Posted on 03/30/2005 4:25:57 AM PST by johnny7
IF you give a mouse a cookie, he'll ask for a glass of milk. Then, he'll ask for a straw. Eventually, he'll ask for your whole house.
That's not just the plot of a popular children's book: It's the strategy of the campaign-finance-reform lobby — and it's on display right now as the enemies of free speech begin a long-planned crackdown on the Internet. Under a court order, the Federal Election Commission has drafted rules to apply the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (a.k.a. McCain-Feingold) to the Web. These would be the first restrictions of online politics — especially on Web logs, the journals known as "blogs." The folks behind this push claim that they just want to make sure paid political ads on the Web don't slip through a "loophole." Yet the "reformers" have already put us on notice that it won't end there.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Yawn.
No one will give this blatant attack on our basic freedoms a second thought. Just like no one really make a big deal about the CFR act when it was first introduced. Sure, people will complain about it for a few days or so, but eventually it will be accepted and people will learn to live with it. We are much more concerned with what Michael Jackson is wearing/will wear/hasn't worn in court than the rights our nation was founded on being systematically and methodically torn apart.
Absolutely shameful, and dangerous. Will the bureaucrats consult the Chinese, or Castro, in drafting regulations?
I am beginning to think I am having a nightmare from which I can't wake up. How can this be happening?
Pewgate: The Battle of the Blogosphere
By Richard Poe
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 25, 2005
The blogosphere is under attack. For three weeks, bloggers have battled the Federal Election Commission, seeking exemption from campaign finance laws that would effectively regulate political speech on the Web. How did it come to this?
The answer lies in a burgeoning scandal which we might call Pewgate. Ryan Sager of the New York Post broke this extraordinary story on March 17. He learned that the McCain-Feingold Act – the law which empowers the FEC to muzzle bloggers – was pushed through Congress by fraud.
For those netizens whose modems and wireless cards went dead three weeks ago, here’s some of the background you missed.
The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 gave federal judges and FEC officials the right to determine who can buy political ads on TV or radio during election season, and what they may say in those ads.
On September 18, 2004, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the FEC to extend McCain-Feingold’s censorship power over the Internet.
Dissident FEC commissioner Bradley Smith blew the whistle in a March 3 interview with CNETnews.com, warning that "grassroots Internet activity is in danger."
Smith warned that the FEC might regulate virtually "any decision by an individual to put a link on their home page, set up a blog, send out mass e-mails, any kind of activity that can be done on the Internet."
An explosion of blogger outrage ensued.
"I will continue to link to campaign websites whenever I want. … If they put me into jail for it, so be it," stated blogger Roger L. Simon.
Blogger Tom Smith at Right Coast declared, "[T]hey can stop us from blogging … when they pry our keyboards from our cold, dead fingers."
This week, the FEC seemingly compromised, releasing guidelines that appear to exempt most bloggers from regulation. However, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh warns that the guidelines are complex and ambiguous. Moreover, future court decisions may overturn them.
How did such a crazy law get through Congress in the first place? That’s where Pewgate comes in.
Beginning in 1994, a group of non-profit foundations began bankrolling "experts" and front groups whose purpose was to bamboozle Congress into thinking that millions of Americans were clamoring for "campaign finance reform" – even though they were not.
Sean P. Treglia, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, claims that he masterminded the scheme. Treglia boasted of his achievement at a March, 2004 conference at USC's Annenberg School for Communication. New York Post reporter Ryan Sager obtained a videotape of Treglia’s remarks.
"I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told any reporter," said Treglia. "Now that I'm several months away from Pew and we have campaign-finance reform, I can tell this story."
Campaign finance reform "didn't have a constituency," admitted Treglia. So he set out to create one.
Says Treglia, "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot - that everywhere they [politicians] looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."
To this end, Pew and its allies dispensed $140 million between 1994 and 2004, 88 percent of which – a cool $123 million – came from just eight foundations: Pew Charitable Trusts; Schumann Center; Carnegie Corporation; Joyce Foundation; George Soros’s Open Society Institute; Jerome Kohlberg Trust; Ford Foundation; and MacArthur Foundation.
Respected "good government" groups such as the Center for Public Integrity and Democracy 21 took Pewgate money. Soros and the Carnegie Corporation lavished contributions on John McCain’s Reform Institute.
