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This week, the rare single guest show. But when that guest is Senator Ben Sasse, he has enough brain power to fill two segments and that’s exactly what the does on today’s episode. Mostly, we discuss his WSJ Op-Ed, Make The Senate Great Again, which is a manifesto on how to fix the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. Also, some thoughts on Woodward v. Trump and the less than great mayor of the City That Never Sleeps.
Music from this week’s show: The Sand Hills of Old Nebraska by Ole Rasmussen
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But it kept working for McCain for many more years.
It’s not difficult to think of ways around that.
Only people who can vote for a candidate should be able to contribute money to that candidate.
That also takes unions and corporate money out of it.
They’ve already pretty much lost that one, because with the limits on direct campaign contributions, people started sending their gobs and gobs of money to PACs etc.
This topic hurts my head, but isn’t money free speech?
I think it’s pretty common in Minnesota for one or two millionaire Democrats to dominate an election for state Senate or state house. Two people giving far more money than the total of all local Democrats and Republicans.
@jameslileks used to talk about how “man of the people” Mark Dayton financed his campaign for governor of Minnesota by selling one of his Monet paintings. Or was it Manet?
That whole situation was such an outrage. The endorsed candidate was obviously far more qualified. Same thing in Omar’s district. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get some Democrats that weren’t idiots, socialists, and anti-Semites.
True, but money is traceable.
FTFY
I didn’t mean they’d need to hide it. When direct contributions were limited, people started sending lots and lots of money to PACs instead. Perfectly legal.
Restricting campaign contributions is pretty much a gift to the Democrats. The media already transmits their messages, no charge. Which is why the Democrats and media always push campaign finance “reform”. (And RINOs, of course.)
Even when, as is usually the case, the Democrats have more money than the Republicans, campaign contributions still help the Republicans. The Democratic ads are boring and uninformative because they merely repeat what the liberal media are already saying. The Republican ads tell people things they didn’t know, because the media wouldn’t tell them, so they have a greater impact.
I certainly hope so.
Not quite. All hat and no cattle is about making claims you can’t backup. Sasse is a guy that talks a lot about the books he has read but doesn’t say anything practical. That is a blowhard. There is a more accurate term for Sasse, but code-of-conduct prevents me from using it.
Not with ActBlue!
So, pac money can only come from within the state of the candidate.
How difficult do you think it is to set up front companies and what-not, to put money wherever someone wants it?
This discussion reminds me of the story that the Byzantine Senate debated how many angels could dance on the head of a head of a pin when the Empire was about to fall to the Turks. Here we are talking about a proposal with no chance of passing, while we are likely about to elect a President in early senility who will have hard left appointees running the country. And a Congress which will encourage those hard left actions, and even pass bad laws. This is touched on when the court packing plans are mentioned. I’m not fully on board with the flight 97 election analogy, but there is a lot to it.
It is pointless to restrict money in politics because the Dems cheat, the Republicans don’t stop them, And we have made DC so powerful it is worth the price.
Fix it with better messaging so money doesn’t buy votes. Reduce the power of DC and strengthen states so the office isn’t worth the high price of achieving it.
If these two are now impossible, then I refer you back to 1776, and today to Venezuela. Pick one. It better include the Constitution as ratified, the Bill of Rights, the Stars and Stripes (with however many stars as needed), and the National Anthem. We don’t need to invent something new because people today don’t have the wisdom of the founders. We need to return to exceptionalism.
Just saw via a tweet by Avik Roy that Peter Robinson has been censored by YouTube, because his interview with Dr. Scott Atlas said things that the World Health Organization (and apparently YouTube/Google) disagree with. I’d assume this will come up on this week’s Ricocet Podcast, along with the question of how does Google deserve their immunity from libel suits as a common carrier, if they’re editing to the point that Peter Robinson is now considered too much of an alt-right bomb thrower for his interviews to be be posted on YouTube?
Well, it was really Dr. Scott Atlas being censored, not Peter Robinson. But yeah.
Welcome to the Alt-Right, Peter!
True. But it is Peter’s normal series of interviews for video/podcast with other political figures. So through guilt-by-association with Atlas, he gets turned into Ricochet’s Proud Boy, or something like that, thanks to the censors at YouTube/Google, who have their Section 230 exemption precisely because they said they would not serve as editors/censors. (I’m assuming because of this, the woke types will stop focusing on people with Hawaiian shirts as being secret alt-rightist, and start focusing on people with sweaters looped around their necks….)
Well, let’s hope. Because that lets ME off.
As long as we are in fantasy land I would repeal the 19th, make no fault divorce unconstitutional, put in a balanced budget amendment, stop birth right citizenship, end all transfer payments to anyone that has a child out of wedlock (including the child). I would do all those before the 17th.
I’m on board!
Call the consumption tax a carbon tax, repeal the 16th, and everybody is suddenly on board. It could actually work and be revenue neutral. But unless repeal 16th you just get both.
I don’t know anything about it, but there are some economists that think the only thing we should tax is carbon. Gasoline would be sky high but everything else would be “free”. lol The concept is, no matter what you say, it’s a finite resource and you need to be working on something else.
I am not going to get into a big argument about this. I’m not endorsing it.
Gasoline would have SOME kind of carbon tax, although really since different qualities of vehicles can produce different amounts of carbon, a “flat” carbon tax on gasoline doesn’t seem justified.
On the other hand, nuclear power would have zero carbon tax, so there’s that.
Also there seems to be some solid evidence that “fossil fuels” are not really a finite resource, that it didn’t come from dinosaurs that are extinct, and in fact the Earth is still making more, all the time.
Good luck with that. The simple fact is, fossil fuels are going to come from increasingly complicated or expensive extraction methods.