It breaks down into three major categories:

1. The Former Media Monopoly — This includes the New York Times and MSNBC. You’ll find their exemption under U.S.C §431(9)(B)(i). Their howling has included some great moments in hypocrisy.

   The New York Times (whom you’ll recall as the petitioner who claimed the first amendment rights of its corporation had been violated in New York Times v Sullivan) opined: “Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights.” Since this was an unsigned editorial, this is a corporation complaining that corporations shouldn’t have first amendment rights. Of course, they’re exempted.

   Keith “You Sir” Olbermann, in a special comment assailed the decision with the personhood argument. His comment is actually a work for hire, the property of a corporation and disseminated by it; but of course, they’re exempted. If they weren’t exempted, they’d  be first in line with an amicus brief for Citizens United.

2. Those in Under The Wire — In 2005, the chilling effects to first amendment speech was clearly seen by the blogosphere. The Internet isn’t even mentioned in the media exceptions of BCRA, but the blogosphere wound up almost entirely exempted by an administrative decision of the FEC. As such, the FEC under another board, could change its mind. If it had decided otherwise in 2005, bloggers would have fought for first-in-line position to deliver amicus briefs along with legacy media.
3. The Exempted Political Idea Industry — This howling appears the loudest to those of us on a myriad of political action lists. This is another monopoly seeing itself lose power. Their exemption came through their ability to navigate the complicated work-arounds that resulted in the lawyered-up’s ability to express political opinions on behalf of the people paying them to do so. They’re the middlemen now cut out because anybody can go to a media distributor and buy time, or go to a computer store and buy DVD blanks and fill them with political commentary.

Poltitical contribution laws were out of step with the way media is changing. It resulted in Citizens United not being able to spew a load of crap, while Fox News does essentially the same thing every day.

It causes folks like Margaret McIntyre to be fined a hundred dollars for expressing her speech, while the Swiftboaters get awards.

The politically protected pundits can’t seem to agree what the effects of this will be. Perhaps we’ll hear nothing but corporate shills morn ’til night, perhaps we won’t.

But one thing it will do is change the game in a big way, because this decision gave a lot of freedom to a lot of people, and took away a lot of monopolies from a privileged few and its been those privileged few responsible for most of the noise that’s being made.

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We’re good at embarrassing ourselves in Palm Beach County and its environs. ‘Til now we haven’t been able to find a supervisor of elections who can count, we are challenged by chad, and we have a 16th Congressional district that seems to have some kind of hardwired feature that catches its sitting congressperson in a compromising sexual situation.

Democrat Tim Mahoney just found that out afresh, when less than a month before his re-election, it was revealed that he’d paid $121,000 to a former mistress to keep her from suing him. Mahoney himself had only won his first-term seat because Republican Mark Foley’s name couldn’t be removed from the ballot, his own scandal over white house pages breaking just before the 2006 election.

Mark Foley in better days

Maybe there’s something about Florida’s 16th that brings out the randy in a politician, or maybe its just serendipity, but there’s definitely something about Foley that makes any suggestion that he’s coming out of self-imposed exile to get back into politics another embarrassment for Palm Beach County. When it comes to Mark Foley, there’s no there there.

Even two years after his embarassing fall from grace, he’s still offering a set of excuses so peppered with appeals to 12-step-style spins that he could build a fire escape from them. It was his alcoholism. No, it was the priest that abused him as a child.

But it wasn’t any of those, it was the kind of blind ambition that lets a politician trade away everything that matters to keep his power, no matter whom he hurts. Fact is, he did nothing illegal, and nothing that would have resulted in anything more than a raised eyebrow if it had been done to female pages.

Trouble was, Foley was the Republican who chaired the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, which brought a whole fox-and-henhouse spin to it.  And now, he’s back, giving the traditional “Breaking his Silence” interview to local NBC-affiliate WPTV.

When he talked about politics he had “a twinkle in his eye,” that led reporter Roxanne Stein to not rule out a return. and that should scare us all. Ex-congressman Foley has a rich history of doing or saying whatever it takes to get or stay elected, whether that’s switching to Republicanism coming from a Democratic family, to walking over his own people (he has suddenly started talking about his “partner”) when it came to gay-rights and gay-protection legislation, to producing an effluent of excuses when he was outed.

And when I say outed, I don’t mean as a gay man. It was “the worst kept secret in Palm Beach County.” I mean outed as a phony and a fraud. We have enough weasels here (Limbaugh, Coulter, Trump) without resurrecting one more.

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