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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (114435)	5/31/2012 9:26:39 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 149317

Retired justice says campaign finance ruling made cash king WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens leveled new criticism on Wednesday against the court's landmark 2010 ruling on campaign financing, saying it had allowed corporations to ramp up spending and non-voters to influence the outcome of elections. Stevens, who dissented from the "Citizens United" ruling, said it had increased the importance of cash in contested elections, opened the floodgates for foreign campaign spending and put corporations or other out-of-state speakers ahead of voters interested in local issues. The Supreme Court split along conservative-liberal ideological lines in making the 5-4 ruling in 2010, giving corporations the constitutional free-speech right to spend freely to support or oppose candidates in federal elections. The ruling triggered a massive increase in spending by wealthy individuals and corporations in federal campaigns ahead of this year's November 6 presidential and congressional elections. "A rule that opens the floodgates for foreign campaign expenditures will increase the relative importance of out-of-state speakers and minimize the impact of voters' speech that addresses purely local problems," Stevens said remarks for a conference in Little Rock hosted by the University of Arkansas. Stevens, who wrote an impassioned dissent at the time of the ruling, said the court may already be having "second thoughts" about the breadth of the reasoning in the majority opinion. A text of his remarks was released by the Supreme Court in Washington. Stevens said he agreed with President Barack Obama's criticism of the ruling - that it reversed a century of law, that it authorized unlimited election-related expenditure by America's most powerful interests and that the logic of the opinion extended to money spent by foreign entities. Obama's criticism was delivered in his 2010 State of the Union address, with a number of the Supreme Court justices present. Conservative Justice Samuel Alito could be seen mouthing the words "not true" in response to Obama's comments. Stevens said that in the future, the court would have to issue an opinion explicitly crafting an exception to the 2010 ruling to make clear it does not extend to foreign corporations. He said the fact that corporations had no right to vote should give Congress the power to exclude them from direct participation in the electoral process. (Reporting By James Vicini; Editing by David Brunnstrom)

To: koan who wrote (114435)	5/31/2012 12:06:45 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

Not to worry.......even Fox News is becoming a super pac. When Fox drops the pretense By Steve Benen - Thu May 31, 2012 9:15 AM EDT An image from Fox News' anti-Obama attack ad. Even by Fox News standards, yesterday's edition of "Fox & Friends" was jaw-dropping. The show produced and aired its own four-minute attack ad targeting President Obama, brazenly shifting Fox from the role of an ostensible news organization to that of a Republican super PAC. The Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik said Fox's attack ad was reminiscent of "1930s propaganda," adding, As the guy who challenged the Obama administration two years when it tried to deny Fox News access to interviews and other opportunities offered to the media on the grounds that Fox was not a legitimate news operation ... even I am shocked by how blatantly Fox is throwing off any pretense of being a journalistic entity.... Any news organization that puts up this kind of video is rotten to the core." Bill Shine, the executive vice president for programming at Fox News, eventually blamed " an associate producer" for the incident. It was a curious response that leads to some follow-up questions: * Did this associate producer stage a bloodless coup, commandeering Fox's control room against the wishes of the senior producers and hosts? And if so, why did the in-house attack ad air twice? * If this associate producer was to blame, why did Gretchen Carlson introduce the attack ad by telling viewers, "We decided to take a look back at the president's first term to see if it lived up to hope and change"? And why did Fox Nation tout the piece as a "must-see Fox video"? * If this associate producer did something wildly inappropriate that embarrassed the network and removed all doubt about Fox serving as an appendage to the Republican Party, why did "Fox & Friends" lavish praise on him after the attack ad aired? Whatever the answer to these questions, Fox News' executives apparently weren't pleased with yesterday's developments -- by mid-day, the "Fox & Friends" attack ad was removed from the show's website as well as Fox Nation, the network's aggregation site.