tvashtarkatena

Nothing in the ruling favored moneyed interests. The ruling did not differentiate between non-profit advocacy organizations such as the Sierra Club or the ACLU, and, say, big bad corporations like GE. That is an interpretation you folks are layering onto the ruling. I doubt any of you would be willing or able to describe the method by which it is decided which organizations get to run ads and which don't: the central point of this ruling. Fortunately, the court saw fit to uphold the fairness doctrine and the 1st amendment in this regard. If you want to limit campaign financing, the pathway to legislative reform remains wide open. If you don't believe that is politically possible, that's a political problem, not a constitutional or judicial one.

Well, it seems that the SC has illuminated a pathway to reform and thus provided a focused issue we can write our congressmen about; ie, it's done its job. After learning more about this issue, I strongly support the SC ruling in favor of less, rather than more, restricted political speech, as well as the message it has sent to the legislature regarding some much needed campaign finance reform.

And there is no reason why that issue can't be addressed in the legislature. Remember, this ruling overturned a poorly conceived and enacted law that was overly restrictive on actual political speech, not contributions. Again, if the anti-Hilary ad had been FREE (wonderfully possible in the age of $200 video cameras and YouTube), it would still have been banned by this law.

start by mandating that insurance companies are non-profit If you check both Regence and Premiera of Washington and Alaska already are. So your solution is already there and it's obvious it doesn't work. ??? If you compare the rise in cost and value of care/v/cost for various organizations, you'll find a wide variance. Don't know about these two orgs, but Kaiser Permanente, another non-profit, scores highly by these measures. You seem to be saying that the system sucks in aggregate, therefore there are no good parts to it. That isn't true of any long term system I know of. Doesn't make a lick of sense to me.

Here's the deal - there are limits on how much say, Exxon, can give to, say McCain's re-election committe - which is controlled by McCain and his assistants. Those are still in place. There used to be limits on how much money corporations could use for funding attack ads (or support ads) that don't specifically say "go vote for John McCain." Typically a Political Action Committee would form in support of a candidate - not by the candidate but by supporters. There is not supposed to be coordination between the PAC and the candidate (in theory). The PAC would then garner money from corporate and individual doaners that would pay for ads. These proved very powerful in the Swiftboat ads against John Kerry. Now there are no limits to how much money corporations can spend on such ads. They do not have to form PACs, the associated financial limits are gone. Corporations can now pay directly for attack ads with no limits. This case was about being able to run the ads period (free speech), not how much the ad cost. If the ads were free, the overturned law would have still banned them. I don't agree with that kind of limitation on political speech at all, and, apparently, neither did the SCOTUS.

As Ira acknowledged in his piece, the court did extend the impact of the case in an activist fashion. And yes, like most SCOTUS rulings, there are potentially far reaching impacts. That's why we have 2 other branches of government: to address those potential impacts. I haven't seen anyone here argue that the potential damaging effects of this decision on the democratic process couldn't be addressed by appropriate legislative reforms. That's the legislature's job, not the court's.

Reads more like pure propaganda to me. I wasn't able to glean a salient point out of it other than "we hate this ruling!"; hardly a rebuttal for a complex 1st amendment ruling, but hey, if it makes you feel angrier, it's done its job, I guess.

I call BS on this statement, which is disingenuous at best. Sure there still are direct contribution limits but, duh, they will be overwhelmed by the indirect limits. The ruling specifically releases corporations from having to form PACs as middlemen and the financing constraints around PACs. They can now funnel money directly into whatever PR program they wish, with no limits. Does the author really think it's reasonable to equate the financial power of Exxon with even the largest Unions in the country? I don't think so. Yes, there are some issues that needed parsing out but there have always been limits on free speech, particularly in recognizing the unbalanced power of large corporations. The Supreme 5 sidestepped the relative narrow question in front of them to take on an issue that was not it play. And Congress devoted to real campaign finance reform? I'll take my chances that the Easter Bunny is real first. Say you're a congressman from a small rural district and you've been making noise about strong bank reform and making some headway. What's to prevent Goldman or whoever from throwing money at a local Swiftboat process? So now that congressman will be more reluctant to take on controversial issues because he doesn't want to disturb the firms with deep pockets. In addition, the 24 states that have campaign finance laws will be affected. You've addressed several of your concerns, all of which could well stand some legislative reform. As Ira correctly stated, however, none of these issues were at issue in this case.

