You asked if certain things are always the case - that if someone agreeing with a candidate “always” means they are a surrogate. That was one of your questions. The only rational answer is no, that pretty much no matter what the question is, it is usually impossible to conclude that something is “always” or “never” the case.
If you don’t like accurate answers to your questions, you need to stop asking such silly questions.
I provided a response to two very poorly thought out questions. A rational person could not possibly answer such absolutist questions in the affirmative. I don’t understand why you’re getting upset with sensible responses to questions that sound like they are thought up by a bad lawyer on a courtroom procedural during cross examination.
For the most part, I think you’re expecting me to answer in a certain simplistic, childish way, and when I don’t, you get frustrated that not everything in the world is black and white. Certainly most of your questions for me imply that there is only one possible answer to your questions.
I’ve addressed this several times during this thread. You may disagree with my judgment, but surely you aren’t implying that I haven’t explained my views. For example:
Now that I’ve recaptiulated what I’ve already posted, I think any calm and rational person can see a clear pattern to my posts and way of thinking, even if they disagree with my opinion. That is that I believe that money has a corrupting influence in politics, either by personal malfeasance by politicians (which is relatively rare in a criminal sense), or more subtle and pernicious (in that its not possible for a sane person to dispute that there is a connection between money and access to elected leaders), and most importantly in my opinion, that the explosion money in elections is alienating that vast, vast majority of voters from both the electoral process and the confidence in government.
As I’ve said several times before, I recognize what the law is, and I don’t dispute the interpretation of it, but I am saying is that it is quite clearly leading us down the path of making all the problems I just listed much, much worse. The First Amendment is very, very important; and without a doubt the most important liberty we have – but I do not share your somewhat fundamentalist religious faith as though God is speaking to use through the Bill of Rights: “So long as we hold total and obedient faith in these writings, the Almighty will provide and everything will be okay.” Well, no, because clearly an out-of-control campaign finance system is a problem, as indicated by the poll I posted in which 85% of Americans basically want to throw this system out.
I can say similar things about the Second Amendment – yes, I recognize what the law is, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t point out that guns are another serious problem in our country. If we extended your fundamentalist faith in the First Amendment to the Second Amendment, one might conclude that adding more and more guns to the country would be just fine, because the Second Amendment is such an important part of our foundational law. I don’t agree that’s the case.
I suppose you just don’t think campaign finance laws are broken. For all I know, you could run a Super PAC and think you’re the modern-day equivalent of Jefferson by wrapping yourself in the flag and thinking that under the First Amendment, there can be no problems. You might think that by taking corporate money and washing it through a nonprofit in order to benefit Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush or Barack Obama that you are upholding the finest traditions of the country that our forefathers fought for. I don’t see it that way. I think money is eroding the link between good governance and the people - it’s getting worse, and something ought to be done in a very careful way to restore and embolden the link between the government and the governed.
You just can’t face the logical conclusions of your own position.
Yes. But you have yet to explain how you think the government has the power to limit this “corrupting influence” by limiting spending on speech without violating the First Amendment.
The First Amendment protects us from people like you, and from those 85% too.
I think your views are corrupt and insulting to the people. You think the voters are idiots who do just what TV ads tell them to do. You think all that speech is a bad influence and those idiots are powerless to do anything about it. You think you know better than they do who should really be elected. You think the people don’t know when politicians aren’t working in their interests, for whatever reason, and that they can’t fix it. And there’s nothing stopping you from saying the same thing about speech that does NOT involve money. So yeah, if that’s me wrapped in the flag, cool.
What an absolute load of crap once again. A legitimate and indeed a critical determinant in applying campaign finance law is the distinction between art and entertainment and flagrant electioneering. The District Court for DC found that the film had no purpose other than to discredit Clinton’s candidacy for president, a fact which was blatantly obvious. But the eventual Citizens United ruling was the usual 5-4 prevalence of raving ideology, continuing its track record of incredible judicial activism damaging the most fundamental national institutions.
The idea that attempting to get all sides in an election campaign to play by the same rules is “censorship” is a recurring laughable myth from the far right. In the big picture, it’s not even about limiting spending, it’s about equal access, and that can be – and is – largely achieved through equal public funding of election messages, so that private money becomes somewhat redundant even if unrestricted.
This policy is, naturally, anathema to the American right, which is wholly and unswervingly dedicated to serving the interests of money, but the reality is that some combination of public funding and private money restrictions constitutes the policy in the following countries:
Every single advanced democracy in the entire world.
And thus any argument against that reality becomes an argument that must invoke the mythology of American exceptionalism, and must furthermore try (as you have done elsewhere) to deny the dominant role of money in formulating public policy, dominant to such a flagrant extent that sometimes backroom lobbyists literally draft legislation (the tobacco industry and AHIP have been notorious for that). Such an argument thus becomes both irrationally dogmatic and in denial of reality and thus logically bankrupt.
Oh, hell, why take the long way around – just simply declare that democracy itself is unconstitutional and turn the country over to the Koch brothers. It’s almost there already. Save yourselves lots of trouble.
