In Hell, its always Pledge Week.
So Hell will be full of parties, all shiny, and smell like lemons. Sign me up.
The Dems eat at the same infested money trough as the GOP behind the scenes and this is the best which can be dug up? Someone’s not trying hard enough.
I can’t let this go by. Mr. Moto , I think you are way off base here.
That’s because I can’t think of a better use for stolen money than yachts, coke, and hookers.
What can I see? I didn’t have to look far. I made the FEC query you recommended, and I can’t understand why you didn’t spot the occupations of all of the Paws. You say they’re “living in modest means in Daly City.” How modest? Let’s look:
Alice Paw, Homemaker
Dimiple Paw, RN at Peninsula Hospital in May 07, RN at Mills Peninsula Health Services in June 07
Dimple Paw (same guy?), Mills Peninsula Health Services, Computer Administrator at Rescare
Dimplo Paw, RN at Hills Hospital
Marina Paw, Acct. Manager, Supervisor, Regional Manager, Finance Manager, Business Development at Actuate Corp. (various spellings)
Nelson Paw, Alluting Professional Services, Attorney for San Francisco School District
Vivian Paw, Homemaker
William Paw, Mail Carrier/Postal Clerk at US Postal Service
Winkle Paw, Managing Director/Project Manager at Components, Ltd., Director at Coolpower, Ltd., Director at Coorporolants, Ltd., Franklin Resources
In short, the family is not of “modest means.” They’re doing pretty darn well. You say the Democrats are “scrambling to rid themselves of Paw money as well as Hsu cash.” I haven’t yet found anything about anyone jettisoning the Paw money. Mr. Hsu’s legal troubles have nothing to do with election laws, and there’s no apparent connection between Hsu’s 1991 screw-up and the Paws’ legal campaign donations.
Now, about this suggestive phrase that Hsu “has a reputation as a bundler.” For those who don’t know, I’ll explain that bundling is not illegal. When a backer of a candidate persuades other people to write checks along with his, he can walk into the campaign office with a fistful of checks, which makes him a hero to the candidate. What it gets him is the ear of the elected person, more than just his own check would provide.
Mr. Moto and the Post editorial he linked to are strenuously nudging and hinting that Hsu paid the Paws to write their checks. Is there any actual evidence, other than implying that an RN, an attorney, and a guy on the board of directors of two corporations can’t afford to donate to political candidates?
The WaPo editorial brings up “the Paws’ apparent financial circumstances – their house was recently refinanced for $270,000” as if that looks like they’re in dire straits. Folks, that’s not a red flag. The family is well off, as I said. $270,000, in the California housing market, shouldn’t raise an eyebrow. The fact that they refinanced is not news, either. Half the homeowners in the country have re-fied in the last 5 years, to get lower interest rates. That’s not desperate, it’s just smart.
Do you really believe that a family of those means would donate $200,000 to a political party in the past 3 years? That seems a little… far fetched. Especially when you consider that the money was collected by a criminal who just skipped bail and tried to run for it.
Perhaps he was stricken with conscience, and hoped to use his ill-gotten gains towards the progress of truth and justice?
But, seriously, folks…what was his agenda? What malefic end was this in support of?
Dunno…whats your theory?
-XT
It’s not something I would do, but it’s not astonishing. Do the FEC query yourself. You’ll see that no individual Paw gave a “millionaire’s” amount at any one time. I’ve met folks who took a year off work to volunteer for a campaign. When you look at the Paw’s jobs, it’s clear they can be more helpful by writing checks. Look at the list. Some of them could be pulling down 6 or 7 figures. Yes, an inspired group like that would cheerfully give $200,000 over 3 years to stop the permanent Republican majority. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush are very inspiring to Democrats.
Do you believe the Feds pursued him as a fugitive for 16 years, missing the fact that he had an address, a phone number, and tax returns the whole time? Don’t you think it’s fishy that a US Attorney just happened to find him in time to embarrass Democratic candidates when the campaign gets revved up? Talk about far-fetched…
Whatever. Use Occam’s razor. Sure, if you search millions of donors, you’ll find some outliers who gave a huge amount relative to their income. But when you dig into the records of a known fund-raising fraud, and find such an outlier, well… I’ll put my money on this being part of the scam. Sure, it’s possible that HSU managed to hook up with the most politically charitable family in America for their income group, but do you think it’s likely?
Frankly, I don’t know why you’re trying so hard to carry water for this guy. I’ve already said that I don’t think this hurts actual candidates (at least not from the evidence released so far), and so it seems to be a non-story in terms of political impact. So why the need to go to the ends of the earth to explain this away? I seriously don’t get it.
Yeah, I’d like to know this as well. Why do people like Hsu do what they do? Is he taking a cut of the ‘bundle’? Is it a purely financial thing? I assume there must be a shadowy agenda somewhere - someone wants to feed money to a candidate and doesn’t want anyone to know where it comes from, so they hire a guy like Hsu as a front, give him the cash, then he slides it to other people and has them write checks back to launder the donation. He probably gets a payday for doing that, as do the people who write the donation checks. At least, that’s how I imagine the mechanics of the scam work. So is there any hint that this guy is connected with someone?
