In yesterday's Wall Street Journal classifieds:

Class A Office Building, $26/sf, Midland, Texas. 11 stories, 233k sf, blt. 1982, full city block, exc. cond., Seller will carry 1st T.D. at 6% int. Perfect exchange upleg. $5,950,000.

1. Why would someone be selling with the upcoming Downtown Midland Boom just on the horizon?

2. Ad could say: "Can be recipient of benefits of exclusive tax district for just your city block!"

Seroiusly, I really think that an organized ad campaign focused on the "available" Class A (and B and C and D) office space in periodicals like the WSJ could pay off. $26/square foot to buy the building is less than some folks pay for a year's rent in some cities.

I was trying to figure out which building this is when I looked out my window at the Texaco/Heritage building. And counted the floors. 11. Whole block. Hmmm. Maybe they are selling becuase they aren't in the downtown devel. district. They should advertise the landscaping...it is one of the best looking sites in town.

Our Own Blog Troll, Ralph Wiggam [sic] is up to three (count 'em, three) posts. I have no idea why I looked.

Update: This Photoshopping out-does mine, hands down. (Although, I must note that in mine, while I colored the hair and the eyebrows, I left the face color un-retouched.)

Update: Dan Rather and CBS are reporting Kerry's new tan as "Fake, but accurate".

The Midland Municipal Management District (MMMD) has been created with no opposition.

Well, it has been created without the kind of opposition that shows up at meetings and voices opposition in a public forum when the outcome is a foregone conclusion. This was not a meeting to seek input. This was a meeting required only by law and/or proper public relations. The real hurdle will be overcoming the opposition that comes in another, more difficult to placate form: That of downtown tenants reacting to what may be an increased cost of doing business downtown. Planters and landscaping may increase the attractiveness of the area, but downtown Midland is not known for its unattractiveness now. Just its emptiness.

So what can the MMMD do with a budget of roughly $1 million over five years? What are the things that this group can do to increase downtown occupancy and activity? We may as well open this to the comments and see what comes in.

Implosion! David Frum on the NYT on blogs and bloggers. This is getting to be fun to watch!

Mike over at Cold Fury remains on the case while the rest of us are distracted by Rathergate, hurricanes (pray for Floridians), non-scandals in the Texas House, Friday night football, real rain (Rain!!) in West Texas (West Texas!!!) and the Family Fair:

Top ten things Kerry and the Democrats would never, ever do merely to get elected:

1. Promote defeatism in a crucial conflict, in direct contradiction of his own past statements, thereby helping to create the very American defeat he falsely claims to be so concerned about.

And on with many more and with links galore. Read the whole thing. Thanks, Mike!

UPDATE: A related article Monday by Jed Babbin:

The problem with Kerry's speeches is not that he's sending mixed signals on Iraq. Of course he is, and by now most of us have lost count of them. The problem is in his sole point of constancy: Kerry says, over and over, that we need to make the Iraq war someone else's problem, and begin pulling out. Nothing in his formulation requires that the war be won — and Iraq and Afghanistan be stable and free — before we leave. That one unshakeable position is sending a precise, consistent, and damaging message to the troops.

Go read the whole thing.

"House Speaker addresses indictments while in Midland; says 'those charged are innocent until proven guilty.' "

A tremendous scoop here by Sarah Kleiner and the MRT! When a sitting Texas House Speaker from Midland is indicted by the Travis County District Attorney it takes no small amount of nerve to merely publish the news much less splash it all over the front page of his hometown newspaper with a big print headline.

Oh, wait......it says here in paragraph number eleven (out of sixteen and on page 4A) that Craddick wasn't the one that was indicted.

Why, that takes even more nerve!

The Downtown Midland Development District (Directors come Pre-Installed!) will probably move forward with the general tax to be placed on downtown property owners now that the Williams Companies have joined in and they are now backed by over 51% of the valuation within the district. Properties appraised at $200,000 or less are exempt from the tax.

As hard as we have been on the creation of the MDDD in the halls of power by the few at the behest of the even fewer in order to tax the all of downtown, there is one question that would be interesting to know the answer to:

How many property owners are there, actually, that are not with the 51%+ in favor of the tax but that are also not exempt from the tax because their property is appraised at over $200,000?

