And This Just in on Elections

[applegrove]

And This Just in on Elections
Opinion
New York Times
Published: December 16, 2006

"Two years too late, the Federal Election Commission has gotten around to slapping token fines on a few notorious abusers of the campaign law’s ban on unregulated mudslinging money. That guarantees we will see a lot more mud being slung in 2008.

The commission — ever the enabler, rarely the watchdog, of big-money politics — declined in the 2004 campaign to rein in the unlimited financing of such obviously partisan efforts as the Republicans’ Swift Boat attack ads against Senator John Kerry and the Democrats’ MoveOn.org assaults on President Bush. Shadowy party operatives, called 527 groups under a section of the tax code, sold the commission a bill of goods that they were mere issue advocates, not hard-edged activists crying out to be covered by the law’s limits on donations.

But now, with a skeptical federal judge breathing down its neck and the election long over, the commission finds that, well, yes, there were grounds to levy fines of several hundred-thousand dollars against the two groups as well as another Democratic operation. Considering the scores of millions these groups raised from fat-cat donors, corporations and labor unions — all looking for a loophole in the McCain-Feingold law’s ban on unlimited party donations — the fines are a pittance and unlikely to dissuade repeat offenses.

The additional scandal is that the commission created the loophole in the first place, by declining the obvious need for a blanket regulation controlling candidate-oriented advertising and opting for a slow case-by-case review of 527 machinations. This dedication to doing next to nothing allowed various stealth partisans to pollute the last two elections with more than $950 million in 527 financing.

............SNIP"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/opinion/16sat3.html?th&emc=th

[babylonsister]

1. Nice of the NY Times to weigh in "two years too late". Their

silence has also been deafening.