Fraud: Many Millions in Dubious Campaign Donations to Barack Obama
Fraud: Many millions in dubious campaign donations to Barack Obama are going unaudited. Meanwhile, Minnesota's Senate race is ripe for the stealing. When elections lack integrity, the people no longer rule.
We may have found something on which the two most powerful black men in the U.S. government (as of next year) — President-elect Obama and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — agree.
Thomas differs with the rest of the high court on the issue of public disclosure of campaign contributions. Noting that the Federalist Papers "are only the most famous example of the outpouring of anonymous political writing that occurred during the ratification of the Constitution," Thomas contends that "it is only an innovation of modern times that has permitted the regulation of anonymous speech."
In the age of modern communications, it takes a lot of money for speech to reach enough voters to have the kind of effect the Federalist Papers had two centuries ago. So in Thomas' view, the 2002 McCain-Feingold law, with its spending limits on broadcast ads, "directly targets and constricts core political speech, the 'primary object of First Amendment protection.' "
How could Obama disagree? He took hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of "speech" from anonymous sources and used it to saturate the airwaves. Someone once again drove an armored car right through a campaign finance law loophole. Ironically, it was the author of the campaign law, Sen. John McCain, who was run over.
Having reneged on his pledge to accept public financing, Obama will likely escape an audit by the Federal Election Commission — which the heavily outspent loser, McCain, must undergo because he took public funding. So much for those filthy-rich Republicans taking advantage of a system supposedly skewed in their favor.
What all this means is we might never get to the bottom of who the thousands of fictitious donors were with names such as "Test Person" and "Doodad Pro." We might never know if the next president of the United States intentionally took money that exceeded the limits allowed under law, or money from foreign powers.
We might never know if the more than $800,000 in falsely reported funds the Obama campaign paid an offshoot of the left-wing organization ACORN was a coordinated national scam, although the FBI is reportedly investigating the group.
ACORN filed more than 43,000 new voter registration forms in Minnesota, where the razor-thin margin of victory for Republican Sen. Norm Coleman over former "Saturday Night Live" comedian Al Franken evaporated from more than 700 votes to just 221 nearly overnight thanks to "typos" discovered over a week before a scheduled recount. Fox News reports that much of Franken's mysterious new votes come from one heavily Democratic small town.
That seat could give Democrats an effectively filibuster-proof Senate majority. But if the cloud of voter fraud hangs over both the Senate and the White House — with Obama's untraceable millions in question — the soon-to-be president might want to change the name of his new Web site from "change.gov" to "cheat.gov."