No, it isn’t. The objective of commercial media is to attract a profitable audience and may also have journalistic principles around establishing truths and exposing corruption, and the objective of true public media (that is actually publicly funded) tends to be even more independent of ulterior interests and guided by a public-interest mandate. The combination of private media under diverse ownership and public media provides a vital diversity of opinion.
Billionaires and corporations may not be completely homogenous in all their interests, but both are overwhelmingly concerned with preserving and increasing their wealth, and corporations have a fiduciary duty to do so. You have to go pretty far down the ladder of top 1%, 2%, 10%, 20% before you start seeing much diversity on matters like progressive taxation and social services.
“Flagrant electioneering” is just as protected - and in fact enjoys the highest level of protection - under the First Amendment as any other speech.
It’s really that simple.
Fine, but this isn’t about public financing - nor is it even about campaigns. It’s about private spending by everyone else. Should everyone - you, me, every group that wants to speak about politics - have public subsidies to pay for their speech for equal access? Perhaps, but you tell me.
I’m a lifelong Democrat.
Oh, and the ACLU supported the Citizens United decision. Not exactly known as righties either.
None of which have a First Amendment.
For god’s sake, stop saying money has power. It has no power. It only helps when the people let it. And don’t invoke back rooms - this is about speech, it’s hardly secret.
What is logically bankrupt is the idea that you want to restrict money but not speech - since the only thing you care about is the speech - the influence on voters and the “access” that the money brings. And it’s also logically bankrupt to say a restriction on speech is meant as an improvement of democracy and trust in the voters, rather than contempt for those.
Oh, hell, why take the long way around – just simply declare that democracy itself is unconstitutional and turn the country over to the Koch brothers. It’s almost there already. Save yourselves lots of trouble.
No, it isn’t. The objective of commercial media is to attract a profitable audience and may also have journalistic principles around establishing truths and exposing corruption, and the objective of true public media (that is actually publicly funded) tends to be even more independent of ulterior interests and guided by a public-interest mandate. The combination of private media under diverse ownership and public media provides a vital diversity of opinion.
Billionaires and corporations may not be completely homogenous in all their interests, but both are overwhelmingly concerned with preserving and increasing their wealth, and corporations have a fiduciary duty to do so. You have to go pretty far down the ladder of top 1%, 2%, 10%, 20% before you start seeing much diversity on matters like progressive taxation and social services.
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I did not intend this as an insult. I was simply reflecting his words when explaining who I was criticizing - a subset of voters whose position he shares. I didn’t use the word insult in my original comment and I didn’t mean it to be one. Perhaps a smiley would have helped but I thought it was clear.
I mean, come on. Someone donates money without you knowing who it is, and someone else uses it to talk about politics, and that’s “declaring democracy itself unconstitutional?” Where do you get this stuff?
It’s just speech. It wont’ hurt you. Ignore it if you don’t like it. Everyone else can ignore it too. Voters aren’t robots who do whatever they are told in TV ads. If you think they are, that’s your contempt for democracy.
If you’re referring to Citizens United, yes, exactly. The idea that the ACLU is far left or something is right-wing claptrap that goes back to the McCarthy era. The ACLU is issues-focused, so trying to impose a political alignment on them is like getting anatomical information about the elephant from one of the three blind men. And among their hot button issues is free speech absolutism to such an extreme degree that it aligns them with extreme libertarians and far-right nutjobs like the Constitution Party, all of whom agree that Citizens United was just a terrific decision, a tour de force of judicial wisdom from five conservative/libertarian justices, notwithstanding vehement and lengthily detailed dissent from the rest and shock and surprise among policy watchers and constitutional scholars here and observers around the world. A decision so profoundly stupid that for the first time in history AFAIK a Supreme Court ruling was overtly criticized in a State of the Union address.
Apparently the words “a more fair and level playing field, in which all voices can be heard” which I’ve repeated in various forms multiple times, mean to you that I just want to shut someone up. Strangely, however, this fundamental tenet of democracy that you find so hard to understand is understood and implemented in electoral policy in every advanced democracy on earth. Hell, they’re even implemented in the US to the extent that campaign finance laws do exist, they’re just spectacularly inadequate in an environment whose whole fundamental structure caters to the influence of money. At this point I have to assume that the constant reference to “censorship” is just the disingenuous result of not having a real argument.
Are you just trying to set a record for being wrong in absolutely everything you say? I’m not going to go through the laws and constitutions of every democracy in the world that controls and mitigates money in politics, since they all do, but just as an example, from the Constitution of Canada:
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
Gosh, that might even sound familiar to you!
All your other points have already been addressed. As I said before, your argument has become purely dogmatic and is now just going around in circles.
Yes, we’re going around in circles when you keep trying to argue that the US should settle for the lower standards of other countries.
We have a First Amendment. It is far better than the protections other countries have. It recognizes that speech is more than a useful thing, it’s a fundamental right. You cannot use suppression of speech as a tool to “even out” access to speech.
The First Amendment protects us from people who think like you do.
Wolfpup has on repeated occasions made it clear he believes that SCOTUS has ruled that burning crosses on the lawns of black families is protected speech.
They were wrong. Or they were using the same flawed thought process you use to rationalize violations of the Constitution. It happens all the time. Even a majority of Americans can favor violations of the Bill of Rights sometimes. That’s an important reason why we have a Bill of Rights.
