Posted on 02/17/2015 7:51:04 AM PST by xzins
The late, great Eric Hoffer once said that, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Some people have started to wonder whether that’s happened to groups in the conservative movement – and that’s understandable. Reports about sleazy activities by conservative groups have not exactly been in short supply over the last couple of years. Damaging stories have popped up on the Daily Beast, Mother Jones, Washington Post, the Politico and at the Daily Caller among other outlets. Additionally, for those of us who have a lot of friends in the Tea Party and among grassroots conservatives, stories of abuse have become rampant. That may be why you’ve heard people like Ann Coulter and Dana Loesch publicly suggesting that there are groups out there ripping people off. However, the problem with the articles that have come out so far is that most of them have come from liberal outlets and have only discussed limited aspects of a few organizations. That naturally led people to wonder if they were reading hit pieces. As to the rumors, there are always two sides to every story and it’s difficult to know how much weight to place on anecdotal stories.
(Excerpt) Read more at rightwingnews.com ...
This is a truly sad report. Rove wastes money and others manipulate us just to enrich themselves.
What better reason that to give to FREE REPUBLIC!
FREE REPUBLIC is your VOICE for conservatism on the internet, in the media.
All I know is that the Liberals spent a LOT of money in 2014 and got their butts kicked on election day.
Then imagine how much worse they would have lost if the money donated to conservative PACs had all been used to fight the fight.
Think just of the Virginia governor’s race.
To my mind, most of these records if true are completely reprehensible, bordering on near fraud, actually. With the exception of CFG who I think is legitimately conservative and not GOPe related, they are pitiful records.
I had suspicions about Jenny Beth Martin and the TPP here in Georgia and was rightly so.
There was a thread yesterday from someone asking what to do about donations to ‘tea party whatevers’. My advice was to put the money into individual campaigns and bypass them altogether.
I need a little clarification. So, the Total Spent is the amount of money raised that went “out” for whatever reason or expense, and Independent Expenditures & Direct Contributions is the amount that actually went to a candidate’s campaign? Am I understanding correctly?
Summary
How many conservative candidates lost in 2014 because of a lack of funds? How many of them came up short in primaries, lost winnable seats or desperately tried to fight off better-funded challengers? How much of a difference would another 50 million dollars have made last year? That’s a very relevant question because the 10 PACs at the bottom of this list spent $54,318,498 and only paid out $3,621,896 to help get Republicans elected. If that same $54,318,498 had gone to the Club for Growth Action PAC and it had been as efficient with it as it was with the money it had, $47,800,278 would have gone to Republican candidates instead of the meager $3,621,896 that those candidates received from those 10 PACs during this cycle. The conservative movement has a right to expect more than this from the PACs that are representing it.
did you know that despite the fact that it raised a staggering 13 million dollars, The National Draft Ben Carson for President isn’t affiliated with Ben Carson and the small percentage of money it spent on independent expenditures didn’t go to him?
how many are funded by democrats?
how many are funding vote splitter candidates? (Huckabee)
That’s the way I read it. If you further read the entire accompanying narrative with the article at the leak, you will see that a common trick by some of them is to expense-out money to vendors for all sorts of things. It also says there are MANY of these PACs whose ‘vendors’ are employees, workers, relatives or other persons not wholly identified. What’s worse FEC regs don’t require them to go beyond the first vendor expenditure. Thus, that expenditure gets credited as an expense. This study sought to find out the truth - and the truth is very ugly my FRiend.
Personally, I am relieved to see my choices of Club for Growth and individual candidates only vindicated.
My first rule is, "If they repeatedly buy lots of airtime on Fox News, they are probably scammers."
Bookmarking
"the bottom 10 performing PACs we researched spent $54,318,498 overall and only paid out $3,621,896 to candidates"
I’ve suspected this all along. When I saw Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots being interviewed on TV about what she and her group directly did to help that professor oust Eric Cantor in Virginia and exactly what her group was doing in the way of funding the Senatorial Primary in Louisiana, I got my answer - essentially not a damn thing.
Frumpy Jenny Beth (Tea Party Patriots) has made millions off the backs of sincere Patriots.
She went from bankruptcy to living in a lakefront mansion in a gated community.
She cleaned houses at one time for cripes sake. She graduated from Reinhart college (must have majored in Grifting). Her reported payouts from that group were enormous both in salary and ‘consulting’. Scam artist in my opinion.
That organization shouldn’t get another damned nickel IMO.
Right, and she likes to brag about all the Tea Party groups that are under the Tea Party Patriots umbrella in order to lure in more suckers.
The last time I went to her site I saw a lot of Tea Party groups listed, but a vast majority of them hadn’t met in 3 years...they no longer existed.
Mark Levin does ads for her. I wish he’d check them out.
My situation here in Georgia is simple. Any ‘republican’ running for Senate against Johnny backstabber Isakson in the primary gets my money. My own congressman has backstabbed me multiple times in his very short tenure so the same treatment for him.
For the national races, I’ll give to Cruz’ campaign directly and that is it. I don’t need Tea Party anyorg.org for anything, frankly. This study reported here shows I’m right as far as I’m concerned.
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