Fundraising

From The Caucus blog :

Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen will do a benefit concert for Senator Barack Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee next month at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City on Oct. 16.

Mr. Obama will be appearing on stage as well for the event, which is set for the day after his debate with Senator John McCain at Hofstra University on Long Island.

The concert was being billed by Obama fund-raisers as the first joint concert for Mr. Joel and Mr. Springsteen, although they have appeared together on stage at least once before in 1987 during a benefit concert for homeless children at Madison Square Garden with Paul Simon, among others.

Tickets for the fund-raiser, which is slated to be Mr. Obama’s last in the New York area, are not cheap. Balcony seats are going for $500; a “premiere seat” costs $2,500; and a “lounge ticket” is $10,000.

Well, this is really getting interesting --and it seems to not have hit Big Media. In a fundraising email John Kerry announces his $1,000,000 contribution to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Of course, I went to JohnKerry.com and couldn't find anything about this announcement After all, Kerry's fame as a fundraiser comes from his email list, not his website.

Anyhow, what I find interesting is how much more influential John Kerry has grown since his disastrous presidential campaign in 2004. He raises money like crazy, candidates don't get to the primary without his blessing and, if you dig a bit, you'll find out he's one of the reasons today we have Barack Obama as the Democratic Party's nominee.

The email after the jump:

Smart, very smart.

Capitalizing on the fact McCain not once uttered the words "middle class", Team Obama slapped together an ad that they're using to fundraise. They've titled it "Zero".

Here's part of the email, "In case you missed it", signed by Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe :

Barack Obama is changing the way politics are done in this country in more ways than one. He now has Karl Rove "deHusseining" him, screeching at any Republican that will hear him, "just call him Senator Obama".

Un.

Be.

Lievable.

And just now I heard a slap across the cash-strapped faces of the Clinton and McCain campaigns, brought to you by The People.

As of this writing (the graphic will be changing as more donations come in), Obama has 1,004,293. When I first saw it (about 2 hours ago) the number was at 1,003,994. In 2 hours he got almost 1,000 more unique donors.

That, my friend, is the power of the people.

UPDATE!
OMG: By the time I previewed and finished readying this post, the donations went from 1,004,294 to 1,004,434. This is INSANE!

Hillary Clinton's campaign is going bankrupt.

The presidential hopeful had to loan to the campaign $5 million of her own money in order to keep the campaign afloat. It's been reported also that all senior staffers have foregone their salaries. That supposedly includes Mark Penn's $4.2 million in consulting fees.

Well, when word got out, donors to the Obama campaign have gone bat-shit insane and have moneybombed the campaign's coffers with almost 7 million dollars. This just since February 5th, so that's little under 72 hours.

If each campaign contribution were considered representative of voting patterns, Barack Obama is beating Hillary Clinton and all the Republican nominee candidates COMBINED by a landslide.

Of course, the Clintonistas are in denial. So much so that bloggers like Taylor Marsh are now repeating the stupidity of Mark Penn and calling Hillary Clinton the underdog of the campaign.

Hillary Clinton. Underdog.

Weren't Billary "inevitable" just a month ago, especially after New Hampshire? The cognitive dissonance over that one would make a weaker person's head explode.

This is the worst kind of news for the Clintons campaign.

John Kerry is known to hold the largest mailing lists of Democratic Party donors in the United States (at last rumors, it's supposed to be 4 million strong). If it has a return rate of even 3-5%, that's right there 150-200,000 active donors.

This endorsement if a major coup for the Senator from Illinois and in some mailing lists it is being described as a smackdown and repudiation of John Edwards.

Harsh.

Following is the text of the email with the links to the fundraising page in bold. It reads like a PBS fundraising event, LOL!

Pretty Bird Woman House, a refuge for abused women on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, has been a focus of some considerable blog effort of late (see, for example, here). This women's shelter had once been saved by the liberal blogsphere, but was then vandalized and was facing losing its lease. The liberal blogsphere stepped up to bat again. The goal was to buy the house outright for the person who ran the shelter and to provide a solid security system. It was estimated that the blogsphere would have to raise $70,000 to accomplish this. The timing was critical because Pretty Bird Woman house had received a Federal grant...which could only be accepted if the shelter still existed.

As of 12/30/07 I learned that the liberal blogsphere raised upwards of $80,000 to establish Pretty Bird Woman House as a lasting shelter for abused women. This was quite an accomplishment and Culture Kitchen played its own small role in it. To those who gave, or even just spread the word, THANK YOU! This was a true mitzveh accomplished thanks to hundreds of people from all over the country.

Of course, I never feel like our job is done. I am hoping that now that we have saved Pretty Bird Woman House and made it a lasting place of refuge, we can do the same for the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center on the Yankton Sioux Reservation.

I am doing a bit of personal fundraising to cover the expenses for repairing my computer. In all I have to raise $600, but I do not expect people to give me more than $20 a pop. To those who have given me more, thank you so much. To those who have not, thank you as well.

I feel that this kind of helping each other out is useful and ghastly necessary; especially those in the long tail of blogging who have been burned by the evil 'blog hive' pixies who controlled the Advertising Liberally network at BlogAds during the first half of the year.

A lot of us got burned out of advertising revenue by bad decisions that all squarely on the shoulders of the people who did not serve us well. Now that Sean-Paul (of The Agonist fame) is doing a fantastic job at serving us all equitably, we are all seeing ads served on our blogs once again.

It means I've spent 6 months scrapping by on culturekitchen and The Daily Gotham; bootstrapping on blood, sweat and tears. It's the reason why I have had to resort to asking for donations.

I just wrote back to one friend how this reminds me of Steve Gilliard's fundraisers, which would have happened right about this time of year. I'd joke we kept recycling the same $25 bucks, sending it to each other whenever we'd put out a call for help.