I mentioned last week about Vilsack creating the Heartland PAC and it’s prototype website. Now a reporter at the Mason City Globe Gazette is writing about the Heartland PAC’s fund raising activities so far (thanks to State 29 for the original link). But the reporter isn’t helping readers to make decisions for themselves, they are parroting the same old (but true) line about Democrats and labor being too close to each other.
First off, they should provide a link to the IRS 8872 filing for the Heartland PAC (or at least a link to where you can search for it on the IRS web site). Next, they should just print all the contributers and let you do your own analysis. This is not a long list, there were only 16 contributions (two from the same PAC) during this period. Remember, bandwidth is cheap.
Here is my 5-minute analysis of the $635,000 in contributions so far:
- 7 Unions – $315,000 – 50%
- 6 Corporations – $220,000 – 35%
- 1 Individual – $50,000 – 8%
- 1 PAC – $50,000 – 8%
Oh, go ahead and play with the spreadsheet I created yourself.
Why can’t reporters do this stuff for us? This took me about 10 minutes to do from finding the IRS form to creating the spreadsheet. Why do they always have to pick and choose the stuff they think is interesting? (Even when it’s not interesting, “Shocking news, local Democrat gets lots of money from labor unions”, this is not news.)