pacino wrote:Some people aren't easily shamed, so im not sure we should simply rely on publicizing donations; rather, simply eliminate them.

jerseyhoya wrote:Big money can’t buy elections – influence is something else - Pretty interesting read from Jonathan Soros, who has been one of those big money Dem donors who has made campaign finance reform a priority in supporting candidates

I think he's mostly on the right track with a lot of this. The right concerns about the current system (lack of transparency, donor influence on priorities of government, perceived or actual limited efficacy of small dollar donors) rather than some of the more commonly aired complaints (money buys elections, Citizens United ruined everything/is the worst Supreme Court decision ever, etc.). He's also got the right concerns about the fixes, with most legislatively designed overhaul plans pre or post Citizens United (including McCain Feingold) amounting to incumbent protection legislation and the ability of money to find its way into the system regardless. I'm not sure how much the matching funds idea would help shape legislation, though it would help on the perceived efficacy front anyway.

Every reform has potential downsides. Increasing public funding for campaigns or subsidizing small dollar donors might exacerbate polarization. Transparency comes with the potential for backlashes that make people hesitant to engage in the political process. But these issues seem a lot smaller than the concerns I'd have about most other campaign finance proposals.

Soren wrote:really bummed about J Stew.

Researchers said they determined that 3,959 black people were killed in “racial terror lynchings” in a dozen Southern states between 1877 and 1950. The new number includes 700 people who were not named in previous works seeking to comprehensively document the toll, the authors wrote. Some of those previous studies were conducted at a time when lynching was still an ongoing phenomenon.

The lynchings we document were acts of terrorism because these murders were carried out with impunity, sometimes in broad daylight, often “on the courthouse lawn.” These lynchings were not “frontier justice,” because they generally took place in communities where there was a functioning criminal justice system that was deemed too good for African Americans. Terror lynchings were horrific acts of violence whose perpetrators were never held accountable. Indeed, some “public spectacle lynchings” were attended by the entire white community and conducted as celebratory acts of racial control and domination.

And this segment describing the spectacles seems to echo what Tolnay and Beck wrote two decades ago regarding how public these events were:


Large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands and including elected officials and prominent citizens, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and/or burning of the victim. White press justified and promoted these carnival like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim’s body parts collected as souvenirs

In addition, the study decries the lack of a public memorial or monument to the lynching victims while the region is cluttered with “markers and monuments” memorializing the Civil War and Confederacy.