Archive for October, 2010

October31

For a saner America

By: Joe Newman

From Jon Stewart’s closing remarks at his Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall:

“I can’t control what people think this was.  I can only tell you my intentions.   This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear.  They are and we do.  But we live now in hard times, not end times.  And we can have animus and not be enemies.

The Examiner has the full text of his speech.

Posted in: Activism, Campaign Finance, Social Justice2 comments

October31

Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity – Oct. 30, 2010 – A photo gallery

By: Joe Newman

Flickr photo by cliff1066™

We scoured Flickr for some of the best photos from Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity. Check out some of the best rally signs after the jump.

We at Public Citizen are strong supporters of rational discourse and would like to thank everyone we met at the rally who signed our petition for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. If you didn’t get a chance to sign, you can still do so by visiting www.DontGetRolled.org.

Flickr photo by Public Citizen.

Flickr photo by TalkMediaNews.

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Posted in: Activism4 comments

October30

Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity was BIG but does size really matter?

By: Joe Newman

Flickr photo by CrazyJoeDavola

Let’s get this out of the way up front — Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity was insane. If the National Mall had been a bar, the fire marshal would have closed it down two hours before the Daily Show host even took the stage. The Daily Show estimated the crowd at 250,000. I have no idea how they came up with that number but I’m going to go out on a limb and say there were more.

That’s the only certainty about Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear — that no one is going to agree on how many people actually attended.

Every major rally or protest in Washington, D.C. in the last 15 years (since the National Park Service stopped providing crowd estimates) has had differing attendance counts, often by hundreds of thousands of people.

The bigger question and more important one is what impact, if any, did the event have on the people who attended the D.C. rally? Was the gathering nothing more than the world’s largest flash mob? Or will some of the people who traveled from far and near look back upon it as a seminal event in their lives?

I’d love to hear what people who attended or watched it on TV think.

Posted in: Activism, Social Justice20 comments

October29

2010 will go down as the year of the anonymous corporate donor

By: Angela Bradbery

Stunning Statistics of the Week:

  • 149: Number of independent groups that have spent money to influence this year’s elections (according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports through Oct. 25)
  • $176.1 million: Amount those groups have spent on the midterms
  • 10: Number of groups responsible for the bulk of that spending
  • 59.9 percent: The percentage of that money that comes from undisclosed sources

Public Citizen calls on electioneering groups to disclose corporate donors
Public Citizen has sent a letter to all groups that are conducting electioneering communications or independent expenditures in the 2010 elections, urging them to disclose to the public the sources and amounts of corporate contributions they use for their campaign spending.

Disclosed corporate funds are a fraction of what is hidden, heavily favor Republicans
Tapping into what few disclosure records exist of campaign spending by outside groups in the 2010 elections, Public Citizen has identified about 200 corporate contributors to a mere 29 independent groups that have reported their funding sources to the Federal Election Commission. These disclosure records account for

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Posted in: Campaign Finance1 comments

October29

American Action Network drops another $2M On Dems' heads

By: Editor

The American Action Network (AAN) disclosed spending an additional $2.1 million on television ads in seven congressional districts, according to its filings yesterday to the Federal Election Commission.

Almost half of the money ($950,000) was spent on one advertisement targeting Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va), while another ad running against Rep. Martin Henrich (D-N.M.) has a reported cost of $449,730.

In the last few days, AAN has had at least two television ads, targeting Reps. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) that were pulled by television stations in the members’ districts. One of those ads, targeting Murphy, appears ready to go back on the air at a reported cost of $123,150. The original ad reportedly included the claim that the health-care overhaul would force “jail time for anyone without coverage. Steve Rabb, a manager for the Connecticut affiliate’s parent company, told Congressional Quarterly that the station felt the group’s material didn’t support the claims [in the ad], and, in fact, contradicted them.

The group also is running ads in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, South Dakota and Minnesota, all against Democrats. With its latest filings, the group, headed by former Minnesota GOP Senator Norm Coleman, has spent about $20 million against Democratic candidates this year without disclosing any of its donors.

Cross-posted from Stealth PACS Blog.

Posted in: Campaign Finance, Congress0 comments

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