Our view on campaign finance: Who's buying this election? Who knows? - USA TODAY

[JohnWxy]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2010-09-28-editorial28_ST_N.htm

This year, television viewers in Pennsylvania are being bombarded by an ad attacking Senate candidate Joe Sestak for, among other things, gutting Medicare. The ad — which the non-partisan watchdog group FactCheck.org calls "badly misleading" — is funded not by Sestak's opponent but by an independent group called Crossroads GPS.



Such ads have long been common in American politics. But this election season, the amount of money flowing into them is skyrocketing, thanks in part to a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that gave corporations and labor unions the right to spend unlimited amounts to back or attack individual candidates.

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Even more troubling than the amount of money is that it is increasingly being channeled through non-profit groups that do not have to disclose their donors.

The group running the Sestak ad, and several ads like it in other states, is affiliated with Karl Rove, a longtime Republican political operative and aide to former president George W. Bush. Because it is structured as a 501(c)(4) organization— similar to non-profit groups that might support education or the arts — it is not required to reveal its funding sources. The same goes for a number of other groups with benign-sounding names— Americans for Job Security and Patriot Majority, to name just a couple— that are littering the political airwaves.
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