Today's Cartoons

Oct 23 2007

Following the money with Hillary and donation-gate

Published by Karl at 1:13 am under Politics, hillary

The following links all show the same thing:  The need for money at any cost as Hillary begins her ascent to the Whitehouse.  I truly believe she is so driven there is no boundary she will not cross, and money is an easy one.  You will not, can not be elected President of the United States of America unless you have a ton of money.  Period.  End of debate.

And the Clintons have long since mastered this game.

But.  to keep perspective, it is certainly not limited to Hillary.  The gamers surrounding campaign donations crosses all stripes, parties and ideologies.  The ends justify the means to these politicians, because they can do so much better then anyone else, so they must be elected.

Campaign finance reform is a joke, a cruel slap in the face of hard working people.

That said, here is the latest ways she uses the poor to drive her ambition.  Others do it too, but the stories are all about her.

An unlikely treasure-trove of donors for Clinton

Something remarkable happened at 44 Henry St., a grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls. It also happened nearby at a dimly lighted apartment building with trash bins clustered by the front door.

And again not too far away, at 88 E. Broadway beneath the Manhattan bridge, where vendors chatter in Mandarin and Fujianese as they hawk rubber sandals and bargain-basement clothes.

All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate -- Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton's campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.

Anyone who does not see what is happening is hopelessly naive.

But just in case, Hot Air provides more info:

The saddest thing about all this is that no one has a very strong incentive to do the legwork on researching it. The campaigns don’t want to know if their donors are shady, as we saw in the willful blindness towards Norman Hsu. Hillary’s rivals have an incentive, of course, but there must be fundraising skeletons in Obama’s and Edwards’s closets too, just as there must be plenty on the GOP side. That makes it a game of mutually assured destruction among the oppo research teams and no one wants to play that game. The media doesn’t have a grand incentive either, the LA Times’s laudable example notwithstanding, because investigations like these are resource-intensive while basically amounting to fishing expeditions, with little guarantee of finding any wrongdoing. Plus, once you investigate one campaign, you open yourself up to charges of bias by not investigating them all. The best hope is the FEC, but does the FEC have the time and personnel — and political will, given the inevitable feeble claims of anti-Asian racism that are bubbling up here — to do spot checks like this? I’m asking honestly; I don’t know the answer. And if the answer is yes, why aren’t they doing it?

Update: Exactly but exactly what I was talking about up top:

Hsiao Yen Wang, a cook in Chinatown, is listed as giving Clinton $1,000 on April 13. Contacted yesterday, she told The Post she had written a check.

But it was on behalf of a man named David Guo, president of the Fujian American Cuisine Council, and Wang told The Post that Guo had repaid her for the $1,000 contribution.

I’ll bet Hsiao got a letter from the campaign asking her to confirm that she donated $1,000 and I’ll bet she answered that letter, completely honestly, by saying that she had. Which, per the campaign’s very scrupulous “investigation,” makes it a perfectly legitimate donation. When is the Wall Street Journal going to take the baton here and descend on this pool of donors in earnest? They can start by telling us a little more about the Fujian American Cuisine Council. Is that one of those nice “neighborhood associations” that’s been so helpful in drumming up cash for Hillary?

Follow the link and see what else the Post found. Hint: a lot of the same things the LA Times found.

And if done right, it is all technically legal.  Unethical, but legal.

More from the WaPo:

Dishwashers for Clinton:  Once again, a zeal for campaign cash trumps common sense.

DONORS WHOSE addresses turn out to be tenements. Dishwashers and waiters who write $1,000 checks. Immigrants who ante up because they have been instructed to by powerful neighborhood associations, or, as one said, "They informed us to go, so I went." Others who say they never made the contributions listed in their names or who were not eligible to give because they are not legal residents of the United States. This is the disturbingly familiar picture of Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign presented last week in a report by the Los Angeles Times about questionable fundraising by the New York senator in New York City's Chinese community. Out of 150 donors examined, one-third "could not be found using property, telephone or business records," the Times reported. "Most have not registered to vote, according to public records."

This appears to be another instance in which a Clinton campaign's zeal for campaign cash overwhelms its judgment. After the fundraising scandals of President Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign, the dangers of vacuuming cash from a politically inexperienced immigrant community should have been obvious. But Ms. Clinton's money machine seized on a new source of cash in Chinatown and environs. As the Times reported, a single Chinatown fundraiser in April brought in $380,000. By contrast, 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry raised $24,000 from Chinatown in the course of his entire campaign.

