With the hurricane taking over the new cycle not much has been able to break through - but this outstanding piece in the New York Times was posted yesterday that talks about the unfortunate backlash from the Citizens United ruling.

"The event was not a fund-raiser for Mr. Romney’s campaign, however, but for Restore Our Future, a political action committee founded by his allies. And only when Mr. Romney left the room did one of the group’s officials stand up to brief the donors on their plans: to raise and spend millions of dollars in unrestricted campaign donations — something presidential candidates are forbidden to do themselves — to help elect Mr. Romney president."

Romney has been on of the leaders in using open campaign finance laws to raise unlimited amounts of money through state PACs, super PACs, as well as his presidential committee.

"The fact that Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is weighing a run for president in 2012, has an active political action committee in Alabama might seem puzzling.

It is, after all, not a critical early-voting state for the Republican nomination, where these kinds of leadership PACs are often set up by potential presidential candidates.
Upon closer inspection, though, Mr. Romney’s interest in Alabama snaps into focus. The state has among the most permissive campaign finance rules in the nation, allowing contributions of unlimited size from individuals and corporations.
As a result, the Alabama affiliate of Mr. Romney’s federal PAC, Free and Strong America, has raised more than $440,000 this year, with many of the contributions amounting to tens of thousands of dollars each."

It shouldn't be shocking that's the reason that the President intends to raise over $1 billion for his campaign. The graph below shows the difference in time that candidates spend with voters when they're campaigns are being publicly financed through clean elections vs. when they're being paid for by donors.

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Every once in a while, when you least expect it, Congress manages to throw a bone to the little guys!

WASHINGTON — Retailers have begged Congress for years, in vain, to limit the fees they must pay to banks when customers swipe credit or debit cards. Bills never reached a vote. Amendments were left on the table. The Senate did not even grant the courtesy of a committee hearing.

That long record of futility ended in a landslide Thursday night. Sixty-four senators, including 17 Republicans, agreed to impose price controls on debit transactions over the furious objections of the beleaguered banking industry.

The amendment to the Senate’s sweeping financial legislation could save billions of dollars for family restaurants and dry cleaners, Wal-Mart and Amazon.com, and every other business whose customers increasingly pay with debit cards. It does not address credit card fees directly.

Consumers also could save money, particularly at businesses like grocery stores that compete on price. But some experts warned that lower profit margins could lead banks to curtail bank card reward programs.

The Senate approved a series of amendments unfavorable to the banking industry over the last week, but this one was widely regarded as the most surprising. Meddling in dealings between businesses generally is anathema to Republicans and a relatively low priority for Democrats.

And this was not an easy vote. Lobbyists for the wounded but formidable banking industry made clear to some senators that this decision would affect future campaign donations, according to people who participated in those conversations.

But retailers mounted an unusually effective yearlong campaign to frame the issue as a chance for Congress to help small business. A leading trade group for chain retailers worked with small-business groups to make sure that every time a senator held a town hall meeting back home, a local business owner showed up to ask about card fees.

So everyone, including the late John Murtha, was cleared in this investigation. We should feel reassured, right?

Not exactly. One thing I learned when I was a reporter was that there is actually very little that Congress members can't do:

The House ethics committee ruled Friday that seven lawmakers who steered hundreds of millions of dollars in largely no-bid contracts to clients of a lobbying firm had not violated any rules or laws by also collecting large campaign donations from those contractors.

In a 305-page report, the ethics committee declared that lawmakers are free to raise campaign money from the very companies they are benefiting so long as the deciding factors in granting those "earmarks" are "criteria independent" of the contributions. The report served as a blunt rejection of ethics watchdogs and a different group of congressional investigators, who have contended that in some instances the connection between donations and earmarks was so close that it had to be inappropriate.

"Simply because a member sponsors an earmark for an entity that also happens to be a campaign contributor does not, on these two facts alone, support a claim that a member's actions are being influenced by campaign contributions," the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct said in a unanimous statement.

Ethics watchdogs issued sharp denunciations, citing portions of the report that showed that the private companies thought their donations helped them win earmarks. The lawmakers -- Reps. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.) and C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) -- claimed vindication.

Years ago, I was working on a story about Crazy Curt Weldon (R-Boeing) when I found out that he was placed "on leave" from CIGNA Insurance when he was elected to Congress. I wanted to know if Weldon was getting paid in any capacity; an official told me no.

"Then what's the difference?" I asked him. He told me they wanted to "support employees who wanted to perform public service."

"How many other employees have you placed on this kind of leave?" Well, it turned out Weldon was the first - and only.

"Why put him on leave? After all, there's nothing to stop you from hiring him back," I said.

Then it hit me: "Is he accruing pension benefits while he's on leave?"

As a matter of fact, he was.

This was useful because at the time, Weldon (who was head of the House Emergency Services Caucus) was fighting to push through a bill Republicans were eager to pass. It was an earthquake relief act that would have the federal government act as re-insurer for any earthquake damage that exceeded a set amount - $10 billion, I think.

That meant Uncle Sugar would pick up the tab for anything over that amount when The Big One finally hit California. Oddly enough, only one insurance company was writing earthquake insurance in California. (Guess which one!)

So I called Weldon's office for a comment, but he refused to talk to me. Instead, his chief of staff called back. He gave me his line about how this bill was to help families get their lives back on track after an earthquake.

