The truth about political money

Back in the 1970s, the federal government set up a system for financing presidential campaigns. People could check a box on their income tax form, designating a buck or two (originally $1, now $3) to go into a presidential election fund. Once the two major parties had settled on nominees, the pot would be split and the candidates would each get a check. In exchange, the candidates had to agree to a limit on how much they would spend.

Through 2008, EVERY Republican and Democrat presidential candidate agreed to the spending limit and took the public financing, except one.

Barack Obama.

In 2008, Barry and his handlers determined that they could raise WAY more money than John McCain, and so they passed up the public financing, blew past the spending limit, won the presidency and inflicted their idea of "Hope and Change" on the American economy.

I didn't have a problem with that. I've always thought campaign spending limits were not only infantile, but a serious affront to the idea of free speech and the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has agreed, which is why spending limits have to be voluntary. A state cannot say to a guy running for governor, "You can only spend $4 million on this race." They have to create a voluntary system that says, "If you agree to only spend $4 million, we'll provide some of the money." It has to be a carrot-and-stick approach, otherwise it violates the First Amendment. Barry chose to pass on the money and ignore the limit, and as I said, I have no problem with that.

What I DO have a problem with is this: Now it's four years later, and it appears that the Romney team is going to be able to at least match the Obama money machine dollar-for-dollar, or maybe even raise more. Suddenly the liberals are absolutely wetting the bed again about "too much money in politics." What they really mean is "We don't have an advantage any more, so it's not fair."

What's changed the landscape and become the left's new boogeyman is a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United. In that case, the Supremes essentially removed limits on unions and corporations that wished to spend money to support or oppose various candidates. This had the effect of leveling a playing field that had been largely dominated by leftist groups, and it's one of the reasons the Romney campaign will not enter the fall at a financial disadvantage.

(Side note: One of the left's talking points on the night of the Wisconsin recall was that Citizens United had allowed Gov. Scott Walker to raise huge sums and "buy" the election. In fact, Citizens United had nothing to do with the race, and Walker's ability to raise money was regulated by a Wisconsin state law specifically written - and passed by the Legislature on a bipartisan basis - to cover Wisconsin recall elections. But that didn't stop the idiots on MSNBC and other places from repeating the lie. But I digress.)

What I've always thought interesting about presidential campaign spending is not how much we spend on the campaigns, but how little. Consider this:

In 2008, Obama and John McCain combined to spend about $2.8 billion on advertising. (Some sources will tell you the campaigns spent over $5 billion, but that's total campaign spending - salaries, travel, office space, etc. - not advertising.)

To put that $2.8 billion number in perspective, consider this: That same year, Verizon, Sprint and AT&T spent about $5.6 billion advertising cell phone service. That's right, just three companies spent DOUBLE the money spent by the presidential campaigns on advertising.

A little more perspective: Total advertising dollars spent this year - on everything from toothpaste to motor oil to fast food - will be somewhere a little north of $150 billion. Obama and Romney will spend perhaps $5 billion, or only about 3% of all ad spending.

Keep in mind that we're debating some serious issues here. Who will hold the office of President of the United States? Who will be considered the Leader of the Free World? Will trillion-dollar deficits continue? Will Social Security and Medicare be reformed in time to save them from collapse?

Pretty heavy stuff. And do we really want to say that by spending less than 4% of all the advertising dollars in America debating those issues we have too much political speech? Do we really want less public debate about who sits in the White House than we have about whether GEICO or Progressive saves you more on car insurance?

Look, I find a lot of political advertising irritating, distasteful and deceptive. But I can say the same thing about Charles Barkley hawking Weight Watchers. It doesn't mean I get to have him silenced, it just means I can choose not to believe the message, or I can buy an ad promoting some other weight-loss scheme.

As George Will and others have eloquently written, the antidote to free speech you don't like is not limiting speech, it's having even MORE free speech.

