[Congressman Billybob]

As said on the other thread, there will be two kinds of ads. The print ones will go in friendly (conservative) newspapers. However, the TV ad run 29 days before the primary WILL appear on the only TV station in this district.

Long before the current revision in the federal election laws, there was a provision that broadcasters MUST run any prepaid ad offered by a federal candidate (House, Senate, President). And they CANNOT censor such ads. Witness presidential candidate Barry Commoner's ad that used the word "Bullsh*t" about the Republicans and Democrats generally, and it WAS run on a national, radio network.

That network did NOT want to run that ad. But the law said they HAD to run it, and they did. The national media picked up on that ad big time and provided free ink. They never, however, quoted that word.

This has been thought through. Details like that are buttoned up in advance.

John / Billybob

[El Gato]

I don't see how a cannidate running the ad is running afoul of the law in the first place. There are issues of hard money donations to the cannidate, but if the cannidate is running the ad, isn't that allowed under the Act? I'm sure I'm missing something here. The act is complicated, you can't possibly understand what it does without having a copy of the US code handy since it doesn't go in all in one place and refers to many sections of the code.

For this non lawyer, although my daughter and her husband are lawyers, just wading through the syllabus of the decision was enough to make me want to go out and wash my brain. IMHO, that alone was enough to gag a maggot, as my mother would say. :)