Good morning, today is Thursday, November 1, 2012. How was your Halloween? I had two trick-or-treaters with Romney-Ryan masks...they each had sweatshirts that said "I'm with stupid."

Our thoughts and good wishes to the survivors of Hurricane Sandy.

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By Kim Barker, ProPublica, and Rick Young and Emma Schwartz, Frontline Oct. 30, 2012

This story is being co-published with Frontline, which is also airing a documentary on the group tonight. Check your local listings.

New signs emerged Monday that a controversial nonprofit may have misled the Internal Revenue Service not only about its political activities but also about support from a purported donor.

Western Tradition Partnership, or WTP, sent the IRS a letter in 2008 asking the agency to expedite the group's request for recognition of its tax-exempt status. The letter said that without it, the group's principle donor, Jacob Jabs, would pull a planned grant of $300,000.

But Jabs, who runs Colorado's largest furniture retailer, said on Monday he had never pledged money to the group, and never even been in contact with them until press stories appeared naming him.

"I think they just grabbed my name out of a hat to forward their agenda," Jabs told us. "I know nothing about the group, never heard of them, never have heard of them until the last few days, and I did not, absolutely did not, commit $300,000 to start this company." (Jabs also spoke with the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, again denying any connection to the group.)

Although operating at the state level, WTP has won national attention for its attempts to fight campaign-finance restrictions. It successfully sued to overturn Montana's ban on corporate spending in elections, extending the provisions of the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to all states. It has also sued Montana investigators over the state's ruling two years ago that the group is a political committee and should have to report its donors.

Documents obtained by Frontline on WTP offer a rare look into the inner workings of dark money groups, tax-exempt organizations that can accept unlimited contributions and do not have to disclose their donors for political ads.

On Monday, we detailed how some of those documents pointed to WTP actively shaping the campaigns of candidates for state office in Montana. The documents, found in a meth house near Denver by a convicted felon in late 2010, indicate possible coordination between candidates and outside groups. Outside groups and candidates are not allowed to coordinate.

Social welfare nonprofits like WTP are allowed to engage in some political activity, but IRS regulations say they must have social welfare as their primary purpose. ProPublica has extensively reported on how some of these nonprofits, known as 501(c)(4)'s after their section of the tax code, appear to exploit gaps in enforcement between the Internal Revenue Service and election authorities so they don't have to disclose where they get their money.

As ProPublica and Frontline have previously reported, when WTP applied for recognition of its tax-exempt status, the group also told the IRS under penalty of perjury that it would not directly or indirectly attempt to influence elections. Yet even before its application, the group sponsored mailers that criticized politicians in the 2008 Republican primary.

The IRS approved WTP's tax-exempt status three days after it received the group's request for expedited review.

Jabs said he only first spoke with WTP earlier this month, after seeing reports that he was the primary donor. Jabs said he reached a WTP official, Athena Dalton, who signed the IRS letter citing him. According to Jabs, Dalton told him she was WTP's secretary and had been instructed to send the letter by two other WTP officials, Christian LeFer and Dan Reed.

"I did talk to Christian LeFer," Jabs said. "They basically admitted they used me to get their 501(c)(4) status." Jabs said he also contacted Reed, who did not call him back.

In an email responding to a ProPublica question about Jabs, LeFer wrote: "Your facts are wrong, I 'admitted' no such thing; that doesn't even sound plausible. Further, what significance this issue might hold escapes me. I don't discuss donors, and I can see that your story line does not need my help."

Reed did not respond to a phone call.

On Monday, LeFer also confirmed the documents found in a meth house were stolen from his wife's car and belonged to him and his wife, Allison. The documents included material from outside groups and candidates, and communications between LeFer and candidates. There were surveys of candidates by outside groups and drafts and final copies of mailers marked as being paid for by the campaigns.

LeFer, described as WTP's director of strategic programming in memos in 2009, said in an email that the boxes of documents were stolen in Colorado in June 2010.

"These stolen documents appear to be a mix of those from my consulting and volunteer work and from my wife's independently owned and operated mail and printing shop," wrote LeFer, whose wife runs a company called Direct Mail and Communications in Livingston, Mont. "Both my wife and I have scrupulously endeavored to avoid any possibility of illegal coordination.

