Citizens United will make stealing elections obsolete.

[cali]

Why bother stealing when you can just buy elections?

And I hate to think it, but I believe we're going to see just how effective it is this year.

[get the red out]

1. Or make stealing them undetectable

Steal an election and then just say that's the way it goes when big money is in the mix.

Personally, I don't see how we can really pretend to live in a democracy after Citizens United. Think how much worse it will get if we have to see Romney appoint a couple of people to SCOTUS?

[RKP5637]

4. We don't have a democracy, haven't for some time, what we have are

many delusional propagandized citizens thinking they live in a democracy. "If" Romney gets in, and he appoints more RW'ers to SCOTUS the Bush years will look like the best of times.

[shcrane71]

7. Do we have a choice between Obama and Romney?

Without fair elections we don't.

[pacalo]

14. +1. It takes a lot of money to buy secrecy & computer expertise.

[RKP5637]

2. In the future, elections will just be corporations bidding for

who owns and runs the country, even now this is true. Most Americans will be immaterial to the process, just cattle in the way.

[Zalatix]

8. Speak for the rest of America, but we in California and Oregon showed otherwise!

Hundreds of millions were spent to conquer California by Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina and we still sent them packing.

Cue King Leonidas speech: THIS!! IS!! SPARTA!!

[RKP5637]

10. That is quite true and a tribute to California and Oregon showing the way

forward if we want to save a democracy!!!

[HereSince1628]

3. Why steal them? Because it would be cheaper.

I can imagine hiring a hacker for under 1 million. Buying an election will cost much more.


Based on what I saw here in WI, CU caused tremendous over-spending. Considered as a two- candidate race, the swing needed to get a victory was ~4%. Collectively CU may have spent as much as $30 per vote vs dems ~$1.5 per vote.

I think the impact of CU will be something like designing nuclear warheads...as they get bigger they tend to get inefficient. So you tend to used more smaller individual weapons. That will likely mean that CU is a good tool to take over and control state governments. For the confederacy of billionaire and corporate interests that's perfect.

We'll need to see just how things go in November to see if using a mega-spending bomb is really effective in a presidential race. Buying Senators and Representatives may turn out to be cheaper and more cost-effective.

[cali]

5. oh, they consider buying elections an investment. More people owe you.

and the history of money in elections strongly suggests that you're wrong.

[HereSince1628]

17. Citizen's United doesn't yet have much history.

[postulater]

6. We could forget the elections also.

Shrinking gubmint to where there are no elected officials will allow us to offer naming rights to the state and our properties directly to the highest bidder.

Only catch is that the rights go to the corporation that pays the most taxes AND donates the largest percentage of its' profit to non-profit agencies in the state. AND that the corporation pay the full cost of any resource they use from acquisition through to final environmental reclamation and eventual recycling costs.

[Trillo]

9. And Citizen's United's 800 lb gorilla is Corporate Personhood. NT

[glinda]

11. They are both stealing and buying....

[planetc]

12. Or, alternatively, spending money has been getting more futile, and so they have to steal them.

No Republican campaign in recent memory has been underfunded.

The kind of rhetoric and overall strategy the Republicans have been using is, because of its nature, getting more and more limited, more and more boring, and more and more transparently irrelevant to real people's lives. The entire Rovian play book calls for attacking a man--Gore, Kerry, Obama. Or a woman, if the attacks on Sec. Clinton during the primary were influenced by Rovian "thought." If he or she's a Democratic candidate, you attack the person. If you're unable to talk about actual policy in any detail without getting into trouble you can't handle, you are compelled to talk about personalities, and "character", and wave streamers of innuendo over the whole thing. In the Wonderful World of Rove, you never have to prove anything.

I saw evidence in 2004 that the populace was waking up to the duplicity and mean-mindedness of Republican politicking, and they elected John Kerry. Of course, by 2004, the incumbent had had a chance to get HAVA passed, which was extra insurance in case the popular and electoral votes weren't close enough to make theft semi-palatable. I suspect that entire states' election outcomes were tweaked to paint the picture the Republicans needed. And of course, as you recall, 2004 is the year the exit polls were matched to the election results, which practice, among other things invalidates any scientific credibility exit polls have.

So you, as a party, have spent billions, and the populace insists on getting more informed, angrier, and more active. You have to keep them convinced that this is still a democracy, so the dog and pony show that our campaigns have become gets more and more insistent that every vote counts. Pundits analyze every nuance of every event and non-event as to what its "political significance" might be. We are told all day how important our opinions are.

Our opinions are important, but they aren't being listened to, because we're too unreliable these days. We haven't been doing what the political parties and the pundit class expect of us. I think our political enemies are nervous. And that they should be.

[1000 Words]

13. 33

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

15. Yeah but Republicans like being evil

There's no fun in it unless they can sneak, steal, cheat, and bend the rules, even if the Supreme Court gives them a legal out.

[TheKentuckian]

16. No worries...TeaPubliKlans love the all of the above thing.

Sometimes money only gets ya close enough to steal.