Something, indeed. After looking into all of the different right wing 501(c)(4) organizations and their associations, it's easy to see the metaphor of a tree with many branches. If the trunk represents the right wing as a whole, then each major limb of the tree represents a different set of affiliations under the overall right wing umbrella.

The Wellspring Committee, Inc. is a large limb on that tree, created to support the anti-gay, anti-woman, religious right Reaganites alongside pet agendas of other contributing billionaires. Despite the lofty language Wellspring used to describe its activities, the dictionary definition of their purpose is more apt: An original and bountiful source of money.

Who is Wellspring Committee?

Wellspring Committee (WCI) sprang to life in the waning days of the George W. Bush era in February, 2008. It is perhaps not a coincidence that its birth also coincided with the efforts of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and other groups to push California's Proposition 8 onto the November ballot, too. In fact, the president of WCI, Ann Corkery, is the spouse of Neil Corkery, who was the President of NOM in 2008 and now serves as Treasurer. Neil Corkery now serves as CFO of a group called the Wedgwood Circle, founded by Comcast mogul Phil Anschutz, Rick Perry bundler George Seay III, and many more. (See bios here).

Neil Corkery says in his bio that he "runs a financial consulting firm specializing in assisting non-profit organizations." Well, there's a convenient place to find oneself: at the crossroads of nonprofits and billionaires aching to buy their governments.

Ann Corkery served as a finance vice chair for Mitt Romney's first Presidential bid in 2008 and is employed by Security National Servicing Corporation as "Director of Philanthropy". Security National appears to specialize in lender-owned properties. I'm guessing they snag these properties at a song, keep them out of foreclosure and sell them at a profit. What philanthropy has to do with it is anyone's guess, but that's what Ms. Corkery does. She is uniquely positioned, as is her husband.

As you review Wellspring's acts of charity, you see tinges of Koch, DeVos, and mainline Republican fingerprints all over it. Clearly it's a major pipeline channel for right-wing organizations desperately in need of their billionaires' support.

Who does Wellspring Committee Support?

As it turns out, they're a pretty generous lot. Lucky recipients for 2010 included:

• American Majority: $1,020,125 Lots of grassroots to be had for the low, low price of a million.
• The Annual Fund: $2,450,000 This organization came into being on September 1, 2010 in time for the midterm elections, and closed its first year on September 30, 2011. This grant by WCI represents nearly all of its first-year income. It then turned and distributed nearly $1.5 million to Right Change in North Carolina, a group founded by Pharma King Fred Eshelman. RightChange targeted Patty Murray, Charlie Crist, Harry Reid and Michael Bennet in the 2010 midterms.

  $500,000 was also distributed by The Annual Fund to FreedomVote, Inc, an Ohio-based 501c4. FreedomVote's mailing address is a FedEx/Kinkos in Dayton now, but the originally reported address went to a Republican PR guy and Boehner crony by the name of Thomas Whatman, who also manages Boehner's PAC, Freedom Project. How that $500,000 was used, I do not know. They have a bare-bones website and little else. I found no records of independent expenditures with the FEC, and so it remains a mystery for now.

  Finally, The Annual Fund gave $475,000 to a group called Citizens for the Republic, which is yet another 501c4 organization launched by old-timer Reaganites and headed up by Craigan Shirley, of Shirley and Bannister lobbying fame.

  Other smaller grant recipients include Independent Women's Voice, where Heather Higgins is the Executive Director and was part of the bizarre James O'Keefe email loop regarding a conspiracy to frame the SEIU and undermine their get out the vote effort, and Enterprise Washington, which is a trade association group of businessmen in Washington state.

  One large grant grew many offshoots, didn't it?

