Imagine the postcards that delegates to the Democratic and Republication conventions will send to their families back home the next couple of weeks:

Attended lots of fundraisers for charity at the convention, got to hobnob with our favorite lawmakers, met lots of people who I think might have been lobbyists, but they didn’t really have to say so, grabbed lots of corporate knickknacks, do-hickeys, and whatnot that they handed out, a good time was had by all, see you soon!

Yes, happy days are here again, for the special interests that get to use the national parties’ conventions as venues where they can coagulate around lawmakers and delegates to ply their trade without the formalities of bothersome practices like much transparency and disclosure. They can thank the Congressional leadership of both parties for having loosened the reins on how lobbyists and special interests might use charities as venues for cozying up to national legislators.

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Wouldn’t it be great if volunteer drivers for charities such as Meals on Wheels and the Salvation Army could take a charitable deduction of 74 cents for the mileage they drive as opposed to the measly, crummy, insulting 14 cents per mile currently allowed under U.S. law?They could—if they were volunteers in the United Kingdom, but not in the American cauldron of charitable sensitivity.

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Should the nonprofit National Football League be exempt from IRS 990 salary disclosure requirements? Apparently the NFL thinks it deserves its own unique exempt tax status, maybe 501(c)(”m” for monopoly), allowing it to report on what it thinks is important for the public to know and withhold what might make the public a little upset with the nonprofit trade association of sports barons.

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Press coverage of the July 16^th revisions to Congressional lobbying rules was scant and generally positive. It must be a rerun of “Short Attention Span Theater” on Capitol Hill and in the Fourth Estate.

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Quick, what’s the difference between Triantafilitsa Mattfeld and Dale Rathke?

Both were caught embezzling money from their nonprofit organizations, Mattfeld $180,000 from the Navy Elementary School PTA in Fairfax County, Virginia, Rathke exactly $948,607.50 while he was handling the books for ACORN, the nation’s premier community-based organizing and advocacy network founded by his brother Wade Rathke who also served until June as ACORN’s Chief Organizer.

Both reached agreements with their organizations to make some sort of financial restitution, Mattfeld pledging $75,000 after having put an additional $80,000 back into the PTA’s accounts in the previous five years, Rathke’s family making $30,000 a year payments since 2001, for a total of $210,000 according to the New York Times with an anonymous donor pledging to pay the remaining balance.

The differences are more than how much they pilfered and how much they or their families and supporters are pledged to repay.

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