March 8, 2005
CQ reader TR points me to a breaking news item from the AP that alleges a conflict of interest for Senator John McCain. After a non-profit group closely associated with McCain and which pays a six-figure salary to one of his aides received $200,000 in donations from Cablevision, McCain wrote a letter of support to the FCC pushing Cablevision's regulatory positions: Sen. John McCain pressed a cable company's case for pricing changes with regulators at the same time a tax-exempt group that he has worked with since its founding solicited $200,000 in contributions from the company. Help from McCain, who argues for ridding politics of big money, included giving the CEO of Cablevision Systems Corp. the opportunity to testify before his Senate committee, writing a letter of support to the Federal Communication Commission and asking other cable companies to support so-called a la carte pricing. McCain had expressed interest in...
In order to understand John McCain's present circumstances, it may be helpful to recall his entry into the Senate, tarnished with scandal over the savings and loan system collapse in the late 1980s. John McCain had been a recipient of over $100,000 in donations from Charles Keating, the owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan and American Continental Corporation. Keating used the S&L to float out bad bonds in ACC, resulting in a $2 billion loss and bailout from the FSLIC and the loss of millions of dollars to ordinary shareholders in ACC. McCain ran interference for Keating, as the Arizona Republic's Bill Muller wrote: In 1982, during McCain's first run for the House, Keating held a fund-raiser for him, collecting more than $11,000 from 40 employees of American Continental Corp. McCain would spend more than $550,000 to win the primary and the general election. In 1983, during McCain's second House...
March 9, 2005
As usual, Chris Muir nails the issue in real time: I'll have more on John McCain and the Reform Institute later today. In the meantime, if you don't read Day by Day on a regular basis, you should start today. Eventually a syndicate is going to wise up and hire Muir -- and then we'll have to subscribe to a newspaper or the syndicate to get our fix......
The Rocky Mountain News apparently won't drink the old-line media Kool-Aid regarding McCain-Feingold and the media exemption. The RMN appears to have an editorial board that remains old-fashioned enough to protect the First Amendment, even when the BCRA gives them a political advantage: Little wonder, since the immediate victims of such a scheme would be the proliferating number of bloggers who devote themselves to online political commentary. Current FEC rules count any Web link to a candidate's Web site as "coordination" with that candidate's campaign. If applied to the Internet, that could make individual bloggers subject to the much more restrictive rules that now govern the activity of special-interest groups. As "Captain Ed" Morrissey of the political blog Captain's Quarters said in an open letter to Sens. McCain and Feingold, during the presidential campaign he linked to Kerry's Web site four times as often as to Bush's, "which would have...
John McCain and Russ Feingold issued a joint statement yesterday in response to the outrage from the blogosphere over the failure of the FEC to appeal the legal ruling ending the Internet exemption of the BCRA. After FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith detailed the range of options open to the FEC for regulating political speech, especially regarding blogs, CQ and a whole range of other bloggers across the political spectrum protested the decision by the three Democratic appointees to the FEC to block the appeal. The joint statement, in its entirety: As the primary Senate authors of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, we have spent years fighting to clean up elections and ensure that powerful monied interests do not drown out the voices of everyday Americans in our political system. Those interests don't want to give up any of their power, and their main tactic has been to try...
When CQ first covered the Bradley Smith interview that started the blogswarm on the FEC and the BCRA this week, I noted several unusual relationships between the donors and the institute, all hinging on Richard Davis, RI's president and John McCain's campaign manager. Since Davis also acts as McCain's chief political advisor, I found it odd that the RI -- which pays Davis a $110,000 "consulting fee" annually instead of a salary as its president -- received money from donors such as the sources that follow below. Bear in mind, please, that foundations don't just line up to hand out cash. Rick Davis has to apply and then campaign for these funds, as budgets are limited even for the richest foundations. They carefully select their grantees to ensure that they support the overall mission of the foundation. Why would a close political advisor to John McCain go to these sources...
