Love the way Rachel Maddow has slyly slipped in the words "C Street"

madfloridian

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Wed Jul-08-09 10:53 PM
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Love the way Rachel Maddow has slyly slipped in the words "C Street"

Edited on Wed Jul-08-09 11:05 PM by madfloridian

The last two nights Rachel has sort of slipped in the words C Street, per Mark Sanford's reference to it in his confession.

Confused how these houses and groups connect: C Street, The Cedars, Ivanwald, the Fellowship, The Family. As we see in the case of the unfaithful governor, apparently they are there to counsel in time of need. And to have an effect on world leaders.

This is something I have never heard mentioned on TV before, at least I don't remember it being talked about out loud. We have talked of it here, but Rachel just mentioned it in passing two nights in a row.

Some very important and influential leaders in both parties are part of that group. I wonder how many decisions about world events are made through such influences. Maybe I don't even want to know.

The Washington Post article in late June....refers to the house this way.

No sign explains the prim and proper red brick house on C Street SE. Nothing hints at its secrets. It blends into the streetscape, tucked behind the Library of Congress, a few steps from the Cannon House Office Building, a few more steps to the Capitol. This is just the way its residents want it to be. Almost invisible.

But through one week's events, this stately old pad -- a pile of sturdy brick that once housed a convent -- has become the very nexus of American scandal, a curious marker in the gallery of capital shame. Mark Sanford, South Carolina's disgraced Republican governor and a former congressman, looked here for answers -- for support, for the word of God -- as his marriage crumbled over his affair with an Argentine woman. John Ensign, the senator from Nevada who just seven days earlier also was forced to admit a career-shattering affair, lives there.

"C Street," Sanford said Wednesday during his diffuse, cryptic, utterly arresting confessional news conference, is where congressmen faced "hard questions."

On any given day, the rowhouse at 133 C St. SE -- well appointed, with American flag flying, white-and-green-trimmed windows and a pleasant garden -- fills with talk of power and the Lord. At least five congressmen live there, quietly renting upstairs rooms from an organization affiliated with "the Fellowship," the obsessively secretive Arlington spiritual group that organizes the National Day of Prayer breakfast, an event routinely attended by legions of top government officials. Other politicians come to the house for group spirituality sessions, prayer meetings or to simply share their troubles.

C Street, Ivanwald, Cedars...confused.

Many of the same men who are reported to live there on C Street by the Washington Post overlap to those listed as living at "Ivanwald" in an article called Jesus Plus Nothing

Undercover among America's secret theocrats

Ivanwald, which sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, Virginia, is known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the organization that sponsors it, a group of believers who refer to themselves as �the Family.� The Family is, in its own words, an �invisible� association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as �members,� as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.

A 2002 article written by Lisa Getter in the LA Times mentioned a house in Virginia called "The Cedars."

Showing Faith in Discretion

For the last two decades, a Virginia mansion has been a private hideaway for world leaders, members of Congress, and even pop star Michael Jackson. Located on a quiet residential street, the $4.4-million estate called Cedars sits at the highest point of the Potomac River, with spectacular views of Washington beyond the pool and tennis courts. It is owned by the Fellowship, the nonpartisan Christian group that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast.

While the annual breakfast is a widely known event attended by a succession of U.S. presidents and foreign dignitaries, the Fellowship's part in the breakfast is low-key. Most attendees think the event is sponsored by Congress or even the president. Likewise, the Fellowship's role in diplomacy and current events has remained in the shadows. That's the way the organization wants it, for philosophical and practical reasons.

"If you want to help people, Jesus said you don't do your alms in public," Douglas Coe, the group's leader, said in a rare interview. A Los Angeles Times review of the Fellowship's archives, which are kept at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., and an examination of documents obtained from several presidential libraries reveals an organization that has had extraordinary access and significant influence on foreign affairs for the last 50 years.

This house connects to a sister house on Capitol Hill the article says.

