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The Free Beacon has a brief profile of Kareem Ahmed from TPM, one of the few million dollar donors to Obama’s SuperPACs. You’d be forgiven if you don’t recognize Ahmed’s name. Before this year, his political giving was limited to a few four-figure checks to California candidates. Several veteran California politics watchers contacted for this story had no idea who Ahmed was, either. But here’s the thing: so far in 2012, Ahmed’s contributions to Obama, Democrats, and the outside spending groups that support them have totaled more than $1.1 million. Ahmed’s wife, Tayyaba Farhat, has contributed another $75,000. At...

A top Obama campaign bundler living in Shanghai, China, is an international businessman with ties to the Cayman Islands. Robert W. Roche has lived in China and Japan for the past 27 years, although he maintains a residence in Chicago. He has used his extensive connections to raise money for the Obama campaign, and has pledged to raise $500,000 for the Obama campaign this year, an upgrade from the $100,000-200,000 he agreed to raise four years ago. He donated the maximum $50,000 allowable to Obama’s inauguration fund in 2009. Roche’s wife, Ritsuko Hattori-Roche, along with Roche’s business partner Don Yang,...

On Thursday, Mother Jones reported that billionaire financier George Soros was "panicked" that Mitt Romney would win the election--and then scrubbed the story without explanation. Mother Jones--the left-wing outlet that published the incomplete "47 percent" video of Romney--was reporting on Soros's reasons for donating $1 million to the Paul Begala / Bill Burton run Priorities USA Action PAC on Sep. 27. Priorities USA Action is the same super PAC that ran the now-infamous "Soptic Ad" in which a man falsely linked Romney to his wife's death from cancer years after Romney left Bain Capital to run the Olympics. Soros now...

Liberal billionaire George Soros is giving $1 million to a "super" political action committee backing President Barack Obama. Soros' contribution to the super PAC Priorities USA Action comes as the group raised a record $10 million last month. It has launched television ads highly critical of Republican challenger Mitt Romney. …

The “Understands” ad, by Obama super PAC Priorities USA, insinuates that Mitt Romney is responsible for the death of the wife of former GST Steel employee Joe Soptic, five years before she died, simply because Soptic lost his job (and thus his health insurance) at a plant owned by Bain Capital. Conventional wisdom has it that the ad is both despicable and false. The question to be answered is: Was it coordinated with either the Obama campaign or the Democratic National Committee? Federal law typically treats a super-PAC ad coordinated with an official campaign or political party committee as an...

Serious question: is there anything—anything!—Debbie Wasserman-Schultz won't say to promote Barack Obama? On Fox News Sunday, interviewed by guest host John Roberts, the Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee somehow managed to keep a straight face as she brazenly claimed: "I have no idea of the political affiliation of folks who are associated" with Priorities USA, the Super PAC that ran the ad essentially blaming Mitt Romney for a woman's cancer death. But as is undoubtedly well known to Wasserman-Schultz, Priorities USA is run by Bill Burton—the former White House Deputy Press Secretary. View the video here.

A SuperPAC supporting Obama is under fire for airing an ad in which a steelworker accused Romney of making decisions that led to his wife's death. The Obama campaign has kept its distance from the ad — but it made the same charge, in a screenshot that appeared in an official Obama campaign slideshow.

The Washington Post seemed to honor Obama-commercial star Joe Soptic in the news section Thursday. Nia-Malika Henderson’s article was headlined “For anti-Romney ads, Democrats call Joe the Steelworker.” The subhead: "New spot seems to tie his wife's death to plant's closure after Bain took over." Online, the headline was "Forget Joe the Plumber -- Meet Joe the Steelworker." The Post couldn't find space for the Soptic story on Wednesday, even though Henderson interviewed him on Tuesday. Just like with the David Plouffe-scores-100-grand story this week, the Post headlines downplayed that Henderson found more details that make the Soptic ad look...

Oops? President Barack Obama's re-election campaign washed its hands Wednesday of an independent group's vicious (and misleading) ad effectively blaming Mitt Romney for the death of a laid-off steelworker's wife from cancer. Campaign officials flatly denied any knowledge of the facts in the case—but it turns out the widower told the same story on an Obama campaign conference call in mid-May. (The Obama campaign responded late in the day: See update below). "We have nothing, no involvement, with any ads that are done by Priorities USA. We don't have any knowledge of the story of the family," Obama campaign spokeswoman...

Representatives from the Obama campaign tried to distance themselves on Wednesday from a new ad released by the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA that links actions taken by Bain Capital to the death of former steelworker Joe Soptic’s wife. Aboard Air Force One, campaign spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters that the campaign had “no involvement with any ads that are done by Priorities USA.” “We don’t have any knowledge of the story of the family,” Psaki said when asked about Soptic’s story. On CNN’s Early Start Wednesday morning, Obama for America Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter also denied that she...

