I have no problems with government agencies sharing equipment. This story has nothing to do with that. This story is about the DoD surveilling Americans on American soil.
No, it's not. You have a fundamental reading comprehension problem.
This is EXACTLY about such equipment being put to non-DoD-surveillance use. You're pretending it's about something else because that helps you find a way to talk about the think you're obsessed about the evil gubmint doing despite your tinfoil hat, and such. Military aircraft have been used for such alternate tasks for as long as there have BEEN military aircraft. You just see the word "drone" and lose all critical thinking skills. Does that happen when you hear the word "antenna" or "truck" or "binoculars?"
Right. You're avoiding the topic. One agency of the government borrowing equipment owned by another agency of the government is nothing more than common sense. Because you're fixated on a particular agenda, you can't wrap your head around the fact that dozens of federal agencies make use of aerial imaging in order to do what they do. Every time a camera in an aircraft takes a picture of something, it's not the Eeeeeevil Gubmint looking over your shoulder through your kitchen window to see which Japanese tentacle porn you're reading. Are you that out of touch with daily life? The government wastes way too much money. You should be glad that the EPA, the DoT, NASA, NOAA, and so many others can save a pile of my cash (you're obviously not a taxpayer) by being able to use another agency's equipment for occasional tasks.
And yet you're talking about warrantless wiretaps. Yes, you're changing the subject. Because it bugs you that there are perfectly valid, entirely constitutional reasons why one piece of the government might use the resources already in place at a another piece of the government. Shocking! It's a conspiracy!
So in other words you'd rather change the subject and rant about something unrelated in order to avoid addressing the actual topic at hand? No surprise.
Which bad behavior are you talking about? Which of the 20 uses, reviewed and blessed by the ACLU after the FOIA request, do you consider to be the "bad behavior" part of civilian agencies avoiding the huge expense of procuring specialized aerial imaging equipment or services for rare use by simply borrowing it from another department for a bit? Please be specific.
So your main problem is that you think the ACLU is under the control of the agencies who borrowed the equipment/systems? You think the ACLU was somehow forced to lie when they reviewed the FOIA-ed info and concluded that indeed there was nothing untoward in the use of the systems?
don't talk about it being lawful, it just makes you look like a fascist
You don't actually know what that word means, do you? Nor how to use it in any sort of useful context? When local search and rescue teams borrow a military truck in really foul weather, do you start screaming "Fascists!" every time? I hope that if you're about to die in a flood, that the Navy helicopter brought in to augment the Coast Guard's SAR teams, the helicopter and crew that could save your life, just fly right on by while you're screaming "Fascists!" and shaking your fists at them. The Supreme Court as already had multiple occasions to examine situations when civilian agencies make use of military resources. It's a shame that the ACLU has been corrupted by The Eeeeevil Fascist Gubmint, but at least we can thank you for breaking that story for us today.
Stop what? Once ever couple of weeks, one civilian agency or another borrows a piece of specialized military hardware so they don't have to waste all of our tax dollars procuring that same piece hardware redundantly for only occasional use? Or would you rather waste your tax dollars on flying specially outfitted manned aircraft for when those agencies need some on demand aerial imagery?
You people make me sick.
Let me guess. You're one of the nearly half of the people in this country that pays no income taxes, so you'd rather those of us who do waste millions of dollars YOU don't have to pay for so that you personally won't feel all icky and scared when the Department of Transportation borrows a military camera platform to survey some infrastructure. Do you also get all panicky when local search and rescue teams borrow a truck or a boat from the military? Are you worried those are being used to hide alien autopsy secrets out in the swamps and whatnot? Come on. Get a grip. And get a job that pays enough so you feel some of the tax burden the rest of us do, so you'll be glad when one agency saves millions of bucks by leveraging another department's hardware and systems once in a while.
what makes you think external powers can pick the "right" side in any given local situation?
What makes you think that's impossible when it comes to military force, but possible when it comes to sanctions or other non-military diplomatic-style power?
More to the point: just because the situation in one area is murky doesn't mean that it's in any way ambiguous who's right or wrong when a caravan of trucks loaded with men carrying machine guns pulls into a village and starts shooting school teachers in the town square. There are plenty of VERY cut and dry cases. For a "local" sociopolitical problem, ISIS sure is swimming in hundreds of millions of dollars, getting financial, logistical, and personnel support from all around the globe, and expanding their operations into (among other places) Africa. Their propaganda (which relies heavily on the narrative that they are militarily powerful and victorious) is being put to use around the world and gaining the support of people who perform mass killings in Europe and North America - not just in Syria or Iraq.
