Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

Except many of us liberals don't see giving money as speech. We see it as bribery.

 

Which is already illegal.

 

If you give to both sides of an election (which happens a lot with institutional donors, and ought to be against the law), that's bribery. If you give to one person or party, you're just leaning in to support your own position.
PS: Primaries would be more interesting if every donor through every means, top line, PAC or dark money, could not contribute to another candidate during the primary process under penalty of jail time.

 

Fuck that noise. If I want to advocate for more than one candidate, that is a valid expression of my free speech rights, and that includes pooling my money with like-minded individuals to extend the reach of our message.

You don't get to throw free speech aside just because it's a little inconvenient to the way you would like to run elections. Well, you can try, but me and the ACLU will fight you on it. So long as you haven't criminalized my donations to them too.

 

Betting both sides of the same contest is OK for horse racing. In elections, it's obviously bribery. Rick, I disagree with the main premise of your post. Buckley v. I forget was wrongly decided. Money is not free speech. It's paid speech, and that's different. BTW, I'd love to see some TV station, not that one ever would, challenge the law requiring stations to run political ads. If ever there was a violation of free speech!

 

You'll have a better chance of getting the nation's 8 year olds to band together to try to get Christmas banned.

Want to give a TV GM an instant erection? Whisper in his ear "I think your state's really going to be in play this presidential election."

 

Whoa whoa whoa. Did you just argue that speech that is paid for does not have first-amendment cover? Every journalist in American history may have a concern with that special pleading.

The only tv station that have to air political ads are the ones who agreed to limitations on their own free speech in exchange for use of public airwaves. 99% of tv stations do not have to do so.

And giving to multiple candidates does not meet any reasonable or legal definition of bribery. That's just playing loose with language for emotional purposes.

 

Giving to candidates on opposite sides does. But never mind, this is to change the subject and is more a point of information. At my address in Lexington, Mass. a very (better than 2-1 and often 3-1) Democratic suburb of Boston, there are three registered Dems., me, Alice and my daughter Hope, who voted absentee today in France. The Mass. primary is Tuesday. If Sanders is to have a ghost of a chance to win, he has to carry Mass. and to have the faintest chance to do that, he has to carry Lexington. So far, our house has received two live phone calls from nice folks from the Clinton campaign and three letters (one for each) from a Mr. W. J. Clinton of New York, NY. From the Sanders campaign -- zero. Grassroots, huh? Twitter and Facebook do not a campaign make.

 

Neither Sanders nor Trump have anything like an adequate grassroots GOTV organization. Trump is much better at playing for media free coverage though. That's going to bite them both.

Trump in particular, because if he wins the primary battle he's going to need the party faithful, and a lot of them are not going to help.

 

Sanders had many volunteers beating the bushes in New Hampshire, many of 'em from here. It's like they won there and said "great, let's go home." Very similar to the reaction of the Minutemen after the British evacuated Boston in early 1776, in fact.