Free Republic

Nikki Haley will embark on her January 31st fundraising tour that features three fundraisers hosted by 12 Democrat mega-donors. Two of Haley’s January 31st events are located in Miami, Florida. The other event location is Palm Beach, Florida. Liberal donors continue to embrace Haley despite her poor performance in Iowa and New Hampshire. This is a clear sign that Democrats are using Haley as a vessel to interfere in the 2024 GOP Primary.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings released Friday show that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) paid over half of her campaign’s spendings in the last quarter of 2019 to her alleged boyfriend’s political consulting firm. According to the filings, between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, Omar’s campaign paid a total of $217,000 to the E Street Group LLC for research services, digital advertising, fundraising consulting, travel, and other expenses. The firm belongs to Democratic consultant Tim Mynett, whose wife accused him in a divorce filing in August of having an affair with the congresswoman.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Wednesday introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, which eliminated restrictions on corporate campaign spending. The amendment would allow Congress and states to put forth limits on campaign contributions, according to a statement from Schiff's office. "The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United overturned decades of legal precedent and has enabled billions in dark money to pour into our elections," Schiff said in a statement. The amendment would also allow states to enact laws creating public financing of campaigns. "Amending the Constitution is an extraordinary step, but it is...

A French appeals court ruled Thursday that former president Nicolas Sarkozy should stand trial on charges of illicit financing of his failed 2012 presidential campaign. Sarkozy, 63, will appeal the decision before the Cour de Cassation, France’s court of final appeal, his lawyers said Thursday. It is one of several legal inquiries which have dogged the rightwing politician since he left office. In upholding last year’s decision by a judge to put Sarkozy on trial, the appeals court in Paris rejected arguments from his legal team seeking to avoid a potentially embarrassing public ordeal of a trial as well as...

Senate Democrats started their campaign-season drive Monday for a constitutional amendment aimed at curbing special interests’ financial clout in elections, a doomed effort the party hopes will help them make a populist appeal to voters. The measure would allow Congress and the states to limit the money raised and spent in election campaigns by outside groups, candidates and others, curbs that the Supreme Court has weakened in recent years. It has no chance of winning the two-thirds majority needed to clear the Senate, let alone even being considered by the Republican-run House. Democrats brought the measure to the Senate floor...

Obama Asks People Getting Married To Forgo Gifts, Ask Their Guests To Donate To His Campaign Instead… You can even register your wedding on his campaign website. Could he be any more pompous?

It has been reported that the Obama campaign this year, as in 2008, has disabled or chosen not to use AVS in screening contributions made by credit card. That doesn't sound very important. But it's evidence of a modus operandi that strikes me as thuggish. AVS stands for Address Verification System. It's the software that checks whether the name of the cardholder matches his or her address. If a campaign doesn't use AVS, it can wind up accepting contributions from phony names or accepting contributions from foreigners, both of which are illegal. The 2008 Obama campaign pocketed money from "John...

The case has taken a dramatic turn...there are now a whopping 20 subpoenas and the investigation may well stretch beyond the Rielle Hunter controversy, and perhaps extend to the inner workings of his former Senate office, or even to the actions of Elizabeth Edwards.... John Edwards...might have thought he’d dodged a bullet when the long investigation into whether he funneled campaign money to Rielle Hunter, the mother of his 2-year-old love child, seemed to stall.U.S. Attorney George Holding has issued as many as 20 subpoenas, bringing a whole new gaggle of secret witnesses to the grand jury in Raleigh, North...

Senate Republicans launched a successful filibuster Tuesday to uphold the Supreme Court's decision earlier this year that let corporations and unions spend freely on campaign ads. Democrats had sought to undo much of the ruling by adding strict disclosure requirements for those who run ads, and banning any ads from companies that have federal contracts. They argued the court's ruling would amount to letting corporations buy elections. But they fell shy of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster and begin debating the bill. "This bill is a partisan effort, pure and simple, drafted behind closed doors by current and...

Just when we thought it was all over, the ACORN Pimp/Hooker Scandal rises again. Our heroes, Hannah Giles and James O' Keefe the fake pimp and hooker were in Philadelphia meeting with the folks at ACORN. Next Stop, Sunny Los Angeles. The first tape released from the ACORN of sunny LA was of Felix Harris Mr. Harris didn’t care about that the two were involved with prostitution in regards to a housing loan, but when the O'Keefe/Giles team started talking about underage girls, he said that ACORN did not get involved with things like that. Felix was the only person...

