Elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns

You read like a HAMC damage control bot. I am sick of being lorded over by criminals hiding in plain sight, it is why the economy sucks. They are sucking on it like leeches.

The commander-in-chief isn't leading a charge at the front lines, so whether or not he can legally own a gun has no bearing; otherwise, we'd have to demand that every elected official has direct, hands-on experience in everything that they legislate, regulate, or judge. Well, perhaps that wouldn't be so horrible, after all...

I personally find the way he came to be a felon to be a darker subsection, but your mileage may vary, of course.

This could be seen as protection for candidates against lawfare, which is widely used in tyrannical governments.

I mean, of all the reasons to oppose Trump being commander in chief, much less President, that seems the least relevant.

As long as people see their chosen political party as their hometown sports team and the other political party as a bunch of demonic goblins looking to murder and imprison them and their families, that will never happen.

If you're not willing to vote for either political party to achieve your supported goals, you're part of the problem and a big part of why the country is the way it is.

Why should money be involved in supporting a candidate? Doesn’t the democratic action of voting do that?

Truth.

The courts have become more / too important as Congress has become more ineffectual.

> It's funny that any time there's a judicial ruling we like, it's fair and impartial, and any time there's a judicial ruling we don't like, it's judicial activism.

It is funny, but at the same time I absolutely believe that in many cases it's possible to distinguish between judgments of the activist kind and those that aren't.

Critics of SCOTUS should keep in mind that they agree unanimously more often than one might think. In fact, it's the modal outcome over all terms, with roughly third of all cases decided unanimously. IIRC 7-2 or more one-sided rulings (meaning more concurrence between all justices) occur roughly four-fifths of the time.

The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade 2 years ago and the Chevron doctrine recently.

Do you think these judgements were both supported by the constitution when they were made and also not supported by the same constitution when overturned? Which one was the "ruling based on law"?

If there was a straight deterministic line from the laws to the rulings the court make, we would need far less courts or lawyers or highly trained judges. The fact is there are a million laws and precedents with 100 applying to any given situation in slightly different ways with many interpretations. Laws are written vaguely to keep them somewhat future-proof and leave room for interpretation/evolution. The courts do have a lot of power here.

That is such a distorted fantasy I don't really know what to say.

The better solution is to continue respecting the First Amendment and not trying to restrict in any way, political speech, and instead reforming the electoral system so that the volume of speech one is able to output through the expenditure of financial resources does not have an impact on election outcomes.

That line of logic is utterly insane even at a glance because it argues that citizens cannot be taxed for something they don’t support.

Shall we ask the DEA when they’ll be issuing refunds?

“Diluting” speech is equally incoherent. The presidents state of the nation address drags people away from my Twitter feed, so the government is diluting my speech. If the argument is just that the government can’t do anything that would make a citizen less heard, the government ceases to function because practically everything they do is more consequential than any citizens opinion.

The First Amendment doesn’t even say anything about being heard. It is a right to speak, not a right to be heard. Funding a candidate does not remove the right or ability for other candidates to speak.

> A better approach would be restricting all political advertising to some government provided platform.

This is not even close to passing even a cursory First Amendment analysis. Telling people they can’t advertise on Facebook/Google/etc is absolutely a First Amendment issue. It is literal speech, and the right to express it is abridged by location. This will never happen without an amendment.

Supreme Court justices are taking bribes to deliver outcomes their cronies want, and "court reform" is a euphemism for holding justices selling our country accountable.

I think even the most conservative of conservatives couldn't really argue our Supreme Court is defending the First Amendment. There's no speech restriction here - rather it's an attempt to further enrich the establishment by ensuring only career politicians and the ultra-rich can campaign. If anything, this is a speech restriction, because I do not have the ability to have my own campaign speech.

Outsiders like Donald Trump in 2016 and Bernie Sanders on multiple occasions also shouldn’t be able to come in an effectively (in the case of Trump) or nearly take over an existing political machine and transform it in their image at the low low cost of changing their party registration on a form with their home state.

You can do it too! In the State of California where yours truly is domiciled, changing your party registration is easier than changing your underwear so if there’s a particular party whose primary you want to vote in for whatever reason, that’s a thing you can just do with absolutely no cost to you whatsoever. You don’t need any buy-in. If political parties are going to be a thing, and we’ve accepted that they’re just going to be a thing for over 200 years and counting, then there needs to be some buy-in for people running under their banner and proportionate institutional influence from the leaders and rank-and-file of the organization flying that banner. Given freedom of association is a thing, parties are not going to go away no matter what you try and do to constrain them, so I’m okay with them also being a focal point around which people qualify for the ballot and secure donations and staffed time to run for office since that is what they are there for.

Real party turnover used to be higher. Parties would either fall out of favor and die and be replaced, or they would face credible risks from smaller parties and work to absorb them into their ranks by taking in the issues that energized them. Right now they’re functionally just an identity group, and that makes them both fragile and dangerous since their name still means something to voters, but their party functions do not command the premium they used to.

> Dollars represent disproportional ability to influence who has power.

People with a lot of money already possess both, which is why I am perfectly content with people who have money to spend their own money.

