“Did Ben Carson Already Break Campaign Law?”: Campaign Law Bars Corporations From Donating To Presidential Candidates
On October 9, Ben Carson appeared at the National Press Club to promote his new book. His campaign manager, Barry Bennett, told The Daily Beast that Carson’s publishing company set up the event and paid for his transportation to D.C. to speak there.
And just like that, Carson may have violated campaign finance law.
The Republican presidential candidate made headlines last week when ABC News reported that he would suspend his campaign for a tour promoting his new book, A More Perfect Union: What We The People Can Do To Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties.
Carson’s team took issue with the story, saying his presidential campaign is still very much underway even though he’s making room in his schedule to sell books.
But here’s where it gets complicated.
Carson’s publishing company Sentinel—an imprint of Penguin publishing—is paying for the tour, according to Bennett. And that puts the former neurosurgeon in a tight spot.
Campaign law bars corporations from donating to presidential candidates—whether those donations are checks or in-kind contributions of goods or services. “Campaigns may not accept contributions made from the general treasury funds of corporations, labor organizations or national banks,” reads the FEC’s guide for candidates. (PDF)
That’s why it gets dicey (though not unheard of) when presidential candidates go on book tours; if the hotel stays, restaurant meals, and publicity associated with a book tour are paid for by the publishing company, candidates can get in trouble if they hold campaign events while traveling on that company’s dime.
According to Larry Noble, senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, Carson may have already broken that rule.
He said that the October 9 stop at the Press Club looked suspiciously campaign-related. The event was billed it as “NPC Luncheon with Dr. Ben Carson, Author and Presidential Candidate.” More troublesome is the fact that Carson used the appearance to explicitly tout his presidential ambitions.
“[U]nder a Carson administration, if another country attacks us with a cyber attack, they’re going to get hit so hard, it’s going to take them a long time to recover,” he said, according to a transcript of the speech (PDF) he gave there.
After the candidate’s remarks, National Press Club President John Hughes questioned Carson more about what he would do if he gets elected. Carson said he would work with Turkey to establish a no-fly zone over Syria and that he would call a joint session of Congress to tell them to “recognize that the people are at the pinnacle, and that we work for them, and they don’t work for us.”
All of that sounds way more like presidential politicking than book-selling.
“Even though he never says ‘Vote for me as president,’ he’s clearly discussing his candidacy. What he’s supposed to say in that situation is, ‘I‘m really not here to discuss my campaign for president; I’m here to to discuss my book,’” Noble said.
That, of course, is not what Carson said.
Noble added that if another campaign filed a complaint with the FEC regarding Carson’s comments at the Press Club, the commission would likely take that complaint seriously.
“They’d at least need to take a look at it,” he said.
Carson is not under investigation by the FEC but formal complaints can be filed by any person who spots a potential violation. The FEC doesn’t comment on the activity of candidates and has noted in the past that there is always a possibility that matters related to the campaign could come before the commission.
Bennett said he doesn’t think Carson has broken any FEC rules.
“The book publisher has attorneys and we have attorneys,” he said. “It was all vetted.”
A publicity contact for Sentinel has not yet returned a request for comment. We also left a voicemail for Premiere Collectibles, which is billed as promoting his tour, and didn’t get a response by press time.
Carson’s Press Club comments aren’t the only part of his book tour to worry campaign finance law watchdogs. Bennett confirmed to The Daily Beast that from October 4 to October 11, the publisher paid for Carson’s transportation and lodging because he was promoting his book. During this time, the candidate made the rounds on cable TV, discussing current events and his presidential campaign.
“My view is that multiple appearances by a candidate on talk shows to discuss politics amounts to campaign activity and, consequently, that the campaign should have paid some of the transportation and lodging expenses,” emailed Paul Ryan, a spokesperson for the Campaign Legal Center.
Ryan added that similar situations have divided the FEC.
“At any rate, the commission deadlocked so there’s no formal guidance from the commission on this point of law,” he said.
