More Money In Politics, Now!
THECONTINUINGCRISIS Indian Eunuchs Irked by Sexist Census Practicing "non-invasive sex," they dispute "male" classification A Valentine's Day outrage February has expired. The month went badly...
...If he had invested so paltry a sum in a private company, meditated Andreessen, no one would have noticed...
...The decisions about how this huge sum is to be spent are made by 100 Senators and 435 Congressmen...
...The American Civil Liberties Union rightly objected, as did anti-abortion groups, the National Rifle Association and the Christian Coalition...
...Campaign spending limits have been a particular boon to one class of challenger: rich, bored, and often not very bright liberals, most of whom inherited their money and have little idea of the virtues required to amass it originally...
...They get caught so frequently...
...TAS...
...Nippon Television Network canceled a proposed broadcast of a Godzilla movie featuring scenes of Godzilla accosting fishing boats, so as to avoid rude comparisons...
...Today spending any sensible amount of money on this goal is made effectively illegal by the severe limits on fundraising...
...profligate incumbents and high-taxer darlings of the press...
...early in February was treated for "depression" in a local jail, according to the Australian press, and presumably released on its own recognizance...
...If they were Americans they would have voted for Al-Gore...
...In the next two-year period, we can safely assume that the Congress will spend at least $4 trillion...
...The theretofore happy bridegroom suddenly gurgled and collapsed minutes after tucking into one of Miss Li's breakfast specialties, which police contend contained rat poison...
...Miss Li Huijie's deplorable cooking skills have gotten her in hot water with local officials once again...
...At her press conference three million of their constituents were too lazy or disorganized to fill out census forms, the United States Census Bureau recommended the government send "unadjusted" census counts to the states for redrawing congressional districts...
...It's a heck of an idea...
...It is time for the creative faction in American society, otherwise known as the top one percent, to reach a similar conclusion about the charge that unlimited citizen donations would allow them to buy elections...
...All the dolorous pother left Mr...
...RET More Money in Politics, Now...
...The talk is of reforming our campaign finance laws, but the broader issue of money and politics gets surprisingly little attention...
...IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, that baby penguin found wandering in a "dazed state" near a McDonald's restaurant at 2:30 a.m...
...Free-spending, citizen-funded, big-budget elections would decrease the relative power of the press and PACs (which ought to be eliminated anyway) and the advantages of incumbency, all of which tend to favor taxers, spenders, and regulators...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 11 along, and no one has kowtowed to them more brazenly than John McCain...
...The notorious soft money, by the way, seems to have accounted for a mere 16 percent of the total...
...Far more important is the depressing effect this limit has on campaign spending in general...
...There is no truth to the rumor he will flee to Tokyo, where the Kydo news service finds that seventy percent of the female teenagers at two of that city's finest high schools have been groped...
...In Washington, DC, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called a February 22 press conference where she attempted to notify reporters that she was "heartbroken" upon hearing that her big fat brother, Mr...
...admits to having used the rat poison in her "hot sauce," perhaps in hopes that it would live up to claims made by an American cookbook promising "a hot sauce to die for...
...Xu's remains were found amongst the tigers who, authorities speculate, were aroused by "the smell...
...Left to their own devices, surely, voters would spend a great deal more money if by doing so they could gain control over Washington's massive redistributions...
...news story, commentary or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication, unless such facilities are owned or controlled by any political party, political committee or candidate...
...When equally unimpressive Republican millionaire Michael Huffington spent $29 million on an unsuccessful bid for a California senate seat in 1994, we were supposed to be appalled...
...When McCain-Feingold came up in 1999, it included controversial restrictions on "issue advertising" by private groups on radio and television in the 60 days before an election...
...Moynihan accused the Reagan administration of deliberately lofting the deficit to push down spending, it occurred to many Reaganites that he had a heck of an idea...
...Huang Zhiqiang (Miss Li's fourth husband in three years...
...Xu had no prior record of defecating on cats...
...The eunuchs, whose traditional source of income is begging, prostitution, and performing at weddings, christenings, and housewarmings, are demanding that census takers subsume them into a category somewhere between male and female, say "undersex" or "oversex...
...More to the point, how much would it be worth to mount effective campaigns against those who take too much of our money and spend it badly, but are protected by the political advantages that inhere to individual contributions to campaigns...