Could it be zero? Maybe...in which case my only objection to the plan is how such a taxing entity was created as described above.

But if the number is not zero, I would love to hear that group's opinions on all of this. How many are they? And who are they?

Former President Clinton's post bypass surgery diet regimen begins to have an effect.

Brian Leiter: Oliver Willis with a real job.

Bill Burkett has now been fingered as the not-so-reliable-after-all "source" of the forged documents Dan Rather and CBS used to smear the Prez. Kerry campaign grandees Joe Lockhart and Max Cleland may be involved in all this.

But the interesting reads of the day can be found over at EllisBlog where advice is being given to CBS producer Mary Mapes.

Read all of the entries that begin "Dear Mary Mapes:". Fascinating stuff.

When the spears start flying, this is the woman that Gunga Dan is going to use as a human shield....gentleman that he is.

From Lileks (who else?):

"We understand that there has been some controversy over the newly discovered Michelangelo painting featured in “60 Minutes” expose of curatorial malfeasance at the Metropolitan Museum. Some outside experts note that close analysis of the wood frame reveals the presense of modern staples, and while we agree this is curious – as are the words ‘Abiline Frame Shop’ engraved into the wood – it is hardly conclusive. Others have questioned the use of acrylic instead of oil paints, and the presence of nylon fibers embedded in the brushstrokes have led some to question whether the painting is indeed 500 years old. These are issues worth pursuing, and we will redouble our efforts. But it’s a little bit frustrating to see all this reduced to a debate over slivers and threads, instead of the real question, namely, how did Michelangelo’s “Madonna of of the Dealership” include a 1957 Chevy Bel-Air rendered with such astonishing detail, half a millennium before the car was designed? That’s the issue we think should be the focus of our attention."

"...That's why I am called an anchor — I provide Americans with the kind of weighty news bogged down in silt and covered with barnacles they're crying out for in this information-starved age. In other words, presenting 60 Minutes II is a hallowed trust, a boon to mankind. I am that trusting boon. "Bias" is simply not in my vocabulary. And neither is "Chandra Levy," come to think of it."

Dan Rather, interviewing himself, here. More here. Deceived? Ha.

In today's Letters to the Editor (no link yet), a Mr. Charles Neely wonders why the Reporter-Telegram ran as its September 10 headline the "news" of Dan Rather's "newly discovered documents" that prompted further questions concerning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, and why, now that everyone on the planet knows these documents to be forgeries, the MR-T has not given like attention to that information.

I have come to the MR-T's defense. In today's edition (9/19) there is a story about the possible source of these forged documents.

On page 4C.

The article is written by Kelley Shannon of the Associated Press and contains the hilarity:

"The authenticity of the documents has been called into question by some experts and relatives of the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who supposedly wrote them when he supervised Bush in 1972 and 1973."

"One of the memos indicated that Killian had been pressured to sugarcoat Bush's performance."

UPDATE: Credit to the MR-T. The front page (above the fold) today has an article saying that CBS is essentially admitting the documents are forgeries.

OK. So Bill Burkett is the current top vote getter as to who it was that forged the Killian memos and is an unreliable witness.

He was probably the guy that faxed these "re-assembled documents" from the Abilene Kinko's.

But CBS could burn this guy in a minute and say they were had by the documents with no real long-term effects. So there has to be someone in the middle. Someone truly and profoundly damaging to not just CBS proper but CBS's now exposed "great cause".

UPDATE: Mark Steyn and Powerline agree.

There is a news photo going around the internet showing a dad with his crying daughter on his shoulders. She is crying because the Bush/Cheney sign she was holding was (supposedly) taken from her by a union thug and ripped up.

But the thick plottens!

UPDATE:

My Options at this Point:

1) Call the Dad a phoney and a photo-op con who ought to be exposed.
2) State that while the photo was an obvious fake, it was accurate.

I choose Option 1.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin says the union guy in the picture is not related to the victim.

I choose Option 3: Think the union guy a bully, and think the Dad whose idea of fun is showing up at the opponent's rally kids in tow in order to agitate someone is a jerk. We have a tie here, ladies and gentlemen.

