Free Republic

ObamaFraud: Still Not News Oct 25, 2008 As readers may recall, a couple of days ago it became clear that the Obama website had intentionally disabled all the basic credit-card-processing security checks and thereby enabled multiple contributions from donors with fake names. The excuse offered in the New York Times story was that, ah, yes, the Obama gang may appear to accept contributions from "Mr Fake Donor" of "23 Fraudulent Lane", but all those phony baloney contributions are picked up by their rigorous offline checking procedures. As many Obama supporters wrote to point out, simply because you get a message...

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Ensign (Nev.), who has spent a major part of the election cycle hectoring fellow GOP Senators to contribute to the outgunned committee, told his colleagues at their weekly luncheon Tuesday that he was contributing $300,000 from his re-election fund to the NRSC. Last month, Ensign bleakly informed his colleagues that he would have to scale back on the NRSC's independent expenditures because they had not ponied up enough money to compete with the Democrats. Through July 31, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had almost $43 million in the bank; the NRSC had $25.4 million...

Since the start of the presidential campaign in the USA, greatest differences between the Republicans and the Democrats could be seen in their views towards war in Iraq. The primaries are over and John McCain and Barack Obama remain as the pivotal rivals, one of which will head the country in the next four years. Republican John McCain is a famous Vietnam War veteran and has been an eager supporter of war in Iraq even before the US Army invaded the country. On the other hand, Democrat Barack Obama opposes war, he has done so from the very start and...

While the media elite goes after Vets for Freedom for making a TV buy for John McCain, they're giving Barack Obama a free ride as he surfs a wave of PAC money to the Democratic nomination, a wave that, if anything, is nearing tsunami proportions despite his boasts that he doesn't accept donations from PACs. The political committees of just one such entity -- which according to Obama's own website, he "begged" for their support -- dwarf the Vets' $1 million ad buy.

A Priceless Opinion The Supreme Court strikes down the Millionaire's Amendment. by Hans A. von Spakovsky IN THE EXCITEMENT over the Supreme Court's decision in the D.C. gun ban case, almost overlooked was a second decision that struck another blow against the McCain-Feingold federal campaign finance law. In Davis v. FEC, a 5-4 majority found the "Millionaire's Amendment" to be unconstitutional, holding that it imposed an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises his First Amendment rights by requiring him to choose between the right to engage in unfettered political speech or to be subject to discriminatory fundraising limitations....

Build a Republican campaign for Tom DeLay's old congressional seat and Dick Cheney will come. The vice president is scheduled to visit Houston billionaire Dan Duncan's home in River Oaks on Friday for a private, campaign fundraising event for congressional candidate Pete Olson of Sugar Land and the Texas Republican Party. Olson is running for the 22nd Congressional District seat held by Democrat Nick Lampson of Stafford. Cheney is no stranger to the local political turf. When DeLay was entangled in campaign ethics charges in late 2005, Cheney was the main attraction at a fundraising event in Houston for the...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Monday that First Amendment rights need to be expanded and cited the elimination of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms as one solution. Gingrich, a Republican, suggested allowing people to give any amount to any candidate as long as the donation is reported online within 24 hours. "Just as tax lawyers always succeed in out-thinking the (Internal Revenue Service) because they stay after five and the IRS goes home, the private-sector lawyers will always out-think the (Federal Election Commission) because they stay after five and the FEC goes home," Gingrich told about 400 people at the...

July 28, 2006 Al Franken Getting Celebrity Support By FREDERIC J. FROMMER ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON (AP) - The list of contributors to comedian Al Franken's political action committee reads like a celebrity who's who: singer Barbra Streisand, writer-director Nora Ephron, actor-writer Larry David and actor Jimmy Smits. Franken, who hosts a radio show on the liberal Air America Radio network, is considering challenging Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., in 2008. Franken moved his show from New York City to Minneapolis earlier this year, fueling speculation of a possible bid. His leadership PAC, Midwest Values PAC, raised $500,000, according to a review...

Republican Bob Corker reported giving another $420,000 in personal money to his U.S. Senate campaign on Thursday, while Van Hilleary belatedly filed a personal disclosure revealing $336,000 in income from a Washington law and lobbying firm. Corker's latest contribution to his own campaign brings his total self-funding to almost $2.2 million. As of July 14, Corker had also reported raising $6.5 million from others. The total of $8.7 million puts Corker on track toward setting a record for spending on a U.S. Senate campaign in Tennessee. That will almost certainly be the case if he wins the Aug. 3 primary....

Capping a period of staff turnover and news reports about its connection with a lobbyist who pleaded guilty to bribery charges, the conservative Free Enterprise Fund has lost its public relations firm. The Herald Group, a year-old firm doing PR work on the fund's legal challenge to the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance law, has resigned. Matt Well, a partner with the Herald Group, said his firm "released them as a client." "They're going through some transitions at the Free Enterprise Fund, and we made a decision that we had a limited amount of resources and wanted to put those resources to...