...In her excellent book on politics in Silicon Valley, How to Hack a Party Line, Sara Miles relates that when Web-browser inventor Marc Andreessen gave $250,000 to the Democratic National Committee—through the "soft-money 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 loophole"—he was surprised by the huge reaction he got from grateful Dems...
...Clinton's half-brother, Roger, was formally charged with drunk driving and trying to pick a public fight...
...To be sure, more money would be raised and spent by both incumbents and challengers, high-taxers and low...
...ENDING MONTHS OF CONTROVERSY with Democrats, who fear that as many as Miss Li's deplorable cooking skills landed her in hot water again after she admitted to having used rat poison in her hot sauce...
...The news media have been wildly enthusiastic about McCain-Feingold all 'We'd have been here sooner, R.L., but my junior partner threw a shoe...
...Fixed in 1971, that figure has never been adjusted for inflation, and is now worth $235...
...Xu might have been encouraged in his reckless evacuation by the Chinese government's campaign to improve the quality of Beijing's public lavatories whose cramped and uninviting conditions could diminish Beijing's chances of becoming an Olympic site...
...Citing the sudden death of Mr...
...police charged Miss Li and her mother with murder...
...The following week the American submarine USS Greeneville sank a Japanese fishing boat off Hawaii...
...It dawned on him just how meager the "money in politics" really is...
...Be brave, John...
...In Cincinnati, Ohio, two local dignitaries were charged with corpse abuse...
...The city will pay for sex-changes undertaken by city employees as part of its health care program...
...Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori came under pressure to resign when it was learned that, after being apprised of the lost Japanese trawler, he continued to play golf, the quintessentially American game...
...Among Beijing's newest lavatories is "the singing toilet...
...The month went badly for the Boy Ex-President with liberal columnists and news media sounding ever more like The American Spectator circa 1994...
...So $5 million "bought" a one-hundredth share of control over the disposition of about 10 trillion dollars...
...Incumbents, over time, tend to join the "government party" of taxers and spenders...
...But the more cash available to both candidates, the less the relative importance of the non-cash advantages of incumbency or the media's favoritism for high-taxers...
...WHILE ANNOUNCING PLANS to revitalize the American military with "new technology" President Bush threw European leaders into confusion by declaring "God Bless NATO...
...Thousands of Hindus near and around historic Lucknow attacked shops selling Valentines Day cards, which they found "loaded with nudity and sex...
...He is a professional singer...
...Jonathan Tobias allowed a photographer, Mr...
...As the First Amendment clearly requires, they are allowed to spend their own money on their campaigns...
...Rodham's request...
...As for Miss Li, she Senator Clinton insisted that her brother's $400,000 "came as a surprise to me...
...He tried to hit up the taxpayers for plush digs in Carnegie Hall...
...The invaluable South China Morning Post reports that nineteen-year-old Mr...
...Facing a filibuster in the Senate, and the complaint that it blatantly violated the First Amendment, the provision was removed from the Senate bill...
...The consequence of reform, unintended by Common Cause, is that the Senate is filling up with dim multi-millionaires, not This year, the issue-advocacy ban has been put back in, perhaps as "veto bait," allowing legislators to vote for "reform" while providing Bush a nice defensible grounds for a veto...
...How much money should we spend to elect those representatives...
...Hugh Rodham, had accepted $400,000 for advocating clemency for two felonious supporters...
...Their motives aroused unwholesome conjecture after authorities established they lacked authorization from any National Endowment...
...Xu Xiaodong, a tiger keeper at Beijing's Jinan Zoo, was mauled to death after attempting to defecate on his cats...
...IN OKINAWA, CITY OFFICIALS ADOPTED a resolution demanding that the chief of United States military forces there be fired for calling his Japanese hosts "nuts" and "wimps...
...A good chief financial officer How much would it be worth to mount effective campaigns against those who take too much of our money and spend it badly...
...Here is how cheap it is to join Congress, measured against how much money you control when you get there: In the 1998 Senate races, winning candidates raised $161 million in all, for an average of just under $5 million per race...
...Bush sent American aircraft to bomb an Islamic country, the first non-political American bombing since his father was President and a clear break with the Clinton Administration's policy of Bombs for Boobs...
