Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama super PAC, gets $1 million donation from Bill Maher
Television host and comedian Bill Maher announced Thursday night that he would donate $1 million to a pro-Obama super PAC.
Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama super PAC, has received a $1 million donation from comedian Bill Maher, the Washington Post reported.
Maher's donation is a huge boost to the super PAC, which only raised $58,000 in January. However, the president didn't give his supporters explicit permission to cut checks to the super PAC until earlier this month, Slate reported.
Priorities USA Action had raised a little less than $4.5 million before Mr. Maher’s contribution, even with Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg's $2 million donation to the PAC, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Maher, the liberal host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," told the audience of his hour-long special "CrazyStupidPolitics" that he planned to give Obama $1 million, The Los Angeles Times reported.
“My surprise tonight is I would like to announce a donation to the Obama Super PAC—which has the very unfortunate tongue-twister name ‘Priorities USA Action’,” Maher said on Thursday night. “I know, it was named by Borat. But tonight I would like to give that PAC one million dollars.”
Maher is known for being vocal about his political opinions, and discussed his predictions for the 2012 race on CNN.
“The rest of those people are, of course, selling their souls to the corporate interests who back them,” Maher told Anderson Cooper. “They all act like god created the world in January of 2009, and then Barack Obama completely screwed it up.”
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When Cooper asked him who he thought was going to win the election, Maher quickly tapped the president as the eventual winner.
“My money is still on Mitt Romney,” he said. “And I think he’s going to get the nomination, and then I think Obama is going to beat him like a runaway sister wife, yes, I do.”
Super PACS have played a key role in the 2012 presidential race, especially in the fight for the Republican nomination, with all four of the remaining candidates benefiting from technically independent political action committees, which have received large donations from donors to aid their campaigns, Slate reported.
Maher said that an Obama victory over any of the Republican contenders was "worth a million dollars" and described the donation as "the wisest investment I think I could make," according to the Los Angeles Times.
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