Slashdot Mirror
Democrats Defeat Online FOS Act
not so anonymous writes "The Online Freedom of Speech Act was defeated in the House of Representatives yesterday. The Act would have immunized political bloggers from having to comply with hundreds of pages of FEC rules." From the article: "In an acrimonious debate that broke largely along party lines, more than three-quarters of congressional Democrats voted to oppose the reform bill, which had enjoyed wide support from online activists and Web commentators worried about having to comply with a tangled skein of rules. The vote tally in the House of Representatives, 225 to 182, was not enough to send the Online Freedom of Speech Act to the Senate. Under the rules that House leaders adopted to accelerate the process, a two-thirds supermajority was required."
Well, most of the time Slashdot does have a political slant. It's just that this articles slant is not like the rest of them, and is slanted in a different direciton.
The fact that it is uniquely easy for J. Random Citizen to disseminate his own message of rebuttal.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Remember who signed the DMCA--Clinton. I think free speech in the slashdot, eff sense is really quite orthogonal to party lines.
can someone explain?
Sure. In a nutshell, you've been lied to. I would never assert that the Republican party has always vote pro-Freedom (yeah, we wrote the Patriot Act. Sorry about that.), but censorship has often been a Democratic pastime. Remember, the DMCA was signed by a Democrat president, and the PMRC was a pet project of Tipper Gore.
And yet, to hear liberal groups tell it, it's always the Evil Republicans (tm) who want to silence everyone. The truth is far more complex, but how often do you hear of both parties' sins?
P.S. I don't know which party Jack Thompson affiliates with. I won't blame either party for that nut.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Remember, the DMCA was signed by a Democrat president
And passed by a Republican majority congress. The sins of both parties are legion, and whenever someone comes around to challenge the status quo, left or right, they band together and squash the threat.
It is so funny to me to listen to the Democratic Party's newly found fondness of federalism, where for 40 years prior they treated support of states' rights and federalism as mere code words for supporting racism and segregation, and out of touch with core American values. Now that they're outnumbered at the federal level, they have all kinds of respect for checks and balances and fiscal responsibility.
And the Republicans AND Democrats have way more money than every other political party...where's the laws bringing that into balance? Oh wait, we third party people don't even argue about that... We just want elections that are fair where when we get on the ballot we don't get dragged into local courts by the big parties with them arguing we should be taken off because we have no chance to win...because we aren't them... where our Presidential candidates, if they are on enough ballots to (in theory) get enough electoral votes to win, can participate in Presidential debates...where the ballot boxes aren't stuffed and voting machines aren't rigged (both big parties guilty of this)... In other words, we want Free and Democratic elections in the United States (well....everyone sems to want them for Iraq, or this or that third world piss poor country, only fair we should want them here.) That would be election reform. Who gives a shit about "campaign finance" at a stage where everything else is broken?