That’s the real elephant in the room. The only way you could really damage a candidate over this is if it turned out that the candidate’s team was the group funelling money to HSU to skirt Campaign Finance laws. But if it’s just some unconnected group, or even a foreign government that’s doing it, it shouldn’t hurt the candidate anyway. They’re not responsible.
Perhaps he is on the level for now, and is hoping that if Clinton becomes president that he would get a pardon and avoid that whole fraud convection thing. If there is an agreement beforehand then the politician is being unethical, but if he is just hoping that he will be able to use his pull later on to get himself out of trouble then not so much.
I can’t believe #85 didn’t get a little sarcastic repartee from the poster it was directed to. Must not be up to his standards. Sigh.
Count your blessings. It’s still getting more play than the record setting fine the Federal election commission slapped on the Club for Growth last week:
I hate to press the point, but the ACT (that I linked to above) were slapped with a penalty twice as big ($775K vs your $350K) within the last couple of weeks. The third largest fin in FEC history.
From the Washington Post:
That your trump card can’t even touch the ACT fine, or that Pelosi was fined $21K and still gets to be Speaker kinda points towards the blind eye mentioned here.
Well, its one of those “whatever” kind of things. I mean, if you want to posit some equivalence in corruption between one party and the other, try to imagine how little I care. Not even close, try again.
So maybe they’re both skanky old whores, with running sores and every STD known. But one of them has spent the last 6 years demonstrating that she’s fucking stupid, so dumb she tried to suck off a dump truck going thirty miles an hour.
I dunno… I tend to agree with you more than disagree, but your argument (and the Ted Stevens crack) skate a little too close to the kind of thing that makes Republicans sputter “but Clinton did it.” It seems born out of the same kind of line of thinking. Democrats bring up Stevens, Republicans bring up Hsu, Dems harp on Abramoff, Repubs harp on those recent New Jersey indictments/arrests/whatever… I get dizzy. 
He’s not a “known fund-raising fraud.” Pay attention. Hsu has never been accused of any violation of election fund-raising laws, except in the press.
I’m only trying to get your feet back on the ground, Sam. You keep imagining things that there’s no evidence for. His 16-year-old crime had nothing to do with politics. The FBI made no effort to round him up for 16 years, and now they bust him for it, and NOT for any violation of election rules.
There you go again, Sam. A candidate’s team funneling money they already have through the process again? :dubious: You’re a conundrum, Mr. Stone.
Okay, general fraud then. He’s obviously a very shady operator.
Right. So a known fraud emerges as a ‘bundler’ for Democratic candidates. One of his ‘clients’ has donated $244,000 to Democrats over the past three years, despite being clearly a middle-class family. Sure, it’s possible that they’re the most philanthropic people in the country, giving everything they make to Democrats while carrying mortgages and working regular jobs, but given that the person involved is a shady operator, this seems to me to be unlikely. YMMV.
You know what I meant - if a campaign was skirting campaign finance laws by shunting money they otherwise couldn’t take through a guy who then breaks it down into many cheques. Note that I’m not accusing anyone of this - I just said that something like that was the only way I could see this sticking to an actual candidate. I don’t think that’s what happened, and there’s no evidence for it. Try reading my messages a little closer. I’ve pretty much been on your side on this in terms of whether it should be a political issue for Democrats. I don’t see it.
But that doesn’t mean I think Hsu is squeaky clean, and these donations are on the level. My gut feeling is that they aren’t. I just don’t think any of the Democratic candidates should be affected by it, unless prosecutors can show direct involvement of the campaign in whatever scam is going on.
Not so sure about that. I was struck by how the NYT today vaguely mentioned that this “garment executive” had no apparent visible means of support for his “garment companies” (which largely appear to be mail-drops), and then went on, without spending much more time musing on how a mail-drop would put one in a position to channel hundreds of thousands of dollars through various other co-countrymen. Occam’s Razor would suggest to me that a guy with two bankruptcies and no visible means of support was getting his money from yet another source, rather than from some vague but totally-legal but highly-profitable business that somehow spun off $600k in surplus income that he had nothing other to do with than donate to scores of campaigns. I do okay for myself, but, say, $1,500 would be a heavy, heavy donation for me to a political cause. “Hundreds of thousands” in contributions is beyond anything I can imagine.
And if Occam’s Razor tells me this – it also tells me that the least-convoluted possible source for huge amounts of Democratic-influence-buying money begins with a P and ends with a C and has an R in the middle. Certainly, my reactionary Taiwanese Kuomintang acquaintances are not shouting racism here. They’re shouting, “The Commies are buying the election!” Discount for their political/irredentist bias, and YMMV, but it is hardly an unreasonable hypothesis, given the comparatively small proportion of Chinese in the U.S. and their comparatively large role in buying Dem. influcence and spying (when they do spy), on behalf of the Politburo in Beijing.