Not interested in getting into a pissing match here, but doesn't it seem ironic that the Court has affirmed the 1st amendment rights of corporations such as Planned Parenthood yet does not recognize any such nascent rights to the unborn? I'm certain there are some legal doctrines that have bearing on this of which I'm not aware (as a layperson). One couldn't compare this to the Dred Scott decision or to the recent decision by the Supreme Court in upholding a lower court ruling ( SCOTUS Petition Asks Justices to Review Torture Abuse Case of British Former Guantánamo Detainees a Second Time Well.... There is that infant who somehow advocates for X investment co (the talking baby ads) so I guess with ultrasound communication the unborn could become day trading shareholders or even form a corporation or even become corporate officers, and in that case the SC has recognized their nascent rights, otherwise I guess they're SOL as far as the holding of the case we're talking about. Nicely played. I was just gonna tell this thumping ass clown to STFU about abortion and stick to the subject. Since he just proved he can't even intelligently discuss Roe V Wade due to a painfully obvious lack of familiarity with the ruling and its treatment of personhood for the unborn, I'm not holding my breath. And back to the 'corporate personhood' discussion; should free speech not be afforded to organized groups of individuals, such as the non-profit in this case? Should incorporation come with a gag rule and if so, by what constitutional principle? Can anyone tell me why organized people must STFU while non-organized individuals enjoy freedom of expression?

It would be more interesting to hear exactly what aspect of the analysis or decision you don't agree with. For example, do you not agree that new campaign finance laws, such as those suggested in the piece, are needed? Which specific proposals mentioned do you find fault with? More importantly, do you support banning the anti-Hilary ad put out by a non-profit group and those like it: the central issue of this case? As an aside, this case had nothing to do with corporate 'personhood', as is so often mis-stated, including in this thread.

You should also talk to him about the 9th circuit's recent landmark ruling that found that our criminal justice system is racially biased. It'll be interesting to see what lawmakers do with that shot across their bow.

As is so often the case, the devil's in the details, not the headlines. I haven't read the Supreme Court decision yet, but I'm sure it contains more surprises. They often bare little resemblance to the media stories that cover them. Warning: This was originally published in the Huffingtonpost....