That means Carson stepped into a legal gray area every time he did interviews with political reporters during the week of October 4. Two days later he appeared on Fox and Friends to discuss his campaign.
“I don’t want to be the establishment candidate,” he said. “What has the establishment really gotten us?”
He added that he wouldn’t have met with the families of victims of the Umpqua shooting if he were president.
“I would have so many things on my agenda that I would go to the next one,” he said.
He also appeared on The View on October 6, The Kelly File later that day, and on Hannity on October 7.
This week Carson will juggle fundraising events and book tour stops in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska. On some days, like October 18, campaign events are wedged in between book tour stops. Next Sunday, Carson will promote his book in the Woodlands, Texas, at 2:30 p.m., hustle to a forum at a Baptist church in Plano at 5:25 p.m.—which is a campaign event—and get to San Antonio by 8 p.m. for another book stop. In an effort to avoid FEC violations, the campaign says staffers will only show up at the Plano pit stop.
“FEC rules and regulations call for the separation of campaign and non-campaign finances,” said Ying Ma, deputy communications director for the Carson campaign. “We’re trying to do our best to abide by all requirements. Campaign staff will be at campaign events. That’s what campaign staff do.”
By: Gideon Resnick and Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, October 19, 2015
“If I Only Had A Gun…”: It’s Clear To Me Now, Jewish Civilians With Revolvers And Hunting Rifles Would Have Made All The Difference
Of course. It makes perfect sense. Why couldn’t I see it before?
There could never have been a Holocaust had the Jews been armed. Granted, the Nazis swept aside the armies of Poland and France like dandruff, and it took six years for Great Britain — later joined by Russia and the United States — to grind them down. But surely Jewish civilians with revolvers and hunting rifles would have made all the difference.
Much as I’d love to take credit for that insight, I can’t. No, it comes from presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson in a recent interview with CNN. “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” Carson said.
This has become a recurrent theme on the political right, the idea that unarmed victims of violence are to blame for their own troubles. And not just in the Holocaust. Rush Limbaugh said two years ago that if African Americans had been armed, they wouldn’t have needed a Civil Rights Movement. The founder of so-called “Gun Appreciation Day” said, also two years ago, that had the Africans been armed, there could have been no slavery.
There’s more. When nine people recently died at a mass shooting in Oregon, Ted Nugent declared that any unarmed person thus killed is a spineless “loser.” Carson seems to agree. “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me,” he said. Or, as Clint Eastwood says in Unforgiven when Gene Hackman complains that he just shot an unarmed man: “Well, he should’ve armed himself…”
It’s so clear to me now. Guns don’t take lives, they save them. Guns make everything better. Carson is a surgeon, not an optometrist, but golly gosh, he’s sure opened my eyes.
As a friend recently observed, what if Trayvon Martin had had a gun? Then he could have killed the “creepy-ass cracker” who was stalking him. Surely, the court would have afforded him the same benefit of the doubt they gave George Zimmerman, right?
And what if the men on Titanic had been armed? That tragedy might have had a happier ending:
LOOKOUT
Iceberg dead ahead!
CAPTAIN
No time to port around it. Get your guns, men! We’re making ice cubes out of this sucker!
KATE WINSLET
Jack, is that a Colt in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
LEONARDO DICAPRIO
It’s a Colt, woman. Now, stand aside.
Hey, what if Jesus had been armed?
“Thou wisheth to nail me to what? I think not. Come on, punks. Maketh my day!”
The possibilities are endless. So I’ve taken the liberty of composing a new campaign song for Carson, to the tune of “If I Only Had a Heart” from The Wizard of Oz:
When a man’s an empty holster, no courage does he bolster
No confidence is won
What a difference he’d be makin’, he could finally stop his quakin’
If he only had a gun
He could stand a little straighter with that ultimate persuader
And wouldn’t that be fun?
He could put an end to static with a semiautomatic
If he only had a gun
Can’t you see, how it would be?
