I’m clearly going about this blogging thing all wrong. Took a look for myself. I didn’t know you could get catering for $10 from Starbucks. I think someone needs to call Grover. Someone needs to draft a letter.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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LOL. I’m glad to contribute to this fine establishment. I’m not sure I’d be so happy if I contributed to her PACs.
um, I am reading these reports, and I’m finding much ado about nothing.
i realize the starbucks entry looks silly, but then you don’t really describe what they’re catering. However, a few weeks ago here at the nonprofit where i work, there was an early meeting for the leadership team, which featured coffee as well as bagels. it’s not uncommong to provide some kind fo refreshment at meetings like these.
Now, this was for about 6 people, so it was probably a little more than $10.00. But I can certainly see an early morning meeting between 2 or 3 people costing that much.
I’m still reading the reports, but so far, nothing’s jumping out at me as shocking.
Committee Contributions to Federal Candidates= 0
That’s in the year-end report.
What I am missing here?
HELLO. It is generally customary for administrative expenses to total less than 100%, as compared to 0% being spent for, you know, the cause the donors thought they were contributing to.
I’m at work, and have been going over the reports piecemeal. after work, i have way too much to do to prepare for my kid’s visit to pore over reports.
So to facilitate, can you point me to which report has the breakdowns on salaries, G&A, program expenses, etc? there’s a lot here. if there’s some sort of smoking gun, I’d like to see it.
I’m seeing greenwald and hamsher paying themselves $24,000, which is hardly a princely sum. it’s a lot less than my execuitve director makes, and a lot less than I make.
i think the outrage is more a comment on who Jane Hamsher is relative to the left blogosphere. if there was more substance to the charge, i’d expect to see a complete breakdown of what’s wrong with the balance sheet, and more than just a snarky remark about starbucks.
Would any money put towards unseating Blanche Lincoln be in the report yet? Have there been any notable(read not pie in the sky) primaries besides Donna Edwards since her PAC started?
FDL Action PAC ran ads against Lincoln and Ross. This PAC is for fielding candidates. So far, they’ve fielded Bill Halter, who they claim to have ‘recruited.’ I wonder if Halter would agree with that characterization.
Meanwhile, she’s sold herself her own list for $14,000, set up her own consulting business and paid herself for obtaining lists that she then offers to other customers, rented herself office space, and paid herself $24,000 in cash. Yet, so far, no money for candidates.
So she spent how much on herself? $38,000? Or did she pay herself rent for using her home as an office? What do other PAC’s spend? How do her expenses compare with say, Feingold’s PAC(just using him as example because I know he has one .. because I’ve contributed to it in the past)?
Well, I don’t know how much she’s earned from the PAC.
She’s made $38,000 in direct payments, but she’s gamed it so she advertises through her own company, rents herself office space, uses herself as a consultant and then uses the lists she buys with PAC money to get more money on the side. Add to that that someone is charging their coffee and danish every time they go to Starbucks and whatnot…
Basically, she and her friends have consumed (more than) all the money and produced nothing of note except a Lt. Gov. in Arkansas who was probably running anyway and won’t want their help.
Add to that that someone is charging their coffee and danish every time they go to Starbucks and whatnot…
Every time? Really?
Basically, she and her friends have consumed (more than) all the money and produced nothing of note except a Lt. Gov. in Arkansas who was probably running anyway and won’t want their help.
And you know this how? Who else was beating the anti-Blanche Lincoln drum in the beginning? I love how Hamsher has become the bogey-man for a few blogs. Why? Just because she wasn’t willing to settle for a backroom health care deal? Because she feels Obama isn’t living up to his campaign promises?
Who else was beating the drum? Oh, I don’t know, me? Howie Klein. Kos.
Look, no candidate in his or her right mind would accept the help of a group so toxic even with progressives that no one wants anything to do with them.
The entire premise of Accountability Now was destroyed as soon as FDL decided that Kucinich and Sanders were corporate tools. If they need primarying then so does any conceivable replacement. Jane has led FDL into a reductio ad absurdum house of mirrors.
And who says they are toxic? Rahm Emanuel? Kos sticks up for her. I guess getting signatures on paper saying you’ll do something, then going back on it, is okay(meaning the public option letter all those Reps signed)?
Interesting that her PAC paper-entity is paying her Firedoglake paper-entity $4000 and calling it “rent.” (page 43 of PDF year-end report) But otherwise, things look pretty normal. Yeah, a fair amount of money was spent on travel to DC and on food in the DC area. No surprise there. It could be alot more.
