August 10, 2012

This Week in Dark Money

A quick look at the week that was in the world of political dark money…

the money shot

 


quote of the week

“The point of having a super PAC is like having a Rolex. It’s a pain to tell time with a Rolex, but it’s great for looking rich and picking up girls. Similarly, our super PAC isn’t here for raising money, but it gives us a very unique bragging right.”
—Anthony Kao, president of the Joe Six PAC super-PAC, talking with the American Prospect. He got the idea to create his super-PAC, which has raised $0 to date, after finding an article on Reddit about a Florida man who launched 60 of them.

 

attack ad of the week

A new ad (which has yet to air on TV) from the pro-Obama super-PAC Priorities USA Action features a familiar face. Joe Soptic, who was laid off from a Missouri steel plant after it was sold to Bain Capital, appeared in an Obama campaign ad in May that blamed Mitt Romney for closing the plant. Soptic appeared in the Priorities ad wearing the same shirt (but no glasses) and insinuates that Romney is partly responsible for his wife’s death from cancer. Campaigns and super-PACs are prohibited from coordinating with each other, and both camps said they hadn’t. But after news that Soptic told his story to reporters during an Obama campaign conference call in May, an Obama spokeswoman walked back a claim that the campaign was unaware of Soptic’s story.

Here are the two ads:


 

stat of the week

193 percent: How much spending by groups that don’t have to disclose their donors has increased in 2012 compared with the same time in 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

 

chart of the week

A new study by the liberal think tank Demos and the US Public Interest Research Group sheds some light on the wealthy donors behind this year’s “tsunami of slime.” Among the findings: 58 percent of all outside spending has come from just five groups, and 1,082 donors account for 94 percent of all super-PAC donations from individuals. We chartified some of the data:

 

more mojo dark-money coverage

• How Secret Foreign Money Could Infiltrate US Elections: Think the United States is immune from foreigners’ campaign cash? Think again.
• 250 Years of Campaigns, Cash, and Corruption: From George Washington to Citizens United, a timeline of America’s history of political money games.
• Dark Money’s Top Target: Claire McCaskill: Will Dems save the centrist Missouri senator from Karl Rove’s attack ad onslaught? Don’t hold your breath.

 

more must-reads

• New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman ramps up his investigation into shadowy 501(c) groups. New York Times
• Republican senators urge the IRS to ignore political pressure for “sudden changes to well-established law” when it considers revising dark-money rules. Senate Finance Committee
• Senate candidate Heidi Heitcamp (D-N.D.) gets Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS to pull a false attack ad against her. Talking Points Memo
• Kansas Senate President Steve Morris, a Republican who lost his primary Tuesday, blames Koch brother-affiliated outside groups from moderates’ defeat in state races. Huffington Post

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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