All right, so Adelson evades the ban by paying the Times' owners $3 billion for the paper, runs his piece - indistinguishable from a full-page ad - and then sells the paper back to the owners for $3 billion less the price of a full-page ad.

There's still plenty of ways - available only to the rich - to evade your ban. You're not helping your claimed problem, you're making it worse.

Your argument is like the old joke:

"Will you sleep with me if I gave you a million bucks!"

"Yeah!"

"How about $25?"

"What do you think I am??!"

"We've already established that. Now all we're doing is haggling over the price."

If it's wrong to spend millions to publish political speech but not billions, then you're just haggling over the price.

It's easy. Put a second countdown on the red light for the cars.

Amen. I was looking for a direct answer to my pointed question, and all I got were mealy-mouthed platitudes.

"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?

Those people and their spiritual children are still with us.

Osama bin laden doll that turns into a Darth Maul.

Your attempt to confuse here isn't really helpful.

Google does *sell* Google Glass and Nexus phones and tablets and Chromecast and Nest and soon Dropcams and probably more. They are "Google products" branded and sold by Google as theirs.

Mozilla only has one device that it works on directly, the Firefox OS Flame reference phone. The rest of the hardware you see out there is being made and sold by someone else.

And that's not just true of the hardware. Much of the work going on to extend Firefox OS software into areas outside of phones is being done by third parties for their products.

Mozilla doesn't build hardware. We make software, including Firefox OS. Firefox OS is a completely open platform freely available for any company to build on top of without restriction. There are dozens of companies building Firefox OS-based products today and there will be more tomorrow, covering mobile phones, tablets, TVs, set top boxes, game consoles, streaming dongles, wearables, and more. Some of those companies are working directly with Mozilla and others are taking the code and running with it on their own.