[Tall_Texan]

I honestly don't have a problem with this being aired...once the election is over. Showing them now seems politically suspicious (intentionally so, and it is just so typical of liberals to cry "politics" when somebody prevents them from speaking yet in the same breath claim innocently that their whole issue is about "freedom of speech", not politics).

So, Shut Up And Wait. Come November 8th, you can spew your bilge on any network you please. Otherwise, you are simply one more loophole in the whole McCain-Feingold canard and you should have no more right to speak just before an election than a myriad of other interest groups with a political point of view.

[ReignOfError]

So, Shut Up And Wait. Come November 8th, you can spew your bilge on any network you please. Otherwise, you are simply one more loophole in the whole McCain-Feingold canard and you should have no more right to speak just before an election than a myriad of other interest groups with a political point of view.

I was wondering about that. My read of McCain-Feingold is that it restricts "issue ads" that name a federal candidate -- Bush isn't a candidate for any office, and I didn't see any other politicians I could identify in the ad. But the ad spending, even without targeting a specific race, could still classify as an in-kind donation to the Democrats, I guess. I noticed that the ad didn't have the disclaimer about who paid for it at the end.

All you'd have to do is release a movie or a book, and launch an ad blitz for it, thus sneaking an issue ad in the back door -- not a bad ploy, and if it worked this time, you could count on it being tried again.

Ann Coulter's (a small mention, so just a small pic, but rules are rules) publisher, for example, could decide that her book needed a promotional boost in early November for some reason -- and so could Al Franken's. Give 29 seconds of quotes from the book with pictures of the people targeted, and then plug the book at the end.

From there it's a small step to throwing together a cheap book or movie with no intention of ever making any money off of it, but just using it as a conduit for advertising. And from there it's a small step to a 527 setting up its own ostensibly for-profit publishing house to crank out books as an excuse to advertise them.