March 10, 2005
I had not known about this beforehand, but CNN put together a short piece on bloggers and the FEC for last night's broadcast. Hosted by Howard Kurtz and lasting about two minutes, it covered the framework of the threat the BCRA and the recent stripping of the Internet exemption holds for bloggers. Howard Kurtz hosted it, and quoted from CQ (using my full name) and La Shawn Barber. Trey Jackson has the video. UPDATE: For a short segment, Kurtz did a good job, I thought. Let me know what you think about it. BTW, I must have a face built for radio; while I see many of my fellow bloggers getting talking-head time on cable debate shows, my cherubic visage has yet to grace the small screens of America. You can consider this a good example of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of market wisdom, I suppose ......
Two more columnists today use their platforms to argue for the blogosphere and the equal treatment of bloggers as part of the national media. Both use the Apple case as an example of the differing treatment given to self-publishing citizen journalists/pundits. Jacob Weisberg of Slate writes today that a journalist doesn't get made by an HR department or a university program, but by the quality of the writer: [M]any old-line journalists have tried to define their work in a ways that exclude the new aspirants. Insitutionalized journalists argue that bloggers don't do conventional reporting, aren't accurate, aren't responsible, or aren't paid—and hence are not genuine reporters. They fret that the current influx of amateurs will undermine professional standards or that seasoned professionals will be unfairly brought down by an electronic lynch mob, as some posit that Dan Rather of CBS and Eason Jordan of CNN were. Disregard all such self-interested...
With the pending FEC regulations on Internet politicking percolating through the blogosphere, the prevailing wisdom goes two different directions. Either the decision by Judge Kottar-Kotelly to strip the Internet of its BCRA exemption portends even more encroachment on political speech by regulating bloggers to death, or the threat has been overblown and the FEC wouldn't dare to try it. No one in the blogosphere has argued on behalf of greater regulation. That is, no one until Chris Nolan wrote this piece for eWeek. Nolan argues that bloggers have become so influential in politics that regulating us should be a high priority for the FEC, in order to prevent our interference with campaign finance reform: It's silly to think Smith's warnings will all come to pass and that the FEC will attempt to figure out, for instance, the actual monetary "value" to a campaign of a hyperlink from a blogger or...
March 11, 2005
I have given Howard Kurtz some harsh criticism over his lack of coverage in the Eason Jordan controversy, but today he does an excellent job of covering the wide-ranging debate over the FEC and its new charge to strip the Internet of its exemption from the BCRA. Kurtz notes that with the media exempted from the BCRA, the strategy at the moment is to get the FEC to explicitly define bloggers as journalists to work under the same exemption -- a notion for which he sympathizes: I'm not one of these people who thinks you need a graduate degree, an ID card or an official stamp of approval to call yourself a journalist. Anyone with an idea and a computer can now play the role of reporter, commentator or social critic. People can tell the difference between a New York Times correspondent and BozoBlogger.com, and both have something to contribute....
Ryan Sager writes a powerful column in today's Tech Central Station that exposes the big money behind campaign-finance reform and the BCRA. Sager spots a report by Political Money Line which traces an astronomical amount of money that got spent by just a handful of sources to push the BCRA, and all of them from the Left: Consider a report just out from the folks over at Political Money Line, "Campaign Finance Reform Lobby: 1994 to 2004." Ignored by the media to date, it details how the supposedly grass-roots campaign-finance reform movement has been funded over the last decade to the tune of $140 million. Of that $140 million, the vast majority ($123 million) came not from retirees scraping together their last nickels for the cause of democracy, nor from schoolchildren collecting deposits on cans plucked from dilapidated playgrounds. No, the money came from just eight ultra-liberal foundations (including the...
