You're speaking in general terms now, instead of sticking to the topic, but I'm going to assume that when you say, "wrecking things like the First Amendment," what you're actually talking about is, "putting some restraints on political advertising funded by corporate donations." You do get specific in implying that stopping Citizens United from broadcasting their advertisement during the proscribed period is the goal of people who object to this decision... I don't know why you believe this, but my confusion is irrelevant.

I came into this thread to correct you: You said that the application of this law was partisan. That was untrue. You've equated Moor's film and the CU film in the eyes of this law. That was invalid. You are now claiming that people who disagree with you are thinking short-term. This is also untrue.

Really, the least you could do here is try and understand why people argue against this decision. To put this as unambiguously as I can: the goal in opposing this decision is not about Citizen's United, or their advertisements, or advertisements in general, or Hillary Clinton, or partisan politics. This is all about stopping corruption and anything else (limiting corporate political donations, etc.) are means to that end.

You may disagree with the method if you like. You may also disagree with the goal, maybe you love corruption or something. That's your prerogative. But whatever you may think of opposing corruption in this manner, it is not a short-term goal. It is not a partisan goal. And it's also, according to the Supreme Court, not an unconstitutional violation of the first amendment.

The Citizen's United decision didn't strike down the laws for violating the first amendment, it struck down those laws for going further than the court believed was necessary. The court was perfectly okay with putting limits on speech in the interest of preventing corruption, it just felt that preventing communication between the donor and the politician was sufficient in meeting that goal. So it struck down the further limitations enacted by the laws as being unnecessary.

Not successful, successful doesn't matter, it just had to be commercial activity. I was using Moor's success as an example of that activity, not as a prerequisite for being commercial. The law also didn't say that the government could ban films, only that political advertisements were prohibited from broadcast during a certain period in proximity to elections. This also has nothing to do with Trump's ability to muzzle the media, since the media consists of commercial activity (I gave the example of Fox News above).

I see lots of problems with lots of things, I have said nothing here in defense of this law (though, since you ask, my feelings on it are mixed). However, the problem that is most evident to me in this case is your eagerness to see conspiracies when all of the officials involved here have acted in good faith. The dems at the FEC who you said were causing all of this partisan evil were nonexistent, and the republicans there applied the law as it was written accurately and by all appearances in a fair and non-partisan fashion. There is nothing to indicate that the lawmakers who wrote the law had any goal in mind, other than limiting one more avenue for corruption. It is apparent that they were making an effort to mitigate one way in which companies with deep pockets influence politicians.

The fact that you would see this and assume villainy is a big problem. It concerns me much more than any misgivings that I may have about how the law was implemented.

You started by actually addressing the topic of political speech, in your way, and then devolved into a "Clinton is teh evil" diatribe... So I'm going to pretend that you stayed on topic, and I'll address the one thing and not the other:

The question is not whether Michael Moore's documentary was politically motivated, ha said repeatedly and explicitly that it was, there were two questions: Was the film advertised via broadcast within the period in which political broadcast advertisements are prohibited, and did those advertisements in and of themselves constitute political advertising? And second: Did the film constitute a corporate monetary contribution in favor of a candidate?

The to the first question was no - the film was not advertised via broadcast during the prohibited period, rendering the second part of that question moot. The answer to the second question was no - the film was commercial activity (the most profitable documentary ever, in fact) and so was not a contribution. There are any number of right-wing examples of this same rule, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. were all flagrantly right-wing but did not qualify as contributions. This contrasts with Citizens United, who existed only for political reasons.

Also, this happened in 2005 so those "dems at the FEC" that you're complaining about were Republican appointees.

My bet: something else happened. Specifically, we're not manufacturing large numbers of nuclear bombs anymore and so the incentive for having lots of nuclear plants has dried up.

You remember back in the day, when they were predicting that nuclear plants would make electricity free? Do you remember why that was? It wasn't because nuclear plants were free, it was because the bombs were supposed to pay for the plants and the electricity was just a bonus.

My experience: if you're not buying new then it's cheaper to buy an iPhone than an iPod Touch. Probably due to market glut, I don't know, but check both before you buy. The difference was substantial when I did it most recently.

What are you, a communist? The answer is unambiguous: because they have more money. We had a much-publicized supreme court decision on this very issue - having lots of money entitles your opinions to maximum visibility. This may seem unreasonable or unfair to a legal layperson, but lessor people are still allowed to speak in their tiny little voices, or to plug their ears if they don't like what they're hearing, so clearly we all still all have free speech and blah blah blah.

The point is: if you want a say in politics, you can have it. It's available to everyone, including Joe Sixpack, because this is a free country full of free people. Like everyone else, Joe just needs to spend a few tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and political campaigning.

What if you find yourself in a protest, with a few people misbehaving? Then what do you do?

This isn't a rhetorical question, every large protest is this way. People are protesting, after all, because they're angry about something, and with any large group of people there are going to be some with anger issues. Saying, "Just leave." isn't any different from saying, "Just give up. Abandon whatever cause has brought you out here today, protests are an unacceptable form of political expression."

Allow me to anticipate your response: "So, what, you're saying that rioting mobs are just misunderstood people who have gotten a little overly passionate? So all of that is just A-okay?" No, of course I'm not saying that. What I'm really saying is that rioting is unacceptable behavior whether everyone is doing it or only a few people are doing it, but that when you're prosecuting people it's necessary (it should be necessary) to establish guilt on an individual basis and not merely claim that a person was part of a mob and therefore guilty.

It's a minimum of 9%. This problem was, of course, recognized by the researchers. From the NYT article:

The parent was making reference to one of the realities of current American politics: no one cares what you have to say if you're from the other party. This guy can make all of the sensible, logical, truthful, insightful statements that he likes, but as long as he's a Democrat only Democrats are going to listen to him.

It's a bit of an exaggeration to say this, but sadly not too far from the truth.

This is 1/125th of a person.

This is just a triviality of the manufacturing process. That's like saying milk isn't milk because they separate out the cream and then add it back in, or orange juice isn't orange juice - it's just a way of ensuring a consistent product.

Yes the brown sugar is more processed than refined sugar, but why are you saying that it's more unhealthy? Just the added molasses? I suppose that would marginally increase the calories if measured by volume, but wouldn't that also marginally decrease the calories if measured by weight?

Well I suppose I'm not a counter example, since XP was my last MS operating system, but: mandatory Windows Genuine Advantage is what did it for me. So... there's a negative thing.

You're thinking too small. Remember the TSA's VIPER teams at train stations? If people don't push back on this, we can expect it implemented at every train station, bus station, and any other transportation hub you can think of, and probably soon(ish). The security cameras are already there. Maybe they don't all have the resolution to do decent facial recognition right now, but they all need to be replaced eventually. And while they're being replaced, why not future proof them a little? You know, just in case.

This could be broadly implemented within ten years, easily, and it wouldn't even cost that much. Drop in the bucket, comparatively.

Yeah, I got the gist of what you were saying in your comment above. I'm expecting this to be a law about what government agencies are allowed to do, and nothing to do with the population at large. If you're really worried about this then you can look up the text of the bill, it shouldn't be too hard to find.

That's even assuming that this ever gets passed though, and I can't imagine that happening.

Probably not. This is a law with three goals: preventing Trump from doing something specific, calling attention to the fact that Trump wanted to do this, and perhaps creating a law for Trump to break (and thus be more easily removed from office). In other words, this is all about Trump and will likely be written so as to effect the rest of us not at all.