President Barack Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina sent out an official reelection campaign video wherein he said talk of Mr. Obama having a billion dollar campaign war chest is “bullsh*t” because “we don’t take PAC money unlike our opponents. We fund this campaign in contributions of $3 or $5 or whatever you can do to help us.

Mr. Messina’s plea for Obama supporters to chip in “$3 or $5″ leaves the impression of a presidential campaign divorced from big money donors. Furthermore, the claim that Mr. Obama will not accept PAC money leaves the impression that his fundraising efforts are removed from the influence of lobbyists or Wall Street. Nothing could be further from the truth.

From the New York Times:

Despite a pledge not to take money from lobbyists, President Obama has relied on prominent supporters who are active in the lobbying industry to raise millions of dollars for his re-election bid.At least 15 of Mr. Obama’s “bundlers” — supporters who contribute their own money to his campaign and solicit it from others — are involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies. They have raised more than $5 million so far for the campaign.

Because the bundlers are not registered as lobbyists with the Senate, the Obama campaign has managed to avoid running afoul of its self-imposed ban on taking money from lobbyists.

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One year out from the next election, the President’s 2012 reelection coffers are failing to fill up at a fast enough rate to meet the quarterly bilking quota.  Thus the situation demands a new tactic to prod, embarrass and shame former contributors into making the same mistake they made last time by sending money to reelect a man who, if truth be told, most people wish would retire.

One thing Obama has never had a problem doing was finding a way to guilt people out of money.  In fact, money grubbing appears to be the President’s singular forte.

With that in mind, the Obama reelection campaign has come up with a way to mortify people into contributing – sending emails that threaten to expose traitorous former patrons to neighborhood drones who remain faithful.

Initially, the Obama 2012 fundraising effort commenced with a $5 Dinner with Barack raffle. After that idea failed to sell, the concept morphed into a “fired-up” first lady cheerleading supporters into coughing up cash by hawking raffle tickets for the discounted price of $3.

Apparently, that creative tactic hasn’t worked either, because America’s socialist-leaning anti-capitalist president is now hoping to finance his reelection by injecting a perverse form of — dare I say, competition — into the fundraising effort by “ever-so-gently sham[ing] supporters into donating.”

Even if the effort ends up failing, the concept is a good one, because the method could have an effect on baby boomers who grew up way before being first in a competition was considered mean-spirited and guilt and humiliation still held sway over the insecure.

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Sources have told the Chicago Tribune that Google’s Eric Schmidt was seen dining with Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign manager Jim Messina at Café Spiaggia in Chicago last week providing further evidence of Google incestuous relationship with the Administration.

Democratic sources told the Tribune that the dinner was “part of the Obama team wooing and coordinating with the tech world.”  In the case of Google, we are confident it was more about coordinating than wooing.

Google and the president are well beyond the wooing stage of a relationship. Schmidt has been named a potential nominee to fill the vacated Secretary of Commerce position.  Such a nomination would cement Google’s influence over the Administration – a relationship that has put the company in a position to steer policy and taxpayer funded contracts back into the pockets of Google executives who have funded the president since his initial foray into the presidential arena in 2007.

In 2008, Politico detailed the relationship between the newly elected president and the company.  “’ From the staff attorney all the way up the line, everybody now knows that Google is close to Obama,’” Politico reported. “And that could subtly affect the policy playing field in Google’s favor.”  Subtly was an understatement.

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People on the left are constantly asking Andrew Breitbart who funds his “operation.”  It’s grown to become rather amusing, actually.  For those of us who are bloggers on The Bigs, we know the truth, we see how things operate. We know there’s no giant conservative-leaning lump of cash greasing this machine.  If that were the case, I for one think Andrew would probably be home with his family even more, rather than traveling around, worrying about advertising or other ways of self-funding this little “hobby” of his, as the left often like to refer to it.

But let’s just look for one moment at where some of that line of thinking comes from on the other side.  I’ve written previously about the birth of Media Matters as a spawn of Rob Stein’s Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix road show, from which the Democracy Alliance was born.  It’s through this organization from which much of the organization’s funding had come; in recent years, more has been spread out across other progressive organizations, but the funders often remain the same names in most cases.  For instance, The Tides Foundation gave Media Matters and their Action Network over $175,000 just last year.  In earlier years, groups like Montclair, New Jersey-based (hometown of Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert) Schumann Center for Media & Democracy gave the organization $500,000.

