Clean Up Campaign Finance Reporting

I agree whole heartedly with Jon Ralston’s column in the LVSun today. He wrote that the State of Nevada has to stop fat cats from circumventing campaign contribution limits by "bundling."

Fat Cats "bundle" their contributions by using several corporate funds to spread out their contributions. In Nevada, an individual can give a max of $5K to a non-federal candidate for the primary and another $5K for the general election. Fed candidates have their own rules.

Las Vegas Sands Fat Cat Sheldon Adelson, worth a mere $15.6 Billion, funneled nearly $100K to Jim Gibbons’ war chest through various corporate fronts. He should be in jail for violating Nevada State campaign finance laws, but instead he sits in the Venetian Corporate offices and laughs at the rest of us for thinking we have a say about who our next Governor will be.

And who else is laughing at us? Jim Gibbons. Why should he even bother shaking hands and kissing babies?  He can just take the cash from the Fat Cats and buy time on the Stephens-Greenspun-Rogers media monolith and pretend he has hometown, rural values.

If hometown, rural values consist of kissing the shiny black shoes of Big Gaming, Big Mining, and Big Developing, that is.

Titus also benefited from the practice of bundling, but at least she was calling for reforms last Monday in the Review Journal.

Should we expect reform from Gibbons? When he won’t even return the $2000 he got from Tom DeLay and the $1000 he got from Titan Corp., torturers?

Should we expect pigs to grow wings?