election-related blurbs

[geekchick]

Conservative Republican Democrat Zell Miller is set to speak at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night. I'm sure there's *some* reason he still calls himself a Democrat, but I'm sure I don't know what it might be.

What was that Ralphie said about drawing support from the right as well as the left? Yeah, well, sort of... Some conservative groups in Oregon are working the phones to drum up support for Nader's bid to be included on the ballot. Not because they agree with Nader, unsurprisingly; they're doing it to draw votes away from John Kerry in a swing state.

Some right-wingnuts are claiming that advertisements for left-wingnut Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" violate campaign finance laws, and they're asking the FEC to take it up.  Moore couldn't buy publicity like this.  Gotta give the man props for flat-out stating that of course the movie isn't fair and it's completely biased; I suppose that puts him ahead of Fox News.

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking that someone should ask the FCC to treat the advertising for Fox I see around the town the same way.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

The problem is, the way the law is written, and given how Moore has been talking, he's probably violating McCain-Feingold, since he's openly said he wants to defeat Bush and he thinks that the movie will help do that. Fox Newsdoes not explictly describe itself as partisan, so it's safe, even though anyone who watches it has to be aware that its pretty darn partisan.

Welcome to the world of lousy law! I was against McCain-Feingold, so I must admit to some schadenfreude at seeing a prominent supporter of it run afoul of it. And yes, I do think this is politcally motivated, but I always thought that McCain-Feingold was going to easily degenerate into that kind of abuse. This kind of reminds me of the independent counsel law, which was pushed by Democrats, opposed by Republicans (who said it was unconstitutional), and then died after a close to twelve year period where there was always an independent counsel, under three different Presidents of two different parties.

But hey, we've been trying to make all sorts of end runs around that pesky First Amendment thing. I think people will understand how McCain-Feingold fits into that.

Reason had some comments on this: one of their contributors jocosely suggested this, and he was kind of startled (http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/005755.shtml#005755) to find out he was being prophetic.