Super Pac

WASHINGTON -- A pending plan by top GOP strategists would bring back a familiar face from the 2008 presidential campaign, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in a massive $10-million campaign directed at drawing attention to connections between President Obama and the controversial reverend. “The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” the proposal pledges, according to documents obtained by the New York Times . The plan, titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good,”   is one of many being presented to Joe Ricketts, an outspoken supporter of conservative causes and founder of TD Ameritrade, who is more than willing to put his money where his political views are. Ricketts is currently the main financer of the “super PAC” Ending Spending Action Fund.

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti said Friday that Wendy Greuel's dwindling campaign treasury would only bolster his argument that her campaign is being sustained by the independent spending on her behalf. With 11 days left before the May 21 runoff election, City Councilman Garcetti's latest campaign finance report shows that he has 10 times as much cash-on-hand as his rival , who reported $275,000 in her bank account and debts of nearly $535,000. “She's now broke,” Garcetti said after appearing at a Mexican Mother's Day event at San Antonio Winery in Lincoln Heights with telenovela star Jaime Camil, whose surprise appearance brought gasps from the women assembled for the luncheon.

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti said Friday that Wendy Greuel's dwindling campaign treasury would only bolster his argument that her campaign is being sustained by the independent spending on her behalf. With 11 days left before the May 21 runoff election, City Councilman Garcetti's latest campaign finance report shows that he has 10 times as much cash-on-hand as his rival , who reported $275,000 in her bank account and debts of nearly $535,000. “She's now broke,” Garcetti said after appearing at a Mexican Mother's Day event at San Antonio Winery in Lincoln Heights with telenovela star Jaime Camil, whose surprise appearance brought gasps from the women assembled for the luncheon.

Re "'Super PACs' bury limits on spending," April 27 Spending by "super PACs" is a direct result of unrealistically low contribution limits. It takes a lot of money to run for mayor of Los Angeles. The only way to stop PACs is to lift the limits on direct contributions. Then the money would at least be traceable and the candidates accountable. The PACs are running campaigns and crafting messages beyond the candidates' control. They are the direct result of misguided reforms that have simply driven the money underground.

The Colbert Report has become a modern day Schoolhouse Rock, and Thursday night's lesson was all about PACs. Late last month, Stephen Colbert announced his strategy to become a "political playa in 2012" -- form a political action committee, like fellow conservative TV politi-pundits Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. ColbertPAC collected more than 68,000 emails, Colbert said last night. But Comedy Central's corporate parent Viacom, fearing that the PAC violates campaign finance restrictions, asked Colbert to shut the would-be PAC down.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and a "super PAC" working on his behalf churned through more than twice as much money than the two campaigns raised in January, underscoring the financial challenge the former Massachusetts governor faces as he tries to fend off rivals Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. In a month in which Romney lost two out of the four GOP primary contests, his campaign raced through $18.7 million while raising just $6.5 million, according to campaign finance records filed Monday with the Federal Election Commission.

A TV commercial released this week by the pro-Mitt Romney "super PAC" looks much like an ad released about four years ago by the official Romney campaign, raising suspicions among watchdog groups of improper coordination between the super PAC and the GOP presidential candidate's current campaign. The commercial, which is running in Arizona and Michigan in advance of Tuesday's primaries, tells the tale of Romney's former Bain Capital colleague Robert Gay, whose then-teenage daughter had run away in New York City for three days.

Restore Our Future, the independent group supporting Mitt Romney's presidential bid, raised $6.6 million last month, ending January with $16.3 million in the bank, according to filings submitted Monday to the Federal Election Commission. The group also spent almost $14 million in the first month of nominating contests. In all, the "super PAC" -- which can take unlimited donations from individuals and corporations -- has raised $36.8 million for the election cycle. This month's haul marks an acceleration in the group's fundraising pace, but unlike in months past, did not collect any million-dollar checks.

Super PACs have upended the presidential campaign by airing attack ads ad nauseum in Florida, South Carolina and Michigan, among other early-voting states. Some have included material so inaccurate that one professor is embarking on a campaign to stop them from airing. Starting Thursday, Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication wants television viewers to contact their local TV stations and urge them not to air inaccurate Super PAC ads. "People are very frustrated by the level of dirty attacks by Super PACs,” said Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the university.

A "super PAC" created by an influential labor organization will focus its efforts on motivating voters on the ground, rather than financing television commercials. "It's not going to be about FEC deadlines, television ads or the usual super PAC activity. It's about building a new way for workers to connect,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer for the AFL-CIO, at a news conference Thursday morning detailing the super PAC's strategy. Unlike past union efforts, the Workers Voices super PAC will be able to reach out to all workers, including nonunion ones.

