How Jane Hamsher Spends Her PAC Money

Firedoglake publisher Jane Hamsher has become one of the most polarizing figures in the liberal blogosphere, moving people sharply to the pro or con column with her outspoken opposition to the health care reform bill, appearances on Fox News bashing the Obama administration and the letter she sent with conservative activist Grover Norquist demanding the resignation of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Hamsher wields a lot of influence by operating two Democratic political action committees, FDL Action PAC and Accountability Now PAC. By the end of 2009 these PACs had accumulated $454,000 from thousands of individual donors. Because all PACs are required by law to report their donors and expenditures with the Federal Election Commission, I thought the FEC disclosure database would provide a revealing glimpse of how money is moving through the netroots.

PACs have different policies regarding whether they compensate the people who run the committees. Some don't accept one cent of donor money and devote it all to their cause, while others pay themselves salaries, travel expenses and office rent. I interviewed Darcy Burner, a former Democratic Congressional candidate from Washington state who runs the not-for-profit Progressive Congress Action Fund, to learn whether it's common for left-wing PACs to pay themselves. "The bigger PACs require full-time staff to operate -- to raise money, to vet candidates [and] to file reports," she said. "I think the key question would be more one of whether people giving the money understand what it will be used for. ... There's a trust relationship with donors that requires some truth and transparency about how money is going to be used."

The FEC reports show that Hamsher's PACs are a significant source of income for Firedoglake, but my experience trying to question her about them suggests that she's not big on transparency.

FDL Action PAC supports liberal causes and candidates, often with targeted campaigns such as "Tell Blanche Lincoln and Mike Ross to Act Like Democrats." Accountability Now's stated goal is to recruit primary challengers against members of Congress who "sell out the interests of their constituents in favor of corporations," according to its site.

Accountability Now collected $113,695 in donations during 2009, as it reported to the FEC, and spent $169,992 that year on nine consultants. Six of those people managed the committee: The PAC paid Hamsher $24,000, another $24,000 to PAC cofounder Glenn Greenwald of Salon.Com, $65,710 to two executive directors and $38,047 to two management consultants.

The PAC also paid $4,000 to Firedoglake for "rent," according to its FEC filings. This expenditure is difficult to understand. Hamsher has operated her web site out of post office boxes at UPS Stores in Los Angeles and Falls Church, Va., and the Accountability Now web site states that "we have purposely avoided hiring a large staff or incurring the type of unnecessary expenses typically incurred by PACs (including even office rentals) in order to make our donors' contributions last as long as possible."

Out of the $234,920 raised by FDL Action PAC in 2009, $44,192 was paid to Firedoglake and other business entities affiliated with Hamsher, according to FEC filings. The PAC paid $16,411 to Firedoglake for "shared general administrative expenses," $14,111 to the site for "list purchase," $9,920 to CommonSense Media for "online advertising" and $3,750 to KMP Research for "strategic consulting."

The reasons for the expenditures are provided on the filings by PAC treasurer DeVeria Flowers. The list purchase is presumably the sale of a mailing list from the Firedoglake web site to its own PAC. CommonSense Media is a liberal ad network run by Hamsher and KMP Research is a business entity that Hamsher uses in both PACs to pay herself. It has the same post office box as Firedoglake in Falls Church.

Two people who Firedoglake paid to work towards passage of health care reform in 2009 don't show up in FDL Action's FEC filings for the year. FDL raised funds in July 2009 for Eve Gittelson and Noelle Cigarroa Bell to "work full time on this until a bill passes." Gittelson and Bell, who write online as Nyceve and Slinkerwink, announced six months later that they "no longer work with, or receive funds" from Firedoglake. None of their political activity is reflected in the PAC's filings, which raises the question of where donations were sent and how the women were paid.

Trying to understand how the PACs operate, I interviewed several former Firedoglake employees and tried unsuccessfully for the last five days to get Hamsher or Flowers to answer questions about specific expenditures. Flowers did not respond to emails. In an email exchange Sunday, Hamsher refused to answer any questions about how her PACs spend their money.

Instead, Hamsher questioned me repeatedly to see if I'd tell her which employees talked to me and what allegations they might have made. "I'm assuming from your answer that no former FDL employees have made statements or provided any information that will be used in the article," she wrote in an email, "since you have not informed me of nor allowed me to respond to any."

With one exception, the employees spoke to me off the record so I'm not passing along what they said. They were asked the same questions posed to her. PACs are accountable to the public for where their donations are spent. The only person who had trouble giving me an answer was Hamsher.