I don't want to go off too quickly here because the EZ Rider people may be providing to the MR-T only as much detail as to their financials as does the Midland Development Corporation. But does that mean that (in either case) that the MR-T can't insist on receiving meaningful financial information from these public money entities and then inform the public when it is not forthcoming? At least then we would know where the problem was.

Whether the information was withheld by the city or found unimportant by the paper, the net result is this: One year in on EZ Rider and the extent of the reporting is a series of quotes from the guy paid to run it, a lump-sum ridership number, a lump-sum cost to the city (that reflects only a fraction of the actual cost of operations), and the results of an un-scientific, self-selecting online "poll" that is presented as though it were valid polling data.

To operate such as system, lots of people need to be paid, and lots of gasoline and oil needs to be purchased, etc., etc., etc. and while we know that the city government's portion of all of this is $230,000, what is left unreported (or unrecognized) is that that amount represents only part of the total cost of operations. The (unknown) remaining amount is also paid for by the taxpayer, just not through city coffers. Are the answers to the following questions really unattainable?

• What were the total Federal outlays for this program?
• What were the total State outlays for this program?
• What was the total cost of operations for the system by month?
• What were the total ridership numbers per month?
• What were the total revenues for each month?

Get only this information and you can then use Microsoft Excel to do calculations that a reading public might be interested in like...say...total revenue for the year, and total net loss, and cost to the taxpayer per each passenger trip. Useful stuff. Real information.

And, yes, I know that public transportation is not supposed to make money but I will restate something that has already been said here:

If the costs of operating the system are not at all important, then what does it matter what the ridership numbers are?

So it is not about pointing out that EZ Rider isn't making money and won't ever make money. It is about informing the taxpaying public what the real cost of the system is so that they can make their own decisions as to its value.

Even if the poll mentioned in the article were valid (it is not, for the reasons stated above) how could anyone answering the questions contained in it arrive at an informed answer using only what has been provided by the city or reported by the paper?

"Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says"

Hat Tip: Blissful Knowledge.

The Kerry Spot is the place for Rathergate updates. Jim Geraghty fisks the Tuesday night CBS news coverage and finds this money quote in the coverage from the NY Times:

Asked what role Mr. Burkett had in raising questions about Mr. Bush's military service, Mr. Van Os said: "If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 - which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done'' - then, he continued, "what difference would it make?"

Wow. Geraghty's comment: "Ladies and gentlemen, the curtain rises on Part Two of CBS' defense, the idea that the documents are 'replicas of what someone believed existed in 1972 or 1973.' And that while these documents themselves are fake, we the viewers of CBS are to take it on faith that originals once existed somewhere."

CBS needs to understand the First Rule of Holes: "When you find yourself in a hole and need to get out of it, stop digging."

UPDATE: I would be remiss if I did not point out that The Commissar is doing an extraordiarily fine job on the subject matter as well. Excellent work, Comrade!

I watched Dan Rather's evening news broadcast last night just to see how the Rathergate matter would be handled. (An aside: I cannot remember the last time I saw the show. My household was more of an NBC Huntley-Brinkley place. That was 3 decades ago, when I last actively watched network news at 5:30.) Anyway, no surprise. No admission of guilt. No retraction. More "experts" supporting the documents. Little or no mention of the blogosphere. Arcane discussiion of "ells" replacing "ones."

Here is an excellent fisking of the transcript of last night's show from Jim Geraghty at NRO's Kerry Spot. I won't be going out of my way to catch Big Dan tonight.

Brought up from a comment from another post:

"Did anyone watch channel 7 news last night at 10:00, and see Arrrmondo Saldibarrr's ridiculous expose on the private parking lot by Midland County Library?

I have seen a lot of stupid things from the local news, but nothing as bad as Arrrmondo yelling "Is this how you feed your children".

Tatum's cute, but no more CBS news for me, local or national."

Could the memos CBS used to smear Bush have been created on the one typewriter available in 1971 that could come close to matching the typeface and spacing found in these memos?

You be the judge.

If you are not tired of Rathergate yet, go check this out. Fascinating stuff. Toast, I say.

Via Instapundit.

UPDATE: Pulling this up from the comments: more on the technology behind debunking the CBS memos from The Flounder, aka Dr. Newcomer. Another subject matter expert, he has been referenced elsewhere in the Blogosphere. Thanks to our buddy Wallace for bringing this to my/our attention.

