How did campaign finance reform reduce the cost of the Obama campaign?

And how did it keep the DC-residing ACORN mercenaries out of my Virginia neighborhood last fall?

And campaign finance reform as a cure for spending too much time raising money — who should we believe? You or Obama?

I guess you didn’t catch that the White House is saying that Obama needed to make 4 and 5 times as many campaign fundraising appearances as Bush or Clinton because of campaign financing reform.

European Connections vs Rodriguez 2006: Upholding the IMBRA (marriage broker regulation) law, African-American Clinton appointee Clarence Cooper completely reversed his TRO (restraining order on IMBRA) http://www.veteransabroad.com/TRO.pdf because someone upstairs had clearly told him that his attitude that men had a right not to be background checked before meeting women was unacceptable to his chances of being nominated to the Supreme Court. The wording of his final decision compared people meeting each other online to buying a weapon: he “wrote” that both can involve federally mandated background checks on the individuals involved.

Note that Cooper clearly shows that this concept can apply to all online dating websites:

http://www.online-dating-rights.com/index.php?ind=downloads&op=entry_view&iden=25#

The “decision’s” wording can be proven to have come from a federally funded feminist organization (unconstitutional to fund such organizations but, as in 1930s Germany, the public always agrees when it is “to protect women and girls”) because the text could be found, before the decision, word for word on one of their websites.

But what else is new? As long as federal judges depend on Congress and Presidents for their career advancement, we will have a banana republic.

It gets worse:

AODA vs Rodriguez 2006: This time a new GW Bush appointee, Thomas Rose of Ohio, decided he wanted to be liked by the Bush Administration so he decided to refuse a restraining order on IMBRA for the following reasons:

1) “There is no fundamental liberty interest in an American contacting a foreigner for an intimate relationship”

2) Americans online are products that need warning labels.

This is, sadly, not a joke. The court documents are here and those words were spoken on the Friday before Memorial Day 2006. Veterans would turn in their graves:

http://www.online-dating-rights.com/index.php?ind=downloads&op=section_view&idev=2

Rose was apparently trying to suck up to those Republicans who felt they needed legal backing to prevent Muslims from talking to people in Pakistan as any kind of right. I assume he felt he could throw men who want to meet Russian women under the bus and nobody in the press would complain.

He was correct. Dmitri Vassilaros of the Pittsburgh Tribune later admitted that his boss, Billionaire “Republican” Dick Scaife, didn’t want his story of the above decisions to be published.

Another factor in avidly declaring Americans to be in need of “warning labels” (background checks) before meeting foreigners is a “Republican” penchant for wanting to “crack down on sex tourists and sex offenders” – so IMBRA, which regulates how adults can communicate internationally, was a good way to expand on the federal Protect Act, which says that a US citizen who hits on a foreign 17 year old in another country can go to jail in the US for sexually harassing a minor (gay man now being prosecuted for making a proposal to Moldavian teens). IMBRA simply said that we don’t have any right to talk to foreigners older than 18 either.

See how laws progress from those like the Protect Act that sound OK to those that push the envelope?

In almost all tyrannies, freedom grabs almost *always* involve the “need to protect women and girls”. Yellow stars on Jews were specifically mandated so Germanic virgins would know when to run away from “perverts”.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia is controlled by those who get federal funding (and thus the financed work time) to control their interests (the funding) on Wikipedia. You won’t actually find the above actual court documents in the Wikipedia entry for IMBRA.

In fact, how often have newspapers printed actual court documents highlighting what judges actually wrote as opposed to what the newspaper publishers wanted to be known about what the judges wrote?

Everyone is having to devote increasing amounts of time to raise money, and the APPEARANCE presented to the voters is that corruption has become commonplace, while their voices have been drowned out by mega donations provided by national and multinational interests.

We want the voices of the citizens of each district to be more clearly heard:

1. Eliminate corporate contributions. Corporations are profit making entities whose by-laws mandate that they expend money only with the expectation of a return on that investment. When candidates accept corporate money, it creates the appearance of corruption.

2. Eliminate PAC contributions.

3. Restrict contributions to be only from citizens whose PRIMARY residence is within the district. Of course, for statewide elections, permit contributions from anyone whose PRIMARY residence is within Virginia.

4. Cap the amount to the federal limit for an individual contribution.

These reforms will amplify the voices of the citizens who reside in the respective districts, and restore the representative relationship between our elected officials and the citizens who reside in their areas of representation.

Campaign finance reform will enhance the ability of the individual citizen to be heard.

Just as rule changes have made certain sports more competitive, these reforms will help end the never ending spiral of campaign costs. Since everyone will have to play by the same rules, these changes will make campaigns more affordable, while helping to free more time for elected officials to spend on working with their constituents.

The authors made clear in the book that they were only included post-New Deal cases in their list.

However, and this is probably professional bias talking, I would include NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., as well as West Coast Hotel v. Parrish. I agree that any such list is highly debatable.

I’m also a little surprised that Plessy v. Ferguson (even though later reversed, on dubious grounds, in Brown v. Board of Education), Dred Scott (it caused the Civil War, after all), and The Slaughterhouse Cases didn’t make the list, and even more surprised that a case like McConnell did: while an abomination, it was hardly the first case of its sort. Likewise, I’m dubious about the discussion of Roe, particularly since Griswold was the more dubious precursor.

Nevertheless, I’ll have to pick this one up. Sounds like a good read, though I don’t know how anyone schooled in the law can assess whether an author is “making those issues understandable even to someone without legal training.” Given the state of American legal education, we’ve all been too corrupted to do so.