Baby Jesus, also known as Sean Hannity, has a problem.
A fellow conservative, Debbie Schlussel, who is a radio talk show host, columnist, and attorney, yesterday slammed Hannity and his “Freedom Concert Scam.”
For the last several years, Sean Hannity and the Freedom Alliance “charity” have conducted “Freedom Concerts” across America. They’ve told you that they are raising money to pay for the college tuition of the children of fallen soldiers and to pay severely wounded war vets. And on Friday Night, Hannity will be honored with an award for this “Outstanding Community Service by a Radio Talk Show Host” at Talkers Magazine’s convention.
But it’s all a huge scam.
In fact, less than 20%–and in two recent years, less than 7% and 4%, respectively–of the money raised by Freedom Alliance went to these causes, while millions of dollars went to expenses, including consultants and apparently to ferret the Hannity posse of family and friends in high style.
Accodrding to Schlussel, 2006 tax returns for Freedom Alliance, which Hannity promotes endlessly on his radio and television shows,
…reported revenue of $10,822,785, but only $397,900–or a beyond-measly 3.68%–of that was given to the children of fallen troops as scholarships or as aid to severely injured soldiers.
Whoops!
Particularly egregious, for anyone who has ever heard Hannity brag about the good Freedom Alliance does, is Schlussel’s claim that the group gives relatively small sums to the injured soldiers it is supposed to support, including the following:
- $200 to a serviceman who “was involved in a roadside bomb incident in Iraq, which caused loss of both legs and left arm.” As Schlussel says, “Freedom Alliance gave this brave soldier roughly $67 per limb.”
- $200 to a serviceman who “was wounded in Iraq by an IED explosion” and “lost right arm” and had “severe shrapnel wounds to upper body and face.”
- $165 to a serviceman, “a bilateral amputee with 30% facial burns sustained during IED blast.”
Schlussel writes that in 2006,
…while fat-cat consultants and expenses took millions of Freedom Alliance’s money, seriously wounded troops to whom Freedom Alliance donated received a pathetic average of $785 each and the college student kids of the fallen got a paltry average of $2,943 toward tuition. Yes, out of millions raised that year by Sean Hannity at his Freedom Concerts, only $309,000 was given out in scholarships to 105 students, and only $110,703.82 was given to the wounded soldiers.
There is plenty more in Schlussel’s exposé, but I wanted to end with 
something Hannity may have a hard time spinning:
To make matters worse, Hannity deliberately lied to his radio audience about how much money was going to the kids of the fallen American soldiers. On May 28th of last year, Hannity told his listeners, “Our new sponsor, Boca Java, just pledged $30,000 to the Freedom Concerts. That will provide a full one-year college scholarship for a kid of a fallen soldier.” In fact, Freedom Alliance’s tax forms indicate it has never given any student more than $6,000 in a school year, and usually it’s been far less. Many students only get $1,000, which will barely cover anything at most colleges, today.
I can’t wait for Baby Jesus’ explanation, if he ever bothers to respond. When your followers tend toward hero worship, often you can get away with mere silence.
The Erstwhile Conservative: A Blog of Repentance 
Juan Don
/ March 19, 2010Duane,
There’s trouble in paradise when a right-winger like Deb Schlussel exposes Hannity’s venal “patriotism”. I’m tempted to think that Deb is engaging in payback for not receiving her payoff — as in hell hath no fury like a grifter scorned.
Regardless of motivation, it’s going to tax all of Hannity’s dim resources to dismiss Deb as another Marxist loon. If we’re lucky Glenn Beck — Hannity’s partner in shameless pander — will devote chalkboard time blaming Deb’s treason on Woodrow Wilson.
Great visual accompaniment. Perhaps his smug expression comes from separating “great Americans” from their money — known as being “Hannitized” among conservative elites.
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Duane Graham
/ March 19, 2010Juan,
Excellent. I tend to think Beck would place the blame on Teddy Roosevelt, who started all the evil in 20th- and 21st-century America. But Wilson is a good choice, too. We both know, however, that Beck’s daily hallucinations won’t include an attack on Sean Hannity, even though he claims he is only interested in the “truth.”
By the way, it turns out that our friends at Daily Kos first broke this story two and a half years ago, where there was an example presented of a promotion of a Freedom Concert in San Diego:
The point is made on Daily Kos that out of an average ticket price of $50, “the organizers of this event are skimming $37 a person off the top, not including other paraphenelia.”
Further, rather than go directly to helping the fallen troops or their families, the “generous” $4 donation goes to the Freedom Alliance, Ollie North’s “educational and charitable foundation.” And, after presenting a summary of Freedom Alliance’s financial report, the author of the post at Daily Kos wrote this:
As for Hannity’s way out of this mess, even though a bona fide winger has brought the subject up again, he can link it all back to Daily Kos, should he break his silence on the subject. Probably no sweat for him on this one, which says more about his followers than anything else.
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Juan Don
/ March 19, 2010Duane,
I imagine the silence from Sean’s fellow jingoists will be deafening.
A wit from the intertubes has come up with “Scamitized” to replace “Hannitized”.
