Obama runs to the sound of Soros voice on SuperPacs

I don’t often agree with Barack Obama but he is exactly right about this:

The Pres­i­dent opposed the Cit­i­zens United deci­sion. He under­stood that with the dra­matic growth in oppor­tu­ni­ties to raise and spend unlim­ited special-​interest money, we would see new strate­gies to hide it from pub­lic view. He con­tin­ues to sup­port a law to force full dis­clo­sure of all fund­ing intended to influ­ence our elec­tions, a reform that was blocked in 2010 by a unan­i­mous Repub­li­can fil­i­buster in the U.S. Sen­ate. And the Pres­i­dent favors action — by con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment, if nec­es­sary — to place rea­son­able lim­its on all such spending.

But this cycle, our cam­paign has to face the real­ity of the law as it cur­rently stands.

Just because you dis­agree with the DH doesn’t mean an Amer­i­can League man­ager should make his pitcher bat.

The NYT uses an inter­est­ing turn of phrase:

Pres­i­dent Obama is sig­nal­ing to wealthy Demo­c­ra­tic donors that he wants them to start con­tribut­ing to an out­side group sup­port­ing his re-​election, revers­ing a long-​held posi­tion as he con­fronts a deep finan­cial dis­ad­van­tage on a vital front in the campaign.

The Bil­lion Dol­lar Man has a finan­cial dis­ad­van­tage? Say it isn’t so.

Now I don’t have a prob­lem with the pres­i­dent play­ing by the cur­rent law even as he claims he wants it changed. I’ve always thought it was disin­gen­u­ous when the left attacked Social secu­rity and Medicare recip­i­ents who sup­ported the tea party for tak­ing the pay­ments allowed them by law.

The real story here isn’t that he is tak­ing the money, but they whys and where­fores listed by Politico (empha­sis mine)

But that wasn’t enough, sources say, to pull in major play­ers such as George Soros, Peter Lewis, Steve Bing and oth­ers into the game. And many top Demo­c­ra­tic donors were afraid of giv­ing to Pri­or­i­ties USA until Obama made clear he wouldn’t stand on the side­lines and crit­i­cize their efforts

And THAT is the bot­tom line. All of those who say that this pres­i­dent doesn’t run to the voice of Soros & co will either be spin­ning or ignor­ing this.

And politico story has this inter­est­ing line too:

Obama’s top cam­paign staff and even some Cab­i­net mem­bers will appear at super PAC events.

I’m sure Chuck Schumer will be all over this in his hear­ings over coor­di­na­tion between Super Pacs and cam­paigns, as he put it:

“It doesn’t pass the smell test to say some of these groups aren’t coordinated”.

Hey you have to replace that Mex­i­can Drug money some­how, but then again Obama has a his­tory of tak­ing untrace­able and ille­gal funds so I don’t see why this is so odd.

If you don’t remem­ber the story, he is the old Pow­er­line post in full, for some odd rea­son his archives from May-​Dec 2008 don’t exist but I found a print ver­sion online

Who is John Galt?
Octo­ber 23, 2008 Posted by Scott at 6:52 AM

We’ve pre­vi­ously noted the gusher of ille­gal cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions flow­ing into the Obama cam­paign from con­trib­u­tors such as “Doo­dad Pro” and “Good Will.” More recently, inci­dents have been reported in which peo­ple have seen credit card charges sur­face sug­gest­ing they donated to Barack Obama when they did not. Matthew Mosk and Sarah Cohen noted one such inci­dent ear­lier this week:

Now comes the story of Mary T. Biskup, of Man­ches­ter, Mis­souri. Biskup got a call recently from the Obama cam­paign, which was try­ing to fig­ure out why she donated $174,800 to the cam­paign — well over the con­tri­bu­tion limit of $2,300.

The answer she gave them was sim­ple. “That’s an error.”

Is the Obama cam­paign know­ingly receiv­ing ille­gal con­tri­bu­tions? Yes­ter­day one of our read­ers reported the results of an exper­i­ment he conducted:

I’ve read recent reports of the Obama cam­paign receiv­ing dona­tions from dubi­ous names and for­eign locales and it got me won­der­ing: How is this possible?

I run a small Inter­net busi­ness and when I process credit cards I’m required to make sure the name on the card exactly matches the name of the cus­tomer mak­ing the pur­chase. Also, the purchaser’s address must match that of the card­hold­ers. If these don’t match, then the pay­ment isn’t approved. Period. So how is it pos­si­ble that the Obama cam­paign could receive dona­tions from fic­tional peo­ple and places? Well, I decided to do a lit­tle exper­i­ment. I went to the Obama cam­paign web­site and entered the following:

Name: John Galt
Address: 1957 Ayn Rand Lane
City: Galts Gulch
State: CO
Zip: 99999

Then I checked the box next to $15 and entered my actual credit card num­ber and expi­ra­tion date (it didn’t ask for the 3-​didgit code on the back of the card) and it took me to the next page and… “Your dona­tion has been processed. Thank you for your gen­er­ous gift.”

This sim­ply should not, and could not, hap­pen in any busi­ness or any cam­paign that is hon­estly try­ing to vet it’s donors. Also, I don’t see how this could pos­si­bly hap­pen with­out the col­lu­sion of the credit card com­pa­nies. They sim­ply wouldn’t allow any busi­ness to process, poten­tially, hun­dreds of mil­lions in credit card trans­ac­tions where the name on the card doesn’t match the pur­chasers name.

In short, with the sys­tem set up as it is by the Obama camp, an indi­vid­ual could donate unlim­ited amounts of money by sim­ply mak­ing up fake names and addresses. And Obama is doing his best to facil­i­tate this fraud. This is truly scandalous.

Our reader was not yet done. He tried the exper­i­ment on the McCain site: “I tried the exact same thing at the McCain site and it didn’t allow the trans­ac­tion.” He then repeated the exper­i­ment at the Obama site:

I went back to the Obama site and made three addi­tional dona­tions using the names Osama Bin Laden, Sad­dam Hus­sein and Bill Ayers, all with dif­fer­ent addresses. All the trans­ac­tions went through using the same credit card. I saved screen­shots of the transactions.

Our reader reports, inci­den­tally, that he was using his Mas­ter­Card for the con­tri­bu­tions. We sub­mit this report in the spirit of inquiry and would espe­cially appre­ci­ate hear­ing from read­ers who can illu­mi­nate how credit card pro­ce­dures might (or might not) allow this to happen.

UPDATE: Read­ers have repli­cated the exper­i­ment reported in this post. We will have to revisit the issue tonight or tomor­row and appre­ci­ate any infor­ma­tion you can pro­vide in the meantime.

CLAR­I­FI­CA­TION: Many read­ers point out that the Obama cam­paign would exer­cise some con­trol over the secu­rity level required to ver­ify small dol­lar trans­ac­tions and that no col­lu­sion with the card issuer or bank is there­fore required. Mark Steyn elab­o­rates here. Mark explains the ques­tion of secu­rity set­tings and then adds:

As the Pow­er­line reader has noted, if “John Galt” of “Ayn Rand Lane” attempts a con­tri­bu­tion at the McCain cam­paign, it gets rejected. Which is just as well. If the Repub­li­can candidate’s web­site were inten­tion­ally set up to facil­i­tate fraud­u­lent dona­tions, it would be on the front page of The New York Times. But, as it’s King Barack the Spreader, we can rest assured the crack inves­tiga­tive units will be too pre­oc­cu­pied with Gov­er­nor Palin’s shoes over the next two weeks.

It is a point that needs mak­ing and that could be made every day.