Some Pewgate funds bought favorable media coverage. Sager reports that the Carnegie Corporation paid the American Prospect magazine $132,000 to publish a special issue pushing campaign finance reform. National Public Radio has spent at least $860,000 of Pewgate funds on programs spotlighting the role of money in politics.
Pewgate’s tentacles reach even to the U.S. Supreme Court. Many of the legal arguments upon which the court based its December 10, 2003 decision to uphold McCain-Feingold derived from data now deemed to have been fraudulent – data cooked up by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a Soros-funded operation which received millions in Pewgate lucre.
"[A]lmost half the footnotes relied on by the Supreme Court in upholding [McCain-Feingold] are research funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts," Treglia crowed.
Sean Treglia currently sits on the board of the Pew-funded Institute for Policy, Democracy & the Internet, which seeks to foster regulation of political speech on the Web.
The battle of the blogosphere has only just begun.
The Coming War on Blogs [Let Us Not Allow The Voice Of The People To Be Silenced!]
Tech Central ^ | March 25, 2005 | James D. Miller
It's a universal law of capitalism: when an industry faces a new and significant threat to its profits and powers it turns to the government for protection. Well, bloggers who write on current events are challenging the mainstream media (MSM), the most politically well-connected industry in America. Watch for the MSM to start using their political influence to burden bloggers.
But won't the First Amendment protect blogs? Unfortunately, courts already hold that many governmental restrictions on speech don't violate the First Amendment, and I can think of three areas in which the MSM might successfully change laws and regulations to hinder their blogger competitors:
1. Campaign Finance Reform -- Blog entries in support of a candidate could be considered political contributions to that candidate. The danger for most bloggers would lie not in contributing more than the legally permissible amount to a candidate, but rather in having to fill out the paperwork necessary to report their "political contributions".
The MSM, of course, would never permit their editorials in favor of a candidate to be considered political contributions. So to use campaign finance reform against bloggers, courts would have to distinguish between bloggers and the "legitimate" media. Any definition of bloggers will be imprecise, but this won't stop courts because most legal categories already have fuzzy boundaries. To define a blogger, courts could simply use the "I know it when I see it" approach famously employed by Justice Potter Stewart to determine whether something constituted hard-core pornography.
2. Libel Law -- The MSM used to fight aggressively against any expansion of libel law, but I predict this soon will change. The MSM can handle the burden of defending itself from libel suits much more easily than bloggers can. By increasing the scope of libel law the MSM would impose costs on all journalists which they, but not bloggers, could absorb.
3. Copyright Law -- Blogs often use information from other sources and, from what I have observed, sometimes flagrantly violate copyright laws. Imagine if Congress increased the complexity and penalties of copyright laws. Non-lawyer bloggers could never be sure what constituted legal fair use of MSM stories and information. Enhanced copyright laws could have a chilling effect on blogging.
In a fight against the MSM, blogs have two significant weaknesses: lack of monetary and legal resources. Most bloggers already lose money on their blogs. A small paperwork, monetary or legal burden imposed on bloggers would drive many of them to extinction. Expect the MSM to exploit this weakness.
The Democratic Party will likely assist the MSM in their attack on blogs, not because most blogs are pro-Republican but because blogs are not as consistently liberal as the MSM. John Kerry, for example, is calling for the government to do something to protect the MSM. As he said in a recent speech:
"The mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"
The Republicans will, I hope, realize that on average their interests are served by protecting blogs. But the Democrats and the MSM will still use the courts and regulatory agencies to attack bloggers, and if the Democrats ever retake the Presidency and Congress expect "media reform" to become a top priority.
The founders of our great country expected that different interest groups would seek to use the political process for their personal gain. So in seeking to get the government to hinder bloggers, the MSM will be acting exactly as men such as Alexander Hamilton would have predicted. And Hamilton would not have expected the courts to save bloggers. Rather, he would have hoped that bloggers themselves would politically organize to fight back against the MSM.
From Polipundit with a follow up:
FEC Rules
Since you’re reading this blog, you probably like it. And you probably want to keep reading it in the future. But that may not be possible. You see, I may go to jail for writing about politics.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has released a set of proposed “rules” for political speech on the Internet. These rules specify exactly what speech is, and isn’t, allowed on the Internet.