This just proves that anything Ollie North touches turns into a dook sandwich. A seasoned hand playing the fall guy, perhaps the Lt. Col. will bite another bullet for God, country and free, first-class travel.
Juan
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Jane Reaction
/ March 21, 2010Last Jane heard about Ollie he was trying to raise money to keep China from buying the Panama Canal. Seriously.
I guess that as long as Long-Term Con (LTC) North can afford the rent of the donor lists, he’ll be back with other dire threats to Chantilly, Virginia.
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seamus breathnach
/ June 9, 2010I think this is the fate of most charities, especially Christian ones. People should be told — warned — of the huge, huge percentage these charities can legally take for themselves and for ‘administrative purposes’. If they knew about how free the organisers are to manipulate these charities, they might not be so ready to part with their money.
In Bosnia a lot of Biritsh charity found its way into Anti-Muslim armaments. Abroad, heaps and heaps of monies are used to build churches for priests who are never really done begging for ‘the foreign missions’. When I was young, we were forced to pay at least a ‘penny for Noogie’. ‘Noogie’ was some priest in Africa who bought ‘black babies’. And when you put in your penny into the box, the black babyy on the top of the box nodded his head. Of course, some people had half crowns to put in; but many, like where I cam from, had nothing. So, the poor, to avert the anger of the nuns — and the nuns would clout you with a stick at will, if you failed to make the baby’s head nod! Well, many of these kinds used old buttons instead of pennies. They got beaten for it.
While all Catholic countries are industrialised and professional in the way they approach charities — one of the greatest countries for open heart surger are the Irish. Here there are tons of charities, few if any are registered, none are criticised, and most of the funds raised remain with the church or their agents and are often used to imperialise the third world by the erection of huge ugly churches.I saw such churches in Vietnam.. and the Phillipines! They would make button-pushing person like me quite sick.
The promoters have successfully nobled the departments of Foreign Affairs and Justice to cover the Roman Catholic nature of these departments, the latest gag being to introduce legislation against criticising religion (The Blasphemy Laws!) and then legislation outlawing ‘organised begging’. This is to keep the genuine poor off the streets, while the organised beggars — the church — promotes itself only!
‘Organised begging’ indeed. If anyone wants to walk anywhere in Ireland, on the streets, in the shops, the supermarkets the banks, the larger stores, one will find begging bowls all over the place — and all organised to the hilt by the Catholic Church. And on the streets the most organised beggars of all — agencies like Trocaire, Goal, Caritas, the Capuchins, the Foreign Missions etc.,, etc are all given free reign. Bishops have even tried to tap into the savings of children and to make them and their parents pay their savings to agencies like Trocaire: and that is after the Bishops have tried to raise monies (in Ferns) to pay for pedophilic priests. Where Opus Dei and the Bishops stand (and hide) in the money crisis is itself a mystery, some people opining that the hemhorraging hand-outs loaned to Anglo-Irish was a sop to keep the most corrupt dovetailing sections of Irish Church-and-Fianna-Fail-State from ‘falling out.’
Fianna Fail is the dominant party in Ireland; it isn’t true that Fianna Fail has sold its secuar soul to Rome. It is more true to say that no Irish party had a secular makeup, so, it could never lose what it never possessed. It is more true to say that the Irish Church made all Irish parties in much the same way that Jacky Charleton invented an Irish soccer team. The Church likes Irish political parties to play games. So long as the Parish Priest throws in the ball, things are as acceptable as they are in East Timor, the Phillipines, or Poland. Even Sinn Fein, the arch ‘radicals’ in Ireland, run when they hear the word ‘economics’ or, worse, ‘the pedophile church’ to which they so radically belong.
The agents of Irish charities now refuse to be interviewed in their homes, lest peope wonder how they discharge their mortgages. . . And with the exception of St Patrick’s College, Carlow, where an installation worth €16 million has been flaunted, most of the privileged Church-State gravy charities are played down. It just happens that in Carlow the Church’s new move to exhibit such a burning concern for the ARTS, OPERA and Polish Security confuses the natives and enormous building dedicated to whatnots an appear precisely where the church needs them to be.
In the instant case, the charity was called ‘Eigse’ (knowledge or wisdom), and it was begun by one Padhraigh O Snodaigh, a local Republican. Padhraigh wanted people to come into free contact with the Gaelic pagan language that had given way in the middle ages both to Roman Latin, French and Cambric French, and eventually English. He neither charged people money nor coerced them to learn about their pagan past. The Church, however, soon saw the monetary value of turning ‘Eigse’ into a bourgeois project culminating in a €16 million ‘Arts Centre’ fitted nicely into the Romanesque form that St. Patrick’s wanted to possess. And this in the middle of a recession!
You have to hand it to the clergy; they know how to do it , don’t they? Bankers and Bishops were aways Barons of the people. It’s just that one would like the people once in a while to know how they are being used. . .
What is a state-of-the-art art’s building doing locked away under church lock and key? Apart from adorning the Cathedral glebe lands, that is?
As the Chairman of the Urban District Council remarked: ” We are grateful to the Chruch for having giving us the site for the Arts Building for free’.
No one even mentioned a Trojan Horse! And all in the name of charity!
Seamus Brethnach
http://www.irishcriminology.com
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