Mark Steyn agrees with our Ralph. Who'da thunk it?

The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn't hammer Bush for being AWOL in the Spanish-American War but because the senator's AWOL in the present war. Big Media are trashing their own reputations in service to a man who can never win.

Read the rest here. Rather and CBS are toast on this one. Why believe the MSM ever again?

...and who decides what wire service stuff to run in the local paper? An article, "Have some frozen custard, Mr. Vice President," was run on page 4A of today's MRT and is apparently about a campaign stop with VP Cheney at a custard shop wherein we learn that Mr. Cheney does not have a strong fondness for custard. If you read it as published:

"You're all the way here from the White House and you didn't try the custard?" Borkin said he told the vice president. It was custard, not beer, that made nearby Milwaukee famous, Borkin said.

Cheney accepted the vanilla and took several bites.

The stop was the idea of Green Bay Packer legend Bart Starr, who was traveling with Cheney through Wisconsin, the vice president said, pointing to Starr who was eating his own dish.

The balloons that fell from the rafters of Madison Square Garden last week aren't the only deflated leftovers from the Republican convention. ...

And the article goes on to discuss dissatisfied post-convention New Yorkers. I looked at the "deflated leftovers" remark as directed at Cheney or at least as an amazingly cheap shot in a short, throw-away article about campaigning. It turns out that there is a slightly less negative explanation. Another version of the article, found here, is a 3-parter: 3 separate vignettes of the campaign with a break between each.

The MRT did not include the third part (space limits?) and did not make at all clear the break between the stories. I don't believe this was done intentionally, in fact it may have been automatically done by their publishing programming. It is none-the-less another example of annoying your readers unnecessarily, which can be bad for circulation.

Thanks to the MRT for running this column from Cal Thomas on their editorial page today. Mr. Thomas is a little balance to the usual syndicated suspects our paper publishes. Cal and George Will are breaths of fresh air. Mr. Thomas:

In the Russian killings, the news agency Itar-Tass reports that at least 10 of the 32 hostage terrorists were linked to al-Qaida or had ties to Arab nations. Despite these facts, major American media are going out of their way to cover up the obvious, preferring words such as "militants" and "extremists," and refusing in many cases to identify the religious motivation behind the killings.

As always, read the whole thing. And this time, you just have to pick up the paper.

The velocity with which the doubts of a few bloggers have turned into a breaking story (ABC News) provides the drama. But far more dangerous to CBS are the forensics experts, such as those being interviewed by Hugh Hewitt, who are raising technical questions about the journalistic facts outside the traditional media's gatekeeper function. Whether the CBS documents are authentic or not, it is doubtful whether they can loftily ignore these critcisms, any more than they could Swiftvets. They have to meet these technical questions head-on. May the truth win out.

Wretchard at Belmont Club on the possible-to-probable forgery of the 60 Minutes/National Guard documents. Read the whole thing and then read the post below it. You'll never look at an Access database the same way again.

UPDATE, 10:30 am Friday:

...Editors do some analysis but their focus is diluted by their attention to style and the craft of writing. The blogosphere and other actors, now connected over the Internet, are filling in for the missing analytic function. And although the news networks still generate, via their reporters, the bulk of primary news, they generate a pitiful amount of competent analysis. Put another way, the classic media outlet generates data and entertainment but they don't generate much information. Because of this, the MSM will stumble into these pitfalls time and again. The Andrew Gilligan and Jayson Blair fiascos were indicators that something was really wrong, but no one was listening then. Maybe there is no point to listening now.

Wretchard again here. Read the whole thing and follow the links back to the originators. Fascinating how the blogosphere is probably the only tool/mechanism that could have brought this result about: bringing together widely scattered subject matter experts, rapidly, on their own nickel, to bring truth to an important issue. As I said, fascinating.

The gorgeous and inimitable Ann Coulter:

Of course, it gets complicated trying to do a side-by-side comparison of the candidates' positions on terrorism since we don't know which John Kerry is running for president. The one who opposes war with Iraq or the one who supports it? The one who opposes the Patriot Act or the one who voted for it? The one who wants to work with the allies, or the one who ridicules them when they support America?

The whole column is here. Enjoy!

