teabagger Alert!! – ‘Tea party PACs reap money for midterms, but spend little on candidates’
‘Out of the $37.5 million spent so far by the PACs of six major tea party organizations, less than $7 million has been devoted to directly helping candidates, according to the analysis, which was based on campaign finance data provided by the Sunlight Foundation’.
‘Roughly half of the money — nearly $18 million — has gone to pay for fundraising and direct mail, largely provided by Washington-area firms’.
‘Meanwhile, tea party leaders and their family members have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees, while their groups have doled out large sums for airfare, a retirement plan and even interior decorating’.
‘The lavish spending underscores how the protest movement has gone professional, with national groups transforming themselves into multimillion-dollar organizations run by activists collecting six-figure salaries’.
- ‘Three well-known groups — the Tea Party Patriots, the Tea Party Express and the Madison Project — have spent 5 percent or less of their money directly on election-related activity during this election cycle’.
‘Two other prominent tea party groups, the Senate Conservatives Fund and FreedomWorks, have devoted about 40 percent of their money to direct candidate support such as ads and yard signs’.
- ‘On average, super PACs had spent 64 percent of their funds on directly helping candidates by roughly this stage in the 2012 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission data’.
‘The Tea Party Leadership Fund has doled out a quarter of a million dollars to eight consulting firms’.
‘The Madison Project socked away nearly $50,000 for a retirement plan for its staff’.
‘And the Senate Conservatives Fund paid a luxury interior design firm more than $52,000 last year to paint and decorate its Capitol Hill townhouse office’.
From : http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/tea-party-pacs-reap-money-for-midterms-but-spend-little-on-candidates/2014/04/26/0e52919a-cbd6-11e3-a75e-463587891b57_story.html
The Last Of The Millenniums 