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FLASH: White House press corps admits its first 'blogger'... Developing...

Today at 3pm est, "Insights from Washington" with Paul Rodriguez will have FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith as a guest to discuss the recent BUZZ about the FEC extending McCain-Feingold regulations to the INTERNET! CALL in with YOUR questions! 866-884-8255! If you can't call, list your questions here and we will forward them to Mr. Rodriguez!

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Excesses in McCain-FeingoldPublished March 5, 2005 The 2004 presidential campaign gave the lie to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 -- otherwise known as McCain-Feingold, whose intent is to keep "big money" out of politics. Billionaire George Soros is probably still chuckling about that. Now, Federal Election Commission commissioner Bradley Smith warns that legally it could be used to stifle free speech on the Internet.     Here's how: The law regulates political advertising coordinated with political campaigns that appears on "any broadcast, cable or satellite communication, newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising facility, mass mailing or telephone bank...

The legal background to the regulatory threat to the Internet is so complicated that it makes discussion of the legal issues easily susceptible to unintented confusion as well as intentional deception. The organization representing Senators McCain and Feingold as amici in the lawsuit that has resulted in the looming threat to political speech on the internet is the Campaign Legal Center (through the center's Trevor Potter). Yesterday the center issued a press release ("Setting the record straight: There is no FEC threat to the Internet") castigating FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith for raising the concerns regarding FEC regulation of the internet...

Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines. Smith should know. He's one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet. In 2002, the FEC exempted the...

Captain's Quarters has started this ball rolling: March 04, 2005 An Open Letter To The United States Senate To the honorable Senators McCain and Feingold, et al: I have read with considerable dismay the effect that your recent lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission, upheld by Judge Colleen Kollar-Ketelly, will have on political speech on the Internet. I write a political media-watchdog blog, Captain's Quarters, which enjoys a not-insubstantial daily readership. No one pays me to do this; I operate my site and write on topics purely from personal convictions and a deep desire to improve the world around me...

Government Plans Crackdown On Bloggers    I would take great delight in unseating each and every one of their sorry asses.  A fairly extensive FR thread detailing the threat to political Blogs is here.      Blogs Bristle at FEC's Internet Political Speech Proposal (this affects you) -- "You can be assured that none of us in the blogosphere will fail to recognize those who do not act to defend our rights to free and unfettered political speech, and regardless of political party, none of us will rest until those voices of repression are stripped of office by the...

In the United States the discourse about bloggers has mostly concerned whether they pose a risk to traditional media. In some other countries, the authorities apparently are worried that bloggers pose a threat to government control. The blogger community is already abuzz over the cases of several Iranian bloggers—Arash Sigarchi, who has been sentenced to 14 years in prison; Mojtaba Saminejad, who is apparently in jail awaiting trial; and Mohamad Reza Nasab Abdolahi, who has been sentenced to six months behind bars, reportedly for insulting the country's leaders. It's not that surprising that Iran—a member of Dubya's "axis of evil,"...

Deciding to take a trip once again to this freak's website, I discovered this latest bit of crap from the Pop Star Moby. Here is his entry in full. This guy has no clue how dumb he really is. I didn't realize it either until I read this journal entry... flying from toronto to nyc. canada is such a nice place. i really do wish that the northern blue states could be annexed by canada and thus create 'the united states of canada.' as i said to some of the journalists in toronto, we would gladly give up our guns...

Radio talkshow host Mike Gallagher today announced he had inked a marketing deal with the so-called "blogosphere" to provide advertising and promotion for his national program. Under the terms of the deal, Mr. Gallagher, who has been hailed as "America's second-string talk radio host," will provide the blogosphere with "derision and ridicule in exchange for links to his website, and viral buzz generation." "It's a win-win," said Mr. Gallagher. "I get audience growth and more ad revenues, and the geeky losers in their basements get to crank out more illegitimate junk on their computers."

CYBERSPACE — During the US presidential election, many heard for the first time about the rise in influence of the “bloggers,” the wave of self-publishing internet journalists whose up-to-the-nanosecond news reporting caused the downfall of CBS’s anchor-Titan Dan Rather. Now that the bloggers have found themselves powerful enough to depose one of mainstream broadcast media’s most powerful icons, they are realizing their power in other areas. A group of pro-life bloggers has banded together to try to stop the starvation death of Terri Schindler-Schiavo. One of the writers on the group blog, “Tim,” wrote, “Terri's bloggers have a lot of...

