Archive » Campaign finance

So, the president is going to tell us who his computer security czar soon.
Let’s hope it’s not the same person who ran the Obama campaign’s grossly insecure online credit card donation operations.

Regular readers will remember Mauricio Celis.
Guest-blogger See-Dubya was on the Friend of Hillary’s trail in January 2008, tracked his Mexican money laundering ties and bizarro police impersonation antics, and reported on his indictment.
Today, he was re-sentenced to 10 years’ probation for impersonating a lawyer. It’s the Demo-crook wrist slap of the day:
A judge threw out [...]

In my column on the SEIU today, I mentioned how the George Soros-funded group, Americans Coming Together, was hit with a $775,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission – the third largest civil penalty levied in the panel’s history — for gross campaign finance violations.
Yesterday, in little-noticed news, California’s campaign finance panel fined Soros directly [...]

Dirty.

Arlen Specter’s campaign finance travesty deserves more than just mockery. It deserves action. Here are screenshots of his misleading “Specter for the Cure” website, which is a slimy front to raise campaign funds:

And the fine print buried at the bottom of the home page:

Here is how you file an FEC complaint.
Here are the FEC rules [...]

Is it possible for Barack Obama to pick a Commerce Secretary nominee who’ll actually make it past first base? Bill Richardson withdrew in the midst of a pay-for-play scandal. Judd Gregg withdrew in the midst of a humiliating power play over the Census and porkulus bill.
Now, former Democrat Gov. Gary Locke — a lawyer for [...]

He’s got gobs of cash and lots of grumbly Democrats who want to get their paws on it all.
Legally, he can:
1) donate the extra money to charity
2) Transfer it to another political campaign
3) Dole it out in $2,000 increments to local candidates.
What to do? What to do?
Democrats carrying significant campaign debt after winning a string [...]

Charge!

Tip of the iceberg.

Hope and Charge.

Swiped.

Funny money.

Chillin’. UPDATE: It’s from the political Kasparovs who brought you “General Betray-us”.

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 [...]