March 13, 2005
I am proud to be an original signatory to the Online Coalition, a group of bloggers from across the political spectrum which intends on fighting any encroachment on our right to free and unfettered political debate. Today members of our group presented FEC chairman Scott Thomas with our concerns over the direction the FEC will take in regulating Internet speech, as regards the lawsuit brought by Shays-Meehan. Here is our letter: We are concerned about the potential impact that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s decision in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in Shays v. FEC, 337 F. Supp. 2d 28 (D.D.C. 2004) and the FEC’s upcoming rulemaking process may have on political communication on the Internet. One area of great concern is the potential regulation of bloggers and other online journalists who distribute political news and commentary exclusively over the web. While paid political advertising on the Internet...
March 14, 2005
Living up to its name, the Augusta Free Press runs a guest column this morning by Bruce Kesler that details the the threat to free speech that the pending FEC regulation of the Internet portends. He notes the same problem that I have: Under McCain-Feingold, complaints are brought by the public, to which the accused must respond. The complaints of partisans against potent bloggers, almost all being one or a few individuals, can only burden them to end blogging or to restrain their ability to freely blog. It is difficult, at best, to define and to delineate "paid." Is it being paid to accept political ads or to also work for the wide range of organizations considered political entities under McCain-Feingold and similar laws? Are the mainstream media's reporters and commentators to also be so measured, piercing the current media exemption? Of course not; the media exemption got written into...
Scott Johnson of Power Line writes a powerful argument about the true intent of the BCRA and its carefully selected targets in today's Daily Standard. Titled "Dream Palace of the Goo Goos," Johnson's article points out the hypocrisy of sanitizing political speech in an era where the courts have permitted all kinds of activity to act as speech, therefore granting them the protection of the First Amendment umbrella: Even if the McCain-Feingold law and the "press exemption" are unclear on the extent of their application, wouldn't the First Amendment protect freedom of speech on the Internet? The Supreme Court's modern First Amendment jurisprudence has afforded Constitutional protection to such vital speech as nude dancing, flag burning, simulated online child pornography, and sexually explicit cable programming. Surely the First Amendment protects the rights of bloggers to express themselves on the Internet as they see fit in connection with elections to federal...
The AP reports that bills granting reporters a shield from revealing their sources has gained Congressional support and may soon come up for debate. The prosecution of several journalists with national media outlets have given the issue some momentum and a sense of urgency, although it appears that debate will be all that's scheduled for this year: Legislation to require prosecutors and judges to meet strict national standards and exhaust other remedies before they could subpoena reporters has both Republicans and Democrats as sponsors in the House and Senate. Support is building now that several reporters are closer to facing jail, but the Bush administration is silent on the issue and Congress isn't likely to vote on it this year. ... So far, a dozen House members have signed on to Pence's "free flow of information act," which in general would prohibit federal entities from forcing reporters to disclose the...
March 18, 2005
I received several e-mails yesterday regarding this excellent Ryan Sager follow-up on the shenanigans behind the BCRA and the general push for campaign finance reform, but I ran out of time to post about it. Sager has video and transcripts of a talk given by Sean Traglia, formerly of the Pew Charitable Trusts, admitting to staging a fraud on Congress to convince them that a popular groundswell of demand for the BCRA existed: Charged with promoting campaign-finance reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of "experts" all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform. "The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in...
I haven't had a lot of praise for Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), but I'm making an exception today. Reid shows the first sign that the Senate may have heard the outcry from the blogosphere about the BCRA, the FEC capitulation on Shays, Meehan v. FEC, and the coming limitations on blogging. Pennywit, Demosthenes, Right-Wing Nuthouse, and Daily Kos point out a bill which Reid introduced to the Senate which exempts Internet communications from FEC regulation altogether: Paragraph 22 of section 301 of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (2 U.S.C. 431(22)) is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: "Such term shall not include communications over the Internet." Expect a howl to arise from the people who have paid good money -- lots of it -- to ensure that campaign finance and speech limits get applied to everyone except the Exempt Media. However, with Reid pushing...
