For good-government watchdogs, the admission of a partnership between an ostensibly issue-oriented entity and a campaign apparatus sets off alarm bells.
Last month two board members, including Al Gore, America's former vice-president, issued a report ostensibly clearing Apple's boss of responsibility, but confusingly and contradictorily detailing bad options grants (and even a fictitious board meeting) that involved Mr Jobs.Mr Jobs will not be in the clear until regulators give their own verdict.
Our country's enemies only have to spread the word that the United States government has issued plans that ostensibly permit trying non-citizens suspected of terrorism in secret military tribunals and that it is refusing to release the names of hundreds of people it rounded up as possible suspects after Sept. 11.
Ostensibly the issue has been Morsi's constitutional declaration.
First ladies stuck to the ostensibly "safe" issues involving family and children.
Ostensibly about issues, ads they paid for in the campaigns were about politics, and the candidates the groups backed or attacked.
Such groups spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising during the recent election campaign season, ostensibly for issue advocacy, spurring a wave of lawsuits, ethics complaints from campaign watchdogs and criticism from Mr. Obama himself.
Even corporations, though they couldn't contribute to a candidate or a party, were free to write unlimited checks to something called a social-welfare group, whose principal purpose, ostensibly, is issue advocacy rather than political activity.
But as a result of various ostensibly minor issues, the likelihood of a British exit seems to be increasing – which fundamentally alters the importance of the vote in Scotland.
Accordingly, Bush's speeches and campaign advertising focused on such ostensibly trivial issues as a Massachusetts prison furlough plan, Dukakis's veto of a state law requiring public school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and Dukakis's alleged failure to deal with pollution in Boston Harbor.