Most of the shrill "War is not the answer!" crowd are moral relativists who will always resist recognizing that doing things like fighting in WWII isn't the same as starting WWII. Or that using necessary force to push Saddam's annexation invasion forces out of Kuwait isn't the same as starting a war.
The second part seems counterproductive to the first.
No, it's not. Because technology isn't static, and our need to field and support as many human beings has gone down hugely. Which reduces everything from health care (and related veteran) costs to administrative costs. Staying focused on things like remote imagining and unmanned vehicles isn't free, but it produces results with far less cost per task (though we could use better human espionage/intelligence in many cases - that's a different problem, though it is also made more effective per human involved because of newer technology, especially on the back end analysis part).
There is no military solution here
There is no solution for mass murdering, medieval-minded theocratic thugocracies that can work without the ready enforcement of military power. The solution is for such entities to be gone from earth. You're hoping to talking (for example) a large chunk of Islam into thinking differently and giving up on everything they say they are required by Allah to do. What is your non-military way of dealing with that, when part of how they do it involves things like rolling a column of trucks into a village, grabbing the school teacher out of the school and shooting her in the head in front of her students as they burn the school down? Were you going to hang out by the school and sing folks songs to the Taliban or to ISIS so they won't do that? Please explain in detail how you would prevent a school full of girls from being kidnapped and sold by a bunch of machine-gun-carrying Boko Haram fighters without the use of force. Really, details, please. Or admit that your "solution" is to abandon a growing portion of the world to exactly that mindset.
then certainly military spending should go down at some point. something that hasn't happened in decades
It went down hugely as the Soviet threat dried up, and then has wobbled up and down in different sectors as different issues presented themselves. If we were dealing with everything we're dealing with now while only having the technology of the 1980's, military spending would be MUCH higher.
The LAST thing we need is expanding military capability.
No, the last thing we need is people who think you should die for expressing your opinion having greater military capability. And the way to make that not worth it to them is to have countermeasures that are wildly more sophisticated than what they have to fight with. Small, non-manned tools like this REDUCE what we have to spend and deploy in any given scenario. And at the same time the technology lends itself to everything from fire fighting to wildlife monitoring in other venues. You're confusing tools with tool users. Just say it: you don't think it's appropriate to push back against groups like ISIS or regimes like North Korea's. Don't bother explaining why, since that's an irrational point of view and any attempt to justify it is going to be based on a broken world view. But at least just say what you mean, in plain language, and quit pretending that advances in technology are, in and of themselves, a bad thing.
Life in other countries is as good or better than life in the US.
Which explains why a country of 321,000,000 people has an immigrant population of 61,00,000. They're just confused and thought they were heading somewhere else, right?
They are refusing to do their job in order to keep a cloud over her candidacy. They are influencing an election.
What? This would have been over years ago if SHE hadn't deliberately stonewalled and dragged her feet on compliance not only with the requirement that she turn over all her records as she left office, but promptly honored requests associated with all sorts of FOIA, investigative, and even subpoena demands. She's the one that caused this to be happening during campaign season, not Obama's DoJ/FBI people.
If your car breaks as a result of a crash, is that a sign you shouldn't own one? No? I see.
Most small UAS platforms run on highly energetic and notoriously fragile LiPo batteries. Falling from even a few meters can be enough to damage them and potentially start a fire that can seriously damage (and even mostly consume) the device in question. If the operator is compliant with the FAA's silly new rules and has his Super Official No Really I Didn't Write Someone Else's On It FAA Registration Number written on the outside as mandated, a LiPo fire could easily destroy that bit of information. A slo-mo parachute-controlled crash would reduce the odds of that happening.
It's all academic, though. The FAA now considers these to be "aircraft," and federal law prohibits anyone (including the police) from interfering with the operations of a flight - by doing things like shooting at it or forcing it down. There are very, very limited circumstances in which that's allowed (think, flying your gyrocopter through the DC FRZ). But some dude taking landscape photos over a national park? No, the park ranger can't bazooka that down because you're not supposed to fly your 9-ounce toy in federally controlled wilderness. No more than they can shoot down a Cessna.