In December, Hamsher used FDL Action to urge the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation to fire Sen. Joe Lieberman's wife Hadassah Lieberman as a consultant because of her work for a health industry lobbying firm. Hamsher wrote, "Each year they take in hundreds of millions of dollars from people who want to end the suffering of those who are fighting breast cancer. How these donations are channeled, therefore, is of great concern to those those who have invested untold amounts of money and support in its work."

The same principle is true here. As of this morning, FDL Action PAC has collected more than $270,000 from around 9,100 individual donors.

In the six years since she founded Firedoglake and named it after her fireplace, dog and the Los Angeles Lakers, Hamsher has built a well-oiled outrage machine that's now firmly pointed at the White House and its Democratic allies in Congress. These headlines from Hamsher's blog posts show that she's mad as hell and she's not going to take it anymore:

• White House Executive Order: ---- --- to Planned Parenthood
• Do Conrad and Durbin Just Love Banks, Or Really Hate Students?
• Ha Ha. ---- You, Harry Reid. Kicking Your Ass is Going To Be Fun

Hamsher's exceptionally good at getting people to put their money where her mouth is. But because Firedoglake is a blog that's dependent on financial support from PACs, it makes me wonder how much of her outrage is real and how much is driven by the constant need to fire up donors.

I posed that question to David Ferguson, who used to be in charge of Firedoglake's "Late Night FDL" feature under his pseudonym TRex. He replied, "I would hope that Jane wouldn't be so cynical as to exploit her readers in any way. I do know that working for her, there was a constant sense of crisis. Everything was always a blazing, four-alarm emergency, and I think some of that is what comes through on her blog. I don't know whether that's something she's working for effect or if that's just the way she is. Some of her alliances over the last year have genuinely surprised me, though, particularly with regard to the flap over the health care bill."

2009 Accountability Now expenditures to managers and consultants:

The photo of Hamsher was taken by Neeta Lind and is available for reuse under a Creative Commons license.

Politics · Pacs · Firedoglake · 2010/03/29 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Glenn Beck Begs Listeners Not to Throw Bombs

On his talk radio program today, Glenn Beck begged his listeners not to use guns or bombs to respond to the passage of health care reform in Congress. In a long diatribe in which he claimed that today's Democratic leaders were violent radical Marxists in the '60s, Beck said, "They need you to pick up a gun or a bomb. They need you to break the law. They need you to become them in the 1960s."

Beck claimed that the United States is "entering a very dangerous phase" by design of the Obama administration, which he said is intentionally provoking the public by passing health care and moving next to immigration reform.

"If you were in the 1960s and you were a radical and you believed in a Marxist revolution, you were crushed," he said. "And who crushed you? Well, the good God-fearing grandparents that we all had that were going to church. They stood up. ... Who crushed you? LBJ and Nixon. The Man."

Although President Obama, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and most other Cabinet members were too young to have been part of '60s counterculture or had absolutely no ties to the radical movement, Beck maintained that today's Democratic Party is led by '60s radicals who pursued the violent overthrow of the United States.

"If I were a radical in the '60s and I was sitting back and saying OK how did we lose? We lost because we weren't in power," he said. "You must have power. It's not enough to be out on the streets. You must be Richard Nixon. You must have radicals at the top. If I again am sitting there and I'm listening to that and I think, you know what really killed us here is that Americans don't like bomb throwers. They don't like hippies. ...

"If you're going to take over, if you're going to end it, if you want to have the true fundamental transformation of America, what you do is you have to reverse the roles. You have to put yourself in the role of LBJ the Man. And you need to put the Man, you need to put the good Christian people, in your role from the 1960s. The ones with the signs and the banners in the streets because you can manipulate them like crazy -- because you know what the Man did to you that pissed you off. You know what the Man was doing to you that made you say I gotta get a bomb. And you also know that doesn't work."

Comparing the American people to a child being disciplined by its parent, Beck said, "Why do you think they are needling and poking and prodding all the time? Why do you think they slap you down on health care and just when you're getting up they punch you in the face with immigration? Why do you think they're being so divisive? ... They gave us a spanking on health care and then they punched us in the face. They want you to say daddy doesn't love me. They need you to be estranged from them."

Beck's advice: "Do not play in to their game. They hold all of the cards. Do not do anything but get on your knees. As we turn to Him He will turn to us. This is His land. Let it play out His way. Do not pick up anything except your soul. They need you to become radical."

