Back to Basics

Shortly before the election, the Obama campaign sent out this email: “If you’ve waited until the last minute to give, this is the moment. This is the last time I’ll ask you.”

Joe Biden can go gaffe-free for longer than that promise lasted:

In what he called “my last election,” President Barack Obama scored a hard-fought but comfortable victory over Mitt Romney last month, but that doesn’t mean his email list will not longer be hit up for campaign cash. To wit, Mr. Obama’s electoral operation, Obama for America, is asking their supporters to contribute after filling out a form backing his plan to increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

“Thanks for sharing your story. The next chapter begins today. Stand with President Obama for the next four years,” a subsequent contribution form declares. Suggested donation amounts range from $15 to $1,000 and a picture of Mr. Obama is presented with the text, “Stand with me, work with me, let’s finish what we’ve started.”

Presumably the gift registry is still open for business as well.

Why the need to keep fundraising as if they’re still campaigning? Because they’re still campaigning:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbrMHLJI-HA

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton continues to ask for donations to help retire Hillary’s 2008 campaign debt.

This is an amazingly explicit discussion of how the Democrats in Tennessee used the power of government spending to get donations for the party.  From the Washington Post:

Tennessee Democrats, who’d watched their conservative voters drift to the GOP, finally lost the state House in 2010. That had been a financial lifeline for Democrats, since the legislature has broad powers over patronage.

“That pretty much was the end,” said Cheek, the executive committee member. “Because we have nothing left. In the other low points, we had the Election Commission, we had the Building Commission. . . . If you wanted to get state deposits into your bank, those were all ours. And that’s where you’d raise your money.”

Losing those powers “really kicked the props out from under the financing of the party,” Cheek said. . . .

Hat tip to Larry White for pointing to this link.

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus stated on Thursday that he was requesting the Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice to initiate a full investigation into President Barack Obama’s Internet fundraising for his re-election “war chest.”

Priebus sent a letter to Attorney General Holder on Thursday demanding a probe of the Obama campaign‘s “troubling pattern of behavior” in fundraising which could violate campaign laws by accepting online campaign contributions from foreigners.

“The President’s campaign committee does not use the industry standard practices to guard against receiving fraudulent or excessive contributions via the Internet,” Priebus wrote in his letter to Holder.

Priebus’s request for a probe follows a report published this week by the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative political watchdog group, as described by the Examiner.

The report claims that the current online campaign contribution system lacks accountability and transparency, and that the Obama campaign lacks adequate screening for donors’ citizenship and failed to impose basic e-commerce safeguards, such as requiring donors to provide the three-digit Card Verification Value code on back of a credit card.

Under U.S. federal election law, contributions from foreign nationals to presidential campaigns are forbidden.

“This new report suggests that the President’s campaign did not take the appropriate measures to correct for the vulnerabilities uncovered during the previous election cycle, in which reports surfaced that the president’s campaign accepted a large number of excessive contributions and contributions from donors using fake names, suggesting a pattern of questionable behavior that is troubling,” Priebus wrote to Holder.

The Obama campaign released a statement, saying the campaign had not accepted “donations from foreign nationals or any other ineligible individual” and the campaign “voluntarily goes above and beyond Federal Election Commitments to ensure the integrity of fund-raising efforts.”

“The allegations made by Government Accountability Institute ( GAI) are more reflective of the group’s politics than any grain of truth,” said the Obama campaign, adding that even the group’s chairman and president had “strong Republican ties.”

However, as reported by the Examiner, during the 2008 election cycle, there were allegations that Obama’s campaign accepted donations from Palestinians. The Obama administration claimed they returned the money, but the Palestinian denied receiving the $30,000 contribution.

How can the media avoid this?  Isn’t this viewed as extremely cynical?  Is this the change that Obama was referring to?

“The Illegal-Donor Loophole” is the headline of a Daily Beast story by Peter Schweizer of the conservative Government Accountability Institute and Peter Boyer, former reporter at The New Yorker and The New York Times.

The article tells how Obama.com, a website owned by an Obama fundraiser who lives in China but has visited the Obama White House 11 times, sends solicitations mostly to foreign email addresses and links to the Obama campaign website’s donation page.

The Obama website, unlike those of most campaigns, doesn’t ask for the three- or four-digit credit card verification number. That makes it easier for donors to use fictitious names and addresses to send money in.

Campaigns aren’t allowed to accept donations from foreigners. But it looks like the Obama campaign has made it easier for them to slip money in. How much foreign money has come into the Obama campaign? Schweizer and Boyer say there’s no way to know. . . .

Sources tell me an alternate procedure is in the works in case the pothole isn’t filled in time. The contingency planning includes slightly altering the route of the First Lady’s motorcade to steer around the pothole, but hopefully those kinds of drastic measures won’t be necessary:

The office of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a staunch ally of President Barack Obama, asked town officials in the Berkshires to fix a pothole in the path of an upcoming Michelle Obama motorcade, according to a report.

The Boston Herald reports Patrick is hosting a $20,000-a-seat fundraiser for the first lady at his home in the western Massachusetts hamlet of Richmond (pop. 1,475) next month. A Patrick aide called Richmond’s town administrator and asked him to fix a pothole on the road Obama will have to take to Patrick’s estate, called Sweet P Farm. Richmond’s administrator alerted officials in the next town over, where the pothole is actually located.