The inimitable James Taranto:

Maybe John Edwards could file a class-action suit on behalf of all Americans who've suffered whiplash watching Kerry switch from one side to the other and back again.

Read the whole thing here.

A single article from Associated Press concerning the Beslan massacre.

Let us do the word count:

Militant(s): 11
Hostage-Taker(s): 3
Raider(s): 4
Terrorist(s): 2
Muslim(s): 0

From Mark Steyn:

"On opening night in Boston, the Democrats staged a tasteful, teary candlelight remembrance of those who died on 9/11. On opening night in New York, the Republicans put up one speaker after another -- John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Ron Silver -- resolved that those thousands of innocents shall not have died in vain.

I remember a couple of days after Sept. 11 writing that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, the two conventions drew the same distinction. If you want passivity and wallowing in victim culture, the Dems will do. If you want to win this thing, Bush is the only guy running."

Associated Press gets caught reporting something that didn't actually happen....in this case reporting that a Republican crowd booed when President Bush wished former President Clinton a speedy recovery.The blogosphere takes it from there.

Walter Cronkite, call your office.

Wretchard at Belmont Club has, as usual, an interesting view of things. This time he's focused on the current state of two primary political parties in America. He collects from Hugh Hewitt and Dick Morris and pulls it together with his own thoughts thusly:

The Republican clarity of purpose may in fact be the reason why they have been able to use what Hugh Hewitt calls swarm tactics so effectively. He describes the Internet cloud of enemies which has descended on the John Kerry campaign in terms of John Arquilla's netcentric combat theories (Belmont Club has referred to Arquilla in previous posts): the hits keep coming faster than Kerry can coordinate a defense...snip...(quoting Hewitt quoting Arquilla) "Unlike previous military practice, battle management is now mainly about 'command and decontrol,' as networked units all over the field of battle (or business, or activism, or terror and crime) coordinate and strike the adversary in fluid, flexible, nonlinear ways."...snip... In an earlier, low tech era, this phenomenon was referred to in the German Army as "saddle orders". Because the general principles of the campaign were so well understood by lower-level commanders, Guderian and Rommel could redirect subordinates and trust them to do the "right thing", that is, act consistently within the agreed strategic framework. They could give orders from the "saddle". In contrast, the French High Command had to laboriously consider its reaction to each threat. It was this kind of confidence in the Age of Sail which enabled Nelson to break the French line at Trafalgar. Nelson's captains had served together so long they were like a basketball team that could blind-pass to each other, so that his pre-battle signal consisted simply of "England expects every man to do his duty". Both the German Army of 1940 and Nelson's fleet of 1805 were inferior to the enemy in materiel and numbers. But it did not matter. The surprise of 2004 may be that the Mainstream Media, like the Chars of the French Army or the sailing wonders of Villeneuve, will not matter at all.

Emphasis mine. RTWT.

Phone call says the radio is saying that Bill Clinton is undergoing heart surgery.

New York Times says heart attack. No other details.

(And watch it with the comments, guys.)

UPDATE: Updated News from MyWestTexas.com.

I am just now able to stop breathing into a paper to bag to keep from hyperventilating. I thought for just a brief moment that a post subject from this little ol' blog was going to end up in the President's nomination acceptance speech tonight.

"America has done this kind of work before and there have always been doubters. In 1946, 18 months after the fall of Berlin to allied forces, a journalist wrote in the New York Times, "Germany is a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. [European] capitals are frightened. In every [military] headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their utmost to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy that they admit has failed." End quote. Maybe that same person's still around, writing editorials."

But I believe the meme started here with this post and I will always be able to wonder (and not unreasonably) if in all this blog stuff we do, we actually did something useful.

Also, similar credit needs to go to the now inactive blog CounterRevolutionary, who followed up with a lot of work in the archives of the NY Times uncovering like articles, perhaps even including the article that the President did quote.

And, yes, we are the ones Rush got it from too. (No hat tip, however, even though he used our graphics and scans.)

And speaking of hat tips, Tony Snow knows how to give one.

