PLEASE BE IT TO YOUR ATTENTION
URGENT MESSAGE OF BUSINESS
MY NAME IS MR HERBERT KOHL AND I AM A UNITED STATES SENATOR OF THE STATE OF WISCONSIN. I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE IN AN URGENT TRANSACTION OF BUSINESS TO REMOVE $1 MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS FROM MY CAMPAIGN FOR RE-ELECTION IN 2012.
All kidding aside, it’s unfair to compare the 2012 re-election campaign of Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) to a Nigerian scam artist, because no Nigerian scam artist would ever go an entire quarter without making a single dime. But that’s where Senator Kohl’s fundraising stands, according to The Hill:
After loaning his campaign account $1 million late last year, a signal that he’ll run for another term in 2012, Sen. Herb Kohl’s (D-Wis.) report showed no fundraising actvity in the first quarter of this year.
Kohl, who still hasn’t officially announced his 2012 intentions, didn’t raise any cash during the first three months of the year, nor did he loan his account any additional funds. Kohl, who owns the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, has the ability to self-fund.
That’s right: during a three-month stretch in which his home state of Wisconsin was Ground Zero of the national political conversation – with emotions running high over Scott Walker’s battle with the unions, with progressive and union activists pouring money into a previously sleepy judicial election, while on the GOP side Paul Ryan increasing elevated himself to a national figure setting a budget agenda the President is merely following – Senator Kohl didn’t report receiving a single political donation. Not a penny, not a dime, not a pfennig. Nobody in the entire state looked at this landscape and thought, “hey, I should show my support to an incumbent Democratic Senator up for re-election next year.”
One has to assume that Kohl isn’t running, and that he’ll clear the field for Russ Feingold to try to recover his old job. (Whether Ryan is interested in that job is another day’s story). If he is running, well, you can see for yourself what enthusiasm he generates.
Ryan should have his eyes on a bigger prize.
Have we found that rarest of animals? An honest politician? A democrat to boot?
I would expect support from individuals or organizations who benefit from Kohl’s position, yet none is forthcoming. Strange indeed.
Don’t put too much stock into this – the first quarter of 2005 saw Nobody’s Senator raise…$195.00.
Indeed, the entirety of 2006, Kohl’s last re-election, saw him raise a grand total of about $11,000.
“After loaning his campaign account $1 million late last year, a signal that he’ll run for another term in 2012, Sen. Herb Kohl’s (D-Wis.) report showed no fundraising actvity in the first quarter of this year. ”
But I am willing to bet that campaign account managed to make its interest payments to the Senator on time. He is probably charging the campaign a pretty steep interest rate, too. Most politicians do.
Lending your campaign money is how you siphon money directly from your campaign fund into your own pocket.
Lend the campaign a million bucks at 10% a year, it makes “interest” payments to you until there is only a million left, then you “pay back the loan” and you have managed to transfer the entire campaign fund into your own pocket.
Any politician that is lending their campaign money is simply using the campaign for generating personal income.
Crosspatch, while that may (or may not) be something the typical politician does, the reported interest rate on the current Kohl self-loan, as well as the ones made in the 2005-2006 election cycle, is 0.00%.
I know the fact that the PDF generated by the FEC for Senate campaigns is an unsearchable graphic makes it hard to search, but it does help to actually know what is happening.
Ok, maybe he did give an interest free loan. Not many politicians do that. Most of them charge a tidy sum for lending their campaigns money. Maxine Waters, for example, is the biggest of them all for doing that.
He would also need to raise other funds to turn that trick otherwise he would be depleting the bank account and only retaining interest and none of the original loan. Doesn’t seem that there is other money coming in with which to do that.
“… Kohl, who owns the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks…”
Democrat insist that we “Tax the Rich” so let Kohl prove his leadership by not taking any deductions and give 50% of in gross income to the IRS, along with 15% of his (non-income) wealth!
Be a LEADER Kohl, and show us how the Dems want to fund welfare, food stamps, Planned Parenthood, and NPR / PBS! Give until it hurts you, like it hurts the over-taxed middle-class Americans!
Well, I do believe we should tax the rich more than we do. But I also think we should tax the middle class and the poor more than we do (which in many cases is not at all). Because when you actually have to buy into the system, you have more of a stake.
And finally we are talking about the three gorillas in the room: medicare, social security and (sadly not enough) for defense. You can’t just give a $15,000 grant for medicare and say go spend it wisely, because when you are older, that’s when your health care costs go into the stratosphere. Maybe we SHOULD have death panels (almost maybe sort of kidding). Raise the age when you can receive SS benefits to 77; not sure on medicare, but with boomers set to retire, that is not a gorilla in a room, it’s a T Rex; and slash defense by 30%. Do we really need to send zillions of troops overseas every time a president gets the testosterone?
A Congressman who knows nothing about revenue. Sounds like a Republican disusing the deficit.
Oops. “disusing” should be “discussing”.
Ryan is a total fraud.