Woe would avoid his door
The crazy guy would pass him by
Or else he’d shoot — and shoot some more
Oh, the shootin’ he’d be doin’, and all the ballyhooin’
The way the folks would run
His life would be so merry in a world of open carry
If he only had a gun
If you think Carson might like the song, I would not mind at all if you shared it with him: http://www.bencarson.com/contact.
What’s that? You think I’ve lost my mind? You’re calling me crazy? Boy, that makes me so mad I can hardly control myself!
If I only had a gun…
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, October 19, 2015
“Credulous Times”: Grasping At Straws In The Wind, What Has Happened To Journalism At The New York Times?
If you are a regular reader of the New York Times, and tend to think of it not just as a Newspaper of Record, but as an institution with unimpeachable standards of journalistic objectivity and excellence, you might want to give a gander to a scathing piece by New America’s Peter Bergen at CNN about the New York Times Magazine cover story suggesting the official story of Osama bin Laden’s assassination was a pack of trumped-up lies. Seems its author, Jonathan Mahler, is largely buying a conspiracy theory hatched by the famed muckraking journalist Seymour Hersh back in the spring, which was pretty thoroughly challenged at the time–by among others Bergen, who wrote a well-regarded book on the pursuit and killing of bin Laden.
[A]s I wrote in May when Hersh’s story first appeared, his account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense.
As Berger notes, both Hersh and Mahler paint a picture of US-Pakistani complicity in a handover of bin Laden followed by a deliberately fabricated “firefight” that contradicts other Times reporters who cover Pakistan and the U.S. intelligence community.
Among those sharing in the Big Lie of bin Laden’s capture and assassination if these lurid tales are true, of course, is not only the President of the United States but his most likely Democratic successor, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
One of those supposed liars would also be the woman who may well be the next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton. By the way, give her an Oscar for acting for her performance when the iconic photograph was taken at the White House as the bin Laden raid went down, the one in which Clinton has her hand over her mouth in disbelief and anxiety so uncertain was the outcome of the raid.
Hmmm. Seems like there’s another recent line of reporting at the Times that is focused on showing that Hillary Clinton’s an untrustworthy liar, eh?
I don’t know that there’s a connection, but without question, certain elements at the Times are showing some surprising credulity at any straws in the wind that can be used to build the facade of a case against Obama and Clinton.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 19, 2015
“A Toddler Shooter Proves The NRA Wrong”: Willfully Endangering Our Children, The NRA Is Clearly Culpable
In a week of things that only happen with guns and in America, add yet another to the list.
In Rock Hill, South Carolina, Americans’ propensity for leaving semi-hidden deadly weaponry around like it’s a Hanukkah present allowed a 2-year-old to grab a .357 revolver and shoot his grandmother in the back.
The toddler’s great-aunt was taking him for a ride in her car, and naturally there was a revolver in the back pouch of the seat in front of him, where he could reach it and shoot his grandmother, who was sitting in the passenger seat.
“There could be some child neglect or some unlawful conduct towards a child charges based on the age of the child and leaving the gun within reaching distance of a young minor,” said Rock Hill Police Chief Mark Bollinger.
The operative phrase is “could be.” If the grandmother or great-aunt had put the toddler in the back without a car seat, you can bet your ass there’d be charges. If they’d put a shot of whiskey in front of him, same deal. Or if they hadn’t fed him or left him in a hot car, or perhaps, if he were five years older, just let him walk less than half a mile to a playground.
But a gun within reach, nah. Not in the America where we’re electing cast members from Buckwild to represent us in Congress. Tea Party ignoramuses think a gun fetish is just a lifestyle choice and National Rifle Association (NRA) bullshit and legalistic bribes are tantamount to Solomonic judgments.
