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November 27, 2005CapitolLink: Lawmakers Defend Liberal Columnist
The Los Angeles Times has incurred the wrath of two dozen Democrats in Congress over the paper's decision earlier this month to fire liberal columnist Robert Scheer.
The lawmakers sent a letter of complaint to the Times, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, put the text of the letter online at The Huffington Post, where he is an occasional contributor.
"On Nov. 11, the L.A. Times reported this dismissal along with other staff cuts," the lawmakers wrote. "According to the article, a conservative contributing editor to the National Review has been hired to write for the op-ed pages. In effect the L.A. Times has hired a Bush administration cheerleader to replace a leading critic of the administration."
The lawmakers' call for the newspaper to reconsider its decision to fire Scheer was unusual enough for media watcher and blogger Jeff Jarvis to criticize it at both his own blog, BuzzMachine, and at The Huffington Post.
Jarvis defended the lawmakers' right to voice their opinion on Scheer's firing as readers but questioned their decision to register their complaint in their official capacity as elected officials. "The last thing we need is for more public officials to act as if they can or should throw their weight around with the press, the media and our speech," he said.
Readers at The Huffington Post divided fairly evenly over the merits of Jarvis' point. "Much as I agree with their position, they went about it the wrong way," one reader said. "And it may turn out to be counterproductive."
But another argued that the letter actually defends the principle of a free press, as lawmakers should: "They wrote a letter. They did not summon [Times officials] to testify in front of a committee. That it was from members of Congress underscores the seriousness of the matter. A newspaper fired an employee of 30 years because he did not agree with the administration. That is un-American."
Posted by at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)
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In The Blog's-Eye: 'Mean Jean' Schmidt's Maiden Speech
Freshman Rep. Jean Schmidt has been the focus of an all-out blog swarm from the left since a House floor speech last week that her critics took as a personal assault on Rep. John Murtha.
Schmidt, R-Ohio, appeared to call Pennsylvania Democrat Murtha, a former Marine, a "coward" for advocating a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. She quickly clarified that she did not mean to characterize any particular person that way, and she later told the press that she sent a personal letter of apology to Murtha. But Democratic bloggers will not let the issue alone.
Joshua Micah Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo has offered a steady drumbeat of criticism aimed at Schmidt, who is known as "Mean Jean" in her district. He dubbed his first entry on the topic "Jean Schmidt-Piece 'O Work Watch -- Installment #1" and has posted two more entries since then.
The latest one focuses on Schmidt's first floor speech in the House. It occurred Sept. 6, just weeks after Schmidt won an unexpectedly tight special election in Ohio's 2nd District.
The part of the speech that has captured the attention of Marshall and so many other bloggers, including BluegrassReport, Daily Kos and Delusions of Grandeur, involves Schmidt's pledge to be "honorable" in any of her disagreements with colleagues and not to engage in name-calling or character attacks. They see her comments on the floor last week as inconsistent with the vow she made less than three months earlier. Taegan Goddard of Political Wire highlighted one snippet from the speech as his quote of the day.
These words of Schmidt's in particular appear to have been somewhat prophetic: "It is easy to quickly sink to the lowest form of political debate."
The full speech is reprinted in the extended entry, with the key section in bold.
I stand here today in the same shoes, though with a slightly higher heel, as thousands of members who have taken the same oath before me. I am mindful of what is expected of me both by this hallowed institution and the hundreds of thousands of Americans I am blessed to represent. I am the lowest-ranking member of this body, the very bottom rung of the ladder; and I am privileged to hold that title.
This House has much work to do. On that we can all agree. We will not always agree on the details of that work. Honorable people can certainly agree to disagree. However, here today I accept a second oath. I pledge to walk in the shoes of my colleagues and refrain from name-calling or the questioning of character. It is easy to quickly sink to the lowest form of political debate. Harsh words often lead to headlines, but walking this path is not a victimless crime. This great House pays the price.
So at this moment, I begin my tenure in this chamber, uncertain of what history will say of my tenure here. I come here green with only a desire to make our great country even greater. We have much work to do. In that spirit, I pledge to each of you that any disagreements we may have are just that and no more.
Walking in each other's shoes takes effort and pause; however, it is my sincere hope that I never lose the patience to view each of you as human beings first, God's creatures, and foremost. I deeply appreciate this opportunity to serve with each of you. I very much look forward to getting to know you better, and I humbly thank you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing me to address this humble body.
Posted by at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)
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Rep. John Murtha has been the talk of the blogosphere for a week because of his call for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Now the Pennsylvania Democrat is doing some talking of his own on that topic in the blogosphere.
Murtha authored his first-ever blog entry at The Huffington Post yesterday. His message: It's time for the White House to invite people on both sides of the Iraqi war debate for a meeting designed to find a resolution.
"[I]t's obvious that the American people are thirsting for a solution in Iraq," Murtha wrote. "The American people are ahead of Congress in recognizing that we must give the Iraqis incentive to step up and seize their own destiny -- sooner rather than later -- so that our young men and women in uniform will not continue paying such a heavy price for an indefinite period."
The post has spurred 362 comments so far, most of them laudatory of Murtha's role in the debate.
Posted by at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)
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President Bush thinks Americans should be anxious about the possibility of al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi taking control of Iraq. But Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, thinks Bush's recent string of warnings on that front are as misleading as his pre-war warnings about the nuclear stockpiles of Saddam Hussein.
"Like the exaggerated threats used before the war, the threat of a Zarqawi republic is unfounded," Kucinich wrote yesterday in his first blog entry at The Huffington Post. "Congress and the public need to see through the smokescreen, and not be distracted from the real question at hand: how to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq."
He stated four reasons why Bush's take on Zarqawi is not credible: 1) Zarqawi's group "is only a small player in the armed insurgency in Iraq;" 2) Zarqawi is not popular enough to be elected Iraq's leader; 3) he has alienated most Sunnis, the largest Islamic sect in Iraq; and 4) Zarqawi is from Jordan, not Iraq.
