Hillary loves pointing out that the notorious Citizens United case was about her: an anti-Hillary film that ran afoul of federal regulation. But the Supreme Court ruled that, under the First Amendment, the government can’t stop anyone from producing and distributing a political film. I think that was right.
Critics complain this opened the door to unrestrained campaign spending, allowing elections to be bought. 
Yet repeatedly big spenders lose elections. If they could be bought, Jeb Bush, who raised the most money, would be the GOP nominee.
Were the spending all one sided, that would be a problem. But it can never happen in this big diverse country. By and large the two parties are fairly matched in fund-raising ability; and a candidate with substantial public support can always raise the sums needed to be competitive (as Bernie Sanders has done).
But our political spending regime is an opaque mess, dominated by unaccountable “Super PACs” (“political action committees’). The problem is not Citizens United but, rather, the whole Federal Elections schema set up by Congress (in the 2002 McCain-Feingold law) to regulate campaign spending. Jeb Bush himself called it “ridiculous.”
Specifically, while one can spend unlimited amounts on one’s own campaign, others are limited to contributing $2700. That causes larger sums to route instead through PACs, which theoretically are not allowed to coordinate with candidates.
This is the system Bush criticized. Instead, he said, there should be no restrictions on spending for political advocacy – and it should be allowed to go directly to candidates, who’d be accountable for it – with full disclosure required (which is not true for PACs).
Now, can you imagine if Congress furthermore made it illegal for an advocacy organization to run ads criticizing a legislator within 60 days of an election? In America? Maybe in Russia. Yet Congress did exactly that, as part of the aforementioned federal election regime. It’s a blatant incumbent protection scheme that strikes the First Amendment in its gut.
Corruption is a real concern – public officials beholden to special interests that finance their costly campaigns. It’s bribery in all but name. However, I don’t think the answer is to restrict political participation but, rather, to broaden it. I have long advocated a tax credit for political contributions (up to a limit). A credit (not deduction) would mean the money effectively comes from the Treasury rather than the donor’s pocket. Thus it would be a form of public campaign finance, but far preferable to existing systems, because individual citizens would determine which candidates get what. And it would inspire such an outpouring of citizen-directed donations that politicians would no longer be reliant on special interest money.
In a free, democratic country, I think government has no business regulating, at all, the landscape of political advocacy. Government itself is not disinterested, and certainly the elected officials who run it are not. This is a power inviting abuse. Remember the Alien and Sedition laws, that made it a crime to criticize the government?
In a democracy, all interests, that have a legitimate concern with what government does, should have an unrestricted right to advocate for their viewpoints in the forum of public opinion. That includes TV ads. And it includes corporations. They too are legitimate parts of our society and should have the right to make their voices heard in public debate. 
You may not like them – but surely you don’t believe in silencing those you dislike or disagree with?*
Democracy is threatened far less by free campaign spending than by government measures to suppress it.
* Well – left wingers tend to believe exactly that.
John Zogby, who’s very smart, suggests Rubio make Kasich his running mate now. It’s an intriguing gambit that could give Rubio a desperately needed boost. Or could be seen as a desperation move. But something needs to be done, and fast.
I’d been supposing that 33% primary pluralities would not give Trump a delegate majority, especially since the super-delegates (party officials and office-holders, 7% of the total) wouldn’t support him. But then I saw his South Carolina 33% gave him all that state’s delegates. So I researched the delegate apportionment rules.
Our population has always had a percentage of uncouth lowbrow loser assholes. That’s natural, and they have a right to exist and maybe even sympathy. Yet despite their existence our civic life has always been conducted on a somewhat higher plane of seriousness. Now it’s diving down to the lowest common denominator.
And of course he has a difficult relationship with truth, as in saying Muslim Americans celebrated 9/11 – not merely false, but incendiary.
My GOP used to be a principled party of sensible policies aimed at a better world for everyone, including limited government, fiscal responsibility, a free competitive economy, and free trade. A Trump-led Republican party would instead be a nasty racialist vehicle of xenophobia, resentment, and bile. A party of people voting with their middle fingers.
Yet few Republicans say they won’t support Trump if nominated, instead being ready to fall into line (and over the cliff). I am heartsick at this national degradation.
Our daughter Elizabeth is going to Kabul, to sort out the mess there.
And I said to Elizabeth what I’ve often said on my blog – there’s really no such thing as being safe. One can get hit by a car crossing the street, or by lightning, or a thousand other dangers. If we took them all to heart, we’d never get out of bed (and 600 Americans die annually falling out of bed). And of course, in the end, nobody gets out alive (so far).