John McCain (R-AZ) raised $213,282 last quarter, spending $384,258. His total cash-on-hand dropped by 15% to only $1,112,476. Compare to some other senators who have been considering running for national office. Joe Biden, from tiny Delaware, raised $3,044,942, while spending $911,196. Evan Bayh (D-IN) raised $4,598,553, while spending $830,152. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) raised $3,310,886, while spending $713,198. John Kerry (D-MA) raised $7,442,952, spending a staggering $10,221,956. Some potential candidates are running for re-election this year, but are quite transparently working to build a national campaign treasure. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) has raised a mind-blowing $33,180,959, spending $16,725,827 against token opposition. But...

WASHINGTON - Signaling a new phase in the struggle for control of Congress, House Democrats have reserved time for more than $30 million worth of campaign advertising this fall in roughly two dozen congressional districts, with a heavy emphasis on the Northeast and Midwest. The Democratic targets include clusters of Republican-held seats in the Philadelphia area held by Reps. Jim Gerlach, Curt Weldon and Michael Fitzpatrick, as well as the Ohio River Valley, where Reps. John Hostettler of Indiana, Geoff Davis of Kentucky and Steve Chabot of Ohio can expect a protracted televised barrage. Based on information available to date,...

Hooray for the Supreme Court. Yes, believe it or not, they actually do deserve some praise. Specifically the members of the majority who recently held that Vermont’s restrictive campaign finance laws violated the First Amendment’s free speech provisions. This development comes at an opportune time in our political history. Currently, our free speech rights are besieged by politicians using the boogeyman of political corruption to build support for laws which themselves corrupt our political system by limiting our ability to participate in it. The most egregious national example is the 2001 Bi-partisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, (AKA McCain-Feingold), which placed...

January 29, 2006 -- BILL Clinton has made corporate reform one of his top causes since leaving the White House. He calls for more "socially responsible" investing, better protection of workers and greater diversity in corporate management. At the same time, he condemns cronyism, excessive pay for top management and an alleged emphasis on short-term profits at the expense of workers. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton — a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee — has bashed corporations for their failure to live up to their pension obligations. Yet, as the senior adviser to two investment funds...

Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus are teaming up with conservative Republicans to push for the first major changes in the 2002 campaign-finance reform bill, most admitting that they made a mistake in voting for the bill three years ago. "If I had the chance to vote again, I wouldn't vote the way I voted," said Rep. Gregory W. Meeks, New York Democrat, who along with most of the CBC supported the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act after they were promised by Democratic leaders that the bill would not harm their constituents or funding bases in order to garner their...

I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told any reporter," stated Sean Treglia, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a March 2004 conference at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. "Now that I'm several months away from Pew and we have campaign finance reform, I can tell this story." Speaking to an audience of the initiated, Treglia described how the crusade for campaign finance reform was “an immense scam perpetrated on the American people by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a ‘mass movement,’” wrote New...

[O]ne big loser was... McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform".... Preliminary reports say a record $3.9 billion was spent on this year's Presidential and Congressional campaigns, 30% more than four years ago. Instead of severing the supposedly corrupting links between big money and politics, the reform's main effect has been merely to channel the cash through different political hands, and with less accountability. ...McCain-Feingold has succeeded in the narrow goal of staunching the flow of contributions from corporations, Big Labor and wealthy individuals to the two major political parties. Labor unions have turned more of their attention to voter registration and turnout....

<p>Senator John McCain's Reform Institute has suffered some bad press recently due to its involvement in an influence-peddling scandal with Cablevision. As usual, however, mainstream media have failed to go to the root of the matter.</p> <p>Founded on June 26, 2001, McCain's Reform Institute for Campaign and Election Issues has long served as a nerve center for the so-called "campaign finance reform"movement - a movement which has done nothing to clean up campaign finance, but has done a great deal to empower federal judges and government bureaucrats to regulate political speech, in defiance of the Bill of Rights.</p>

Ex-aide's trial puts Hil at high risk GOP salivates over campaign finance case By KENNETH R. BAZINET DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton isn't on trial in Los Angeles on Tuesday - but as far as her political adversaries are concerned, she may as well be. Her ex-finance director David Rosen has been charged with concealing the real cost of a star-studded Hollywood fund-raiser for Clinton in August 2000 - and if he's convicted, her enemies plan to exploit it to the maximum. "If it was any other senator, it might not be an issue, but with her...

The (New Jersey) medical school and its affiliated hospitals donated at least $155,000 to state politicians over the last decade - a highly unusual practice among universities in New Jersey and beyond. The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, which gets $200 million, or about 13 percent of its budget, from the state, gave to candidates and campaign committees from both parties. The contributions ran the gamut from $1,600 to Democrat Richard J. Codey before he became acting governor, to $24,750 to a campaign committee controlled by former Senate President and then-acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco, a Republican....