Campaign Financing

Grilling Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell on Monday's CBS Early Show, co-host Maggie Rodriguez questioned President Obama attacking Republicans over unproven claims of accepting foreign campaign donations: "Why did he spend so much time talking about the Republicans trying to steal the election? Offering no evidence of that. Isn't it a bit undignified for the President to resort to that?"  …

It seems like a phony issue for the a struggling Obama administration to be promoting – the allegations that the U.S. Chamber of  Commerce may or may not be using foreign contributions to fuel political ads against Democrats. However, President Barack Obama would be best advised to make sure his party wasn’t doing something similar before using the bully pulpit to push this meme. On CNBC’s…

CBS’s Bob Schieffer on Sunday mocked President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod for echoing last week’s unsubstantiated charge by a liberal website that the Chamber of Commerce is funneling foreign money to support Republican candidates. “The New York Times looked into the Chamber specifically and said the Chamber really isn’t putting foreign money into the campaign,” said the Face the…

On Wednesday, the far-left blog ThinkProgress unveiled an "investigation" that alleged, without any conclusive evidence, that the Chamber of Commerce was spending funds acquired from foreign-owned companies on political activities in the United States, a crime under U.S. law. ThinkProgress demonstrated that such funds entered the Chamber's general fund, and that money from the general fund…

The Los Angeles Times really wants you to know that Meg Whitman has taken more money from "special interests" than her Democratic opponent in the California gubernatorial race.Not so high on its list of important facts: 97 percent of independent special interest contributions to third party groups have gone towards supporting Brown or defeating Whitman. Yet despite that fact, the Times still…

Appearing as a guest on Monday’s Charlie Rose show on PBS, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin seemed to misunderstand conservative complaints about judicial activism as he seemed to suggest that any court rulings that strike down legislative action could be considered part of judicial activism. The CNN analyst charged that the Supreme Court of the United States has recently engaged in "conservative…

Pot calling the kettle foreign, eh?You're Ed Schultz.  Sorry about that, but work with me. Your big beef on tonight's show is foreign influence on US elections.  What would be the glaring, obvious, overwhelming thing you would want to avoid in your choice of a guest?  Having a union boss who is himself a foreigner, you say?  Bingo!  Yet that's exactly the slip-up Schultz committed.

A number of media liberals are up in arms over a far-left blog's inconclusive investigation - replete with innuendo and assumption - purporting to show that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has illegally spent funds obtained from foreign entities on political campaigns in the United States. Of course near-identical efforts by a handful of the most powerful labor unions have not been mentioned.…

On Wednesday's CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith highlighted supposed division between Sarah Palin and Alaska senate candidate Joe Miller: "...a controversial e-mail, reportedly from Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, that is burning up the internet, it was leaked by a left-leaning website called The Mudflats and is causing quite a stir in political circles."Smith explained that Todd Palin was upset…

It’s okay for the news media to attack a candidate, but not for citizens to join together to buy TV ads criticizing one – especially if more of those ads attack Democrats than Republicans. “Earlier this year, in a very controversial decision, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that outside groups may spend unlimited amounts of money attacking candidates for office,” Katie Couric intoned Tuesday night…

Outrage over political donations by Fox News's parent company News Corp. always seemed like a bit of a stretch when it implied that those contributions affected Fox's political coverage. Many news media outlets are owned by larger companies. Those companies' activities don't ipso facto affect news coverage at their media subsidiaries. So when NewsBusters pointed out that 88 percent of political…

Amidst a war of words with the White House, character attacks from the Left, and a New York Times hit piece on his connections with lobbyists, House Minority Leader John Boehner has received positive media coverage – from MSNBC of all places. The network ran a portrait of Boehner's childhood on its 11 a.m. news hour, and again on "Andrea Mitchell Reports" at 1 p.m."The public hears a lot of the…

"Mr. Boehner's ties to lobbyists seem especially deep," New York Times reporter Eric Lipton wrote of the House Republican Leader yesterday. Well, they're not, and therein lies the problem: Lipton apparently premised his article not on facts and data, but on what he thought seemed reasonable.Had Lipton stooped to investigate some of the serious claims he was making, he might have discovered that…

Over at stopnetregulation.org, Seton Motley reports that if the Democrats can't ban books, they'll try to ban book promotion. Democrats are furious that the conservative Threshhold imprint of Simon & Schuster (a corporate cousin of CBS) published a book by three House Republicans titled "Young Guns," and included a promotional video:   That was too much free speech for the Democrat…