As with the warnings it dismissed about the mega-bundles being brought in by fundraiser Norman Hsu, the Clinton campaign saw the red flags here. After the April fundraiser, when some of the donors' stated occupations seemed out of line with the amounts they were giving, the Clinton campaign wrote to contributors asking them to confirm that the money was their own. In the case of seven $1,000 contributions, donors did not respond and their checks were returned, according to the campaign. The campaign says that the others, including one who told the Times that he did not give the money, reaffirmed the legitimacy of their contributions.

It's certainly true, as campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson says, that "Asian-Americans in Chinatown and Flushing have the same right to contribute as every other American." The campaign argues that it did what it could to ensure that contributions were legal. The alternative, the campaign says, would be to prevent those with foreign-sounding names from participating in the political process. But there's another alternative: to strengthen a vetting process that seems geared more toward justifying the acceptance of checks than toward uncovering problems.

Hillary is defiant to the end:

 Clinton defends questionable fundraising

A defiant Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she has no intention of curtailing her fundraising in the Chinese community despite reports that she accepted cash from dozens of questionable donors in Chinatown earlier this year.

The Los Angeles Times has reported that Clinton had received about 150 donations  of between $500 and $2,000 each from dishwashers, street vendors and other low-wage workers. Of the contributions examined, one-third of the donors could not be found and a $1,000 donor denied giving a contribution, according to the report.

"I represent New York and New York is a  symbol of the success of immigrants coming to America," the senator told reporters Saturday after addressing supporters at the Oak Park Elementary School in Des Moines.

"I am pleased to have a lot of first-generation American support as well as people who have been longtime involved in the political process ... I'm going to keep reaching out to everybody in our country. I want to be a president to everybody."

Earlier this year, Clinton returned about $7,000 of about $380,000 raised during a  fundraiser that targeted donors from China's east coast after campaign officials raised red flags about the donors. It's not clear whether other refunds will be issued.

The recent Chinatown story came to light a month after Clinton was forced to return more than $850,000 raised by accused scam artist Norman Hsu.

Shrug.  The ends justify the means and she even manages to sound open and altruistic as she scams people.

But what did you expect?

Lots more at:  New York Times, Captain's Quarters, Wake up America, Heading Right, A Blog For All, Newsweek.com, Blue Crab Boulevard, MSNBC, Never Yet Melted, UrbanGrounds, GINA COBB, Media Blog, Betsy's Page and Macsmind, Horses Mouth, Patterico's Pontifications, Wake up America, The Atlantic Online, The Hill, Flopping Aces, Boston Globe, MSNBC, Booman Tribune, Blogs for Bush, Gawker, TIME, Political Radar, QandO, Riehl World View, Spin Cycle, Interesting Times, Macsmind and A Blog For All Right Voices and Riehl World View Des Moines Register, The Moderate Voice, Hot Air, Bark Bark Woof Woof, Fausta's blog, Weasel Zippers and A Chequer-Board of Nights … michellemalkin.com and Suitably Flip

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply

You can track future comments on this post via this RSS feed. You can trackback this post by pinging this URL.

Allowed HTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

  • Welcome to Leaning Straight Up


    Contact Me
    My Seattle PI Blog
    My Website

    I am unapologetic
    about being patriotic



    We Must Not Forget


    Leaning Straight Up Honors:
    Robert William McPadden, age 30

  • Buy Me A Pony

    Thank you for supporting Leaning Straight Up
  • Recent Comments

  • Recent Posts

  • Categories

  •  

    October 2007
    M T W T F S S
    « Sep   Nov »
    1234567
    891011121314
    15161718192021
    22232425262728
    293031  
  • Archives


  • Hosted by:


    Banner

    blogroll

    Blogroll Me!


    *** - Recently Updated

    Recommended Reading




  • Advertisers






    Mailing List


    Sign up to be notified of new posts

    What People are saying about LSU


    “Good blog from a new reader." ~ Lars Larson, Syndicated Talk Radio Host

    "I really was blown away by the depth of your writing -- do you write for a living? If not, why not? Count me among YOUR fans." ~ Melanie Morgan, Syndicated Talk Radio Host

    "One of the best Northwest Blogs" ~ Bryan Suits, Radio Talk Show Host KFI 640am

    "Not trying to blow smoke up your butt, but you turn a nice phrase - even though we often disagree!" ~ Ken Schram, Northwest Radio and Television Commentator

    New blog recommendation: ST reader Karl’s blog Leaning Straight Up ~ Sister Toldjah, Nationally recognized blogger

    "It’s a well-written blog and it was enjoying to read through."
    ~ Jon Fredkove, Strategic Name Development







  • Site Stats



  • Syndications