The town administrator in West Stockbridge, Mark Webber, was happy to oblige the governor’s request.

“That’s one of those spots we had planned to fix. Now we’ll just fix it a couple weeks sooner,” Webber said, adding the repair “isn’t a big deal” and will cost “a couple of tons of blacktop, a couple of hundred bucks.”

You’re probably asking yourself, “won’t the pothole be covered by the red carpet and the rose petals Governor Patrick will put down?” Possibly, but that would only take care of the problem from an aesthetic standpoint. The real fear is that if the motorcade might hit the pothole on the way back to the airport after the dinner, spilling the fundraising haul everywhere.

In defense of Governor Patrick, those limos ride pretty low and, if not filled in, the pothole might have been enough to stop the motorcade in its tracks.

Howie Carr ponders a hypothetical imaging doomsday scenario:

Imagine if Mitt Romney as governor had called up the town manager of Wolfeboro, N.H., and asked that the road to his lakefront digs be repaired so that he could entertain … Laura Bush.

At $20,000 a head.

If for some reason the pothole isn’t filled in time, it will be Bush’s fault.

(h/t Weasel Zippers)

My own guess is that education vouchers would not only vastly improve the quality of education (improving it the most for those who are stuck in the worst schools, namely where the poor, minorities live), but it would also reduce unionization of teachers and reduce the political pressure that helps hurt the quality of education for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. This discussion explains why you would be missing much of the public unions’ political activity if you only looked at their donations to politicians. From the WSJ:

What do the American Ireland Fund, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network have in common?All have received some of the more than $330 million that America’s two largest teachers unions spent in the past five years on outside causes, political campaigns, lobbying and issue education.

The contributions—totaling more than $200 million from the National Education Association and more than $130 million from the American Federation of Teachers—were disclosed in annual reports that unions file with the Labor Department detailing their spending on political activities and advocacy work, as well as separate political-action-committee filings. . . .

Members’ dues underwrite much of the unions’ “political activities,” but not donations to candidates, parties and PACs. Those are funded by voluntary contributions. The NEA, the largest teachers union, with about 3.2 million members, also has a super PAC, which can raise unlimited funds. That super PAC had more than $3 million in cash on hand the end of June. . . .

Always look under the Astroturf mat.

Senate Democrats have failed to pass a budget in nearly 1,200 days.

But they are carving out time today to vote on the loophole-ridden, incumbency protection racket, masquerading as “campaign finance reform,” dubbed the DISCLOSE Act.

Wait a minute. Didn’t they already vote on the DISCLOSE Act?

Why, yes. Yes, they did.

They voted on it in September 2010 before the midterms. And it failed to meet the 60-vote threshold.

I told you two years ago in July 2010 why the DISCLOSE Act was a sham:

You know when a politician starts a sentence with “frankly,” he’s about to lie to your face. The same principle applies to campaign finance legislation dubbed the “DISCLOSE Act.” The voter’s instinctive reaction should be: What are they trying to hide now? Drafted out of public view with left-wing lobbyists and rammed through Congress after bypassing committee hearings, this bum bill would have been better named the CLOSEDDOOR Act.

At a Rose Garden press conference on Monday, President Obama decried the influence of “shadow groups” on elections and urged the Senate to pass the “reform” sponsored by N.Y. Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer. But the loophole-ridden package exempts large nonprofits with 500,000 or more members. Behemoth labor unions get preferential treatment. Bradley Smith, former Federal Elections Commission chairman, noted that the law places radical speech-squelching restrictions on companies’ ability to run independent political ads: “(I)f you’re a company with a government contract of over $10 million (like more than half of the top 50 U.S. companies) or if you’re a company with more than 20 percent foreign shareholders, you can’t even mention a candidate in an ad for up to a full year before the election. … There are no similar prohibitions for unions representing government contractors or unions with foreign membership.”

GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell put it more starkly during Tuesday’s debate before the Senate cloture vote on the bill: The DISCLOSE Act, he said, is a “transparent attempt to rig the fall elections.” At bottom, McConnell diagnosed correctly, this is a jobs-protection bill for entrenched incumbents more interested in protecting their hides than protecting the Constitution. While the cloture vote fell three votes short of the needed 60 on Tuesday, Schumer vowed to resurrect the issue “again and again and again until we pass it.”

…Team Obama and their allies on Capitol Hill have some nerve gnashing their teeth about transparency after two years of backdoor kickbacks, secret Big Labor deals, C-SPAN camera evasion, White House disclosure-ducking coffeehouse meetings, and sunlight-shirking holiday and midnight floor votes. And while they preached about America’s right to know and posed as crusaders for open access, Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate continued to stonewall on public hearings for health care rationing czar Donald Berwick — Obama’s recess-appointed head of Medicare and Medicaid.

A White House spokesman called the battle over the DISCLOSE Act a “defining moment for the public.” Nah. It’s just another example of the Democratic majority’s endless hide-and-seek hypocrisy.

Related from former FEC chariman Bradley Smith: A proposed campaign-finance law attempts to scare and regulate opponents into silence.

More: McConnell vows a filibuster today. He talked to Mark Levin about disclosure theater here.

The Soros-backed Center for American Progress is aggressively pushing the DISCLOSE Act today on Twitter.