political blogging to be outlawed

Posted by:: "nu-monet v7.0"
Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 15:56:55 -0700

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http://tinyurl.com/4nxss

Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of
political blogging and online punditry are over.

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.

Smith and the other two Republican commissioners
wanted to appeal the Internet-related sections. But
because they couldn't get the three Democrats to go
along with them, what Smith describes as a "bizarre"
regulatory process now is under way...

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***********
Anyone with a gun pointed
at you is the government.
--nu-monet