Where did I say it didn't impact a lot of people? My point was (in response to the explicit invocation of people operating things like FREAKIN' TRAINS hauling untold thousands of tons of speeding metal and payload through major cities, etc) that it's not unreasonable to check people in whose hands you're about to put possibly thousands of lives on a regular basis to see whether or not they have a real problem with self control/awareness. It's not unreasonable to see if they allow their brains to be clouded by drug use that could impact whether they can safely do their job. If they want to do a job while stoned, there are plenty of jobs out there that don't simultaneously put lives at stake.
There are similar issues in play when (for example) your work involves judgement calls about how you handle information (and information systems) that could impact (or end) the lives of other people in sensitive roles.
Now that the FAA is referring to even tiny 9-ounce plastic toys as aircraft that require a permit to operate even for recreation, this introduces some conflicts. The FAA doesn't generally like interference with aircraft. In that context, downing a four pound GoPro-equipped UAS taking landscape photos isn't really any different than shooting down a Cessna. The FAA needs to sort out its language in this area.
Why are you assuming that working with sensitive information means working for the government? Pretty small worldview you have there.
Regardless, a couple of my biggest customers are in turn defense contractors, or do work for DoJ, or for the federal courts, or for some large non-profits that serve active duty people in uniform, etc. I am thrilled to death that I don't work for the government, but am glad I can pick and choose projects directly or indirectly impact things in that arena I find interesting.
Sure! Lucky me. What does that have to do with it being appropriate for people who do things like drive trains pulling a mile of tanker cars loaded with fuels, acids, and other toxins through your neighborhood being able to show they don't abuse drugs that could make them disastrously bad at that critical job?
You can thank Nancy and 2 stoner train engineers for having to pee in a jar before you can get a job now
I've never had to subject myself to such a test, and I've worked with very sensitive information on behalf of some large operations. Maybe you're thinking about jobs where an employee's alertness and quick reflexes, when compromised, could cost large numbers of lives? Nah, that's just silly talk.
You have falsely convolved free speech and money. Are all bribe givers now merely free-speakers?
No, you're falsely equating running an ad to say you're in favor of politicians that (for example) want to protect consumer encryption products from government mandated back doors with somehow bribing those same people.
Which mechanism for putting money into a politician's campaign fund do you find to be suddenly un-regulated? Or are you confusing your right to run an ad that says you approve of a given political point of view (or that you disapprove of one) with putting money directly into a politician's pocket, as a bribe?
I believe this will evolve into multicandidate non-party races
So what? Are you worried that you are too weak-minded to still vote for the person you prefer, even when the Sierra Club, or AARP, or the NRA shows you an expensively produced ad trying to convince you otherwise? Let's cut to the chase: your real issue here is that you think everyone but you can't be trusted to vote with a purpose.
The Republicans and our Supreme Court may well have destroyed the US's two party system by removing the constraints on political funding.
The US doesn't have a two-party system. The US has two varyingly successful parties. The US system is the one described by the constitution (and to a certain extent the sub-systems described by the constitutions of the 50 states). That constitutional system is completely silent on the matter of people assembling into political parties and taking advantage of shared resources in order to get behind a potential candidate that they like. To the contrary: the constitution expressly forbids the government from getting in the way of political speech, assembly, etc.
Which is why striking down McCain-Feingold (which was exactly an example of the government shutting people up as they tried to express their political views and support) was perfectly in keeping with the constitution's very first and most important amendment. Are you really thinking that the country had been laboring under McCain-Feingold's capricious limits on political support and speech all along, and it was suddenly ripped away? No. It was a fairly recent piece of legislation, it was loudly protested as being counter-constitutional when it was established, and it failed a test of its constitutionality in a plain-as-day case government muzzling someone's political film making.
The Republicans shortsightedly thought that they would be the primary benefactors of unrestrained political spending.
No, they thought that it was unconstitutional to tell you personally that depending on the date on the calendar, you weren't allowed to speak your mind. Or that your ability to offer your political support would be allowed or squashed depending on what sort of business your run or group you form.
If you think the first amendment should be waived so that government can shut up the people you don't like to hear from (but not you or the people you like), then you're going to have to propose something a lot more clever than McCain-Feingold, which never passed the 1A smell test.
At this stage of the game, the internal dealings of a political party isn't any different than the internal dealings of the local bowling club. People are free to assemble and do what they want on their own terms. If that happens to include choosing CNN to host their debate, so what? That's no different than a club renting out a church basement or local legion hall for their monthly meeting. A political party is a private association of people who are, among themselves, deciding who they might want to put forward as a candidate in a general election.
