Yeah, Brian, easy peasy.
I’m well familiar with Cervaise’s thread, and again, I point out: presumably, 99.5% a phone call you’re expecting will be from a person or phone number you know, and therefore Caller ID will make it readily apparent if the call is the one you’re expecting. If it’s not, don’t pick up.
And as far as “for-profit,” every utility survey I’ve conducted in the past 2 years has been for a not-for-profit electric cooperative that the people I’m calling have an ownership stake in. So it’s not at all equivalent to “selling aluminum siding” or any other parallel you’d like to try and draw.
And how, exactly, is it a horrible imposition on you to answer a few questions about the personnel you’ve dealt at the utility company? Especially when, GASP, it might result in an improvement in service that means you can spend even less time dealing with them! Imagine that: taking 5-10 minutes now might save you even more time in the future.
So, your solution to help me avoid wasting my time on you, is to waste my money on you.
Yeah, that’s a helpful suggestion.
Of course, for a lot of people, their home phone is also their business phone.
I still have to stop what I’m doing, get up, open the door, and ascertain if it’s someone I want to talk to. At which point, they’ve already engaged me in conversation, so I get to either wait for a pause in their spiel to tell them I’m not interested, or slam the door in their face. Plus, the entire time my dog is barking his fool head off because there’s a stranger in “his” territory, and he’s a big dog with a loud bark. Even if I decide to unilaterally ignore the door bell, I’m still not going to be able to read or watch TV or whatever while he’s freaking out over the stranger at the front door.
brianjedi, don’t go down that road. Suggesting that people sign up for additional phone services, or listen to a phone ringing and ringing until the machine picks up, then waiting for the inevitable click of the telemarketing machine hanging up is just not reasonable. It’s been done before, and unless you want to be the only person on your side of the avalanche, just let it go. As much as you may think it’s reasonable, 95% of the population doesn’t.
The do not call list gets it pretty much right. The number of zero value telemarketing calls drops to a manageable level.
People like yourself can still make your calls, and guess what? People who are not harried 5x a night every night with lightbulb salesmen are maybe going to be more willing to talk to you. I doubt that you being caller number 6 that night is going to improve anybody’s mood.
Mail me a questionaire, and I’ll answer and return it in my own time. Meanwhile, stay the fuck off my phone.
Of what relevance are his right-wing politics? Here in Maryland, I’ve been getting-automated, no less-calls shilling for Baltimore’s democratic mayor, Martin O’Malley, a politician I actually quite liked until his staff started an unjustified smear campaign alleging adultery against the current Republican governor and he told the Baltimore police dept to stop taking or to start falsifying crime reports (really!) so he could claim he was bringing crime in the city down when he hasn’t.
That’s the issue, a semantic one about what the phrase “spirit of the law” means. I guess I have always thought that violating the spirit of a law while adhering to the letter of it meant finding some weaselly way to circumvent the intent of the law while not technically violating it. That’s just my understanding of the phrase. Clearly, under that definition, this guy isn’t violating the spirit, because what he is doing is specifically permitted by the law. Is that what we wanted from the law? Probably not.
Yeah, and if somebody paints graffiti on my house, no one’s making me paint over it. By your “logic”, that means it should be legal.
Why, don’t you understand that asking his bosses to spend thirty-nine cents is a horrible imposition on them, whereas being interrupted day after day is a trivial inconvenience to you. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Well, the reason they don’t mail questionnaires is that nobody returns, even the people who say, “Mail me a questionnaire, anmd I’ll return it.” But that’s besdie the point, at least the point I’m trying to make. Calls to raise support are legal, because of the First Amendment. I’m sorry you don’t like it. I don’t like the calls, either, but they are legitimate public speech. Why do you think that it’s like spraypainting on your house? How is that analogous? Free speech is often disruptive. If you don’t like the calls, you should let the person calling you know, and they will understand that thye will be losing votes with that tactic. But hating it and saying it should be illegal are two different things.
I disagree that this is a first ammendment issue. If I own a printing press, I am not obligated to let you use it to diseminate your political views. Similarly, you have no Constitutional right to use my phone to air your views. I have absolutly no problem with adding political advertising (and polling in particular) to the DNC laws.
During and after my campaign, a substantial number of people expressed irritation that nobody contacts them (given what we can reasonably accomplish with four phones, six volunteers, thirty days, and fifty thousand voters).
During the campaign, we (that is, real, live volunteers) called people one time, between the hours of ten in the morning and eight at night, unless they indicated they were planning to vote for us, in which case we called them a second time on election day to remind them to vote.
There are specific exceptions for election campaigns to DNC lists (and likewise for mail) because elections are important. Contact between politicians and voters is part of the democratic process. The democratic franchise, and political messages on how to use that franchise, are simply not the same thing as a commercial offer; they’re part of how your country and mine govern themselves.
Repeated calls are obviously irritating, and self-defeating. (And possibly illegal in and of themselves, as with any use of a telephone to harass and annoy someone.) I would recommend you follow your existing course of not voting for a politician who commits them.
