August 7, 2012

LINKS: Who Are Super PACs Helping The Most?

LINKS: Who Are Super PACs Helping The Most?Politico: Myth of the Small Donor
Roughly 2.5 million people have kicked in $200 or less to the various committees helping their candidate win the White House. But those 2.5 million people account for less than 18 percent of the total money haul.

NY Times: Romney Team Outpaces Obama in Fund-Raising Again
The fund-raising machine behind Mitt Romney and the Republican Party once again outperformed President Obama and the Democrats last month, raising $25 million more in July than the president and his Democratic allies.

The Tennessean: Jim Cooper Proposes Campaign Donations Via Text
The idea is to encourage more people to contribute to campaigns through small-dollar donations, counteracting the influence of millionaires and billionaires who max out in their contributions to candidates and political action committees and give unlimited amounts to Super PACs and other groups.

Rolling Stone: Guess Who’s Profiting Most from SuperPACs?
Candidates may raise the unprecedented sums of political cash being funneled through Super PACs this year, and media strategists may decide how to spend them – but the people who actually wind up pocketing much of the money are America’s television broadcasters.

Politico: Republicans Tell IRS to Back Off Tea Party
Leading Senate Republicans are pressuring the Internal Revenue Service to ignore calls for swift changes to rules that have allowed many tea party groups to avoid paying taxes.

AP: Romney Trounces Obama in Fundraising for Third Month
Money wasn’t supposed to be a worry for the president’s campaign, which smashed fundraising records in 2008. But Mitt Romney’s team has hauled in more than Obama and his allies for a third straight month, raising the once-unthinkable question.

GQ: Take the Money and Run
If you had all the money in the world, what would you buy? How ’bout an American President?

National Journal: Revolving Door Chronicles: Skadden Hires Former DOJ Antitrust Chief
In the latest installment of the Washington revolving door, the one-time head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division who helped derail a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile has gone to work at the law firm that worked as outside counsel for Sprint Nextel, which lobbied hard against the corporate marriage.

Vanity Fair: The Rise of Karl Rove
Not long ago, Karl Rove seemed toxic: the brains of a disastrous presidency, tarred by scandal. Today, as the mastermind of a billion-dollar war chest—and with surrogates in place in the Romney campaign—he’s the de facto leader of the Republican Party. But in Rove’s long game, 2012 may be just the beginning.