Thursday, October 30, 2008

Campaign finance

Quite a few recent posts have focused on Obama's unnerving fundraising tactics. This is an issue that will, I think, outlast the election. In a post later today, I'll discuss an aspect of the matter which has received little attention heretofore, at least in PUMA-friendly realms.

Until then, take a gander at the Washington Post's coverage:
In recent weeks, questionable contributions have created headaches for Obama's accounting team as it has tried to explain why campaign finance filings have included itemized donations from individuals using fake names, such as Es Esh or Doodad Pro. Those revelations prompted conservative bloggers to further test Obama's finance vetting by giving money using the kind of prepaid cards that can be bought at a drugstore and cannot be traced to a donor.

The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.
Also recall this earlier expose by CBS News: Contributions came from such unlikely donors as Dahsudhu Hdusahfd of Df, Hawaii. Obviously, if the fakers are resorting to random clobbering of the keyboard, they must have run through every false name they could easily concoct.

Which means that there must be a lot of illegal donations.

Which means that the money must be coming from somewhere.

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

Credit card security systems are designed to prevent the theft of money, not the laundering of it.

If Obama wins, the Whitewater investigations/inquisitions will look an interview with Larry King.

Anonymous said...

I was just about to ask you to put up more stuff about Obama's campaign finance issues. I still think the numbers themselves are sketchy. Does anyone really believe Obama raised this much money?

Anonymous said...

I don't believe for a minute that the bulk of Obama's fundraising came from legitimate small donors. Now that we know about the huge security lapses on his site, it's pretty easy to figure out how it could be exploited.

For instance, what would stop a George Soros type from buying up thousands of prepaid credit cards. Then having a programmer stick all the numbers in a database and set up a program to randomly input them all into the Obama site. It could be set up to grab fake names and addresses from tables, or even just randomize letters, as we've seen some of the donations have done. The programming would not be that hard to do.

I, for one, was very suspicious when his fundraising numbers came out this month. Let's get real - his numbers for the past few months have been way down from what he promised - less than $100 million per month. Then all of a sudden, he raises $150 million this month? Yeah, right! There is some major fraud going on here. I think we all know that someone (or many someones) behind the scene want Obama elected for their own nefarious reasons.

Anonymous said...

Nibbles, I really believe he raised all of that money. I gave him all I could.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the laugh, dausudhu.

And speaking of Soros, I wish Joe or myiq would blog about the real likelihood that Soros engineered the financial meltdown deliberatedly to help Obama, who was falling behind in the polls at the time.

Googling Soros + Lehman Brothers will get you some VERRRRY interesting links. Jim Cramer made this accusation weeks ago--I saw it in the crawl on Fox one morning--but it went nowhere, and I've heard and seen zip about it since then.

--LandOLincoln

Anonymous said...

Hey Dahsudhu

How's the surfing on the Df Island? See, I didn't give O all my money, still have some prepaid cards, and thinking about taking a trip. I mean, what else can I do with the coin?? Fund the contras?

Gary McGowan said...

Could it be that this is just one small facet of a conspiracy to make the nation of the U.S.A. ungovernable?

Nah. Who would want to do a thing like that?

Anonymous said...

Joe, here is an off subject issue that you may want to consider:

Link:
Mexico drug plane used for US 'rendition' flights: report
Sep 4, 2008
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j6QonBKKMo2gw1e3ql-xUcQEZbVg

Featured in ths article is Clyde O'Connor who is my ex-sister-in-law''s brother. Her Husband along with Clyde are business partners and is Clyde's "money man". I met Clyde at my house as the O'Connor and my ex-brother-in-law talked openly in front of me of starting a new business venture. My ex-brother-in-law bragged about the family being a CIA Asset as to explain why the family and him wouldn't ever be prosecuted.

Marty Didier
Northbrook, IL

Anonymous said...

I always wondered how Obama could raise $99 million before the Iowa caucuses.

That's more than all the other Democratic candidates except Hillary COMBINED.

How does a guy with only 2-3 years in the Senate outraise Edwards, Dodd, Biden, and Richardson?

Anonymous said...

No doubt there are some fraudulent donations, no doubt to both sides/parties. Four years ago a friend of mine who works at a Chicago law firm told me that he had discovered a contribution made to Bush in his name (by the firm) without his knowledge. I'm sure it was an isolated incident. Many of the contributors to Obama's campaign are low income people who have waited until after the convention, late in the race to donate. I'm limited income and a cautiously optimistic supporter of Obama (more so after Palin (?!) was chosen), and hesitated until Sept. to make a donation, when I felt confident I wouldn't just be throwing money at a lost cause or a sure thing. And no doubt Palin motivated MANY people to contribute, including those who never have before.

