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The Lincoln Project was founded by a group of rabidly anti-Trump Republican and former Republican consultants. Their attack ads, often tougher than those produced by Democrats, were a huge hit with the rabidly anti-Trump Resistance. The Lincoln Project paired those ads with an aggressive fundraising effort, and the money poured in, mostly in small donations: more than $90 million in all. Where did the money go? It's been known for a while that the Lincoln Project directed a lot of the donors' money to companies that just happened to be controlled by members of the Lincoln Project. A new article...

The special election for Senator in Alabama feels like it was held in 1817, not 2017 and certainly less than a week ago. We briefly touched on some of the problems for Republicans losing a Senate seat in Alabama portends. I mentioned, in passing, that when you stack the Alabama result last week, atop the results in Virginia last month you see the GOP is heading straight for the rocky shoals of political insignificance. I ran an outfit called GOPAC in 1998. GOPAC is known in modern political lore as being Newt Gingrich's PAC. That is - or at least...

We have talked about the power of expectations before and we saw it in play this past weekend when Bernie Sanders won all three contests on the Democrat side: Hawaii [or Hawai'i as it was spelled on CBS during the NCAAs] (70%-30%), Alask'a (82-18), and Washingto'n State (73-27). The Hillary Clinton campaign made it abundantly clear to all who would listen that they expected to get skunked in all three states, but because of the proportional rules, Sanders wouldn't make much headway against Clinton in the delegate count. So it was. As the Easter morning sun arose over the Continental...

I am not generally a conspiracy believer, but last week, as the result of a Freedom of Information action by Judicial Watch - a conservative legal organization - at least one email was released that directly linked the White House to the immediate reaction to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the American Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens. The Benghazi attacks took place on September 11, 2012. The Obama Administration's first response - and it was a significant response - was that the attack on the American compound in Benghazi was a reaction...

I know I have mentioned before that I don't understand even the basics of the stock market and so I keep my total, accumulated wealth - $12.73 - in my checking account at Burke & Herbert bank in Alexandria, Virginia which is the functional equivalent of burying it in a coffee can under the back porch. If I had a back porch which, because I live in a town house, I don't. A couple of weeks ago, the Dow Jones Industrial average dropped about 1,000 points in a matter of minutes. It recovered about 700 points over the next half...

Let's review the bidding. Tom Ridge will not run for Senator from Pennsylvania. He has decided to pass up the chance to trample an ultra-conservative Republican in the primary and sneak past a former-moderate-Republican in the general election for Senate in 2010. Tom Ridge would have been the Senator from Pennsylvania, but he is smart to want to be the Senator from Pennsylvania. Arlen Specter has a pain-in-the, er, tush for nearly 30 years. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980 - the same year as Ronald Reagan was elected President and Dan Quayle was elected Senator...

® An American Cyber-Column The Community Organizer-in-Chief Rich Galen Friday March 6, 2009 * I finally figured this out. Barack Obama is the Community Organizer-in-Chief. He is taking the inequities, the slights, the unfairness, the spread between wealth and poverty, the choices the rich have but which the poor do not … and he wants to fix that. For everyone. * Sounds good, actually. Who doesn't want to take "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and lift them up? * It is not an issue of taking from someone who has a lot and giving...

Hillary Clinton's links to illegal fundraising by Asian-Americans in 1996 should have made her wary of accepting $850,000 from a fugitive Asian-American this year, a rival presidential campaign said Tuesday. The criticism came from an adviser to former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson, who chaired a Senate investigation into illegal contributions by Asian-Americans to Bill Clinton's re-election campaign and the couple's legal defense fund in the 1996 election cycle. Thompson adviser Rich Galen said Clinton's 2008 campaign has become "the sequel" to her husband's scandal-plagued 1996 campaign. Late Monday, Clinton announced she was returning $850,000 raised by fugitive Norman Hsu, who...

Sometime during the Autumn of 1986 I found myself sitting at the kitchen table of a member of the Illinois House of Representatives who was running for Congress. The reason for being at that table with candidate Dennis Hastert was to rehearse for a debate with his Democratic opponent. Hastert won the debate and won the seat. Shift forward 12 years. On December 19, 1998 I was sitting in a hotel room in Jakarta, Indonesia. In 1998 the GOP, then led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, was supposed to pick up seats in that mid-term election, but ended up losing five...

Yesterday the United States Senate adopted an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill which requires the President to report, on a quarterly basis, progress being made in Iraq. This amendment which was introduced by Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner (R-VA) was in response to a Democratic amendment which would have required a hard time-table for troop withdrawals. Frist, according to a Bloomberg report, said that a was a "cut-and-run strategy" which would play "right into the hands" of terrorists who would wait to attack until after U.S. forces departed. While the Popular Press...

