"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech" is, and should remain, the law of the land. Especially when it comes to political speech."

"Replace the word "especially" with "except" in that, and I agree."

In other words, you'd turn the First Amendment on its head when it comes to political speech. Fortunately, the entire history of First Amendment jurisprudence as applied to political speech disagrees with you.

This is as it should be. There is NOTHING more important in our society than the freedom to speak about political issues. Anything else eviscerates the First Amendment.

"If Sheldon Adelson wants to buy the entire newspaper and then run whatever he wants, fine. What I don't want to see is him giving a politician a bucket of money, or spending money to run ad or smear campaigns."

If you see no difference between Sheldon Adelson buying an ad in the NYTimes and buying the NYTimes itself and ordering it to run his positions, then there is no hope for you. All banning the first and permitting the second is raising the cost of the ad.

But if the NYTimes publishes an editorial supporting a candidate, how is that different from someone buying the same space in the NYTimes to run an ad? You either have to ban that as the NYTimes making a campaign contribution, or else allow it and leave a giant gaping loophole that lets corporations give to campaigns as long as they can do it in something that can be labeled "news media". This inconsistency is at the heart of Citizens United, and the reason that the decision came down as it did.

Not all contributions are money, though many are just as valuable.

Further, you talk about campaign contributions of cash, but ignore contributions of cash to such things as issue advertising, not related or coordinated directly with a campaign. Are you proposing to outlaw that kind of speech as well? If so, where do you draw the line? And how do you do so without putting a faceless, unelected bureaucrat in charge of deciding what is political and what is not? If you don't, doesn't that pretty much destroy your carefully crafted regime?

And this exposes the fundamental problem: governments cannot regulate speech and do it fairly. Political speech, especially, cannot be regulated without the highest level of judicial scrutiny. Supreme Court jurisprudence is recognizing that fact at long last, and this is to be encouraged, not stifled.

"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech" is, and should remain, the law of the land. Especially when it comes to political speech. Don't like what someone says? Reply to them. Don't like how loud they say it? Say yours louder. Get help if you need to.

Anything else strikes at the very heart of our country's freedoms, and is not to be borne.

So are you willing to tell the New York Times they can't weigh in on an election, either?

And why should a million people be able to send $100 to a candidate but Greenpeace not be able to send that same $100 million from its members?

And how do you define "politician"?

The same rules must apply to all. Anything else leads to governments deciding what is and is not acceptable speech. That is simply unacceptable, period, end of discussion.

Then let him.

The alternative is to allow government regulation of political speech, something that any lawyer will tell you demands the strictest of scrutiny under well-settled law. The harm in allowing government to decide what is political speech, and how it is to be exercised, is incalculably greater than the evils ascribed to the nasty eeeeevil Koch brothers, who folks arguing for government regulation of speech seem to universally want to target. (And as to money buying elections, ask Eric Cantor how well that works.)

If you allow some faceless, unelected bureaucrat to decide what is permissible political speech and what is not, you're destroying the First Amendment, period. As much as I fear for a country that elected Barack Obama twice, I still trust its electorate more than I trust unelected bureaucrats.

Sure, all voices deserve to be heard. That's why people should be allowed to band together freely to speak louder than any one person can.

Guess what? That's exactly what allowing corporations to have free speech does. Don't believe me? Ask Greenpeace or the Sierra Club or the World Wildlife Federation, all of which are corporations.

Sideslash has it exactly right. The answer to speech you don't like - be it the content, or the source - is more speech explaining why it's wrong, not silencing speech you disagree with.

Regulations to speech have the problem that they're open to interpretation by the regulators - and regulations to political speech have the additional problem that they can silence the very speech needed to fight them.

Why does the prospect of government regulation of political speech not terrify you to your core? Any "campaign reform" proposal must necessarily result in government deciding which speech is political and which is not, which is permissible and which is not. How do you prevent government from suppressing only political speech that it disapproves of?

Zuckerberg spends $100 million to prove that throwing money at broken public schools does not fix them.

Are we surprised? No.

"Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis said she'd rather see companies pay more in taxes and fund schools that way, rather than relying on their charity or free software."

Of course she would. Big Labor's all about squeezing those nasty eeeeevil corporations for all they can get.

Why should Google pay taxes to the district so they can buy Microsoft? Why should they be forced to help their competition at gunpoint?

No, you're likely to get a recipe.

FWIW, this is a good one. I make it about weekly, though I use chorizo; real andouille is hard to find in the wilds of rural Minnesota.

This would be at the top of any list I'd compile.

The other ruling, by Judge Richard Leon, distinguished this case from Smith v. Maryland on the basis that the NSA's metadata collection was different in nature because of its volume. However, as Power Line's Paul Mirengoff noted,

But these changes provide no sound basis for distinguishing Smith. That case rests on the view that, because of the nature of metadata, its collection by the government without a warrant isn’t constitutionally problematic. This true no matter the quantity of metadata the government collects.

It's going to take the Supreme Court deciding that yes, you do have an expectation of privacy in records you did not originate, never possessed, and have no control over, and thus to throw Smith v. Maryland out the window, to have the NSA metadata collection ruled unconstitutional. Fourth Amendment jurisprudence rests very squarely on the idea that you only have an interest in not having subject to search those things and places where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That's where the arguments will fall down.

The article summary is misleading. The Supreme Court ruled, in Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), that you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in records you don't control. It's not Judge Pauley's conclusion, it's binding precedent that the court that rucked against the NSA handwaved away with not good explanation.

Duh, Bruce *Sterling*, not Bruce *Schneier*. Still, this Bruce's perspective might get interesting...

I keep saying that if I were President, I'd appoint you head of the TSA. Would you accept? If not, who would you recommend for the job?