More huge checks flowing to the RGA in its disclosure, which went up tonight on the IRS's website.
ThinkProgress noticed another $250,000 from News Corp.
Also notable: An amazing $3.5 million from the Texas GOP moneyman Bob Perry, $1.5 million from Paul Singer -- and more from his firm -- and $1 million from Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and in sum from the hedge funder Kenneth Griffin and his wife, Anne.
Bayh loves the new Manchin ad, thank you very much.
Hasen defends campaign finance regulation
Are Dems voting earlier, more often?
Linda McMahon's campaign has reportedly "ended formal media interviews and continued its policy of limiting information about her campaign schedule."
The spokesmen for the DNC and American Crossroads are going at it today, with Crossroads' Jonathan Collegio calling Woodhouse a "brazen hypocrite" for attacking his group while having worked in the past for another 501(c)(4) that didn't disclose its donors.
Woodhouse responds:
The group I ran and the one Karl Rove runs may fall under the same area of the tax code, but that's where the similarity ends. While Rove's group has run dozens of political attack ads assailing candidates just in the past few weeks, Americans United in six years in business has never run a single such ad during the election season. Not once. Americans United was never under the jurisdiction of the Federal Elections Commission, but Rove's group is because running political attack ads is all it does. And, Americans United would not have been subject to the Disclose Act, which we have supported and which Republicans blocked to benefit groups like Rove's, because it doesn't run political ads while Rove's would have been. The two groups could not be more different.
I understand that Karl Rove and groups like his are taking on water on this issue and that he wants to drag others down into the mud with him, but he's going have to find another pig to wrestle with. This dog don't hunt.
Collegio responded to this by sending over the ad above, which attacks Norm Coleman in pretty straightforward terms.
The real difference: AUC never spent anything like the money that the Crossroads groups have.
Democratic House candidate Surya Yalamanchili, running against Rep. Jean Schmidt in Ohio, wonders whether "it would be worth blogging if i told you that this might be the first campaign ad in the country actually thought up, written and created by the candidate?"
Well, maybe!
He continues: "Cost of ad? Less than $20. And that was on image royalties. Not bad, right?"
A quick note of thanks to Gabe Beltrone, who has been incredibly helpful behind and in front of the scenes on this blog over the past year, and who is moving onward and upward at POLITICO.
A smooth writer and strong reporter, you'll be seeing his byline quite a bit more as the next big election approaches.
Jeff Greene's press secretary e-mailed yesterday to see whether reporters would like to talk to the former candidate about, well, pretty much anything, and my colleague Dave Catanese took him up on the offer.
A highlight:
"I have a colorful past. There’s no question about it. Most of my success is because I’ve taken risk. But most of it was silly sideshows. Look, I was single. I met my wife when I was 51. When you’re a single, wealthy guy in southern Florida, you’re going to do stuff. I never did drugs. I think a lot of it wasn’t fair. But I understand that’s what people want to hear about, Mike Tyson and Lindsay Lohan,” he said, referring to two of his more memorable and controversial yacht guests.
In a general election campaign, Greene argued, “all my negatives would have been fleshed out.”
Democrats continue to do quite well on the hard money front, well enough to — so far — keep them in the general ballpark of the unlimited GOP funds:
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will report later this afternoon that the organization raised $15.5 million in September, its largest one-month haul ever.
(A side media note: The Times's Caucus blog, whose Michael Shear had the mini-scoop, seems to have emerged from years of identity crisis to start competing for news, which is fun. Welcome!)
With talks between U.S., Israeli and Palestinian leaders apparently on the brink of collapse over a Palestinian demand — and Israeli refusal — to extend a construction moratorium, a source close to the White House tells me the State Department is preparing its first public pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since the relationship warmed up earlier this year.
The State Department is expected to issue a statement saying it "regrets" the decision because it is "not productive" for the peace negotiations, the source said.
Much of the reaction from all sides will depend on the exact calibration of the criticism, and State's reaction will of course depend on exactly what Netanyahu says today.
The Globe and Mail reports that Palin again made light of the advice she was given during McCain's campaign during a Canadian speech and continued:
“Thanks for the advice,” said Ms. Palin, at the event ostensibly to plug her book Going Rogue. “When I do run again I will be more rogue.”
(via Chait)
The only enforcement body that poses any threat to the tide of outside spending is the IRS whose opaque rules — like that a (c)(4)'s "primary purpose" not be electoral politics — everyone is frantically gaming.
