Anonymous cowards buy the US mid-term elections

Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of right wing attack ads have been aired in this US mid-term election season, but for the most part, no one knows who is paying for these ads, as the payments are laundered through shadowy political organizations that are late (or negligent) in complying with disclosure rules.

Dan Gillmor has a proposal:

If I could be media czar for a day, I'd get every newspaper behind this project: * The first step would be, with the public's help, to visit every station, get a copy of every log of political advertising, and then compile numbers at local, state and federal levels.
* The next step would be to see who's benefiting from the spending, i.e. who's not being attacked, and disclose that.
* Then, see if the spenders are following the law in how they describe what they're doing with the money; as NPR observed, the gaps in the forms showed that the spenders were blatantly flouting even the minimal disclosure requirements.
* Then get every media outlet that cared to trumpet the results for their own regions and the nation.
That's the easy part, unfortunately. Learning how much is being spent, and on whose behalf, won't uncover the names and businesses of the anonymous cowards who are pouring so much cash into buying a new Congress. But perhaps, just perhaps, wider understanding of the vastness of this enterprise would generate sufficient public outrage to force some changes later on.

Anonymous cowards are buying the 2010 election