Obama: Come One, Come All No Donation Too Small, Too Foreign

[bitterlyclingin]

[If its low down, if its filthy, if its scurrilous, if its illegal, if its just plain rotten, guaranteed Obama is doing it. Anything to get elected. Donations from the Palestinian Refugee Camps, no problem, from Ayman al Zawahiri, even less problem. Dimitri Medvedev, Sure thing. Vlad Putin, Hell Yeah! Welcome aboard, Vlad. Glad to have you as a supporter, we can divy up the world between us in our New Socialist Order after the election, sorta like Joe and Adolph did with Poland in 1939. Shhh! Don't tell the 4,000 Polish officers standing in the Forest or their families what's coming, though]

"Dubious donations (2012 edition)

Barack Obama has proved the greatest campaign fund-raiser of all time by a long shot. In 2008 his campaign raised more than $750 million. The Obama campaign even went the extra mile to raise campaign funds by failing to adopt standard protections against fraudulent and illegal giving. Federal law prohibits foreign contributions and requires the disclosure of identifying information for contributions in excess of $200. Campaigns must accordingly keep running totals for each donor and report them once they exceed $200.

As we and others noted, the 2008 Obama campaign’s records revealed big contributors with names like “Doodad Pro” (employer: “Loving,” profession: “You”) and “Good Will” (same employer and profession). Both donated via credit card. I believe it was Pamela Geller who reported that some donations came from overseas — raising the question of whether Obama was accepting donations from foreigners.

All of which prompted an enterprising reader to test the controls put in place to enforce compliance with federal campaign law by the Obama and McCain campaigns. He decided to conduct an experiment. He went to the Obama campaign Web site and made a donation under the name “John Galt” (the hero of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged). He provided the equally fictitious address “1957 Ayn Rand Lane, Galts Gulch, CO 99999.” He checked the box next to $15 and entered his actual credit-card number and expiration date. He was then taken to the next page and notified that his donation had been processed. Others repeated “John Galt’s” experiment, giving to Obama under such fictitious names as Della Ware, Joe Plumber, Idiot Savant, Ima BadDonation (with a Canadian bank card) and Fake Donor.

The Obama campaign was able to take these donations because it had turned off the standard Address Verification System that screens credit-card charges for matching names and addresses. (It can also screen cards issued by foreign banks.) The McCain campaign used AVS and provided a searchable database of all donors, including those who fell below the $200 threshold. The Obama campaign chose not to use the AVS system to screen donations. (The McCain campaign rejected such donations through the use of the AVS system.) You can find a good description of the AVS and CVV fraud prevention devices here.

If you go here you will note that credit card donations to the Obama election campaign do not require the credit card security code [i.e., the CVV code]. What they have done is disable the Address Verification System (AVS) which prevents credit card fraud. Yesterday, just to see what would happen, I submitted a donation and filled out the form as follows:

Name – Adolph Hitler
Address – 123 Nuremburg Way, Berlin, Germany
Occupation – Dictator
Employer – Nazi Party

After submitting, I received an email that began, “Dear Adolph, thank you for your generous donation….”

I then went to the Romney and Santorum websites and tried the same thing. Both rejected the donations with a message that the address could not be verified as belonging to the card holder.

Try it. Make up a name and an address and donate to Obama. Then try it with the other two. Only Obama will accept the donation.

Why is this important? Federal law prohibits any foreign nationals from financially contributing to any election in the United States. It’s on the FEC website and is one of our most important safeguards against foreign influence in our elections. But anybody in the world can contribute to Obama. Not only that, but they can do so anonymously. Not only that, they can contribute an unlimited amount since there is no record of who made the donation. I could contribute $49 every day for the rest of my life by just changing names every time I reach $2,500 and no one would be the wiser."

Dubious donations (2012 edition) | Power Line

 

[Conservative]

of course, the libtards will either call you a liar, say the end justifies the means, or avoid the thread entirely.

Of course, had a Republican candidate done this, all Hell would break loose in Libtard-land.