Strict limits on campaign contributions imposed by voters nearly three decades ago are crumbling in the Los Angeles mayor's race, with big donors using loosely regulated "super PACs" to help candidates like never before in a citywide election, a Times analysis has found. Of the $17.5 million collected so far to support mayoral hopefuls Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti, roughly one-third - a record $6.1 million - has gone into independent political action committees that can accept contributions of any size.

Stephen Colbert likes to tread the line of fiction and nonfiction with his conservative pundit character on "The Colbert Report," but he's putting the fictional part aside to help out his sister, who's running for Congress in the siblings' home state of South Carolina. Colbert's sister Elizabeth Colbert Busch, who works in business development for Clemson University, is running as a Democrat for the House of Representatives seat vacated by Republican Tim Scott when he moved to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat of retiring member Jim DeMint.

Is Stephen Colbert going to join the Senate? Probably not, but that won't stop him from trying. The news last Thursday that Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) would be retiring from public service sparked immediate speculation about the possibility that everyone's favorite fake pundit, quasi-presidential candidate and South Carolina native son would run to replace him. Within hours, someone launched a “Colbert for Senate” Twitter account, and the host was named the top choice to replace DeMint in a survey conducted over the weekend by Public Policy Polling -- never mind that there's virtually no chance that Gov. Nikki Haley, an actual Republican, would appoint a fake one like Colbert to the vacant seat.

Just as the devil's finest trick is persuading you that he doesn't exist (according to the poet Baudelaire), the best trick of big-money political donors may be persuading Americans that Citizens United doesn't matter. Citizens United, of course, is the infamous 2010 ruling by the Supreme Court that overturned limits on political spending via ostensibly independent groups, and thereby unleashed a torrent of donations from corporations and wealthy individuals in presidential and congressional election cycles.

A fundraiser put on by heavyweights in Los Angeles' liberal-leaning environmental community should have been a tough crowd for Kevin James. But James, affable, polite and the only Republican candidate in a Los Angeles mayoral race dominated by City Hall Democrats, had no trouble chatting up guests as he made his way around the crowded event for the Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters. Richard Mueller, an executive with a multinational manufacturer, and Dave Alba, his business partner, seemed happy to corner him. The men spent several minutes outlining a massive freight automation project they are hoping to bring to San Pedro - a tough sell in labor-friendly L.A. They were at the party hoping to line up support for the project.

Carlos Gutierrez, who led Mitt Romney's outreach to Latinos during the presidential campaign, had harsh words for the former nominee Sunday as he joined the growing number of conservative voices calling for immigration reform. Appearing on CNN's “State of the Union,” Gutierrez said he was “shocked” to hear about Romney's recent call to campaign donors in which he credited President Obama's “gifts” to various groups , including the Latino community, for his loss in the election.

The group behind “King of Bain,” a 28-minute video attacking Mitt Romney's career at Bain Capital, has called on Romney to help identify errors in the film. Winning our Future, a “super PAC” backing Newt Gingrich, has used the film as the basis for attack ads airing on television in South Carolina, where the GOP primary campaign is in full gear. The film has been reviewed by a number of fact-checking organizations, which have concluded that it contains inaccuracies and distortions.

With contributions coming in, allies of Newt Gingrich have just purchased $6 million in advertising in Florida, to further build up the former House speaker after his victory in South Carolina. The first ad labels Romney as "the inventor of government run healthcare" suggesting he is allied with President Obama. The ad is paid for by Winning Our Future, a "super PAC" aligned with Gingrich. The organization has received $10 million in donations from one couple, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, who have backed Gingrich since they met him in 1995 when legislation important to Israel passed the House.

Looking to dramatically tip the scales in the race for Los Angeles' next mayor, a nationally prominent Republican media strategist has formed a "super PAC" that aims to spend millions of dollars to elect dark-horse mayoral candidate Kevin James. Fred Davis, a GOP advertising man who has worked on campaigns for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, U.S. Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina and former President George W. Bush, said the Better Way LA committee has raised nearly $500,000 on behalf of James and plans to collect at least $3.5 million more.

WASHINGTON - In the end, the old truism held: Money isn't everything. Deep-pocketed "super PACs" and other independent groups dumped more than $1 billion into the 2012 election, largely on behalf of Republicans, injecting a harsh tone into races across the country and driving record spending. But they failed to have the dramatic impact both sides anticipated after such intense saturation of the airwaves. Tuesday's results challenged the notion that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney had a strong edge because of heavyweight allies such as Americans for Prosperity, Restore Our Future and the two Crossroads organizations that were cofounded by Karl Rove, the political strategist and former advisor to President George W. Bush.