"The stolen documents, which were in the process of being transferred to storage when the theft occurred, have been mingled to infer that the work of two separate people is in fact the work of one person and therefore improper. This is false." (Here is LeFer's full response.)

Candidates have confirmed that LeFer worked with Direct Mail. They have also said LeFer was an adviser on their campaigns.

There is also other evidence LeFer worked with the firm.

On Tuesday, a woman named Elizabeth Sheron said that when she briefly worked for Direct Mail in 2010, LeFer welcomed her to the company. She provided us a check from Direct Mail and an email from LeFer in which he asked her to elaborate on her abilities and experience. LeFer also wrote that he hoped to increase the membership of one of his social welfare nonprofits to 250,000 people in two years.

Sheron said she did work for Direct Mail, WTP and other related groups. "They kind of had you involved with every project…no matter who was paying you," she said. "I was paid by Direct Mail but I was doing stuff for other groups." Sheron worked there only briefly before quitting.

In an email, LeFer said he didn't think it was useful to try to recall "snippets of information from years back." He said if reporters sent "the entire file of materials you have and you want to discuss at a later time, please do so."

The documents from the meth house eventually landed in the office of Montana investigators, who couldn't do much with them because they couldn't definitively prove they were real, or how they ended up in a meth house.

On Monday, a lawyer for LeFer confirmed them by sending a letter to Montana authorities explaining that the car was stolen from a homeschooling conference in Denver. The lawyer said the documents were stolen property and "evidence regarding the criminal investigation of the car theft in Colorado." The lawyer also said the documents contained sensitive information, and demanded that the documents be turned over to LeFer.

Montana investigators have sealed access to the documents, saying that now that someone has asserted ownership, they are unable to further discuss or release them until a court rules on the matter.

Western Tradition Partnership is now known as American Tradition Partnership. So far this election season, the group has advocated for candidates in Montana's Republican primary, putting out a press release announcing that 12 of those candidates won. It also has launched a newspaper called the Montana Statesman, which claims to be the state's "largest & most trusted news source," to be the state's "only non-partisan newspaper" and to have been founded in 1889.

A second edition of the purported newspaper was mailed to voters in Montana last week. Like the first edition, the 12-page paper contains many articles attacking Steve Bullock, the Democratic candidate for governor who as attorney general fought the partnership's lawsuits against the state. One on the front page accused him of being soft on child molesters.

Other stories attacked the state auditor, a Supreme Court candidate and the secretary of state.

On its website, the group describes itself as a "no-compromise grassroots organization dedicated to fighting the radical environmentalist agenda."

In a statement responding to the story Monday by ProPublica and Frontline, American Tradition Partnership, or ATP, said it had not coordinated with candidates. "I have never met or spoken to virtually all the candidates on the ballot," wrote Donny Ferguson, the executive director of the partnership and the editor of the Montana Statesman, on the Statesman website.

Ferguson also said the law was always on the group's side, and that the nonprofit had always obeyed every applicable law. He denied that the group told people how to vote. "ATP does not, and never will, tell voters which candidates to vote for," he wrote. "ATP speaks on the issues, informing voters where candidates stand and of their public records."

The IRS defines political advertising much more broadly than election authorities, asking whether social welfare nonprofits directly — or indirectly — engaged in campaign activities.

Evan Axelbank, a reporter with WPTV in Florida, was tweeting late Tuesday night about a memo he received from a GOP campaign adviser to a local candidate there that contained some good news...for Democrats. (See the memo above.)

Axelbank tweeted that a "Worried GOPer leaked memo to me because they wanted to motivate the base, show that loss is possible."

The text of the memo reads:

The early and absentee turnout is starting to look more troubling.

As of yesterday, Republicans made up only 22% of early voters and 30% of returned absentee votes.

This is closer to (and worse than) 2008 where we saw 19% EV and 38% of the absentees. 2010 (our blowout year) was 33% of EV and 45% of AB.

Conslusion: The Democrat turnout machine in the county has been very effective and they are cleaning our clock. Even if Romney wins the state (likely based on polls), the turnout deficit in PBC will affect our local races.