 

[bitterlyclingin]

[Liar? Of course they will. This looks like it has more of the permanence of, let's say, a Gibralter. Let an organization of substance pick this up and E Holder and a phalanx of agents will be at this lawyers office 'muy pronto'. A guy that does occassional work for the Koch brothers and proprietor of a Right Wing Legal blog, Holder will be there personally himself in his bedroom at 4 in the morning and be the one holding the pistol to the back of atty Hinderakers head. The way Obama's been carrying on, you have to know a Fritz Gerlach moment is coming soon, that is, if Andrew Breitbart wasn't the first, already.The cardiologist hasn't heard of anything in the grapevine yet. He knew within a week of Tim Russert what had happened. Maybe they are hiding something out on the Left Coast. Professor Ogletree has his counterpart among pathologists, I presume. Forms with which to donate are available at the links]

"As we note below, the Obama campaign does not require the widely used CVV 3-digit security code feature for credit card transactions on its Web site. Anyone, anywhere can donate to President Obama’s re-election campaign — as Adrian Murray did in the name of Adolf Hitler yesterday. The Obama campaign is thus facilitating illegal and fraudulent campaign contributions, just as it did in 2008. Watch the intrepid volunteer below repeating Adrian Murray’s experiment on Obama’s Web site, as well on those of his GOP opponents — doing the job that ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times and the rest of Obama’s media allies refuse to do."

Dubious donations illustrated | Power Line

"Another reader reports that he was able to make a donation to the 2012 Obama campaign as Usama bin Laden (Address: “6 feetunder Drive, Islamabad, DC”) without any credit card verification. He writes: “The irony is that when I tried to make a contribution for $1, I received an error that the donation must be at least $2.” Our reader received an email from the Obama campaign thanking Usama for the contribution. He has forwarded us screen shots of the transaction, including the one below. I didn’t quite catch Mr. bin Laden’s occupation (gravemaker) in the screenshot, but you get the idea."

Dubious donations illustrated (bin Laden edition) | Power Line

"Among the many dubious donations Barack Obama received in 2008 were two from readers who contributed under the names “Joseph Stalin” (Address: “114 Gulag St, Stalingrad, LA”) and “Imon Deathrow” (Address: “13 Alcatraz Island, Laststop, CA”). Reader Claudia Brown writes to discuss a third that she repeated last week:

So glad you are shining some light on this scheme. Like your various contributors, I too made a couple of bogus donations to the Obama campaign in 2008 and they went through with no problem. I am an American citizen but I live in Canada, and I used my Canadian credit card on the transaction, but the donor information I entered online was all fictitious, literally — all lifted from To Kill a Mockingbird, including a fake email using one of the book’s racial epithets that you can’t even print in public. I thought it might cause some bells to go off at the campaign headquarters, but that never happened.

I then signed on for Obama campaign communiques, and the organization has sent me HUNDREDS of emails in the past four years, most of them including a money request, and almost always setting out the suggested donations beginning with $5 or $10. During the past year they even scaled back to requests for less than 5 (toward, for example, the “lunch with Barack” raffle). Obviously the strategy was a winner — why give it up?

So to test out whether the campaign might be feeling any pressure to clean up its act as the next election approaches, in the past week I have made my little donation again, using the same card and the same phony donor info, and it was all accepted without hindrance. I then passed this information on to Pam Geller. I really think somebody should start collecting accounts of this caper for a dossier to be made public during the summer. I figure (and hope I’m right!) that if a large number of people do this, and keep their total donations at a very small figure (my personal total over four years is just $20), we can probably afford to confess our part in the scheme without having to worry (much) about being fined or carted off in the Black Mariah.

Let the dossier begin!"

Dubious donations, cont’d | Power Line

"The Obama re-election campaign fundraising scandal deserves to be, and I think inevitably will be, a major news story. Earlier this morning I decided to find out how far an illegal donor could push the envelope and still have his contribution welcomed by the Obama campaign. So, like a number of our readers, I went to the Donate to Obama page and identified myself as Illegal Contributor. I entered my address as Cell Block 13, State Penitentiary, Stillwater MN. I identified my employer as Minnesota Penal System and my occupation as Inmate. Here is a screen shot showing the donation from Illegal Contributor:"

Dubious Donations Illustrated (Illegal Contributor Edition) | Power Line