Middlesex County PACs Update
Middlesex County Democratic Chairman Peter Barnes is responding to the controversy over the Middlesex County PACs that are circumventing the State’s pay to pay laws by ranting that Governor Christie is doing the same thing, according to a story at Politickernj that also takes credit for breaking the PACs story last month, even though Harold V. Kane broke the story here at MMM last September.
Someone should tell Barnes, and Politickernj’s Darryl Isherwood, that Democratic NY Governor Andrew Cuomo is employing the exact same fund raising technique to promote his agenda in New York that Christie is using in New Jersey.
All of this ranting about PACs and 501(c)4’s circumventing the pay to pay laws is silly. The campaign finance system is working exactly the way it was designed to work. It decreases transparency and gives politicians something to shout at each other about while the public tunes out to pay attention to something more entertaining. That’s what the system was designed to do!
Note to Isherwood: The New York Times broke the story about Cuomo’s use of a 501(c)4.
More from my site
Turning up the heat on Middlesex County pay to play scandal
The Folly Of Campaign Finance Laws
Christie and Cuomo Enact Port Authority Reforms, Encourage Legislative Concurrance
Christie And Cuomo Direct Port Authority To Scale Back Toll Hikes
Joint Statement From Governors Christie, Cuomo and Malloy Regarding U.S. Senate’s Action on Hurricane Sandy Disaster Aid Bill
Monmouth Poll: New Jersey residents expect Christie to run for POTUS
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo Announce Reopening of World Trade Center and Exchange Place PATH Service on Monday, November 26
Christie’s Cuomo Diplomacy
Ken Kurson Resigns As Observer’s Editor-in-Chief
5.7% turnout for school board elections
Art-
Harold did a nice job detailing the existence of the PACs, however his story made no mention of the pay to play aspect of all of this, did not detail the contracts that all of those donors have with the various towns where the PACs are active and did not make any mention of who runs the PACs and how they are connected to the power players in Middlesex.
I’m not taking anything away from Harold’s work as I know how tedious it is to track the donations, but the story you posted here was not the same story we wrote last month.
Darryl,
From your recent story:
Christie has several times attacked Barnes over his role in the county and for what Christie says is the new chairman’s failure to clean up a network of political action committees, first exposed by PolitickerNJ, which take in money from dozens of vendors and dole it out to various candidates and committees throughout Middlesex.
Harold was the first to expose the network of PACs. He did it here. He did it seven months before you published your story.
You do take away from Harold’s work by taking credit for it yourself.
That’s not to take away from your work detailing the the contracts that all of those donors have with the various towns where PACs are active, exposing who runs the PACs and how they are connected to the power players in Middlesex.
To my knowledge, no one has given you credit for the biggest service you have performed with this story, which was publishing it when the Star Ledger editors were trying to quiet it. Good job there!