Topic: WorldNetDaily
For his 47th anti-Obama article, WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein goes spelunking through right-wing blogs again and latches onto ... Pamela Geller, who runs the Atlas Shrugs blog and is virulently anti-Obama -- currently joining Klein's Obama-hating buddies at Israel Insider in embracing the fake-Obama-birth-certificate conspiracy -- as well as (like Klein) a sympathizer of right-wing Israeli extremists.
Anyway, the blog tidbit that Klein is trying to make a big deal out of this time is a claim that "Palestinian brothers inside the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip are listed in government election filings as having donated $29,521.54 to Sen. Barack Obama's campaign." Klein goes on to assert "The contributions also raise numerous questions about the Obama campaign's lax online donation form, which apparently allows for the possibility of foreign contributions."
But as Klein goes on to note, the Palestinian brothers falsely claimed to be living in Georgia on their donation form, which means the brothers are committing fraud, not Obama. And Klein does not outline any difference between Obama's campaign and John McCain's campaign in "allowing for the possibility of foreign contributions" in online donations.
Further, Klein states that there are "prohibitions on receiving contributions from foreigners and guidelines against accepting more than $2,300 from one individual during a single election" but not that there are exceptions. For instance, as Klein was pushing his daily Obama-bash, Talking Points Memo was detailing how "Ten senior Hess Corporation executives and/or members of the Hess family each gave $28,500 to the joint RNC-McCain fundraising committee, just days after McCain reversed himself to favor offshore drilling, according to Federal Election Commission reports." That's apparently legal (if unmentioned by Klein). Further, because Klein doesn't note exactly where the brothers' money went or what, if anything, they got for it -- the brothers did claim to have purchased T-shirts from the campaign -- there is not enough information to determine the legality of the donations.
Finally, it's highly unlikely, despite Klein's suggestion to the contrary, that the Obama campaign knowingly broke the law in allowing over-the-limit donations from a foreign national.
This is only a half-reported story. Despite the Obama campaign not returning his calls -- given that he has a record of hurling distorted, murky and outright false attacks against Obama, why would they? -- he went with it anyway, solely in order to make Obama look bad, even though he can't actually back all of it up.