• Citizens for the Republic - $360,000 This donation was in addition to the $475,000 passed through via The Annual Fund, and is one of the strongest indications that these organizations are used as conduits by groups of like-minded right-wingers.
• Faith and Freedom Coalition - $250,000 Ralph Reed's newest incarnation of the Christian Coalition.
• Franklin Center - $160,000 The Koch-funded propaganda apparatus operating out of Wisconsin
• Freedom Vote - Oh, look! Another $200,000 into a black hole of non-accountability.
• Federalist Society - $200,000
• RightChange - $900,000 - A companion contribution to the $1.5 million funneled through The Annual Fund
• Illinois Manufacturing Association - $500,000 I'm curious as to whether this group sponsored ads supporting crazy deadbeat dad Joe Walsh.
• Judicial Crisis Network - $350,000 - Don't be fooled by the name. It's a group formed to undermine democracy wherever it can. President Gary Marx is a long time associate of Ralph Reed. In their first reporting year of July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010, they boast of spending nearly $800,000 to "[advocate] for the importance of judicial restraint in the debate over the 2010 hearing for U.S. Supreme Court nominee. It also became heavily involved in state supreme court nominations." The SCOTUS nominee mentioned had to be Elena Kagan. I suppose they're the ones who started the rumor that she's gay, too. That would explain part of their opposition to her nomination since they're a bunch of homophobes over that way.
• Better Courts For Missouri - $850,000 It seems right-wingers don't like elected judges very much, so they have been campaigning since 2008 to shift that over to the governor's office. Unfortunately, lawyers don't like it either, and this group failed to get the required signatures to place a constitutional amendment on the 2012 ballot. That hasn't stopped this group from pouring thousands into the state to unleash a huge propaganda campaign against "George Soros judges."
• Michigan Chamber of Commerce - $125,000 In 2010, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce was one of the preferred money laundering conduits for state races. Millions flowed through them and out to other states and candidates. Looks like this organization was a minor contributor.

In 2009, Wellspring was more or less dormant. A few small grants went out to Missourians for Better Courts, the Know Campaign, and around $111,000 was paid out for "citizen outreach regarding state level issues and policies." I'm guessing that was the beginning of the astroturf anti-health care reform effort, or maybe just general muckraking.

But in 2008, Wellspring was flowing like a river after a month of rain. You're starting to see the pattern here, right? Nothing much happens in the out years, but in those even years, boy howdy, they get busy. Here are but a few of their 2008 projects:

• Americans For Job Security: $2,605,824
• Americans for Prosperity: $2,000,000
• American Energy Alliance: $509,000
• Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce Association: $200,000
• American Future Fund: $367,500
• National Right to Life Committee: $542,000
• Susan B Anthony List: $753,000
• Louisiana Conservative Action Network: $312,000

You get the idea. WCI received a total of $10 million and change in grants, and flowed through about $7.3 in grants to other organizations. Of course, by serving as the conduit, the other organizations can disclose their donors without actually disclosing their donors. That leaves anyone who is interested simply guessing who the donors might be.

Call me cynical, but Ralph Reed's close ties to organizations receiving these conduit funds makes me feel like we're getting dangerously close to a more sophisticated operation that looks a lot like Jack Abramoff's past handiwork. I'm not sure anyone who was that close to that many millions and escaped any punishment isn't capable of reconstituting his money train yet again, using tax-exempt organizations and a desperate right wing to move him up prosperity road.

Make a note: The Wellspring Committee is one of several major players in the right wing network. Each has their function, and all the billionaires do is choose from the menu of organizations to use for the laundering operation, which is why I will continue to write these long, detailed, link-laden posts about them. Because even if you don't care much now, you will the next time one of these groups tries to shove their right wing candidates, agendas, judges, or news themes in your face.

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When CNN and Fox both sent out text message alerts and erroneously reported that the Supreme Court had overturned the Affordable Care Act, I had my doubts about whether that news came to them in real time. When Tea Party True Wingnut Richard Mourdock published his "Yay! ObamaCare is unconstitutional!" video prematurely a week before the decision was actually released, my hair stood up on end because it dovetailed with numerous celebratory emails I was receiving from different Tea Party groups.

At the time, I speculated that if there was a leak from the court, it came via Ginni Thomas. I remain somewhat convinced that might be the case, since leaking anything from the US Supreme Court is widely considered to be a career-ending act.

Like everything else, though, this Supreme Court is unlike others, and CBS has two confirmed insider reports that Chief Justice John Roberts "flipped" from the conservative decision to overturn the entire law to the final decision which preserved the mandate, and thus the law, under the taxing power of the constitution.

In her report for "Face the Nation" today, reporter Jan Crawford claims to have two sources inside the Court who confirm that Roberts flipped his vote on the mandate (aka Personal Responsibility Donation), much to the chagrin of the other four justices, Kennedy in particular.

Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.

Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.

"He was relentless," one source said of Kennedy's efforts. "He was very engaged in this."

But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, "You're on your own."

The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress' power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said.

Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts' decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.

Leaks or speculation?

I might shrug at this report if it had come from any reporter but Jan Crawford. As ThinkProgress notes, Crawford is a conservative reporter with ties to the Federalist Society.

The Federalist Society is a favorite of Justices Scalia and Thomas, so it's not all that difficult to imagine leaks walking out of the court a little ahead of time, especially if those leaks actually spark some news reports that might find their way back to a "wobbly" Chief Justice.