...played a role in the death of Ilyona Soptic at age 55. The ad features Joe Soptic, 62, of Missouri, who lost his job when GST Steel of Kansas City—owned by Bain and other investors for eight years—was closed. As melancholy music plays, Mr. Soptic says that when the plant closed, he and his family lost their health-care coverage and "a short time after that, my wife became ill." Her illness was diagnosed five years later. "I don't think Mitt Romney understands what he's done to people's lives by closing the plant," Mr. Soptic says in the ad. The steel...

The Obama supporting Super PAC Priorities USA yesterday introduced us to Joe Soptic. Mitt Romney killed his wife. Except it is complete and utter crap. Mitt Romney and Bain Capital bought GST Steel at some point. Romney left day to day operations of Bain in 1999. Thereafter, Bain offered Joe Soptic a buy out and he refused. Eventually the steel plant went out of business and Joe went on the unemployment line. That happened in 2001. In 2002 or 2003, Mrs. Soptic injured her rotator cuff and left her job. She lost her insurance. In 2006, she was diagnosed with...

Chutzpah overload in full effect: President Obama's sleazy super-PAC, run by his former White House spokesman Bill Burton, just released an ad accusing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of causing the cancer death of a steelworker's wife. It's not just a slanderous and false attack. It's a foolish attempt to camouflage the administration's massive jobs death toll, politicized pension plundering and Big Labor bailout cronyism. And it will backfire big time because the thousands and thousands of true victims of Obama's economic wreckage are speaking up and fighting back. Let's dispense with the "Romney = murderer" meme first. The warped...

No description at YouTube, so my write up:CNN's Brianna Kielar spoke with Joe Soptic, a former steelworker featured in a new pro-Obama super PAC ad who was laid off in 2001 when Bain Capital closed the company he had worked at for a reported 30 years. Without directly accusing Soptic and Priorities USA of being despicable liars, CNN lets its reporting call them out as despicable liars. Soptic told CNN his wife had her own health insurance at her own job when he was laid off. Soptic said his wife quit her job a year or two later due to...

Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com) Dough-Faced Liberal fat cats wimp out. Alec MacGillis June 22, 2012 | 12:00 am IN EARLY JUNE, a small group of Barack Obama's top fund-raisers gathered for an urgent meeting in a bar on Chicago's Michigan Avenue. They had been summoned to town for a briefing from campaign manager Jim Messina to the several dozen moneyed men and women who make up Obama's finance committee. But, in a classic example of Citizens United-era subterfuge, a handful of the attendees slipped away from the Renaissance Blackstone Hotel in the South Loop and headed to...

Former Reasoner David Weigel has an interesting article up that seeks to answer why there aren't any Club For Growth/FreedomWorks/Tea Party/Paulista-style primary-election challenges to the worst of the Democratic Party's status quo (like, say, the execrable Dianne Feinstein). This section in particular is unintentionally revealing: Two months ago, Progressive Insurance founder Peter Lewis left the Democracy Alliance, a lefty donor coalition. Earlier this month, billionaire George Soros made his first 2012 political donations—$1 million each to America Votes and American Bridge 21st Century. That’s $23.5 million less than he gave to liberal groups in 2004. According to David McKay, chairman...

Complete Title: The Soros Summit - Free Beacon exclusive: Inside the secret Miami meeting of George Soros’s liberal conspiracy ### A secretive network of left-wing billionaires and their political operatives descended on the luxurious Biltmore Hotel in Miami over the weekend to discuss strategy for the coming elections. The location of the conference had been kept a closely guarded secret by the members and guests of Democracy Alliance (DA), a collection of ultra-wealthy liberal donors formed in 2005, and is reported here in a Washington Free Beacon exclusive. Attendees roamed the grounds at the 150-acre tropical resort on their way...

To cleanse the palate, behold the first 2012 attack ad rolled out by Priorities USA, one of those outrageously outrageous outside groups funded by anonymous donors that The One used to dump on at every opportunity. The first lesson of Hopenchange, though, is that getting elected takes priority over principles (see, e.g., his reversal on accepting public financing in 2008), so now top O-bots Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney have struck out “on their own” to form the very same kind of group in his service. (A previous ad whined about the Koch brothers.) Liberals like Russ Feingold who, contrary...

Two former White House aides launched a pair of independent groups Friday to defend President Obama and fight the array of conservative efforts that poured money into the last elections, adopting the same tactics condemned by Obama. The move by Bill Burton, a former Obama deputy press secretary, and Sean Sweeney, who was a top aide to former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, confirmed the sharp reversal by Democrats on the use of undisclosed political spending. Burton and Sweeney said they were moved to create the outside groups to fend off conservatives such as the billionaire Koch brothers and American...