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CBS Report Flags Murray as Target of Mysterious Attack Ads
Democrats have been complaining this campaign season about TV attack ads, run by independent groups with innocuous-sounding names, that don't reveal who's funding the spots. That's because the amount spent on anti-Democratic messages has been $14 million so far this campaign season, while anti-GOP messages have totaled less than $3 million.
President Obama focused his most recent White House address on the issue, coinciding with an alarming Sunday New York Times editorial titled "the Secret Election."
Last night, CBS News did a report on mystery independent campaign cash, using an anti-Patty Murray ad by a group called The Committee for Truth in Politics as its main example of the phenomenon.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xqPLiPQvJ4[/youtube]
It's no wonder they focused on Murray. As we've reported a couple of times, (including our post last month on the same ad featured in the CBS report), Murray has been hit hard by independent expenditure ads.
Appropriately enough, Sen. Murray is co-sponsoring a bill called the DISCLOSE Act, which would require the top funder of an ad (corporate CEOs and union heads alike) to identify him-or-herself the same way candidates must do when they run a TV spot. For example, "This is Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and I sponsored this ad."
Murray is giving a floor speech today hyping the DISCLOSE Act. Editorializing here, but is there any way to count these floor speeches as campaign expenditures?
Rossi's campaign told us this summer that he had problems with the DISCLOSE Act because of a loophole that allowed unions to bundle individual union contributions without disclosing, getting around the threshold for reporting contributions to the federal government. However, the latest version of the bill closed the union loophole—and more to the point, the union loophole was about contributions to candidates, not about disclosing funders behind independent expenditure TV ads.
We have a message in to Rossi's campaign to find out what his current position is on the DISCLOSE Act.
President Obama focused his most recent White House address on the issue, coinciding with an alarming Sunday New York Times editorial titled "the Secret Election."
Last night, CBS News did a report on mystery independent campaign cash, using an anti-Patty Murray ad by a group called The Committee for Truth in Politics as its main example of the phenomenon.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xqPLiPQvJ4[/youtube]
It's no wonder they focused on Murray. As we've reported a couple of times, (including our post last month on the same ad featured in the CBS report), Murray has been hit hard by independent expenditure ads.
Appropriately enough, Sen. Murray is co-sponsoring a bill called the DISCLOSE Act, which would require the top funder of an ad (corporate CEOs and union heads alike) to identify him-or-herself the same way candidates must do when they run a TV spot. For example, "This is Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and I sponsored this ad."
Murray is giving a floor speech today hyping the DISCLOSE Act. Editorializing here, but is there any way to count these floor speeches as campaign expenditures?
Rossi's campaign told us this summer that he had problems with the DISCLOSE Act because of a loophole that allowed unions to bundle individual union contributions without disclosing, getting around the threshold for reporting contributions to the federal government. However, the latest version of the bill closed the union loophole—and more to the point, the union loophole was about contributions to candidates, not about disclosing funders behind independent expenditure TV ads.
We have a message in to Rossi's campaign to find out what his current position is on the DISCLOSE Act.
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