Wise-use wiseguys

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1997:

Kathleen Marquardt, just a few months after announcing the
merger of her anti-animal rights group Putting People First with the far-right
American Policy Center, was billed at a February 15 fundraiser for
Congressional Representative Rick Hill (R-Montana) as spokesperson for
something called Putting Liberty First––on the same bill as APC founder
Tom DeWeese. An extensive online data search indicates that Marquardt’s
husband, attorney Bill Wewer, may not have appeared in public or written for
PPF since July 1991, and has apparently surfaced in articles about PPF in
mass media only once since PPF moved in 1994 from Washington D.C. to
Helena, Montana––Marquardt’s home town. “I have not been as visible lately,”
Wewer said by fax, “because I have moled into a movement organization
uising an identity which, although assumed, does contain a humorous clue to
my real identity, if you know how to look for it.” From 1990 to 1994, it was
Wewer rather than Marquardt who tended to have the higher public profile.
Wewer and Marquardt were two of the four board members at the National
Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare when it ran afoul of
two Congressional investigations and was reprimanded by the U.S. Postal
Service and the Justice Department in the mid-1980s for allegedly misleading
fundraising. Wewer subsequently incorporated the Doris Day Animal League
in 1987; did legal work for the National Alliance for Animal Legislation in
1989, preparatory to the 1990 March for the Animals, after Marquardt founded
PPF; and left DDAL and the Alliance to represent PPF in early 1990.

“Despite an urgent fax alert from Chuck Cushman’s Land
Rights Network, only three property rights protesters appeared outside the
Embassy Row Hotel in Washington D.C., the site of the Environmental
Grantmakers Association conference,” in early February, reported the
February 10 edition of the Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and
Research electronic newsletter Clear. Cushman, founder of numerous wiseuse
“groups,” whose existence is often manifested only by a maildrop and fax