The charges that OTA channels get to charge cable companies a purely a protection racket. THAT is what should have been made illegal, not Aereo!

Mr. Lessig,

Since it seems that your PAC espouses the belief that Citizens United is a horrible supreme court ruling, and noting that the key product of the Citizens United LLC was a Documentary, and also noting that almost all documentaries are backed by or produced by corporations of one form or another; aren't you explicitly calling for the total prohibition of political documentaries in our political system? Also, is the publishing by major corporations (this includes all publishing companies) of books that are about politicians or from politicians required to be banned to take money out of politics?

Mr. Lessig,

Have you considered the potential side effect that if you are successful in removing "money from politics"? You will likely end up enormously empowering the position of incumbency, establishing a ruling class that once elected, no one will have the capabilities to truly mount a successful campaign against.

Incumbents have huge benefits and a large number of tools to communicate to the voters (who are of course their constituents, so they can even justify it).

My great fear is that campaign finance reform will do nothing to stem the tide of permanent, lifetime, politicians dominating our system. Even in the worst election for incumbents in a half century (2010) over 80% of incumbents won.

Will you support and make your backed candidates support a constitutional amendment to create and enforce term limits on members of Congress?

If Mayday can't support term limits, then I can't support it. In fact I may feel compelled to fight against it. I don't even really want money out of politics if it leads to lifetime memberships in Congress for the lucky ones that achieve office once, and then never lose again until they die.

You think the Fairness Doctrine would have prevented incumbents from having an advantage?!!?

That's rich.

The leading factor in taking out incumbents has been, like it or not, the Tea Party. The Tea Party is largely fuled by and supported by talk radio. The same talk radio that would't exist if the "Fairness Doctrine" were still in place.

It wasn't until after the "Fairness Doctrine" was removed that we could truly see and realize how horrible and awful an impact it had on free speech and expression in this country.

Correct. Plus if campaign finance reform is achieved and campaign speech becomes subject to severe limits, then incumbents will hold a massive and largely unassailable power to dominate campaigns over newcomers.

And with incumbency being a root cause to many of the problems in Washington, I won't support this PAC either until they make term limits a core part of the reforms they are calling for.

About damn time!

Google, how the fuck is this not evil?

Then genetically engineering new strains of bananas is a good thing, no?

I wonder how long it will take FWD.us to feel like they're paying to much to their American born Data Scientists and strive to replace them with H1B visa holders? Is that phase 6?

WHAT??!

Brat is actually the poster child for "getting the money out of politics." Cantor had him outspent 4 to 1. He was the little guy in this race.

From what I've heard about him, he's also very libertarian leaning. I think libertarian leaning Republicans have a bright future. I think the old guard and the social conservatives will have a hard time against them in the future as well.

The elephant in the room is that the money in politics really isn't campaign money.

The reason so much is being spent on campaigns now days is because so much is being spent by government.

There is an immense amount of power involved in generating TRILLIONS of dollars in tax revenue and borrowing BILLIONS more and then determining what that should be spent on.

That power is desired mightily, which is what is driving the campaign spending.

Think of it this way. Every member in congress is voting on bills to spend ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more money each year than they have control over in their campaign funds.

The campaign funds are just the ante to get in the game of playing with the much bigger piles of money.

It think its mostly because before the effort was very undefined.

Now they've stated their goals and they are all identical to the goals of the left.

I will not support or believe that this PAC is beneficial until they add the goal of term limits to their proposed reforms.

Its a far bigger factor in the problems of our government than campaign finance is.

Exactly. A horrible name choice if you want to appear to be non-partisan.

I don't believe they are really heavily partisan, but their proposed reforms lean profoundly to the left.

I think in is entirely in the realm of possibility that if they were truly very effective in their goals we would see a tilt toward one party rule.

One party rule would, of course, be infinitely worse than having "money in politics". Cite: see the history of one party rule.

Unions don't tell their members to personally donate to politicians, they take their members money and give it to the politicians, regardless of what the members want.

Hey wait!!! That's exactly what you accused the CEO of doing.

To be fair, it is completely in the CEO's rights to ask employees to donate their own money to candidates.

The point here is that it would be the employees choice in either case.

You compared apples to oranges and then just stated that oranges are evil.

Looking at reforms, I don't see much that will do anything.

If they succeed in getting the money out of politics, we will still be faced with incumbents having a disproportionate amount of power in staying in office.

For me to root for the Mayday PAC, they must include implementing term limits on congress as one of their goals. If we don't get that, their "getting money out of politics" will solve nothing. We'll still end up with ancient geezers who have been in office forever writing crappy law about copyrights and patents because they know shit about technology.