ALL TRUMP!!! ALL THE TIME!!!

trumps government is forcing the closure of the chinese consulate in houston

and apparently they were burning documents the other day. hmm

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/07/22/houston-fire-and-police-responding-to-reports-of-documents-being-burned-at-consulate-general-of-china/

How Donald Trump Moved Millions From His Campaign Donors To His Private Business

Millions from his campaign, millions from the RNC, millions from committees. While other billionaires spend big on the election, the Donald is raking it in.
Forbes (It used to be conservative.)

Something I read last year that surprised me (but didn't really shock) but honestly I thought, maybe I didn't quite understand fully.

Let's say I run for the presidential primary. I receive 5 million in campaign donations, but do not win the bid. Do I have to return those donations or do I keep a large portion(or all) to do with what I wish?

On that topic, John Stewart just made a movie about just that.

(not about president, but campaign contributions) It's actually a really neat movie. IRRESISTIBLE

The comedian? So they can just keep them and use them for whatever? Reason I asked it because IIRC what I read made it seem like some people run for president, knowing they have no shot at winning, just for a pay day. It was implied that was what Ralph Nader was doing.

I don't want to spoiler the movie, if you've got nothing better to do with two hours, watch it. Comedy. Rose Byrne, Steve Carell.

I hadn't even heard of it until now. Interesting premise, but apparently the critics weren't too fond of it.

In title only.

Critics don't like anything good. It's not a 5 star movie. Not going to win awards. So it's critically trash.

Yeah, critics hated Joe Dirt. I did not.

Just an odd premise then. If they can keep it, all of them, and there doesn't seem to be any rules about what they do with it, why are there any campaign finance laws at all? Do they only apply to the winners?

Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite movies are hated by critics. I just found it interesting that a political commentary by a notorious Trump hater would be panned when all it takes is a dose of Orange Man Bad for other garbage movies to score highly (e.g. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9).

Hudson Hawk is a great movie, and I will fight you in the streets if you say otherwise

At the end of a campaign the candidate gets to keep any remaining campaign funds left over after paying taxes on it as income.

This is because when a campaign starts it's treated as a pseudo LLC owned by the candidate for the purpose of getting elected. When the LLC is dissolved it acts like all other LLC's, any remaining funds are distributed to the owners. The "owners" are then taxed on that amount.

Campaign finance laws deal with how contributions are made so as to limit corruption and influence precisely because candidates, as "owners", get to keep the remaining funds.

This all side-steps the real money in elections, Political Action Committee's, aka "PACs". A PAC is a 527 (IRS tax code) private non-profit organization that exists to advocate for political issues. In theory they exist outside of election campaigns as they are for issues not people, in practice they are abused by other parties.

To understand how a PAC works in theory, imagine you and ten of your friends all want to advocate against the actions of local paper-mills. Individually you are limited but you can pool your resources and setup a 527 organization "People against Paper Mills". You can then contribute funds to that organization which can then use those funds to hold rallies, make banners, organize marches and put out adds against those paper mills. Those ads can influence voters to oppose paper mills and a candidate for office might take notice that people want more restrictions on the paper mills. As long as a PAC doesn't expressly support a specific candidate, then it maintains it's 527 status. This is why you see so many candidates say "I support this message", or political advertisements that show pictures or audio clips but don't expressly say "vote for person X".

What both parties have done is create these immense PAC's with very general nebulous goals like "Fighting Corruption in Government". They can then use that nebulous goal to shoehorn in non-explicit support for their preferred candidate or attack the rival candidate. As long as they go about it in a round-about way, then they can keep the special status which keeps all their donations private and unreported. As a tax exempt organization they still need to report to the IRS their donations, only they don't need to report who made those donations.

that's why things like this look sketchy af
https://nypost.com/2020/07/07/ilhan-omar-has-paid-new-husbands-consulting-firm-878000-filings-show/

while people who break the laws deserve jail time
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/03/duncan-hunter-pleads-guilty-to-misuse-of-campaign-funds.html

Yep "preferred treatment" has been an issue for forever. And that's just for official election campaign funds, imagine how much shady ***is going on for the PAC's.

If your nice to the Democrats, they are nice to you. Same could be said for Republicans but those guys are too greedy to be handing out money left and right. They want people to earn those kickbacks.

