"He is currently still in jail because our money has been going to campaigning, so he will serve the time he needs to serve until we can get funds to get him out," said Smith's campaign manager and fiance, SunShine Fox.

Smith owes $2,921.46 in child support. He also owes $1,850 in fines for two separate incidents: 1) caught driving with an open container and a suspended license; 2) driving with no driver's license, no insurance, and expired tags.

Not as much as you think, according to many experts:

But the best anecdotal evidence suggests that this kind of thing isn't happening in nearly the proportions you might expect. Kenneth Gross, an election lawyer who represents an array of large corporations, told me that few of his clients have contributed to the social-welfare groups engaged in political activity this year. They know those contributions might become public at some point, and no company that sells a product wants to risk the kind of consumer reaction that engulfed Target in 2010, after it contributed $150,000 to a Minnesota group backing a conservative candidate opposing gay marriage. "If you've got a bank on every corner, if you've got stores in every strip mall, you don't want to be associated with a social cause," Gross told me.

None of this is to say that Citizens United hasn't had an impact. Gross and others point out that in the era before Citizens United, while individuals and companies could still contribute huge sums to outside groups, they were to some extent deterred by the confusing web of rules and the liability they might incur for violations. What the new rulings did, as the experts like to put it, was to "lift the cloud of uncertainty" that hung over such expenditures, and the effect of this psychological shift should not be underestimated. It almost certainly accounts for some rise in political money this year, both from individuals and companies.

Even so, the Supreme Court's ruling really wasn't the sort of tectonic event that Obama and his allies would have you believe it was. "I'd go so far as to call it a liberal delusion," Ira Glasser, the former executive director of the A.C.L.U. and a liberal dissenter on Citizens United, told me. Which leads to an obvious question: If Citizens United doesn't explain this billion-dollar blast of outside money, then what does?

SNIP

A consequence of McCain-Feingold has been to flip on its head an old truism of politics, which is that incumbency comes with a fixed financial advantage. In the era of soft money, controlling the White House meant that a party could almost always leverage its considerable resources to dominate fund-raising. But today it's much easier to tap into the fury and anxiety of out-of-power millionaires than it is to amass contributions in defense of the status quo. This dynamic probably explains why wealthy Democrats who pioneered the idea of outside money during the Bush years have largely stood down this year, even while conservative fund-raising has soared. It isn't that liberals don't like Obama or grow queasy at the mention of super PACs. It's a function of human nature: nobody really gets pumped up to write a $10 million check just to keep things more or less as they are.

If you're a Democrat, there's some good news here. One persistent fear you hear from liberals is that Citizens United altered the balance between the parties in a permanent way -- that corporate money will give Republicans a structural advantage that can never be overcome. What's more likely is that the boom in outside money will prove to be cyclical, with the momentum swinging toward whoever feels shut out and persecuted at the moment. Liberals dominated outside spending in 2004 and 2006. And should Romney become president, they'll most likely do so again.

The Daily Telegraph (London, UK) | July 25, 2012
Mitt Romney would restore 'Anglo-Saxon' relations between Britain and America - "As the Republican presidential challenger accused Barack Obama of appeasing America's enemies in his first foreign policy speech of the US general election campaign, advisers told The Daily Telegraph that he would abandon Mr Obama's 'Left-wing' coolness towards London. In remarks that may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity, one suggested that Mr Romney was better placed to understand the depth of ties between the two countries than Mr Obama, whose father was from Africa. 'We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,' the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: 'The White House didn't fully appreciate the shared history we have'."

Bob Hope Airport (Burbank, CA) - The swirling winds of the San Fernando Valley and Burbank's relatively short runways will often make airline pilots earn their keep. (Check out the passenger's comment in the background at 1:21 in this video.) And this is the same airport where in March 2000, a Southwest Airlines 737 arriving from Las Vegas overshot the Rwy. 8 threshold and landed too far down the runway, crashing through a retaining wall and careening onto busy Hollywood Way before coming to rest just outside a service station  -- since relocated, for obvious reasons.

Kahului Airport (Maui, HI) - It is not uncommon for airliners on final approach toward Rwy. 22 to buck 50-70 mph headwinds, because the airport is sited in the central Maui plain between the 5,000 foot West Maui Mountains and 10,100 ft. Haleakala, which creates a funneling effect for brisk North Pacific wind currents. This, of course, can sometimes offer passengers a very bumpy ride on final approach.

I mention this because at the time I remember saying to my friends, "Wow, what does a large passenger jet do if the pilot isn't perfect in his calculations. I found out several weeks later when an American Airlines jet crashed into the side of the mountain, killing three dozen passengers.