Koch Brothers to Spend $900 Million on 2016 Elections

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And MSNBC is never concerned about it’s bottom line when it panders to it’s fans with falsehoods?

And unions support all candidates instead of just the ones who support the union’s positions?

It’s nice that you wish to prevent U.S. voters from being deceived by someone else but I believe the best way to do that is to allow all groups to publically state their positions and let the people decide who is full of shit, or just mostly full of shit.

Mass coverage. Write a book, someone has to make the effort to buy it. Put up a poster, somebody has to walk buy it. You’re not reaching hundreds of millions of people. You can lie your ass off and you won’t have much impact. Buy media ads to smear your opponent, you can buy an election quite easily.

Not if you’re giving it away free.

Not if you put up the posters everywhere.

So - again, what is the difference in principle? Not in quantity, in principle?

You know a “gotcha” is not when you lunge and grab a handful of air, right?

With political advertisement, you’re using a public resource, the broadcast frequencies, to intrude into peoples’ homes. With books and posters, they have to come to you.

So cable political advertising would be ok then? And by your logic, am I correct that you do not consider ads in newspapers/magazines to be the kind of proscribed “political advertising”?

I would prohibit cable ads as well. Too often, there is a monopoly granted to cable providers thus the citizen has little choice but to be subjected to your ad. With magazines and newspapers, you have to buy the paper and there are alternatives available to you.

Who is forcing people to watch television?

And with DVRs and such, one needn’t watch commercials, either.

Really? Last I checked, my cable carried hundreds of channels. That’s a bit more than “little choice” wouldn’t you say?

You often have little choice in provider. If only one company was allowed to sell magazines in your town, they could filter the ads you see and screen out magazines that sell unfriendly ads. Your cable company decides what channels you get and by inference whose ads you might see.

As you have not been able to furnish examples (And we know already, your examples are usually underwhelming) there is not much to support what you claim, by contrast there is a thread already showing with hundreds of examples how full of it FOX and others are.

Every cable company carries all the popular channels. The differences between channels on one cable company vs another is on the fringes, with channels only watched by few people. So - no.

Care to try again?

It’s not an infringement on speech if it applies to everyone equally. Any limits that apply to the Kochs also most apply to political parties. Unless you’re proposing equal spending between the Democrats and Koch Industries, then you are giving parties more rights to speak than the Kochs.

If the Kochs are say, limited to $1 million, that’s how much the Democrats are limited to.

Soros spends money to influence political campaigns. Soros spends money to fund the creation of groups that try to influence political campaigns. MSNBC spends it expensive airtime allowing it’s news and entertainment talkingheads to repeatedly attack conservatives and Republicans while it champions Democrats and progressives, in order to influence elections. The dailykos spends it’s money and time babbling something positive about Democrats while it froths incoherently about Republicans.

There are many other ways to get a political message to the people. You only want to shut down the ones who do not agree with your pet project. News flash - Ain’t gonna happen.

In the last month or so I saw the PBS NewsHour do a puff piece on the Koch Brothers, who after all, fund them. Apparently we should love and trust them because they are so influential and their fingers are in so many pies.

This was Gwen Ifill. On the PBS NewsHour.* I am not making this up.*

Not at all. If we don’t want the news, and the informing of the masses about major issues, to be slanted by certain private interests who exploit and maintain an unlevel playing field, then we need more public funding–accountable both to democratic processes and to scientific criticism–not less.

Of course, in reality, PBS is funded by and answers to the Koch bros. Really.

Then the Kochs don’t need PBS, and the American people can put it back under state funding and public governance. So why isn’t that happening?

So a political party made up of 20% of American households and another 15%-25% that are hangers-on should be grateful to be equal in influence to a half-dozen persons descended from a successful mineral-rights speculator of sixty years ago? :dubious:

Real news flash: you are only pulling a straw man, I already said that me and many others will support more restrictions and that they will apply to all.

No they won’t. The politicians will never allow THEIR speech to be limited.

Irrelevant, I was referring to his accusation that the law before did not cover also democrats. Or that I would only support restricting Republicans, what the poster told about me remains a strawman.