Eight members of Congress, including Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), live in a grand house on Capitol Hill, which is owned by a sister organization of the Fellowship. The house, which is registered as a church, routinely hosts gatherings for lawmakers and ambassadors. Members of Congress have traveled around the world on the Fellowship's behalf, sometimes mixing matters of state with religion.

So I guess that sister house would be on C Street. Which is confusing since some of the names overlap with Ivanwald.

I do know that this Fellowship has a powerful
connection to Florida through Senator Bill Nelson and his wife, Grace.

Grace Nelson was asked about Hillary Clinton, who has been a member of Grace's prayer cell in the Fellowship. I was stunned at how Nelson answered.

We contacted all of Clinton's Fellowship cell mates, but only one agreed to speak�though she stressed that there's much she's not "at liberty" to reveal. Grace Nelson used to be the organizer of the Florida Governor's Prayer Breakfast, which makes her a piety broker in Florida politics�she would decide who could share the head table with Jeb Bush. Clinton's prayer cell was tight-knit, according to Nelson, who recalled that one of her conservative prayer partners was at first loath to pray for the first lady, but learned to "love Hillary as much as any of us love Hillary." Cells like these, Nelson added, exist in "parliaments all over the world," with all welcome so long as they submit to "the person of Jesus" as the source of their power.

Grace Nelson is on the board of this group.

At Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearings for incoming State Department officials last year, Sen. Bill Nelson (D- Fla.), whose wife, Grace, is on the board of the Fellowship, complained that the State Department blocked President Bush from meeting privately at the 2001 prayer breakfast with heads of state from Rwanda, Macedonia, Congo and Slovakia.

This blog tells more about the involvement of Grace Nelson, and mentions the house at 133 C Street.

133 C Street legally and actively a church

According to the Los Angeles Times, Harper�s magazine, and the Associated Press news service, his former address, 133 C Street, S.E., two blocks from the United States Capitol, is legally and actively a church, and the six to eight congressmen and US senators domiciled on the top floor are brothers in "the Family" or "the Fellowship," a mysterious, 60-year-old, conservative, worldwide group dedicated to ending the traditional American separation between religion and politics.

...."Members, who carry no cards and are very loosely defined, are required to keep quiet about their activities. But publicly available documents reveal that the Fellowship Foundation � a central legal entity, but far from the only one involved with the group � has an $11-million-a-year budget and a board of directors including Grace Nelson, wife of Florida�s Democratic US Senator Bill Nelson. Its president is Richard Carver, Air Force assistant secretary under President Reagan. Its rich backers include Jerome Lewis, a Denver oilman; Republican contributor Michael Timmis; and Paul Temple, a Maryland investor. Among members, Getter writes, are congressmen who are in charge of the State Department and foreign-aid budgets.

"It�s an incredibly secretive, powerful group that has entree all around the world," Getter said in an interview about her article. "It has tentacles everywhere."

This segment from Jesus Plus Nothing by Jeff Sharlet tries to clarify which houses are which.

At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as �quiet diplomacy, I wouldn't say secret diplomacy,� as an �ambassador of faith.� Coe has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, �making friends� and inviting them back to the Family's unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation. A waterfall has been carved into the mansion's broad lawn, from which a bronze bald eagle watches over the Potomac River. The mansion is white and pillared and surrounded by magnolias, and by red trees that do not so much tower above it as whisper. The mansion is named for these trees; it is called The Cedars, and Family members speak of it as a person. �The Cedars has a heart for the poor,� they like to say. By �poor� they mean not the thousands of literal poor living barely a mile away but rather the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom: the senators, generals, and prime ministers who coast to the end of Twenty-fourth Street in Arlington in black limousines and town cars and hulking S.U.V.'s to meet one another, to meet Jesus, to pay homage to the god of The Cedars.

There appears to be two houses...The Cedars and Ivanwald. But I can not tell who lives where.