Crawford notes that around Memorial Day, there were many reports emerging in the media about how damaged the Roberts Court would be if they struck down the entire law along partisan lines. Examples here, here, here, here, here and here.

And then on June 2, 2012, this tweet from Barton Gellman, quoting Ramesh Pannoru of National Review:

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On Tuesday, Senate Democrats beat back Jeff Sessions’ filibuster of Obama’s first judicial nominee – Judge David Hamilton – by a reassuring margin of 70-29. Sessions lost ten of his fellow Republicans, including conservatives like Hatch, Cornyn, and Thune, and Hamilton will be confirmed Thursday afternoon to the Seventh Circuit.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the GOP is winning the battle for the federal courts.

Just a few short years ago, right-wing Senators denounced filibusters of President Bush’s nominees in the strongest possible language and threatened to employ the “nuclear option.” Sessions went even further – he claimed Democrats were violating the Constitution by blocking any Bush nominee (no matter how extreme). But some time after November 4, 2008, his interpretation of the Constitution must have changed dramatically.

Now a Democrat is in the White House, and – hypocrisy be damned! – Sessions is vehemently pro-filibuster and pro-obstruction. And the worst part is that he’s been successful. Judge Hamilton was nominated in March to general acclaim. He received the highest possible rating from the ABA, both his home-state Senators strongly endorsed him (including senior Senate Republican Dick Lugar), and even the head of the Indianapolis Federalist Society backed him. It doesn’t get much better than that.

But the nomination was dragged out for months by the GOP. As a result, Hamilton will become just the seventh Obama nominee to be confirmed to the federal bench. By contrast, nearly 30 such Bush nominees had been confirmed at the same point. We’re talking lifetime appointments to the highest courts in our land. President Obama obviously has his hands full, but he can’t afford to neglect this crucial aspect of his legacy.

But so far, Obama has been playing into the hands of the GOP obstructionists. He’s nominated fewer than half as many people as Bush had at this point. That has got to change, and quickly. The Obama administration has a window of just 4-5 months to return some semblance of balance to the federal bench before the mid-term elections. The choice is simple: act now to fill the judicial pipeline with highly qualified progressive nominees, or let Sessions and Bush win.

Not content with its past role in screening candidates for positions in the Bush judiciary and Justice Department, the conservative Federalist Society is back to defend the Bush torture team it helped create. Ironically, the Federalists' conference call Monday came just three days after McClatchy reported that Steven Bradbury - one of its members and a figure at the center of the storm over the release of the OLC torture members - refuted their claim that the military's SERE training program proved the United States did not torture terror detainees.

As Politico reported, the National Review hosted a media conference call featuring many of the usual suspects among the Bush torture apologists:

The lawyers' group, which was a pipeline for judges in the Bush White House, is hosting a call this morning with National Review writer Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, lawyer David Rivkin, and Chapman University Law School Dean John Eastman.

Their claim, as Politico noted, was that the "much-criticized memos from the Office of Legal Counsel were perfectly reasonable." McCarthy brushed off the CIA's use of waterboarding on terror suspects by proclaiming "they were not going to be killed by the tactic." Eastman, whose university is hosting Federalist Society member and Bush torture architect John Yoo as a visiting professor, insisted the treatment was no worse than that undergone by American service personnel:

Eastman responded to The New York Times's Scott Shane about the use of waterboarding during the Spanish Inquisition and by the Japanese military, and responded "that psychological reviews of graduates of the military's SERE program, in which members of the U.S. military were waterboarded, is a more relevant example.

"Why would I go and look at something the Spanish Inquisition did just because it was also called 'waterboarding'?" he asked.

Perhaps because, as the Bush Office of Legal Counsel chief and 2005 torture memo author Steven Bradbury concluded four years ago, "SERE trainees know it is part of a training program."

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The Heretik: Another of G-Dub's "advisors" has admitted a military victory in Iraq is no longer possible.  This is a tale told to an idiot who, just last week, held communist Vietnam up as an example of what Iraq could become "if we do not quit."

Pensito Review: Bush eliminates hunger...the word, that is

TPMmuckraker: McCain says the Bush administration breaks laws to hide Global Warming data.  Meanwhile, the anti-science administration's Dept. of Health & Human Services has rather unsurprisingly declared that they don't know what "scientifically accurate" means.

