THE CAMPAIGN REFORM FRAUD

THE CAMPAIGN REFORM FRAUD
Chicago Tribune: Even before the new federal law designed to do away with soft money political donations went into effect, party officials and lobbyists were forming new groups to slip, slide and skirt around it. So say four campaign finance advocacy groups that have filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.
They accuse officials of both parties and two prominent Republican lobbyists of conspiring to evade the ban on unlimited contributions to political parties by forming new organizations, either openly or secretly, for the sole purpose of evading the law and allowing the rivers of campaign cash to flow uninterrupted.
Well, of course they are. It was naive to expect anything different to happen.
The McCain-Feingold campaign finance law is desperately flawed for a number of reasons. The most significant: It is a blatant government curb on the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment. Beyond that: It doesn't bring honesty to campaign politics, it doesn't level the playing field for candidates, it doesn't achieve any of the high-minded purposes for which its sponsors say it was created.
Fund-raising machines
Quite the opposite, the law gives new advantages to candidates who can fund their own campaigns or who have large, well-oiled fund-raising machines that are well-tuned to gathering lots of small donations. It disadvantages critics of incumbents who might seek to be heard around election time.
That is, all the advantages go to incumbent members of Congress. McCain-Feingold is, if anything, a self-preservation tool for the people who voted to make it law.
Even before the ink was dry on McCain-Feingold, whopping loopholes appeared that allow party leaders to set up organizations outside the party structure, call them independent advocacy organizations, and continue to raise unlimited cash. The law doesn't put a secure lid on money or its influence in politics. It does provide new funding channels that will make it more difficult to figure out who is bankrolling the campaigns.
The lawsuit has been filed by four groups, Democracy 21, Common Cause, the Campaign and Media Legal Center and the Center for Responsive Politics. They have named as defendants the Democratic and Republican congressional committees; the Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Terence R. McAuliffe; Joseph Carmichael, chairman of the Democratic State Parties Organization; the Leadership Forum and two GOP lobbyists, Bill Paxon and Susan Hirshmann, who are forum officers.
Democratic and Republican officials deny any connections between the parties and the independent organizations that supposedly are flouting the law. But even if the party leaders had a hand in all this, it's not clear they violated the law. It appears to have been written in such a way as to allow the FEC to exempt organizations that the parties created prior to Nov. 6, even if they were created specifically to skirt the new soft-money ban.
A LITTLE GOES A LONG WAY
Los Angeles Times: If the refrigerator police have their way, the current weeks of bounteous holiday food and drink might simply illustrate everything that's wrong about America. It's not just that all that food makes you fat. It also might kill you.
Humans have been ratted out. Literally. Laboratory experiments on rodents and other animals suggest that drastically decreasing caloric intake -- in plain English, starving yourself -- might significantly increase human lifespan, to as much as 110 years, and defer heart disease and other ailments. Rats that haven't been subjected to the spartan diet droop listlessly in their declining years, whereas rodents who have been put on the diet cavort friskily in their cages.
The National Institute on Aging has begun scientific trials involving about 200 people to see whether humans are no different from rats and other creatures in this regard. These pioneers are forgoing gastronomic pleasures to eat low-calorie diets in the hope of longer lives.
Heartburn
The test will take years, but presumably McDonald's and other fast-food chains that bombard consumers with super-sized sodas and juicy hamburgers are already suffering from heartburn. McDonald's is being sued by overweight customers. What's next on the menu for the tort industry? Ninety-nine-pound weaklings suing because they aren't even skinnier?
Scientists theorize that drastically restricting calorie intake may reduce production of damaging free radicals in the body by reducing metabolism. Therefore, it may be that no amount of exercise would have the same effect on longevity as semistarvation.
Whether those souls who gird themselves to follow such a diet will lead happier lives is a less answerable question. It's also the case that something seems a little off about reducing Americans to a mass of guilt for eyeing another slice of pizza.
In the December Atlantic magazine, cultural critic Jonathan Rauch notes that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans' life expectancy has reached a high of 77 years. "If Americans are living longer...," he asks, "what exactly is the problem?"