Viewer beware.

A long shot Kentucky House candidate with deep ties to a radical anti-abortion leader is broadcasting a campaign ad like no other: It purports to show images of dismembered fetuses and murdered Jews and Christians while comparing President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler and mass-murderer Ted Bundy. The ad touts the candidacy of the long-haired self-described tea partier Andrew Beacham, who is running as an independent against Republican Rep. Brett Guthrie in Kentucky's 2nd District.

The New York Times reports:

[The ad] opens with images of Hitler and Bundy as the candidate narrates. "Would you vote for a murderer?" he asks. "Would you vote for a man who paid others to murder for him? Would you vote for a man who stole from others to pay for his murders?"
Then a picture of an aborted fetus appears on screen. The candidate continues, "Well, Obama gives your money to Planned Parenthood to murder babies, and to the Muslim Brotherhood, who murders Christians and Jews."

Beacham is a longtime guerrilla-theater disciple of anti-abortion activist Randall Terry, whose strategy involves running for office and getting other people to run for office so that they can exploit loophole in the Federal Communications Commission's indecency regulations. As my colleague Tim Murphy has reported, the loophole allows candidates to run graphic political ads that would otherwise be banned by the FCC.

Terry, who ran this year for president as a Democrat (and is still running as a no-chance independent for Congress in Florida's 20th District), says the candidates he's enlisted will spend between $250,000 and $1 million to run ads in seven races, according to the AP.

Possibly the weirdest part of Beacham's ad—aside from the viscera and disregard for Godwin's Law—is the candidate himself, wearing an undersized mesh cowboy hat and puffing on a cigar. "If you vote for Obama, the real question is what are you smoking?" he asks, before blowing smoke into the camera.

Full video (warning—contains extremely graphic images):

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On Friday morning, Mother Jones briefly published a story containing details about liberal financier George Soros' decision to donate $1 million to the pro-Obama super-PAC Priorities USA Action, and $500,000 to two other super-PACs focusing on House and Senate races. The story was based on information provided by a source; the source contacted us after the story was published and said the information was incorrect. We have removed the story.

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With six weeks until Election Day and Barack Obama's polling advantage holding steady, a new narrative is emerging about the first presidential election of the super-PAC era. It goes something like this: All the hue and cry about outside interests buying the election has been misguided; in fact, about the only thing super-PACs have been good for is blowing their rich backers' money. "A summer of vast campaign spending and dark warnings about sinister, secret donors is on the verge of being replaced by a fall in which rich men spend a lot of time explaining to their wives why they wasted millions of dollars," Buzzfeed's Ben Smith wrote last week. In July, the New York Times' Matt Bai made a similar case that the impact of the Citizens United decision that made super-PACs possible had been overstated.

We won't know the full story until after the election, but it's too early to completely write off super-PACs. A few reasons why:
 

1) Super-PACs may have helped keep Romney in the game: The Obama campaign has raised $150 million more than Romney's. However, the $143 million already spent by outside groups opposing Obama has tilted the money game in Romney's favor. "We helped leave this race a statistical dead heat," Steven Law, president of Karl Rove's American Crossroads super-PAC, told the Wall Street Journal. "Obama has gotten almost nothing for all the money his campaign has invested." Likewise, Gary Bauer, the former GOP presidential candidate who runs the anti-gay marriage super-PAC Campaign for American Values, told the Journal, "If Romney didn't have the help from the outside groups that he's had, this race would be over."

However, this reliance on super-PACs could also hurt Romney. Campaigns and super-PACs aren't allowed to coordinate (at least not too obviously), which can make message discipline tough. The Romney campaign "has to guess at what it thinks other people are going to say and where they are going to say it, and then has to deploy its resources where it thinks there will be gaps, and that's a hard guessing game to play," Brad Todd, a GOP ad man, told the Los Angeles Times. And as Romney's fortunes wane, groups like American Crossroads appear ready to shift more resources to down-ballot candidates, and could withdraw their support for him altogether—what Washington Post's Ezra Klein calls "Romney's nightmare scenario."
 

2) Super-PACs have amplified megadonors' influence: Wealthy donors love to get up close and personal behind closed doors with the politicians they fund, as our reporting on the Koch brothers' secret confabs and Mitt Romney's 47 percent gaffe show. Super-PACs have given this elite group a new avenue for catching lawmakers' attention. As casino magnate Sheldon Adelson told Politico, "I don't believe one person should influence an election. So, I suppose you'll ask me, 'How come I'm doing it?' Because other single people influence elections."

As Bai noted, superdonors already had ways to write big checks before Citizens United. Yet unlike 527 groups, super-PACs can advocate for specific candidates, and there's little chance that candidates are ignoring the donors using super-PACs to sidestep limits on campaign donations. And even after the election, super-PACs will remain on the scene to infuence policy and politicians' votes. They're already getting into the lobbying game.

On the other hand, megadonors aren't exactly expert strategists. No one has made this more clear than Adelson himself, who along with his wife Miriam has poured $36 million into super-PACs—including $10 million to Newt Gingrich as his primary campaign was imploding. Money may guarantee that a donor's voice is heard, but money can't always save a loser.
 