I’m not kidding. They really do want to regulate political speech on the Internet. Bloggers, like yours truly, could be fined and punished for writing about a political candidate, if the FEC decides that we violated some aspect of their byzantine “rules.”
Are you as shocked and outraged by this as I am? What kind of country do you want to live in? America? Or China, where people go to jail for using the Internet for political speech?
Fortunately, there is something you can do. The FEC is asking for your comments on the proposed “rules.”
A suggestion on comments: If you don’t have the time (and who does?) to read and understand all the “rules” the FEC is proposing, just say that the FEC should protect the right to free speech above all other considerations.
Please send your comments to internet@fec.gov. Include your name and postal address.
Otherwise, the next time the lying liberal media pulls a RatherGate, no blogger may be able to challenge them.
-- PoliPundit
More on the FEC Rules
I noted yesteday that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) had drafted “rules” that specified what political speech is, and isn’t, allowed on the Internet. As if that wasn’t outrageous enough, Red State has uncovered an earlier draft of these rules. The draft is truly draconian, and confirms our worst fears.
If you like this blog, if you don’t want me to go to jail for writing about politics, if you want to continue hearing the news that the lying liberal media supresses, then you have to do something about it.
The FEC is soliciting comments on its proposed “rules.” Please write to the FEC at internet@fec.gov. Address your e-mail to “Mr. Brad C. Deutsch, Assistant General Counsel.” Be sure to include your name and postal address.
Here are some comments polipundit.com readers have sent to the FEC:
Sirs: I appreciate that you have tried to insulate the Internet and blogs from undue interference in free speech by your proposed rules.
However, as with any rules, and the ability of attorneys to manage and to manipulate them, just the very act of rules will inevitably lead to both dilemmas of interpretation and enforcement and to creative ways around them. The result will be more rules, interpretations, and evasions.
Meanwhile, the victim will be the news and information consumer, the beneficiary of free speech. The expense and expertise to evade will limit the willingness and ability of those who are not professional communicators or politicians to participate in the public forum of ideas. Other consumers will, thus, be limited in what they are exposed to, for their own right to make decisions.
The example of 527’s is instructive. They are a legal way to evade the BRAC rules, but require expensive legal expertise to do so. Despite many times higher expenditures by pro-Kerry 527’s, the more grassroots and lower expenditures of the pro-Swift Boat 527 had far greater measured impact. In other words, the consumer is capable of making choices, and the consumer’s choices will govern the impact of political communication. That is the genius of free speech.
Another point of problem with the proposed rules relates to shopping libel suits in British courts against Americans speaking in America. Bloggers may have to assume corporate shells in order to insulate themselves from these free speech abuses. But, the proposed rules do not protect the free speech of corporate-entity blogs.
Again, in the proposed rules extending the BRAC’s interest in limiting corporate political speech, they also limit the ability of bloggers to protect their own right of free speech from abuses occurring in the British courts, and thus unduly limit Americans’ free speech.
In conclusion, the FEC should further adjust its proposed rules, if rules there must be, to allow corporate-entity blogs, and to recognize that any rules should be drafted to be an equivalent exemption to that right of free speech of the formerly established media.
I am not myself a blogger. I am a consumer of a wide range of news and information sources, including blogs, all valuable inputs to my rights of choice as a citizen.
Bruce Kesler ChFC REBC RHU CLU (Address)
Regulating bloggers: Tell FEC you support free speech online
Manchester Union Leader ^ | March 25, 2005 | Editorial
IN A SET of new regulations proposed on Wednesday, the Federal Election Commission indicated that it would not attempt to restrict political speech made by individuals on the Internet — if that speech is not coordinated with a political party or campaign. But that is easier said than done under the rules set forth in existing campaign finance law.
Until now, the FEC refused to apply campaign finance laws to the Internet. But last year supporters of government restrictions on free speech (otherwise known as backers of federal campaign finance “reform”) sued the FEC, saying the commission’s regulations were too lax. The judge agreed, and Wednesday’s proposed rules were designed to comply with that ruling.
In short, the six-member FEC shows no burning zeal for regulating Internet-based political speech made by private citizens who are not part of a political campaign. Its new rules are not intended to apply to independent bloggers. But there are two important catches.
The first is that the campaign finance laws compel the FEC to regulate speech that is made in coordination with a candidate or party. The question is, what might the FEC, Congress or the courts consider coordination when it comes to blogging?
