Posted on 04/07/2007 10:56:41 AM PDT by freespirited
...Thompson has never had to show consuming energy as a candidate, never having been in a closely contested race. ... He did not seek reelection in 2002 -- not a painful sacrifice for a man who disliked the Senate: "I'm not 30 years old. I don't want to spend the rest of my life up here. I don't like spending 14- and 16-hour days voting on 'sense of the Senate' resolutions on irrelevant matters." ... As a senator he insistently advocated increasing the government's regulation of politics. One of only four senators who supported McCain's candidacy in 2000, Thompson argued for the McCain-Feingold legislation that regulates the content, timing and amount of political speech.
In 1996, Thompson worked successfully to preserve the (currently collapsing) system of public financing of presidential campaigns. His arguments were replete with the rhetoric standard among advocates of government regulation of political speech...
...he warned of money from "special interests" and asserted that the checkoff system "flat out worked" ... In 1994, according to the IRS, the checkoff was used on 14 percent, of the 114.8 million individual tax returns, so a landslide of 86 percent of forms were filed by taxpayers who rejected participation. Today, use of the checkoff has sunk to just 9.6 percent. Its unpopularity is unsurprising, given that it has allowed a small minority to divert, in a bookkeeping dodge, $1.3 billion of federal revenue to fund the dissemination of political views that many taxpayers disapprove of as much as they disapprove of public funding of politics.
Back then, Thompson believed, implausibly, that voters are "deeply concerned" about campaign finance reform. Today, many likely voters in Republican primaries are deeply concerned about what Thompson and others have done to free speech in the name of "reform," as John McCain is unhappily learning.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009798
Many on the right remain angry he supported the campaign finance law sponsored by his friend John McCain. “There are problems with people giving politicians large sums of money and then asking them to pass legislation,” Mr. Thompson says. Still, he notes he proposed the amendment to raise the $1,000 per person “hard money” federal contribution limit.
Conceding that McCain-Feingold hasn’t worked as intended, and is being riddled with new loopholes, he throws his hands open in exasperation. “I’m not prepared to go there yet, but I wonder if we shouldn’t just take off the limits and have full disclosure with harsh penalties for not reporting everything on the Internet immediately.”
He already has.
Hasn't he already done so?
George Will is a RINO, who dresses in drag, is the secret lover of Rooty and stole the gold in the WTC rubble with Rooty.
George will is a rudy shill
Gee, that even rhymes!
Already has.
That Fred is now above the radar is obvious as the Washington Post is firing salvos.
Bwhahaha!
Gee, that even rhymes!
*************
My opinion of Will has just taken a nosedive.
Thompson hasn’t even announced yet and George Will is in full panic mode, devoting an entire column to him. He knows what’s coming. .....and it ain’t pretty for his man Rudy.
It’s a good start, but I think he will need to go farther than that.
As a senator he insistently advocated increasing the government’s regulation of politics.
—
Who better to “regulate” politics than politicians? ;-)
Now its hits: he is becoming more and more like Rockefeller (RINO-NY)
He’s at least going in the right direction. Rudy is going for more ‘loophole’ closing in CFR.
George Will needs to watch a few baseball games, have a beer, and then shut up.
McCain's spokesperson credited Thompson with the passage of the thing, in its watered-down form. You could say it was Thompson's one accomplishment in the Senate.
He's not "ready" to denounce his anti-speech agenda. Thompson is just tickling our ears with what we want to hear.
The nexus of money and politics is a tough issue to deal with. All of the options are bad. The issue, is which one is the least bad? I favor the government cutting checks to an opponent, when the other candidate spends over a certain amount, but that one would be hard to implement in practice, and has little support, certainly around here. I think Maine may have experimented with that option a bit, or so I have heard, but I have not researched it.
All the rules and regulations concerning campaign finance are actually making the situation worse. Scrap the FEC and just let candidates get money from whomever, as long as it isn’t from foreign sources and it’s made public.
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