Over the weekend, Centerfield, a political blog, did some digging in and around who might be responsible for funding a spate of anti-Howard Dean ads that ran in Iowa a few weeks ago. In the course of Rick Heller's research, he discovered that the Yes Network, the cable television arm of the YankeesNets holding company (which included not only the Yankees, but the Nets and the New Jersey Devils before the sale of the Nets to a group of investors headed by Bruce Ratner), had contributed $100,000 to the effort.
And that just didn't sound right to me. After all, the YES Network is majority-controlled by George Steinbrenner, who as I recall, got into a whole lot of trouble way back when for some of his donations to Richard Nixon in 1972. And after a quick trip to Open Secrets, I discovered that Steinbrenner has no history of making any sort of soft money donation at all in the past three election cycles.
But the CEO of YES is Leo Hindery, and his background is a completely different story. Hindery has made $800,000 of soft money contributions to Democrats since 2001. In 2002 alone, Hindery used YES to make $550,000 in donations to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. As many might recall, Hindery was CEO of former telecom high flyer Global Crossing before becoming CEO of YES.
Original link courtesy of Instapundit.
Recall that DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe made millions on the sale of Global Crossing stock before it tanked in 2001. It’s all interchangable…can someone please tell me why everything is a big secret? Let’s have as much money as we can in politics, as long as there’s full disclosure of where it’s coming from.
McCain-Feingold definitely has/will hurt the full disclosure principle.