March 21, 2005
For those who worry about the possibility of the Federal Election Commission encroaching on the freedom of political bloggers, today's article in the Washington Post will not provide much comfort. Brian Faler notes that the FEC has now been ordered by the courts to regulate political spending on the Internet, and Faler points out the various connections by which independent bloggers might fall afoul of the FEC: "We are almost certainly going to move from an environment in which the Internet was per se not regulated to where it is going to be regulated in some part," said FEC Commissioner David M. Mason, a Republican. "That shift has huge significance because it means that people who are conducting political activity on the Internet are suddenly going to have to worry about or at least be conscious of certain legal distinctions and lines they didn't used to have to worry about."...
The Chicago Tribune profiled a Democrat yesterday as a potential candidate for the presidency in 2008, a name that has not yet come up in the national crystal ball, but one whose main political accomplishment should disqualify him for the office. Meet Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin progressive who teamed up with the maverick Arizona Republican John McCain and a hundred million dollars in far-left money to strike a blow against free political speech: Largely overlooked by national political pundits in the aftermath of the November election was the impressive re-election victory by the John McCain of the Democratic Party. As usual, Feingold campaigned as a straight-talking, risk-taking reformer, and his convincing victory should make him highly appealing to Democrats longing for somebody who not only has a winning track record, but who unabashedly stands for progressive Democratic Party values. This is no wimpy liberal who trims his message to fit...
When Justice Anthony Kennedy relied on international legal practices to justify his decision to strike down death penalty sentences for minors, he may have inadvertently opened up a new front in the assault on American political speech. Now with the Supreme Court relying on foreign courts for precedent, the ability of people to rely on the high threshold for establishing libel and slander in American courts may no longer apply, as plaintiffs might simply venue-shop internationally for their complaints instead. Skeptical? You may want to read Thomas Lipscomb's latest article in Editor & Publisher, which describes exactly how such cases have already been filed. This example involves Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, whose book on terrorist financing, Funding Evil, has provoked legal action from one of the people she names as a terror financier: Sheik Khalid Salim a bin Mahfouz has allegedly endowed and arranged financing for a number of Islamic charity...
March 23, 2005
Earlier, I wrote about Sheikh Mahfouz and his libel case in Britain against Rachel Ehrenfeld for a book she never published outside the United States. Mahfouz won a default judgment against Ehrenfeld when she refused to acknowledge English jurisdiction for the case. Now British courts have laid claim to the entire Internet for libel and slander cases and Arnold Schwarzenegger has become their first target: Schwarzenegger, who is now governor of California, had challenged a ruling by a senior High Court official giving Anna Richardson permission to serve proceedings on him out of the jurisdiction. The decision today, by Mr Justice Eady, has cleared the way for a libel trial in London sometime this year. Miss Richardson alleges she was libelled by Schwarzenegger and two campaign workers in an October 2003 article in The Los Angeles Times, which also appeared on the internet. The article ran in the Los Angeles...
Mike Krempansky at Redstate has the FEC proposal for public review of their upcoming regulation of political activity on the Internet, posted in HTML format for easy review. I've been reading through this on the eve of their first public hearing. While some may find this rather tame, compared to the mischief the FEC could have wrought, the questions the document asks still gives me some trepidation about where the FEC will go in following the court's mandate. For instance, when talking about the issue of defining public communications in terms of regulation, the FEC proposal includes this: The Commission invites comment on whether announcements placed for a fee on another entity’s website should be considered “general public political advertising,” and therefore, a “public communication” under 11 CFR 100.26. Is this approach consistent with BCRA’s definition of “public communication” to include broadcast, cable or satellite communications, newspaper, magazines and outdoor...
