Stephanie Mencimer

Reporter

Stephanie works in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. A Utah native and graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning, she has spent the last year hanging out with angry white people who occasionally don tricorne hats and come to lunch meetings heavily armed.

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Stephanie covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She is the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, a former investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004 for a Washington Monthly article about myths surrounding the medical malpractice system. In 2000, she won the Harry Chapin Media award for reporting on poverty and hunger, and her 2010 story in Mother Jones of the collapse of the welfare system in Georgia and elsewhere won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

Beck's Favorite Gold Company Goes To Washington

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Fri Sep. 24, 2010 4:16 AM PDT

Glenn Beck wasn't invited to testify at Thursday's congressional hearing focusing on his favorite gold company, Goldline International, but he was certainly there in spirit. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce was ostensibly meeting to consider legislation that would better regulate the sale of gold coins. But to hear the Republicans on the committee tell it, the hearing was nothing more than a witch hunt against a respectable company that had the nerve to advertise on conservative talk radio shows. Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY) quoted several news headlines about the hearing that started with something like "Glenn Beck's Favorite Gold Company..." Whitfield suggested that were it not for Beck, the Democrats in charge would never have taken up the gold issue to begin with, though charitably he added, "I hope that's not why we're here."

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), who has made gold scams one of his crusades and who pushed to introduce the legislation, was incensed: "This hearing is not about whether Glenn Beck keeps shilling for this company. That's Fox News' problem." Instead, he fumed, the hearing was designed to help protect consumers from unscrupulous coin dealers preying on their fears about the poor economy.

But the Republicans were prepared and had even come with props to counter claims that Goldline vastly overcharges people for its products. Whitfield had dispatched his staff to buy a roll of coins from the U.S. Mint for $35. He said the "melt value" of the gold in those coins was substantially less than what they paid for them—to the tune of a 2000 percent markup. "Even the US government is doing a tremendous job of marking up its product as well," Whitfield observed.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) found an unusual way to defend Goldline: He blamed Obama and liberal Democrats in Congress for not fixing the economy, thereby forcing aAmericans to seek out companies like Goldline. Rather than find ways to create jobs, Scalise ranted, "liberals' answer is to go beat up on the people selling gold." Committee chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who made a brief appearance at the hearing, chastised Scalise for trying to politicize the hearing by suggesting that people were getting ripped off "because liberals are running Congress."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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Goldline, Meet Reps. Weiner and Waxman

Execs of Glenn Beck's favorite gold company are in for an epic congressional grilling—but will it curb Goldline's deceptive practices?

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Thu Sep. 23, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

Glenn Beck's favorite gold company is getting hauled up to Capitol Hill Thursday for a grilling over its allegedly deceptive business practices. And top on the list of questions for company officials is likely to be: Do you really think President Obama plans to confiscate people's gold?

That members of Congress would be seriously considering such a question during a hearing is a sign of how strange the political times are. But concern over gold confiscation, once relegated to paranoid Beck fans, has gone mainstream, all thanks to the aggressive marketing and rapid growth of Goldline International. The California-based precious metals company is one of the largest sponsors of the right-wing talk radio and TV empire, especially Beck's share of it. And scaring people about potential government gold confiscation is one of its most successful sales pitches.

As Mother Jones revealed earlier this year, Goldline's salespeople frequently tout gold coins as a good investment—but not just any gold coins. As part of its standard telemarketing and sales pitch, the company urges customers to eschew government-issued bullion in favor of "numismatic" coins, which tend to be old European currency like the Swiss 20-franc piece. Such coins contains a tenth of the gold of a standard bullion, and Goldline marks them up 30-plus percent higher than the value of the gold in the coin, compared with a 5 percent markup on regular bullion.

To make the upsale to the overpriced coins, the company preys on people's fears about the economy. Goldline's sales staff suggests numismatic coins were exempt from confiscation in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order making private gold ownership illegal—ergo, when Obama comes for your gold, the government won't be able to take your Swiss francs. It's an utterly ridiculous idea on its face. Nonetheless, Goldline includes in its standard "investor kit" a copy of the 1933 executive order that ended the gold standard in the US. The order exempted certain types of gold from the anti-hoarding provisions, including "gold coins having a recognized special value to collectors of rare and unusual coins." Goldline claims its 20-franc coins and other semi-rare offerings meet this standard.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) has questioned Goldline extensively about these claims. As part of his office's investigation into Goldline's practices, which began late last year after Beck’s relationship with the company received heavy media scrutiny, Weiner asked the Congressional Research Service to examine how accurate Goldline's interpretation of the 1933 executive order really is. The CRS reports lay waste to Goldline's spin on history, as well as the assertions of the company's sales staff that its overpriced coins would have been exempt from Roosevelt's executive order.

