Back on November 30, 2022, I wrote a blog post about Ross Gelbspan’s most visible recent activity at his Facebook page, which concerned a couple of less-than-well-ought-out Facebook comments on his part. For the purposes of this blog post as it concerns his activities that may interest investigators sometime in the near future, I created a new blog category tag just for these specific posts. All part of a larger pattern on his part, you see. Time for another update, albeit on a different angle: money.
While watching James O’Keefe’s Nov 1 video about the discovery of highly suspect fundraising activity carried out by the conservative WinRed organization, I recognized the WinRed name from innumerable times I’ve looked into GOP candidate websites to see if I could contact them directly about the leadership opportunity on questioning the collective global warming issue; it’s been frustrating to encounter the WinRed begging page when I click on the candidates’ “Contact” links because it means I have to go into much more intensive efforts to find a way to contact the candidates. (If I was running the elections regulations business, I’d mandate by law that election candidates include direct email contacts at their websites so that they can hear straight from the public …. but that’s a whole other topic.)
From James O’Keefe’s suggestion toward the end of his video, I decided to drop my name into the Federal Elections Commission page for searches of individual donor contributions to see if anyone was misusing my name — I still live at a sub poverty level, and cannot afford to give a dime to any candidate, thus I’d know if someone was falsely making donations in my name. My name is common enough that others also have it, but none of those results are me.
Then I thought it might be interesting to drop in a couple of of the ‘usual suspects’ names. It appears that Kert Davies, neither under that nickname or his given “Roland” first name (as ironically detailed by a big money guy), donated to anybody recently. John Passacantando, as I showed via IRS 990 payments to contractor forms, is a big money guy himself, and apparently had no trouble tossing out eight donations totaling $5 grand to several candidates and two PACs during the last two years (“self employed” … doing what?). Must be nice to throw away that kind of extra cash, I just spent that a third less of that amount to fix the water pipes in my residence, a critical outlay that put a serious dent in my meager savings. I’m crossing my fingers that this preventative measure will erase any possibility of a far larger water damages cost, but I also hope I didn’t need that cash to cover some other calamity costs. Lest anyone forget, John Passacantando has no such financial calamity fears whatsoever – he and his wife Lisa Guide (still together after all these years) sold their palatial home in Virginia for nearly a million four in mid 2022, and must be living luxuriously somewhere in New York state* now. *(Odd, isn’t it, that Ms Guide can’t figure out within a span of 35 days whether she is located Virginia or NY state?)
Meanwhile, the last time my Facebook account was operational, I saw no activity of Ross Gelbspan’s there. FB locked my account for reasons they cannot support, but I do have one other means of seeing what’s new in Gelbspan’s account. Still, no direct activity from him since March this year. But then I dropped his name into the FEC donors activity page for the same 2022-2023 time frame.
It’s clearly him, all MA state locations down the entire list, each individually ID’d either with Boston or his town location of Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston. 102 donations over 2022 to 2023 for starters, from a minimum donation of $15.62 or $15.63 (an odd figure repeated 16 times on the same day going entirely to the ActBlue PAC) to a max figure of $250 given a dozen times. I used FEC’s Sort feature to arrange those 102 contributions from highest to lowest, and counted up the number of times for identical or near-identical ones (different by just a penny – I rounded down one penny to be overly fair), and I arrive at the total for the two years being $10,145.57. That’s not the end of it. I expanded the search back to January 2000, the man’s given 328 donations starting in August 2012, where his last donation remains at Sept 29, 2023, but the highest jumps to a trio of $500 contributions, and the lowest bottoms out at multiple $5.00 ones. I’ll leave it up to somebody else to tally up that entire figure. Broaden Passacantando’s FEC time span to back to January 2000, and he’s made 51 additional donations which include a few more $1000 ones. It was easy enough for me to tally his expanded 59 entries total to $19,455.
Interesting how a man who swims in millions of income can only bring himself to donate barely more than $9,300 to politicians than an ex-reporter pensioner.
Again, no matter who’s giving it …. must be nice to be able to throw away that kind of cash, but the question concerning Ross Gelbspan is – for a guy who was just a Boston Globe reporter for 31 years and then an author of three books that hardly fit the definition of being best sellers – where does he get that kind of extra money?*
Just askin.’
————————————————————————
* (Fair’s fair, when it comes to suspect-looking money situations – the other side brings it up. In a March 2003 ‘science journal’ paper which should be barred for publication because of its inexplicable use of a particular profane word – more on that shameful wipeout here – it used the word to imply (I’ll put t politely) that what ‘climate scientist denialists’ say is disinformation. Regarding skeptic climate scientist Dr Robert Balling’s alleged disinformation, the paper’s author said he was tainted by illicit funding, and pointed to a cryptic “Determination” as the evidence for the accusation. Here’s the larger context of that situation, inadvertently revealed in a 2012 Arizona State University newspaper backstory of the 1998 event, which the paper’s author couldn’t bring himself to share with his readers. Dr Balling’s ultimately paltry funding figure wasn’t revealed in a courtroom, it happened at a Minnesota news group ombudsman hearing. Meanwhile, the original illicit funding accusation hurled at Dr Balling sources from …. guess which enviro group, and guess who person …. containing, well, to put it politely — disinformation. Just goes to show, no matter where you go in the “crooked skeptic climate scientists” accusation, profanely hurled or otherwise, there you are: Ross Gelbspan and John Passacantando’s old Ozone Action place.
Arguably, the March 2023 “Climate denialism [disinformation] is harmful” author is guilty of exactly what he accused skeptic climate scientists of doing. The irony of it all ….