My latest column in Sunday's San Luis Obispo Tribune is available here. It deals with public financing of municipal elections.

This bad idea was proposed by the same group fronted by anti-First Amendment crusader William Ostrander, who's apparently running to replace the retiring Rep. Lois Capps this fall.

In the past couple of days there have hilariously been a couple of letters to the editor taking SLO councilman Dan Carpenter to task for reversing course on his support of this public financing scheme after he heard from his constituents.

According to the letter writers, listening to your constituents is apparently a "bad thing" when they encourage the politician to oppose your views.

Anyway, my research for the piece was rather far reaching and there's a lot of "stuff" that ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. If you're interested in reading more, here are some links:

• National Conference of State Legislatures on Public Financing of Campaigns
• McComish v. Bennett (SCOTUS)
• Wikipedia on Publicly funded elections
• Justices Reject Vermont's Campaign Finance Law (Washington Post, 2006)
• Goldwater Institute on Arizona's Taxpayer-financed Campaign Experiment
• Obama Campaign accepted foreign Web Donation—and may be hiding more (NY Post)
• Obama Campaign Fined Big for Hiding Donors, Keeping Illegal Donations (US News & World Report)

In the end, I cut a bunch of Obama-hypocrisy out. His abandonment of the post-Nixon public financing for his presidential elections says all you need to hear about the depth of Democrats' belief in public financing schemes.