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I have no problems with government agencies sharing equipment. This story has nothing to do with that. This story is about the DoD surveilling Americans on American soil.
No, it's not. You have a fundamental reading comprehension problem.
This is EXACTLY about such equipment being put to non-DoD-surveillance use. You're pretending it's about something else because that helps you find a way to talk about the think you're obsessed about the evil gubmint doing despite your tinfoil hat, and such. Military aircraft have been used for such alternate tasks for as long as there have BEEN military aircraft. You just see the word "drone" and lose all critical thinking skills. Does that happen when you hear the word "antenna" or "truck" or "binoculars?"
Right. You're avoiding the topic. One agency of the government borrowing equipment owned by another agency of the government is nothing more than common sense. Because you're fixated on a particular agenda, you can't wrap your head around the fact that dozens of federal agencies make use of aerial imaging in order to do what they do. Every time a camera in an aircraft takes a picture of something, it's not the Eeeeeevil Gubmint looking over your shoulder through your kitchen window to see which Japanese tentacle porn you're reading. Are you that out of touch with daily life? The government wastes way too much money. You should be glad that the EPA, the DoT, NASA, NOAA, and so many others can save a pile of my cash (you're obviously not a taxpayer) by being able to use another agency's equipment for occasional tasks.
And yet you're talking about warrantless wiretaps. Yes, you're changing the subject. Because it bugs you that there are perfectly valid, entirely constitutional reasons why one piece of the government might use the resources already in place at a another piece of the government. Shocking! It's a conspiracy!
So in other words you'd rather change the subject and rant about something unrelated in order to avoid addressing the actual topic at hand? No surprise.
Which bad behavior are you talking about? Which of the 20 uses, reviewed and blessed by the ACLU after the FOIA request, do you consider to be the "bad behavior" part of civilian agencies avoiding the huge expense of procuring specialized aerial imaging equipment or services for rare use by simply borrowing it from another department for a bit? Please be specific.
don't talk about it being lawful, it just makes you look like a fascist
You don't actually know what that word means, do you? Nor how to use it in any sort of useful context? When local search and rescue teams borrow a military truck in really foul weather, do you start screaming "Fascists!" every time? I hope that if you're about to die in a flood, that the Navy helicopter brought in to augment the Coast Guard's SAR teams, the helicopter and crew that could save your life, just fly right on by while you're screaming "Fascists!" and shaking your fists at them. The Supreme Court as already had multiple occasions to examine situations when civilian agencies make use of military resources. It's a shame that the ACLU has been corrupted by The Eeeeevil Fascist Gubmint, but at least we can thank you for breaking that story for us today.
There is one man that can stop this
Stop what? Once ever couple of weeks, one civilian agency or another borrows a piece of specialized military hardware so they don't have to waste all of our tax dollars procuring that same piece hardware redundantly for only occasional use? Or would you rather waste your tax dollars on flying specially outfitted manned aircraft for when those agencies need some on demand aerial imagery?
You people make me sick.
Let me guess. You're one of the nearly half of the people in this country that pays no income taxes, so you'd rather those of us who do waste millions of dollars YOU don't have to pay for so that you personally won't feel all icky and scared when the Department of Transportation borrows a military camera platform to survey some infrastructure. Do you also get all panicky when local search and rescue teams borrow a truck or a boat from the military? Are you worried those are being used to hide alien autopsy secrets out in the swamps and whatnot? Come on. Get a grip. And get a job that pays enough so you feel some of the tax burden the rest of us do, so you'll be glad when one agency saves millions of bucks by leveraging another department's hardware and systems once in a while.
what makes you think external powers can pick the "right" side in any given local situation?
What makes you think that's impossible when it comes to military force, but possible when it comes to sanctions or other non-military diplomatic-style power?
More to the point: just because the situation in one area is murky doesn't mean that it's in any way ambiguous who's right or wrong when a caravan of trucks loaded with men carrying machine guns pulls into a village and starts shooting school teachers in the town square. There are plenty of VERY cut and dry cases. For a "local" sociopolitical problem, ISIS sure is swimming in hundreds of millions of dollars, getting financial, logistical, and personnel support from all around the globe, and expanding their operations into (among other places) Africa. Their propaganda (which relies heavily on the narrative that they are militarily powerful and victorious) is being put to use around the world and gaining the support of people who perform mass killings in Europe and North America - not just in Syria or Iraq.