The following analysis is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in this topic. It refutes several erroneous perceptions posted in threads on the subject, and makes several thought provoking points not presented. Understanding the Citizens United Ruling By Ira Glasser, former ACLU executive director (1978 – 2001) The recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has been greeted with screaming dismay by most liberals. Many of them mistake the decision for doing things it did not do: for example, one hyperbolic letter to The New York Times asserted that the decision overturned "the century-old ban on corporate contributions to political campaigns." It did no such thing. Corporations are still banned from contributing to a candidate or to a candidate's campaign. The assertion was wrong, and the Times was remiss in publishing such a factually false claim. More seriously, in his State of the Union, President Obama said that the Court's decision "reversed a century of law." It did no such thing. Congress did enact a law about a hundred years ago that barred direct corporate contributions to election campaigns. But that law was not involved in the Citizens United case, and remains unaffected by it. Now such stalwart liberals as Sen. John Kerry in the Senate and Rep. John Conyers in the House, normally reliable supporters of freedom of speech, have proposed a constitutional amendment to "fix" the First Amendment in order to bar corporations from exercising freedom of speech. What corporations exactly? They don't say. Who shall decide which corporations may speak, and which may not? They don't say that either. These liberals, and others like them, who denounced the decision have failed to appreciate what a great ruling it was for the First Amendment, and what a huge victory it was for freedom of speech and against government censorship. Yes, censorship. So what was this case actually about, and what did the decision actually do? Herewith some observations: 1. The issue at stake in the case was whether, consistent with the First Amendment, the government could criminalize speech that criticized a public official who was also a candidate for elective office, 60 days before a general election and 30 days before a primary. One would think that it was precisely during an election campaign that the right to criticize or defend an elected official was most important. But not according to the campaign finance "reformers." They have actually been trying to stop such speech for four decades, and not just speech by the sort of big, bad corporations you may have in mind. In a similar case involving a similar issue back in 1972, the ACLU, which by the way is also a corporation, was prevented from taking out an ad in The New York Times criticizing then-President Nixon for his opposition to school busing for integration, and had to go to court to vindicate its right to free speech. The campaign finance "reformers" wanted to prohibit such speech because Nixon was also a candidate for re-election, and the ACLU's speech criticizing him might affect the election in ways the reformers thought was unfair! (I am not making this up.) The law was struck down when the ACLU sued, but it came back again in other forms. In 1984, the ACLU was cited and investigated by the Federal Election Commission for public statements it made criticizing President Reagan for what it considered his violations of civil liberties. That of course was what the ACLU existed to do. But because this criticism occurred during the 1984 re-election campaign, the FEC moved to bar it because, it claimed, such criticism was the functional equivalent of supporting a candidate!! And that was prohibited by campaign finance law. In these and many other cases over decades, not-for-profit cause groups of all kinds were repeatedly subjected to curbs on precisely the kind of speech the First Amendment was designed to protect. In the current case that has caused all the commotion, the victim was a not-for-profit group called Citizens United that wanted to distribute a film it had made criticizing Hillary Clinton and questioning her fitness for office. No good, said the law, you can't criticize her while she's running for office. Why? Because Citizens United was incorporated. So is the ACLU and so is pretty much every other cause organization. Should Planned Parenthood, for example, or NARAL Pro-Choice America be banned from criticizing Sarah Palin during a future campaign for office? That was precisely the question raised by the Citizens United case. Should the fact that such activist citizens' organizations are incorporated allow the government to bar their speech, especially when it matters most? That is the question the Court was asked to answer, and it answered correctly: such organizations' freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment. Why liberals should be unhappy about that, or willing to tolerate the censorship of their own speech that would have resulted from a contrary decision is a mystery. 2. The law that barred corporations from spending money to speak critically or supportively of public officials during an election campaign also barred labor unions, even though labor unions aren't incorporated. Why? Because in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act, a law hostile to organized labor and a law most liberals opposed, decided to include labor unions within the prohibition to "balance" the prohibition against corporate speech.. The precedent of barring corporate speech thus became an excuse for barring the speech of labor unions. Liberals who think that such limits, if allowed, will not apply to them but only to the corporations they hate are deluding themselves. As all our history shows, the first target of government censorship is never the last. It is for that reason that the First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech" but Congress did, and in a series of campaign finance laws over the past 40 years, Congress has done so over and over again. 3. The case also had nothing to do with limits on campaign contributions to a candidate, or with the prohibition of corporate contributions to a candidate; those remain intact and were not at play in this case. Rather the case had to do with what is called independent expenditures on speech. This means speech engaged in by an organization in its own behalf, and not in coordination with any candidate. The statute in question in effect instituted a government licensing system for independent speech that mentioned a candidate by name in an electronic broadcast communication 60/30 days before an election, effectively granting the government the authority to silence such speech during that time, including speech by labor unions, the ACLU, Citizens United and any other similar organization. 4. The campaign finance "reformers" argue that the government ought to be given the power to ration speech because democracy requires an equitable balance of speech in order to be fair. And it is certainly true that inequities of speech flow from inequities of wealth. That has always been the case, and it is true for all speech, not just campaign speech. When I grew up, the names of the governors of New York were Lehman, Roosevelt, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller. All but Dewey were fabulously wealthy, a determinative fact in their political prominence and election. For that matter, Thomas Jefferson wasn't exactly a man of the working class. Money isn't speech, but how much money one has always determines how much speech one has. It's like travel: money isn't travel, but $100 won't get you very far, and those who have $25,000 can travel more, and more freely. If I told you you had a right to travel, but could spend no more than $100, wouldn't you think your right to travel was being limited? It's the same with speech. Most if not all of you reading this have never had as much speech as, say, The New York Times or George Soros or Nelson Rockefeller or George Bush or, as we recently discovered in my city, Mayor Bloomberg. The inequities of speech that flow from the inequities of wealth are certainly a big and distorting problem for a democracy, and have