> Attempts to nudge candidates ability to win are antithetical to our value of egalitarianism.

In that case, would you also support prohibiting people from spending their private time or using their public speech to influence election outcomes? No more volunteers, only paid workers funded by the State?

The influence of dollars alone on the outcome of an election is already overvalued. Michael Bloomberg already engaged in the grandest experiment to prove that money really can’t buy political office and depending on your point of view here, either succeeded fantastically in that goal or failed miserably in his own goal in what was fundamentally an own goal.

It’s also utterly naïve to think that by attempting to resource constrain elections by funneling money through the State to redistribute to campaigns that you will succeed in capping the real economy around election campaigns and prevent the State from giving the ultimate incumbent advantage and using its own official functions to influence the outcome of elections. More than likely you would just be hiding most of the activity around a campaign inside the State itself.

The game doesn’t change just because you’re spending public or private money: your goal is to get people to fill out their ballots and submit them in your favor. What changes is whether it is private individuals, from small dollar donors to billionaires deciding how to spend their money (as is their right in all areas of life!) or the State deciding how they are going to spend other peoples money for them, which you know, speaking of, that is a mockery of decency.

> Let's just close up shop and vote with dollars like we shop for shoes.

So let’s not and say we didn’t. The cost of converting dollars into real votes is high and plateaus. The actual spending is an entire economy supporting the salaries of campaign staff and paying contractors and advertising firms which I am okay with. I’m even okay with putting additional constraints on who can raise money and in the case of local elections, Senate and House seats, from where locking out foreigners and interstate donations entirely changing the shape of that entire economy (provided an appropriate Constitutional amendment is agreed upon and passed), but not one red cent should be coming from a local, State or the Federal Treasury. That’s money to support the functions of the State and the excess should go back to its rightful owners instead.

Voting is just passive a passive part of politics, but there is active part of politics, like political activism, and that is as important as voting.

People that are good at public relations and communications can directly do political activism, while people bad at that and good at something else can use money generated from what they are good at to hire or support someone to do political activism for them.

So forbidding money in political activism is just gatekeeping political activism to people good at public relations.

I would opine it was Robert Bork a few years earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomi...

I disagree. For one, Bork had already been refused a seat on the Supreme Court. Secondly, it's the first time that a mainstream political party ever succeeded in "othering" another group of straight white capitalists purely with propaganda.

Yeah really hurt branding/prospecting - haven’t seen the impact for retargeting yet since I run super high bids there but surely will be affected soon.

Wish my employer took on political clients - such easy free money.

They don't (have to) care. At least in America, the vast majority of people have never felt the pinch of being "broke"-broke. When you have money coming in, you have enough to waste on dumb stuff. Going off my own list: $100/m phone bills when $15/m ones are available (even less, because employee discount!)? Well, it's more convenient (it wasn't, it was just money getting shoveled into the trash). Eating out at lunch? Making food is a chore (actually, stew pots are your friend, Panda Express is not). $200/m for a storage unit isn't reasonable. Neither is a new car note. Overspending on insurance. Monthly media subscriptions. On and on. You don't realize it until the money simply isn't there anymore, and you're forced to make cuts. And it's at that point that you realize, "Dang, I could have had a lot less stress now if I'd been more vigilant about spending money I didn't need to - if I'd just known better - then." But the entire economy essentially encourages and then preys on your apathy and lack of knowledge.^1

By the time you see what's going on, it's too late. You're a bum and no one cares about what you have to say.

1: Actually, this is not in and of itself a bad thing. "Stupid" purchasing decisions keeps artists and artisans in food and home, is the "slack" that keeps labor inefficient enough to be tolerable. The problem is twofold: 1) that corporations systematically prey on this tendency, and 2) its distribution as an ability is lopsided: most people can be extremely frivolous with money, and some can't be frivolous at all, and there's very little middle ground.

I am always shocked at the number of people who don't balance and reconcile their accounts each month. I go through each of our accounts at least monthly and compare each financial org's ideas of our transactions with our own record. I cannot fathom not doing this. And yet, people look at my like I'm nuts when the subject comes up.

Sometimes they err in our favor and I still try to have it fixed, expecting that eventually they'll figure it out and try to claw the money back. Goldman Sachs gave us about $200 earlier this year. It went something like this:

- Starting balance: $1000

- We paid: $700

- New charges: $300

- End balance: $400

I spent a couple hours on the phone trying to get them to realize their arithmetic was wrong. I finally insisted that guy I was talking to pull up a calculator, punch in the numbers, and see for himself. "Let's see, $1000 minus $700 is $300, plus $300 is $600, so... wait, why did we tell you $400?" "I don't know!" I even escalated to their audit department who said their math all checks out that I only owed them $400 instead of $600. I am certain to my core that someday they're going to ask for that $200 plus interest.

Well, I did say spending and not campaign contributions.

How do you ban a candidate from paying for air time like Ross Perot did?

Yes, and also a medical advance directive in most jurisdictions where that is separate from a legal/financial POA.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act applies only to "commercial" messages. Political ads are technically exempt, as a free speech issue. But because political ads go out via the usual SMS spam services, STOP usually works anyway. The services don't want their outgoing lines blocked.