March 25, 2005
Mike Krempansky at Redstate continues to keep an eagle eye on the FEC while it debates the best way to regulate Internet campaign activity, or the least worst way, depending on the point of view. Mike has attended the initial FEC hearing on the subject and managed to get his hands on an initial draft of proposals from March 10th that, according to Mike, amounted to speech regulation worse than what Brad Smith had predicted the week before its drafting: To step back a moment, remember – on March 3rd, Commissioner Bradley Smith warned of some real potential problems with the upcoming rulemaking process. In return for ringing the alarm bell, he was dismissed as a crank, a partisan, an ideologue – and most of all, just plain wrong. The FEC would NEVER do something like regulate bloggers – heavens no! It’s inconceivable. Well, I don’t think that word means...
March 28, 2005
Let's imagine that a reporter (or a blogger!) attends a political event where a politician accuses specific opponents of being homosexuals and child molesters. The journalist writes a report about the event that includes the charges leveled by the unbalanced politician, quoted verbatim. The article even includes a rebuttal from the slander victim. Nevertheless, the writer and the publisher of the article eventually find themselves as defendants of a slander action, presumably along with the idiot who made the comments in the first place. Would the case get thrown out of court, as it amounts to nothing more than a truthful account of a public event? Not if the writer works in Pennsylvania, or apparently even in the United States: The Supreme Court refused Monday to step into a lawsuit against a newspaper, leaving the media in Pennsylvania legally vulnerable when they report defamatory comments by public figures. ... The...
March 29, 2005
The Los Angeles Times ran an opinion piece by David Shaw on blogging that argued against extending First Amendment protections to the "solipsistic, self-aggrandizing journalist-wannabe genre." He wrote that bloggers didn't deserve such consideration because we do not have editors and fact-checkers to ensure that we don't make errors or slander people. Then Shaw used Matt Drudge, who even Shaw acknowledges as a questionable blogger, to make his point. Somehow his editor missed that. (He's not a blogger; he's a news aggregator. Different animal.) Jack Shafer at Slate didn't miss it, or the irony of Shaw's screed, and he takes Shaw to the woodshed in his response at Slate this morning. Not only does Shafer point out the goofiness of Shaw basing his entire argument on quality while failing to use a correct example, but Shafer also teaches Shaw a little First Amendment history along the way: Giving every indication...
May 2, 2005
The Exempt Media has decided to take another whack at bloggers and the exercise of free speech, this time in the Washington Post. Brian Faler writes in tomorrow's edition about the upcoming Congressional action exempting bloggers from the FEC's upcoming Internet regulations, and his article heavily emphasizes the notion that bloggers can serve as Trojan horses for political campaigns: The FEC requires candidates to disclose their expenditures, including any payments to bloggers, in periodic reports to the government. Some bloggers also disclose their financial relationships with candidates, but they are not obliged to reveal those payments, and the agency recently said it is not proposing requiring them to do so. Some election law experts want the FEC to reverse that policy, saying it gives campaigns the opportunity to use ostensibly independent blogs as fronts to create the illusion of grass-roots support, mount attacks on their opponents and disseminate information to...
May 26, 2005
An Indiana judge needs a remedial course in Constitutional law if this report in the Indianapolis Star accurately characterizes his custody decree. In determining custodial arrangements for a nine-year-old boy, Judge Cale Bradford instructed both parents to refrain from instructing their son in Wiccan beliefs, despite their shared religion not being a point of contention in their filings: An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge's unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals." The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth. Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple's divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion. Bradford's reasoning behind this ban? The boy attends a Catholic...
June 1, 2005
Mike Krempansky at Redstate has posted the response from the Online Coalition to the Federal Election Commission about their proposed regulation of Internet activity during elections. Mike has made it available in PDF and HTML format. The credit for this goes to Mike himself, who has been a lion in this fight. I am honored to have been asked to be a signatory to this effort. Please make sure you read the response, and drop Mike a comment thanking him for his hard work....
