The press has been fawning over Beto O’Rourke for 18 months. One of his promises is not to take money from PACs sine they are corrupt and prove that you are owned by big interests. Of course it was different when he accepted PAC donations for his House campaigns.

Parsing Beto Part 1
Would you count taking bundled donations from a PAC as being PAC money? Beto doesn’t count it, saying the $167,408 in one cycle from the J-Street PAC was only a pass-through. PAC resources were used to solicit and collect the funds, but that doesn’t count of course.

Parsing Beto Part 2
Beto is traveling to DC for what he calls a grass roots effort, but he’s getting help from the End Citizens United PAC. This PAC calls itself a grass roots small donor PAC. If you look at a recent FEC filing, it looks like they’ve got a lot of small donors set up for monthly contributions – and then every contribution is matched via ActBlue, adding up to around $1 million per month. They have a donation page that goes “directly” to Beto, except that they keep half of it. But that’s okay because it’s all matched. Are these the sorts of layers of “dark money” that Sheldon Whitehouse says bought Kavanaugh’s nomination?

Beto’s text messages
Over the past few months I’ve received several text messages on Beto’s behalf on a cell phone that I pretty much never give out the number for and most certainly have never given out to any political group at all, much less any liberal political group. I didn’t get this text, but of course Beto’s people are denying they sent it.

Hi, it’s Patsy here w/ Beto for Texas. Our records indicate that you’re a supporter. We are in search of volunteers to help transport undocumented immigrants to polling booths so that they will be able vote. Would you be able to support this grassroots effort?

If the above makes you want to scream and you need a chuckle, check out my Zina Bash diary from last night.

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