Politician Funding Secrets

Find Out How Your Favorite Elected Officials Raised the Money They Needed to Get Elected Reading Between the Lines There is Often More to the Story. Http://www.Opensecrets.Org Is a Must See Website Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Crazy figures like the Obama campaign ending the election with a war chest of 65 million dollars still unspent and Big donors including Some of the top Universities in the country. Did you know that non profit organizations like Universities contribute as much as a half million dollars to a political campaign. I sure did not till I started exploring www.opensecrets.org I am too smart to take the information on the site at face value . Surely they only report what is reported or reportable which is a legal term meaning something between required and not necessary. The reason why major political contributions are made to candidates is not always a clean cut endorsement necessarily . On this site you can check the opposition candidate's contribution funding to see if supporting interests supported both candidates in the same election. It often happens. The site also lists other attributes of candidates including personal finances. This is a truly amazing site. The reason to say so is that before a resource like this it was not easy to find all this information in one place so well organized that anyone can instantly have a command of the numbers involved in the political arena. There is even a payback tracking section to see what donors expect to get back and perhaps gage what they actually do get from each candidate they help get elected. Fun facts like the one where the Obama Campaign raised 640 million dollars is just mind blowing. More than half a billion dollars for that flawless campaign we watched turned to glory. I have not had time yet to compare the McCain campaign figures but will get to it soon. For 640 million dollars spent on a campaign and perhaps over a billion dollars for all candidates it certainly puts a value on the office of the presidency or at least on the first four year term. I am not sure how in kind contributions are listed or how they get evaluated. I am interested in seeing where campaign dollars got spent. We all heard about the expensive Palin wardrobe. That is not as interesting to me as which news media outlets got direct spending and if that sort of spending bought any endorsements? With Major universities, none of which are currently broke and looking for federal cash necessarily, why they spent endowment money on a presidential election? Do they do it every year? What kind of payback is Stanford looking for with large election contributions? When supposedly non profit organizations are bankrolling an election in part it opens a few lines of questions. More important sometimes is who and what does not appear in the open records and that is in the context of both making donations and receiving payment for goods and services. For those who believe politics in America is bought and paid for this site may offer the proof they want. My curiosity is in what is not there or what changed from the years before and why. A strange quirk in the Obama numbers is Goldman Sachs corporation giving around 800,000 dollars while the Bush administration entertains an ex top Goldman official as the present secretary of the treasury. It is impossible to know if the next secretary of the treasury will come from the same brokerage firm, but it would not be a surprise if he did. When you see top universities as top donors the issue of who owns America in campaign contributions takes new direction. Maybe the rich are not necessarily who we think they are? Go visit the site and find out if major Universities funded the McCain campaign to the degree that they funded the Obama campaign. That research can be done in a few minutes.with accurate facts at your finger tips. .