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As long as the attacks took care not to involve Hillary, it appears they would be perfectly legitimate.

It's better than just 'legitimate.' In this culture, any attack on a female can backfire, or be made to backfire. Hillary has played to this effect brilliantly. But one can dump on Bill all day long and never trigger the sympathy response, even though half the mud may well stick to her.

Drink Good Coffee. You can sleep when you're dead.

if it was attacking a citizen who was not running for office?

A 501(c)(4) organization could do it, too, or even a for profit corporation, if you wanted to pay taxes on donations. All "527" means is a section of the tax code under which groups organize for political activity - "McCain for President" is a 527; the Republican National Committee is a 527, "Bob Jones for County Commissioner" is a 527, Acme Corporate PAC is a 527; the Orange County Republican Party is a 527.

This is why Senator McCain makes no sense when he says he wants all groups to "play under the same rules." There is no one set of rules now. Rather, there are different rules that apply to each of state and local candidate committees, to presidential campaign committees, to national party committees, to state party committees, to corporate PACs. They are all 527s. Then there are different rules that apply to 501(c) organizations, such as the Sierra Club or the NRA. There are different rules that apply to corporations themselves, and to unions, and to trade association PACs. And there is yet another set of rules that apply to 527s that avoid explcitly advocating the election or defeat of candidates, such as this "Americans United for Change."

Sometimes these many sets of rules overlap, and sometimes they don't, and politicians and partisans try to adjust them to penalize their political opponents. All of this began long before McCain-Feingold - McCain-Feingold just made it all a whole lot more complex and a lot more restrictive of speech.
Brad Smith
Professor of Law
Capital University Law School
Capital University website
Center for Competitive Politics website

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Thanks, Brad.

"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill

I am still slightly unclear. I assume the benefit to funding this through a 527 is the tax-free status. But it sounds like 527s are for political organizations. It seems that what Mr. Hahn is proposing is that we attack citizen (non-candidate) Bill Clinton. Would it need to be one of the other organizations you describe since it would not be political. And are any of the other organizations similarly tax free?

Additionally, are donations to any of these organizations tax deductible (since it would not be a political contribution)?

1) whether the organization has to pay taxes on its income
and
2) whether contributions to the organization are tax deductible

Any organization that conducts political activity loses #2. That's why churches have to be so careful about participating in political activity and why organizations like NAACP have to pretend to be non-partisan. A for-profit entity loses both #1 and #2.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

does this constitute political activity? We would be attacking a non-candidate. Granted he is an ex-politician and the attacks would be purely politically motivated, but does that mean the activity would be considered political? It is still subject to the regulations of McCain/Feingold? Would it be regulated by the Federal Election Commission?

No other candidates' spouse has made themselves as big a part of a campaign as Bill has done. He tries to make himself the story in most of his appearances. I love the idea of campaigning against him non-politically while our candidate campaigns against Hillary politically. The two-fer would be magnificent.

But if you didn't try to make contributions to your group tax deductible, you could avoid all the trouble of getting hauled into court by the IRS.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

Only then will the time be ripe to remind the public of the Clinton Legacy.

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(-2.75, -4.92)

giving to such a 527....oh please.

Freedom of Religion not Freedom from Religion

If a few wealthy Republicans want to get together and bankroll such a plan to run counter-negative ads in this campaign, by all means. But I'm about 1 week from having my electricity shut off (and that's no joke) and I'm not in the mood to concentrate on anything involving side issues and attacking Bill Clinton.

Now is no time to be going "green", kowalski.

Sorry - thought maybe a little levity would help.

I'll help build the website. Will work for hire. No joke. I just can't contribute right now, but I think it's a fine effort.

Thanks to National Grid I won't have to go "green" of my own recognizance: Massachusetts already has the 7th highest electricity prices of any state in the nation and Deval Patrick has already said that we don't need any new power plants. So I'm not going to *decide* to do it, I'm going to be *forced* to do it.

If an independent group is formed to sling mud at Bill Clinton all day, every day, then what do our nominees have to do with it?

As for #3, well, I'm in the same situation, but not all of us are trying to launch businesses, heh.

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Definitely! It's a waste, but hey, they can waste their money. If I were a union member & saw my dues going to this kind of monkeypoop I would be one unhappy camper.

As henious as Bill Clinton is, I think our money & efforts are better spent toward the future. Bill is doing a great job hacking off the "black" voting bloc right now by exposing the soft underbelly of racism inherent in the statist mindset. They will spin Obama's SC win as a black v. white issue, which is something that I hope our candidate exploits. May make some "black" voters think twice about following the overseers to vote democrat.

What if, after (& assuming) the Clinton machine chews up Obama, there is a third party candidate who is African-American?

Unlimited money paying for billions of nasty lies and half truths about Bush. But it's not personal at Bush - it's an attempt at guilt by association to make all Republicans look bad cause they're Republicans like that "Evil Bush". And it's a really sneaky sinister way to use gobs of money to attack republicans and get around McCain-Feingold restrictions.

I was real depressed when I read the original post - and then I read and re-read the last two sentences. The saying, "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" comes to mind - and in this case, people who live in glass houses shouldn't do weird things with cigars either. :-)

I believe it is actually quite a bit more sinister. I thinkthere has been far too little exposure of what was going on in the first Clinton administration that may have more directly than indirectly led to the 9/11 attacks.

Everyone here I am sure rembers the Jamie Gorelick memo erecting a wall between the investigative and intelligence divisions of the FBI and between the FBI and CIA. Gorelick was the defacto Attorney General at the time.

Why was the wall important to Bill Clinton? Because Louis Freeh and the FBI were closing in on him with respect to illegal foriegn contributions. I seem to remember that there were complaints by investigators that a case could not be put forward because it would have required bringing together information from the various agencies that were specifically prohibited by Gorelick's memo.

As we painfully learned on 9/11, not sharing information across agencies was a bad idea. So, did Bill Clinton's erecting of a wall to protect his seamy existence lead to 9/11? Not exactly. But, then again, we'll never know if it could have been prevented, either.

on the papers Sandy Berger stole. I guess he's not running for elective office now either.

Hey, thanks for the tip.

And the compliment :)

Drink Good Coffee. You can sleep when you're dead.