"All the facts point to the conclusion that Zarqawi cannot and will not realistically take over Iraq," Kucinich argued. "By making Zarqawi the face of the opposition, however, the White House is distracting us from the significant, real and widespread non-violent Iraqi opposition."
Posted by at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)
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The Inside Track To Political Insiders
People who want to send a message to political insiders, and who appreciate the value of blogs to accomplish that goal, have a new forum to do just that: the Political Insiders Ad Network via Blogads.
Political Wire, one of the blogs in the network, announced the development in a post today.
"Millions of dollars are spent each year on advocacy ads trying to influence political insiders," Taegan Goddard wrote. "The network will include blogs most read by these people -- politicians and their staffs, campaign aides, political consultants, lobbyists and journalists. It's a bipartisan collection of the most thoughtful political sites across the ideological spectrum."
That collection includes serious sites like Political Wire and snarky but well-read ones like Wonkette. Other participating blogs include D.C.'s Political Report, MyDD, Mystery Pollster, PoliPundit, Political State Report and Swing State Project.
The weekly ad rates vary from $10 for space on the smallest blogs to $300 for a slot at Wonkette. Political Wire invited other blogs to join the network.
Posted by at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
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The spat over campaign strategy that divided the Democratic "netroots" and party establishment in Washington earlier this year may be subsiding. The makings of a detente emerged on two fronts this week.
First, a reader of Swing State Project launched a Web site aimed at recruiting bloggers to cover campaigns in all 435 House districts. The site, DistrictBlogs, reflects the bold, nontraditional strategy of the netroots. It currently lists active blogs in 21 districts covering 14 states and provides feeds from those blogs. The site also offers tools to create new blogs focused on other districts.
"The combination of these two features means that [DistrictBlogs] has the potential to become a very powerful district-level tool," Swing State Project noted.
Tim Tagaris, a former contributor at Swing State Project and now a blogger for the Democratic National Committee, also drew attention to DistrictBlogs in a post at the DNC blog. The DNC favors a "50-state strategy" for challenging Republican candidates in every state.
Tagaris also highlighted the second development that indicates common strategic ground among Democrats: a new page at the site of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that lists where Democrats hold House seats, and where the party currently has and lacks challengers. "In the races where Democrats have a candidate, a hyperlink connects you to some opposition-research-type information about the Republican incumbent," Tagaris said.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, arguably the most influential Democratic blogger, praised the DCCC's move -- and he used his bully pulpit at Daily Kos to urge folks in the netroots to help the DCCC find more candidates.
"The DCCC can do a lot, but we in the netroots number millions," Moulitsas wrote. "We know lots of people who would never register on the DCCC's radar. I'm not talking lawyers or career politicians -- we've got more than enough of those -- but teachers, firefighters, farmers, vets, etc. Real people that could be persuaded to make a run to help build [a] clean house in D.C. and take power away from those utterly corrupted by it."
Posted by at 10:58 PM | Comments (1)
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The Culture-Of-Corruption Beat
Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo has made a name for himself by calling attention to the sins of Republican officials, and one of his favorite topics trying to piece together what he sees as their culture of corruption.
But with his own blog and the TPMCafe service he is building, Marshall doesn't have as much time as he would like to make sense of the story for his readers. That's why he has put out the call for TPMCafe's first full-time reporter.
"That's a site I'd like to read because I'm never able to keep up with all of it myself," Marshall wrote last week. "So we're going to try to create it. I don't imagine it will be easy. But it will be an experiment with a new sort of journalism."
Marshall gave a hint at the content to come in a post on Thursday, after House Republicans stripped from a budget bill language to open the Artic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil exploration. "Today's an example of one of the reasons I'm eager to have a blog-reporter not just literally up on Capitol Hill but more generally following all of the ins and outs of what's going on up there," he wrote.
Journalists like me already are blogging, and now bloggers like Marshall are plunging headlong into journalistic ventures. So begins the merger of old media and new. I can't wait to see who Marshall hires, whether that reporter becomes the first blogger to get credentials to cover Congress, and what direction the new publication takes. It should be an interesting journey.
UPDATE: The New York Sun reported on Marshall's plan today and noted that he is now looking for two muckraking reporters, one senior and one junior.
Posted by at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)
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Blogging The Midnight Oil
Thanks to a snide sound bite from an uppity mainstream journalist, many people no doubt imagine bloggers doing their best work in pajamas. That perception may not have been far from reality at the tail end of last week, as Congress finished its pre-Thanksgiving legislative dash in the wee hours, and citizen journalists followed the action as dutifully as any credentialed reporters.
Bloggers touched on an array of issues. They vented about budget decisions, reported on a last-minute congressional pay raise, covered the latest campaign finance news, called attention to new legislation, and even highlighted obscure provisions tucked into larger bills.
But they reserved most of their commentary for Friday evening's impromptu and vitriolic debate about the Iraqi war, a debate spurred by the sudden call for a U.S. troop withdrawal from defense hawk John Murtha, D-Pa.
The debate came on a nonbinding resolution urging the troop withdrawal. Republicans oppose that idea but forced the issue to the floor in an attempt to get Democrats on the record for the move. Democrats did not oblige. The vote was 403-3, with six other lawmakers voting "present."
Several blogs opined on the House antics as the battle unfolded on C-SPAN. The live-blogging included the likes of Captain's Quarters, Michelle Malkin and PoliPundit on the right, and AMERICAblog, Daily Kos and Seeing the Forest on the left. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., also shared her views in a post at RedState.
When Murtha took to the floor, John Aravosis of AMERICAblog encouraged other bloggers to join the fun. "He's on C-SPAN now," Aravosis wrote. "Blog it!"
At PoliPundit, the topic was so hot that when one entry spurred more than 300 comments, Lorie Byrd reignited the discussion with a new post. It promptly generated more than 400 additional comments.
