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Obama’s Dictionary – Definition of Transparent = Conceal

Posted on 12 November 2008

The hot topic in the blogsphere today is the news that the FEC is going to audit McCains Campaign Finances and that Obama’s will most likely not be audited due to the ridiculous rules currently on the books.

The story within the story is about Obama’s campaign pledges about being “open, transparent, and accountable to the American people” and yet Obama refuses to disclose the names of donors under $200.  Not only will he not disclose those names his campaign went to extreme lengths to ensure the addresses of all internet donations were not validated ensuring the donors could be anonymous and thus immune to campaign finance laws. There has been no answer to why they went to the extraordinary effort to disable the computerized address verification systems for their internet donations.

At the very minimum his campaign could provide the ip addresses of all donations which his credit card processors could easily provide.  Dumping that data into a spreadsheet could show us in just a few short minutes:

- How many contributions were placed from foreign countries

- How many contributions were placed from the same ip address.

Why are these two questions important?  If there are a significant number of contributions placed from foreign countries it should raise a red flag for the FEC to investigate possible illegal foreign donations.  In the same vein if there are many contributions from the same ip address then the FEC should also investigate.  For example hypothetically – What if there were a high number of contributions made from an ip address lets say 5,000 contributions and that just so happens to be the address of an Obama campaign office?  Or what if there were 10,000 contributions all made from the same ip address in the Cayman Islands?

The Obama campaign could provide their “claimed” transparency with a miniscule amount of effort that could almost instantly remove any significant doubt of possible campaign fraud.  On the other hand it could almost instantly show significant potential campaign finance violations.  Is his total lack of transparency on this issue part of his plan to restore “faith in our government”?

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