Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor's identity, campaign officials confirmed.
Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.
Aside from the nefarious purpose of allowing people who aren't allowed to donate to sidestep the law, why do you think the Obama campaign has taken this route?
Interest Payments Baby!!!!
Even if they have to return the donation the interest still accumulated and then it gets compounded. Compound Interest is a powerful thing.
In recent weeks, questionable contributions have created headaches for Obama's accounting team as it has tried to explain why campaign finance filings have included itemized donations from individuals using fake names, such as Es Esh or Doodad Pro. Those revelations prompted conservative bloggers to further test Obama's finance vetting by giving money using the kind of prepaid cards that can be bought at a drugstore and cannot be traced to a donor.
The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.
"They have opened the floodgates to all this money coming in," said Sean Cairncross, chief counsel to the Republican National Committee. "I think they've made the determination that whatever money they have to refund on the back end doesn't outweigh the benefit of taking all this money upfront."
...
When asked whether the campaign takes steps to verify whether a donor's name matches the name on the credit card used to make a payment, Obama's campaign replied in an e-mail: "Name-matching is not a standard check conducted or made available in the credit card processing industry. We believe Visa and MasterCard do not even have the ability to do this.
"Instead, the campaign does a rigorous comprehensive analysis of online contributions on the back end of the transaction to determine whether a contribution is legitimate."
Juan Proaño, whose technology firm handled online contributions for John Edwards's presidential primary campaign, and for John F. Kerry's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2004, said it is possible to require donors' names and addresses to match those on their credit card accounts. But, he said, some campaigns are reluctant to impose that extra layer of security.
So as I see it Obama and company found a loophole which allows them to gather contributions that would be screened out using the ordinary security measures, and which allows them to realize a gain even if they have to return the contribution.
It also explains why Obama felt no compunction about breaking his promise to accept public financing.
Illegal? I don't know. Violation of the spirit of the law? Definitely.
The fact that the verification feature is a default measure in the credit card acceptance programs would indicate to me that the campaign is not making a good faith effort to check, but I am not a lawyer and am not real sure what the law requires.
Oh well all I can hope is that tonight's faux-fascist iconography pageant is a flop and Our True Lord and Savior Barack Obama (tm) has wasted his $4,000,000.
I haven't decided if I am going to watch, but I have to give the guy credit - He may be a lying marxist scumbabg who has sculpted every personal relationship to further his political goals, but he learned the Hitlerian skill of making a big splash also.
Obama’s constant theme is of transferring wealth, to “spread it around.”
There is so much else beyond his statements. Obama surrounded himself with people who were socialists and communists. Obama’s minister of 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright with his black liberation theology, a religion described as turning “Jesus into a black Marxist rebel.” Father Michael Pfleger, another Obama spiritual adviser, is also quite leftist. And his associate William Ayers apparently told an author, who was writing a book on 1960s radicals shortly before the foundation was set up in 1995, that “I’m a radical, leftist, small ‘c’ communist.”
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But Obama himself acknowledges that he was drawn to socialists and even Marxists as a college student. He continued to associate with Marxists later in life, even choosing to launch his political career in the living room of a self-described Marxist, William Ayers, in 1995, when Obama was 34.
Obama's affinity for Marxists began when he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles.
"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully," the Democratic presidential candidate wrote in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father." "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."
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