Blogs are not the place for objective analysis, though, so accounts of the winners and losers in the debate largely depended on the political leanings of the blogs themselves.
To hear Armando tell it at Daily Kos, "now Murtha is a 'giant' of the House. And now, an honorable debate seems to have ensued." But PoliPundit dubbed the whole debate "Murtha Madness" -- madness that he predicted will cost the Democratic Party the 2006 election.
From a political perspective, the debate rallied both the Republican and Democratic bases in the blogosphere, much as recent speeches on the war by President Bush have done. "Good move, elephants!" Malkin cheered in a post that linked to bloggers who saw the debate as evidence of long-sought GOP backbone. "It's go time," GOP Bloggers added.
On the left, Aravosis compared House Democrats' reaction to the debate with Senate Democrats' recent decision to force that chamber into a closed session on pre-war intelligence in Iraq. "What happened tonight was impressive," he wrote. " ... For those that watched it, Republicans looked scared. They were in disarray."
Daily Kos and other Democratic blogs were quick to note the differences between what Murtha had proposed and what Republicans offered. "They've completely gutted and rewritten it," Scott Shields wrote at MyDD.
On that score, John Hinderaker of the conservative Power Line offered a rare nonpartisan insight into the debate. "The House leadership had a golden opportunity to make the Democrats put up or shut up tonight," he wrote, "and I'm afraid they blew it" by offering a resolution for immediate withdrawal rather than one using the language Murtha offered. "So nothing was accomplished. And the debate, needless to say, was less than edifying."
Hinderaker noted that the reporting about the seemingly superficial but arguably substantive differences between the two resolutions "has been abysmal" -- but people who get their news from left-leaning blogs would have reason to disagree.
The debate over the resolution, meanwhile, served as a painful learning opportunity for freshman GOP Rep. Jean Schmidt, a frequent target of the Democratic "netroots" earlier this year during her special election in Ohio.
Lawmakers sometimes cross the oratorical line during heated debates, and when they do, they can have their words removed from the official Congressional Record. It doesn't work that way in the unvarnished public record of the blogosphere.
Schmidt crossed the line when she appeared to suggest, via the recitation of a call from a Marine in Ohio, that Murtha was a "coward" for urging troop withdrawal. Although PoliPundit called her speech a "magnificent performance," Schmidt eventually sought and received permission to withdraw those remarks.
Bloggers weren't as forgiving. Her comments were featured prominently at Democratic sites like The Stakeholder, the blog of House Democrats' campaign arm. Some blogs also posted video. At Political Wire, Taegan Goddard characterized Schmidt's speech as "potentially career-ending" and added, "Expect [the video] in campaign ads next year."
Schmidt's speech stirred such anger that one blogger, Max Blumenthal at The Huffington Post, went so far as to report details on the Marine she quoted, Col. Danny Bubp. And readers at AMERICAblog posted contact information for Schmidt's congressional offices -- including the ZIP codes necessary for non-Ohio residents to bypass e-mail filters.
Alas, Congress has adjourned until mid-December, and the policy adrenalin no longer is coursing through the blogosphere as strongly as it was.
At 1:52 a.m. Saturday, AMERICAblog's Aravosis signed off with this thought: "I'm off to bed. I can't believe I stayed up to watch C-SPAN."
About 21 hours later, AMERICAblog's Rob in Baltimore told his readers: "Step away from the C-SPAN, and turn off that TV. Three nights in a row will make you an addict! Go out and be merry; it's been a fun week!"
Posted by at 09:58 PM | Comments (1)
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The Senate GOP's 'Blog Row'
House Republicans started the "blog row" trend by inviting select bloggers to visit Capitol Hill almost a month ago to the day. Not to be outdone, Senate Republicans held their own session yesterday.
William Beutler of The Blogometer here at National Journal Group was among those to attend, and he has a recap of his own, plus links to other bloggers at the session.
Pat Cleary of the Manufacturers' Blog was among those to live-blog the event, with separate entries summarizing what each senator had to say to the bloggers. Cleary also offered his final thoughts in a separate post that included links to others' coverage of the event.
He concluded with this point: "We hope you enjoyed it, we expect there will be more opportunities like this, and we celebrate democracy, where common bloggers can thrust and parry with senators and leave it all out there for you to see."
Posted by at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)
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BillBlast: Final Call On The PATRIOT Act
Congressional opponents of the 2001 anti-terrorism law known as the USA PATRIOT Act are using the blogosphere to fight an extension and expansion of the statute.
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., posted an entry on the topic earlier this week at ConyersBlog, and today Sen. Russell Feingold posted a diary entry at Daily Kos.
Feingold, D-Wis., was the only senator to vote against the law when it was enacted soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Now he is part of a bipartisan coalition of senators threatening to block action on a bill to reauthorize the law unless changes are made in the final version.
"The conference committee has met about reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act, and what we are hearing is not good," he wrote. "I plan to fight hard to try to stop a bad bill from becoming law." Read the entire post for details on the senators' objections to the legislation.
Congressional leaders hope to clear the measure to President Bush before lawmakers adjourn for the Thanksgiving Day break.
Posted by at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)
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The Federal Election Commission today unanimously voted to give a political Web log a media exemption from the law on reporting campaign finance activity, National Journal's Technology Daily reports.
The decision for Fired Up -- a Missouri-based company that runs pro-Democratic Web sites in Maryland, Missouri and Washington -- is a major victory for bloggers and puts the commission firmly in favor of a broad media exemption for online news sites.
FEC Chairman Scott Thomas said his review of Fired Up found that its Web sites "fall within the legitimate press function." His only concern is whether such sites could change in the future to become political committees.
"Where would a group like this cross the major-purpose line?" Thomas asked. "This is not a totally clean bill of health that anything that appears on a blog is exempt."
Tech Daily subscribers can get the full story here.
