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Bloggers Exempted From Campaign Laws
MaceyHW writes "The Federal Election Commission ruled today that the only online political activity subject to Campaign Finance Laws are paid advertisements on a third party site. Today's ruling extended the regulations to paid advertising as required by a 2004 Federal Court ruling, but explicitly exempted all other forms of online activity: 'For example, the rule says individuals can use union or corporate computers or other electronic devices for political activity, as long they do it on their own time and are not coerced to engage in such activity by the union or corporation. Bloggers would be entitled to the same exemption from the campaign finance law that newspapers and other traditional forms of media receive. "There will be no second class citizens among members of the media," [FEC Chairman Michael T.] Toner said.'"
Poor Michael Toner -- you know half his emails get bounced by spam filters. He should change it to T0n3r.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Of course the problem is that the question had to be settled by the FEC in the first place. It should be a no brainer, since after all; "Congress shall make no law...."
I await the day when we get enough strict constructionists on the Supreme Court to reverse their previous bad decisions, sweeping away McCain Fiengold and most other 'Campaign Finance Laws' that aren't limited to mandatory disclosure requirements. And even those have to go eventually, after all why can't someone donate anonymously? Yes we voters should normally be highly suspiscous of a candidate funded anonymously but I can theorize situations where it might be acceptable.
Democrat delenda est
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The tone of this post is misleading, making it sound like bloggers (online sites, actually) get special privilege. Nothing is farther from the truth. The FEC decision is that the internet community is to be held to the same standards as traditional media. This is a great thing, I just hope it holds. The FEC commissioners now get that the internet is just another media outlet, like print or television. In fact it is more egalitarian; the corporate owners of Gawker Media (for example) can't dictate the political bent of internet content the way News Corp. (FOX) or GE (NBC) can with their large-scale dominance of the limited bandwidth of television. There are hundreds of thousands of web servers on the internet, but only a few hundred broadcasters on both over-the-air and cable television.
A politician / government employee used an ounce of common sense? This IS news!
I see a lot of triumphalism around the "blogosphere" about this... talk of the "netroots" and all those wonderful keywords, and how they changed the world.
This went through because to turn it down made absolutely no freaking sense. That's it.
I just don't get how they ALL can be drinking the kool-aid at once. You raise money for candidates. Woo! So does the phone, and dinners, and direct mail. But this is faster? Okay, it's more efficient and well-targetted. Does that give you political power? Maybe?
No, it doesn't. Your audience is far too diverse, and while you may come together to raise money for someone, that doesn't mean you can even get a coherent message together to send that person, just that he's some kind of internet darling. Maybe a consultant job for the blogger, but what did the blogger do, really? Rant a bit, host a website, and find the right words to get people pissed off enough, usually. Difficult? Undoubtedly. But politically savvy? No. Just smart business sense and a dash of rancor.
I keep seeing all these wonderful, starry-eyed monologues about how the internet will forever change the way politics is run, how it'll cure all ills and eventually (of course), those bastards that disagree with you will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. That isn't the sound of politics, because these people aren't politicians. It's the sound of religion- except now the religion is political invective.
So, bloggers, great job. You succeeded in being the beneficiaries of the obvious and poking around a confused media because you're both shooting so hard from each side it has no idea what it can do. You've become gatekeepers to an enormous cash cow, but don't have the real clout to keep the floodgates closed, because there're enough important blogs that it doesn't take any sort of agreement or platform between them to give a candidate exposure. But, above all, you're creating little bubbles filled to the brim with a kind of group-mind, perfectly separated from true opposing viewpoints with a powerfully whispered "troll." Very soon the political blogs will either fall into two groups: shrill hive-like structures and unknown policy wonks, on both sides. You can't create a shining future when you're using all your might to run towards the inoperative, rotten present.
If you choose to go to a website, that's your choice. If they have a beowulf cluster with more bandwidth than God, with 100 live video feeds 24/7 for one candidate - you're choosing to go there, and it's not intruding on you. I don't care how they raised the money for it. IMHO, it's like visiting a campaign headquarters. That's public information.
And if I see one damned ad on TV, I want tougher regulations. That's intrusive. Like all this damned political spam. One deserves to be unregulated and one deserves to be banned.
Furthermore, if the RNC wants to have its own cable TV station (*coughox*) that it pays for, and the DNC wants one too, I don't see a problem with any amount of spending on that. As long as you can block those channels to prevent your kids from watching that trash...
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
But the real problem is the federal government itself. The Founders didn't raise this issue because they set up a system where the states delegated a few, specific tasks to the federal government. It didn't (and shouldn't) matter who holds office, particularly, as long as he's competent to do the job.
Today, when the federal government takes power and treasure from us whenever it wants, recognizing no limits to its own authority, it does matter. And that's the problem.
But there's now an unlimited number of resources available for speech. Let one party open as many blogs as they want to open, it won't stop the other party from opening their own and letting their positions be heard. Unlike television or radio, the audience isn't bound to a limited number of channels, and thus can't be dominated by any single party.
This is a good move by the FCC. I'm torn on the issue of CFR over traditional mediums, but only because my inner libertarian can't stomach regulation of free speech and my inner citizen is sick of watching politicians elected by the size of their war chest than the quality of their performance. This isn't an issue on the Internet (yet... wait until election year banner ads), and in no way does regulation have any place there. Again, bravo, FCC. About time.
A hand on every (yah-yah), a vibrator in every (woo-hoo) and a falafel in every (meow)?
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
Three words. O'Reilly. Falafel. Loofah.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Well, that's one rather pessimistic way to look at it.
I think that having more blogs is pretty much inarguably a good thing. Up until now, media didn't really approximate much of a free market. You can't compete with CNN because they have deals and control many of the channels to viewers.
However, if you start writing a decent blog, it's easy for various people to try to evaluate how useful your blog is. Google does this sort of thing for webpages already, and I would expect techniques to only become more advanced. Of course, maybe you can subvert various "reputation evaluating" services, but there is a low barrier to entry in this world. If Altavista starts to suck, Google can easily displace them.
So now you have radically reduced the barrier to entry into the media world, and you have systems for evaluating the worth of that media that will only become better.
I agree that things will not magically and instantly become perfect. There will be loopholes, and those loopholes will be exploited. There will be *many* years of ideas and improvements to come, and many unforseen problems that will have to be addressed. But I believe that the blog world has the potential to become far more valuable a source of information than the traditional media companies have been.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I can accept that you and I disagree about this. But how do you justify coming down and trying to kill me over it?
The South offered to pay full compensation for all federal facilities with its borders. Lincoln and Seward strung them along for weeks, all the while planning to force the issue at Sumter in order to provoke war. Sure enough, in the middle of negotiations, an armed naval convoy shows up, in violation of all the promises Seward had made.
So the South took the fort. Shots were fired. Zero Yankees were killed. They were all allowed to return home, and did so.
Even after the event, and in fact throughout the war, the South was looking for peace and to buy out the federal presence in the region.
Looks like the shoe's on the other foot here.
I don't know, but the debates would be legendary. He'd probably turn all red in the face and start shouting, "cut his mic!"
The Farewell Tour II
The problem with McCain Feingold is that it puts a major crimp in the activity of voluntary grass-roots-funded political organizations while leaving billionaires (who can afford to set up the whole operation) and unions free to spend as much as they want. It cripples ad-hoc organizations, hobbles large ones, and puts the power of the mainstream advertising machine in the hands of a small elite.
Which is PRECICELY what it was intended to do.
The importance of this decision is that it blocks the law from doing this on the internet - preserving the disruptive influence of the net's transfer of power into the hands of individuals.
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