In a Gallup poll released yesterday after the House approved health reform, more Americans supported the health reform bill than opposed it by a margin of 49 percent to 40 percent.

Beck, however, fears that the passage of Democratic legislation by a Democratic president and Democratic Congress will lead to revolution. "I'm thinking ... if there's a revolution now, it ends the way the French Revolution did, which is Napoleon, a dictator, bloodshed -- awful, awful things."

• Video of Beck's diatribe
• Transcript from GlennBeck.Com

Radio · Politics · Crime · 2010/03/24 · 17 COMMENTS · Link

Andrew Breitbart Lied to Pimp ACORN Story

Clark Hoyt, the ombudsman of the New York Times, has finally figured out that Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe lied to the media about the way O'Keefe was dressed during the ACORN sting videos last fall:

... O'Keefe almost certainly did not go into the Acorn offices in the outlandish costume -- fur coat, goggle-like sunglasses, walking stick and broad-brimmed hat -- in which he appeared at the beginning and end of most of his videos. It is easy to see why The Times and other news organizations got a different impression. ... The Times was wrong on this point, and I have been wrong in defending the paper's phrasing. Editors say they are considering a correction.

The Times reported several times that O'Keefe was wearing a ridiculous pimp costume during the visits to ACORN offices, an impression furthered by O'Keefe when he wore it during an appearance on Fox News.

As the story was first getting national attention, Breitbart wrote in his column for the Washington Times that O'Keefe was dressed that way:

When filmmaker and provocateur James O'Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN -- the nation's foremost "community organizers" -- dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for - and getting -- help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice.

As Breitbart had to know at the time, since he had viewed all of the videos and was publishing them on his Big Government web site, O'Keefe was dressed conservatively in a button-down shirt while talking to ACORN workers. He only wore the pimp costume in footage shown of him getting out of a car, which was filmed separately and edited into the videos to mislead viewers.

Telling people O'Keefe wore that pimp getup helped give the story wider media attention and made ACORN workers look stunningly stupid for not seeing through the ruse.

Dig into any story pimped by Breitbart and you'll catch him spreading half-truths or brazenly false information. Though he employs the trappings of journalism, he engages in practices that no professional journalist could get away with at a reputable organization.

In May 2001, the Drudge Report ran a story that quoted Breitbart and chided the New York Times for not covering Sidney Blumenthal dropping his libel suit against Drudge:

"What the NEW YORK TIMES is doing with its sin of omission concerning the Drudge case is no doubt a form of libel of its own, corporate news slander of the highest degree," said Professor Emeritus Andrew Breitbart of the Cashmere Institute of Media Studies.

The Cashmere Institute of Media Studies does not exist. It's a phony organization named by Breitbart as an in-joke that would be spotted by his personal friends. Breitbart was editing the Drudge Report at the time, and he either quoted himself or Drudge quoted him.

When I was a newspaper reporter, I would have been fired if I pulled a stunt like that to inject my opinion into a story. But Drudge and Breitbart have the good fortune to work in online agenda-driven journalism, where no one is ever held accountable for being wrong. Breitbart lied back then, lied about the ACORN sting and will probably lie in furtherance of the next scoop he peddles to the mainstream media.

He can't be trusted.

I wonder how long it will take the Times and the rest of the major media to figure that out.

Related blog entries:

• Simon Owens interviews Brad Friedman, the liberal blogger who has doggedly pursued a correction from the Times

Journalism · Politics · Prostitution · 2010/03/21 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

W3C Serves 130 Million XML DTDs Per Day

A Java application I wrote that reads several dozen RSS feeds started running into trouble with the W3C. Feeds failed with HTTP 503 "Service Unavailable" errors like this one:

Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd

At first I thought this was a temporary error. HTTP 503 errors are defined to indicate that a server is temporarily overloaded or undergoing maintenance.

However, the W3C Systems Team announced in February 2008 that they were dealing with so much traffic for their XML DTD files that they were using 503 errors to deal with bandwidth-hogging XML clients that request the files too often:

... we receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven't changed in years. ...

A while ago we put a system in place to monitor our servers for abusive request patterns and send 503 Service Unavailable responses with custom text depending on the nature of the abuse. Our hope was that the authors of misbehaving software and the administrators of sites who deployed it would notice these errors and make the necessary fixes to the software responsible.

But many of these systems continue to re-request the same DTDs from our site thousands of times over, even after we have been serving them nothing but 503 errors for hours or days.

Although the problem went away for reasons I don't yet understand, I'm looking for a way to read local copies of the XML DTDs with the XOM Java XML library. XOM doesn't yet support XML Catalogs, an XML standard for handling this kind of issue.