Much of the surge in contributions is based on a general sense that the Supreme Court has shifted, rather than on specific law, and Forbes reports on a potential issue:
In a memo, Ofer Lion, a lawyer with Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp who specializes in nonprofit organizations, writes that unlike contributions to certain other political organizations, there is no gift-tax exemption written into federal law for contributions to 501(c)(4)’s, which the IRS officially classifies as social-welfare organizations but that also are often used for lobbying. And that, he says, raises the possibility that down the road the Internal Revenue Service might come calling for the tax, plus interest, plus penalties. “The IRS may well find irresistible the potential revenue to be raised from assessing gift taxes on 501(c)(4) contributors,” writes Lion.
A spokesman for Crossroads GPS, which is based in Washington, D.C., said Thursday he had never heard anything about a possible gift tax liability on 501(c)(4) contributions until Forbes called, and did not know whether his organization had a written legal opinion specifying why there would be no liability for its donors.
Enforcement of the gift tax would be up to the IRS. “That’s an interesting issue,” an agency spokesman said Thursday. He said he would need more time to look into the matter.
I'd be interested in what other tax lawyers and accountants — or IRS officials! — think about this, and about other issues surrounding the groups.
UPDATE: Here's Lion's full memo. He adds in an e-mail that "the 501(c)(4)s recipients may have secondary liability for gift taxes not paid by their contributors."
Rupert Murdoch tells shareholders that "change in Washington" is "in the interest of the country and of all the shareholders."
This isn't great for the image, which the company's public relations office strains to preserve, of a bright line between Fox and News Corp.
Maggie Haberman is a bit puzzled by this, as am I:
[Radio host Leonard] Lopate asked if the vetting "was complicated because of your involvement in the New York State attorney general's investigation into the pay-to-play pension fund scandal that recenly got Alan Hevesi sent to prison?"
Rattner replied, "That actually had nothing to do with my vetting. My involvement in it was fully disclosed to the people who hired me. And at that point in time it was not a problem. Nobody thought it was a problem, including the New York state attorney general, and that only came up later."
Lisa Murkowski, tactfully, airs an ad Ted Stevens cut on her behalf.
(AP)
The Philadelphia Inquirer today reports on a kind of a sequel to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in Cambridge last year: Another well-known black Ivy League academic, Marc Lamont Hill, has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit over an encounter with Philadelphia police.
The twist: The cop alleged to have illegally frisked and interrogated Hill is a celebrated officer who sat beside Michelle Obama at President Obama's first address to a joint session of Congress.
The officer, Richard DeCoatsworth made national headlines as a rookie in 2007, after he was shot in the face with a shotgun at a traffic stop, but nevertheless chased down his attacker two blocks.
He won the National Association of Police Organizations' Top Cops Award.
A Chicago reader sent on a footnote to the scrap this week between a conservative radio reporter and a TV reporter covering Rahm Emanuel that is so eyebrow-raising that it seems worth passing on.
The incident was played on Drudge and elsewhere as the Chicago press shielding Emanuel from questions. But the questioner, William J. Kelly, is actually a fairly well-known Chicago figure, a Republican former State Comptroller candidate currently exploring a bid for alderman. Perhaps most notably, however, he's the author of a self-published 1995 manifesto called "The Rghts of the Middle Class: Advent of the Rebel Conservative," a sort of Breitbart before his time and apparent fan of the work of Norman Mailer.
I was able to find the book on Amazon, and the highlights seemed to make it worth revisiting the incident. The book focuses on the concern that the white middle class is being undermined by the spread of inner-city black culture by white liberals, and pays repeated tribute to Norman Mailer's 1957 essay, "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster."
From Kelly's book:
A high incidence of black males now typify the elements ascribed to them in Norman Mailer's White Negro — the psychopath, the sexual predator, the gratificationalist, the moral relativist, and the so-called ‘middle-class made’ criminal. Remember, it was this art of the primitive and this morality of the bottom that the architects promoted as the cultural icons of their new utopian society.
And:
Criminals should be made to pay for their crimes through hard work. Prisons should become hard labor camps and the money, thus earned, should be given to the victims of crime and their families.
And:
Yes, meet the White Negro, the worst of black and white, where the ghetto replaces the bungalow; and where the beginnings of a plan to destroy the middle class were being implemented.
And:
Do not be timid about employing trickery to get the information that you need. Above all, ingratiate yourself to the White Negro/Hipster planners. Feign ignorance whenever possible and open your ears to all the details that may soon come in handy.
