The media never mentioned all of Casey's contributors, so I did their work for them! 

NUMBER ONE CONTRIBUTORS TO CASEY AND SANTORUM ARE THE SAME FIRM.

Bob Casey (D)
Blank Rome LLP $67,775
Simmons Cooper LLC $45,000
Berger & Montague $42,150
Goldberg, Persky et al $38,950
Kline & Specter $31,700
Kirkpatrick, Lockhart et al $29,577
Baron & Budd $29,531
Reed Smith LLP $27,125
Wolf, Block et al $24,350
Willig, Williams & Davidson $23,450
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania $21,450
Bernstein, Liebhard et al $20,700
United Food & Commercial Workers Union $20,665
Raynes, McCanty et al $19,200
Buchanan Ingersoll $18,700
Kane Warehousing $17,800
Stevens & Lee Law Firm $17,550
Pepper Hamilton LLP $17,250
Schiffrin & Barroway $16,800
Childrens Research & Education Institute $16,000

Rick Santorum (R)*
Blank Rome LLP $118,350
Federated Investors Inc $102,100
Exelon Corp $73,200
Day & Zimmerman $52,400
Sunoco Inc $46,800
PPL Corp $41,800
Duane Morris LLP $38,250
Bear Stearns $37,065
Comcast Corp $36,950
WPP Group $36,300
Mellon Financial Corp $35,750
Welsh, Carson et al $35,000
American Express $34,250
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $33,906
US Steel $33,400
Reed Smith LLP $32,250
First Quality Products $30,600
Citigroup Inc $29,250
JJ White Inc $29,000
CONSOL Energy $27,500

Bob Casey (D)
Lawyers/Law Firms $1,985,059
Retired $358,530
Leadership PACs $233,700
Real Estate $190,525
Securities & Investment $143,575
Education $112,749
Lobbyists $108,450
Business Services $100,150
Misc Finance $94,412
Health Professionals $83,435
Public Sector Unions $81,450
Industrial Unions $71,100
Building Trade Unions $71,000
Printing & Publishing $69,300
TV/Movies/Music $68,250
Insurance $59,575
Misc Unions $58,415
Democratic/Liberal $58,100
Misc Business $54,771
Civil Servants/Public Officials $54,010

Rick Santorum (R)*
Lawyers/Law Firms $1,015,271
Retired $1,013,090
Securities & Investment $855,210
Real Estate $677,740
Insurance $510,641
Health Professionals $436,338
Leadership PACs $422,023
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products $416,502
Lobbyists $363,404
Misc Finance $332,695
Misc Business $328,717
Commercial Banks $284,950
General Contractors $264,150
Electric Utilities $253,851
Hospitals/Nursing Homes $225,118
Misc Manufacturing & Distributing $213,024
Oil & Gas $207,240
Business Services $203,051
TV/Movies/Music $191,600
Construction Services $182,040

OPENSECRETS.ORG

Dems dispute petition of Green Partys Romanelli

Democrat challenges validity of signatures Wilkes-Barre resident got to run for office.

By KRIS WERNOWSKY kwernowsky@leader.net

State Democratic Party officials announced Friday they would most likely challenge the signatures gathered by Pennsylvania U.S. Senate Green Party Candidate Carl Romanelli campaign.

Pennsylvania Democratic Committee Chairman T.J. Rooney publicly challenged the validity of petition signatures gathered by a company paid for by Romanellis campaign, citing several incidents of potential fraud.

We have found excessive and serious instances of multiple signatures by the same persons, unregistered voters and fake names, Rooney said through a press release issued Friday after his press conference. Given this rampant fraud and the lower number of signatures turned in, we are confident that Romanelli will be yanked from the ballot.

Romanelli, of Wilkes-Barre, said he didnt find the Democratic challenge to his petitions surprising.

I think that they want the position back where the only qualification (Democrat) Bob Casey needs to run is that hes not (Republican) Rick Santorum, Romanelli said by phone Friday after Rooneys press conference. With me in the race were able to highlight the similarities in the candidates.

Casey spokesman Larry Smar said Romanelli is being used by the Santorum campaign to siphon liberal-leaning candidates who might vote Democratic but might disagree with Caseys stances on social issues such as abortion. Romanelli previously said hes aware that the majority of the $100,000 spent to gain signatures for his campaign came primarily from GOP sources, according wire reports.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported earlier this week that Romanelli listed $66,000 as an in-kind contribution from the Green Party in his latest campaign finance report.

But Federal Election Commission spokesman Ian Stirton, speaking generally about the law, said this week that such donations cannot exceed $5,000. Romanelli attributed the discrepancy to inexperience on the part of his campaign treasurer. We thought we had an obligation to disclose everything.

Romanelli and Green Party gubernatorial hopeful Marakay Rogers, who circulated joint petitions, have said they turned in at least 90,000 signatures Tuesday to meet the petition deadline for minor-party and independent candidates. Those candidates were required to collect 67,070 signatures this year to qualify for the Nov. 7 general election.

Romanelli estimated that half of his petition signatures were collected by JSM Inc., a Florida company that assisted Ralph Nader in other states during his 2004 presidential bid. The rest were gathered by volunteers and other paid petitioners, he said.

