The PAC Scam

When I went to Drudge this morning, the paid ad at the top urged me to contribute to Sarah Palin’s PAC to help 2014 GOP candidates.

If you check out SarahPAC’s latest FEC filing, you’ll learn that while she raked in $5.1 million in the last election cycle, she gave only $298,500 to candidates she supposedly supported.

My first response to reading this was wondering why she wears such cheap and tacky wigs.  With millions flowing in, she can obviously get the quality human hair ones.

Look, if you want to support a candidate whom Palin supports in 2014, donate to that candidate directly (and then please get yourself some help…).  Otherwise, you’re just giving money to prop up Palin’s increasingly pathetic attempts at celebrity and relevance.

We worry about these PACs having outsize influence on elections.  Really many of them are just slush funds, just another clever scam.  They threaten our wallets much more than our democracy.

Picture Bachmann In An Orange Jumpsuit

Salon has an interesting story up*, that Michele Bachmann hasn’t paid five Iowa staffers from her failed presidential campaign because they have refused to sign an agreement prohibiting them from discussing with police or the press “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity” they saw.

There is an ongoing criminal investigation pertaining to a home schooling group’s accusations that Bachmann’s campaign stole their email list.  The group has also filed a civil law suit.  As Dick Morris will be the first to tell you (check out the self-dealing between his PAC and Newsmax to make Morris rich from selling his email list, whereby poor fools donate to Morris’ PAC, the PAC then pays Newsmax for Morris’ list and calls it “fundraising,” and Newsmax pays Morris), you can’t just steal someone’s list, you have to pay for it.

I love the image of Bachmann in an orange jumpsuit, picking up trash by the side of the road.

* “Bachmann still hasn’t paid presidential campaign staffers,” Alex Seitz-Wald