Most of the shrill "War is not the answer!" crowd are moral relativists who will always resist recognizing that doing things like fighting in WWII isn't the same as starting WWII. Or that using necessary force to push Saddam's annexation invasion forces out of Kuwait isn't the same as starting a war.
The second part seems counterproductive to the first.
No, it's not. Because technology isn't static, and our need to field and support as many human beings has gone down hugely. Which reduces everything from health care (and related veteran) costs to administrative costs. Staying focused on things like remote imagining and unmanned vehicles isn't free, but it produces results with far less cost per task (though we could use better human espionage/intelligence in many cases - that's a different problem, though it is also made more effective per human involved because of newer technology, especially on the back end analysis part).
There is no military solution here
There is no solution for mass murdering, medieval-minded theocratic thugocracies that can work without the ready enforcement of military power. The solution is for such entities to be gone from earth. You're hoping to talking (for example) a large chunk of Islam into thinking differently and giving up on everything they say they are required by Allah to do. What is your non-military way of dealing with that, when part of how they do it involves things like rolling a column of trucks into a village, grabbing the school teacher out of the school and shooting her in the head in front of her students as they burn the school down? Were you going to hang out by the school and sing folks songs to the Taliban or to ISIS so they won't do that? Please explain in detail how you would prevent a school full of girls from being kidnapped and sold by a bunch of machine-gun-carrying Boko Haram fighters without the use of force. Really, details, please. Or admit that your "solution" is to abandon a growing portion of the world to exactly that mindset.
then certainly military spending should go down at some point. something that hasn't happened in decades
It went down hugely as the Soviet threat dried up, and then has wobbled up and down in different sectors as different issues presented themselves. If we were dealing with everything we're dealing with now while only having the technology of the 1980's, military spending would be MUCH higher.
The LAST thing we need is expanding military capability.
No, the last thing we need is people who think you should die for expressing your opinion having greater military capability. And the way to make that not worth it to them is to have countermeasures that are wildly more sophisticated than what they have to fight with. Small, non-manned tools like this REDUCE what we have to spend and deploy in any given scenario. And at the same time the technology lends itself to everything from fire fighting to wildlife monitoring in other venues. You're confusing tools with tool users. Just say it: you don't think it's appropriate to push back against groups like ISIS or regimes like North Korea's. Don't bother explaining why, since that's an irrational point of view and any attempt to justify it is going to be based on a broken world view. But at least just say what you mean, in plain language, and quit pretending that advances in technology are, in and of themselves, a bad thing.
Life in other countries is as good or better than life in the US.
Which explains why a country of 321,000,000 people has an immigrant population of 61,00,000. They're just confused and thought they were heading somewhere else, right?
They are refusing to do their job in order to keep a cloud over her candidacy. They are influencing an election.
What? This would have been over years ago if SHE hadn't deliberately stonewalled and dragged her feet on compliance not only with the requirement that she turn over all her records as she left office, but promptly honored requests associated with all sorts of FOIA, investigative, and even subpoena demands. She's the one that caused this to be happening during campaign season, not Obama's DoJ/FBI people.
If your car breaks as a result of a crash, is that a sign you shouldn't own one? No? I see.
Most small UAS platforms run on highly energetic and notoriously fragile LiPo batteries. Falling from even a few meters can be enough to damage them and potentially start a fire that can seriously damage (and even mostly consume) the device in question. If the operator is compliant with the FAA's silly new rules and has his Super Official No Really I Didn't Write Someone Else's On It FAA Registration Number written on the outside as mandated, a LiPo fire could easily destroy that bit of information. A slo-mo parachute-controlled crash would reduce the odds of that happening.
It's all academic, though. The FAA now considers these to be "aircraft," and federal law prohibits anyone (including the police) from interfering with the operations of a flight - by doing things like shooting at it or forcing it down. There are very, very limited circumstances in which that's allowed (think, flying your gyrocopter through the DC FRZ). But some dude taking landscape photos over a national park? No, the park ranger can't bazooka that down because you're not supposed to fly your 9-ounce toy in federally controlled wilderness. No more than they can shoot down a Cessna.
Where did I say it didn't impact a lot of people? My point was (in response to the explicit invocation of people operating things like FREAKIN' TRAINS hauling untold thousands of tons of speeding metal and payload through major cities, etc) that it's not unreasonable to check people in whose hands you're about to put possibly thousands of lives on a regular basis to see whether or not they have a real problem with self control/awareness. It's not unreasonable to see if they allow their brains to be clouded by drug use that could impact whether they can safely do their job. If they want to do a job while stoned, there are plenty of jobs out there that don't simultaneously put lives at stake.
