Good post, Mary. I am a Sierra Club member, so I'll start looking into this and will urge other members to do the same.

The following was news to me:

And in my opinion, by backing this shady takeover, they have lost my respect – just like Ralph Nader did when he took Republican funds during the 2000 election.

Could you give more info on this, or at least a link, even though it's not the main topic of your post?

Go to Tidepool.org for information on the Sierra club takeover. You may need to do a search there. You will find a few articles.

Re: Nader. Here is one piece that shows how the Republicans used Ralph to hurt Gore.

One thing I do believe is this wouldn't have hurt Gore if Gore had just given a speech like he gave to MoveOn.org recently. Gore just didn't speak passionately enough about his core belief and it made Ralph's contention that Gore was as bad as Bush on the environment (or that Bush was as good as Gore) credible to enough people (especially moderate moms) that they picked Bush.

Thanks for bringing this to the attention of fairly casual Sierra Club members such as myself, Mary.

This is so typical of the right wing talibanistas. Never content to leave a good thing alone, they would destroy it in order to foist their "beliefs" on everyone else. The Sierra Club will now have to change how they conduct business, add restrictions, spend time and capital dealing with this bullshit instead of their primary focus, and probably do a piss poor job of defending themselves in general in the process.

Look at their homepage and you'll see nothing about this, because they can't take sides. So it's up to us memebers to do it for them.

Raygun was always doing things like this, because it wasn't explicitly said he/they couldn't. Bush and his fellow religious freaks, sorry, fanatics, okay, neo-conservatives, are doing it in spades. And why? Because they can.

I truly loathe these people. Man, are they going to be disappointed when their big day comes, if you know what I mean.

I am not a member of the Sierra Club. I am a supporter of Move-On.Com. But I am totally stunned by what I see on Move-On’s splash page.

Some one named ‘Wes Boyd’ has a sidebar taking sides on an internal dispute within the Sierra Club.

Who is this guy Wes Boyd, and who gave him this space for such a wrong-minded and divisive purpose?

It’s not as if Move-On has resources to spare, or that it finds itself on cruise control with respect to its mission of removing Bush from the White House. I can’t for the life of me understand why Wes Boyd has attempted to divert Move-On from its mandated purpose of replacing the current President with a peripheral project of dabbling in the internal politics of the Sierra Club.

Not being a Sierra Club member, I am not privy to all of the recent nuanced political history with respect to the Club’s position on population control. But I will say that it seems perfectly natural for an NGO with environmental preservation as its organizational mission to be concerned with regulating immigration. As a matter of fact, the Sierra Club has for decades advocated stabilizing the American population for the sake of the environment. Overpopulation and over-consumption are critical root causes of excessive resource extraction, habitat destruction, wilderness loss and biodiversity loss etc., etc. Finally, along with other means of population control, immigration reduction is an appropriate policy to pursue if our environment is to be protected against the current demographic and consumption trends.

I have to add that Boyd has provided a link to an anti-democratic political clique within the Sierra Club that is only bent on perpetuating the current incumbent Board of Directors; a Board which refuses to take a position on immigration because of its ‘controversy’. Finally, the site to which Boyd links us has resorted to orchestrating Karl Rove-like distortions and defamation when it characterizes the well respected environmentalists it opposes as “right wing racists”: Dick Lamm? David Pimentel? Frank Morris? Robert Roy van de Hoek? These guys are neither racists nor the unwilling tools of racists. I think they are the real deal.

What’s going on here? Wes Boyd is leading Move-On.Com on an errant hay ride. Let’s get back on task before we get split off on divergent wedge issues.

http://www.sozadee.com/e107/news.php

Funny, all this kinda reminds me about how the religious right co-opted anti-porn feminist rhetoric in order to put a veneer of "political correctness" to cover their reactionary, anti-sex (and, of course, anti-woman) agenda. And, IMHO, those activists against TV/media got co-opted by the repressive forces of the State for the same reason.

I just found a well written report on the Sierra Controversey at:

www.newcomm.org/hostiletakeover.pdf

It is a well balanced report that proves (at least to me) that there is a well orchestrated attempt by outside anti-immigrant organizations to take over the Sierra Club.