My question then is: Why aren’t sales calls legitimate public speech? To my knowledge, the First Amendment draws no distinction between the type of political speech you are defending and sales calls. It may be that Supreme Court decisions have narrowed the definition of free speech to make exceptions for certain types of commercial speech, but if you know of an actual case that makes the distinction you are drawing a legal one, then i’d like to see it.
The answer, of course, is that sales calls are, in fact, legitimate public speech. But they also happen to be a type of speech that Congress, in its wisdom, has decided should be restricted when it involves the use of telephones to intrude into people’s houses, in cases where people have explicitly stated that they don’t wish to receive these calls.
If Congress had wanted to, they could have included political fundraising and other similar calls in their legislation, without raising the specter of first amendment violations, but they chose not to. That is my understanding; if you can cite case law or statute to demonstrate that i’m incorrect, i’ll happily concede the point.
Note that i’m not arguing that Congress necessarily should have included political campaigning in the DNC laws. I tend to agree with matt that while such intrusions might be annoying at times, they are, when used judiciously, a legitimate part of the political system. I’m simply disagreeing with saoirse’s Constitutional argument, and asking for some evidence that supports it.
Elections are important, but I don’t think that political calls are. I’ve never heard a single thing from a political phone call that I didn’t already know about whatever issue/representative is being sold to me. Especially since 90% of these calls come in the last few days before the election, long after I’ve made my decision about who to vote for, and often long after I’ve already mailed the damn ballot, anyway.
Although the fact that I live in a solidly Democratic, liberal area probably has a lot to do with that.
And i should add that, while i don’t really mind that political campaigning was exempt from the DNC provisions, i do think that non-profit and charitable organizations should have been included in the legislation, especially given the rather broad definition of what constitutes such an organization. Plenty of them are still shilling something, and are just as annoying as sales calls; if i never get another call from the Maryland Police Benevolent Association (or whatever they’re called), i’ll be quite happy.
Maybe they could have had a second DNC list specifically for such entities, and people could have chosen whether or not to join that list.
I do agree with this.
I tend to agree with matt that these calls might be part of our political process, and part of how we govern ourselves. I would also argue, however, that an even more important part of the political process is an active, informed citizenry, one that doesn’t need formulaic telephone calls from candidates in order to decide whom to vote for, or whther to vote at all.
Yes, elections are important. Yes, contact is part of that process, but it should be at the voter’s choice. Given the deluge of information in the form of pamphlets, TV ads, billboards, lawn signs, constituency meetings, etc. etc. etc., preventing politicians from phoning voters on DNC lists would not critically diminish their ability to get their issues to the public.
And, yes, I have call display, but at least north of the border they haven’t come out with the telepathy option yet; I actually have to go over to the phone and look.
Wel the most important message they communicate is, “election day is this week!” or “election day is today!” You may not need that call, but there are plenty of people who do, and who remember during the conversation that they could probably use a ride. Also, I am pretty active politically, and haven’t heard much that I didn’t already know form one of these calls. Other people have other hobbies, though, and do get exposed to a message they wouldn’t otherwise hear.
Why is it a free speech issue? No one can use your phone to bother if you don’t connect it to a public network. If you want to connect to the public network, which gives you access to millions of people and businesses who have never heard of you, then you take the bad with the good.
mhendo, it wasn’t Congress that drew a distinction between commercial speech and protected speech. It was the Supreme Court. They have defined the First Amendment in such a way that it has limited application to commercial speech.
I do understand how annoying these calls are. I am on some sort of Irish call list. I got a call from a volunteer for Hillary Clinton’s opponent in 2000. He wanted to tell me that the candidate’s wife was Irish, that her great-grandparents immigrated from Ireland. It did give me the opportunity to reply, “Her great-grandparents are form Ireland? And she lives on Long Island? That’s unbelievable!” I also got a prerecorded call that had Frank McCourt asking me to vote for his “good friend” Alan Hevesi in the primary for Comptroller.
I’m aware of the fact that the Supreme Court has drawn a distinction, and noted as much in my earlier post.
But you strongly implied that the distinction they drew was directly relevant to this issue, and that First Amendment issues (including the Supreme Court’s position) are the reason behind the distinctions drawn in the DNC legislation. I’d be interested in seeing some evidence of that.
I can name dozens in Nebraska alone.
I’ve never been called by Sen. Nelson who is running for Senate a 3rd time. He never bothered me the two campaigns he ran for Governor.
Neither of Ricketts’ opponents in the Republican primary has bothered me yet.
None of the candidates for governor has bothered me.
Come to think of it, the only other political calls I’ve ever had came from the half-wit who will hopefully stop being the Mayor of my little suburb this year and one from Sen. Hagel during his 1996 campaign.
Hagel’s call was made by an actual live human being who profusely apologized and then promised to take me off the list. Apparently she was true to her word.
A lot of people have to keep the audio turned up on the answerer. Business and friends and/or relatives with health problems are but two reasons. To those of us who MUST answer the phone, one way or another, people like Ricketts are a gigantic pain in the ass.