So in conclusion to this line of thought, if anyone who runs can just keep whatever money is left over and do with it what they choose, why would anyone care what a current politician holding office did with campaign funds (unless they just wanted to make something out of nothing for the sake of partisanship)?

Nail on head.

Remember these on only personal election campaign funds, the kinds that are covered by a mountain of finance laws.

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate-taking-receipts/contribution-limits

Contributions are limited to $2,000 to $5,000 per person per election, so no way for someone to give you a hundred thousand dollars. This is why super PAC's are used to much, they can side step this requirement entirely. George Soros can funnel fifty million USD to a "Freedom from Corruption" PAC that's only purpose is to run anti-Republican advertisement. But as those have been getting too much attention, they just bought news channels instead and re-branded political advertisements as "entertainment news". So what we see on CNN / MSNBC / CBS / ABC is just political ads being presented as news.

Oh come on Saevel, we have republicans running anti republican adds.

Frankly they are better at it than the democrats.

Can we keep them?

You mean The Lincoln Project? lol. Co-founder Fatboy Conway who only hates Trump because Trump didn't give him a cabinet position but did his wife??

You need to do better than pick a pile of disgruntled wanna-be employees who didn't get the job and people still mad at Trump for beating them in the 2016 primary. These guys are not only RINOs but bad at hiding it.

Yeah. I don't buy into the whole "I'm actually conservative but I hate Trump so much I'm willing to support Biden" thing. I understand having a moral crisis and not wanting to support anyone, but you don't get to actively attempt to hand over an almost guaranteed Supreme Court pick to the Democrats and pretend that you care about conservative values.

Yes and there is only one major Republican controlled news station vs the dozen or so Democrat controlled ones.

What? No, man. No.

There are three major cable news channels:

Fox on the right
MSNBC on the left
CNN... not really "centrist" so much as "both sides Establishmentism". You can put them on the left if your definition of left is "everything to the left of Grover Norquist".

Among the smaller players, the right has OANN and Newsmax. I couldn't even name a smaller player on the left.

You're also leaving out maybe the most significant force: Sinclair Broadcast Group, the second largest television station operator in the United States, which has a well documented history of being not just right-wing but very pro-Trump. I mean, is MSNBC going to be showing Plandemic over the weekend?

I know y'all Trumpy types really like playing the victim card, but at least try and use it on things where you don't actually have an easily verified advantage.

You seriously are not putting CNN in the "we only show the left side of things" category? Could you then show examples of CNN the past 3 years even trying to be remotely un-biased to the left?

I don't mean to argue but I don't see any evidence of any network "news" source other than Fox to be even remotely unbiased to the left. And OAN I wouldn't call network. You can barely find it on most cable/streaming packages. I know because my mom used to watch it all the time when we had Direct TV but now that I shut that off and we use YouTube TV, it is not available, which is fine with me.

Every news channel available to us, aside from Fox News and Fox Business Network, is super anti-Trump and majority anti-anything conservative in general (CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Sky News, TYT, any of the ABC channels even I don't see anything but Trump bashing). Trust me, my mom is Chanti but on the right...I'm constantly trying to get her to shut the damn news off and watch something less angry. I'm always showing how just watching Fox all day doesn't give her the full picture on some things, but I honestly don't see any other news source that's even remotely conservative. I mean Breitbart but, is that even a channel? Or just a website? What are these network or even cable conservative channels aside from Fox/OAN?

Rooks ... you are messing with their religious beliefs...

CBS and ABC aren't news channels. So, all you really did here was affirm Rooks' point. There are 3 news channels: Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.

I didn't reaffirm ***, I asked a question. You telling me your versions of NBC/ABC/CBS wherever you live doesn't have news hours? Am I living an alternate universe or something?

Sky News isn't a news channel? Young Turks? I mean, they don't talk about anything else but supposed news stories and politics.


Maybe, again, this is why we all argue on here so much. You guys seem to have a completely different definition of things than I do. Makes it tough to communicate. Literally, anyone who tries to say our media isn't overwhelmingly liberal biased from what I have observed is laughable to me. You all must have completely different channel line-ups of stations I've never seen before if you can think this.