SMURFS - Not Always Cute and Cuddly
How the Practice Can Evade Campaign Financing Laws and Regulations
I saw this, and didn’t want to wait until I had fully viewed it to post a link here.
So far, the evidence of such acts has been either ignored, or minimized as ‘accidental’. As If!
One of the biggest offenders is ACT Blue, which was set up for such purposes. Other tricks they use involves directing people to donate to the site under false pretenses, such as having them send money to them for causes such as general protection of women, specific issues coming up in states, or BLM. There IS a disclaimer that permits the ACT Blue site to redirect that donation to OTHER beneficiaries, not necessarily related to the cause the donor targeted.
That permission is used, a lot, to permit the intended recipient to have their donation taken from them, and sent to a more radical cause that doesn’t generate the appeal of the intended cause. This is just one of the shady tricks used to fund The Left, through misleading donors.
In other election news, I’m sure it will come as a COMPLETE SURPRISE that Tim Walz is a liar.
We expect some braggadocio from public figures. Heck, many of us have those This-is-my-story-and-I’m-sticking-to-it folks in our own genetic pool.
My father famously told stories that were intended to be funny, if not all that accurate. And, they were funny, for the most part. The strange thing was, his own REAL life was far more interesting than the embellished tales he told. Most of it, I only found near the end of his life, when we were on a trip together to visit his family.
My mother was of Irish heritage, which, according to her, meant “Don’t take the facts too seriously”. Her stories, and those of her father, got better and better each time they were repeated.
For years, I leaned more toward their hyperbole. Over the last 30+ years, I’ve stuck close to the truth - or, when I might prefer not to tell the truth, shut up.
In many cultures, the exaggeration of storytellers is a given. They are not trying to be historians, but mythmakers.
Was The Iliad or The Odyssey truth? No. It was the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath, and was intended to be an entertaining myth, that solidified the listeners understanding of What it Meant to be Greek.
Obama did the same in his story, Tales From My Father. It was the mythic version of how he and his family came to be a part of American history. And, I did not expect every detail to be fact-checkable. It was a highly sanitized version of reality, the kind of story that you might tell your children and grandchildren.
Walz should have turned Harris down. She, and her staff, made a HUGE error when they failed to properly vet the Minnesota governor. His story had obvious holes in it from the beginning, and he isn’t as facile a liar as Harris, who can, without a blush or stammer, say that she had not said what she is on video RECORD as having said.
Who knows? It may work. People who have a visceral hatred of the opponent will overlook a lot for their candidate to win.
The trouble is, those ‘Yellow Dog Democrats’ are not all that plentiful. Much of the success of the Dems in elections past was due to the ‘What Are You Going to DO For Me’ crowd - unions, teachers, low-income, minorities, etc.
And, thanks to rampant inflation, if they go along with the masquerade, they will be SO screwed!
It will be an interesting month ahead of us.
I will be voting early. I am being trained as a poll worker, and will be expected to have voted before Election Day. I will finish my training tomorrow (I’m going to have to miss the Guardian’s game! Hopefully, it will take longer than 2 hours).