always been so, and not just during elections. No one knows how to remedy that, short of fundamental re-distributions of wealth. But I'll tell you what isn't a remedy: granting the government the power to decide who should speak, and how much speech is enough. Nothing but disaster flows from that approach, and that was what was at stake in this case. 5. The campaign finance "reformers" claim that corporate wealth is uniquely different, and that the protections of free speech afforded to the rest of us ought not, in the name of equity, be afforded to corporations. But any effort to single out "corporations" as properly subject to such a licensing system as this case represented is both over- and under-inclusive: if regulating the unevenness of speech by regulating the unevenness of wealth is the goal, then why include small business corporations (repair shops, small grocery stores, gasoline stations, etc.) but not Warren Buffet or George Soros, and many other individuals whose personal wealth, unincorporated, dwarfs that of most corporations? And what about the ACLU and the NAACP and Planned Parenthood and The Sierra Club, etc., etc., all of which are corporations that engage in the sort of speech prohibited by the statute struck down in Citizens United? And what about The New York Times, and CBS and other media corporations, which also are corporate (NBC is owned by General Electric) and which by their coverage and their editorials endorsing and opposing candidates spend money all the time for purposes that were generally prohibited by the statute? Consider: The Times endorses Candidate A in an editorial, or Fox News devotes its entire coverage to promoting or tearing down a candidate, and that is constitutionally protected, but if Citizens United or the Sierra Club or the NAACP or Planned Parenthood wants to buy time for an ad to reply, supporting a different candidate or even just mentioning a candidate by name in an ad that doesn't expressly support or oppose the candidate, they commit a crime? Where in the First Amendment does it say that such corporations have fewer speech rights than a "media corporation?" And what exactly is a "media corporation?" General Electric or Westinghouse are barred from political speech, but if they buy NBC or ABC (which they both did), they become a "media corporation" that escapes the ban? Why should we be allowing the government to decide who may speak by making such distinctions? Yet the Times, a corporate entity that spends money all the time to criticize or praise candidates, and to support or oppose them, blathers on hypocritically about how if other corporations have exactly the same right as they do, it means the end of democracy. Do we want the government--the government??!!-- to be deciding which corporations can speak and which not? The Times? Yes. The ACLU or Citizens United? Sorry, no. Wasn't this precisely the power denied to Congress under the First Amendment? One of the great features of the Court's decision is that it cleared away all of these unsupportable distinctions, and took away the government's power to decide whose speech it would permit and whose it would not. 6. Congress and state legislatures may still, under the terms of this decision, require corporations to disclose their funding of other groups' speech, especially for very large gifts, thereby turning such gifts into a political issue. More fundamentally, if Congress were interested in creating fairness and equity in campaign speech, it could move in the direction of public financing. The problem is, however, that such public financing is unlikely to be either adequate or equitable. For one thing, Congress, consisting nearly entirely of Democrats and Republicans, is unlikely to want to fund third-party candidates, yet why shouldn't their speech be as entitled to be heard as the speech of the two major party candidates? For another, Congress is highly unlikely to provide adequate funds to finance effective challenges to themselves. Campaign finance reforms have from the beginning been designed to protect incumbents. For example, research shows that what matters in campaign speech is more the floor of spending than the ceiling. That is, if $2 million is an adequate amount to get your message out, and if an insurgent candidate for Congress has $2 million to spend and the incumbent spends $4 million, then that doesn't normally affect the outcome, assuming $2 million is enough. But if the insurgent only has $400,000, the incumbent virtually always wins. The incumbent has name recognition, which the insurgent usually doesn't; the incumbent has the franking privilege with which to reach voters, while the insurgent has to raise money in amounts limited by law to do equal mailings; the incumbent can call a press conference or hold a hearing and generate publicity that is regarded as news, while the insurgent has to spend money raised in small amounts to generate equal coverage. The requirement to raise campaign dollars in small amounts discriminates against insurgent candidates and favors incumbents. Raising lots of contributions in small amounts requires name recognition and the support of many people, which insurgents usually don't have. In 1968, Gene McCarthy began his anti-war campaign against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson with only about 2% name recognition in New Hampshire. He had three major donors who gave him seven figures each--huge gifts in 1968-- when he challenged LBJ in the New Hampshire primary; those gifts would have constituted a crime today, and pretty much since the early seventies. Without that handful of large gifts, McCarthy would have had little chance to get his message out effectively against an incumbent. With those gifts, he came so close to beating Johnson that Johnson quit the race for re-election. Legislators know all this research; that is why they pass the "reforms" they do, which limit large contributions, require challengers to raise money in small amounts from large numbers of people, and to the extent that they provide public financing, do so in insufficiently low amounts and then bar candidates who take such inadequate public financing from raising any additional money. Campaign finance laws passed by incumbents assure the insufficiency of insurgent candidacies. Incumbency has greatly increased for several reasons, but its rise since these campaign finance "reforms" became popular about 40 years ago is a substantial one. When I testified in Congress over the years against such campaign finance restrictions on First Amendment grounds, I proposed many public finance alternatives: free air time for candidates who get on the ballot; the franking privilege for challenger candidates as well as incumbents, and direct funding for all Congressional candidates in adequate amounts. No one, not any Democrat, not any Republican, not any advocate of campaign equity, supported such suggestions. Why? Because they were not about to fund effective challenges to themselves. So aside from the profound First Amendment problems created by all these laws, they have generally suppressed insurgent candidates, advantaged incumbents and increased inequity in election campaigns. Liberals and Democrats have been the chief offenders in this scenario, favoring equity in the abstract but never seeing how the particular reforms they advocated made the problems they wished to remedy worse, and never seeing that giving the government the authority to regulate speech was not a good thing. Maybe now this result, which has steamed up liberals and Democrats, may at last shift their attention to the kind of public financing that equitably provides money for more speech instead of pretending to create equity by granting the government the authority to restrict speech. We shall see. If they do move in this direction, citizens should remember that the floor is more important than the ceiling: the amounts provided have to be adequate; if they aren't, fair campaigns will not follow; and if they are, then restrictions on what can be raised in addition, with disclosure of the source (for large amounts), will be unnecessary. This is not a new proposal; but maybe now it can gain some traction.

