Sunday, October 26, 2008
Obama flunks SOX
Mark Steyn has more on the hilarious and probably intentional failure of internal controls at the Obama campaign. If it were a public company it would have to disclose a material weakness, and its auditors would wonder whether its "tone from the top" had actually encouraged the practices in question. Fortunately for politicians of all parties, we do not hold government to anything like the same standard of accountability that applies to private businesses with public stockholders.
7 Comments:
By 
, at
Sun Oct 26, 09:13:00 AM:
The "probably" intentional failure? "PROBABLY"? Hawk, with all due respect, your frequent attempts to appear fair and objective can make you look like the proverbial man so open-minded that his brains fell out of his head.
If you haven't figured out by now that The Chosen One is a corrupt, end-justifies-any-means guy with elbows sharper than razors, you haven't been paying attention. BHO's website has obvously taken in piles of money from donors who would make Clinton-DNC money man Johnny Chung look like a choirboy by comparison.
Me, I had Barry pegged with the Rezko real estate deal.
By 
Kathy Hall, at
Sun Oct 26, 10:43:00 AM:
It's obvious we are not using "private business" standards when someone with absolutely no experience running anything is considered qualified to run the largest business in the world! It boggles the mind how this can happen.
By , at
Sun Oct 26, 11:31:00 AM:
locker room,
Go easy on the Tigerhawk. There have been so many serious breaches of journalist integrity this election cycle everyone needs to be careful of what they write.
That being said, I used to teach website design and it is not possible to "accidentally" disable all of the security controls on an online credit card account like that. Whoever did it, belongs under the bus with Wright, Goolsbee, Ayers and all of the others. Credit card fraud is a very serious offense, and though I would bet that eventually, we will discover that what was done was technically legal, although obviously not ethical.
How about it, N.Y. Times? Is it time for a "Obama Campgain raises Millions Through Credit Card Fraud?
I always said that the reason Hillary stayed in until the last minute is she understood this sort of thing was inevitable. Unfortunately, the press covered for Senator Barak Obama so well that true extent of his dirty tricks campaign didn't come to light until she was completly out of the picture.
By George, at
Sun Oct 26, 08:54:00 PM:
As someone who's actually donated to Obama, an American living abroad, I know how this system works.
The Obama campaign did not verify that I was in fact a US citizen until more than 6 months after I donated earlier this year.
Conclusion: Obama's campaign is deliberately facilitating fraudulent donations to use them as a credit card for their operations.
All the Obama campaign's spin about bi-daily screening checks of donations is complete bull.
If they were serious about preventing fraudulent donations, they wouldn't have rejected industry standards such as address verification and CVC verification.
I'm literally sitting here wondering why I haven't filled out my voter's ballot for McCain by now.
Barack Obama has shown himself to be a fraud again, and again, and again. I guess I just desperately want to give the guy a chance, but he has used up every chance I have been willing to give.
I'm sure he had nothing to do with this fraudulent online donation scam his campaign is doing, but still. He seems carefully incurious about how they are managing to fund his campaign.
Let's have the FEC conduct a full investigation already. Not after the election, but now. By not checking addresses and CVCs, Obama's campaign has already shown it needs to invite the FEC to show that they're not conducting massive fraud.
For all we know, they have been using foreign donations as a credit card for almost a year. That is if they have returned all of them, eventually. How does anyone know that they have done so, when they won't release the lists of sub-$200 donors?
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 12:07:00 AM:
please Tyree - there's no fraud in that sense - both sides of that transaction are perfectly happy with the outcome.
By Moneyrunner, at
Mon Oct 27, 07:16:00 AM:
Here's something I blogged on yesterday.
There are a few facts that strike me as odd about the massive Obama contributions. Obama said he raised $150 million in a single month, September. Let’s do some simple math. According to FEC records, about half of Obama’s contributions come from donors under $200.
Let’s assume that’s also true in September. That leaves us with $75 million. Those contributions can be anywhere from, say, $5 to $200. If we assume the best case that every contributions was for $200, that means that the Obama campaign would have to screen 375,000 contributors in September to insure that none are fraudulent. Since they have turned off the credit card fraud screens, they would have to be done manually. Let’s assume a room full of hyper-efficient fraud screeners working for Obama in 8 hour shifts, taking no breaks, screening 12,500 contributions per day taking just sixty seconds to verify a contributor’s name, address, employers and occupation. That would take 26 screeners working 7 days a week.
If the average donation is less than $200 (and Obama brags about the $5, $10 and $25 dollar contributions) the number of people required to properly vet these contributions becomes enormous. And I don’t believe for a minute that this can be done in a minute per contributor.
So here’s the bottom line. The Obama campaign has made a deliberate decision to rake in as much money as possible and forget about where it comes from. They are not going to get caught by the MSM who are rooting for them. The numbers of contributors fake and real are going to create data overload on any organization like the FEC that tries to do an audit. And after the election, the FEC will be in Obama’s hands.
The danger to Democracy from a media that takes a dive for a candidate is becoming more and more apparent.
http://moneyrunner.blogspot.com/2008/10/campaign-finance-gets-new-scrutiny-but.html
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 07:53:00 PM:
Tyree,
What's your source for this?
"I'm sure he had nothing to do with this fraudulent online donation scam his campaign is doing".
How are you sure he had nothing to do with it? I'm not trolling, I seriously want to know if you have a source (besides intuition).
From what I've read about the Obama campaign he's quite the micro-manager, so I'd be surprised if he had nothing to do with the decision to disable industry-standard credit card fraud protection on his campaign site so he could rake in fraudulent contributions. I'm not saying he did make the decision, but I would not be surprised if it were his decision.
I find Obama to be a weird mixture of Nixon and JFK, but with extra charisma and paranoia, and less experience than either of them.
