Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Mini BMG PAC fundraiser: send us a dollar. Seriously!

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We understand that many of you don’t have a lot of spare cash lying around these days.  But we hope you might find enough change under the couch cushions to send a dollar — that’s right, $1.00 — to BMG PAC.

Why?  Easy.  PACs gather clout by showing that they represent the interests of a lot of people.  We think BMG PAC can actually have some influence around here (we wouldn’t be going to the trouble otherwise), but it will only happen if we can make the case that BMG PAC has the support of more than just a handful of people.  We would love to be able to say that BMG PAC has the support of 20 — 50? 100? more? — readers who are willing to put their money where their bloggy mouths are.

We know that a lot of people read this site, and we hope that a lot of our readers agree with the principles set forth in the BMG PAC announcement post.  If that’s you, the best way to show it is to make a donation of any size.  So seriously: send us a dollar.  We’ve tested the Google Checkout thing for credit cards, and it seems to work smoothly.  Or you can send a check if you’d prefer.  All the info is in the “Support BMG PAC” box in the left-hand sidebar.

We’ll get to the higher-dollar fundraisers later.  There’s plenty of time for that.  Right now, though, we want to kick-start this project by getting a lot of people signed up.

We’re also interested in getting some quick feedback on how our Google-based contribution system works. So after you make your donation, please drop a comment if you have any suggestions for how the system could be improved.

One dollar to help change the world.  Are you likely to get a better offer today?  đŸ˜‰

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Comments

    • Pretty standard.  For monthly traffic of less than $3,000, it’s 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.  Well worth it, considering that they take care of handling credit cards securely, fraud protection, etc., which would cost us a lot up front if we did it ourselves.

        • For future reference, the address is in the box in the left-hand sidebar.  

          <

          p>BMG PAC
          PO Box 877
          Medford, MA 02155-0877

          • Was it there before I asked?  I didn’t see it, but I didn’t actually look either…  đŸ™‚

              • too much magical thinking about when I would or could pay them off.  Cash or checks only are how our family is now paying for things.  If we don’t have the money, we don’t buy it; with one parent laid off it is quite a reality check.

              • It’s just like a credit card, except the money comes right out of your checking account.  There is no fee, at least for the consumer (although some banks may charge a fee, you should check first)  It is so much more convenient than writing checks all the time.

                • Small merchants will love you for doing this, even if they don’t say anything.

                  <

                  p>Their processing fees are much lower for debit-card transactions than for credit-card transactions, even for the same card.

                  <

                  p>My family and I do our personal and business banking with Wainwright Bank. They’re green, small, local, community-focused, and great to do business with (especially after Bank of America). They issue debit cards with the Visa logo that work either as credit cards or debit cards, depending on what the merchant wants). No fees, no balances, no shenanigans — when we buy something, it appears immediately in our online banking statement. The folks in the branch (we use Coolidge Corner) really do know us, they watch out for us, and they are — best of all — real people.

                  <

                  p>The only advantage of cash is that it really is anonymous, in a way that nobody has figured out how to match.

  4. If one of our editors/professional singers would record this  silly little modified cover of Leonard Cohen’s Democracy is Coming to the USA for this thread, I’ll will contribute. Of course, because I’m a dreaded lobbyist my contribution is limited to $200.00

    <

    p>Anybody else ready to cough up semi serious dough to hear this?

    <

    p>

    Democracy is coming to the BMG

    They’re sentimental, if you know what I mean
    They love the country and want to influence the scene.
    Tho they’re more left than right
    They’re not staying home tonight,
    to get lost in that hopeless little screen.
    And they’re stubborn as those garbage bags
    that Time cannot decay,
    They’re not junk and they’re holding up
    this little wild bouquet:
    Democracy is coming to the B.M.G.

    Sail on, sail on
    O mighty BMG!
    To the Shores of Need
    Past the Reefs of Greed
    Through the Squalls of Hate
    Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

    apologies to Leonard Cohen’s very wonderful Democracy is Coming to the USA   http://www.azlyrics.com

  6. How often will you guys update giving history?  Even if you xxx out names*, donor history would be interesting.

    <

    p>Dollar amount, date, zip code, that sort of thing.  As close to real time as possible.  Thoughts?

    <

    p>

    <

    p> * I think you should x-out names when not required to publish them, say under $50 or whatever.

    • We are required by state law to file reports on a set schedule of everyone who gives to BMG PAC, and those reports will be publicly available at the OCPF website, just like any other campaign finance report.  At present, we don’t have any plans to publicize donors outside of OCPF’s requirements.  Our first report will be due Jan. 20 for all of calendar year 2009.

      • I had thought that there was a threshold — donations below $x didn’t require as much information disclosure — or is that just federal political donations, or something else entirely?

        • … but the threshold is total donations, not any one donation.  This creates a problem in that if you donate below the threshold more than once, you may wind up donating a total that is above the threshold.  With that in mind, many organizations make the decision to play it safe and get the info for all donations.

          • What is the total?  And what do you think would happen (in general, and in BMGs case) if a person were to donate below the limit and ask that their personal details not be disclosed?

            • … database to keep track of individual donors.  The complications than can come deal with mistakenly not matching multiple donations to the same person due to misspellings, differing addresses, etc.  

