The pols' self-protection act

NY Post ^ | July 29, 2010 | MICHELLE MALKIN

[Scanian]

You know when a politician starts a sen tence with "frankly," he's about to lie to your face. The same principle applies to campaign-finance legislation dubbed the "DISCLOSE Act." The voter's instinctive reaction should be: What are they trying to hide now?

Drafted out of public view and rammed through Congress after bypassing committee hearings, this bum bill would have been better named the CLOSED-DOOR Act.

At a Rose Garden press conference on Monday, President Obama decried the influence of "shadow groups" on elections and urged the Senate to pass the Sen. Chuck Schumer-sponsored "reform." But the loophole-ridden package exempts large nonprofits with 500,000 or more members. Behemoth labor unions get preferential treatment.

Bradley Smith, former Federal Elections Commission chairman, noted that the law places speech-squelching restrictions on companies' ability to run independent political ads: "If you're a company with a government contract of over $10 million [like more than half of the top 50 US companies] or if you're a company with more than 20 percent foreign shareholders, you can't even mention a candidate in an ad for up to a full year before the election . . . There are no similar prohibitions for unions representing government contractors."

GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell put it more starkly during Tuesday's debate before the Senate cloture vote on the bill: The DISCLOSE Act, he said, is a "transparent attempt to rig the fall elections." At bottom, McConnell said, it's a jobs-protection bill for incumbents. While the cloture vote fell three votes short of the needed 60 on Tuesday, Schumer vowed to resurrect the issue "again and again and again until we pass it."

[Squantos]

Regardless of their games I vote. At the cash register with my dollars an on election day....