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Supporters say the strategy is crafted to avoid clashing with the Citizens United v. FEC ruling, which held that corporate election spending is protected by the First Amendment.

Citizens United is usually one of the things that Dems, for some reason, keep blaming when they lose general or an issue elections, just as "media" and "SOROS!!" and some other predictable things the Reps blame on their losses - because it's easier than examining, let alone admitting, the actual reasons for bad elections results.

With or without CU, "money = free political speech" has been the fact of political life before, and even more so in the digital information age, which slightly predates the CU decision in 2010.

The days of knocking on doors for GOTV, that mostly benefited the unions, have been going away in most (at least, non-rural) locales - you can't stop people from becoming "influencers" and "sharing" their opinions on ex-Twitter, YT, TT, and multitude of blogs and boards, from which the information (and misinformation) flows.

In fact, misinformation/disinformation campaigns by the bad actors, like Russia (Operation Overload aka Matryoshka / Storm-1679, Storm-1516 etc.), Qatar, Iran, would be a lot more difficult to counter without CU, as those expenditures are not bound by any laws.

www.wired.com - A Pro-Russia Disinformation Campaign Is Using Free AI Tools to Fuel a 'Content Explosion' -
Consumer-grade AI tools have supercharged Russian-aligned disinformation as pictures, videos, QR codes, and fake websites have proliferated.
- 2025-07-01

www.sgdsn.gouv.fr - Matryoshka - Operation Overload - Storm-1679 - A pro-Russian campaign targeting media and fact-checking community

In the last several elections (2026, 2024, 2020, 2016) the side with the substantial money advantage lost or didn't do as well as could be explained by the dollars spent - the decisive factors were the [exceptionally poor] quality of the candidates (Hillary Clinton, Biden-2020/2024, Harris-2024) and their campaigns.

Harris had $1B, the expenditure of which still seems unexplained, even after a 1-year "post-mortem", Trump and RNC had $500+M in the bank while DNC was broke, Musk spent $500M or so on several campaigns, including TX... and the results of that were dismal.

So the excess of money isn't at all the guarantor of victory... in fact, most of this money is poorly spent - watching 300 stupid commercials in the course of campaign (as opposed to 200, 100?) doesn't usually change people's opinion when they usually make one after a few early "infomercials" or actually read about candidate and props in more details, or discuss them on boards.
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This image below appears to be that of FBI Special Agents arresting Robin Patrick Martin.


A complaint is merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

"FUNNY 2"


"FUNNY 2"

Big Daddy Graham- Walk On The Mild Side (1984)
www.youtube.com


Why did I post this song?

Well, maybe the Democrats need to take a step back and look more towards the long-term, and stop relishing in their current amazing win.

That is, maybe the Democrats need to be more ~mild.~


More from the article ...

... Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer announced she is taking a "brief hiatus" from her Loomer Unleashed podcast just hours after a Trump administration adviser exposed her for being paid to post some of her manic, hateful content.

It all started on Thursday, when Alex Bruesewitz, who is behind much of Trump's digital media strategy, took aim at conservative social media influencers following the GOP's massive midterm election loss.

"Believe it or not attacking Democrats over their relationships with a streamer (Hasan Piker) wasn't an effective hit," Bruesewitz posted, not mentioning Loomer by name. "GOP candidates probably shouldn't take messaging advice from fringe right-wing influencers' moving forward."

Loomer took the bait.

"But they should take their advice and meetings with @TuckerCarlson instead? ... It's completely reasonable for people to be appalled with Democrat candidates campaigning with a guy who said America deserved 9/11. Hasan Piker regularly makes comments in support of jihadi groups," she wrote. "What wasn't helpful was your friend Tucker Carlson essentially endorsing Abdul El-Sayed over Mike Rogers and using his show to tell people to not support Rogers just a few weeks out from an election. But we all know you will never condemn your buddy Tucker."

"Laura, you are basically the Republican version of Hasan Piker.

Democrats over the years have attacked Republicans for affiliating with you. Those weren't effective hits either," Bruesewitz replied. "Voters simply don't care enough about influencers' or streamers. lol" ...


Then there's this ...

The US election showed growing frustration with Israel on both sides of the aisle
apnews.com

... In the space of about 24 hours, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested cutting off aid to Israel, a staunch critic of Israel won a key Senate race and the vice president partly blamed his own party's landslide defeat on U.S.-Israel relations.

The rupture caused by Israel's devastating military campaign in Gaza and the jointly launched war with Iran has shredded bipartisan U.S. support for Israel that goes back decades. Democrats are fiercely divided over Israel, and Republicans are increasingly critical of its actions.

In Israel, critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accuse him of having mismanaged relations with the country's closest ally. But the divide runs much deeper, and is likely to persist even if a new government is formed after last week's elections.

On the left, Americans increasingly see Israel as an international pariah because of the war in Gaza and violent settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. On the right, some see Israel as having undermined Trump's "America First" pledge, accusing it of dragging the U.S. into a costly and unnecessary war with Iran.

