I thought about that KVI suit also. But didn’t they rule against the conservatives in that case? BTW, I understand the “freedom to blog” argument, but DK and DU are fundraising sites too. The Daily Kos convention was a free multimillion dollar advertisement for the Left. I think there is a big difference between Free Republic and these sites.
I like to mention it as often as I can because "in-kind political contribution" is a potential weapon against all conservative talk. Sure, the right could use it too but we'd be accused of hypocrisy -- and bigotry, racism, homophobia, nativism, jingoism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant . . . .
Here is a John Fund column with an update. "Campaign finance regulators say speech isn't free--it's a form of 'contribution.' "
The good news is "Washington's largely liberal Supreme Court agreed that political free speech was jeopardized by the attempt to regulate media outlets under campaign finance laws. Writing in concurrence, Justice Jim Johnson noted, 'Today we are confronted with an example of abusive prosecution by several local governments. . . . This litigation was actually for the purpose of restricting or silencing political opponents.' The court took the unusual step of sending the case back to the trial court to determine the nature of any constitutional violations the prosecutors who brought the case committed and whether the Initiative 912 supporters have a right to collect attorneys' fee from the local governments who sued them."
The "Fairness Doctrine" of course was / will be used as a weapon. According to an Internet source Fred Friendly in his book appropriately entitled The Good Guys, the Bad Guys, and the First Amendment, "Fairness Doctrine" complaints were part of a "massive strategy . . . to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited, and decide it was too expensive to continue."