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To: COUNTrecount

To me, the biggest crime ever committed when it comes to campaign “financing”, is how the democrats were able to turn the media, over the years, to be permanent mouthpieces for their party. In essence, the liberal media should be considered willing participants in espousing the democratic party’s agenda. That should carry a value of perhaps $500 million to $1 billion dollars in a presidential campaign. If the democrats were to have paid for the friendly air coverage over 2 years of campaigning, that could easily surpass $2 billion in value.

It’s no wonder that the Hillary campaign, and especially the “vast left-wing media” were so sorrowful when they all lost to someone that only spent a tiny fraction of what the democrats and their liberal left-wing media spent.

A value needs to be assigned to any friendly coverage that a candidate gets, no matter what the party or candidate. Right now, there is no reporting of facts in the left-wing media, and it’s all anti-Trump attacks all the time, with attacks on other republicans sprinkled in just to appear a bit “balanced” in coverage.


10 posted on 01/13/2018 10:47:54 AM PST by adorno
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To: adorno
This is a testament to what I call the true American heros:I, for one, am damn proud of the way our zeal turned out.
22 posted on 01/13/2018 11:10:12 AM PST by upchuck (Keep a sharp lookout. The best is yet to come.)
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To: adorno
To me, the biggest crime ever committed when it comes to campaign “financing”, is how the democrats were able to turn the media, over the years, to be permanent mouthpieces for their party.
IMHO you have the causality backward. Journalists have the motive of wanting to be, as Adam Smith put it, our “leaders and directors” by virtue of being believed. And journalists have the motive to be socialist because socialism sells.

Socialism is cynicism towards society and (concomitant) naiveté towards government. Journalism’s profitability depends on its ability to prevent people from ignoring it, and the recipe for achieving that is to claim that negativity towards society is “objective.” But “the conceit that ‘negativity is objectivity’” is a very serviceable definition of cynicism..

Thus we see that journalism and the Democratic Party are in a symbiotic relationship, both criticizing society and promoting bigger government.

But a critical point about the regulation of campaign financing is that Republicans have no motive to want to do it, and Democrats (who get free advertising from journalism) do. And so (at least in their role as persuaders) do journalists. The First Amendment does not allow for licensing of journalism, and yet McCain-Feingold actually lists newspapers who have the right to promote their own editorial choices for public office during campaign season. “The freedom of the press” should be understood as the right of the people to spend their own money to promote their own (religious, political, and other) opinions.

Considering that the authors of The Federalist Papers (John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton) published under a pseudonym and thus arguably did not believe that the Constitution would have been ratified if they had written under their own names, even a prohibition against anonymous publication of political argumentation looks like a violation of

Amendment 9
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In short, I believe that “Campaign Finance Reform” is newspeak for government interference in the First Amendment rights of the people. And the crime involved is the passage, signing, and SCOTUS approval of such “laws.” But that is not a position that any Democrat is likely to take . . .

There seem to be plenty of crimes to the charge of Mrs Clinton, including financial ones especially. Violation, as Secretary of State, of the “Emoluments Clause” of the Constitution would be very prominent in any list I would make. But IMHO “campaign finance reform” has severely damaged the political parties. But Emailgate - the illegal and dangerous, hence deeply immoral, use of a clandestine private server to store and transmit government secrets and to evade FOIA - might be the worst thing Hillary has done. And Mr. Obama was down with it.


29 posted on 01/13/2018 12:13:02 PM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion (Presses can be 'associated,' or presses can be independent. Demand independent presses.)
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