...That restricting the Times would be unconstitutional is no defense...
...Twenty years ago, when Sen...
...President Bush proposes, for example, that in the coming year, the Federal government shall spend $1.98 trillion...
...If the senator is as principled as he constantly tells us, why not summon the publisher of the New York Times and the network bosses to testify on Capitol Hill, inquire how much they spend on political coverage, and suggest that they be subjected to expenditure limits under the law just like everyone else...
...But even these sums are large only relative to what candidates who cannot evade the donor limits spend...
...That is $1,980 billion...
...Former President Clinton admitted to knowing that fees had been paid to his roly-poly brother-in-law...
...Nevertheless it is interesting to note that this provision, which clamps down on speech by advocacy groups, includes a specific exemption for the press, noting that "expenditure" does not include "any The Senate is filling up with dim liberal multimillionaires, not because they have so much money but because citizens are allowed to spend so little...
...The most well-known effect of this limit is to force candidates—driven to distraction by the need to cajole thousands of people each to come up with a thousand dollars—to turn instead to PACs, which can give $5,000, or to soft money, which comes in unlimited amounts...
...Meanwhile, San Francisco is taking (CONTINUED ON PAGE 10) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 positive measures on behalf of its eunuchs...
...Why should the Times be allowed to spend its money circulating editorials if National Right to Life cannot...
...In the same year, it is estimated, Washington will collect $2.2 trillion in taxes...
...Where is the logic in that...
...No one knows why the Clintons continue to lie in public...
...Thus the $3 billion we spend to elect federal politicians amounts to only 0.075 percent of what they in turn will redistribute in an attempt to secure their reelection...
...He and she made off with this and that...
...though, he lied, that he was unaware of the payments when he granted Mr...
...But Huffington's bid amounted to but a dollar per resident...
...In progressive India, census officials had a tougher time...
...That would get their attention, and ours...
...Clinton's friends pensively speculating upon what their idol's next contretemps might be...
...Hindus are very strict...
...Apparently Australian law bans the incarceration of penguins for longer than forty-eight hours...
...Thomas Condon, to take pictures of cadavers whom he posed with such trinkets as syringes, sheet music, and a key...
...Later in February, despite his strong standing in the polls and with no sign of scandal or impeachment impending, Mr...
...There, the Asian Age reports, the country's eunuchs are incensed at being listed as males...
...IN henan PROVINCE, CHINA...
...On February 22, Mr...
...Total spending in the latest political cycle, including all spending on the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Al Gore, all the money spent on all 435 congressional races last year, the 34 Senate races, and all the "soft money" given to the parties, all the television advertising, all the consulting and polling fees, and so on, over a two-year period, came to an estimated $3 billion...
...They collected twelve tins of rat poison from Miss Li's kitchen as evidence that she killed all four husbands for their worldly possessions...
...But the government's ever-expanding involvement in the life of the nation justifies a defensive response by the taxed and the regulated...
...the restriction on advocacy groups is just as clearly so...
...For all the soft-money, PAC-money talk, the most salient rule governing election spending is still the limit of $1,000 on would say it is a dangerously small percentage for oversight...
...By mid-month the editorials in the New York Times were calling the forty-second president worse "than the expectations of his most cynical critics...
...Congress was then spending about $1.7 trillion a year, and a senator is in office for six years...
...The anti-fragrance movement got a boost when Swedish scientists announced that trees coated with pine weevil excrement are offensive to Swedish bugs...
...because they have so much money but because citizens are allowed to spend so little...
...Deputy coroner Dr...
...There is no more common refrain in Washington than "there's too much money in politics...
...Despite exposure to American television the girls do not like it...
...PAC money accounted for approximately $232 million...
...Now if only anti-fragrance activists can link pine weevil excrement to, say, Chanel Number Five or deodorant they may become as big as the animal rights movement...
...Last year the average cost of a Senate seat was up by 2 million, to $7.2 million, inflated by three record-breaking campaigns by Maria Cantwell in Washington, Mark Dayton in Minnesota and, at $60 million, Jon Corzine in New Jersey...
...Wow, they had never seen so much in one chunk...
...For taxpayers, that is not a favorable balance of power...
Vol. 34 • April 2001 • No. 3