"Something fundamental has shifted," said Michael Oren, a historian and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. "My working assumption is that the call to cut off military aid is just the beginning." ...


Related ...

OpenAI boss Sam Altman spells out how and why the AI industry wants to slow down: We could lose control' (September 2026)
www.cnbc.com

... AI bosses have since shown a rare display of unity, with both Altman and Musk on Saturday backing an essay from Amodei that urged AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models. ...

Sam Altman sets out 2 ways AI could go 'very badly'

"We welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI," Altman said in a post on X just after midnight on Monday, adding that "no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness."

Altman warned of two ways AI progress could go "very badly," including losing "control of the future to AI" and too much power concentrating around a single person or company.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in Washington are scrambling to address calls for safeguards. ...


Probably more than you may want to read ...

Why Was the Electoral College Created? (October 2025)
www.history.com

...At the time of the Philadelphia convention, no other country in the world directly elected its chief executive, so the delegates were wading into uncharted territory. Further complicating the task was a deep-rooted distrust of executive power. After all, the fledgling nation had just fought its way out from under a tyrannical king and overreaching colonial governors. They didn't want another despot on their hands.

One group of delegates felt strongly that Congress shouldn't have anything to do with picking the president. Too much opportunity for chummy corruption between the executive and legislative branches.

Another camp was dead set against letting the people elect the president by a straight popular vote. First, they thought 18th-century voters lacked the resources to be fully informed about the candidates, especially in rural outposts. Second, they feared a headstrong "democratic mob" steering the country astray. And third, a populist president appealing directly to the people could command dangerous amounts of power.

Out of those drawn-out debates came a compromise based on the idea of electoral intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn't be picked by Congress or elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent "electors" who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency.

Slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise

But determining exactly how many electors to assign to each state was another sticking point. Here the divide was between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn't the Founders include slaves in counting a state's population?

In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were enslaved Black people, who couldn't vote. James Madison from Virginia"where enslaved people accounted for 60 percent of the population"knew that either a direct presidential election, or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn't fly in the South.

"The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States," said Madison, "and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes."

The result was the controversial "three-fifths compromise," in which three-fifths of the enslaved Black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that Southern states would ratify the Constitution and gave Virginia, home to more than 200,000 slaves, a quarter (12) of the total electoral votes required to win the presidency (46). ...


Wait, what?

I had read this ...

Iran's Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated -- and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News (June 25, 2025)
www.whitehouse.gov

... The world is far safer after President Donald J. Trump's highly successful, decisive precision strikes against the Iranian regime's key nuclear facilities.

Take it from those who actually know:

President Trump: "Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term! The white structure shown is deeply imbedded into the rock, with even its roof well below ground level, and completely shielded from flame. The biggest damage took place far below ground level. Bullseye!!!" ...

[emphasis theirs]


From the sub-summary...

Gulf states fear fiercer Iran retaliation if US strikes again
www.stripes.com

... Gulf states fear that another U.S.-Israeli attack on a better-prepared Iran could unleash an even more destructive war across the region, leaving them to pick up the pieces.

"We find ourselves drawn within a crisis that we worked diplomatically very hard to try to avert," Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to UAE's president, told the IISS Manama Dialogue in Bahrain on Sunday. "We are clearly seeking a political off-ramp."

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said the U.S. and Israel would "finish the job" in Iran. ...


When I saw this thread, I wondered how it may be related to another comment I have posted ...

To wit ...

U.S. Appeals Court Strikes Down North Carolina's Voter ID Law (2016)
www.npr.org

...The appeals court noted that the North Carolina Legislature "requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices" -- then, data in hand, "enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans."

The changes to the voting process "target African Americans with almost surgical precision," the circuit court wrote, and "impose cures for problems that did not exist."

The appeals court suggested that the motivation was fundamentally political -- a Republican legislature attempting to secure its power by blocking votes from a population likely to vote for Democrats....

[emphasis mine]


And, kudos to the Trump admin for starting to bring the FCC into the 21st century.

Next step, hire more air traffic controllers so that those currently employed can have time off to relieve their stress.

Don't try to fire , hire instead.

Elon Musk's DOGE Tried to Fire Air Traffic Controllers: Report (March 2025)
www.newsweek.com

... Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was accused by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy of attempting to fire air traffic controllers despite the series of recent plane crashes, according to The New York Times.

The heated exchange reportedly occurred Thursday when President Donald Trump called his Cabinet into the Oval Office to clarify the scope of Musk's authority within the administration. Trump emphasized that Cabinet secretaries, not Musk, hold ultimate responsibility for staffing and policy decisions in their respective agencies.

This account is based on interviews with five people with knowledge of the events. ...



Texas Flood - blues - SRV

www.youtube.com

Texas Flood / Larry Davis (original songwriter, 1950's release)

www.youtube.com

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