The "sky is falling" tenor of this organization's communications is getting tedious. I know that generating fear and anxiety was the Republican stock in trade, but, in case someone didn't notice, their schtick got retired in 2008.

We are now into 2010 and it's time to focus on accomplishments.

You say there are none? Well, find some, and do it quick.


In the mean time, the maundering over the Supreme Court decision putting an end to campaign finance regulation as Washington had come to know it is really misplaced. That McCain/Feingold was un-Constitutional was obvious from the start--a typical authoritarian effort to regulate and restrict the populace, instead of the agents of government and known malefactors.

The Constitution provides a good model in defining what the agents of government may and must do. It does less well prohibiting abuses of power because the framers probably assumed that, if our agents minded their ps and qs, they wouldn't go too far wrong.

In the interim, the long tradition of people in power doing favors for their buds keeps resurfacing. Democrats make a little effort to hide it by bragging "see, how we've got the special interests to serve the public in exchange for letting them have a monopoly." Republicans just dole out benefits to the rich and threats to the poor, so that latter get the message--"it could be worse; the rich could just be thieving without intermediation."

If our agents of government weren't in the habit of doling out favors and tying any regulation that actually benefits the country as a whole or prevents some disaster to special considerations, it wouldn't be necessary for them to be lobbied for what they are already paid to do.

In any event, if we don't want public officials and candidates for public office to accept anticipatory bribes, then accepting money from anyone, other than individual citizens who are also qualified to vote for a particular person, is what ought to be proscribed. Why regulate the donor when it's the solicitor who needs to be controlled? If the answer is that legislators are loath to regulate themselves, my response is to get a better class of legislators.

Corruption in my book, btw, is getting paid twice to either do or not do the task for which one was hired. On the other hand, the notion that there's a direct correlation between dollars spent on advertising and votes in the ballot box is insulting and (as a matter of fact) demonstrably false. The President's quip that Brown "parked his truck on Wall Street" probably got him more votes from people who'd like to park THEIR trucks on Wall Street and give the banksters a piece of their mind than anything the Club for Growth, amply funded by that family enterprise, the Stephens Group, down in Arkansas, actually spent. Being a "closely held" private corporation, the Stephens Group and their friends at WalMart and Monsanto didn't have any restrictions on them anyway.

So, let's cut out the whining. OK?