Comment & Debate
“Ignore that $800,000 behind the curtain.” The Economist Democracy in America Blog. Oct 4th 2010: “the New York Times’ Mike McIntyre set out to find out what you’d have to do in order to discover who the actual donors are behind these kinds of expenditures [for TV issue ads]. The verdict? You can’t. Mr McIntyre tries to track down a mid-sized nonprofit called the Coalition of American Seniors, which was just formed in June and has so far spent $400,000 on ads featuring smart-alecky babies in diapers attacking the Democratic health-reform bill. After a long odyssey through Delaware post-office boxes and registered service agents, he finds that the group’s telephone number rings at the offices of a Florida health-insurance broker; the political consulting firm the group lists seems to refer to just one guy, who refuses to provide any information about who its donors are.”