Fed Election Commission and Bloggers
So the FEC is powerless to do anything about assuring fair elections but they want to strong arm bloggers? Not a surprise considering everything and everyone in Washington is now Bush's bitch.
From CNET:
Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.I'm not personally too worried. I don't make "contribute to this" appeals often. But it cracks me up that the FEC considers bloggers worthy of their attention when they are spineless in every other arena.
In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.
Smith should know. He's one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet.
In 2002, the FEC exempted the Internet by a 4-2 vote, but U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly last fall overturned that decision. "The commission's exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines" the campaign finance law's purposes, Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
Blogging
Politics
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