There is no bigger deal in Washington, DC this week than the Karl Rove business. To catch up, I recommend most strongly that you review previous Mullings: "The Sweet Mint Teapot Dome Scandal" "Joe Wilson Can't Find the Truth, Either" What we know is this: Rove, according to an internal e-mail leaked to Newsweek's Michael Isakoff, was warning Time Magazine's Matt Cooper off the Joe Wilson story. At the time the story was swirling around that the office of Vice President Cheney had authorized the trip and then buried Wilson's report. SIDEBAR If you don't think the popular press is...

I am for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) invoking what the Democrats are calling the "nuclear option" when it comes to cutting off filibusters on Federal judges because the politics of it will work in favor of the GOP. Let's step into the Way Back Machine and set it to November, 1994. On election night, Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution gave the GOP control of the US House of Representatives for the first time since 1954. In early January 1995, the GOP took physical control of the House and Newt was sworn in as speaker. In April, 1995 the White...

The Government Reform Committee of the US House stepped up to the plate yesterday and held a day-long hearing on the issue of steroid use in American sports. There were four panels including the parents of two high school athletes who took steroids and then committed suicide in the aftermath of their drug use. The meat of the order, though, was the three current and two former major league players including Jose Conseco - who has written an autobiography naming several other panel members as steroid users; as well as Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmiero, and Curt Schilling. I'm...

One of the most senior observers of the US Congress is David Espo who holds the title of "Special Correspondent" for the Associated Press. He has been covering the House and Senate since about 1980 which means he has seen pretty much all of the good, the bad, and the ugly which has occurred over that quarter-century. Over the past few days Espo has published a couple of pieces regarding the status of the Congress which, taken together, are a pretty complete overview of the current state of play. They include a report on status of Tom DeLay's position as...

From Washington, DC The race for '08 has begun. Assuming Vice President Cheney doesn't declare his candidacy, 2006 will be, by my reckoning, the first time since 1952 (Dwight Eisenhower v. Adlai Stevenson) that there hasn't been in sitting President or Vice President on the ballot on either side. A poll by Quinnipiac College has Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham running just behind both Rudy Giuliani (43-44) and John McCain (41-43). Headlines proclaimed Rodham Clinton Rodham "competitive" against both Giuliani and McCain because she was a statistically insignificant distance behind. We can't help but wonder what the headlines would have been...

Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters By KATHERINE Q. SEELYE his article was reported by Katharine Q. Seelye, Jacques Steinberg and David F. Gallagher. With the resignation Friday of a top news executive from CNN, bloggers have laid claim to a prominent media career for the second time in five months. In September, conservative bloggers exposed flaws in a report by Dan Rather; he subsequently announced that on March 9 he would step down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News." On Friday, after nearly two weeks of intensifying pressure on the Internet, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at...

I think we can agree on this: 2004 was not the best year that ever was. There was precious little to recommend 2004 as "my favorite year." Election results - In the US, Afghanistan and the Ukraine - pretty much cover the positive news. In January, when I was in Baghdad, a huge explosion killed dozens of people just outside one of the main gates leading into the Green Zone. As the year ended a wave of Biblical proportions killed so many people that - that it defies comprehension. In between it was like the 1959 Kingston Trio song, "The...

Mullings - An American Cyber-Column This is Diplomacy? Rich Galen Wednesday December 29, 2004 · The United States was deemed “stingy” in its immediate promise of $15 million in aid to the post-tsunami relief effort in Southeast Asia by the United Nations Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Jan Egeland. · I have two words for the U-G for HA & ER Egeland: Get Out. · In fact, I have the same two words for the whole United Nations: Get Out. · The United States – the “stingy” United States – contributes 20 percent of the entire budget to...

The United States was deemed "stingy" in its immediate promise of $15 million in aid to the post-tsunami relief effort in Southeast Asia by the United Nations Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Jan Egeland.

One of the problems with political people is they never know when to say "enough is enough". This is true of Republicans and Democrats. Conservatives and Liberals. A couple of weeks ago, Bernie Kerik attempted to escape a full-frontal investigation by entering a plea of guilty to having hired an illegal immigrant and not paying the required taxes. He apparently believed that if he would cop to the lesser offense of "nanny-gate," everyone would forget about it. And him. Oops. No one did forget. The press waded into the clothes bin and uncovered enough dirty laundry to make the officials...