Mark Jen landed a dream job with an American Internet search engine giant in January. He was fired less than a month later. His infraction? He ran a Web log, where he freely gabbed about his impressions of life in his workplace. Others who lost their jobs courtesy their personal blogs include a flight attendant who claims she was fired for pictures she posted on her personal blog that her airline deemed "inappropriate." An online social networking site canned an employee last summer for her online musings about the company. Web logs, or blogs, the online personal diaries where big...

SAN FRANCISCO — Like so many other 20-somethings hoping to mine the Internet gold rush of the late 1990s, Mena Trott was thrown for a humbling loop by the dot-com bust, yet still craved stardom. Her unassuming husband, Ben, just wanted another computer programming gig in Silicon Valley's depressed job market. The couple's odd chemistry cooked up Six Apart Ltd., a startup that has helped popularize the "blogging" craze, with millions of people worldwide maintaining online personal journals that dissect everything from politics to poultry. The Trotts, both 27, have amplified the buzz about Web logs, or blogs, by making...

For 11 years, Justin Hall was dedicated to documenting his life online. Composing more than 4,800 pages from nearly a decade of constant writing, which he posted on his site, www.links.net, Hall became a pioneer among online diarists and Web loggers. For Hall, nothing seemed to be too embarrassing or too personal to write about -- with photos and links. From romantic relationships to his father's suicide to a bad case of shingles, he shared himself with a fairly substantial audience. Thousands of people read his site every day. Then, in mid-January, he made a short film called "Dark Night''...

EAGER TO DIVERT ATTENTION from the incredible incompetence displayed in the handling of Eason Jordan's remarks before the Davos audience (and Jordan's November 2004 accusation that the U.S. military was torturing journalists), a number of voices within the mainstream media have argued that the credentials of bloggers are suspect and that in their amateurism there lays a danger to the public discussion. The most surprising of these attacks came in an unsigned editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal chose to ignore Jordan's November 2004 accusation about the American military torturing journalists, and pronounced the Davos pratfall as...

Blog pundits claim CNN scalp Roy Eccleston FEBRUARY 17, 2005 "THEY'RE scared spitless," says Glenn Reynolds. "But they shouldn't be." The University of Tennessee law professor and author of the popular web log - blog - InstaPundit.com is talking about the reaction of the mainstream US media in the week after bloggers gleefully claimed the scalp of a top CNN executive. This scalp belonged to Eason Jordan, who was claimed to have accused the US military of deliberately targeting reporters in Iraq and killing a dozen of them. Exactly what Jordan said at the World Economic Forum in Davos isn't...

Real fear is mixing with snarky disdain in the "mainstream" media's attitude toward web loggers in the wake of the resignation last Friday of Eason Jordan as CNN's top news executive. "Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters," said the headline in the New York Times Monday, the first time many of the newspaper's readers were made aware of a controversy which had been roiling for nearly two weeks. "The New York Times media beat reporters got beaten badly on the Eason Jordan story — by (gasp!) web logs and cable news — and so how do they react? By catching...

Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters By KATHERINE Q. SEELYE his article was reported by Katharine Q. Seelye, Jacques Steinberg and David F. Gallagher. With the resignation Friday of a top news executive from CNN, bloggers have laid claim to a prominent media career for the second time in five months. In September, conservative bloggers exposed flaws in a report by Dan Rather; he subsequently announced that on March 9 he would step down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News." On Friday, after nearly two weeks of intensifying pressure on the Internet, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at...

WASHINGTON – After a pointed question at a White House press briefing two weeks ago, a massive left-wing investigation of Talon News and Jeff Gannon's personal and business affairs was launched and was said to reveal that he was associated with homosexual website addresses. Left-wing bloggers, specifically Media Matters, which ironically is run by former conservative and once-closeted homosexual David Brock, have made a name for themselves by taking the scalp of this conservative journalist by the name of Jeff Gannon. His crimes were that he was too pro-Republican, attended White House briefings, and asked questions unfair to Democrats. This...

Suffering from "pure boredom" while working as a features writer for a North Carolina newspaper, Rachel Mosteller began keeping an online journal. Anonymously, with names changed to protect the guilty, she chronicled the people who inhabit just about any newsroom - the foul-mouthed female reporter, the chubby sportswriter, the co-worker who hoards the free books sent in by publishers seeking reviews. But her blog, called the "Sarcastic Journalist," didn't stay secret for long. Her bosses found out last year, and Ms. Mosteller, eight months pregnant at the time, promptly found herself sacked. She learned a valuable lesson: If you have...