When you are calling or canvassing, remind people how effective our opposition has been and how they must not only get themselves to the polls, but their friends and neighbors as well.

Axelbank spoke with Palm Beach GOP Chair Sid Dinerstein, who is responsible for leading the ground-game criticized in the memo.

Dinerstein says he believes that motivation will not be a problem for GOP voters in Palm Beach Co.

"We are broken glass Republicans, meaning we will walk over broken glass to vote."

Obama has been surging in Florida's early voting for three days now, and apparently it's taking its toll on Florida Republicans to the point that even they don't believe Mitt Romney is going to win. And not that I enjoy kicking anyone when they're down -- okay, I do make an exception for Republicans -- the latest numbers from FivethirtyEight give President Obama a 77.4% chance of winning the election, 299 electoral votes projected for Obama, and 50.4% of the popular vote projected to go to Obama.

Mike Huckabee makes a pre-election push with a new ad claiming, in his usual unsubtle Republican way, that if you vote the wrong way on Nov. 6 you're probably going to go to hell.

Huckabee:

Many issues are at stake, but some issues are not negotiable: The right to life from conception to natural death. Marriage should be reinforced, not redefined. It is an egregious violation of our cherished principle of religious liberty for the government to force the Church to buy the kind of insurance that leads to the taking of innocent human life.

Your vote will affect the future and be recorded in eternity. Will you vote the values that will stand the test of fire? This is Mike Huckabee asking you to join me November 6th and vote based on values that will stand the test of fire.

Actually, "the Church" is exempt from the contraception coverage mandate, which Huckabee says forces "the Church to buy the kind of insurance that leads to the taking of innocent human life." Not only that, but the hormonal birth control he's likely speaking of works by suppressing ovulation, not sperm.

So essentially, Mike Huckabee lied. As I recall that puts him at risk of eternal damnation, hell fire and all that jazz.

Hurricane Sandy left a trail of destruction in its wake on Tuesday, October 30, as it moved inland after battering the US northeast coastline. This video shows the devastation in Seaside Heights, in New Jersey, as a National Guard helicopter flies overhead searching for displaced residents on Tuesday.

The official death toll in the U.S. from the superstorm Sandy climbed to 33 by Tuesday, with most of the fatalities being attributed to falling trees. Outside the U.S., one person was killed in Canada and 67 in the Caribbean, including 51 in Haiti. The storm weakened as it made its way west through the U.S., but still dropped three to four inches of snow in West Virginia, where one storm chaser called it a “nor’easter on steroids.” Wind and rain also damaged the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. As of 5 a.m. Tuesday, the storm was centered about 90 miles west of Philadelphia, with winds of about 65 miles per hour.

14th St. NYC Con Ed Coal Plant (Or the substation, conflicting reports) explodes.

In a press conference in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that the storm’s destruction will be felt for quite some time, and it might be the worst the worst the city’s ever experienced. He said that the death toll in the city is at 10, but the number is expected to rise. The main priorities are getting the subway system up and running and restoring power, which may take three to four days. Bridges are being cleared and reopened. Con Ed says there has been “unprecedented damage” and there are approximately 750,000 New Yorkers without power.

Long line of ambulances outside the NYU Medical Center. Via @bananarams.

New York City’s transit chief called Hurricane Sandy the most “devastating” event to the city’s subway system ever while the rest of the city reeled from the storm early Tuesday morning. As of Monday night, seven subway tunnels under the East River had flooded, as did the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and Metropolitan Transit Authority chairman Joseph Lhota said there is “no firm timeline” for when the system would be back up and running, even as nearly every bridge and tunnel out of Manhattan was closed down. A backup electrical system failed New York University Medical Center, one of the city’s best hospitals, forcing the evacuation all 215 patients in the strong wind gusts. Meanwhile, a six-alarm fire at Breezy Point in southern Queens had destroyed 50 houses, with 198 firefighters fighting the blaze.

The New York City skyline with power out compared to a normal shot. Via the AP.

