Monday, February 18, 2008

the Clintonian Files: CNN Polling Company Linked to Clinton Contributor

I met Zennie (he's in the video below) a couple years ago at Youtube's As One Festival in San Francisco. He's a video blogger and has a regular (not video) blog called Zennie's Zeitgeist. His vlog below is about a link between the Clintons and the owner of a Polling company that supplies polling data to CNN. Zennie makes a few assertions in this video that are yet to be substantiated, the suspicions however, are warranted. But to me there's enough of a problem here without drawing any additional conclusions.

Here's a couple blurbs from Zennie's blog:
I argued that CNN -- the Cable News Network -- should not be using polls that came from a company linked to Vinod Gupta, a major Clinton Donor. Gupta owns Info USA and the Opinion Research Corporation (OPC). It's the OPC that makes the polls that are reported by CNN, and those same polls early in the 2008 Democratic Presidential race gave consistently enormously high leads for Senator Clinton. Polls by the OPC were consistently high for months, even as other organizations like Gallup USA began to show Obama closing on Clinton.

Now, it's revealed in this NPR article that the Clinton campaign sold -- or rented -- their donor list to Info USA and the OPC, but NPR's article does not make the extra step of explaining why InfoUSA / OPC would even need such a list. That's what this video is about. The list was rented for just $8,225, and not the six-figures it's valued to be, and the Clinton campaign did not collect the money until 11-months after the list was delivered.

And....
Meanwhile Gupta himself is in some trouble, as his activities of lending the Clintons the use of his private jet, and hiring President Bill Clinton for $3 million a year have ignited a shareholder lawsuit against Gupta. as Gupta's corporate operatives want to know what value, if any, Gupta's free-spending ways on Clinton have gained InfoUSA.
It raises the question of whether Democrats want someone with potential skeletons in the closet like this as their nominee this fall. Especially in view of the fact that the Republicans will be especially energized and gunning for her. Check out Zennie's Zeitgiest and the accompanying links.

-Fight the powers.

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