No April Fool’s Day here, I’m afraid. Things are strange enough without going down that road.

I know that I view the recent flap over the proposed “fix” to clarify the campaign spending law’s treatment of contributions by political committees differently than my friends in the reform community. Now that the clarification effort has died for another year after reformers tried to leverage it into a ban on corporate contributions and legislators declined to follow, it offers an interesting lesson in the twists and turns of politics.

If the “fix” so adamantly opposed by campaign reformers had been adopted, what would have changed from the way the law works right now?

Nothing.

And what happens now that the clarification has stalled?

Well, for this election, corporations will be free to contribute to candidates up to the same limits that apply to other donors, just as they had been doing before a twisted Campaign Spending Commission legal call put corporations, unions, and other political committees under a strict limit when using their own funds (as opposed money collected by associated PACs), unless they had set aside funds before the commission opinion went into effect, which is exactly what most of the big players did.

In any case, with this “victory”, the reform push has left us not only with the reality of corporate money in politics but also the likelihood of no reporting of those contributions by the political committees. That’s because of the commission’s “if you don’t agree with me then I’m not going to play at all” response, which has been to stop enforcing reporting requirements for these big political players while the legal appeal is pending.

And if the Supreme Court lets the Maui ruling stand, this is apparently the way things will continue for a while.

I’m sorry. I can’t see what the public won in this exchange.

Let’s see.

You may have noticed something missing here. Those Google ads are gone. For whatever reasons, although the number of visitors to this site has been up over the last year, Google revenues dropped from so-so to pathetic. I barely made enough from Google ads any recent month to buy a single bottle of inexpensive Australian wine. So those ads are gone.

Amazon stays for now, not because it brings in any money but because I like to see what they predict is going to be of interest.

As to revenue to support this site, I’m not what I’ll do.
Ray Barrington, a newspaper guy in Green Bay, Wisconsin, who has been in touch since the early days of this web site, sent along some sad news.

A bit of sad news from our end – Trip, our cat who was on your old “pet friends of the diary” page – has died. We found out about three months ago that he had an enlarged heart, and a couple of weeks ago he staggered into the living room and fell over. We took him to the vet, and his heart had now grown to fill most of his chest. We decided against heroic measures, just loved him the best we could for whatever time we had left, and it was about a week when he woke us up at 3 a.m., unable to walk. Congestive heart failure, they said, and he was gone. As it turned out, we had picked up a new kitten just a few weeks before, and thank goodness for that. But he was a great cat.

He also added:

Looks like the Advertiser’s new look is going to be the default for Gannett. Up here, the Appleton Post-Crescent has already picked it up (with, undoubtedly, the rest of the Wisconsin papers to do so in a month or two) and a friend of mine in Jackson, Tenn., sent me a link to his paper’s new look. (That’s one thing about working for Gannett; you suddently find friends all over the country.)

And so it goes on this Tuesday morning.