For here again, as with the campus shootings in Oregon, Texas, and Arizona, or the execution of a reporter on live television in Roanoke, Virginia, the NRA is clearly culpable. It has lobbied against every attempt to require that guns be stored with safety locks and told parents not to use them. It fights against the requirement or even existence on the market of smart gun technology that would allow only the owner of the weapon to use it. It has fought mandated training and the kind of personal liability insurance requirement that tends to make people more careful with their deadly weaponry.
No, the NRA pushes on kids its inane Eddie the Eagle, a cartoon character who’s supposed to convince children to get an adult when they see a gun. It’s been proven to work about as well as telling Ted Nugent to bathe. There’s a reason these things don’t happen in other high-income countries, nations not saddled with this group of misanthropic, evolutionary-scale losers operating out of the congressional offices of the vast majority of members of one of our two major parties.
Speaking of this, I have been impressed by President Obama’s reaction to the recent shootings, his righteous anger at those willfully endangering our children. But using everything at your disposal really means using everything at your disposal. So why, then, would his Justice Department award a $2.4 million grant to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s official lobby, which in a cruel twist of irony is located in Newtown, Connecticut?
Handing out gun locks and teaching safety is an obvious good. But can’t you find people better to do it than the yahoos who exist near Sandy Hook and still lobbied against every reform that could have saved kids’ lives after a massacre in their own damn town? Is it possible to be more terrible human beings (I use that term loosely)?
There’s a battle raging. And the NRA is on the wrong side of it, and history as well. It will be demographically extinct within a decade to a decade and a half. But a lot of innocent people can die in that timespan, and it seems determined to make as many as possible pay the price for its ignorance and avarice.
Kids shooting their family members in cars is patently ridiculous, and preventable. It’s just another symptom of a society sick with the NRA virus. We’ve started to get better, as gun owners increasingly realize the NRA leadership is a bunch of batshit nutters and break away to do their own thing. But clearly it’s no time to let up now.
By: Cliff Schecter, The Daily Beast, October 13, 2015
“You Don’t Know Jack”: When It Came To Climate Change, Kemp Was As Extreme As The Rest–And A Model Of GOP Irrationality
CNN commentator Michael Smerconish–a former right-wing pundit who was effectively chased out of the conservative movement after he endorsed Barack Obama in 2008–has attempted to hold up the late Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY) as a model of the broad-minded bipartisanship today’s Republicans should emulate. However, his analysis doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Smerconish suggests that Kemp rejected right-wing orthodoxy throughout his political career, citing the following views:
Possessing the forethought to have opposed the Iraq invasion.
Willing to oppose an effort to deny public services to illegal immigrants, including education to children.
Equally reverential of Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Eager to seek votes in all neighborhoods and say things like: “We may not get every vote, but we’re going to make it unambiguously clear . . . that we want to represent the whole American family, that no one will be left behind, that no one will be turned away.”
Utterly incapable of launching a personal attack…Kemp was a big-tent Republican, the original compassionate conservative.
Apparently, Kemp’s compassion didn’t extend to those victimized by human-caused climate change. Nineteen years ago, Kemp–then-GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole’s running mate–launched an acid-tongued attack on then-Vice President Al Gore during their sole debate, accusing Gore of promoting “fear of the climate” and embracing an “anti-capitalistic mentality” because Gore dared to call for strong action to combat carbon pollution. (This was, of course, two years after Kemp appeared at a mid-February CPAC conference and moronically joked, “So much for Al Gore’s theory of global warming!”)
In 1999, Kemp aligned himself with the powerful climate-denialist “think tank” known as the Competitive Enterprise Institute; in this capacity, he viciously attacked climate science and took credit for President George W. Bush’s decision not to regulate carbon pollution from power plants. Some centrist.
Yes, Kemp criticized the racists who blamed the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act for the 2008 financial crisis. Yes, he said some nice things about Obama’s historic 2008 victory. However, when it came to climate change, Kemp was as extreme as the rest–and as a model of GOP rationality, he was far from the best.
UPDATE: From 1997 and 2002, more on Kemp’s vicious attacks on climate science.
By: D. R. Tucker, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 17, 2015
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