NewsHog: More on the striking Houston janitors trampled by mounted police and jailed. Put together what Jim Webb sees with what Dick Cheney told the Federalist Society and add in the uber-right's own rhetoric about the enemy within and last Friday's use of the police as paramilitary strike-breakers and tell me you aren't the least bit worried.

TalkLeft: Keisler must be blocked...unless you want a former Bork law clerk who Bork himself calls "one of my favorites", on the D. C Circuit and the fast track to the Supreme Court

AGITPROP: Wingnut Roundup

More on Ashcroft:

Antonin Scalia Is an Enemy of the State!

So says John Ashcroft. Jeffrey Dubner reports

GET YOUR ROBES OUT OF OUR PRISONS! I just watched John Ashcroft's address to the Federalist Society. It's a gripping speech, and quite frightening. He devotes the greatest portion of it to challenging the Supreme Court's decisions in Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and the other "enemy combatant" cases. A taste:

...intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas of treaties can put at risk the very security of our nation at a time of war.

It's very much in the vein of "the ability to set aside the laws is inherent in the president." There's no transcript available just yet, and I expect there'll be analyses and critiques up by more qualified legal folks than I by the time we get back from the weekend. But I wonder how confined this constitutional theory is to Ashcroft, and whether it will in any way leave office with him. I highly doubt it.

UPDATE: Tonight's keynote speaker is, of course, Federalist Society member and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. He's as like as not to agree with Ashcroft on this, although it's hard to be sure.

I do think that this is, in part, fallout from Bush v. Gore. Everybody knows that Scalia and company don't believe the equal protection rationale they set forward for their decision. And if what the Supremes are doing is expressing their political preferences rather than setting forth judicial principles--well, why should their will get to override Bush's and Ashcroft's? Just because Scalia, Rehnquist, and company ruled in favor of Bush in 2000 doesn't mean that Bush and company respect them for it.

Trent Lott on Fox News says that Democrats are blocking judicial nominees because of racism!

Video

Lott uses Miguel Estrada's nomination as the basis for racial discrimination.

From Independent Judiciary

Judicial Temperament. A member of the Federalist Society and a board member of the arch-conservative Center for the Community Interest, Mr. Estrada is described by people who have worked with him as a conservative ideologue who is unable or unwilling to distinguish his personal views from what the law requires. That this evidence does not come in the form of law review articles, judicial opinions, or written criticism by colleagues on a state supreme court does not make it any less troubling.

Miguel Estrada is held in high regard by James Dobson from the "Focus on the Family" group and is their hopeful for the supreme court.

Blue Gal: Jill Carroll - something we can do

FBIHOP: New report from Europe on CIA's secret prisons

We'd be worried about the stunning incompetence of our self-described “War President" if Darth Cheney hadn't assured us that the Iraq insurgency was in it's “last throes."

The Revealer: New Canadian PM, Stephen Harper, is politically and religiously much further right than George W. Bush. God help 'em...
Somebody should ask Justice John Scalia why he shunned Chief Justice John Roberts' swearing-in for a Federalist Society paid junket that included a cocktail party co-hosted by Abramoff's former law partners.  Ethics, schmethics.

The Daily Howler: The NYT's fatuous Elizabeth Bumiller knows what G-Dub's readin' and what he thinks about them books.  How?  Because Scotty told her.

Somebody should ask Justice John Scalia why he shunned Chief Justice John Roberts' swearing-in for a Federalist Society paid junket that included a cocktail party co-hosted by Abramoff's former law partners. Ethics, schmethics.

The Daily Howler: The NYT's fatuous Elizabeth Bumiller knows what G-Dub's readin' and what he thinks about them books. How? Because Scotty told her.

Live Blogging from Supreme Court Watch:

"A second Repubican senator, Orrin Hatch of Utah (defying conventional political tie conventional wisdom in a very nice gold striped number), seems to be trying to lay the groundwork that it’s okay for Judge Roberts not to answer questions he find uncomfortable. Hatch tried to bring up a Harding nomination from years ago, citing a same-day nomination and confirmation as some kind of gold standard."

Senator Hatch himself in 1997 said:

"The Senate can and should do what it can to ascertain the jurisprudential views a nominee will bring to the bench in order to prevent the confirmation of those who are likely to be judicial activists. Determining which will become activists is not easy since many of President Clinton's nominees tend to have limited paper trails... Determining which of President Clinton's nominees will become activists is complicated and it will require the Senate to be more diligent and extensive in its questioning of nominees' jurisprudential views." (Address of Senator Hatch before University of Utah Federalist Society chapter, February 18, 1997)"