[Read the full article]

Brad O'Leary's "Is Obama a Muslim?" Poll

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Mon Sep. 20, 2010 9:19 AM PDT

Right-wing talk show host and WorldNet Daily columnist Brad O'Leary has a fondness for Zogby polls, especially the ones he commissions himself. He used several of them in his 2008 anti-Obama book, The Audacity of Deceit, to make misleading claims about the president. And he frequently cites polls he's commissioned in his WND columns. (Just to give you the flavor of his polling inquiries, one O'Leary commissioned last year asked, "The stimulus bill would allow undocumented workers, who are also referred to as illegal aliens, who are working and paying taxes to collect a tax rebate check of $500 per person. Do you agree or disagree with this provision?")

This weekend, he presented a new poll to attendees of the Values Voter Summit in DC which could have been dubbed the "Is Obama a Muslim?" poll. The summit, sponsored by the Family Research Council, is a high-profile gathering of religious right activists who come to DC to hear from potential GOP presidential candidates and other conservative luminaries. But on Saturday afternoon, after the ballroom lights had dimmed and activists headed to smaller break-out sessions around the Omni Shoreham hotel, O'Leary headlined a presentation of new polling data that had been billed with the bait-and-switch title, "Who are the tea party and Christian voters and what do they believe?"

If the values voters on hand thought they might be getting some new insights into what makes the tea party tick, or on whether the tea party movement is really compatible with social conservative set, they may have been sorely disappointed. O'Leary gave a PowerPoint presentation that first examined a burning issue at the top of every tea partier's agenda these days: spanking. Most of the data he presented looked at whether tea partiers were more or less likely than Democrats or Republicans to believe parents have a legal right to dole out a "modest spanking" to their children. More than 80 percent of tea party respondents believed that they do, compared with 47 percent of Democrats. (The poll was connected to a later presentation by Home School Legal Defense Association head Michael Farris, who is trying to rally the faithful to oppose Senate ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which he believes will make spanking illegal.)

But even more revealing about O'Leary's data was the section he presented on the 2012 presidential hopefuls and their Christian values. While O'Leary said at the session that Zogby couldn't in good conscience ask people outright whether they thought Obama was a Muslim because the question itself was too biased, they could ask people whether they thought Obama had "strong Christian values or not." So that's what they did. And shockingly, only 37 percent of the respondents thought Obama wasn't a Muslim—er, was a good Christian, a number that actually went up the less likely someone was to go to church. (Of those who never attend church, 45 percent thought Obama was a good Christian.)

The breakdown was even more interesting when viewed by political loyalties as opposed to church attendance. O'Leary pointed out that a mere 2 percent of tea partiers think Obama has strong Christian values, compared with 5 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats. Oddly enough, Obama seems to score better among NRA members, 37 percent of whom thought he was a good Christian, suggesting his avoiding of gun control issues might be paying dividends in at least one regard. (Either that or NRA members lean more libertarian than either Republicans or tea partiers and are overrepresented in the "never go to church" category.)

NRA members, though, did not think so highly of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; only 4 percent thought she had strong Christian values, while 6 percent of tea partiers did. O'Leary also had Zogby ask the question about Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. Romney scored better on the "Christian values" scale than Obama—about 60 percent of tea partiers, Republicans and NRA members thought he had good Christian values—but he was roundly trounced by Palin, who is apparently the most righteous of the bunch, even if Democrats don't see her that way. While 86 percent of tea partiers and 78 percent of NRA members believe Palin's Christian values are strong, only 28 percent of Democrats do. Christian values are apparently in the eye of the beholder.

Values Voters Woo the Tea Party

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Mon Sep. 20, 2010 3:10 AM PDT

Last year, the Family Research Council's DC Values Voters Summit was about as establishment Republican an event as you can get. The entire GOP congressional leadership addressed the crowd of evangelical activists and Mike Huckabee, a longtime favorite of social conservatives, won the conference's presidential straw poll in a landslide.

How things have changed in one year: Not a single member of the Republican leadership made the trek to DC's Omni Shoreham hotel for this year's summit. Instead, the event was dominated by tea-party-caucus types like Representatives Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), along with newly minted conservative rock star Christine O'Donnell, the surprise winner of the Delaware GOP senate primary. And in a startling indicator of just how much the political landscape has shifted, Huckabee was edged out of the 2012 straw poll by tea party favorite and Indiana congressman Mike Pence. (Sarah Palin placed fifth.)

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

A Tea Partier Against O'Donnell?

Are tea party activists having second thoughts about the GOP candidate for Senate in Delaware?

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Mon Sep. 20, 2010 3:03 AM PDT

Christine O'Donnell's GOP Senate primary upset over Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware last week has the media buzzing about how the tea party movement is overthrowing the established order of things—at least for Republicans. But while O'Donnell may be labeled as a "tea party" candidate, the movement is far from a monolith, and there are some in its ranks who aren't all that thrilled to be associated with her.

Andrew Ian Dodge is the Maine state coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, one of the largest tea party umbrella groups. TPP doesn't endorse candidates, but that hasn't stopped Dodge from expressing his own opinon about O'Donnell. He thinks she's a bit of a nutter. "Everything I've seen about her has made me laugh my ass off," he says. "What the hell do you say? First you have Alvin Green, and now you have her." His concern is that if she loses in the general election to Democrat Chris Coons, the defeat will be widely regarded as a reflection on the tea party movement—and he doesn't want that.

[Read the full article]