regulations to inform donors exactly how much of their money was going to the cause they thought they were supporting. The Heritage Foundation raced forth with an issues bulletin announcing that any such rule changes would subject church leaders to vicious attacks, and would increase the paperwork on every Christian organization . . . inevitably lessening the funds each charity can use for its stated purpose. (Christianity itself being the obvious target of this Democratic subterfuge of reform.) And just to give the cause the imprimatur of elected office, a favorite congressman of the Christian Right, John Conlan of Arizona (Hes never been honest, Barry Goldwater once said about him), was drafted to explain that the high overhead of direct-mail campaigns was a boon to the charity-customers: it represented start-upprospectingcosts that would permit organizations to raise yet more money down the line. (Defends charities against Big Government, read the caption beneath a picture of Conlan in Conservative Digestthe magazine Richard Viguerie published.)Heres the thing, though: as is the case with most garden-variety pyramid schemes, the supposed start-up costs never seemed to stop. And conservative groups that finally decoupled their causes from Vigueries firm found their fundraising costs falling to less than fifty cents on the dollar. Viguerie would point out his clients didnt feel ripped off. At that, maybe some were in on the con, toofor instance, his client Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti-smut group, took in an estimated $2.3 million over a two-year period, with more than 80 percent going to Vigueries company; the groups principal was future S&L fraudster Charles Keating.It all became too much for Marvin Liebman, the Dr. Frankenstein who had placed the business model in Vigueries palpitating hands. Liebman told conservative apostate Alan Crawford, author of the valuable 1980 exposeThunder on the Right, that Viguerie and company rape the public. Another source familiar with the conservative direct-mail industry wondered to Crawford, How anyone of any sensitivity can bear to read those letters scrawled by little old women on Social Security who are giving up a dollar they cannot afford to part with . . . without feeling bad is unbelievable.Such qualms clearly did not carry the dayand now the practice is apparently too true to the heart of conservatism to die. In 2007, theWashington Post reported on the lucrative fundraising sideline worked up by syndicated columnist Linda Chavez. George W. Bush had nominated Chavez to be his first secretary of labor, but then backpedaled after reports that she had lied about an undocumented worker living in her house. Among the prime red-meat entries on her resume is a book called Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics. And while Chavez probably wouldnt have brought much reliable wisdom to the task of regulating organized labor, its quite clear from the Post report that she had mastered the art of the shakedown. In her direct-mail career, she had used phone banks and direct-mail solicitations to raise tens of millions of dollars, founding several political action committees with bankable names: the Republican Issues Committee,