Rightwing Media Exposes Rip-off Rightwing PACs

Call it ?Mutiny on the SarahPAC,? maybe. A news source so rightwing that it’s name is ?Rightwing News? just criticized Palin’s and other Republican PACs for ripping off their donors, after all.

According to John Hawkins? recent ?50 Million Down The Tubes? posting, many conservative political action committees are raking in big bucks, but aren’t spending that money the way donors think. Many donate under pretense that their contributions will be forwarded by these PACs to political campaigns; instead, the money gets funneled into the pockets of a select few.

While this has been pointed out by media repeatedly, Hawkins acknowledges, he and other conservatives simply wrote that news off as unfounded slant.

?(T)he problem with the articles that have come out so far is that most of them have come from liberal outlets and have only discussed limited aspects of a few organizations. That naturally led people to wonder if they were reading hit pieces.?

Aided by a ?professional researcher,? though, Hawkins says he learned that many conservative PACs spend little if any of their collections on political campaigns.

For example, Tea Party Express spent $12.3 million in 2014’s election cycle, but only $568,000 (about five percent) went to any campaign. Tea Party Patriots used only $1.4 million of it $14.2 million collected that year on candidates. Many other big-name PACs, such as FreedomWorks, spent less than half of all expenses in campaign contributions, too. Some even spent not a single dollar of their collections for such purposes. (And as for Sarah Palin?s? It dropped only seven percent of its annual take into campaign coffers.)

So where does the money go? Hawkins concludes:

?(A) large percentage of the money that was intended for (candidates) is being siphoned off to vendors, wasted, and just plain old pocketed by people in these PACs.?

A classic example would be the Americans in Contact PAC, which didn’t make Hawkins? write-up. AICPAC supposedly spends its collections to aid campaigns in polling (although of the ?push poll? variety). But the registered treasurer of AICPAC is Gabriel S. Joseph III, according to Open Secrets. Joseph also owns and operates ccAdvertising, the Washington Post learned. And who does AICPAC pay to conduct its push polls? You guessed it ? Joseph’s company.

In fact, since its formation in 2008, over 55 percent of AICPAC’s expenses went to Joseph’s ccAdvertising. And only 10 percent of its collections went to any campaigns, political parties, and committees.

With a traditional online ?tip of the hat,? we can thank RightWingNews.com for this open reporting, and maybe its readers will learn that what they call ?liberal media? is actually truthful media. At the very least, let’s hope those readers learn to not donate their money to rip-off artists like conservative PACs.