I just went through the 2009 year-end report and EVERY SINGLE disbursement is for administrative work. None for fundraising, none for voter drive, none for direct candidate support.
$209,000 dollars in disbursements, none for candidates, all of it for administrative costs.
I’m open to the fact that I don’t know how to read these reports, but it looks pretty lame to me.
I’m not trying to defend anything here. I skimmed through too many of these things during the last election and couldn’t believe the amount of detail they need to provide, yet they lump everything into generic categories like “administration.” But in this PAC’s case, I don’t think it was intended to disburse to candidates directly, but rather to run their own independent issue-based advertising. The vast majority of the money is spent on consultants and Ad/PR firms, who do all of the ad buying. Now if she were paying enormous salaries to herself and her friends, that would be more interesting, but I didn’t see that. It would be more interesting if they had to provide breakdowns of how much money was spent on exactly what with their biggest vendors, instead of just the large disbursements.
have you ever filled out one of those reports yourself?
not defending anyone or anything (like i said in an earlier comment, I don’t have the time to go through all of them, nor the most advanced skills), but i think a lot of it depends on how those categories are defined.
It’s my understanding that the leadership of both PACs is the same as the employees. It’s not like they have a staff of 10 or 20: it’s mostly jane and outside consultants. So that might mean, by definition, that her salary comes under adminsitrative. i know when we do program budgets here at my job, certain employees come under admin, while others do not.
I mean, you’re essentially calling jane Hamsher and glenn greenwald crooks, and it seems you’d better have solid evidence before you start lobbing charges like that at people.
No one here has called anyone crooks, essentially or otherwise. Get a grip! I gather from your comments and others that the “Consulting” fees were the monies spent for ads or whatever it was the PAC was set up to do. I don’t see how it’s “lobbing charges” to wonder about some of these items. Some of them do seem peculiar…
“No one here has called anyone crooks, essentially or otherwise.”
not in so many words, but they’re insinuating that something is shady about the way FDL PAC has handled their money.
comments like this:
or this:
or this one, suggesting that Glenn Greenwald is hiding a financial relationship with FDL:
So no, no one comes out and says “Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald are crooks”. But the implication is clear as day: all of these comments, and the diary that spawned them, suggest that Jane Hamsher and Co have been dishonest with their donors about how the money is being spent.
I’m not defending anyone, because i don’t know all the facts. But i think before you make insinuations like that, you’d better be damn sure you know what you’re talking about. if someone wrote stuff like that about me, and i was able to prove it was untrue, i would hit that person with a libel suit.
What you lack in reading skills and legal knowledge, you make up for in belligerence and bluster. A true child of FDL.
*Disclaimer* No implication of actual biological parenthood is intended nor may such be inferred.
Why don’t you do something useful, and ask Lady Jane to explain this 100% admin, 0% mission breakdown? Seems like a reasonable enough question, especially considering how she looooooves transparency and accountability.
are you serious? THAT’S your response? To a comment that wasn’t even directed at you?
that’s just laughable. I laugh at you.
Cool — I haven’t seen Bozo since I was a kid.
hey, unless you got an excuse for raising over 100 grand from your readers to hold corporate Democrats accountable and then spending not one penny on that while blowing over 200 grand on salaries for yourself and you friends, your ad company, your own email list…
Clearly, what you need to be doing is GETTING PEOPLE UPSET about SOMETHING, asking them to CONTRIBUTE MONEY to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT and then, you know, paying yourself to write, paying Cabin Girl for accounting services, paying the Cabin Boys for administrative services and paying Finn for entertainment services.
AND, if there’s any money left over, you could PAY ME to post diaries on dKos GETTING MORE PEOPLE UPSET who will CONTRIBUTE MORE MONEY… AND, maybe then, you could PAY BRENDAN to go over to dKos and troll my diaries so that there would be lots of meta-diaries about HATING YOU or REALLY APPRECIATING YOU. ALL OF WHICH will boost your page hits and raise your ad revenues…
NOW. What highly inflammable SOMETHING should you select? Your position must be full of contrariness; going with the flow gets no notice. You must be slightly irrational; otherwise, there’s nothing to argue about but, your position needs to be easily justified by your devotees…
Whatever IT is, you must go about it like a FOUR-ALARM FIRE, exhausting yourself and everyone connected to you so that at the end of the year — when you haven’t actually given any money towards SOMETHING — everyone will say how hard you’ve worked and EARNED the money.
Fuckin a right.
It never ceases to amaze me how people continue to make excuses for this woman.