Oh but I am not buying it! Even though I am a Republican, I still hope that Obama will change the culture in Washington. But I have to report in this area of Ambassadorships, Obama has turned into a Bush clone. I have written previously about how Bush gave Ambassador posts as a reward (Bush once gave a posting to the CEO of Ameriquest Mortgage to the Netherlands after his company went out of business and was sued over 160 times for help causing the sub-prime meltdown) for raising money for him, and Obama seems to have forgotten his promise...

Jack Abramoff, present jailbird, was convicted of all sorts of crooked schemes. One of his favorites was to funnel money through various organizations into the hands of other people. It appears Dede Scozzafava is funneling RNC, NRCC, and donor dollars through her campaign account to her family. Dede Scozzafava is or was until recently the Chief Operating Officer of her brother’s company...

How many fund-raisers would you like your candidate to attend in September, with 60 to 30 days remaining until Election Day? By my count, Obama's doing about 40 of them. One of them is in London. Now, many of them will not be major time commitments. Drop in, shake a few hands, give a five to ten minute speech, then hop in the motorcade to get to the next event. And some of them can effectively double for speeches if he decides to open up these events to the press. But by comparison, McCain will be doing none, unless he...

GENEVA (Reuters) - George Clooney has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama by headlining an exclusive event for Americans in Geneva, one of the world's most affluent cities. The Hollywood actor and director, fresh from the world premiere of the Coen brothers' comedy "Burn After Reading" in Venice, slipped without fanfare into the Swiss city on Tuesday for his first appearance on behalf of the Democratic nominee. Some 170 contributors have paid $1,000 a head to attend a cocktail party with Clooney at a museum in Geneva's Old Town on Tuesday evening. And 75...

*** Obama opts out: In a video to supporters that his campaign has just released, Obama has announced that he's opting out of the public financing system for the general election. This move has been widely speculated, but it's a reversal from comments he made earlier in the campaign season that he would he accept general funds -- which gives the candidates about him $85 million to spend after the conventions. Assuming each of Obama's 1.5 million-plus contributors gives him $100, that comes to $150 million; if they give him an average of $200, that’s $300 million. Campaign finance issues...

This article recommends limiting the campaign war chests of encumbents in order to give new candidates a more equal opportunity to win elections.

RUSH: Now, folks, I want to say just a little bit more about the "unfairness," the "inaccuracy," whatever you want to call it from the Drive-By Media of the Harry Reid smear letter auction with my matching donation now generating $4.2 million for the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation. In anybody's judgment, that's huge news, especially since it involved a skirmish between me and the Senate majority leader. The amount of coverage that this has received, especially accurate coverage, is such that you could put it in a thimble. Well, maybe a syringe, but certainly nothing larger than that. But the...

With an endorsement of sorts from George Bush, Hillary has now rounded up about all the big names and moneybags in Washington politics. The President predicts she will get the Democratic nomination, and everything seems to be going her way. Never has the adjective "golden" found a more apposite noun to modify than "Ms. Clinton." The woman has always had an affinity for gold. You can trace her appetite for bling back to her Arkansas days, when she was a partner in the Rose Law Firm. Questions arose about her billing clients, which have not yet been satisfactorily answered. Nor...

EVERYONE who laughed when the elfin Dennis Kucinich threw his hat in the ring to run for president in 2004 should realize why he smiles. He had 2,955,963 reasons to smile. That is how many bucks federal taxpayers gave his ridiculous campaign for president. Kucinich had no chance. Yet under the bizarre federal election rules, taxpayers had to give this fool $2,955,963 just to humor his vanity. Ralph Nader took $798,827 from taxpayers in 2004 to indulge his fantasy of being elected president. Consumers beware. I look for this demagogue to run again. Lyndon LaRouche is another likely candidate. Last...

In March, Harris went on national television to say she would pump $10 million of her personal fortune into her bid to become a senator. So far, she has put in about $3.15 million, and only three weeks are left in the campaign. Harris paid $795,000 for the home in 2003, and its total assessed value in 2005 was about $806,500. Even if she sells it for $1 million and puts that into the campaign, her total personal contribution would be $4.1 million. Just-released finance reports show that Harris had about $964,000 in campaign money as of Sept. 30. That's...