Video: Colbert Super-PAC Donates Its Leftovers

"If you eat a ham in the shape of a rival's head you gain all their knowledge…and all their sodium too."<a href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/398530/september-29-2011/colbert-super-pac---ham-rove-s-comeback">Colbert Nation</a>

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The Ham Rove Memorial Fund, rumored to be linked to Stephen Colbert’s super-PAC (okay, definitely linked), announced it will donate more than $135,000 to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit organization that aims to expose money’s effect on elections and public policy. Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, won a Peabody Award this year for his work in educating the American public about the implications of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling through Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow (ABTT), his satirical super-PAC.

On his December 13 show, Colbert announced that he legally wasn’t required to disclose the whereabouts of the nearly $774,000 remaining in the war chest of his super-PAC after the election. Coincidentally, the same exact amount was just donated to a new memorial fund named in honor of ABTT’s former chief strategist Ham Rove, a bespectacled slab of ham who suffered a tragic end when he fell upon a knife that Colbert happened to be swinging wildly in his immediate vicinity.

The Ham Rove Memorial Fund then divvied up the cash to the CRP as well as the Campaign Legal Center, another organization that fights for transparency in politics, several Hurricane Sandy relief organizations, and the Yellow Ribbon Fund, which helps wounded troops returning home from war.

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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.

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