Moe Lane

…personally, I don’t find the system nearly as ‘corrupt’ or ‘pollut[ed]‘ as the New York Times seems to – unless, of course, we’re simply taking both terms to be semantically equivalent to ‘got rid of legislators that the NYT liked’ – but in its way that just makes all the better this bitter, despondent, let-me-swig-more-rotgut-and-pound-the-typewriter screed about how Obama’s going to use those eeeeeeeeeeeevil Super PACS in his campaign.  I mean it, too.  Watching the anonymous author come to terms with the fact that he or she was deliberately and callously lied to will warm your insides.

Mind you, the author will still vote for Obama in November. Which is why I’m so contemptuous: don’t expect respect from me if you can’t even respect yourself…

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Believe me, it’s alarming to me, too: but Jon Walker has a point here about Obama’s excitingly new position on Super PACs.

When the Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United ruling, Obama still had one of the largest Democratic majorities in Congress in decades.  But Democrats still didn’t do anything about it. If they viewed that holding as truly critical, the Democrats could have passed a law addressing the issue. Passing legislation about campaign finance reform was simply not a priority for the Obama administration.

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Super PACs are, of course, the political groups that were set up after the Supreme Court’s landmark free speech decision in Citizens United: they are able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money advocating both for and against political candidates, but may not donate to those candidates directly. The Left ostensibly hates them, which did not stop them from using them to raise over 28 million dollars in the 2010 election cycle (44% of total Super PAC fundraising) to the Right’s over 35 million (54%: the other 2% hedged their bets); their general argument is that allowing groups to openly spending money expressing their opinions on candidates is corrosive to American democracy. ‘Openly’ is the key here: Super PACs must generally disclose their donors.

The generally is… the interesting bit.

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