Blogs also are happily, albeit sometimes cautiously, reporting the news. "The current FEC commissioners apparently understand that any rational understanding of how the media exception has been applied means that generally blogs and similar [online publications] would be covered under it," noted Duncan Black of Eschaton, who testified before the FEC in the summer. "Though that's no guarantee that a future set of commissioners would feel the same."
In addition to Fired Up, other blogs that are reacting to the news include Comm Law Blog, Daily Kos and RedState.
Posted by at 04:38 PM | Comments (1)
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The criticism President Bush has lobbed at Democrats the past couple of days over their comments on the run-up to the Iraqi war is proving to be a proverbial two-edged sword.
While Bush's bold defense of his policy decisions has rallied conservative bloggers back to the president's side, it also has emboldened his critics. And if Reed Hundt has his way, liberal bloggers will rally just as strongly against the president.
Hundt, a former FCC chairman who now blogs at TPMCafe, compared the White House's efforts to "write the history of the invasion of Iraq" with its assault on the Social Security system. Earlier this year, he argued that bloggers successfully countered Bush's distortions on that issue, and he urged them to do the same in the debate about the war.
"Like the attack on Social Security, a resolute defense and an effective counter attack will be necessary for lovers of the truth, including, one hopes, the party out of power," Hundt wrote. "The blog world was heroic in battling against the utterly deceptive assault on defined benefits. No less of an effort should be provided now."
Republicans are just as determined to fight. The Republican National Committee has yet another conference call scheduled with bloggers this afternoon. The purpose, according to an e-mail, is to showcase a new RNC online video titled "Democrats: Dishonest on Iraq," and to criticize Democrats who voted for the war but "who are now attempting to rewrite history."
UPDATE: Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, blogged about the latest outcry against the Iraqi week after also addressing the topic in a House floor speech. Here's an excerpt from the blog entry:
Attempts to distort these facts [about the circumstances that led to the war] are an attempt to revise history. Doing so only undercuts the efforts of our troops overseas and politicizes our national security. This cause is far too important [for] me to stand by and watch the facts be distorted the way they have been.
Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits, meanwhile, reported on the RNC conference call with bloggers, including what he characterized as "a terse and aggressive rebuke" of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Posted by at 01:16 PM | Comments (0)
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Rep. Jack Kingston will testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee later this afternoon, but you don't have to wait to hear what the Republican has to say about immigration in his home state of Georgia. You can read it at RedState, where Kingston has posted his written testimony in advance.
Now that's a novel use of the blogosphere -- and one that is probably going to get Kingston's views on the subject more attention than if he buried the testimony on his congressional Web site.
Posted by at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)
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The Greased Pig In Congress
During my youth in West Virginia, I loved watching my friends chase the greased pig at the county fair. Most of them grew frustrated and weary long before the pig, and the few who managed to get their hands on the swine usually couldn't keep their grasp for long.
These days, I love watching bloggers chase "pork" in the federal budget, a creature that is as greasy and elusive as any pig in the county fair.
Some bloggers apparently think they have the beast by the ankle or maybe it's curly tail today. But others are not so sure.
Andy Roth has the scoop at The Club for Growth, including a link to commentary from Radley Balko at The Agitator.
"This is smoke and mirrors," Balko wrote of a decision not to fund the "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska that has become the bloggers' rallying point. "It's a cheap stunt by the GOP to deflect public criticism that doesn't really change much of anything.
"All the conference committee did was remove the earmark for the bridges. Alaska will still be getting the same obscene amount of money from the federal government. It's just that the state won't be required to use it to build those two particular bridges. It'll be up to the executive and the state legislature to decide how to spend it."
Posted by at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)
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Georgia Lawyer Blogs Way To Washington
RedState blogger Erick-Woods Erickson soon will be leaving the politically friendly territory of conservative Georgia for good to work full time as a blogger inside the Beltway. The job: blog master at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.
Erickson, 30, officially started the gig last week but has been dividing his time between Georgia and Washington until the blog launches in a few weeks. He left his job as an associate attorney at Sell & Melton in Macon, Ga., after five years of work on business transactions, asset protection and elections.
"I never really wanted to be lawyer but was working for Saxby Chambliss' congressional campaign back in 1998 and needed a summer job," Erickson explained in an e-mail. "I was fixing a computer for a friend of Saxby's who called up another friend and insisted that the guy hire me as a summer associate.
"After eight years of that -- five as a lawyer -- I got called at home before seven one morning by an obnoxious client, who was not even my client, and I remembered I never really had wanted to be a lawyer anyway."
The new blog will try to explain energy issues to consumers "without all the technical mumbo-jumbo that makes the average person's eyes glaze over," Erickson said. "We want to educate consumers in an informative and helpful way."
Although focused on the law for several years, Erickson is no stranger to the energy sector. His father worked for Conoco Petroleum for 30 years and his father-in-law now works for Southwire, a transmission cable manufacturer. More importantly for his current role at NRECA, Erickson's legal work exposed him to the electric industry.
"Part of my business-transactions practice involved working with development authorities and power companies attracting new businesses to the middle Georgia area," he said. "In doing that, I've learned a lot about rural electric cooperatives, dealing with them on a regular basis. I've also been a user of [electric membership corporations] and, as a result, an owner."
Washington is a different world than Georgia, but that doesn't bother Erickson, who proposed to his now-wife on the Capitol steps.
"I'm a huge Washington fan," Erickson said. "When we lived overseas [in the United Arab Emirates], I tried to convince my parents to take a vacation in D.C. I memorized the D.C. map and subway system to convince them that it was worth going to visit. It didn't work."
The moral of the story: Blogging is among the best routes to Washington these days.
Another conservative blogger also has a new job. Mary Katharine Ham, who has written for Townhall.com's C-Log and Wizbang, is now working for Salem Communications, which distributes the radio show of popular conservative blogger Hugh Hewitt.
