Patrick Ruffini has the story:
I just contributed $5 to Barack Obama.
I didn’t want to. Ideally, I could have contributed $0.01 and cost them money. But it was the only way to confirm the root cause of the fraudulent micro-donations to the Obama campaign (“Doodad Pro” for $17,300 and “Good Will” for $11,000).
The Obama campaign has turned its security settings for accepting online contributions down to the bare minimum — possibly to juice the numbers, and turning a blind eye towards the potential for fraud not just against the FEC, but against unsuspecting victims of credit card fraud.
The issue centers around the Address Verification Service (or AVS) that credit card processors use to sniff out phony transactions. I was able to contribute money using an address other than the one on file with my bank account (I used an address I control, just not the one on my account), showing that the Obama campaign deliberately disabled AVS for its online donors…
There is much more, and I recommend reading all of Ruffini’s piece, but it seems clear to me that whatever else Obama might be, his fundraising operation has descended to a “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization” (and there’s a law for that, too). There is simply no doubt in a rational mind that people at the Obama campaign have deliberately and with malice aforethought broken our campaign finance laws – whether or not Obama knew about it beforehand is the unanswered question, but we really should press for an answer to it.
Outside of that, we are starting to see that Barack Obama might be a bit of a con job altogether. It seems that our Obamessiah is more of a “St. Styrofoam” – puffed up to a grand thing, but easily crushed and tossed aside. Right now, I doubt the whole show – the amount of money Obama has allegedly raised (it could be remarkably less than reported, and what has been collected could be in large part illegal donations), the amount of enthusiasm he’s generating among the American population (ACORN’s bogus registrations cast doubt upon all of the alleged Democratic gains in voter registration over the past two years) and the polls alleging he’s cruising to a slam dunk victory (too many of them have massive over samples of Democrats). If Obama winds up with a landslide victory on November 4th, then it will be obvious that I’m wrong on this – but if Obama does anything from win narrowly to lose in a landslide, then I’ll be proven correct.
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