The way in which we choose to spend our money is simply another way in which we exercise our First Amendment rights of free expression. And if George Soros chooses to bankroll the political left, or Sheldon Adelson opts to fund the political right, it's all good. The next time you hear someone complain about "too much money" in politics, it's likely that what they really mean is, "I don't want those who disagree with me to have the same freedom of expression I do."

The curious incident of the State of Rhode Island

A friend of mine who lives in South Minneapolis - where Republicans are feared and hunted for their meat - reports that a stranger came to the door the other day and asked her to sign a petition to "oppose Voter ID."

Of course, "Voter ID" is shorthand for the constitutional amendment question that will be on the ballot in Minnesota this November, asking voters if they would like to require people to produce a photo ID when they want to vote. I'm not sure what the purpose of a "petition" is, since voters will already get a chance to make their voice heard in November, but then, there are lots of things Minneapolis liberals do that mystify me.

My friend said that she was actually in favor of the ID requirement, making the perfectly reasonable point that you already need an ID for most of life's basic transactions. She said she regarded ensuring election integrity to be at least as important as the ability to purchase malt liquor, to name just one of the things for which ID is needed these days.

This produced the REAL reason the stranger at the doorstep opposed an ID requirement. "It's just a plan by Republicans to keep minorities from voting," he said. Ah, of course.

Her recitation of this conversation put me in mind of the good folks of Rhode Island, whose legislators took up the question of photo ID requirements in 2011.

The thing you need to understand about Rhode Island is that in the Ocean State, Republicans are nearly as scarce as they are in the nirvana of South Minneapolis. Their two U.S. Senators are both Democrats. Their two congressional representatives are Democrats. The Lt. Governor, Secretary of State, State Treasurer and Attorney General are all Democrats. In the Rhode Island Senate, Democrats outnumber Republicans 29-8, and in the House of Representatives, the Democrat margin is 65-9. Balanced against all of this is the state's Governor who is - wait for it - an Independent.

We're going to find Ron and Nicole's "real killers" before we find an influential Rhode Island Republican.

What diversity there is comes from people like the self-described mixed-race Speaker of the House, Gordon Fox, the son of an Irish-American father and a mother from Cape Verde.

Surely, in this solid-blue state, where Democrats control every button and lever in the great machine of government, where the electorate is more racially and ethnically diverse than Minnesota, (Rhode Island has a lower percentage of whites and higher percentages of blacks and Hispanics than Minnesota, according to 2011 figures from the Census Bureau), surely the racist/Republican/oppressive/disenfranchising concept of a Voter ID requirement could never gain traction, right?

Um, well, yes it could.

Not only did the bill pass, but it was signed into law and implemented for April's primary election. The Boston Globe reports that fewer than 25 people in the entire state lacked the needed ID, and they were allowed to cast provisional ballots. Pretty oppressive, eh?

The black and Hispanic members of the Legislature were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the bill, including Rep. Anastasia Williams, an African-American. She saw the need for Voter ID when she showed up at her polling place in 2006 with her daughter and both of them were told they had already voted. Four years later, she testified, she watched another man vote under one name, go to the parking lot, change clothes and return to vote under another name.

So you have a Democrat black member of the RI legislature, after having seen voter fraud first-hand, supporting a Voter ID law and being joined by the majority of her Democrat colleagues.

Yeah, it's all a racist Republican plot.

Thinking of the Gipper

These first few days of June - as I think I've written before - always fill me with Reagan nostalgia. June 5 is the anniversary of his death, June 6 marks the immortal "Boys of Pointe Du Hoc" D-Day speech in 1984, and yesterday, June 8, was the 30th anniversary of his famous speech at Westminster Hall, where he said that Communism and the Soviet Union were headed for "the ash heap of history."

Of course, the lefties went nuts. Reagan was a war monger, an idiot who would blow up the world in a nuclear war. And of course, they couldn't have been more wrong. On the day Reagan threw down the gauntlet at Westminster, we were less than a decade away from the collapse of the Soviet Union, which brought freedom and opportunity to millions of people that the American left would have been happy to leave enslaved by Communism.

