I've never much believed in this campaign finance reform nonsense.  I'm no constitutional scholar, but it seems pretty clear to me that money is speech, etc.  But forget all that for just a moment.  Remember that little box that you can check on your tax return that throw a dollar into the hopper for publicly funding political campaigns?  Well, it turns out that next to no one uses it.  This is OK, ironically, because no serious political candidate takes that money, since it restricts the total they can raise.  But does that stop them from trying to put that money aside anyway?  No. If fact, in 1995, they raised it from $1 to $3, and even less people opted in. But as George Will writes this week (the entire column is a must read):

Because by now 90 percent refuse the $3 checkoff, the Federal Election Commission lobbied the largest manufacturers of tax preparation software to take two measures to promote the checkoff system.

Hitherto, the companies' software, reflecting their customers' obvious preference, used "no" as the default option. But the FEC got the companies to change that, and to include an advertisement for the checkoff, saying it "reduces candidates' dependence on large contributions from individuals and groups and places candidates on equal footing in the general election." That bit of puffery is simplistic to the point of tendentiousness: Large hard-dollar contributions (larger than $5,000) are illegal, and there is much more to "equal footing" than hard-dollar equality in the post-convention sprint to Election Day.

So now they want to turn it into an Opt Out system?  What a bunch of hypocrites.