This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 9, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown. Only a couple

days after the Washington Post raised an eyebrow at a mystery supporter of the Mitt

Romney campaign, the donor revealed himself.

Since the Citizens United decision freed up political activity,

it's likely to be a long campaign season of secretive donors and untraced gifts to campaigns.

John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute

says anonymous speech, quite simply, is free speech.

To read the Washington Post, you would know that a group came out of nowhere, essentially,

gave the Mitt Romney campaign a million dollars, raised and gave the Mitt Romney campaign a million dollars and then

simply ceased to exist and it seems like very little information is known about

that group and to the average person observing electoral politics it seems that they could make a

better decision about whether or not Mitt Romney is their guy if they knew who

these people were who just dropped a million dollars on his campaign.

So what's wrong with making them be transparent about who the donors were, right?

And the nature of the corporation and who gave the money to the corporation.

In this case, you know, what we're going to hear a lot in the next couple years is about cases

like this, which ones that make at least a plausible case on the surface that not everything is

known.

And you sort of say, well, what could be wrong with that?

Well, the problem there is that we're not going to be reaching out and doing these particular cases that are problematic.

We're going to have a general rule about if we have a mandatory disclosure for these kinds of independent spending groups.

We're going to be hearing a lot in the next couple of years of particular cases that sound particularly

...