[WASHINGTONEXAMINER] Claiming that thousands of public comments condemning "dark money" in politics can't be ignored, the Democrat-chaired Federal Election Commission on Wednesday appeared ready to open the door to new regulations on donors, bloggers and others who use the Internet to influence policy and campaigns.
During a broad FEC hearing to discuss a recent Supreme Court decision that eliminated some donor limits, proponents encouraged the agency to draw up new funding disclosure rules and require even third-party internet-based groups to reveal donors, a move that would extinguish a 2006 decision to keep the agency's hands off the Internet.
Noting the 32,000 public comments that came into the FEC in advance of the hearing, Democratic Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub said, "75 percent thought that we need to do more about money in politics, particularly in the area of disclosure. And I think that's something that we can't ignore."
But a former Republican FEC chairman said in his testimony that if the agency moves to regulate the Internet, including news voices like the Drudge Report as GOP commissioners have warned, many thousands more comments will flood in in opposition of regulation.
"If you produce a rule that says we are going to start regulating this stuff, including the internet and so on, I think you will see a lot more than 32,000 comments come in and I don't think staff will analyze them and find that 75 percent are favorable to more regulation," said Bradley Smith, now with the Center for Competitive Politics.
Democratic Chairwoman Ann Ravel, who called the hearing, has said she wants to regulate politicking on the Internet, though she has pulled back amid a public outcry, especially among conservatives who see her move as a bid to silence center-right websites and Internet based conservative groups and news sites.
However, there's more than one way to stuff a chicken... two groups, including the League of Women Voters, said they support more disclosure by those who use the Internet to influence campaigns and policy.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/12/2015 00:00 ||
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#1
Dems are afraid the internet is a medium not controlled by their partners in the MSM
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/12/2015 12:03 Comments ||
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#2
The peak of hypocrisy coming from an administration that intentionally did not use basic credit card security checks on their campaign website.
[Rooters] - The Champ singled out office supply giant Staples Inc as undercutting his healthcare reform law and said large corporations should not use the health insurance issue as an excuse for cutting wages, the news website BuzzFeed reported.
"It's one thing when you've got a mom-and-pop store who can't afford to provide paid sick leave or health insurance or minimum wage to workers but when I hear large corporations that make billions of dollars in profits trying to blame our interest in providing health insurance as an excuse for cutting back workers' wages, shame on them," Obama said in an interview with BuzzFeed.
The Affordable Care Act requires companies with more than 50 employees to pay for health insurance for people who work 30 hours a week or more. Reuters has reported that some businesses are keeping staffing numbers below 50 or cutting the work week to less than 30 hours to avoid providing employee health insurance.
Staples, the No. 1 U.S. office supplies retailer, has told its employees not to work more than 25 hours per week, according to a Buzzfeed report on Monday. No surprises here, petulant vindictive anger at work. Tom Stemberg, co-founder of Staples was a big supporter of Romney and Romney's contributions to Staples. Stemberg is not a supporter of the ACA, calls it a "disincentive to work."
#1
Gee, who would have guessed such things would happen? Only damn near every one of us that was shouting it from the treetops when Pelosi and Reid rammed this thru with legislative trickery and outright lies.
#5
In somewhat related cause and effect news; another company is pulling out of Seattle due to the $15 an hour minimum wage issue.
Another "no one could have predicted this" moment.
Posted by: USN, Ret ||
02/12/2015 7:03 Comments ||
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#6
Politicians spewing this nonsense? Symptom, not cause.
The cause is a public which has told itself to one extent or another that showing up to a job which doesn't require a lot of skill to do, or that lots of other people can do equally well, is a magic ticket to a standard of living not justified by the amount they produce.
A public like that will cheer on, and vote for, any politician who tells them that their job should pay more than it does. Never mind the facts.
Sorry, but your work isn't worth the lifestyle you have convinced yourself you deserve. And if you keep voting in politicians who will coerce, regulate, and steal to take money from your boss and neighbors to prop up the lie, sooner or later the whole thing collapses. And then you nave NOTHING.
Right now, it looks like sooner.
You voted away your jobs to other countries basically for beer money.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
02/12/2015 8:17 Comments ||
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You didn't build that!
Remember one of the fundamentals of the Left - Thou shall covet.
#10
Businesses will react to regulations to maiximize their bottom line. Apple, Google and Microsoft sell copr bonds for billions of dollars yet have hundereds of billions on the balance sheet. Why?
