What is hilarious and immensely sad is that the poster thinks that police stopping radioactive people is the where the current battle lines over privacy and the first amendment rights are in the US.

Dude...have you been in a coma or something???

"An increase in wealth is otherwise known as an income."
eh??

Its called capital gains and can be taxed independently as is done in many countries.

How you tax it fairly and when are very difficult discussions.

OH MY GOD! AN OFFICIAL RESPONSE? THEY WILL BE SHAKING IN THEIR SHOES BROTHERS!

THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN!

In the words of William Wallace:

FREEEEEEDOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!!

(appropriately the fake one in a historically inaccurate movie...)

You know the scene, just before he had his bowels torn out and put on display?

Yeah. That's the one. Fitting metaphor

errr...that is sort of what I meant?

I was not talking about "The US legal definition as perverted by a corrupt establishment, proven so in 2010".

I meant REAL free speech....

The article is about lobbying which in terms of dollars is 99.9% corporate.

So yeah. Nice try at a straw man. Also good one on the insults too. Real classy.

So let me reply in kind:

Didn't you realize, you naive little child, you need to be a millionaire to be elected in the US? Or at least be personally backed by one.

Though I better school you in case you have not being paying attention. (or lack the competence to which is most likely)

I also don't come from your country and our government is not close to being as corrupted as yours.

So yeah. Nice post. Ignoramus.

That is not correct.

Since when are corporate campaign donations "free speech"? That is complete tosh sir. What a twisted and perverted version of free speech that is!?

It is a cliche but here is what the wisdom is with corruption and conflict of interest (one which my country actually adheres to BTW):
It is not enough to simply not have the INTENT of conflict. Avoiding a conflict of interest is NOT about intent to be proved in court.
Avoiding a conflict of interest means not have the appearance of conflict. Even the appearance of a conflict is not good enough and should be avoided. The reason: Because humans cannot consciously control their biases and are mostly unaware of them.

Bribery (a form of corruption) is where there is not just a conflict of interest and you have actively and purposively sought to benefit from the conflict. This of course has to be proved.

In the case of Dodd he just admitted (what we already knew of course) that he is not just in a conflict of interest and is in fact corrupt. He has effectively admitted that accepting a lobbying donation (which is ALWAYS a conflict of interest) is dictating his decision regardless of the public good he is entrusted to represent.

He may of been a useless drunk and did terrible things to the country but he was occasionally funny.

PS: I think he was drunk when he called the last fateful snap election.

I am not sure which part you find hard to believe?

- They do have a fast track. I hire a lot of people and am currently in the process of hiring 5 more and most of the candidates just landed or are on the way. So I do know what I am talking about.
- The "brain drain" has been a hot topic in this country for some time now and the immigration/emigration deficits are routinely reported in the local papers.. Especially amongst our skilled and this includes skilled manual labour as well as the uni grads. Most go to Australia who are going through a mining boom and almost managed to sidestep the recession unlike us. Many do return later but overall we bleed. This might be due to our general education system (rated in the top 10 last time I checked) and the perception of our work ethic which is quite high in many countries.

So yeah. This is not just meaningless opinion.

I assume your last comment is some random "anti-communism even though I don't know what that is or the difference between 'their' and 'there'" comment. About as ignorant as it could possibly be. Nice one.

Yes. IT geeks have basically a fast track to citizenship in this country. I hire a lot of foreigners including someone from California just recently. :)

And don't blame kiwis for being too stupid to take the jobs...our best and brightest (except me) all leave for Australia!

It is called ACTA. So yes you are right.

But our government (NZ) is not as corrupt and in fact comes out routinely as one of the least corrupt in the world. Not that I am being patriotic. We are probably just too small to be worth buying! :)

Of course buying politicians with campaign donations is not considered corruption by many - and for those they deserve what they get...which is this and many other things.