Archive » Campaign finance

The Left tries a pre-emptive strike…

Impersonating a deputy, attempting to take nude woman into “custody” at a Quickie Mart at 4AM, wearing only a bathrobe? Pure gravy.

Update 9/7 1:45pm Eastern. Hmmmmm. The foreign funny money mystery just got murkier.

Update 9/7. More details. He was “delirious:”
Disgraced Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu remained in custody Friday at a Colorado hospital after his arrest days after he failed to show up for a court appearance related to a felony theft conviction.
FBI agents took Hsu into [...]

Democrat Jim Doyle’s got a Hsu fetish
Update 4:30pm Eastern: Wisconsin’s Democrat governor is standing by Hsu…
Even though Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu remains a fugitive from justice, Democratic Governor Jim Doyle is not parting with the $2,000 in donations he got from the New York businessman. Doyle says he is monitoring the situation with Hsu to [...]

Update 9:15am Eastern 9/5. My column today is about Hsu and the Democrats’ funny money. I take on the Asian-American groups who are doing exactly what they did during Chinagate in the 1990s–play the race card.
While the campaign finance reform crowd ducks under the table, there is one vociferous group making noise. Like clockwork, Asian-American [...]

Meet Rehman Jinnah.

There’s an important breaking court decision on a political free speech case involving my friends at KVI radio in Seattle. A reader e-mails:
A unanimous Washington state supreme court ruling, issued this morning, reversed a lower court ruling that held radio commentary by Seattle’s
KVI-570’s Kirby Wilbur and John Carlson made “in-kind” contributions when
they promoted an anti-gas [...]

For those of you who have been following the story of the McCain-Feingold-inspired crackdown on Seattle’s conservative talk radio, Ryan Sager has an update:
The gas-tax opponents who were slapped for not reporting radio commentaries as “in-kind” contributions to their ballot-initiative campaign have fired back.
In complying with the judge’s order, they’ve made new campaign-finance filings listing [...]

Ryan Sager at the NYPost follows up on the McCain-Feingold-inspired crackdown on Seattle’s conservative talk radio:
THE campaign-finance-reform lobby has always claimed that it wants to regulate money, not speech.
So why are two talk-radio hosts being harassed by Washington state officials under local campaign-finance laws for their on-air support of an anti-tax ballot initiative?
And why did [...]

Been meaning to bring this important story to your attention:
Last week, a Thurston County, Washington, judge ruled that on-air editorial comments by two of my old friends, Seattle talk hosts Kirby Wilbur and John Carlson of KVI-AM, are considered in-kind campaign contributions, subject to reporting under state disclosure laws.
Brian Maloney, a former talk show host [...]

Ryan Sager continues his excellent coverage of the folly of campaign finance reform. His latest Tech Central Station column reports on some on the Left finally catching on to “the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to let the government decide who can and cannot engage in political speech.”
Ya think?

Eugene Volokh has a post up that bears on the FEC controvery, the Apple Computer controversy and the proposed Free Flow of Information Act. An excerpt:
It turns out that many states have statutes (or state constitutional provisions) that do protect a journalist’s privilege. The California statute, which is at issue in the recent Apple trade [...]

National Journal’s Technology Daily (subscription required) notes this statement posted on Sen. Russ Feingold’s web site:
As the primary Senate authors of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, we have spent years fighting to clean up elections and ensure that powerful monied interests do not drown out the voices of everyday Americans in our political [...]

I was going to respond in detail to this New York Times article about the FEC’s potential regulation of blogs, but I see that Ed Morrissey has beat me to it.
Several Democratic FEC Commissioners are quoted in the article. They basically say that bloggers have nothing to worry about. What a relief! But hold on. [...]

Chris Muir shows us the regulatory wave of the future in today’s Day by Day cartoon.

K. Daniel Glover of National Journal’s Technology Daily has published a story on the FEC vs. blogs controversy. You can’t read the article without a subscription, so I’m not going to bother with a link, but the article quotes three Democrats–FEC member Danny McDonald, FEC member Ellen Weintraub, and Rep. Martin Meehan of Massachusetts–saying, basically, [...]

CNET reporter Declan McCullagh has an important piece warning of the “coming crackdown on blogging.”
Joshua Claybourn of In the Agora analyzes the campaign finance law absurdities and First Amendment infringements on bloggers here.
Winfield Myers is on the same wavelength. He writes:
The possibilities that [FEC commissioner Bradley] Smith lays out are chilling and, if enacted, could [...]

This is pretty amazing - a searchable database put together by an enterprising team at FundRace that allows you to find out who your neighbors have been giving political donations to and how much.
Personally, my husband discourages me from talking politics with the neighbors. Our kids wouldn’t have anyone to play with if [...]

How many times have you read a story about ethics or campaign finance that quotes “non-partisan” groups such as the Center for Responsive Politics, Common Cause, Democracy 21, Public Citizen and the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington? (A Nexis search I just ran for “non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics” brings up 421 hits.)
Well, [...]