Waldo Jaquith is busy once again, kicking ass and taking no prisoners (ha), over at his blog. During the 2005 campaign, it was people like Scott Howell who felt the sting of Waldo's wrath, as in the classic Crafting the Message. Now, it's our old friend "Taliban Bob" McDonnell, now Attorney General by just 0.0166% of the vote, even after outspending Creigh Deeds by nearly $3 million. That's right THREE MILLION DOLLARS! Where the heck did all that money come from? According to Waldo:
The money was coming from the Republican State Leadership Committee, a tool of the RNC used to funnel money into state campaigns. In those last days of the campaign they pumped a truly astounding $2,083,500 into the race, or a third of all of the money that McDonnell raised for his entire campaign...The question all along was, of course, who gave McDonnell the money? The RSLC is just a funnel for the money. So what was he hiding? The press universally lambasted McDonnell for hiding his donors, and his ties to the Abramoff/DeLay scandal didn?t help any. But McDonnell refused to talk, and so we just had to sit tight and wait for the RSLC?s January 31, 2006 IRS filing to be made public.
That IRS filing is now available (PDF). I have taken that data and converted it into a CSV file, so that you can play along at home. This is a list of all contributions that the RSLC has taken in. Consequently, every RSLC donor can be assumed to have had some or all of their contribution given to McDonnell; everybody is fair game.
It?s everything you might expect: McDonnell has taken in huge quantities of money from alcohol, big oil, drugs, gambling, and shady loan companies...
Needless to say, there's a TON of material here, and already Waldo is raising lots of questions:
* Who gave to the RSLC this year who has not given in past years?
* Who gave to McDonnell both directly and via the RSLC?
* Why did Intuit contribute so much? Does it have anything to do with wanting to keep the Virginia Department of Taxation from providing free tax software to taxpayers?
* Why did Jonathan Perel donate $35,000, and does it have anything to do with Perel v. Brannan?
* Which corporate donors also gave to Deeds, and what was the difference in their giving?
* What business are these companies in? It takes a little research to find out that Diageo ($25,000) is an alcohol company, that Lorillard ($40,000) is a tobacco company,
* Why did the Mississippi Band Of Choctaw Indians, a tribe embroiled in the Abramoff bribery scandal, give $25,000?
And there's lots more, no doubt. Which is why, as Waldo points out, "now it's your turn" to make a difference. In your spare time, take a look at the IRS filing. Keep your eyes peeled for any convicted criminals on the list. Shady companies? Ties to DeLay, Abramoff et al? Let's shine some sunlight and see what crawls out from under this slime-infested rock. This should be verrrry interesting!
[UPDATE: Here's a good one - over $20,000 to something called "Dotterlydon, Inc." of Alexandria for "consulting" and "compliance" services. So what on earth is "Dotterlydon, Inc." I don't know exactly, but it's located at the same exact address as the infamous "Honest Leadership for Virginia PAC". Yes, that's right, the same group that was responsible for those phony robocalls aimed at suppressing Democratic turnout, made in the closing days of the Kaine-Kilgore contest this past year. Oh yeah, they're also the same group that is based out of a private address, even though their job was to funnel mebabucks - nearly $3 million - from the Republican Governors Association to Virginia Republicans. Finally, they're the same ones who had their