              • Since, after all, for most races the frequency of last name donor intersection is quite low for most last names.  For a presidential campaign with so many donors, it’s tough.  But a local campaign — where the total donors is in the hundreds or thousands?  It doesn’t seem too hard.

                <

                p>Sure, Messrs Smith and Jones create problems, but Messrs Fryczynski, Papademetriou, or Feleciano don’t — and there are far more of the latter than the former in terms of database hits.

                <

                p>

                <

                p>It’s all a matter of resources.  Campaigns never have enough resources, and the potential loss of donor is low, the savings high.  That seems to be the long and short of it.

                • … the registered voter lists in Lowell and tried to run a comparison to donor lists (also publicly available).  I figured the string comparison would get most of them.  I was wrong.  It’s a lot trickier than you’d think.  Resources is right because to do it properly would have taken at least a few days.  

                • This is a great example of something that is usually much easier for humans to do than computers or databases — just ask anybody who works on OpenId.

                  <

                  p>Even before we talk about aliases, mis-spellings, duplications, and intentional fraud, consider the following names:

                  • John Quincy Adams
                  • J. Adams
                  • J. Q. Adams
                  • Jack Adams
                  • Adams, Jack
                  • Adams, John Q.
                  • Adams, J. Q.

                  <

                  p>Then consider fun stuff such as how forms collect the names. One field (full name), Two fields (first and middle, last) Three fields (First, Middle, Last).

                  <

                  p>Is “Dr. John Adams” the same or different from “John Q Adams”? How about “John Adams, MD”? Do the names “Dr. John Adams”, “John Adams, MD”, and “John Adams, PhD” describe one, two or three individuals?

                  <

                  p>There are the variants near and dear to the hearts of those who have been enjoying the EB3/Howie Carr show — where do appendages like “Sr”, “Jr”, “III” and so on fit in?

                  <

                  p>And these are just the beginning. Is the John Adams who lives in Quincy, MA the same or different from the John Adams who lives in Philadelphia, PA?

                  <

                  p>If you think this doesn’t matter much — or that I’m overstating its complexity — try reading specs for HIPAA. Then re-read the many horror stories about the terrorist “watch list”.

                  <

                  p>This question — web identity — is an important motivator for the latest spawn of what we called “Artificial Intelligence” in the 1980s: the “Semantic Web”. It’s a big, complicated, tough question. That means job security for at least a few programmers đŸ™‚

                • I’m just skeptical about just how much, especially since the campaign provides the form.  When the form is:

                  <

                  p>First name: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
                  Last name: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
                  Middle name: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

                  <

                  p>I’m not sure how all those variants of the second president come up.

                  • First name — “John” or “Jack”?
                  • Middle name — “Quincy” or “Q”?
                  • Last name — “Adams” or “Adams Jr” (or “Adams, Jr”)

                  <

                  p>There are many names that are more fun …

                  • “Mary Elizabeth McPherson McGee” (who goes by “Liza”)
                  • “Ann Marie Elizabeth Jones” (who goes by “Annie” among friends and “Ann Marie” professionally), not to be confused with Annmarie Elizabath Jones (a different woman)
                  • “Mary Louise de la Puente”

                  <

                  p>Many women use a married name personally and a “maiden name” professionally, who knows how they’d fill out the form.

                  <

                  p>Various websites differ in the validation software they use to collect the form on the web, and there’s often a second stage of validation on the server — and differences crop up there as well. Spaces and capitalization does and does not matter (depending on who writes the code), and that’s before we get into unicode/utf8 encodings of special characters. Is “Gödel” the same or different from “Goedel”?

                  <

                  p>My favorite horror story is from an old IBM contact database, where the “last name” field was too short to allow common names in a certain country. The DB administrators changed the back end to use the “Address 2” field instead (for that country and only that country).

                  <

                  p>In the example offered above, from Lowell, I would not be surprised if these sorts of issues abound (especially the encoding problems).

  7. As I think I’ve written earlier here, I prefer to make my own decisions about who I contribute to. As much as I admire the editors here, in my view success in building a superb and influential online community lies in a different domain from political king- and queen-making.

    <

    p>I would prefer a model where BMG offers some sort of donation form with checkboxes for each proposed candidate. I would like to be able to select FOR MYSELF how my money is distributed among them. This way, I remain in control of who does and does not receive my contribution. In such a model, I would welcome and even expect the editors (and the community) to take a leadership role in determining who does and does not make the contemplated list. I would hope to find well-researched links from each candidate summary (presumably each checkbox would have such a paragraph) to more detailed support documentation, including discussion threads and conversations here. In my view, such an approach is far better suited to the spirit and vision of BMG.

    <

    p>I am eager to support the mission of BMG. I am eager to raise our visibility, and I welcome the participation of influential figures in our community. I hope that you read my counter-proposal in this spirit.

    • What you’re describing is an ActBlue page.  We’ve done that before (here is our now-outdated page, just by way of example), and we’ll do it again — it’s a great way to encourage individual donation.  What we hope to accomplish with BMG PAC is something related, but distinct: a collective voice of the progressive blogosphere.  Anyone who participates in that endeavor will necessarily give up a certain amount of control in exchange for what we believe will be increased influence; that’s in the nature of collective action.  Some will find that trade-off to be worth it; others will not.  It’s all good.

        • We’ll still try to raise money for individual candidates through ActBlue pages and by links to their websites etc. One can give there, or give to BMGPAC, or save one’s money for something else!

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