April 22^nd

Have you ever heard of American Commitment? Not exactly a household name is it? How about the U.S. Postal Service (USPS)? That’s better, that’s an organization everybody has heard of. Today we have a rant against the USPS by one Phil Kerpen who bills himself as the chief honcho of a 501 c 4 organization called American Commitment. This outfit is heavily funded by the Koch boys, the generally right wing multi-billionaires who, thanks to a SCTUS ruling on political contributions, can now buy just about anything they want including the United States of America.

Kerpen has gone off on a tirade about the USPS and their spendthrift ways. He accuses them of a “secretive” deal with Amazon for Sunday package delivery. How’s that again? I guess it isn’t really a secret then because you did find out about it so what’s your point? A “whistleblower claims the deal has caused a pervasive distortion of Postal Services core responsibility of delivering priority mail.” But priority mail isn’t delivered on Sunday. This is beginning to sound like the “pants on fire” comments your outfit has made about political candidates. We’ll get back to that.

Then Kerpen has the hutzpah to say, “Congress and the Postal Regulatory Commission, the agency’s regulator, need to, at a minimum make sure the law is being followed… before all of this blows up on taxpayers.” That could be difficult because the USPS Regulatory Commission doesn’t have a quorum and so it can’t meet. It doesn’t have a quorum because the Republican controlled Senate refuses to confirm the President’s new appointees to the commission. This commission, by law, must be not contain more than a six to five majority for one party. The President’s nominees included a Republican; that didn’t matter to the Republicans in the Senate. These were Obama’s nominees after all, so let them sit.

As a 501 c 4 organization American Commitment cannot campaign for, or against, any nominee for public office. What they can do and what they have done in the past is produce slick and very misleading public announcements.  They cannot say, “Don’t vote for Tammy Baldwin;” they can say, “Tell Tammy Baldwin to stop putting special interests ahead of Wisconsin.” As you can see this prohibition against actual campaigning is not much of a bother if you are willing to lie about programs, or people, you dislike. Factcheck.org details many of American Commitment’s lies, so many that I wouldn’t know where to start if I wanted to list them.

It is interesting that you can’t deduct contributions to American Commitment… unless you can claim them as a business expenses. I wonder how the Koch brothers handle that.