To date, Rove’s Crossroads GPS and American Crossroads have spent a combined $174.3 million, with more than 70.5% of this money coming from undisclosed contributors. Some may wonder why a campaign contributor would want to remain anonymous. One reason is that donors sometimes receive negative publicity. Others may give to one candidate, but hedge their bets by remaining anonymous in case the other candidate wins.   read more

Only nine states—Colorado, Virginia, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and North Carolina—are considered competitive. This concentration of competitive states explains why 93% of the $746 million spent to date on TV ads (or $697 million) has gone into so few states. These hotly-contested states contain less than 25% of all American voters.   read more

Experts say the number of Protestants has declined because more Americans are not part of any religious movement or institution. One-fifth of respondents said they have no religious affiliation, and among people under 30, the rate is even higher: one third. For the first time in history, there are no Protestants on the U.S. Supreme Court and, also for the first time, neither of the members of the Republican presidential ticket is Protestant. Mitt Romney is Mormon and Paul Ryan Catholic.   read more

The U.S. Supreme Court has put an end to lawsuits against telecommunications companies for helping the Bush administration spy on American phone calls and emails. Illegal surveillance by the Bush administration outraged civil libertarians who filed more than 30 lawsuits, which prompted Congress in 2008 to grant retroactive immunity to companies aiding the NSA.   read more

The National Bank of Canada is taking advantage of a loophole in the law to threaten hundreds of state homeowners with foreclosure if they don’t pay off credit card debt the financial institution bought up in a secondary market. Credigy Receivables, a unit of the bank, buys judgment liens from California lawsuits over unsecured debt and then files foreclosure lawsuits using the liens. The bank is also active in other states.   read more

A deadly outbreak of meningitis has been traced back to medicine produced by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, a specialty pharmacy that the federal government does not regulate. To date, eight people have died and 105 have become ill from a steroid used to treat back pain and joint disorders.   read more

To help Americans learn how the United States government spends their money, AllGov asks each of 350 departments, agencies, and programs to reveal their 10 leading contractors. Most of these entities cooperate, but the U.S. Botanic Garden would not.   read more

The system, called “VoiceGrid Nation,” can match a recording to a database entry in only five seconds (based on a scan of 10,000 voices), with an accuracy of 90%. Dozens of countries have invested in the company’s biometric technology, with the biggest markets in the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Asia. These include dictatorships, such as those of Belarus and Uzbekistan.   read more

According to the latest figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. unemployment rate for September dropped to 7.8%, the lowest it has been since January 2009, the month of Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration. This represents a 1.2% decrease since the same month a year ago. Coincidentally, this is the largest month-to-month annual drop since November 1984—the month that President Ronald Reagan won reelection.   read more

Overall pesticide use went up by 404 million pounds from 1996, when the first GE herbicide-tolerant crops were rolled out, to 2011. Herbicide use increased by 527 million pounds while insecticide use decreased by 123 million pounds. Most of the increase has been caused by is the spread of weeds that are resistant to glyphosate, an herbicide created in 1970 and marketed by Monsanto as Roundup. It is the most commonly used agricultural herbicide in the United States.   read more

The centers circulated information about Ron Paul supporters, the ACLU, activists on both sides of the abortion debate, war protesters, advocates of gun rights and Muslim community group and mosque activities—including book recommendations and parenting classes—that were clearly innocent. Although the federal government is barred from storing information about First Amendment activities unrelated to criminal activity, DHS kept these reports on its computers, despite knowing they were worthless.   read more

In 2008, only 50% of eligible Latino voters went to the polls, compared with 66% of whites and 65% of blacks. Between 2008 and 2010, the number of Latinos registered to vote actually declined by 600,000.   read more

The three presidential debates are run not by the government, but by a nonprofit organization, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). The CPD was created in 1987 by the Democratic and Republican parties as a bipartisan—rather than a nonpartisan—effort. The current co-chairmen of the CPD are Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr. and Michael D. McCurry. Fahrenkopf is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, while McCurry was President Bill Clinton’s press secretary.   read more

The government claims investors lost $22.5 billion as a result of low-quality mortgages sold by entities now controlled by JPMorgan. The suit does not ask for a specific amount, but rather calls on JPMorgan to turn over all the profits it made as a result of fraud and to pay restitution to investors. Homeowners who were sucked into the deals with get nothing.   read more

Americans aren’t as interested, as some politicians would like to believe, in downsizing the federal government across the board. When asked in 2011 about whether they would increase, decrease, or maintain spending levels, respondents strongly favored upping the budgets for education and veterans, and, to a lesser extent, for social security, Medicare, health care and combating crime. Where Americans most want to cut funding is foreign aid.   read more

The web sites of government agencies—those with URLs ending in “.gov”—had the highest level of accuracy, 80.9%. National organization—with URLs ending in “.org”—also did well, at 72.5%. The most inaccurate websites belonged to retail businesses, with an accuracy rate of only 8.5%. Blogs also did poorly at 25.7%.   read more