The donors’ list is vast and diverse, and we plan to cover that in detail in the future.  So I’ll focus in on one set of donors to Media Matters, which is the Labor Unions.  More specifically, in light of some recent posts regarding the Kenneth Gladney incident, I thought it appropriate to revisit donations made to Media Matters specifically by the Service Employees International Union.

When you look at the timeline of events and the media calendar in general leading up to the Gladney incident last August, it’s difficult not to conclude that there was collaboration amongst White House staff, components of Big Labor, and certain liberal media outlets.  However, we know that all will continue to deny it.

Further, just as the flurry of media activity finally starts to wind down a bit around October last year, this is when SEIU makes three separate donations to Media Matters totaling $50,000, under the classification of “Communications”, according to the SEIU LM-2 report. (In reviewing other LM-2s for several previous years, this appears at least to be the first time that SEIU has donated to Media Matters, and there does not seem to have been another donation recorded since these.)

This is the type of funding that I would question in return to Media Matters.  With their membership being so low and their unfunded pension expenses so high, can the SEIU really afford to be randomly donating funds to an organization like Media Matters?  Perhaps SEIU purchased advertising on Media Matters’ website, but then I’d think it would be categorized as such, as others ad expenses in the LM-2 were.  If not advertising, if not random donations,  then what’s the reason for SEIU having donated these funds?  One could logically conclude that Media Matters performed a service in return.  Only they can answer that.

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Yesterday we discussed the events leading up to the August 6^th health care town hall meeting featuring Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-MO).  The event was hosted by Health Care For American Now (HCAN) and Organizing for America (OFA), the former a front group for Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the latter an off-shoot of the Obama Campaign now run by the Democratic National Committee (DNC).  We revealed a four page document released by HCAN two days before the August 6^th town hall meeting.  In that document, guidelines are revealed for members of HCAN (union members) on how best to stifle the protestations of ObamaCare.

The meetings hosted by HCAN (like the one on August 6^th in St. Louis) were set up using these rules.  Americans showed up at these meetings thinking that it would be an opportunity to address their elected representatives and talk to them about the single most important piece of legislation our congress has proposed in decades.  Instead, they were pushed to the back of the room and shouted down by the well-trained SEIU members.  Eventually, an American citizen who was distributing “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and buttons was assaulted by a handful of the SEIU members.  His name is Kenneth Gladney.

Let’s look at that memo and how it matches the events of August 6^th: (more…)

On August 6, 2009 two Service Employee International Union (SEIU) leaders and a volunteer for Organizing for America (OFA) assaulted Kenneth Gladney outside of Rep. Russ Carnahan’s Town hall meeting on health care.  The perpetrators were arrested at the scene of the crime, and three months later charges have finally been filed.

Much has been said in the past three months about this incident.  Here at Big Government calls have been made for justice, for formal charges and mostly for the mass media to follow the story and delve into the government’s role in this violent attempt to intimidate and silence dissent.  We can no longer wait for the establishment journalists to connect the dots and bring to light the insidious relationships between the SEIU, OFA, Russ Carnaham’s office and the Obama Administration.

Was this assault merely a flare up of tempers during a heated exchange of rival political camps?  Or was it a coordinated attempt to silence the scores of protesters who had been so effective at swaying public opinion against the President’s health care scheme?  Today, Big Government will bring to light documents that read like an instruction manual for the SEIU forces in St. Louis the evening of August 6^th.  We will also show that on the very same evening of the St. Louis assault, an almost identical scene played out in Tampa Bay, Florida.  Also involving SEIU and OFA.  Also resulting in hordes of union members shouting down and physically evicting protesters from a U.S. Representative’s Town hall meeting.  Finally, we will introduce all of the various players in leadership roles at these organizations, what they said in instructing their members in how to fight back against the Town hall protesters, and how these individuals all connect to each other and to the Obama Administration.  As I said, we’ve been waiting for the “Real” journalists to do this, we’ve waited long enough.

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