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The Democratic research super PAC American Bridge is going up with its first ads of the cycle, buying time in the Toledo area -- the Northwestern area of Ohio where the auto bailout has benefited President Obama -- to hit Mitt Romney with an ad based on the Monopoly board game.

The ad follows the game to hit Romney over the "let Detroit go bankrupt" headline, layoffs at Bain Capital, and his policy plans, with voiceovers from the candidate and some testimonials from Bain workers.

Tim Pool (@timcast) takes us on a tour of the mandatory evacuation zone in New York City.

NEW JERSEY: 35 foot section of Atlantic City Boardwalk floating down what used to be St. Katherine's place, photo by JitneyGuy via Twitter.

Hurricane Sandy is seen moving towards the east coast of the United States in this NASA handout satellite image taken on October 29, 2012.

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They're our grandmothers and grandfathers, great-aunts and uncles, beloved counselors, kindly neighbors. They are the Greatest Generation. And, this election season, they've got some knowledge to drop.

Follow your elders' advice: visit VotersRising.org

This video was produced for MoveOn.org by Michael Moore, and was written by Michael Moore and Jonathan Schwarz.

Occupy activist Scott Olsen, an Iraq War veteran critically injured during a heavy-handed eviction by Oakland police during last year's protests, speaks about his experiences with Occupy and where it stands today. The movement that swept the globe in 2011 has not seen as much success in 2012. What obstacles has it faced in its efforts to maintain momentum? And what can it do to bring people back into the streets?

On a side note, if you watched any of Occupy Oakland's anniversary march last week, you may have caught a glimpse of Scott either walking with a cane or being pushed in a wheel chair. It seems he was hit by a car recently as he was crossing a street. I don't have any other information on his injuries, but he seemed in good spirits during the march, and was able to attend all of the anniversary festivities at Oscar Grant Plaza.

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Watch Big Sky, Big Money, an investigation with Marketplace on PBS.

By Kim Barker, ProPublica, and Rick Young and Emma Schwartz, Frontline Oct. 29, 2012

This post was co-published with PBS' Frontline.

The boxes landed in the office of Montana investigators in March 2011.

Found in a meth house in Colorado, they were somewhat of a mystery, holding files on 23 conservative candidates in state races in Montana. They were filled with candidate surveys and mailers that said they were paid for by campaigns, and fliers and bank records from outside spending groups. One folder was labeled "Montana $ Bomb."

The documents pointed to one outside group pulling the candidates' strings: a social welfare nonprofit called Western Tradition Partnership, or WTP.

Altogether, the records added up to possible illegal "coordination" between the nonprofit and candidates for office in 2008 and 2010, said a Montana investigator and a former Federal Election Commission chairman who reviewed the material. Outside groups are allowed to spend money on political campaigns, but not to coordinate with candidates.

"My opinion, for what it's worth, is that WTP was running a lot of these campaigns," said investigator Julie Steab of the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices, who initially received the boxes from Colorado.

The boxes were examined by Frontline and ProPublica as part of an investigation into the growing influence on elections of dark money groups, tax-exempt organizations that can accept unlimited contributions and do not have to identify their donors. The documents offer a rare glimpse into the world of dark money, showing how Western Tradition Partnership appealed to donors, interacted with candidates and helped shape their election efforts.

Though WTP's spending has been at the state level, it's best-known nationally for bringing a lawsuit that successfully challenged Montana's ban on corporate spending in elections, extending the provisions of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Citizens United decision to all states.

The tax code allows nonprofits like WTP to engage in some political activity, but they are supposed to have social welfare as their primary purpose. As reported previously by ProPublica and Frontline, when WTP applied for recognition of its tax-exempt status, it told the IRS under penalty of perjury that it would not directly or indirectly attempt to influence elections — even though it already had.

The group is now locked in an ongoing dispute with Montana authorities, who ruled in October 2010 that the nonprofit should have registered as a political committee and should have to disclose its donors. WTP sued. A hearing is set for March.

In the meantime, the group has changed its name to American Tradition Partnership, reflecting its larger ambitions. This month, it sent Montana voters a mailer in the form of a newspaper called the Montana Statesman that claimed to be the state's "largest & most trusted news source."

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