(It’s official:  I will now start using the “2010 Elections” category I created the day after the election.)

Also said (as much as it disgusts me to repeat it here):

Mr. Reid now has more than $5 million on hand after starting the year with $3.3 million, said a Democratic official familiar with the Reid campaign’s first-quarter contribution reports, which are due Monday.

The official did not want to be identified discussing campaign-finance figures not yet made public.

The cash infusion will push his total contributions to $7.6 million for the 2010 re-election race, compared with the $9 million total he raised for the 2004 campaign. Since his 2004 election victory, the Reid campaign committee has given about $1 million to other Democratic candidates and party entities.

Mr. Reid scheduled a meeting with supporters and volunteers in Las Vegas this week to discuss the campaign, which is “already in full swing,” according to the Nevada state Democratic Party.

He plans to rally volunteers Tuesday at the Democratic Party Organizing Convention, in Clark County, Nevada. There, party officials say, Mr. Reid intends to retool the Obama grass-roots organization in the state to boost his re-election campaign.

“I think starting early is just being smart, not being cautious,” said Sam Lieberman, chairman of the Nevada state Democratic Party. “As much as Republicans would like to target the race, I don’t see a credible candidate emerging…”

(I told someone the other day that at least $20 million would be spent on the race between Reid and his challenger.  The person looked at me in disbelief.  Well, do ya’ believe me now…?)

From the other side:

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), says the party is courting a strong challenger, but he’s not saying who that is.

We wait.  Oh My Stars !! do we wait, and hope, and pray, for Someone who can beat Harry Reid, who so deserves to lose his seat on The Hill.  Which is why:

Republicans say Mr. Reid will need an early start and deep pockets this time around.

“On a range of issues, he is to the left of the state,” NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh said. Nevada voters “know Harry Reid. They are just saying they don’t support him.”

The four-term incumbent consistently scores less than a 50 percent job-approval rating in Nevada, which, though then-Sen. Barack Obama carried it in the 2008 presidential elections, is generally more conservative than the Democratic Party national agenda Mr. Reid champions on Capitol Hill.

“There are a lot of folks who are upset with all the spending and what’s going on in the federal government,” said John Ellison, a longtime member of the Elko County Board of Commissioners in northern Nevada.

If and when a viable conservative candidate is announced, I pledge my blood, sweat, and tears to his/her campaign.

This makes it hard to understand why The Maverick has been so quiet on the snarkfest re: Palin.

Says a new blog pal:  Your silence, sir, is deafening!

…some McCain aides had felt for a while that their candidate had had a deep reluctance to impede the election of the nation’s first African American president. That he had, perhaps, pulled punches and failed to strike as hard as necessary to win this thing, for that greater good. [This] was infuriating, since more depended on the election than changing the race dynamic — which, it must be said, has been changed for some time, and did not require this particular symbol to validate it. To be sure, McCain must have known that his campaign was losing — and did not want to swing blindly. And maybe he didn’t like being called “erratic,” “desperate”, and a “racist” every time the inconvenient facts of Barack Obama’s short past came up for discussion.

But all Republicans who watched their candidate these past few months, must have been struck, as I have been, by the sense that he was holding back. I wondered, too often, how it could be that no one at the campaign could frame and muster the arguments that were clear to all conservative writers here and at the other publications and blogs that share our view. When the arguments were made, they were too little, too late, and garbled enough to drain their force. The campaign had it’s (very serious) flaws, but it seems that the reluctance to aim and shoot cleanly, was due to the candidate’s internal conflict here.

I’m not sure what I think about this.  But I also often wondered why, with so many brilliant minds and writers at his disposal, McCain did not do a better job of articulating his message in speeches, interviews, debates and ads. 

How is it possible that McCain’s campaign could not manage to patch together a persuasive narrative?  Lisa’s post may explain at least some part of it.

What He Said (whole post here):

I haven’t much liked McCain’s campaign in 2008.

But our job as voters is not to act as campaign reviewers, handing out three stars for a good performance and booing a bad one.

Our job is to act as citizens and to discern as best we can the quality of the candidates and their philosophies of government.

A bad performance by a candidate makes the citizens’ job more difficult – but no less imperative.

Re: Charlie Gibson Hits Obama On His Donors   [Mark Steyn]

Oh, please, Greg. That’s not a “hit”, that’s a Swedish massage by Princess Fluffy Bunny. That’s Charlie Gibson appearing to cover himself while letting Obama get away with mush. A (Palin-style?) hit would have taken the conversation on a quite different tack:

OBAMA: What I would simply point to is that the way we have raised this money has been by expanding the pool of small donors in this country in an unprecedented way.