Would a campaign volunteer or staffer have to report any blogging in support of his boss as an in-kind contribution? If a blogger works as a consultant on a campaign, as happened last year, would the blog be subject to FEC regulation?
The second catch is this: Now that campaign finance laws have infiltrated the Internet, what might Congress do to see that existing or new laws be made to silence criticism of candidates? The McCain-Feingold law was written explicitly to muzzle critics of Congress. There is every reason to expect that Congress would love to muzzle bloggers if at all possible.
The FEC is accepting comment on the proposed rules, which be read at www.fec.gov. A letter opposing the expansion of campaign regulations to bloggers could help prevent that frightening scenario from ever happening.
You betcha.
For more on the Pew-Tides ties, click here.
I must say I pitty all those cubicle bound computer jockeys, for they will be forced to actually work for their employers instead of perusing the internet for fun and relaxation while at work.
The horrors of it all.
bttt
I don't think anyone should hold their breath waiting for the Republicans to ride to the rescue on this issue because these regulations more than anything else are about maintaining the status quo. If incumbents can limit their challengers options they limit their ability to reach voters. Even Republicans want to stay in office more than anything else. The combination of politicians and old media makes for a pretty effective silencer of free speech.
The only hope is that Republicans will realize that this legislation will eventually silence them as well since the MSM is overwhelmingly liberal. It's not much of a hope really but the other alternative is expecting the courts to uphold the 1st amendment. Since the 1st amendment can't be found in Scottish law that's a pretty remote possibility.
bttt
BTTT.
If M-Feingold does attempt to destroy the Blogosphere, we can set up a server farm for FR over here (UK). It would be my pleasure to help.
Thanks for that post!
Astroturf Politics
How liberal foundations fooled Congress into passing McCain-Feingold.
Monday, March 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
If a political gaffe consists of inadvertently revealing the truth, then Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, has just ripped the curtain off of the "good government" groups that foisted the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill on the country in 2002. The bill's restrictions on political speech have the potential for great mischief; just last month a member of the Federal Election Commission warned they could limit the activities of bloggers and other Internet commentators.
What Mr. Treglia revealed in a talk last year at the University of Southern California is that far from representing the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, the campaign finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by liberal foundations like Pew. In a tape obtained by the New York Post, Mr. Treglia tells his USC audience they are going to hear a story he can reveal only now that campaign finance reform has become law. "The target audience for all this [foundation] activity was 535 people in [Congress]," Mr. Treglia says in his talk. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That everywhere [Congress] looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."
The truth was far different. Mr. Treglia admits that campaign-finance supporters had to try to hoodwink Congress because "they had lost legitimacy inside Washington because they didn't have a constituency that would punish Congress if they didn't vote for reform."
So instead, according to Mr. Treglia, liberal reform groups created a Potemkin movement. A study last month by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan Web site dealing with campaign funding issues, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote liberal campaign reform in the last decade, a full $123 million came from just eight liberal foundations. Many are the same foundations that provide much of the money for such left-wing groups as People for the American Way and the Earth Action Network. The "movement" behind campaign-finance reform resembled many corporate campaigns pushing legislation. It consisted largely of "Astroturf" rather than true "grass-roots" support.
But the results were spectacular. Not only did the effort succeed in bulldozing Congress and President Bush, but it might have played a role in persuading the Supreme Court, which had previously ruled against broad restrictions on political speech, to declare McCain-Feingold constitutional in 2003 on a 5-4 vote. "You will see that almost half the footnotes relied on by the Supreme Court in upholding the law are research funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts," Mr. Treglia boasted.
Reporters are used to attempts to hoodwink officials into thinking an issue is genuinely popular, and they frequently expose them. But when "good government" groups like the Center for Public Integrity engage in the same tactics, journalists usually ignore it. Perhaps that's because Washington media types overwhelmingly wanted McCain-Feingold to pass.
It will be interesting to see if, in light of Mr. Treglia's comments, reporters continue to do so. The tape of his remarks, which Post editorial writer Ryan Sager unearthed, could provide material for a dozen stories on how campaign finance reform was really passed. The editors of Political Money Line note that while the 10-year lobbying effort to pass campaign-finance reform was a small effort as lobbying campaigns go, it succeeded in changing the fundamental rules of American politics.
