Campaign Finance Reform Bombshell

Are you a fan of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill? Not a fan? Either way, read this:
"BUYING REFORM" by Ryan Sager

The money quote:
"The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

So in other word, these people took upon themselves the goal to manufacture support for a campaign-finance bill. And Senator McCain (R-Media) went along with it. As did President Bush. And the Supreme Court. Bah.

And look who's involved:
"But this money didn't come from little old ladies making do with cat food so they could send a $20 check to Common Cause. The vast majority of this money — $123 million, 88 percent of the total — came from just eight liberal foundations.
These foundations were: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6 million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros' Open Society Institute ($12.6 million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation ($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2 million).
Not exactly all household names, but the left-wing groups that these foundations support may be more familiar: the Earth Action Network, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Public Citizen Foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation . . . "

There's our buddy Soros, again. Interesting that there are several liberal groups, but no conservative or libertarian ones. You know, liberal, the ones to who free speech means more than anything (including freedom of religion, the right to bear arms...). "Free speech for me, but not for thee," apparently.

Oh, and it gets better:
The press as a whole, of course, wasn't bought off. But most journalists were either too ill-informed or too unconcerned to figure out the fraud.
Back to the videotape, where an unidentified (but apparently sympathetic) individual asks Treglia: "What would have happened had a major news organization gotten a hold of this at the wrong time?"
"We had a scare," Treglia says. "As the debate was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column. And a lot of his partisans were becoming aware of Pew's role and were feeding him information. And he started to reference the fact that Pew had played a large role in this — that this was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress."
"But you know what the good news is from my perspective?" Treglia says to the stunned crowd. "Journalists didn't care . . . So no one followed up on the story. And so there was a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up."
Treglia's right. While he admits Pew specifically instructed groups receiving its grants "never to mention Pew," all these connections were disclosed (as legally required) in various tax forms and annual reports. "If any reporter wanted to know, they could have sat down and connected the dots," he said. "But they didn't."
Fan-freaking-tastic. They got away with because the press was missing in action. Although, in my opinion, that's the problem with the press - not so much that they are biased, as that they are ignorant and lazy.

A partial transcript of the tape Sager found is available here. I'm going to go slam my head in the wall a few more times, kill off some IQ points. Then I'm going to apply to the editorial page of the Tribune. Or maybe run for office.