Obama has made a great start by not accepting money from lobbyists for his Presidential campaign, but there is obviously much, much more work to be done.

^Thanks NetRunner. Keep up the good fight.

^It would be fun if you had the stomach to put the same scrutiny to your own candidate, Bob "War on Drugs supporting, Defense of Marriage author, Patriot Act signature" Barr, that you do to Obama. But if you did that, you'd have to find a new candidate, so I can see why you wouldn't.

^I have a pretty big stomach.

I'm a bit confused about the free speech zone thing, because there were definitely protesters that made it on TV, notably in this top 15 vid.

Personally I think protesting a particular party's convention and expecting them to listen is a bit silly -- it's not a forum for discussion, it's a marketing infomercial.

Wouldn't stop me from protesting the RNC convention, but my target audience would be TV and YouTube, not the delegates.

The bit about a corporate feeding frenzy isn't a surprise, though you're deluding yourself if you think it wouldn't happen to the Libertarian, Green, or Constitution parties if they wielded 40%+ of the political power in the country. Their conventions would be the same, free speech zones and corporate orgies included.

I'd be more interested in knowing how other countries deal with the problem of corporate money leading to political influence, because here in America, everything's for sale, and anyone who says otherwise is a communistsocialistmarxist un-American American.

I know your answer blankfist...just get rid of government's influence over corprorations, and the corporations won't see a need to twist government's arms.

I think as long as money = speech, we're fucked. Hell, I think as long as we as a society see amoral selfishness as a virtue, we're fucked.

Oh, and I came across a vid of the full segment, including the panel discussion that followed this.

*dead

This published video has been declared non-functional; embed code must be fixed within 2 days or it will be sent to the dead pool - declared dead by eric3579.

*dead -- "Video unavailable
This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated."

This video has been declared non-functional; embed code must be fixed within 2 days or it will be sent to the dead pool - declared dead by ant.