The foundation blueprint may also be a model for future campaigns, as more nonprofit 501(c)3 groups (which rarely make lists of their donors public) get involved in the Social Security and legal reform debates. "We can watch the lighted [disclosed] money avenues, provide a roadmap of routes, and report on traffic patterns," says Kent Cooper of Political Money Line. "But it may be harder when most of the traffic is shifting to the unlit avenues used by 501(c) organizations."
In his recorded comments, Mr. Treglia expressed satisfaction at how the Pew Charitable Trusts were able to avoid public scrutiny of the $40 million the foundation poured into the campaign. "The strategy was designed not to hide Pew's involvement . . . but most of Pew's funding," he said. "I advised Pew that Pew that Pew should be in the background. And by law, the grantees always have to disclose. But I always encouraged the grantees never to mention Pew."
He acknowledged that this created an appearance problem. "Did we push the envelope? Yeah. Were we encouraged internally to push the envelope? Yeah. . . . We stayed with the letter, if not the spirit, of the law." But the subterfuge was indeed necessary. "If Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless," he confessed. Hence the need "to convey the impression that this was something coming naturally from beyond the Beltway."
The efforts of Pew and the other liberal foundations, which include George Soros's Open Society Institute and the Carnegie Corp., were aided by the news media's complicity. The American Prospect, a liberal magazine, put out a special issue on campaign finance reform in 2000 that was paid for by a $132,000 Carnegie grant--a fact the magazine failed to disclose.
National Public Radio openly accepted $1.2 million from liberal foundations to provide such items as "coverage of financial influence in political decision-making." Its campaign finance reporter, Peter Overby, is a former editor of the magazine put out by Common Cause, a major supporter of McCain-Feingold. No one suggests there was direct collusion between NPR and campaign finance lobbies. With the money and personnel available to NPR, there didn't need to be. Sympathetic stories on the need for campaign finance reform flowed naturally. Sounds like the kind of "faux news" that liberals are complaining the Bush administration was guilty of engineering when it put out video press releases or provided conservative commentator Armstrong Williams with a grant.
The media simply didn't think the involvement of liberal foundations in bankrolling campaign finance reform was a story. Mr. Treglia admits that "we had a scare" after George Will "stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column." But he said nothing came of it. "Journalists didn't care. . . . There was a panic there for a couple weeks, because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up." And they easily could have. Mr. Treglia admitted that despite all the efforts to hide the attempt to deceive Congress about the true origins of the campaign finance reform lobby, "if any reporter wanted to know, they could have sat down and connected the dots. But they didn't."
Mr. Treglia isn't talking to reporters about his remarks at USC. But he has released a statement saying "it is incorrect to suggest that [Pew] would attempt to deceive or mislead about its funding efforts. I regret that my comments have led to any confusion." Rebecca Remel, Pew's president and CEO, says that "any assertion that we tried to hide our support of campaign finance reform grantees is false." No doubt Pew did comply with the technical requirements of the law, but it also certainly didn't follow the kind of transparency standards it demands of politicians or corporations.
The successful stealth campaign by the eight liberal foundations means we now have to live in the Brave New World of McCain-Feingold. Bradley Smith, a Federal Election Commission member, made news this month by warning that bloggers could face federal regulation because a federal judge had thrown out their legal exemption from campaign finance regulations. The Internet has been burning up with concern that bloggers could be hauled into court for, as Mr. Smith puts it, "any decision by an individual to put a link [to a political candidate] on their home page, set up a blog, send out mass e-mails, any kind of activity that can be done." Mr. Smith warns that "it's very likely that the Internet is going to be regulated" by the FEC unless "Congress is willing to stand up and say, 'Keep your hands off of this, and we'll change the statute to make it clear.' "
McCain-Feingold did little in last year's elections to limit the influence of money in politics, but a great deal to benefit incumbents and harm true grass-roots politics. Its ban on using soft money to run issue ads in the 60 days before an election mean that such ads will run earlier, make campaigns longer and allow incumbents to avoid criticism of their voting records. David Mason, who serves with Mr. Smith on the FEC, says that the incredible complexity of the bill is likely to lead to "invidious enforcement, singling out disfavored groups or causes" and "subjecting regulated groups to harassment by political opponents."
The next time Congress debates further "reform" of the rules for conducting elections, it would behoove all of us to learn who is really behind the effort, and what their true motives might be.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
