PACs: No winners in this game

I read a recent cdapress.com article with great interest, because I have often felt suspicious about the influence of PAC money on political campaigns. The article highlighted Sandy Patano’s objection to Responsible Coeur d’Alene PAC’s use of the 48-hour independent expenditure notice, which is required when a PAC electioneers during the final days of the campaign.

This confused me, because I know Sandy Patano is herself an executive committee member of NIPAC, a group that has also made prolific use of the tactic she called “a deliberate manipulation of Idaho’s election and disclosure laws.” Her criticism would have sounded more genuine if she had resigned from her own PAC, or if she made some specific policy change proposal to fix her perceived loopholes.

As it stands, this appears to me to be just more election noise: PACs battling each other while the rest of us do our best to decipher what is actually going on behind the curtains of power and privilege.

In the end, I found the article’s headline to be an accurate statement warning us about the effect of the article itself. It was titled: “Muddying the Election Waters.”

BJORN HANDEEN

Coeur d’Alene