.

After telling the board how nervous he was—more than he was before those Super Bowl and World Series appearances you might remember him from—he recounted how plans for the school were born. “This all started as a dream, but yet a dream while I was still awake,” Sanders explained, relating a vision he’d had three years ago. “Could you imagine, educating kids of all socialities and different social statuses—white, black, Hispanic… Asian?”

Well, Sanders could—and he’d decided to leverage his considerable fundraising power to help make it happen, with two new campuses in North Texas. Prime Prep Academy would serve inner-city kids in Fort Worth from grades K-5. Sixth to 12th graders would get a separate school in Dallas, and both would be built on a combination of academics and sports.

The most novel aspect of these charters, though, may be the private funding sources they’ll depend on to round out their $10 million-a-year budget: not usual suspects like Bill and Melinda Gates or the Walton Family Foundation, but big brands Sanders has endorsed or worked with over the years, which he name-drops regularly when talking about the school.

Sanders says Prime Prep is a natural extension of TRUTH, a sports-and-study program he’s run for the last few years, that has received money from many of these sponsors already. The school’s leadership team told the state it had secured pledges from a few of those companies already, but when contacted, many said they hadn’t, in fact, pledged money to the school—at least not yet.

When the time came for the board to vote on approving the school’s charter, two members, Thomas Ratliff and Mavis Knight, said they weren’t sure how to feel about Sanders’ role with the school. “I don’t want this process to turn into the celebrity of the month club,” Ratliff said, and while Knight said Sanders’ celebrity was a downside for the application, she felt those concerns were outweighed by his fundraising power. “Actually, there were probably more resources coming to that school because of his involvement,” she said.

That’s the argument Prime Prep made in its application, too. The school’s academic plans are based on an online curriculum developed by the state and already in wide use. (They’ll supplement it with a new online study portal, Prime Study Hall, that’s password protected and wasn’t available for the SBOE to review.) Strategies common among high performing charters—long hours, extended school years or tough disciplinary policies—aren’t included in their plans.

What Prime Prep’s leaders stress is unique about its plans are its emphasis on sports along with academics, its dedication to serving inner-city kids in low-scoring school districts, and, of course, the big money that Deion Sanders’ friends at big brands will throw at the school.

As D.L. Wallace, the school’s chief executive officer, told the board back in August, that’s where Prime Prep will truly stand out:

All of hte children that we’re serving are trying to get to a finish line, and that finish line at some point is going to connect with colleges, and it’s also going to connect to the corporate community. We’re in a very unique position where we have ties to them both.

One of the great benefits of Deion Sanders’ presence and deep-seated involvement is that we are connected to tons of corporations, and we now hold those corporations accountable.

I heard Ken [Mercer, an SBOE member] say earlier that we cannot mandate parental involvement, and Ken, you’re exactly right. But what we can do is mandate that the corporations that are connected to us, that want to have an impact on kids, we can mandate that they do certain things in conjunction with us.

The SBOE approved Prime Prep’s application 8-4.

While Sanders isn’t on Prime Prep’s board, the application details how he drummed up excitement among companies like Under Armour, Campbell’s Soup and DirecTV. When Sanders courted them at a meeting before this year’s Super Bowl in Dallas, the application says, “All in attendance agreed that such an initiative has the ability to enhance the educational landscape for families in the inner city with limited options.”

Sanders elaborated in an interview later with KDAF-TV:

“The State of Texas gives us enough money to put on a nice public school, but we want to give our kids the best experience, so we`re calling on the private sector to assist us in a lot of our endeavors,” he said.

Exactly where Sanders and his star power comes in.

“We met with Direct TV, with Van Heusen, we met with Procter & Gamble, we met Under Armor, we met with the NFL on assisting us with in endeavors and they did a cartwheel,” said Sanders.

In its charter application Prime Prep also listed $186,000 in donations that had already been pledged “upon approval of the charter school,” including a pair from Walmart and the NFL Network worth $50,000 each.

But as enthusiastic as Sanders said they all were, most of the companies on the list told me this week that they never did pledge money to the school. The other three either didn’t return calls or didn’t have an answer ready.

“Someone left a message, but we haven’t talked to anyone,” said Main Event Entertainment’s Amy Johnson, who Prime Prep lists as the contact for their pledge. Home Depot spokesman Steve Holmes said they were “unable to find any record of” the pledge. Renee Mallonee, the contact listed at Monitronics, said they did, indeed, donate $10,000 to Sanders’ cause—last year, to buy equipment for his youth football program.

“I can tell you that we do not have a pledge to them of any dollar amount,” said Aleta Stampley, the contact listed beside Bank of America’s $25,000 pledge to Prime Prep. “A few years ago we did give them some money for a sports camp—it was may be $2,500, so there may be a misprint somewhere.” Stampley says she hasn’t been in any conversations with Sanders or Prime Prep about donating more.

Walmart spokeswoman Kelly Cheeseman said they did give $25,000 each to a pair of causes tied to Sanders two years ago, but hadn’t pledged any to a new charter school.

Asked to comment on the discrepancy, Wallace, says it was just a mistake—they accidentally listed old grants given to Sanders’ other charities. “It wasn’t intentional. It was an oversight,” Wallace says now. “We emailed the companies about the error, and to a man, they all said we’re glad to say we’ll help.

Sanders, who was also on the call, said it’s all chump change anyway, compared to the real deals he’ll be securing for the school soon. “These are my personal deals—on the sheet, it was like a meaningless $15,000 pledge,” he said. “I have so many business partners, that all these people are going to play ball. All these kids deserve the best, like the kids in Plano, Frisco and Southlake.”

Under Armour donated uniforms for his TRUTH youth sports squads, and they’ll be on board with Prime Prep too, he said. Van Heusen, another brand Sanders endorses, has close ties with JC Penney, a major supplier of school uniforms around the country. So guess who’ll be donating Prime Prep’s uniforms, Sanders says.

And his presence isn’t just about having nice things, either.

“With my notoriety, we are attracting some of the best teachers in the country, not just the state. My people know we’re going to have ultimately close to 100 jobs.” In October, Sanders told KDAF they’ve already got a waiting list 2,000 kids long.

Wallace and Sanders say, for now, they’re hard at work getting school plans ready for all of them. He says he’s selling his house so he can move closer to the Fort Worth campus; he says his own kids will be attending Prime Prep next fall. They’ve got a few more weeks to answer questions for the state while their approval is still provisional.

Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe says Prime Prep’s list of pledges doesn’t matter much to their application. “Even if a charter applicant says they have pledges for land or services from various corporations or entities, we don’t let them count that as revenue unless they have a signed letter from the donor.”

But while the SBOE grilled other applicants about where they’d be getting startup cash or grants to augment state funding, Prime Prep seems to be running entirely on star power. The only signed agreements in its application at first—a $1,000 loan from a Fort Worth real estate firm and a fundraising agreement with a group called PrimeTimePlayer—were dropped because Wallace and other school officials were aslo in leadership roles at the companies that stood to profit, as the Austin American-Statesman reported last month.

Today, Wallace says they never needed those other deals anyway. “We included anything we thought could help our charter in any way, shape or form,” he says. “There’s nobody that can market products and services better than Deion Sanders can.”