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."
The traditional media, writers, publishers, are mostly Democrats. Especially in the major media markets of LA and NYC where the ad dollars would be transfered to the internet sites and the traditional guys would loose big (ie Dems loose contributions). Second quite frankly the Democrats blame in large part the blogging world for their losses in the last election. It has nothing to do with free speech in their minds but the fact that the Republicans have so much more money than the Democrats that they can overwhelm them with Republican speech and not get their side out.
The slight-left-of-Ted-Kennedy average Slashdotter will have you believe that the PATRIOT (capatilized due to its acronym nature) is a right-wing conspiracy choking our civil liberties.
Democrats shooting this down is worse than anything in the PATRIOT act. (who, by the way, Democrats helped create and voted for)
The act simply extends the CURRENT abilities of law enforcement towards drug dealers towards terrorists. You will not find a SINLE provision inside the act that can change the way you are treated as a citizen.
It simply allows our government to retrieve warrants based on suspicion of terrorism (which was possible before), administor roaming wiretaps based on suspicion of terrorism (which was possible before), and sieze library records under suspicion of terrorism.
Unfortunately since not RTFA is common around here, almost no one has read through the complete act to realize this... and our liberal media doesn't have the guts to tell you.
Parent post seems to have to same issues of ommission the Slashdot article suffered from.
We can use 2006, an off-year election, as the be all end all dataset if that feels more comfortable.
As you said only three of the top ten are declaritively Republican. Numbers 1, 3, and 10 are unions. If you are one of the people who believe Republicans never attempt to represent the view of the working man, then I guess unions would be Democrat in a two party system.
Number 8 is League of Conservation Voters. Environmentalists. If you are one of the people who believe Republicans never attempt to represent the view of environmental advocates, then I guess the League of Conservation Voters would be Democrat in a two party system.
Number 2, America Coming Together, and number 6, Emily's List, seems to be the only declaratively Democratic 527s.
I think this establishes that 527s are neither a Republican or Democratic stronghold, and we haven't even begun to account for those 527s that appear suddenly with massive amounts of cash near the end of the election cycle (in 2004 a good example would be Swift Boat Veterans for Truth). We also aren't accounting for which socio-economic group benefits the most from current campaign finance laws, 527s or otherwise. I'd make you the bet that it isn't the guy who has four bucks taken out of each pay check that ends up in in a 527.
Oh, no doubt about it. You could have your site with .tv tld and most people wouldn't even assotiate it with Tuvalu and you could put whatever you like on it and host it in China or Cuba or Venezuela.
Except that YOU live in the US. I think the rationalizaton that it would be easy to circumvent the US law is wrong. You create your blog in the US at your keyboard and then just post it offshore. I wouldn't bet my next 10 to 15 years of freedom on the legal theory that the US wouldn't have jurisdiction. I imagine the prosecutor and judge would both have a good laugh when someone tries to use it as a defense. It would be a lot like saying, "Yo, Judge. Yes, I robbed the bank in the US, but I kept the money in the Cayman Islands - you have no jurisdiction!"