We lost him eight years ago this week, but his smile, his commitment to freedom, his optimism and his love of America live on. It's hard to pick out my favorite Reagan quote, but this one is right up there: "Above all, we must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women."

We miss you, Gipper.




http://timdroogsma.brandyourself.com/
 

One little, two little, three little Indians......

Take a moment to read through these three possible facts about me:

A) I'm Native American. My great-grandmother was a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, making me one-sixteenth Indian.

B) I come from a family of great race-car drivers. My great-grandfather drove in the Indy 500 and my father raced stock cars at the Princeton Speedway, where I learned to drive.

C) My family's military history is star-studded. An early ancestor was at Yorktown to witness Cornwallis' surrender to Washington, and my great-great grandfather fought at Gettysburg.

So which – if any - of these statements are true about me? Apparently it doesn't matter, because now, according to Elizabeth Warren, we are all “what we know” we are.

In case you've missed the story, Warren is a Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, and she has a bit of a problem. It turns out that Warren has been advertising herself as Cherokee for a few decades, which allowed some of her employers – Harvard and Penn universities among them – to list her as a “minority” on various forms and reports, thereby satisfying their consciences that they were “diverse” enough.

Warren's tale about her ancestry – and its role in advancing her career – seems to change weekly. First she denied telling Harvard that she was a Cherokee. Then it was discovered that she'd been listing herself as an Indian years before she joined the Harvard faculty. The she suddenly “remembered” that she HAD mentioned it to Penn and Harvard after all, but certainly not in a way that would have helped her get hired. 

Of course not.

Whether her heritage played a role in her hiring or not is, of course, an unanswerable question, since only those who made the hiring decision know what internal calculations they made, and they're not talking much about it. But it goes without saying that being a “minority” member is absolute gold in elite academic circles.

What's particularly amazing about the Warren story is this: There's no evidence whatsover that she has any Cherokee blood in her!

She claims to be 1/32^nd Cherokee based on family lore and the alleged “high cheekbones” of one of her ancestors. But there is no documentation, no genealogy records, not one single shred of proof that anyone among her ancestors was an Indian. The New England Genealogical Society – one of the nation's premier ancestry organizations – backed away from its initial support for her Cherokee heritage claim when it couldn't find any supporting evidence or documentation.

But the lack of proof isn't stopping Warren. She told the Boston Globe this week that the proof is in her family stories. “It’s who I am, it’s how I grew up. It’s part of the home I grew up in. It’s me, part of me, through and through. I can’t change that.’’

So there you have it. If your parents told you that you were heir to the throne of England, then you're a prince. If they told you that aliens left you on the doorstep, then you're the King of the Milky Way. Whatever you claim to be, you are. Whether Fauxcahontas' genealogy will matter to the voters of Massachusetts remains to be seen.

As for me, alas, there is no famous military hero or race-car driver in my family lineage. There is, however, my great-grandmother, Lulu Trueblood. Part Indian herself, she married a full-blooded Sioux Indian, and I have relatives scattered all over the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota and the sand hills of northwestern Nebraska. My Minnesota-born father – himself the great-grandson of Dutch immigrants – met my Nebraska-born mother when they both were in the Army and stationed in Alabama. They married, had me while living in Michigan and then moved back to Minnesota when I was a toddler. So even though most people would consider me one of the whitest guys they've ever met, I have a far greater claim – and a documented one at that - to minority status than does Elizabeth Warren.

But never in my life did I consider checking a box that said “Native American” next to my name. Those who know me well know how much I abhor identity politics, racial preferences, affirmative action or any other thing that tries to segregate, label and separate us as Americans. Perhaps there would have been additional scholarship money while in college, or a job promotion somewhere along the line, but I would never have sought it nor felt right about it.

(Personally, I'm most grateful for what appears to be a dominant Sioux genetic feature of a full head of hair. At age 55, there's not a hint – knock on wood - of a receding hairline or any thinning. When was the last time you saw a bald Indian?)