UPDATE: Re-reading this post this morning it looks more like chest-thumping than I really wanted it to. It is not that...it is not about us. It is more an amazement of what is now possible for anyone, anywhere with some time and effort and a small amount of money for a hosting plan. Just a few years ago, we could have run across such an article and then what? Use the text in a single Letter to the Editor? Photocopy it and mail it to several friends or hang it on the break room wall? Mail it to a campaign and hope for the best? Wow. Maybe it was us, maybe it wasn't. But my freebie stat package tells me that, regardless, this post/article made it a little further than the break room wall.

It may be Kerry's CIA guy. It may not. In any event, he is not wearing a hat!

From Drudge:

FOXNEWS BEATS BROADCAST NETWORKS FOR TUESDAY NIGHT COVERAGE OF CONVENTION -- HISTORIC UNPRECEDENTED NUMBERS FOR CABLE

10-11PM

FOXNEWS -- 5.2 MILLION
NBC -- 5.1 MILLION
CBS -- 4.4 MILLION
ABC -- 4.3 MILLION
MSNBC -- 1.6 MILLION
CNN -- 1.5 MILLION

Revisiting this earlier post on Kerry's non-answers and outright press avoidance on his now widely recognized Cambodian adventure fabulism, you will see that I linked directly to a document on the Kerry official web site that shows the "illegal" connections between the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign. I also wrote in that post, "NOTE TO DEMS: It may not be such a good idea to post things on your official web site that will be linked to more often by your opponents than by your supporters."

Very consciously, therefore, I am going to link to that document once again.

And this time I am going to accompany same with this rebuttal from one of the names shown on that handy dandy map of the VRWC provided by the Kerry campaign, one Benjamin Ginsberg.

An excerpt:

"A $500,000 ad buy made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth brings searing media scrutiny and "proof" of illegal coordination based on a lawyer (me) representing both the Bush-Cheney campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans; on an accountant working for Tom DeLay's political action committee; and on a $200,000 contributor to the group who is not a major donor to Bush-Cheney 2004 but who does know Karl Rove.

Meanwhile, the media give practically no scrutiny to a $63 million, five-month, negative-ad buy done by Democratic "527" groups (the Media Fund, MoveOn.org and others) with a revolving door of connections to the Kerry campaign. Consider:"

"Bob Perry has been criticized and scrutinized for giving $200,000 to the group questioning Kerry's claims about his Vietnam service and for knowing Rove. But does anyone in the media see a double standard in the lack of reporting on the far more direct connections among major Kerry-Edwards fundraisers who have contributed to their 527s? These include:

• Fred Baron, chairman of Kerry Victory 2004, who gave $50,000 to Richardson's 527.

• Stephen Bing, John Edwards's top donor, who contributed $8 million to 527s.

• Susie Buell, Kerry vice chairman, who raised more than $100,000 for the campaign and gave more than $1 million to 527s.

• Lewis Cullman, a major DNC donor who raised more than $100,000 for the Democratic Party and gave $1.65 million to 527s."

Yet all we hear about is Bob Perry (of Bill Clements campaign fame) and his $200,000 given over to an organization run by a guy named John O'Neill...a guy that is such a huge fan of George W. Bush that his candidate of choice was John Edwards.

The Kerry campaign has no charge here that they are not equally guilty of. Perhaps we should all have a huge case against 527's and what they have become (I don't) but that is a different argument altogether.

What I do think is hilarious is that seasoned legislators like Senators McCain and Feingold thought that....oooooohhhhhh....writing a law would make people behave as these Senators wished. I wish my amusement at their naivete' took more of the sting out of the fear that this is how they believe we regular folk need to be handled when we get any ideas about conveying our opinions beyond the confines of a dining table or a break room.

But, hey, they sure took the money out of politics, didn't they?

There will forever be an increasing amount of money in politics. That much is certain. But now this enlightened legislation has, by law, pushed this money away from the direct control of the candidate...the one person that could truly be held accountable for its use.

Need one more worry? Ok. McCain-Feingold will be seen by its supporters as being ineffective, but not because it was always unworkable and generally a bad idea. It will be seen as not being enough. Look for an attempt at even more restrictions on your First Amendment rights.

McCain-Feingold is all the evidence required to show that many in the political class/mainstream press are already looking at your First Amendment rights like they have looked at your Second Amendments rights for some time now. Only this time, the idea is that they are the militia and the rest of us get to be the "well regulated".