Because regulations make it costly to on-shore the dollars. so they sell a bond at 2.5% and use the money on-shore. Is obama ashamed at his liberal buddies at google, apple and microsoft?
They still believe. Because they WANT to believe. Voting in politicians who will use the police and taxation power of the state to take money from your more wealthy and productive neighbors and give you some of that money in amounts that aren't justified by the value of your labor is very much what all Democrats and a significant number of Republicans do.
To be sure, there is a symbiosis there. But in the end, demand creates supply. At other times in history a politician promising this would have been laughed off stage at best and in all likelihood strung up, even by the type of people he was pitching this scheme to.
I doubt very much that if you told an most adults alive in 1910 that they should thuggishly band together to demand more wages than their work justified, or that they should take out a loan to own a house that they couldn't afford to pay for, they would have thought either was a good idea. Something has changed in 100 years. Not for the better. Politicians made it worse by pandering (and delivering on their pandering). But the public itself seems to have no governor on its divorced-from-reality notions about income stream and guarantees thereof. The politicians we have are a reflection of that, not vice versa, IMO.
A British MP has said (I paraphrase) that very nearly all of the problems facing the West today stem from the populations of Western countries vastly overvaluing the worth of their labor in terms of material standard of living and security of the same. I think that will go down as the epitaph for the Anglosphere unless huge changes occur in the next 5-10 years. When a public schoolteacher makes more than the average private worker, when Boston cops average six figures, and when UAW guys are making $80.00 an hour to watch robots build cars, we've lost our mind as a society. Millionaire CEO's are annoying, but their cumulative effect on our downfall is nothing compared to scores of millions of overpaid union members and government employees sucking the life out of the economy. Even the welfare sector is less of a problem than that.
Let's redefine "working class" and "middle class" back to what our grandparents did, adjust lifestyles accordingly and you'll see the country recover in not too many years. Don't do this, and it's the Mad Max times for sure.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
02/12/2015 11:23 Comments ||
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We need an industry unification plan and have those industries doing well to pay for the ones that don't. They have millions and they can support it.
Only problem is that when you lose money long enough you go bankrupt. Then you ain't got jack sh*t.
Anybody who voted for the Affordable Care Act is delusional, lazy, stupid, or malevolent. And that was a majority of congress. How f*cked are we? We're really really f*cked.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
02/12/2015 15:18 Comments ||
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So here is a guy that has never run a business, not even a hot dog stand. Someone that in 6 years has yet to balance the budget, or even propose one. Once bankrupt he proceeded to write bade checks, IE Quantitative easing, and borrow money from the global loan shark-China. And now I'm supposed to listen to him lecture a solvent company about fiscal responsibility? I would be better served to ask a 10 year old for advice...
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
02/12/2015 17:33 Comments ||
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no mo, when you get down to the very bottom you're, of course correct, the public voted for this.
I think it was Adam Smith that first said that a democratic system would work only until the public realized they could vote themselves other peoples money.
By putting in place a constitutional republic the founders slowed the momentum but the brakes eventually failed. How about we go back to the State legislators appointing the Senators?
[ISRAELNATIONALNEWS] Jen Psaki ...a valley girl who woke up one morning and found she was spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of State... the latest Obama spokesperson to stutter an explanation as to why he described the attack on kosher store as just 'random'.
They subsequently walked it back, according to The Times of Israel. The queer thing is, up until that point State had always called it an antisemitic attack. It was only when President Obama said it was random that they temporarily changed their tune to match his.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/12/2015 00:00 ||
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#4
If I was an American Jew I would have to take a hard look at the Republican Party and consider changing my party affiliation to it. The Democrats have politically turned on Jews and Israel in an insidious way.
#8
#4 If I was an American Jew I would have to take a hard look at the Republican Party and consider changing my party affiliation to it.
78% of the American Jewish voters voted for Obama in 2008. This number decreased to about 66% for the Donks in the 2010 midterm elections. In the 2012 Presidential election the support for Obama and his policies declined another 2%. Obama lost about 14% of the Jewish support over time. Obama is not well-liked in Israel but unfortunately they do not vote in the U.S. The Israeli Jew is a different kind of person than the American Jew. I wonder when the American Jew is going to realize that Obama is an anti-semite?
#9
Our State Department is a dumping ground for a large number of leftists. Their spokespeople say and do a lot of inane things which make little sense. Much of it feeds into our enemies' game plans.
#10
I seriously believe ObamaCo is in survival-induced denial, owing that if the American public knew what was really going on, we would be seriously untidying our whities.
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