FEC Considers Restricting Online Political Activities ( Web Ads, Bloggers' Endorsements)

The Federal Election Commission has begun considering whether to issue new rules on how political campaigns are waged on the Internet, a regulatory process that is expected to take months to complete but that is already generating considerable angst online.

The agency is weighing whether -- and how -- to impose restrictions on a host of online activities, including campaign advertising and politically oriented blogs.

Election officials are reluctantly taking up the issue, after losing a court case last fall. The FEC, which enforces federal election law, had issued scores of regulations delineating how the campaign finance reform legislation adopted in 2002 ought to be implemented. But Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.), who sponsored the legislation, complained that many of those rules were too lax, and they successfully sued to have them rescinded. The commission must now rewrite a number of those directions, including ones that left online political activities virtually free from government regulation.

"We are almost certainly going to move from an environment in which the Internet was per se not regulated to where it is going to be regulated in some part," said FEC Commissioner David M. Mason, a Republican. "That shift has huge significance because it means that people who are conducting political activity on the Internet are suddenly going to have to worry about or at least be conscious of certain legal distinctions and lines they didn't used to have to worry about."

Which people, what activities and where those lines should be drawn, though, have yet to be determined.

You have no doubt about where I stand on this intended new violation of the First Amendment by the FEC. That Commission will conduct a public hearing on its final proposal.

Jim, would you like me to go to that hearing, which the FEC is required to hold, as the official representative of FreeRepublic? I have practiced before the FEC decades ago. The fee for my doing that would be, of course, $0. Let me know if I can be of service.

John / Billybob

Now, again, why did George Bush sign this bill?

The Stench from PEW (vidoetape exposes phony buzz created for McCain-Feingold CFR) - New York Post, Editorial, March 21, 2005 - posted to Free Republic, March 21 2005, by Liz:

A former program officer for Pew, Sean Treglia, was caught on videotape bragging about how the foundation worked behind the scenes to create the false impression that there was a "mass movement" afoot clamoring for campaign-finance reform...
Pew did this in the run-up to the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — a.k.a. McCain-Feingold — by spreading around more than $40 million to grass-roots front groups like Common Cause, the Campaign Finance Institute and the inaptly named Center for Public Integrity...
Several other major liberal foundations — including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Institute — colluded with Pew to give $123 million between 1994 and 2004 to promote the regulation of political speech.
But Pew's role in the effort seems to have been particularly insidious.
"Having been on the Hill, I knew that . . . if Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless. It'd be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain," Treglia says at one point in the tape.
"So, in order, in essence, to convey the impression that this was something coming naturally from outside the Beltway, I felt it was best that Pew stay in the background."
"By law, the grantees always have to disclose. But I always encouraged the grantees never to mention Pew," Treglia says. "Did we push the envelope? Yeah. Were we encouraged internally to push the envelope? Yeah . . . We stayed within the letter, if not the spirit, of the law."

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