FEC Poised to Pollute Blogosphere

Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.

We'll see about that.

Here's a really interesting discussion about the Federal Election Commission's positioning to strangle political speech in the blogosphere. This, of course, is all about squashing the one avenue of public free speech still available to average (and not so average) people.

One reason I've rejected the idea of advertising on this blog is because I don't want my hands - or tongue - tied by bureacrats or some aspiring Johnny Boardroom. It's been tempting at times because I'm a lot of things, but wealthy isn't one of them.

At any rate, the FEC can tell me what I can or can't say, but I really don't give a gnat's ass what the FEC or anyone else does to try to prevent people like me from expressing my opinions - even if those opinions have the effect of supporting a candidate or political party. It ain't gonna work, period. Assuming they were even able to get close to achieving what they hope to achieve, there are people all over the world who would be happy to post my words and images on non-U.S. servers and the FEC wouldn't have the least bit of influence as to who viewed them. Even if they were able to prevent me from directly linking to a campaign's website, guess what? Dissident is my second language, and I can speak it well enough that anyone who wants to contribute to Candidate X or Party Y will know exactly what to do.

Considering CNN and FOX and MSNBC - not to mention the broadcast networks - are relentless shills for the Republican Party twenty-four hours a day the whole year round, it's laughable that a bunch of Beltway crooks in D.C. think they can effectively shut up an individual who doesn't make one cent from an website like this one. They can try all they want, but in the end, they'll fail and end up looking like the fools they are. It wouldn't be the first time the FEC bit off more than it could chew.