Free Republic

If you listen carefully, you can hear the stampede of politicians distancing themselves from their once best-friend - Hotel magnate Sant Singh Chatwal - as AP reports, he plead guilty Thursday to charges he secretly funneled more than $180,000 in illegal campaign contributions to three unnamed candidates and coached someone to lie about it. Without the contributions "nobody will even talk to you," Chatwal said. "That's the only way to buy them, get into the system." Welcome to the ugly truth of American politik.  The FT details that Sant Singh Chatwal, chairman of Hampshire Hotels Management, pleaded guilty on Thursday...

The Supreme Court’s decision last week in McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission, eliminating the total limit that an individual can contribute in an election cycle to candidates and party committees, amounts to a shot of adrenalin to American democracy. The court ruled that such limits violate First Amendment free speech protection. Limits remain on the total funds that an individual can contribute to a given candidate in an election cycle. But the limit on the total contributions that an individual can make are now gone. The principle involved - that participation in elections and supporting candidates of one’s choice is...

When you have a problem, you look for a solution. Whether you’re an engineer, a teacher, a scientist, or a cook, the goal is to solve an identified problem. The field of politics works the same way; the main challenge is that different sides have such different views of not only what the right solution is, but also of what the problems are. Campaign Finance laws – which have always existed, but were turbocharged in the mid-1970s through the Federal Election Campaign Act and its successors – are written to deal with one simple problem: there’s too much money in...

Until this morning, the federal government could limit the amount of money you contribute for political speech. Today in McCutcheon vs. FEC, the Supreme Court invalidated overall contribution limits. The federal government limited individual campaign contributions to $48,000 overall and $123,200 to everything (PACs, candidates, national parties) each cycle. The Supreme Court struck down the limits, holding that the government’s justification for limiting free speech rights – to keep money out of politics and the avoid the appearance of impropriety – failed. This decision cuts at the heart of the leftist narrative on free speech attacks. The heart of the...

Breaking: scotus strikes down aggregate campaign contribution limits 5-4 per Chief Justice Roberts in McCutcheon case.

For many Americans, Fox News is their “alternative” choice for news. They’ve made it the No. 1 cable news network, largely because they believe its “fair and balanced” promotional slogan? Many even believe Fox leans to the right and provides news they can’t get anywhere else. But is Fox really different from the rest of the media? Or has it been successful merely at positioning itself as different? Would it surprise you to know that individuals at News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, gave nearly six times as much money to Barack Obama than Mitt Romney in the...

While Sandy pummeled the East Coast Monday night, Michelle Obama was soliciting campaign contributions from folks affected by the storm. The following was sent at 7:44 PM via email to voters in North Carolina and Virginia just around the time Sandy made landfall: From: Michelle Obama > Subject: I know we've asked a lot of you, but we're almost there To: Date: Monday, October 29, 2012, 7:44 PM Friend -- There's still time to meet Barack and get two of the best seats in the house on Election Night. If you make a donation today, you'll be automatically entered to...

A soon to be released report from the conservative Government Accountability Institute shows that President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has increasingly collected more electronic donations from non-existent ZIP codes throughout the 2012 campaign cycle. From February through June this year the GAI findings reported that the Obama campaign collected $175,816.26 in electronic donations from non-existent ZIP codes. One month later, the campaign raised $411,369.55 through such donations and $197,464.59 in August. By the end of September, the Obama campaign raked in $2,199,204.38 – thanks to donations from non-existent ZIP codes. The upcoming GAI report suggests the Obama campaign is allowing...

I first wrote about Barack Obama’s “Dubious donations” for the New York Post just before the 2008 election. We returned to the subject earlier this month in a series of posts upon the publication of the Government Accountability Institute report documenting this fact: Same as it ever was. Today the New York Post arrives on the scene at just about the same point in the campaign that I did four years ago with an exclusive report that provides a case study:

Politicians use their e-mail lists to continually hit their base with requests for donations. Everyone who puts their name on a political list expects to see those e-mails on a constant basis, usually tied to the news cycle. Michele Bachmann's campaign is particularly adept at this, with missives that start by saying something like this completely hypothetical opening sentence: "Senate Democrats passed a tax increase on job creators last week, so it's more important than ever to have me in the House fighting for our economic health." That kind of moment-to-moment marketing approach both uses potential flash points to encourage...