Also, try confronting Ms. Accountability with this 100% admin, 0% program breakdown and see what kind of response you get. 10 bucks says it includes words like “bottom feeder,” “corporatist,” “veal pen” and “sellout.”
For years we’ve been trying to find ways of making lefty advocacy pay a living wage. Compared to the gigantic Wingnut Welfare system (full of dirty money from the uber-wealthy who like things the way they are) that pays for the dissemination of right-wing propaganda, Hamsher’s little operation is peanuts.
About the time she started these PACs and turned the rabble-rousing up to 11, I lost interest in anything she had to say and stopped taking her seriously. Other bloggers have done similar money-making schemes over the years, some with better success than others.
The key is always generating rage and anger among your readers, whether you’re being completely truthful with them or not. Most of them trust you (for a while) and will do whatever you ask of them.
If you want to have real (egghead) fun, go read through Sarah Palin’s PAC FEC filings. Forget about Starbucks. How much does she spend on private jets?
and not to beat a dead horse, but I fear this is EXACTLY what BradBlog does, what BlackBoxVoting does – they aren’t as much about solutions as they are about getting you fired up enough to contribute.
Is there nothing he won’t stoop to? Call Marcy Wheeler to go through the documents! Rezko must have modified the kerning. Kill the bill, I mean the starbucks bill.
I don’t recall Greenwald ever disclosing that he had a financial relationship with FDL. Odd that.
were you there on that memorable Sunday when we went through all that at Balloon Juice?
missed it. But he seems remarkably opaque on the issue.
You definitely are, BooMan.
Real bloggers don’t live in cabins. Will Starbucks even come out to where you are? 🙂
And Pennsylvania is too far from DC to pull in any serious cash.
As I recall, $10.00 won’t even buy a cup of coffee and a danish at Starbucks.
These are the disbursements over >5000$ cumulatively, and only for the fiscal year of ’08
Jeffrey Hauser – $35k over 10 payments between Feb-Jun ’09
BreakTheMatrix – $15.8k in one payment on Oct 1, 08.
Fitzgibbon Media – $7.5k over two payments, one in early Feb and one in late April of ’09
Auburn Quad – $7.3k over 5 payments.
This does not count disbursements to Hamsher, DMDM Enterprises, Marisa McNee or David Meyer.
The total cost of disbursements for reasons catering (10 items), cabs (1), copies (1), car rental (1), food (1), gas (4), lodging (1), meals (8), parking (5), and travel (5 item, not counting disbursements to DMDM Enterprises, which I figure are reimbursed) come to ~$5.9k
Again, only for fiscal year ’08.
Well, is there anywhere that we see what candidates she’s supporting with PAC money to hold others accountable? On her own website for the PAC they seem to have just selected the fist candidate March 1, 2010.
I’ve never understood why people want to give their money through some internet pac instead of directly to the candidate (where you know it at least got there), but maybe that’s just me. I have no need to elevate someone else’s stature with my donations.
ahem:
published at DKos, Balloon Juice, and elsewhere.
remember how I said you should slow down a little before lobbing accusations?
Well, now you look like fucking idiots. Perhaps you might want to put up a retraction, cus it seems like it might be in order.
The whole kerfuffle (Damn, I wanted to use that in a real sentence) seems to be driven by little more than jealousy. I suspect that some folks who take great pride in their writing (see dKOS rec pages, esp. those who really should never make it up there) hold a far greater view about their talents than others do.
To see a person not only survive, but make a living off of this blog thingie, well, my hat’s off to them. I don’t always agree with Jane, and she has the ability to irritate even Terri Schiavo types into grumbling, but not only is there no crime apparent, this is clearly one method of expanding the blogtelligencia into the real world.
You know, the one with bills, mortgages, car payments, insurance costs, and medical bills.
While I don’t agree with her tone or her content all the time, I do applaud her getting out there and doing it. If she succeeds, so much the better. It even helps other bloggers figure out what works, and what to avoid. Like, say, Grover Nordquist.
The inject of the bloggosphere into the real world is no easy task. The traditional media hate, fear, disdain, and fail to understand us. Conservatives pretend that we sit in our batman PJs in mom’s basement, while we stuff our fat, pimply faces with cheetos. Even democratic leaders find us to be, well, an irritant. They can’t tell if our screeching is based on fact or fiction, or whether we have real numbers behind us, and worst of all, do we even vote?
That addresses one thing. The lack of funding for any candidates. It fails to address the way Jane has arranged to pocket the money coming and going. It’s also deeply insulting.
No. YOU look like a fucking idiot.