Hi Joe,
First my two wishes: (1) for Tuesday to be here and gone; (2) for people to stop using blogs and repeat/identical articles as sources.
Now, if you read the WashPo article all the way through, you'll see that this is also happening in McCain's coffers too:
S
en. John McCain's campaign has also had questionable donations slip through.
Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's communication's director, said that "no organization can fully insulate itself from these problems. The McCain campaign has accepted contributions from fraudulent contributors like 'A for You,' 'Adorable Manabat,' 'The Gun Shop,' and 'Jesus II' and hundreds of anonymous donors."
Why is this on page 2 of this so-called liberal rag? Yours for the guessing
Now, look at the end of the article:
Campaign finance lawyers said there is a long history of debate within the FEC about how to ensure that donors use their own credit cards.
Election lawyer Brett Kappel said the FEC has never grappled with the question of cash cards. "The whole system is set up for them to accept the payment, then determine whether it is legal or not. And if it's not, send it back. That's what the statute requires," he said.
So this just reinforces for me, personally, why we need federally financed elections, with no donations whatsoever. To me, it's just common sense. How in the world is anyone who is not uber wealthy supposed to try to get into office with all this nonsense going on (and by nonsense I include the lobbying).
Also, not for nothing, if you check out this article from the BBC, you'll see that proportionately, Obama's campaign is taking in more from
private donors, while McCain's campaign elected to take federal funds, which skews the numbers [of private donations] to a considerable degree. That leaves open the question of just what the number of fraudulent donations would be, if we were to reduce these bogus donations
proportionately.
Mr McCain has decided to take public financing, which means that from 1 September he has a maximum of $84m [£51m] to spend on his campaign. The McCain campaign is no longer accepting donations, except to its compliance fund - money to pay for lawyers, accountants and other expenses involved in maintaining compliance with federal election laws. The Republican National Committee, however, can still raise money to support the McCain campaign.
Barack Obama is the first candidate not to take public financing since the system was introduced in the mid-1970s. In September, the Obama campaign raised $153m [£93m], a new record for a single month, and can continue fundraising.
editing to add the bbc link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7596690.stm
I would guess that if McCain's campaign were not accepting the public financing and raising their funds in the same grass roots manner that Obama's campaign is, we'd see similar results.
All of this just makes me want to see an end to the circus that our national elections have become. Sorry if that's off topic, but that's the conclusion that I came to after sifting through your links, as well as the BBC article. This is such nonsense, the way we conduct our elections and campaigns. SNL appearances? Please, this is so stupid. We're a bunch of tv-addicted idiots, really.
Now, as for the rest of your sources, one, blogs don't count: they are opinions. Sure, sometimes they cite sources, but all too often, they are the ones already "out there."
One of your links (this one
Obama accepting cash from untraceable prepaid credit cards) is merely an identical repeat of the WashPo article, and it even says so at the top. (Always check your sources.)
Another one of your links (this one
http://electionlawblog.org/archives/012090.html ) is oh-so-official looking that at first glance one would think that only Obama's campaign has had these fraudulent donations. Look again: it's a blog, not a legal analysis, as one would think at first glance. (Always check your sources. How come this one didn 't mention that McCain's campaign has had some of the same crap going on??)
I don't understand the inclusion of the last link in your list of sources--the Reuters article about gift cards and why people would use them (those who do not have good enough credit to obtain bona fide credit cards, etc).
So. How's that?
Right Mr Bush?