June 2, 2005
What issue could possibly draw conservative Republicans and the Congressional Black Caucus into a legislative alliance? This morning, the Washington Times reports that the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act's provisions on campaign limits hit sour notes with both groups, as traditional African-American outreach efforts got starved in favor of the massive influence of George Soros' 527 strategies in 2004: Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus are teaming up with conservative Republicans to push for the first major changes in the 2002 campaign-finance reform bill, most admitting that they made a mistake in voting for the bill three years ago. "If I had the chance to vote again, I wouldn't vote the way I voted," said Rep. Gregory W. Meeks, New York Democrat, who along with most of the CBC supported the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act after they were promised by Democratic leaders that the bill would not harm their...
June 30, 2005
Following the depressing nature of the questions at the latest FEC hearing on regulating the Internet, it appears that some bloggers are ready to jump ship, so to speak. Jeralynn Merritt has declared yesterday as the Day the Blogs Died, and now says that TalkLeft is no longer a blog, but an "online magazine." Joining her are Americablog (which might therefore require a name change), The Talent Show, Crooks and Liars, and even Instapundit, although I suspect that Professor Reynolds has tongue firmly in cheek. Not Captain's Quarters. I may describe myself in a variety of ways, including citizen journalist, free-lance writer, pundit at large -- but foremost in this community, I am a blogger. CQ is a blog, and it will remain a blog. It will undoubtedly evolve over time, offer new concepts to the CQ community, change its look, but at its heart, Captain's Quarters will be a...
July 12, 2005
The Washington Post updates its readers on the efforts by the FEC to determine whether bloggers deserve the media exemption granted by the McCain-Feingold Act, or BCRA as it is more officially known. Brian Faler reports that the panel has not yet issued a decision and covers the thrust of the commentary received by the panel during its public hearings: A growing number of the online pundits of various political persuasions are urging the Federal Election Commission to explicitly grant them the same wholesale exemptions from regulations governing contributions to political candidates that mainstream reporters, editorial writers and pundits get. "I'm troubled by the fact that participants in this emerging medium, which allows anyone the opportunity to participate in the national political discourse at a minimum cost, would face stricter regulation and stronger scrutiny -- along with the potential for ruinous legal expenses -- than would participants in media outlets...
July 15, 2005
An appellate court has upheld the decision by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly forcing the FEC to regulate Internet speech as part of the BCRA: An appeals court agreed Friday that federal election regulators wrongly opened several loopholes in the new campaign finance law meant to take big contributions out of elections. The federal appeals court in Washington affirmed U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's 2004 ruling striking down several FEC regulations interpreting the 2002 campaign finance law and ordering the commission to write tougher rules. The lower court judge struck down 15 commission regulations. The FEC asked the appeals court to overrule her on five of them, but lost its bid Friday in a 2-1 ruling. We find yet another judge who cannot determine the meaning of "Congress shall pass no law ..." To be fair, this appeal was not on the BCRA itself but on Kollar-Kotelly's ruling on a lawsuit brought...
As the Captain reported below, a power-mad three-judge panel of the D.C. circuit has made a dreadful ruling. What the hell you been smoking, ab Hugh? The Hamdan ruling was incredibly good! We need those military tribunals to -- Not THAT ruling, you nitwit! I'm talking about the ruling that upheld Judge Kollar-Kotelly's ruling that the FEC had to start regulating blogs and other internet "communication" under the McCain-Feingold "Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act," treating them not like the sainted "exempt media" (the MSM), but rather as if blogs were the equivalent of political ads... forbidding us from blogging about candidates within sixty days of an election, for example, without having our posts being assigned a dollar value and counted as "contributions" to a campaign. This would presumably mean that if I posted about the 2006 race and urged Santorum to be reelected, and if my insights were deemed to be...
