Slashdot Mirror
Bill to Treat Bloggers as Lobbyists Defeated
Lawrence Person writes "The attempt to require political bloggers to register as lobbyists previously reported by Slashdot has been stripped out of the lobbying reform bill. The vote was 55 to 43 to defeat the provision. All 48 Republicans, as well as 7 Democrats, voted against requiring bloggers to register; all 43 votes in favor of keeping the registration provision were by Democrats."
Why? Why do you want our side to look even more technology stupid than the Republicans?
In before series of tubes jokes.
YouStockIt - Education through Unorthodox Methods
Now that the Democrats have a majority in the legislative branch, they're starting to completely twist all their campaign promises. Remember the Democrats who were complaining about the price of oil? Well, they just approved about $15 billion in Big Oil taxes. And now they're trying to effectively restrict or silence the mainly-Conservative grassroots/astroturf efforts just in time for 2008. (I don't believe it's a coincidence that MoveOn.org doesn't fall under their definition of astroturfing.) Politicians (all politicians, mind you) will say and do anything to get re-elected.
>I could be wrong, but I think the target was talk radio
>and/or conservative sites that are advertiser funded like
>LittleGreenFootballs, but not MoveOn.org, which is funded
>by contributors (George Soros)
Exactly. Liberal blogs and liberal talk radio (such as it is) have been, with a few exception, unsuccessful while Conservative blogs and radio have done spectacularly well. Another move along these lines is to revive the "Fairness Doctrine" requiring broadcasters to present "all sides" of any political opinion, which is aimed directly at muzzling Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. "Fair" as typified by borderline "Workers Daily" propaganda and socialist claptrap like the NBC Nightly News and NPR.
Business as usual for liberals, who welcome and respect all opinions, as long as they agree with the weeks' talking points. Otherwise it's 'hate speech', the babblings of ignorant rednecks, or "fundamentalist dogma" and must be supressed.
Brett
Exactly. It was a law restricting freedom of speech, just as McCF also wrongly does.
I guess the hard part is that liberals don't consider it "press" unless they agree with it.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Indeed, this bill's defeat brought to you by Swift Boat Veterans for Free Speech.
Doesn't that about sum it all up?
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
The right-wing stations have been ranting about this for over a week now and I'm really glad it was defeated. Even talk radio was being targetted with this. Personally, I'm not going to read over every line of every bill. I depend on things like that to inform me of someone trying to slip something like this in. So for all of the left or right wingers with blinders on:
right wing - wants to listen to what you are saying (privacy)
left wing - wants you to keep quiet or pay $10K (free speech)
Personally, I prefer to keep hearing what's going on without hearing it from a paid/biased lobbyist and just not do anything stupid to end up on a terrorist watch list for the privacy thing. With the latter, you're screwed on both counts since you wouldn't hear about the next privacy bill.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.