There are similar issues in play when (for example) your work involves judgement calls about how you handle information (and information systems) that could impact (or end) the lives of other people in sensitive roles.
Now that the FAA is referring to even tiny 9-ounce plastic toys as aircraft that require a permit to operate even for recreation, this introduces some conflicts. The FAA doesn't generally like interference with aircraft. In that context, downing a four pound GoPro-equipped UAS taking landscape photos isn't really any different than shooting down a Cessna. The FAA needs to sort out its language in this area.
Why are you assuming that working with sensitive information means working for the government? Pretty small worldview you have there.
Regardless, a couple of my biggest customers are in turn defense contractors, or do work for DoJ, or for the federal courts, or for some large non-profits that serve active duty people in uniform, etc. I am thrilled to death that I don't work for the government, but am glad I can pick and choose projects directly or indirectly impact things in that arena I find interesting.
Cliver Cussler should be able to skip hiring at least two ghost writers this week.
Sure! Lucky me. What does that have to do with it being appropriate for people who do things like drive trains pulling a mile of tanker cars loaded with fuels, acids, and other toxins through your neighborhood being able to show they don't abuse drugs that could make them disastrously bad at that critical job?
You can thank Nancy and 2 stoner train engineers for having to pee in a jar before you can get a job now
I've never had to subject myself to such a test, and I've worked with very sensitive information on behalf of some large operations. Maybe you're thinking about jobs where an employee's alertness and quick reflexes, when compromised, could cost large numbers of lives? Nah, that's just silly talk.
You have falsely convolved free speech and money. Are all bribe givers now merely free-speakers?
No, you're falsely equating running an ad to say you're in favor of politicians that (for example) want to protect consumer encryption products from government mandated back doors with somehow bribing those same people.
Which mechanism for putting money into a politician's campaign fund do you find to be suddenly un-regulated? Or are you confusing your right to run an ad that says you approve of a given political point of view (or that you disapprove of one) with putting money directly into a politician's pocket, as a bribe?
I believe this will evolve into multicandidate non-party races
So what? Are you worried that you are too weak-minded to still vote for the person you prefer, even when the Sierra Club, or AARP, or the NRA shows you an expensively produced ad trying to convince you otherwise? Let's cut to the chase: your real issue here is that you think everyone but you can't be trusted to vote with a purpose.
The Republicans and our Supreme Court may well have destroyed the US's two party system by removing the constraints on political funding.
The US doesn't have a two-party system. The US has two varyingly successful parties. The US system is the one described by the constitution (and to a certain extent the sub-systems described by the constitutions of the 50 states). That constitutional system is completely silent on the matter of people assembling into political parties and taking advantage of shared resources in order to get behind a potential candidate that they like. To the contrary: the constitution expressly forbids the government from getting in the way of political speech, assembly, etc.
Which is why striking down McCain-Feingold (which was exactly an example of the government shutting people up as they tried to express their political views and support) was perfectly in keeping with the constitution's very first and most important amendment. Are you really thinking that the country had been laboring under McCain-Feingold's capricious limits on political support and speech all along, and it was suddenly ripped away? No. It was a fairly recent piece of legislation, it was loudly protested as being counter-constitutional when it was established, and it failed a test of its constitutionality in a plain-as-day case government muzzling someone's political film making.
The Republicans shortsightedly thought that they would be the primary benefactors of unrestrained political spending.
No, they thought that it was unconstitutional to tell you personally that depending on the date on the calendar, you weren't allowed to speak your mind. Or that your ability to offer your political support would be allowed or squashed depending on what sort of business your run or group you form.
If you think the first amendment should be waived so that government can shut up the people you don't like to hear from (but not you or the people you like), then you're going to have to propose something a lot more clever than McCain-Feingold, which never passed the 1A smell test.
At this stage of the game, the internal dealings of a political party isn't any different than the internal dealings of the local bowling club. People are free to assemble and do what they want on their own terms. If that happens to include choosing CNN to host their debate, so what? That's no different than a club renting out a church basement or local legion hall for their monthly meeting. A political party is a private association of people who are, among themselves, deciding who they might want to put forward as a candidate in a general election.
I do applaud your ability to avoid the topic, though. That takes dedication.
Oh, you mean you really DO think that Trump is a psycho killer? Here I thought you were trolling, instead of just a fool. Silly me!