Rooney contended that Romanelli actually submitted only about 80,000 signatures. After reviewing about half of Romanellis signatures, the party has determined that up to 90 percent of those gathered by JSM were invalid, Rooney said.

We would have to have fewer than 15,000 of these 80,000 removed by the court in order to have Mr. Romanelli not to appear on the ballot, Rooney said.

JSM officials could not be reached for comment Friday; a listed phone number for the firm could not be found.

State law requires independent and minor-party candidates to collect a number of signatures that represents 2 percent of the ballots cast for the top vote-getter in the last statewide election. This years requirement was based on a record 3.4 million votes Casey received when he was elected to his first term as state treasurer in 2004.

Posted by Joshua Holland at 1:53 PM on August 3, 2006.

As Lindsay points out in Peek, TPM Muckraker figured out that it was conservative supporters of Rick Santorum who funded the $40,000 signature drive to get Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli on the Pennsylvania Senate ballot.

Shocker. Even though it's happened time and time again.

And, of course, on cue, the liberal bloggers are pulling out their knives.

Holden at First Draft, begging for a shot to the kisser, asks: "Is there any magnet for whores in this country larger than the Green Party?"

The non-evil Roger Ailes repeats the conventional nonsense that Nader was responsible for Bush and now cries about tricky Rick Santorum courting a "Selfish Green Rogue."

John Aravosis at Americablog also blames Nader for not one but "two Bush presidencies," and demands that the "Green Party candidate return the money and pull out of the race." (Recall how snippy John got when some of his readers had the nerve to question his ethics for accepting a bloggers' trip to Amsterdam paid for by the Dutch government.)

And Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money thinks "the Republicans are funding a Useful Idiot Party candidate for the Pennsylvania Senate."

[OK, deep, calming breath.* These are otherwise good people, Holland, and it's not the time for an obscenity-laced tirade.]

Of course Repubs help Greens get on the ballot. That's the way the system's set up. And is that somehow the Green candidate's fault? Or is it the fault of the Dems and Repubs? Are the Greens somehow responsible for the fact that you need to collect 100,000 friggin' signatures to get on the Pennsylvania ballot? Why not put the blame where it belongs?

This whining has become a maddening tradition, and it just makes me crazy how short-sighted people are.

You'd think from reading those clips that these bloggers hate spoilers, but they don't. Spoilers -- a constant stream of Republican-backed Green Party candidates -- don't bother them in the least.

If they did, they'd talk all the time about the clean elections model, they'd talk about Instant Runoff Voting and they'd talk about how ludicrous these onerous ballot requirements are.

They'd talk about what an unbelievable joke it is to call the U.S. a democracy and guarantee everyone the right to participate, and then set the price of entry at $40,000 dollars.

But we hear so little about those things that we can only conclude that they love spoilers. After all, it's something to bitch about, and it's someone to blame when the Dems ignore the issues most important to Americans, roll over for the Repubs and lose.

If we had a couple of hundred Ned Lamonts -- people who can throw one and a half mil into the ring along with their hat -- then it wouldn't be an issue. But we don't, so it is.

Now, I'm pragmatic enough to hold my nose and root for a Casey win, because Santorum's among the most odious of wing-nuts and I want to see a Dem Senate that won't rubber stamp Bush's madness. (And whoever thinks some no-name, no-money Greenie is going to swing the Pennsylvania vote to Man-on-dog Santorum needs to share what he or she's smoking with the rest of us. Seen the polls lately?)

But I can promise you, as a former Green who's now a disgusted, Dem-leaning, independent liberal swing-voter -- I've been on both sides of this question -- that if progressives and Greens and Dems can't get together on the basics of small "d" democracy, we have zero chance of ever creating a broad coalition in the American left. We simply will never see eye-to-eye as long as the Dems are indistinguishable fro the Repubs on these basic questions of American political participation.

*I'm grumpy because the heat index is at 105 degrees. I'm going to head to the damn supermarket and hang out in their industrial-strength AC until I'm my usual perky self.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.

Carl Romanelli, the Green Party's challenger to U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum this November, doesn't have a large entourage. He can't afford one with a campaign war chest currently containing less than $5,000. But the former family courts officer from Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania said yesterday during a trip through Philadelphia for a peace rally that his grassroots campaign is growing in strength. "You start by reaching one heart and one mind at a time," Romanelli, 47, said. "As Pennsylvania gets used to seeing us, they'll see there are other capable options [besides Republicans and Democrats]." Romanelli said the Green Party has growing appeal with both young voters and senior citizens because it addressess the issues that most affect those age groups, including health insurance, education and federal spending. "We need to bring the budget sensibilities that is currently lacking [at the federal level]," he said during an interview at Cosi Cafe on Chestnut Street. "It's been reported that we won't be able to pay the interest on the national debt by 2035." Romanelli is relatively new to politics. As a former registered Democrat, he said he became involved in the Green Party in 2000 after realizing that "the right wing would steal the [presidential] election and the Democrats would let them get away with it." Based out of Wilkes-Barre, Romanelli said he would be flattered to raise $1 million for his campaign, which would allow him to open campaign offices in Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.

Metro.us Philadelphia, Pa Monday March, 20th 2006 

My campaign will set up a paypal account on this site and my offical site to raise funds. 

I am taking on two corporate republicans.  I need your help.