It is the largest pool of unidentified money that has ever flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2002.

An intriguing sentence, no?

It's from a Newsmax story about the Obama campaign being awash with secret donations and foreign money. The sentence before it reads as follows:

The FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign has identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only $39.6 million of that amount comes from donors the Obama campaign has identified.

Apparently, as long as donations come in small chunks -- particularly from credit cards, they don't have to be publicly disclosed. Elsewhere the article talks about million-dollar fundraisers for Obama in Nigeria, the contrast between the Hillary campaign's policy of requiring a passport for foreign donations and Obama's (where no checks were done at all), and unrefunded donations from clearly suspect sources.

In contrast, the McCain "campaign has made its complete donor database available online" whereas "the Obama campaign has not identified donors for nearly half the amount he has raised." Which (to make a partisan-sounding but true point) shows that McCain, regardless of the other issues I may have with him, does much more than talk about "openness" and "transparency" -- he actually does it.

Laws -- particularly pointless, onerous, and hard-to-enforce laws -- frequently favor evil. So those who favor more laws are often, regardless of their intentions, are working to put good people in chains, while handing power and wealth to rulebreakers.

Gun-control laws tend to be scrupulously followed by ethical citizens, and ignored by gang-bangers, career criminals, and serial killers.

Unenforced antitrust laws gave Microsoft a huge advantage against its competitors, since Microsoft boldly broke laws other companies had heeded, affording them a more competitive position.

Likewise, the McCain/Feingold "reforms" have done a lot towards keeping ethical small businesses and millionaires from influencing politics, but apparently do nothing at all to stop more nefarious figures from pouring untold millions into political coffers though various channels.

And so Obama has raised twice what McCain has. Half of that -- equivalent to the McCain campaign's entire war chest, apparently -- has come from undisclosed donors. Are there many wealthy McCain supporters who would have loved to have given more than $2,300? If so, and if that leads to McCain's defeat, then ironically the passage of McCain/Feingold may prove to have been the decisive, fatal blow for McCain's own campaign -- and a permanent advantage to those willing to bend or break the rules.