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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."
It's as if a 100 million free-speech loving liberals cried out and were suddenly silenced.
(Actually, they were silenced when their heads exploded like Dantooine when they found out that it was Republicans who blocked the bill.)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Politicians are almost uniformly "technology stupid." (tube joke redacted) Their opinions of different technologies (and everything else) are based entirely on what lobbyists and the party platform tell them to support. Why would anyone think the two parties differ in this regard?
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
The Second Amendment guarantees the First.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Ok, but that's a non-unique argument. If government search standards are as low as you describe, there are dozens, if not hundreds of laws or regulations law enforcement could already use as an excuse to harass you. The issue in your scenario is the lax requirements for warrants, not the lobbyist law.
What your missing is that the bill was never about making bloggers register as lobbyists - that was all spin, and slashdot nicely bought it hook, line and sinker.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Yeah the grassroots protests against this are probably from political lobyists who get paid to write stuff in their blog. Interesting how well it works.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Can anyone explain why there are _any_ limits on political speech? Isn't that the most important kind of speech to protect? Why do you need to "register" as a PAC?
Isn't there already a law that limits how much political speech can happen leading up to an election and who can say it?
We can all find the bad in pretty much every law on the books. What i can't find is the "good" about any political-speech-restriction laws.
There are lots of voices out there that i'd just as soon not have to hear, but silencing them via government intervention seems pretty unAmerican (for historical values of "American").
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Actually it sounds more like treating lobbyists as the liars and scoundrels they are. They should not be able to pretend they are normal, well behaved people on the net or in any other public forum. Perhaps tattoos on the forehead and cheeks (both ends) would be appropriate a big L in red to denote a lying lobbyist whose opinions are for sale to the highest bidder.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"Our" side? They are rich American politicians. You are posting on slashdot. They are not on your side.
It is a mistake to think of "us vs them" as "democrats vs republicans", whichever way around you think of it. Everybody in congress is on the same side, and it's not your one.
Please, read the actual bill. It says you must reach 500 people AND make $100,000 working as a paid shill. Not OR!!!
Please don't link to a propaganda piece by a professional conservative lobbyist and claim it to be equal evidence to the above cited UCLA law professor and the above cited Orginal Bill. Payment and Reach were considered separately in the bill. Why don't you read the actual bill, and see if that alleviates your concerns.
I did read it. Here's what it says:
(19) GRASSROOTS LOBBYING FIRM- The term `grassroots lobbying firm' means a person or entity that--
`(A) is retained by 1 or more clients to engage in paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying on behalf of such clients; and
`(B) receives income of, or spends or agrees to spend, an aggregate of $25,000 or more for such efforts in any quarterly period.'
$100,000 is an extrapolation of $25,000 over a whole year. The bill said simply that a person who makes $25,000 a quarter for political astroturfing ($100,000 a year salary) or is given the same amount to spend on astroturfing is a lobbyist. It's straightforward, true, and doesn't affect bloggers at all.
You're asking the wrong question. Why? Because here we're talking about laws that put restrictions on speech that is both political and commercial. Commercial speech, as I sure hope you already know, is not protected by the First Amendment in the USA. So the real question is whether we should restrict commercially produced political speech.
In both the case of PACs and the case of this proposed law, the idea is that such speech is restricted in a particular way: such speech is allowed, but it must disclose its commercial nature, i.e., the fact that somebody is paying to produce it. Why? In order to hold actors in the political field honest, and to enable the public to better judge political information that it receives.
Are you adequate?
Who wants to limit the freedom of the press?
Everyone. There have always been people who have wanted to silence "the other side". Not just politics, but religion and science and pretty much every other field of human endeavour where people disagree.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
What's so frickin' hard about this? Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. No law means no law.
As it stands now doesnt it still target talk radio?
Whether or not you agree with the Rush and Hannitty's of the world, considering them under this bill is still a first amendment violation.
There is no spoon
I must have missed the memo too.
/. people automatically think everybody agrees with them. You find this in other forums, but it is most prevalent here for some reason. I really equate the /. editors to The View cast. However there is no Elizabeth Haselbeck among them to give a conservative view of the world.
I find it really funny that
So the Democrats position was to shut down a majority of people that critisize them?
Yes, because K Street lobbying has certainly been "shut down" by registration. You also think that "a majority" of Democratic critics are getting paid +$25,000/quarter? Where do I sign up?
What in the world does this have to do with the question of who controls economic resources? Nothing at all. It has fsck-all to do with the socialist/capitalist axis.
Democrats have been in favor of a slightly more regulated market, but that's not socialism either; market socialism and planned economy capitalism are both possible. (The former existed briefly during the Spanish Civil War, the later in the U.S. during WWII.) Outside their fringes, both the Democratic and Republican parties are firmly capitalist.
So can we stop using "socialist" as a McCarthyist scare word already?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I think you are being blinded by intent; It's not an issue of what it is supposed to mean, but rather one of everything it could be interpreted to mean.
Let's say I run a popular website to stimulate a grass-roots election effort (thus 19 applies). The site gets millions of hits before an election, and my hosting is expensive (I never expected that kind of bandwidth usage!), so I have to pay $25k (this meets part B). I'm running out of money, and politician Bill McGreedy pays me $1 to "keep up the good work" (this meets part A). Oops. Now, this might get shot down at trial if the judge is a nice guy, since the case doesn't match the true intent of the law. However, you can bet your ass I'll need a good lawyer, and will have to go through a trial. Given the speed of the legal system, it won't be resolved until after the election, either. I think another poster had a more likely form of misuse however, which is that the bill can be used to assert hidden payment of bloggers and thus launch an investigation of them. That will either shut the blogger up or slow them down.
We don't need this law to "protect" us; We only need to tell people that random bloggers, just like people you meet on the street, might be lying. Don't trust random people you don't know -- It's that simple. A lying blog can always be countered with another blog which digs up the truth, and that is the appropriate way to respond.
Finally, I don't see the difference between one blogger paid 50k per quarter and 10 bloggers paid $5k per quarter. The latter is a yet more sinister approximation of a "grass-roots" effort, and would be completely legal under this (now defunct) part of the law.
So to recap, this law can be used for nuisance attacks, is based on the fundamentally bad assumption that you should be able to trust random people on the internet, and has a large loophole for exactly the type of shillery it is supposed to stop. Well intentioned as it may have been, I say good riddance.
As a citizen, I'd like that astroturfing labeled as such
As a person with a brain, I'm offended by the suggestion that I can't just evaluate speech on the merits. And as a lover of liberty, I'm extremely offended by the suggestion that liberty be infringed in this way.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.