Warren Buffett says he won't donate to Obama super PACs

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Despite his public backing of President Obama, billionaire investor Warren Buffett won't be donating money to any of the outside groups supporting the president's bid for re-election.

"I don't want to see democracy go in that direction," the Berkshire Hathaway chairman and chief executive officer said over the weekend at his company's annual shareholders meeting, according to Bloomberg News. "You have to take a stand some place."

Elections are Rigged in Favor of Incumbents

John Fund gets it right except for his conclusion. We need less money in politics not more:

More Americans approve of polygamy than of Congress. A February CBS News/New York Times poll found just 10 percent of respondents approved of Congress’s job performance. A recent poll from the same source found 11 percent of respondents thought polygamy “morally acceptable.” Other polls have found that the “U.S. going communist” has 11 percent support—meaning that concept has more fans than Congress has.

But here’s the paradox: While the approval rating for Congress has hit an all-time low, well over 90 percent of incumbent House members routinely win re-election. Even in the Tea Party election of 2010, 86 percent of House incumbents were returned to office. How can this be? It’s because the game is rigged in favor of incumbents, with more than four out of five congressional districts a lock for one party or another. Incumbent gerrymandering and enormous campaign contributions from Washington lobbyists make it nearly impossible to dislodge members short of major scandal. The general elections in which they cruise to victory time and time again are really fake fights, like the ones in pro wrestling.

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"Pro-Romney super PAC declines to give details behind $400,000 donation"

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The super PAC promoting Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy would not reveal precisely Monday who wrote a $400,000 check to the group in March. Restore Our Future said, however, who did not write the check: Scott DeSano, the man whose business address is listed on a report to the Federal Election Commission.

Restore Our Future on Friday reported to the FEC $8.7 million in March contributions, including a $400,000 gift from “Seaspray Partners LLC” at a Palm Beach, Fla. address. The company at that address belongs to DeSano, a former stock trader at Fidelity Investments.

DeSano told USA Today that he and his company have not contributed any money to Restore Our Future, and a spokeswoman for the super PAC told the Globe that a clerical error was responsible for the incorrect attribution.

Old, Rich White Men Are Buying This Election

Source: Frank Rich, New York Magazine:

This isn’t quite what was supposed to happen. When the Supreme Court handed down its five-to-four Citizens United decision in 2010, pre-vetting Mitt Romney’s credo that “corporations are people,” apocalyptic Democrats, including Obama, predicted that the election would become a wholly owned subsidiary of the likes of Chevron and General Electric. But publicly traded, risk-averse corporations still care more about profits than partisanship. They tend to cover their bets by giving to both parties. And they are fearful of alienating customers and investors. Witness, most recently, the advertisers who fled Rush Limbaugh, or the far bigger brands (­McDonald’s and Wendy’s, Coke and Pepsi) that severed ties with the conservative lobbying mill responsible for pushing state “stand your ground” laws like the one used to justify the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida. While corporations and unions remain serious players in the campaign of 2012, their dollars don’t match those of the sugar daddies, who can and do give as much as they want to the newfangled super-PACs.

Sugar daddies—whom I’ll define here as private donors or their privately held companies writing checks totaling $1 million or more (sometimes much more) in this election cycle—are largely a Republican phenomenon, most of them one degree of separation from Karl Rove and his unofficial partners in erecting a moneyed shadow GOP, David and Charles Koch. At last look, there were 25 known sugar daddies on the right (or more, if you want to count separately the spouses and children who pitch in). You’ve likely heard of Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas tycoon who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s unofficial ambassador to the GOP. But you may be less familiar with Irving Moskowitz, the bingo entrepreneur who funnels his profits into East Jerusalem settlements. Or Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund master of “flash trading” who poured a clandestine $1 million into ads attacking the “ground-zero mosque” and nearly another $3 million into a scale-model railroad in his Long Island mansion. Or Steven Lund, the co-founder of Nu Skin, which became “direct selling” sponsor of the Romney-run 2002 Winter Olympics after having spent much of the nineties settling complaints over false advertising and other unscrupulous practices with the Federal Trade Commission and six different states’ attorneys general.

Conservative nonprofit ALEC acts as stealth business lobbyist

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Desperate for new revenue, Ohio lawmakers introduced legislation last year that would make it easier to recover money from businesses that defraud the state.

It was quickly flagged at the Washington headquarters of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a business-backed group that views such “false claims” laws as encouraging frivolous lawsuits. ALEC’s membership includes not only corporations, but nearly 2,000 state legislators across the country — including dozens who would vote on the Ohio bill.

One of them, Bill Seitz, a prominent Republican state senator, wrote to a fellow senior lawmaker to relay ALEC’s concerns about “the recent upsurge” in false-claims legislation nationwide. “While this is understandable, as states are broke, the considered advice from our friends at ALEC was that such legislation is not well taken and should not be approved,” he said in a private memorandum.

The legislation was reworked to ease some of ALEC’s concerns, making it one of many bills the group has influenced by mobilizing its lawmaker members, a vast majority of them Republicans.

Despite its generally low profile, ALEC has drawn scrutiny recently for promoting gun rights policies like the Stand Your Ground law at the center of the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida, as well as bills to weaken labor unions and tighten voter identification rules. Amid the controversies, several companies, including Coca-Cola, Intuit and Kraft Foods, have left the group.