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Just look around. Delay and Noe and Blunt and Abramoff are the obvious egregious cases. Bush, Cheney, big bizniss, and the oil companies is another. So is Joe Biden and the credit card companies.
The list of abuses and the shit it has caused is bipartisan. Mostly repug, to be sure, but bipartisan nonetheless.
And can Wally O'Dell's now famous "I am committed to deliver Ohio .... " utterance not an illegal campaign contribution, in kind if not in cash?
It is time for **all** campaigns to be publicly funded. Totally and completely publicly funded. Take a nickel in private donations and go to jail. Period.
Funding to the parties is another issue that needs to be controlled.
But perhaps the biggest out of control part of campaign finance is special interest groups. Here I am going to suggest a positively dictatorial, non-liberal, non-permissive stance. Limit free speech. Yes. Censorship. Gag orders. There is no way to control these groups and there's no way to demonstrate the work of these groups is not coordinated with a campaign. Can anyone honestly say that the Scumboaters didn't coordinate with at least some part of the RNC or the bush campaign? Can anyone say that Mike Moore or Moveon didn't coordinate, at least to some degree, with the DNC and Kerry campaigns? I think the former is a certainty while the latter is conjecture based on supposition, but the case remains.
Lastly, at all times, we need rules that requires the broadcast of opinion to be clearly labeled as such. Rush can say any damned thing he wants. But he cannot call it news - or even pretend it is news. It isn't. It is opinion and spin. Persuasive to many, but spin and opinion nonetheless.
How to pay for this?
Taxes.
Campaign spending limits.
Yes, I know much of this goes beyond free speech to limit it.
I admit that. But I'd like to hear a better way to guarantee fair and honest elections based on the ***issues*** instead of haircuts or acceptability to sit on the next bar stool.
This is our country, for god's sake. This is, figuratively and literally, life and death serious.
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