Ham introduced herself in a post at Hewitt's blog, where Hewitt said she will be guest-blogging for several weeks.
Her full-time role is to help build what she called "a bloggy conservative activism Web site that will serve the great fan bases of all of Salem's conservative talkers, and be a great tool for bloggers, too." The site is called BeyondtheNews and is set to launch next year.
Posted by at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)
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In The Blog's-Eye: A Rocky Intelligence Road
Bloggers on the right are swarming against Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia for his comments on a Sunday talk show about the intelligence that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Captain's Quarter's and Power Line are among those running transcripts of the interview with Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"He tried to parrot the [Democrats'] party line on Iraq intelligence in an interview with Chris Wallace this morning," John Hinderaker wrote at Power Line. "His inability to answer the most basic questions is embarrassing."
"How empty are the Democrats of ideas and long-term plans for national security?" Ed Morrissey added at Captain's Quarters. "Three years later, they're still lying about their own statements on national TV to smear George Bush -- even though he can't run for election again! Rockefeller shows how lame this meme has become."
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit also noted Rockefeller's statements, via Just One Minute. Tom Maguire wondered at that blog how Rockefeller can show his face after apparently conflicting comments he made on the same intelligence in 2002, and Reynolds answered: "Long political experience, and an unshakable faith in the press's short memory, is my guess."
Mark Kilmer of RedState focused on the fact that Rockefeller said he visited Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan in January 2002 and told leaders of those nations that he believed Bush already had decided to go to war in Iraq. He wrote: "This is major revelation. ... Here is a United States senator, four months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, traveling to the region, alone and under the cover of darkness, to warn various regional leaders that he was certain the president was really after Saddam Hussein. Why was Rockefeller undermining U.S. foreign policy in this manner before the initial shock of 9/11 had not yet worn off?"
Michelle Malkin also is keeping tabs on the reaction not just to Rockefeller's comments but more broadly to the speech President Bush gave on Veterans' Day last week in defense of his decision-making on the Iraqi war.
With that one speech, Bush appears to have regained the affection of conservative bloggers, many of whom have been among his chief critics on various issues since late summer.
Posted by at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)
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The Defense Department spending bill for fiscal 2006 has become the focal point for a debate about the rights of suspected terrorists, and bloggers on the left are urging the netroots to take a stand on the issue.
The battle came to a head last week, when the Senate adopted language that would strip "enemy combatants" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of the right to challenge their detainments in court. The vote was 49-42.
This week, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., has proposed an amendment designed to alter that language by letting Guantanamo prisoners challenge their incarceration by petitioning civilian courts for writs of habeas corpus. The amendment could be offered as soon as today.
At least two contributors at Daily Kos are urging readers to contact their lawmakers to support Bingaman's amendment. TalkLeft posted a similar entreaty over the weekend, closing with this thought: "And remember, first it's no habeas for them, then it's no habeas for us."
Posted by at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)
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The PorkBusters campaign is still going strong in the blogosphere, but the outcry against special-interest earmarks is not being heard within the halls of Congress. The evidence of Congress' institutional deaf ear is abundant in the fiscal 2006 spending measures addressed in recent days.
Congress cleared the Agriculture Department spending legislation earlier this month, and negotiators also have finalized language for some annual bills that tend to be heavy with "pork" -- those that fund the Commerce, Justice and State departments, and that fund energy and water programs. All of them are loaded with earmarks.
Take the bill to fund the Agriculture Department. The conference report for the measure is scattered with mind-numbing pages of text like this:
The conferees have agreed to fund budgeted increases for the following areas of research:Emerging diseases of livestock/crops
Develop systems for rapid response to bioterrorism agents -- Laramie, WY, $250,000; Athens, GA, $175,000; vaccinology research for control and eradication of biological threat agents -- Ames, IA, $450,000; Plum Island, NY, (antigen delivery systems) $250,000; Plum Island, NY, (foot-and-mouth disease) $150,000; advance intervention strategies for emerging diseases of livestock and poultry -- Ames, IA, $300,000; develop diagnostics for rapid, practical, identification of pathogens -- Parlier, CA, $150,000; Ft. Pierce, FL, $150,000; Salinas, CA, $175,000; develop taxonomy, biology, and genetics of pathogens -- St. Paul, MN, Pullman, WA, others (wheat stripe initiative), $500,000; Pullman, WA (rust disease of wheat), $175,000; Ft. Pierce, FL, $300,000; develop science-based forecasting systems for each pathogen/crop combination -- Ft. Detrick, MD, $250,000; develop integrated disease management strategies and tools -- Stoneville, MS, $240,000; Ames, IA, $150,000; Raleigh, NC, $150,000; Urbana, IL, $150,000; Charleston, SC, $50,000; and, Tifton, GA, $50,000.
The same is true of the conference report for the Commerce, Justice and State departments. The earmarks for that measure are so abundant that the House Rules Committee has divided some of them into handy, topical charts for: Edward Byrne discretionary grants, methamphetamine and enforcement grants, law enforcement technology grants, juvenile justice grants, and ocean service grants.
The conference report to the energy and water bill, meanwhile, is rife with the kinds of Army Corps of Engineers earmarks that some experts say could have gone to more worthy projects, like bolstering levees around New Orleans.
The Senate still has to clear the latter two measures, and House leaders expect to vote on the four remaining spending bills for fiscal 2006 as soon as this week. The Senate also will need to address those measures. Two of the bills -- the ones that fund the Defense Department and the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education departments -- are the largest in the federal government and are frequent targets for pork projects.
Whether bloggers can break lawmakers of their pork habit for the long term remains to be seen. But the fight appears to have been lost for next year.
Posted by at 07:20 AM | Comments (0)
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CapitolLink: Rep. Waxman on Ahmad Chalabi
Rep. Henry Waxman wants Congress to investigate the role of Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi in leading the United States to attack Iraq, and Chalabi's visit to Washington last week gave Waxman the perfect peg to revisit the issue at The Huffington Post.
