TIM NOAH had a good piece last week on a bogus Republican front group called the Physicians' Council for Responsible Reform, which is not made up of physicians and doesn't want reform, and isn't very responsible, either. The organisation was launched and bankrolled by the National Republican Congressional Committee, and it's basically a direct-mail and phone-bank scheme to harvest lots of names of doctors and affix them to the bottom of statements claiming they oppose the Obama health-insurance reform initiative. It's not clear whether doctors actually have to endorse the views in the mailers the PCRR sends out; if they don't explicitly call the organisation and say they oppose those views, they may end up on PCRR statements claiming they're on board. It's a sort of "opt-out" method of grassroots organising—Cass Sunstein, of "Nudge" fame, would be proud.

Here's another organisation that seems to consist of just a dozen or so staffers floating on a cushion of cash: the Independent Women's Forum. Is it independent? Well, most of its funding comes from four different Scaife foundations. So, no, it's not independent. It's conservative. Is it a forum? Not really. If you read the group's blog, you find that there aren't very many commenters, and the comments that do appear are almost all furious negative responses by visitors outraged at the generally thin, propagandistic posts that appear there. One of the more heavily commented recent posts attempts to rope in breast cancer treatment and Britain's NHS as a reason to oppose the Obama health insurance reforms; commenters rail at the poster for "irresponsible fear-mongering" and denounce the IWF as a tool of the insurance industry. To the extent that the group generates a response from women outside its staff, it seems to consist of people angrily yelling at them to shut up. Redstate it ain't.

Recently the group has begun broadcasting a television ad claiming that if the government "ran" health care in America, "300,000 women could have died" of breast cancer. That's the kind of stat you just gotta love. (Died when? Why? If what? Huh?) And it has sent out an anti-health-reform fundraising email with the subtle, sophisticated header "More American Women Are Going To Die." As Michelle Goldberg reports, until last year, the group shared its office and support staff with Americans for Prosperity, "a major organizer of anti-Obama tea parties and town hall protests." None of this has inhibited mainstream media outlets from featuring the group's staff members as "independent" voices. IWF president Michelle Bernard appears regularly on MSNBC, identified as a "political analyst". She was paid over $218,000 by the IWF in 2007.

It's obviously not the case that all conservative organisations are front groups represented by highly-paid, intellectually mediocre television personalities who just happen to belong to traditionally liberal ethnic or gender demographics, bankrolled by fanatically right-wing white male billionaires. There are actually a whole lot of genuine conservatives in America, and they organise themselves into real community-based groups that authentically voice their interests and concerns. Many church-based groups are exactly the kind of truly powerful grassroots organisations that Tocqueville praised when he wrote the book from which this blog draws its name. But one thing about those kinds of groups is that you can usually tell who they are from their names. The Moral Majority didn't give itself some kind of weak deceptive name designed to cloak its identity, "Americans for True Tolerance" or whatever. That's because the group was choosing a name that would appeal to its members, not one that would confuse its enemies. You can tell the Physicians' Council for Responsible Reform and the Independent Women's Forum are astroturf outfits just from the names. They're not trying to appeal to their membership, because they don't have any.

And one more thing, while we're on the subject of women's rights and authentic democracy. Friday over at DoubleX Meredith Simons interviewed Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American women's-rights activist who was locked up in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison for four months in 2007. Ms Simons asked Ms Esfandiari whether American democracy-promotion aid had been a good idea in Iran. "The allocation of money to [NGOs that] promote democracy in Iran was counterproductive," Ms Esfandiari replied. Why might that have been? Ms Esfandiari chalks it up to Iranian popular paranoia after 30 years of poor relations with America. But what if the NGOs America funded to promote democracy in Iran were really just grant-churning conservative front groups that themselves had no experience or competence in building grassroots democracy?

Amount the Independent Women's Forum received from the US State Department in a 2007 grant "to promote democracy for women in Iraq and Iran": $392,240.

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