Follow the money, if you can

Well, here's something interesting. The McCain campaign is disclosing the names of all donors, regardless of donation size, online. The Obama campaign, however, is not.

FEC rules state that a campaign must disclose the name of any donor whose aggregate donations total over $200. Indications are that the Obama campaign is exploiting this as a loophole to disguise the sources of nearly half of the amount he has raised so far.

Surprisingly, the great majority of Obama donors never break the $200 threshold.

“Contributions that come under $200 aggregated per person are not listed,” said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the FEC. “They don’t appear anywhere, so there’s no way of knowing who they are.”

The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only $39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has identified.

It is the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2002.

Read the whole thing to learn about the donations of such well-known citizens as Good Will and Doodad Pro.

But that's just the beginning. It turns out that the Obama campaign has received a considerable amount in foreign donations whose sources are questionable.

The FEC has compiled a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations that contains more than 11,500 contributions totaling $33.8 million. More than 520 listed their “state” as “IR,” often an abbreviation for Iran. Another 63 listed it as “UK,” the United Kingdom.

More than 1,400 of the overseas entries clearly were U.S. diplomats or military personnel, who gave an APO address overseas. Their total contributions came to just $201,680.

But others came from places as far afield as Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa, Beijing, Fallujah, Florence, Italy, and a wide selection of towns and cities in France.

Now it's possible that most or all of these donations are legitimate. But somehow I don't think so. I call on the Obama campaign to emulate the McCain campaign and reveal the names of all donors. Of course should that actually happen, a certain red-skinned, horned, and tailed ruler of a very low-elevation domain will be required to put traction tires on his vehicle to drive to work.