November 2, 2005
Despite the efforts of bloggers in promoting an exception to the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance rules for on-line punditry, the House has defeated the measure on a procedural vote. The lower chamber turned down the measure, already passed by the Senate, by failing to gather the needed two-thirds majority to overcome technical obstacles placed in its path by original BCRA sponsors Christopher Shays (R) and Marty Meehan (D): Online political expression should not be exempt from campaign finance law, the House decided Wednesday as lawmakers warned that the Internet has opened up a new loophole for uncontrolled spending on elections. The House voted 225-182 for a bill that would have excluded blogs, e-mails and other Internet communications from regulation by the Federal Election Commission. That was 47 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed under a procedure that limited debate time and allowed no amendments. The vote in effect clears the way...
November 3, 2005
CQ reader Ed C used some personal connections to get a specific response from one of the Republicans that voted against the blogger exemption to the BCRA last night. Todd Platts represents Pennsylvania's CD-19, which includes York and Mechanicsburg, and normally provides a solid center-right vote for the Republicans. Platt's office gave Ed C this response to explain why the normally reliable GOP politician voted against free speech: I strongly support free speech on the Internet, just as I do on the airwaves and in the public square. Blogs and other Internet communications are an exciting and growing aspect of our democratic system. They provide a forum for debate and a low-cost means of promoting candidates and ideas. At the same time, without the application of any campaign finance restrictions to the Internet (as proposed by H.R. 1606), corporations and unions could improperly funnel undisclosed contributions of exceedingly large sums...
March 25, 2006
The FEC announced its new regulations last night, the timing of which would normally bode ill for free-speech advocates, but it appears that the regulatory body has avoided regulating blogs at all: The Federal Election Commission last night released proposed new rules that leave almost all Internet political activity unregulated except for the purchase of campaign ads on Web sites. "My key goal in this rule-making has been to make sure that the commission establish clear rules to exempt individuals who engage in online politics from campaign finance laws," said Chairman Michael E. Toner, a Republican. "We tried to craft a regulation that would allow the maximum amount of freedom for people as possible," said Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democrat. Most bloggers, individual Web users, and such Web sites as Drudge Report and Salon.com are exempted from regulation and will be free to support and attack federal candidates, much...
April 4, 2006
EJ Dionne poses an interesting take on the recent campaign-finance legislation that the FEC has finally produced. Dionne hails the blogger exemption that the FEC delivered while maintaining the regulations regarding Internet advertising as a win-win: The new FEC rule is not that complicated, but it did involve some careful balancing. The commission, under pressure from a court decision, decided that paid advertising on the Internet should be subject to the same regulations as paid advertising on television, radio or in newspapers. The restrictions on the use of unregulated "soft money" that apply to the old media would apply to the new media, too. At the same time, bloggers won what they had long sought: exemptions from regulations on what they can say that are akin to those that apply to what is now quaintly called the "old media." For bloggers, it was a Let Freedom Ring moment. The decision...
April 10, 2006
The Los Angeles Times reports on a movement to end so-called speech codes at public schools, universities, and in the workplace that infringe on unpopular speech, especially that which argues against multiculturalism. In what some call a civil-rights movement for Christians, a number of groups have filed suit across the country to protect their right to speak out for their beliefs, even when others find those beliefs offensive: Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant. Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation. Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy. With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public...
April 15, 2006
I met Bill Hobbs during Justice Sunday II last year and was impressed by his thoughtfulness and dedication to blogging and to his beliefs in faith and country. Those beliefs will hopefully allow Bill to weather his storm, in which he has resigned from his job as a result of a cartoon he posted on his blog. Bill posted a stick figure planting a bomb with the caption, "Mohammed Blows", as a response to the Prophet Cartoon riots and the Iranian Holocaust-cartoon contest. When a politically-connected local reporter wrote a scathing column regarding Bill's cartoon and his support for the Republican Party candidate for governor, Jim Bryson, and his employment at Belmont University. Faster than one can say dhimmitude, Hobbs has been cut off from the Bryson campaign and his job at Belmont. I can understand why Bryson distanced himself, at least in terms of politics. Why, though, did Belmont...
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