No officials offer to return bank's blood moneyThe fallout from the HSBC money laundering scandal continues to reverberate around the globe, but U.S. Congress members apparently are in no hurry to return millions of dollars they have received from the scandal-plagued bank. WND, which originally broke the story on the HSBC debacle, conducted an analysis of Federal Election Commission records specific to the company political action committee’s generosity toward Congress. The investigation centered upon two congressional panels with primary oversight of the industry: The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs, and the House Committee on Financial Services. Since...

Two New Jersey lawmakers tasked with federal oversight of the banking industry are keeping quiet about whether they will return “blood money” donated to their campaign war chests. HSBC executives already have appeared before the U.S. Senate for the bank’s global role in a drug-gang and terrorist money laundering scandal. However, The Revered Review is now pressing Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J) and Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J./5th District) about what they plan on doing with the tens of thousands of combined dollars that the scandal-plagued bank’s political action committee has given them... TRR analyzed Federal Election Commission records specific to the...

Democrats think your money is theirs to give to other people, while Republicans believe your money is your money to do with as you please. Yes, that is a tired, old political cliché, but all clichés are born out of some level of truth. President Obama seems to be both a Democrat and Perpetuator-in-Chief of political clichés by coming up with a novel, yet oh-so-liberal, way of raising money for his re-election campaign. In the true fashion of someone who believes wholeheartedly that he can put your money to better use than you can, President Obama has set up an...

The Romney campaign announced today that it raised $106.1 million in June, its best fundraising month to date. The money was raised by Romney for President, Romney Victory and the Republican National Committee. The campaign reported having $160 million on hand at the end of the month. June’s loot far exceeds May’s total of more than $76 million, out-raising the Obama campaign by $16 million. The Obama campaign has not yet released its own fundraising numbers for the month of June.

When people say Thursday's Supreme Court ruling was a big win for President Obama, the Romney Campaign must shake their heads just a little bit. Since the ruling, Team Romney has raked in $5.5 million. That money isn't coming from big time donors at fundraisers, but is made up of 55,000 separate donations, with 65 percent of those people donating for the first time. These numbers come after Romney outraised President Obama in May, spent less and Obama seems to be draining his war chest quickly. Just one month after the start of the general election campaign, Mr. Obama has...

What are the tax implications of the zombie apocalypse? The only certainties in life are death and taxes, but how do you handle the taxes when death doesn't go quite as planned? Law professor Adam Chodorow takes a stab at estate planning for the undead in perhaps the only legal paper to cite both the Internal Revenue Code and Weekend at Bernie's II. Chodorow, a professor at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, authored the paper "Death and Taxes...and Zombies," which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Iowa Law Review. Chodorow notes that, while the...

 Our Debt to the Catholic Churchby Sebastian R. Fama Attacks on the Catholic Church have never been in short supply. The Church’s critics have been maligning her and predicting her demise for centuries. While those same critics fade off into history one by one, the Church continues on in her mission, sometimes shaken but never defeated. Whenever scandals arise in the Church gleeful detractors try to portray the aberration as the norm. Starting with Judas, the Church has always had within its walls those who would betray Christ. However, to focus on such individuals while ignoring those who take their...

Today the Journal Sentinel is launching an interactive page that will allow you to explore contributions to candidates and political action committees in the gubernatorial recall election on June 5. With it, you can compare campaign contributions to any of the candidates or PACs that have raised money in the recall election through January, which was the last filing deadline. We will update the data as committees submit additional filings. After you choose two committees you would like to compare, interactive maps will show how much money each candidate received from each state. For instance, if you choose the political...

Sometimes, good intentions bring bad results. Such is the case with the so-called Stop Special Interest Money Now initiative – a promise to fix what ails California politics by unconstitutionally muzzling someone else's freedom of speech. What could go wrong? . . . The Stop Special Interest Money Now initiative is another well-intentioned infringement of Americans' basic rights. There is a reason freedom of speech was part of the first amendment to the Constitution. The freedom to speak on political matters, especially when offensive to those in power, was one of the basic rights American revolutionaries fought and died for....

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson contributed another $5.5 million to Winning Our Future, the super-PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, according to Federal Election Commission documents filed Tuesday. The former House Speaker has vowed to stay in the race until the Tampa, Fla., convention in August, and denies that he’s only being kept afloat by the large donations from Adelson. “I have 176,000 supporters at newt.org — they want me to stay in the race. I really represent their interests as individuals," he told CBS last week, claiming that "95 percent have given less than $250" — meaning they haven't hit their legal...