So, last we spoke, I said I’d watched Rubio blow the presidency in that pre-New Hampshire debate. Well, that was a bit hasty; he seems to have recovered from that disaster (showing his mettle), to finish second in South Carolina.
Here’s the rock-scissors-paper schema: Rubio beats Hillary, Hillary beats Trump, Trump beats Sanders. Assuming a Sanders nomination, Trump supporters might have imagined him winning the presidency (yelling “socialist, socialist, socialist”). Had Hillary lost Nevada, she’d have been in real trouble; but her winning there now makes a Sanders nomination pretty improbable. And between Hillary and Trump, the electorate, for all its disaffection, would surely choose the “safe pair of hands.”
I hope Rubio can do it. He’s shown an unfortunate impulse to flatter the same voters Trump and Cruz are getting. Instead Rubio should let them batter each other competing for the Duck Dynasty vote, while differentiating himself from them, stressing what is really his strength: his positive, genuinely progressive and inclusive vision, contrasted against their negativity and divisiveness.*
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Money does buy a lot of things that enhance well-being; and many of life’s problems can be solved if you have enough money. But past that point, scientific evidence suggests, more money may not make you happier. (Though still the quality of life is better, and I’d rather be rich and miserable than poor and miserable.)
However, if lefties then arguably have a point that wealth tends to go to the “wrong” people, that seems to be a basic fact of human society that cannot be undone without destroying the sources of economic growth and progress – that is, people striving to better their personal situations – that have meantime made the world as a whole so much richer, especially in the last century, eliminating so much squalor and misery.
A related key reason why, beyond a certain point, added wealth doesn’t increase happiness is what social scientists call the “adaptation effect.” One adapts psychologically to a new higher living standard; the surprise wears off and the “new normal” becomes what you now expect and take for granted.
“Keeping up with the Joneses” is a very real psycho-social force. As The Economist further says, in evaluating one’s relative position one tends to look at those above rather than below; so, “when our own lot improves, we shift our reference group to those who are still better off. In other words, we are never satisfied, since we quickly become accustomed to our own achievements.” The adaptation effect again. “Perhaps that is what spurs people to earn more, and economies to grow.” (My emphasis.)
Conclusion: to keep people from getting rich would not be good for the poor, but bad.
What was supposed to happen was that Marco Rubio, surging with momentum out of Iowa, would do very well in New Hampshire, conceivably even winning; Bush, Christie and Kasich fall away so Rubio consolidates the backing of the sensible wing; while Trump and Cruz divide the wing-nut vote; Rubio gets the nomination; and defeats Hillary with all her baggage; making 
So what we have now is Donald and the Seven Dwarves, more or less. We’ve already had the ridiculous spectacle of the gaggle of lower-polling candidates attacking and even running negative ads against each other, all struggling for the right to be the non-Trump, while Trump himself gets a free pass on the vilest candidacy in memory. It’s now altogether possible that Trump walks off with the nomination without winning more than about 35% of the vote in any primary.
How could this happen? Well, democracy is messy. And there are no inevitabilities in history; contingency reigns supreme. It didn’t have to be this way. What people do matters and changes events. As Marco Rubio unfortunately demonstrated Saturday night.
The $180 million works out to something over $80,000 per existing high school student. Just imagine if that kind of money were spent instead on some sort of intensive program to actually help kids benefit from their education – like hiring a corps of life coaches/mentors/tutors/big brothers?
Just shows the stagnant thinking that pervades the education establishment, that so poorly serves minority and disadvantaged people.
The Judaeo-Christian creation story is pretty straightforward – God did it (don’t ask where he came from). Science says it was a Big Bang. Superficially the two may seem equivalent. However, science today has a great deal more to tell us about the Big Bang than simply that it banged.* And importantly, this isn’t just story telling like the Bible’s, but confirmed by empirical evidence. Science is not just another “faith.”
The answer is inflation – a quick early burst of expansion at faster than light speed. Of course Einsteinian relativity says light speed can’t be exceeded. But that only applies to motion within space. Inflation expanded space itself.
The acceleration began about midway in the Universe’s 13.7 billion year history. The cause is dark energy – so labeled because we don’t (yet) know exactly what it is. However, note that gravity’s strength is inversely proportional to the distance between objects; expansion increased that distance; until the push of dark energy became stronger than the diminishing pull of gravity, causing the slowing expansion to speed up.
I’ve 
You may still prefer to believe the whole thing was the work of an imaginary quasi-anthropomorphic being. I prefer the adult version: reality, elucidated by science.
The Rational Optimist 