The California Democrat wrote that instead of meeting with Chalabi privately, lawmakers should have forced him to testify under oath "so that we might ask him about his role in providing false intelligence to the United States government in the lead up to the Iraq war." The allegations date back a few years, and according to Waxman, now that Iraq is free of Saddam Hussein, Chalabi does not think his past statements are important.
Waxman disagrees. "There are many unanswered questions about why the Bush administration led the nation into war in Iraq," he wrote. "Why did the president and his top advisers make literally hundreds of misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq? Were these honest mistakes, as the president insists, or was the intelligence deliberately twisted, as mounting evidence would indicate? Mr. Chalabi may have answers to some of these questions."
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., also addressed Chalabi's visit in an entry at The Huffington Post. He was one of several Democrats who, before Chalabi's arrival, sent a letter requesting a meeting with the Iraqi leader.
"He needs to answer for his role in one of the most tragic scandals in American history," Conyers wrote of Chalabi.
Posted by at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
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You could almost hear the frustration, not to mention the Southern drawl, of Rep. Marsha Blackburn last week at RedState after House leaders decided to delay action on a deficit-reduction bill.
"Ya'll," she began her post. "The old adage that you never want to see sausage and law being made holds true. This turn of events stinks about as badly as it gets."
She put the blame on Democratic leaders, who she said are intent on dissuading any of their rank-and-file from voting for the GOP-crafted bill, and on the fiscally conservative Democrats who she argued have been "scared off or never meant what they'd been saying in the first place" about wanting to cut federal spending.
Blackburn also chastised the "few" House Republicans who she said will not support spending reductions. "I'm disappointed we've got some in our party who won't support this very, very slight reduction and that we've got an opposition party that won't even consider a reduction," she wrote.
Posted by at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)
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An Unimpressive Blog Call By The GOP
The White House and Republican Party held another in a recent series of conference calls with bloggers yesterday. The agenda: answering the conflict-of-interest criticisms plaguing Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito.
Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters participated in the call but was not impressed. "In my opinion, the conference call went long on invective and short on useful information," he wrote. "The organizers didn't give us much background on the cases themselves, nor did they tell us why Alito's participation did not constitute a conflict of interest. As a presentation, it lacked substance -- which is why most of the questions asked covered other subjects."
That said, Morrissey isn't buying the criticisms against Alito: "The bottom line for me is whether Alito has a pattern of operating from a conflict of interest and if any evidence shows that these skew his court rulings. Clearly in this instance, as his rulings were upheld after his later recusal, this conflict did not."
ProfessorBainbridge live-blogged the call and also lamented its lack of effectiveness. "The Democrats' new line is not that Alito had a legal obligation to recuse himself, but that he broke a promise to the Senate to do so. ... The White House did not offer an effective response to that charge on this call. They need a better set of talking points."
Other blogs that commented on the call and the controversy: Tim Chapman's Capitol Report at the conservative Townhall.com, Decision '08, Right Wing News and Suitably Flip.
The first such call with bloggers, to defend the since-withdrawn Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, also fell flat.
While conservative bloggers clearly appreciate the attention they are receiving from the GOP powers-that-be in Washington, they are demanding substance and clarity -- albeit with a political twist -- and they are setting the bar for these sessions high. They are not just taking what their party feeds them without question or complaint. Good for them. They are setting an excellent example for other citizen journalists, no matter their political leanings.
Posted by at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)
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"Who really wants to hear a blow by blow of what goes on in my office or in the House of Representatives?"
That's the rhetorical question freshman Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, asked in his virgin blog entry this week. And the answer, based on feedback he has received during trips home to the Lonestar State, is quite a few.
"Every time I went back to the district someone would comment on the Conaway Chronicle (my weekly newsletter)," he wrote. "This blog will allow me to expand on what the chronicle does with a more personal account of what goes on in my office."
Conaway said he will post entries to the blog as much as he can, but staffers will provide more of the content. The blog has a .com address and is separate from the congressional site, but there is a link to the blog from the official site.
Oddly, Conaway invited readers to send e-mail, but the link to the impersonal e-mail form is buried at the bottom of the page and was broken as of this morning.
For now, though, readers can get Conaway's take on the latest setback for the bid to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The House leadership this week pulled from a budget bill language that would have allowed such drilling.
Posted by at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)
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When the Republican National Committee held a post-election conference call with reporters on Wednesday, Chairman Ken Mehlman was suprised by an unwanted guest: a hostile reader of the liberal Daily Kos blog.
The reader found his way through the teleconference door thanks to a post at Daily Kos that listed the access information for the call. The Fix, a political blog of The Washington Post, reported what happened next:
[I]nstead of simply parrying the expected questions from reporters concerning the gubernatorial losses in New Jersey and Virginia, Mehlman also found himself ear-to-ear with one antagonist who asked sarcastically: "Given the results of the election, do you think Satan has taken over the country?""Next question," scolded Mehlman.
Posted by at 09:12 AM | Comments (0)
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Speak Out California, a liberal group that challenged the initiatives on the Golden State's ballot, thinks its modest buy of blog ads might have made a difference in the defeat of the initiatives Tuesday.
A Daily Kos diarist affiliated with Speak Out California made that point in a comment at Daily Kos the day after the election. "Of the $300 billion spent, I can't help but think the best roughly a thousand dollars that anybody spent on this thing was on Speak Out California's tiny little blogad buy," the diarist wrote, noting that the ad resulted in numerous downloads of the group's voter guides.
"We haven't cooked the numbers on the buy down yet, but at least in the haze of maybe-victory, it looks like that was a great tactic. Nifty."
Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, best known for starring in the "Terminator" movie series, was the force behind the initiatives, and their defeat is seen as a major setback for his administration.
Posted by at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)
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With her severance package from The New York Times in hand, First Amendment heroine/villain Judy Miller is testing the waters of the blogosphere in the "news section" of a site created in her honor.
