No, looks like martin brought that in. He just referenced Red's issue with political appointees while promoting his libertarians. I thought you were making addressing that earlier.
Companies like vice president's former company Haliburton are awarded $billions in no-bid contracts. Elected officials appoint thousands of agency heads like "Helluva Job" Brownie on the basis of patronage, not qualifications. Almost all state and local agency heads are appointed. Assuring that the appointees are qualified is not always a part of the process. My point is that an elected official who doesn't know the dollars doesn't owe the favor. He is under less pressure to reward patrons with political appointments and is more likely to hire qualified individuals who will do their jobs well and make him look good.
in red's communist world the gestapo prevents you from telling a candidate when you gave him money. if you tell him, the death squads come to you house and beat you. the candidate has to pretend he doesnt know where the money in his account came from or he is also beaten by the gestapo. if exxon writes a letter to bush telling him how much they gave, bush burns the letter, kills the postman and the accounting firm that certifies the truth of the letter. everyone pretends they dont know who gives money to who. it is a great system.
you have a completely unrealistic idea of how the government can supress information. if people want to donate and they want the recipient to know about it, you arent gonna be able to stop them. and it would be an incredible waste of time to try, as well as a violation of of people's rights to do and say what they want. again, you cant solve every problem by restricting people and forcing your will on them.
i am not having them do anything. they just do it. and i am not going to stop them from doing what they want, or force them to do what i want. they are not my slaves. people will give to candidates they like, thats all there is to it. people should not be denied the right to choose who they do and who they do not donate money to. nor should they have some ridiculous secrecy pact shoved down their thorat.
Okay, what if instead of wording it your way where we are denying people's right to donate money to who they want - we deny a candidate's right to accept that money. It's already illegal for them to accept bribes, we could simply expand the definition.
you shoulnt be trying to deny anyone anything. if you dont like bought candidates, vote for somebody else. and it should be your right as an american to run for political office and have your friends help you finance the campaign. it is amazing to me what people want to the government to do to us. restrict this, ban that, cripple our rights every chance they get.
plus, for every rule you try to enact there are so many ways people will invent around it that would cause the whole scene to be a mockery of law. candidates would collect donatioans before they officially announced they were going to run, and collect as much as they needed. what are you gonna do, ban donations to people who might run? or candidates would start "independent" organizations that happen to favor electing them and they money would go their instead and work just the same. even if the candidate didnt endorse the organization, we would all know where to put our money for candidate x. you can ban candidate donations all you want, but i will start "citizens for bush" instead. and we at CFB just happen to do the exact same things with our money that bush would do, we run the same ads on the same channels, produced by the same marketing companies, except we can mudsling even more, because we are not officially tied to the candidate (although secretly i am on the phone with karl rove). dont try to stop people from doing things they should be allowed to do and will do whether you like it or not.
