I’ll adopt Obama as “Sacred Heart Jesus” as my photo avatar if you’ll adopt Obama as “Hitler with mustache” as yours.

Here’s a good description of facsism by Robert Paxton, an American historian at Columbia University:

“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Please point me to your evidence that Obama has demonstrated an…

* “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by”
* “compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which”
* “a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants,” and * “pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

I don’t see the preoccupation with decline and victimhood or purity cults or committed nationalist militants or redemptive violence or internal cleansing or external expansion.

Let’s start over with the word “Fascist.” Let’s strip it of its genocidal implications, to the degree that we can. What is Fascism? What policies would promote it? Worth thinking about, at least.

“Well, of course. The whole point of free speech is that we think it’s a *good* thing for expressed opinions to influence people’s opinions, and hence indirectly their voting behavior.”

Yes. Of course. But choosing the disingenuous locution “express their opinion” instead of the candid “influence US elections” suggests a hidden agenda. If you believe foreign nationals should have the same rights as Americans to influence US elections, why disguise your intent behind the innocuous “express”?

“You know as well as I do that allowing the New York Times to endorse candidates is a euphemism for allowing the New York Times to influence elections.”

Well, of course, Steve. But then the NYT has special 1st Amendment press rights that don’t apply to the run-of-the-mill domestic or foreign corporation. Moreover, any corporation that wants to control an editorial page can buy a newspaper, right?

And like any other corporation (before CU), the NYT couldn’t make campaign contributions.

You know as well as I do that “express their opinions” is a euphemism for “influence US elections”.

Well, of course. The whole point of free speech is that we think it’s a *good* thing for expressed opinions to influence people’s opinions, and hence indirectly their voting behavior. You know as well as I do that allowing the New York Times to endorse candidates is a euphemism for allowing the New York Times to influence elections. Everyone knows that, but very few
people think it’s a bad thing.

“You miss my point, which is not that the government should never regulate but that, given its inevitable role as a regulator, maybe it’s kind of a bad idea to let it own companies that compete in the very markets it’s regulating.”

No, I got your point. I used it as a point of departure for a larger point: that there are greater outrages being perpetrated in the name of laissez fair economics than the one you cite about one independent agency (NHTSA) regulating Toyota and another (Treasury), which is not involved in its day-to-day operations, overseeing GM’s management.

Do you have any evidence that Treasury is, directly or indirectly, influencing NHTSA’s regulatory response? I’ve followed the story pretty closely and NHTSA’s response seems SOP to me.

But I agree that it’s not desirable to have the feds own GM for a multitude of reasons, among the least of these being the appearance of a potential conflict of interest with its regulatory role.

“Another missed point. I didn’t say anything at all about constitutional rights. I asked why we should be more leery of foreign corporate speech than of domestic corporate speech (which has been the president’s position lately) and whether this can be reconciled with the president’s former position that we need to listen to the views of foreigners more.”

Yes, you didn’t mention constitutional rights, but of course the context of the President’s comments was the CU decision granting *constitutionally* based free speech rights to corporations, including those run by foreign nationals or are the subsidiaries of foreign companies.

The President has not suggested he is “more leery of foreign corporate speech than of domestic corporate speech”; he’s clearly leery of both. He focuses some of our attention on the perverse aspect of the CU decison which grants foreign nationals the “right” to influence the outcome of US elections. (Can you name another country that has legalized this outcome, much less written it into its constitution?)

“[President Obama] keeps warning me that it will be disastrous if foreign interests are allowed to express their opinions in our political campaigns.”

You know as well as I do that “express their opinions” is a euphemism for “influence US elections”. Corporations, foreign and domestic, do not spend millions of dollars for lobbying and political advocacy for the purpose of merely “expressing” themselves. I know this; corporations apply a very rigorous ROI analysis on their political investments. It’s at best naive to say otherwise.

As our future GOP nominee from Alaska says, you can put lipstick on a pig but he’ll still stink.

Perhaps a disagreement about facts is the basis of this debate.

Any foreign corporation or individual is free to buy advertising, lobby policy makers, appear on talk radio or TV interviews, place op-eds in newspapers, sponsor or attend conferences, etc. in order to educate policy makers and Americans generally about any issue whatsoever. So there is no restriction on their expression of perspectives, opinions, facts, theories, whatever.

What IS restricted is foreigners’ ability to contribute directly or indirectly to political campaigns.

So what do we have here? Confusion about the facts or a glossing-over of the distinction between foreigners’ “right” of expression and their “right” to influence US elections?