INFORMED GIBSON QUESTION: What’s unprecedented is that, unlike John McCain, your website disabled the standard credit-card security system used by almost all reputable online retailers. Why did you do that? And, given that of the record $150 million you raised in September two-thirds was raised under this systemically corrupted Internet operation, isn’t it likely that a significant proportion of your half-hour infomercial was paid for by fraudulent donors? And, as to “expanding the pool of small donors in this country”, what about the way you’ve expanded the pool of donors in other countries who’ve been able to make illegal contributions to your campaign because you switched off the AVS security checks?

OBAMA: I mean, you’re looking the people who are giving $5, 10, 25. Ordinary folks who have gotten impassioned about this campaign in a way that is unprecedented. And that, really, is…

INFORMED GIBSON QUESTION: Also a lot of extraordinary folks have gotten impassioned about your campaign. You’ve received contributions from, among others, a Mr Saddam Hussein, Mr A Hitler and Mr K Marx? How do you propose to return those contributions given that all three “donors” are deceased?

OBAMA: Look, you know, 3.1 million donors would be a pretty hard thing for us to be able to process…

INFORMED GIBSON QUESTION:  Why? I mean, you’ve had no problem “processing” the money, have you? And, if you hadn’t monkeyed with the standard online retail data system, all you have to do is press a button and 3.1 million names and addresses pop right up. Ask Amazon. So why did you switch it off? And, if you yourself did not make that decision, who did?

The Senator terminates the interview to instruct an aide to have state and local officials look into this guy Gibson’s child-support payments, tax liens, etc. Later, it emerges that Charlie the Anchor is not even a state-licensed interviewer.

This morning I heard someone - I think it may be have been Megyn Kelly on Fox News – talking about people buying prepaid credit or debit cards (which have no name or address associated with them) and using those to donate as much as they wish, since Obama’s campaign turned off the credit card security measures on their website.

Who knows how many millions have been collected illegally and/or improperly?  The whole thing stinks, and even though Obama will not agree to release a list of his donors, or turn the online security stop gaps back on, not one mainstream/network media outlet (other than Fox) seems to give a damn. 

From Ken Timmerman at Newsmax:

As Barack Obama reaped a stunning $150 million in campaign donations in September, bringing his total to more than $600 million, new questions have arisen about the source of his amazing funding.

By Obama’s own admission, more than half of his contributions have come from small donors giving $200 or less. But unlike John McCain’s campaign, Obama won’t release the names of these donors.

A Newsmax canvass of disclosed Obama campaign donors shows worrisome anomalies, including outright violations of federal election laws. For example, Obama has numerous donors who have contributed well over the $4,600 federal election limit. Many of these donors have never been contacted by the Obama campaign to refund the excess amounts to them.

And more than 37,000 Obama donations appear to be conversions of foreign currency.

According to a Newsmax analysis of the Obama campaign data before the latest figures were released, potential foreign currency donations could range anywhere from $12.8 million to a stunning $63 million in all. With the addition of $150 million raised in September, this amount could be much more….

Hat Tip:  Andy McCarthy @ The Corner

LOL

Mega thanks for the laughs go out to my good friend (and good conservative citizen) Shane Markuson.

Over half of the $426.9 million Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won’t disclose.  (McCain has made his complete donor database available online, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP)).

 Federal law does not require campaigns to identify donors who give less than $200, but it does require reported running totals for each donor once they go beyond the $200 mark.   

 The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. (Only $39.6 million comes from identified donors.)

It is the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system…

And shennanigans have been discovered:  for example, donors with fake names giving small amounts that far exceed the $2,300 limit for single persons.  In one case, over 1,000 charges of $25 or less came from a donor named “Good Will.”  Total credit card charges:  over $17,000. 

Another donor (”Doodad Pro”) gave $19,500 in 786 separate donations, most of them for $25.

AND

The FEC has compiled a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations that contains more than 11,500 contributions totaling $33.8 million. More than 520 listed their “state” as “IR,” often an abbreviation for Iran.

More than 1,400 of the overseas entries clearly were U.S. diplomats or military personnel, who gave an APO address overseas. Their total contributions came to just $201,680.

There are a lot of specifics and examples in the story, including instances where the Obama camp was caught in specific wrongdoing and had to agree to return money and discussions about some of the foreign donations.  (The campaign is still under investigation.)

I strongly encourage people to read the Newsmax story – and forward this link.