Joshua Tanzer, a Web developer for Business Week Online in New York, created the site, which urges readers to support a federal law to shield journalists from prosecution for protecting sources. Miller went to jail briefly in the summer for refusing to reveal an anonymous source who revealed the name of an undercover CIA agent.
Miller started posting to JudithMiller.org on Wednesday, the day her severance package with the Times was announced. Although not technically a blog, the news section does have dated posts in reverse chronological order, the format of blogs. And Miller's content has the personal feel of an online journal.
So far she has posted entries in answer to her critics, including Times public editor Byron Calame and Maureen Dowd, one of the paper's columnists. Miller also has posted her farewell letter from the newspaper and a note from Times executive editor Bill Keller.
Not surprisingly, her entries are not open to comment from the public.
Posted by at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)
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Defense Agency Wants To Translate Blogs
The Defense Department research wing that created the Internet now has its sights set on computer technologies that could translate foreign-language Web sites, including blogs.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on Monday awarded IBM a contract worth nearly $8.3 million to work on a program known as Global Autonomous Language Exploitation, or GALE.
The research, which eventually will cost more than $12.8 million, aims to eliminate the need for human analysts and linguists, according to a description at FedGrants.gov. Instead, military personnel and English-speaking analysts will be able to have foreign-language information delivered to them automatically in translated form.
The grant description said the winning contractors will be tasked with creating computer engines that can "process naturally-occurring speech and text of all the following types: broadcast news, talk shows, newswire, newsgroups, Web logs and telephone conversations. The source languages will be English, Chinese and Arabic, plus surprise languages to be announced later." The department release announcing the contract said the work will be performed in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and will be completed in October 2010.
"GALE is a research program to develop technologies so that computers can translate text in a foreign language into English and summarize and organize it into categories such that it is a useful to humans," DARPA spokesman Jan Walker said via e-mail. "For the research, they need large volumes of electronic files of foreign-language text, and the Web is a good source."
When asked whether the research will extract text for translation from particular blogs or types of blogs, including those in the United States, Walker declined to elaborate. "The focus is the development of technology for machine translation," he said. "This is not an effort to troll blogs, sorry."
Recent DARPA research projects, including its plan for Total Information Awareness to be achieved by mining databases for information on potential terrorists, have sparked firestorms of protest from privacy advocates and others.
An IBM spokesman also said the company could not "answer specifically what DARPA's plans are," in part because the research is just beginning. He added that the company has "a long history" of creating machine-based translation services.
IBM also is involved in the blog-monitoring business. On the same day that DARPA announced the award to IBM, the company introduced software to help businesses monitor comments about them on blogs, news feeds, newsgroups and other social networks.
"Companies are seeking new ways to better understand how they are viewed by customers, investors and other stakeholders who have an impact on their brand reputation," Jon Prial, the vice president of content management and discovery, said in a release. "This solution can help clients track and analyze the pulse of the public in real-time, allowing organizations to be more responsive and deliver better service to their customers."
Posted by at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)
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The Salt Of The Blogosphere
When it comes to policy blogging inside the Beltway, the National Association of Manufacturers is the leader of the pack.
But for "blogger in chief" Pat Cleary, it's not enough to hold forth at the Manfacturers' Blog; he wants his comrades in the manufacturing business to come to know the power of the blog, too. That's why he headed a blog training seminar for NAM members late last month.
"We told of our odyssey over the last year, from [NAM President] John Engler's initial OK to traffic numbers today that we only dreamed about then," Cleary wrote. "We also promised tons of consulting time to the folks from the Chocolate Manufacturers Association in return for some of that sweet stuff. We were pretty shameless, actually."
The modern-day Willy Wonkas apparently aren't ready to take the blogging plunge just yet. But the head of another flavorful group, Dick Hanneman of the Salt Institute, was so inspired by the seize-the-day seminar that he quickly started a blog called Salt Sensibility.
The topics over the first few days range from food labeling and the dietary impact of salt to the condition of the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the merits of federal highway spending. Part of your balanced blogging diet.
Visit the site yourself to sample the salt of the blogosphere.
Posted by at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)
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The U.N. As A Threat To Online Speech
Bloggers of all political persuasions rallied online last week to defend their right to speak freely about American political candidates. But on the global question of who should oversee the Internet, an issue with potentially far broader ramifications on free speech, bloggers have been noticeably less vocal.
Internet governance tops the agenda for the World Summit on the Information Society meeting scheduled for next week in Tunisia. The primary focus will be whether to decentralize control over the Internet and give more power to the United Nations.
A report by a U.N. working group outlines four alternatives, three of which would change or eliminate the role of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The European Union also has proposed a "new international model of cooperation." ICANN currently controls the Web via an agreement exclusively with the U.S. Commerce Department, and the U.S. government adamantly opposes a shift toward global management.
Blog-like tech publications such as ICANN Watch and Slashdot have covered the debate about Internet governance regularly, and tech-oriented bloggers like Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network and Steven Forrest at Free2Innovate.net have opined on the topic. Carvin even created WSISblogs, a clearinghouse for reports from bloggers who cover WSIS-related events.
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds also has mentioned Internet governance periodically. But even with the heft of his influential blog, the issue has failed to gain the same traction as the blog swarm against Federal Election Commission plans to regulate the Internet.
Bruce Kesler called for more attention to the issue in a post at Democracy Project, where he decried the European Union for aligning with "such stalwarts of smothering Internet freedom as China, Cuba, Iran and several African states."
"This issue, this outrageous putsch attempt, deserves an uproar heard around the world on the Internet," he wrote.
"I honestly don't know why the bloggers haven't been more active on this one," said Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, who has covered the topic at PFF Blog. "It's perplexing and frustrating."
The most obvious explanation for the sporadic focus so far is the arcane nature of the topic. Save for occasional debates about online pornography and .xxx Web addresses, Internet governance is not exactly a sexy issue. "Overall, it's a difficult issue, heavy on technical complexities," Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos said in an e-mail interview.