“The content of their character” was Martin Luther King's idea of how his children would be judged, and the fact that someone's great-great-grandfather was a slave, or was attacked by Custer or arrived on a boat from the poorest country in Europe shouldn't have anything to do with how their descendants are treated today. We each need to rise or fall on our own merits.

Which is why the world view of Elizabeth Warren – not to mention Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the other race hustlers – is such poison in American society. We can decide to thrive for a few more centuries as “Americans,” or we can descend into a dark, divisive world of tribal identities that eventually tears society apart at the seams.

The really sad part of Elizabeth Warren's story isn't that she might have hustled her way into a cushy job, or added some cachet to the Harvard faculty list. It's that she thinks a hypothetical link to someone from a hundred years ago defines “who I am.” If she really believes that, I pity her.

Ooooh....ouch.....ohhhh....

There were few things more fun tonight than watching the crowd as Tom Barrett made his concession speech tonight in Wisconsin's recall election. This was one room full of bummed-out folks.

With Barrett having lost to Gov. Scott Walker by six points 18 months ago, the Cheesehead lefties spent tens of millions of dollars of their union members' money to orchestrate another loss, this time by about nine points (as of 11:20 p.m., with 93% of the vote in.) I suppose if you gave them another 18 months and another $20 million, they could lose by 15 points.

I don't say this often, but they've earned it tonight: Well done, Badgers! Now we can go back to considering ALL of you a bunch of gap-toothed, knuckle-dragging, alcoholic Packer fans. (My Menomonie in-laws excluded, of course!)

The buffoonery of Jesse Jackson

It's been at least a couple decades now since Jesse Jackson completed his transition from civil rights activist to full-time circus clown. Wherever there's a TV camera and the chance to scream "racism," you can count on Jesse to show up and say something mind-numbingly stupid. It's his special gift.

This past weekend he showed up in Wisconsin, anxious to be part of the left-wing freak show that is the Gov. Scott Walker recall effort. Arriving in a $100,000 Mercedes, accompanied by a $75,000 Cadillac, this "man of the people" told the crowd that Walker had to be removed from office because, in part, "Milwaukee is the number one most segregated big city in America…and number four in poverty."

Sharing the platform with Jesse was the man opposing Walker - Tom Barrett - who happens to have been the Mayor of Milwaukee for the past eight years.

Funny stuff, JJ. Keep up the schtick.

Lies, damn lies and Bernadette Gillick

Just when you think the "progressive" movement in Wisconsin couldn't get any scummier, up steps a woman named Bernadette Gillick to show us how desperate and evil Wisconsin Democrats have become.

The lying Dr. Gillick

Gillick, hours before the Wisconsin recall election, made up a story about her college roommate, and said that the roommate had been impregnated by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker while he was a college student at Marquette University back in 1988.

Dr. Gillick spun a tale of how Walker got her roommate "Ruth" pregnant, then disavowed paternity and abandoned Ruth to raise the child herself. "I cannot listen to his lies anymore," Gillick told something called the "Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-Op" in a story you can read here. "I cannot dream of how anyone would support such an evil man. Once a man shows that he has no soul, there is nothing more.”

Except that the whole story is a bald-faced lie.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel tracked down Gillick's roommate, who said that, yes, she did become pregnant her freshman year, but denied that Walker was the father. Another liberal wacko claimed the story had to be true, because the Wisconsin court records system listed a paternity case involving a "Scott Walker." Except that the court case involved a Scott Alan Walker, and the governor's name is Scott Kevin Walker, and the two men have different birthdates.

Sadly, the taxpayers of Minnesota play a role in this story, since Gillick's salary is paid by the University of Minnesota, where she is an assistant professor teaching physical therapy. According to the U of M's web site, she is enrolled in graduate school there as well.

In case you'd like to let Dr. Gillick know what you think of her scummy attempt at character assassination, her email is gillick@umn.edu, and her office phone # is 612-626-3121.

UPDATE: Even the Daily Kos web site - where they are usually proud to spread any vicious lie they can about conservatives - has backed away from Dr. Gillick's story. They had a link to it but have scrubbed the story from their web site.