Katherine said...

Interesting... it would be very interesting to see where this goes with digging. I think this just might be a big kettle of fish with unexpected results.

Anonymous said...

I called my shot:

http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/how-to-launder-money-illegal-campaign-donation-edition/

Anonymous said...

Joe:

No wonder your trolls post anonymously - they know how stupid they sound.

Anonymous said...

Um, Iran?

Anonymous said...

It should be noted that illegal contributions to a campaign are generally only crimes of the donor, not the donee, absent any showing of knowledge and collusion by the campaign of the donee.

This should go without saying, but people don't appreciate the practical difficulties any campaign would have in fully checking out the bona fides of donors to assure nothing illegal was going on.

A case in point was Bob Dole's campaign finance chairman, a Mr. Fireman, iirc. He spread money around among his company's personnel, to illegally reimburse them for donations to Dole's campaign, so that he was able to hide the fact that he himself was giving sums far in excess of the legal limits. Despite his extraordinarily close ties to Dole as his campaign finance chair or co-chair, and despite his record-setting $2 million dollar fine and imprisonment in home confinement, Dole was neither charged or even investigated criminally, nor should he have been, given the assured impossibility of any practical method of preventing such laundering of donations.

Typically, campaigns simply donate such sums to charities if they are determined to violate the law, and even that isn't required by law.

By this precedent, you could even have Axelrod's proven involvement, and it might not implicate Obama, per se.

XIslander

Anonymous said...

I wish the people who have the resources to dig had gotten into this months ago. There was an article months ago in an independent San Francisco paper, saying that the Republicans had initially funded Obama.

But the amounts of money are huge even for corporations. It seems likely Auchi bought Obama's house. Arab oil money seems the most likely source to me. What are they expecting in return?

I agree with the Soros suggestion to. Why does he want Obama so badly?

Hillary would have been/will be a great president. You can see from how many had to be aligned against her to bring her down.

Anonymous said...

Joseph,

The fix has been in (at least on the Dem side) for 3 years. So any investigations on where the money came from will lead to more than simply Obama. Why else would Dean have switched the convention from the tradition July to August, coinciding with the anniversary of MLK's I have a Dream speech? Let alone hijacking Hillary votes just to get Obama's butt across the finish line. And the instant switch of headquarters to Chicago had to have been in the works for a while. That takes planning.

Anonymous said...

XIslander:

The Nixon administration gave us the term "plausible deniability"

But If Obama can't take responsibilty for his own campaign then why should we put him in charge of our government?

The buck stops where?

Anonymous said...

So the Obama campaign has deliberately disabled the online payment industry’s standard safeguards against fraud (unlike essentially all online vendors and other political campaigns - which use these security measures to prevent illegal donations), does not require that the name of the donor match the name on the card, allows the use of cards with a non-U.S. address, and allows the use of untraceable prepaid cards.

From the Washington Post article:
"Lawyers for the Obama operation said yesterday that their 'extensive back-end review' has carefully scrubbed contributions to prevent illegal money from entering the operation's war chest."

Yeah. They've scrubbed contributions so carefully that their FEC reports contain contributions from Dahsudhu Hdusahfd, contributions from Rafah GA (look it up on a map), and $174,800 in contributions from 'Mary T. Biskup' (the actual Mary T. Biskup apparently has never contributed to Obama).

Actually, given how the Obama campaign has online payments set up, there's absolutely no way to flag most illegal donations - other than the donor doing something flagrantly stupid, like Dahsudhu Hdusahfd's keyboard bashing tactic. Keyboard bashing is a commonly used way to quickly fill out fields in a form - so this particular donor may well have been racing through the form repeatedly (for a whole series of contributions).

They're also not releasing the list of donors for amounts under $200. I wonder how many of Dahsudhu Hdusahfd's relatives are on that list.

I have to say though - unlike some, I don't think there will be any serious investigation. Obama will be in the Presidency, Democrats will control both the House and Senate (so politically, there would be no motive to investigate), and the media are in love with Obama (so there might be a few squeaks, but nothing more).

Anonymous said...

I still wonder where the $100 million Obama got for Rezko went. It didn't go to fixing up his slum properties. It didn't go into his pocket (he had to get a loan from Auchi to buy his house). Is he hiding it/using it for some other purpose? (In which case, why didn't he use it to set himself up in some other part of the world and flee the US ahead of the investigators?) Or did he just give it to Obama?

SR
[Sergei Rostov]