It’s a felony to be coerced into making a campaign donation?

Posted by Jon on 1 July 2005 @ 11am

As with the crack, the felony is in the action on the part of the third party. It’s just not the sort of thing that one is likely to want to report. For starters, anybody making such a confession would presumably lose their job. They may end up embroiled in a federal investigation. And I can only assume that MZM isn’t likely to just roll over — many of these higher-level execs could have been involved in the other alleged crimes with Rep. Duke Cunningham.

It ain’t the sort of thing that anybody wants to go confessing to being involved with, victim or otherwise. Katherine Harris has made the same “offer.” I’ll be very interested to see on the next campaign filing if anybody takes them up on it. My guess? Nobody with two brain cells to rub together would respond to that letter.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 1 July 2005 @ 11am

What about the money Virgil got from the MZM PAC? Shouldn’t he be giving that back, too? It was, apparently, being given for the purposes of “owning” a congressman. If Congressman Goode doesn’t consider himself “owned”, I would think he’d want to do more than offer to give that dirty money back. I hope he’d be writing a check to the PAC and insisting that they take it.

Posted by Harry Landers on 1 July 2005 @ 11am

[...] Fourth, the Post is wrong on several levels when it says that “The blogs are too new to have a major impact on the Nov. 8 election…Most draw only a few thousand readers a day.” For starters, blogs aren’t that new at all, having been around for several years now. Perhaps the Post has heard of blogs’ influence during the 2004 elections? Some blogs, like DailyKos, draw hundreds of thousands of visitors per day. True, most Virginia political blogs receive only a few HUNDRED readers daily (not “a few thousand,” as the article incorrectly asserts), but that does not provide much indication regarding their significance. For that, the Post reporter could have done a serious examination of the types of people who read Virginia political blogs, the ways in which they help “frame” the debate, and the information they have uncovered. That might have taken a bit of time and effort. If the reporter had done that, however, he might have stumbled upon Waldo Jaquith’s fanstastic recent series on Virgil Goode and MZM, for instance, an example of the “blogosphere” doing a far better job than anyone in the so-called “mainstream media” in covering what should be a major story. [...]

Posted by Raising Kaine » Washington Post Blows it Big Time on Blogs on 6 July 2005 @ 8am