Java · Xml · Bandwidth · 2010/03/16 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Huffington Post Censors Jesse Ventura on 9/11

A March 9 commentary submitted to Huffington Post by former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura was removed after publication by the site, which replaced it with a note stating that contributors are banned from engaging in conspiracy theories:

Editor's Note: The Huffington Post's editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories -- including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post.

"I can't believe the Huffington Post today will practice censorship. I've got news for them," Ventura responded to the action. "I won't ever write for em again."

I get tired of a lot of the conspiracy stuff posted by users on the Drudge Retort, which gets 2-4 posts a day from Infowars, Prison Planet and similar sites, but I've never banned it. I know it's difficult for Huffington Post to deal with fringe stuff -- the conservative group blog Red State kicked off birthers and truthers last month -- but the Post is doing a public disservice by allowing no discussion at all on a subject. Ventura is a former governor. When prominent people challenge the government, the idea that their views should be censored on the grounds they are a "conspiracy theory" is antithetical to open debate in a free society. Any far-out idea could be dismissed as conspiracist. Would the Post have censored Jim Garrison from writing about the Kennedy assassination? The site is running Jenny McCarthy's dangerous autism vaccine quackery, a view widely discredited by medical experts.

To combat the censorship, I republished Ventura's censored 9/11 commentary yesterday and gave it major news banana treatment on the Retort:

You didn't see anything about it in the mainstream media, but at a recent conference in San Francisco, more than 1,000 architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9-11.

That's right, these people put their reputations in potential jeopardy -- because they don't buy the government's version of events. They want to know how 200,000 tons of steel disintegrated and fell to the ground in 11 seconds. They question whether the hijacked planes were responsible or whether it could have been a controlled demolition from inside that brought down the twin towers and WTC Building 7.

His views aren't faring too well in the Retort discussion. But they deserve to be heard.

Politics · Journalism · Censorship · 2010/03/15 · 22 COMMENTS · Link

Boston Herald: Alabama Shooter Played D&D

A story I missed last month: After University of Alabama-Huntsville professor Amy Bishop was arrested for shooting up her faculty department, Boston Herald reporter Laurel J. Sweet blew the lid off a shocking angle of the crime: Bishop was an avid player of role-playing games.

Accused campus killer Amy Bishop was a devotee of Dungeons & Dragons -- just like Michael "Mucko" McDermott, the lone gunman behind the devastating workplace killings at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield in 2000.

Bishop, now a University of Alabama professor, and her husband James Anderson met and fell in love in a Dungeons & Dragons club while biology students at Northeastern University in the early 1980s, and were heavily into the fantasy role-playing board game, a source told the Herald.

"They even acted this crap out," the source said.

I didn't think the press was still capable of anti-D&D hysteria like this. Back in the '80s, Joe McGinness wrote a ridiculous true-crime book on some murderer who blamed D&D for his crime, Tom Hanks starred in the anti-D&D TV movie Mazes and Monsters and grieving mother Patricia Pulling began the scare group Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, blaming the game caused her teen-age son's suicide.

But these days, D&D and role-playing games are about as controversial as Yahtzee. Millions of people played the game as kids and grew up without worshiping the occult or committing murders. The deaths of game creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in recent years were major news covered across the globe, sparking countless remembrances by people who huddled around a table with dice when we could've been experimenting with drugs and alcohol. (I was going to say drugs, sex and alcohol, but who am I kidding?) Today, millions of people play MMORPGS and other videogames that are D&D in everything but name.

Like out and proud D&D geek Stephen Colbert, I was a dungeon master in my youth (and not the cool kind who wears assless leather chaps and ties women up on torture wheels in my basement). I've managed to reach middle age without killing anybody at all, not even a single drifter or truck stop prostitute.

Gaming · Crime · Journalism · 2010/03/14 · Comment · Link

The Heavy: David Letterman Likes Them Now

On Jan. 18, the British band The Heavy impressed David Letterman so much with their song "How You Like Me Now?" that he did something he's never done before in the history of his program -- he asked for an encore.

The YouTube video is the televised broadcast -- which edits out most of the encore -- but you can see it in full in high quality on Letterman's web site. Paul Shaffer and Letterman even perform part of the encore.

There have been some great live performances on Letterman, including TV on the Radio's Wolf Like Me and Phoenix's 1901, but that one tops them all.

Music · Television · Letterman · 2010/03/12 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Read More Entries