"Here’s another situation reported by The New York Times in March 2005: “In a small office a few miles from Capitol Hill, a handful of top advisers to Senator John McCain run a quiet campaign. They promote his crusade against special interest money in politics. They send out news releases promoting his initiatives. And they raise money—hundreds of thousands of dollars, tapping some McCain backers for more than $50,000 each.”
These advisers work for a group called the Reform Institute, founded in 2001 after Sen. McCain’s failed presidential bid. The chairman of the board of the Reform Institute is…John McCain. If you go to look at the press releases at reforminstitute.org, you will see that virtually every release mentions Sen. McCain in the first sentence. Not paragraph, sentence. Who runs the Reform Institute? Well, the president is Richard Davis, who is paid over $110,000 a year. Who is Richard Davis? He was John McCain’s 2000 campaign manager. The counsel to the Reform Institute is Trevor Potter, whose law firm is paid more than $50,000 a year for the work. Who is Trevor Potter? Why, he was legal counsel to McCain 2000! The finance director of the Reform Institute is a woman named Carla Eudy. She was finance director for McCain 2000. The communications director is Crystal Benton; she was McCain’s press secretary.
Recently the Reform Institute, which bills itself as “a thoughtful, moderate voice for reform in the campaign finance and election administration debates,” launched what it calls the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. And what does natural resources stewardship have to do with “campaign finance and election administration”? As near as I can tell, its only connection to campaign finance and election administration is, as the institute’s site tells us, that “Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have introduced the Climate Stewardship Act” in Congress. And, of course, John McCain is planning to run for president again, and his signature issue, other than campaign finance regulation, is global warming. To run the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, the institute hired John Raidt, who, you guessed it, served 15 years working on “environmental initiatives” for Sen. McCain.
And how is the Reform Institute funded? With contributions, in six figures or more, from individuals and corporations, including the cable company Cablevision. Cable companies are constantly before the Senate Commerce Committee, which Sen. McCain chaired at the time of Cablevision’s contribution. In fact, Cablevision gave $200,000 to the Reform Institute around the same time its officials were testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee. Appearance of corruption, anyone?" What a hypocritical, corrupt SOB. Keeps his campaign machine primed and oiled and rolling in the big bucks in the off years. And I guess it would be illegal to run this info in an ad prior to his next election bid?
FECA’s provisions create a very complex matrix that depends on who is giving to whom. The backdoor effect, and perhaps one of its purposes, is to create such a labyrinth of laws and regulations that almost everyone will inadvertently violate one or more of them. Then selected politicians, meaning conservative Republicans, can be outed by the media and their heads demanded on a platter for being part of "the culture of corruption". Look no further than Tom DeLay for evidence and then compare his situation with those of Reid, Pelosi, and other Democrats.
We are being set up for a takeover and then FR and other outlets can forget it.
So what’s next? Right now the FEC is conducting a rule making that could regulate the Internet. Because the McCain-Feingold bill did not mention Internet regulation in its list of terms, we at the FEC passed a rule exempting online speech. So Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Marty Meehan (D-Mass.), the main House sponsors of McCain-Feingold, filed suit, joined by Sens. McCain and Feingold in an amicus brief. They argued that the Internet exemption was improper and got a federal district court judge to agree. This rulemaking is the result.