Mitt Romney boosted sales of his book this spring by asking institutions to buy thousands of copies in exchange for his speeches, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.
Romney's book tour ran from early March to late May of this year, and took him to bookstores, universities, conferences and private groups around the country. Their giant purchases helped his book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, debut on top of the New York Times best-seller list, though with an asterisk indicating bulk purchases.
The hosts ranged from Claremont McKenna College to the Restaurant Leadership Conference, many of whom are accustomed to paying for high-profile speakers like Romney. Asking that hosts buy books is also a standard feature of book tours. But Romney's total price — $50,000 — was on the high end, and his publisher, according to the document from the book tour — provided on the condition it not be described in detail — asked institutions to pay at least $25,000, and up to the full $50,000 price, in bulk purchases of the book. With a discount of roughly 40 percent, that meant institutions could wind up with more than 3,000 copies of the book — and a person associated with one of his hosts said they still have quite a pile left over.
One place he didn't charge: Iowa State University, where an official noted that they're accustomed to getting their politicians for free.
Earlier this week, I compared the leading Republican candidates' speaking fees and wrote that Romney speaks for free. Instead, it appears, he's priced between Haley Barbour and Mike Huckabee on the open market.
Romney's spokesman didn't immediately respond to a question about the practice.
An anti-abortion candidate running for Washington, D.C.'s shadow Congressional seat will begin airing a harrowingly graphic campaign advertisement on local broadcast channels beginning next week.
The candidate, Missy Smith, is an ally of longtime hard-line anti-abortion activist Randall Terry, and her ad features horrifying images of aborted fetuses.
"I killed two of my babies by abortion," she says in the ad. "Obama, Pelosi, Reid, [Rep. Eleanor Holmes] Norton — they all support the murder of babies."
The ad, linked at the bottom of these items, contains extremely disturbing images, but a lawyer for Allbritton Communications, which owns the D.C. ABC affiliate WJLA (and also owns POLITICO) said the stations have no choice but to air it.
"Much as broadcasters may be repulsed by these graphic images and are sensitive to their viewers, Federal law requires stations to air the spots," Allbritton general counsel Jerry Fritz wrote in an e-mail.
Fritz cited a similar 1992 Georgia case in which an anti-abortion candidate, Daniel Becker, sought to run a similar ad on an Atlanta station.
"The station asked the FCC for permission to channel the spot into time periods when children would be less likely to be in the audience — late night. Other broadcasters joined in and asked the commission for the right to refuse the spot altogether," Fritz e-mails. "The FCC gave permission to permit the channeling, but Becker appealed. The D.C. Court of Appeals found for the candidate in a 1996 decision."
The reason, per Fritz: The Communications Act requires broadcast stations to sell "reasonable amounts" of ad time to qualified Federal candidates, and bars stations from making any changes to those spots, in what's known as the "no censorship" provision.
Fritz added that in his understanding, Smith requested ad time from WRC, WTTG and WUSA as well as WJLA.
The ad can be seen here, but I don't recommend it.
They are, basically, news releases, cherry-picked at best and fudged at worst.
Nate Silver elaborated yesterday:
I’m not sure why people take polls released by campaigns at face value. This does not mean that campaigns don’t have very good pollsters working for them. But the subset of polls which they release to the general public is another matter, and are almost always designed to drive media narrative. For an instructive example, Google the term “internal polls”: the first result is a blog post, circa late October 2008, entitled “McCain’s Internal Polls Looking VERY Good.”
What we’ve found is that is that polls commissioned by campaigns and released to the public show, on average, a result that is about 6 points points more favorable to their candidate’s standing than nonpartisan polls released at the same time. (Other analysts have found similar results.) So, just as a first cut, you might take a Democratic internal poll that shows a tied race and “translate” it into nonpartisan terms by adding 6 points to the Republican’s margin.
A large majority of South Carolinians — roughly 7 out of 10 — give the governor a grade of “C” or better for his overall performance as governor, according to a Winthrop Poll conducted earlier this month. Those grades stand in sharp contrast with earlier polls that showed residents to be unhappy with the governor, and they raise the prospect — unthinkable a year ago — that Sanford’s political life will not come to a close when his eight-year term as governor ends in January.
“There is amazing grace in this state,” Sanford said after presiding over a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “I never comprehended the nature of forgiveness and grace as I do now.”
(h/t GOP 12)
