Neither Dangerfield Newby, nor I, are Constitutional Scholars. Nor, it appears was or is my fellow Princeton Tiger Samuel Alito. But I know more than a little about media law, and NYT v. Sullivan hasn’t shit to do with either the legal tenor of Citizen’s United, or the political agenda behind the SCOTUS majority holding. Suffices to say, the political agenda was shown to be as limp as a conservative old white guy’s solsticce.

—CAC

In American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock, the SCOTUS majority in Citizens United, again channeling the robber baron Lockner v. NY and Jim Crow Plessy v Ferguson bad ole days struck down Montana’s 1912 campaign finance law which limited unlimited corporate money in elections. It extended Citizens United, in other other words, to states. 22 states and John McCain himself wrote amicii supporting the law. Montana, mind you, is a ruddy, ruddy red state; the Montana Supreme Court upheld the law and the Montana attorney general defended it valiantly. But nope. There’s an agenda here, folks, and we can’t let even our own peeps get in the way of it. It’s called power. The constitutional law concept of “federalism” has long been a tenet of conservative—indeed right wing—politico-legal philosophy. It means the states should have equal or even superior power to the federal government. Of course, when it, too, gets in the way, trash it. Conservative judge and scholar Richard Posner became a traitor to the wingnuts back in 2000 when, in his book Public Intellectuals, he said that’s exactly what happened in the Bush v. Gore opinion (giving Al Gore’s election win to George W. Bush). And very soon, Posner was dragged back into the fold and regurgitated what he was fed. Power is as power goes.

But let’s not complicate things. We have a country to take back and run for you…

The FCC rule to make ad source info available digitally, rather than in a rusty file cabinet, is labeled “Stalinism.” Who knew?