3) Super-PACs are shaking up state races: Even those who argue that the impact of Citizens United has been overstated, like Bai, have pointed to congressional races as an exception. Super-PACs like the antitax Club for Growth Action have poured millions into state races, from Arizona to Wisconsin, typically influencing the outcome. In Texas, a 21-year-old millionaire helped a Rand Paul-backed House candidate win his GOP primary. And super-PACs aren't limited to spending on federal races: Rich out-of-state donors helped push its total cost of June's recall election in Wisconsin beyond $60 million.
 

4) Super-PACs are flooding the airwaves: Analysts predict that more than $3 billion will be spent on political ads in this election cycle (including twice what was spent in 2008 on cable ads). According to a recent Sunlight Foundation study, Citizens United is directly responsible for 78 percent of spending from outside groups this election.
 

5) Dark money still matters: Even if super-PACs have been overhyped, there's still no denying that outside money is playing a bigger role than ever before in this election. That's especially true when you figure in 501(c) "social welfare" nonprofits, which have spent more money on ads than super-PACs. We may not appreciate their influence until the election is over. As the IRS has gotten more aggressive in determining whether 501(c)s have violated their tax-exempt status, the groups have become more adept at skirting new rules to keep toothless regulators at bay. And if that trend continues, reformers predict, outside spending in the future will dwarf 2012's numbers.

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Britta Pedersen/DPA/ZUMAPress

UPDATED October 10, 2012, 1:00PM EDT:

In a surprising turn of events during the Pussy Riot appeal trial today, one of the band members was set free, while the two-year sentences of the other two were upheld by the Moscow City Court.

The court reaffirmed the guilty verdict against all three women on charges of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred," but freed Yekaterina Samutsevich. The three-judge panel accepted the argument by her newly hired lawyer, Irina V. Khrunova, that her role in the church protest was not parallel to that of the other two women, because she was seized and taken out of the cathedral before she had time to sing or jump around, according to the New York Times.

As the Times reports, however, the court failed to address the procedural problems with the initial trial:

The judges did not address the numerous concerns that the women and their defense lawyers raised in August — what they called the arbitrary disqualification of defense witnesses, the testimony by so-called victims who were not in the cathedral for the Pussy Riot stunt, the bizarre conflation of alleged moral offenses and violations of the state penal code.

Putin said the three women "got what they asked for," in a documentary that aired on Sunday.

The other two band members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Maria Alyokhina, are headed to prison colonies, but their lawyers will continue to appeal, according to the Times, which also notes that the verdict is sure to "intensify, rather than quiet, any debate."

In a speech during the trial Tolokonnikova predicted the fallout from the Pussy Riot case in wider society: "What is happening now, what is happening during the third Putin presidential term — it unfortunately leads to growing instability," she said. "I will go away for one and a half years, and a civil war will erupt in the country, because Putin is doing everything to achieve it."

Here is blow-by-blow live text coverage of the trial from the Russian Legal Information Agency.

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UPDATED October 1, 2012, 2:00PM EDT:

Pussy Riot's appeal trial, which was scheduled for today, has been postponed until October 10, after one of the women requested a new defense lawyer. The AP reports:

As the hearing began Monday, band member Yekaterina Samutsevich unexpectedly announced that she has fired her three lawyers over an unspecified disagreement. Samutsevich said she had found another lawyer but had not yet signed a contract. Her fellow band members said they supported Samutsevich's choice but would still retain the services of their lawyers.

Olga Mefodyeva, an analyst at the Center for Political Technologies, told the AP the decision may be a way to draw waning international attention to the trial again.

Pyotr Verzilov, the husband of band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, downplayed the move. The defense team says the women are "under tremendous pressure, with the government threatening to take away their children," and Verzilov says Samutsevich's decision "was simply caused by a change of mood," according to the AP.

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The riot grrrls who walked into Christ the Savior cathedral on February 21st, screamed, danced and asked the Virgin Mary to “put Putin away,” are now locked up in a medieval castle-style detention center in Moscow. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were sentenced to two years in prison on August 17 on charges of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for their performance protest. An appeals trial is scheduled for October 1st, but no one is holding their breath. Instead, the Pussy Riot team is turning to the international community to try and put pressure on Putin.

The whole world, including Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev and Russian Human Rights Commissioner Vladimir Lukin, has condemned the absurd sentence. But that doesn’t matter, says Mark Feygin, one of the Pussy Riot defense attorneys, since, as Mother Jones' Sydney Brownstone reported, the verdict was basically phoned in by Putin. In court on Monday, the lawyers will point to the breaches of law that occured in Pussy Riot's initial trial, including barring key witnesses and experts from testifying and preventing defense lawyers from having confidential discussions with the three band members. Alisa Obraztsova, a legal assistant for the defense team, says the court may reduce the sentence by a few months, "just to show that the appeal is working. But we cannot be sure even in this."

[Read more]

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