"I don't agree," I said. "People make decisions based on risk, and what this bill will do is make earthquake insurance premiums artificially low, since the insurers will only have to pick up a limited amount of liability. I would argue that this bill actually puts more families in danger, because they're buying properties in unsafe locations. They'll think because they can afford the insurance, it must be safe."

A pause. "You would look at it like that," the aide said accusingly. (I told him I couldn't think of any other way to look at it.)

Anyway, I contacted the Congressional Ethics Committee, and was shocked to find out this was all perfectly "ethical" by their standards. I took a look at their standards, and that's when I discovered they're appallingly lax.

So these stories aren't all that reassuring to me, and they shouldn't be to you, either.

And gee, I wonder how many of the people voting for this expensive pork barrel of a bill are the same Blue Dogs who are restricting health care because of "fiscal responsibility"?

The Democratic-controlled House is poised to give the Pentagon dozens of new ships, planes, helicopters and armored vehicles that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says the military does not need to fund next year, acting in many cases in response to defense industry pressures and campaign contributions under an approach he has decried as "business as usual" and vowed to help end.

The unwanted equipment in a military spending bill expected to come to a vote on the House floor Thursday or Friday has a price tag of at least $6.9 billion.

The White House has said that some but not all of the extra expenditures could draw a presidential veto of the Defense Department's entire $636 billion budget for 2010, and it sent a message to House lawmakers Tuesday urging them to cut expenditures for items that "duplicate existing programs, or that have outlived their usefulness."

While the administration won a big victory when the Senate voted July 21 to end the F-22 fighter-jet program, the House's imminent action demonstrates its continued rebellion on many other Obama administration military spending priorities. Gates continues to struggle with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are loyal to existing military programs benefiting contractors that provide jobs and large campaign donations.

House appropriators want to buy, for example, extra C-17 transport planes and F-18 jets, as well as four extra military jets used by lawmakers and Pentagon VIPs. And they want to keep alive a troubled missile-defense interceptor program and continue the troubled VH-71 presidential helicopter program.

Gates vowed in April to fundamentally overhaul the military's "approach to procurement, acquisition and contracting" and urged Congress to support the termination of many traditional weapons programs in favor of more spending on counterinsurgency efforts and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this round, those Democratic and Republican lawmakers who support maintaining or expanding programs that Gates proposed to eliminate or trim appear likely to prevail, because an unusually restrictive rule for floor debate agreed upon Wednesday will allow only amendments that could strip less than half of the spending the administration did not request.

Roughly $2.75 billion of the extra funds -- all of which were unanimously approved in an 18-minute markup Monday by the House Appropriations Committee -- would finance "earmarks," or projects demanded by individual lawmakers that the Pentagon did not request. About half of that amount reflects spending requested by private firms, including 95 companies or related political action committees that donated a total of $789,190 in the past 2 1/2 years to members of the appropriations subcommittee on defense, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit watchdog group.

(Guest blogged by Logan Murphy)

That's the number former Ohio Congressman Bob Ney will be sporting in federal prison for the next thirty months.

Yahoo:

Former Congressman Bob Ney reported to a federal prison Thursday morning to begin serving a 2 1/2-year sentence for corruption, a fall from grace spurred by gifts from now imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

As inmate No. 28882-016, Ney's lifestyle will be more austere and his wardrobe mainly khaki.

The six-term Ohio Republican who once drew a $165,200 annual salary will be getting a wage of 12 cents to 40 cents an hour, depending on his prison job. Movie nights will be in a high school-style auditorium with 1,300 other inmates. He'll sleep on a bunk bed in a room for 12.

Ney pleaded guilty in October to conspiracy and making false statements, admitting he traded influence for golf trips, campaign donations and other gifts arranged by once-influential lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates.

Let's give Bob a warm C&L send off, shall we?

Daily Delay:

"Mitchell Wade of MZM -- the guy who bribed Duke Cunningham -- apparently made illegal campaign donations to two other members of Congress..."

Roll Call:

"Wade also steered $78,000 in illegal contributions to the re-election campaigns of Reps. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) and Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) during the 2003-04 and 2005-06 election cycles. Neither lawmaker was aware that Wade was reimbursing other donors for making those contributions, according to the criminal information document."

Support Francine Busby for the vacated seat.

I guess Russert missed this one.

"A new and extensive analysis of campaign donations from all of Jack Abramoff's tribal clients, done by a nonpartisan research firm, shows that a great majority of contributions made by those clients went to Republicans. The analysis undercuts the claim that Abramoff directed sums to Democrats at anywhere near the same rate...read on"

Update: Josh has more...

Here's the "Open Letter to Tim Russert"

"Identified in new court documents as "Representative No. 1," Republican Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio has become the poster boy in the Jack Abramoff bribery probe, a beneficiary of trips, tickets and campaign donations, allegedly in exchange for official acts...read on

The FBI, as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the Rev. Al Sharpton, secretly videotaped him pocketing campaign donations from two shady fund-raisers in a New York City hotel room and then asking for more, it was reported yesterday. One of the donors was later recorded on a wiretap saying Sharpton may not have reported to the Federal Election Commission tens of thousands of dollars in campaign cash, as is required by the law, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer....read on

Update: Sharpton came out firing on O'Reilly tonight. Denying the story and saying that he received only checks and that it had been investigated already. More will be revealed...