Making existing, well functioning systems like Medicare available to a larger population is the model other civilized countries have used with great success. They've also banned for profit health insurance after taking the step of legally defining equal access to health care as a basic right. The drug/insurance companies are certainly pushing to block health care reform, but from a voter standpoint, the Teabaggers are probably the # 1 largest voting block against health care reform today. The ignorant, paranoid, and insane are now forming a rather large political party: a uniquely American version of the zombie apocalypse. Their message? Um...yeah, they're still working on that one.... The good news is that the Teabaggers are pretty much 100% former GOP, so if they do form a separate party, and all signs indicate that's where they're headed (they'll soon hold their very own convention), they'll make Ralph Nader's vote splitting seem like small potatoes.

A smaller photo makes the same point without the carpet bombing. Just sayin....

Well, to an extent. I'm not sure what Bill's on about 'shortcutting the technology' for the Apollo program (presumably). Wasn't the Apollo program well funded and wildly successful in attaining its objectives? Neither the Apollo 1 fire nor Apollo 13 accidents probably would have been averted with more funding or more sophisticated technology. On might argue that had the technology been more complex, there would have been even more accidents. Two words: space shuttle. Furthermore, later technology certainly hasn't fared any better: half of all Mars missions, for example, have failed. Besides, I'm all for having a little balls and actually getting the job done with the tin can you've got; something the Apollo astronauts did admirably. I don't think there would have been many, if any, more robotic exploratory missions had Apollo's funding been cut back earlier. As it was, Viking and Voyager followed closely on that program's heels; ushering in a new era of smaller probes made possible by a new generation of hardened integrated circuit based technologies that simply wasn't available before. After that, a new generation of 'better, faster, cheaper' missions like Pathfinder and Galileo were created precisely because funding was scarce. Finally, the space shuttle and ISS, two of the biggest peace time (actually, no...half of all shuttle missions are military) national pride wank fests, swooped in to suck up the money after Apollo. Apollo was beyond amazing. One might argue that we went 1, 2, or 3 too many times (the program WAS killed by politics, BTW, so the system worked) but that program inspired and will continue to inspire an entire world for some time. I mean, we put a fucking CAR on another planet, for Christ's sake. The sad part is that we did not follow up with a series of robotic exploratory missions to fully survey our closest neighbor (until much later, anyway).

Dude. Get laid. 1st Avenue, anything. Seriously.

Too bad the climb wasn't quite so sunny...

We just netflixed some old Jetsons episodes from 1962. George keeps complaining how his 3 hour workdays and 3 day workweeks are killing him LOL

Spiritual spray leader.

That orange has been in the crisper WAY too long.

Spiritual spray leader. Yeah, that's about right.

Been in the crater a couple of times in the 90s. Noisy place.

OHhhh...that was Fanfest...I thought Walmart's 2nds Sale was in progress.

I'm experiencing tertiary awesomeness from your meeting John over here...