But the same is true of federal campaign finance law, and Moulitsas and other bloggers have been all over that issue.
Reynolds said bloggers might not have rallied against Internet governance because they don't see the United Nations as a threat. "Perhaps it's a mistake, but I don't think that bloggers take the U.N. that seriously," he said in an e-mail that referenced the body's response to human rights abuses in Bosnia and Iraq. "Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam [Hussein] have made fools of the U.N., so bloggers don't think it dangerous."
Kesler added that blogs tend to focus on domestic issues that readers see as more pressing. "The FEC potential regulations are a more immediate threat," he wrote in an e-mail, "but the U.N. interference is of wider import, as there are alternate means of and protections of free speech in the U.S. but not in many sad places abroad."
He also noted that swarms demand consensus. Although most bloggers who have commented on the idea of U.N. oversight of the Web oppose the notion, that view is not unanimous.
"You can see the U.S. conservative spin machine turning this into a battle between the democracy-loving U.S. government protecting the Internet from censorship from the dictators and thugs who run the United Nations," the blog Rikomatic noted last month. "The reality, of course, is more complex."
That complexity includes a general mistrust of the Bush administration when it comes to international relations. One blogger characterized the administration's emphatic dismissal of a global role in Internet governance as another example of poor diplomacy, comparing it with the U.S. attitude in rejecting a treaty on global warming.
Moulitsas argued that the administration's "international belligerence has given the rest of the world little faith that the U.S. will have global interests in mind when regulating what is, in effect, a global medium." He added that the U.S. government's decision earlier this year to warn ICANN against creating a .xxx Internet space exclusively for porn indicated that the administration "will impose its political agenda on Net governance."
"The Internet isn't served well by having it controlled by the political whims of the sitting U.S. government," he said.
Moulitsas has mixed feelings about U.N. Internet governance. He said it is only fair for "the world's lone global authority" to oversee the global medium, and he said some sort of international oversight is inevitable. But he added: "Any kind of global governance will introduce artificial borders to the equation. I can't see any good coming of that."
Although Reynolds said U.N. control of the Internet would have only a marginal impact on bloggers at first, he warned of attempts "to conscript national authorities into enforcing U.N. rules." Some countries would target political speech on blogs, Thierer added, and an even greater threat to bloggers would be the application of other nations' libel standards on Internet speech.
"If we allow the libel standards that most other countries on the globe use to govern online speech, it would mean that many bloggers could suddenly be subjected to defamation suits from far-off places," he said.
Not even Saturday's personal attempt at reassurance from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in The Washington Post is enough to put critics at ease. "I remain uncomforted," Reynolds wrote after reading Anan's column.
Posted by at 09:30 AM | Comments (15)
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RedState's FEC Connection
Bloggers took their physical seats at the witness table of the Federal Election Commission back in June, and now one FEC member has claimed a virtual seat in the blogosphere.
Commissioner Michael Toner, a Republican, blogged yesterday morning in RedState's GOP-friendly online space. His topic was one of the hottest in the blogosphere this week: the House vote on granting a limited exemption from campaign finance law to Internet political speech -- especially speech that occurs on blogs.
Toner recounted the history that led to the debate -- the enactment of the 2002 campaign finance law, the FEC's decision to exempt Internet speech from that law, and a federal judge's decision to overturn the FEC on that issue -- and he advocated passage of the pending legislation. The bill "would accomplish by statute what the FEC sought to do by regulation, and I strongly support the legislation," he wrote.
He also challenged the main argument against the measure. "One specific charge is that the ... bill, if passed, would allow federal candidates to coordinate with corporations and unions to spend soft-money funds to purchase Internet banner and video ads on behalf of candidates," Toner said. "This charge has no legal foundation." He added that the fate of the legislation "should be decided on its own merits and not based on charges and counter charges that have no legal basis."
UPDATE: FEC Chairman Scott Thomas has responded to Toner's arguments. Apparently he is not as comfortable with this whole blogging thing as Toner, though. RedState founder Mike Krempasky posted Thomas' response for him.
That said, Krempasky is right on the mark with this comment: "How surreal is it to see Senate-confirmed commissioners duking it out at RedState?" Or any other blog, for that matter. Pretty cool.
Skeptic's Eye blogger Allison Hayward, herself a former FEC staffer, challenged Thomas' opinion in a comment at RedState.
Posted by at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)
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RedState is the place to be these days for Republican lawmakers eager to make the case for a bill to protect Internet political speech. In the days since the House dealt the legislation a procedural setback on Wednesday, three lawmakers have posted entries at the site.
Bill sponsor Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, was the first to post an entry -- just hours after the House vote. "We proved that we can pass this bill in the House under regular order," he wrote. "Working with leadership, I hope we can achieve this worthy goal before the FEC issues new regulations that will prohibit Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights over the Internet."
Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican who is fast becoming a semi-regular contributor to RedState, also commented on the vote. She blamed the setback on lawmakers who refuse to acknowledge that their passage of the 2002 campaign finance law at the root of the current debate "has been a disaster."
"You had a lot of people on soapboxes denouncing those opposed to the 2002 reform as despicable and corrupt, and it has turned out that the 2002 reform has only complicated the system and infringed on free speech," she said. "In my opinion, we ought to scrap the 2002 bill altogether before it gets its hooks into the Internet."
And Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, who started posting regular diary entries at RedState in late October, lauded RedState contributors and readers for their role in the debate. Kingston wrote, "You all make a difference in the legislative process, and I am confident that RedState.org will continue to educate members of Congress on the importance of this issue to ensuring that free speech remains just that -- free."
He also noted that House Speaker Dennis Hastert is an advocate of the legislation. Hastert, R-Ill., blogged about the bill before the vote, and his press secretary posted the Speaker's reaction afterward. "This bill will come back under regular order," he said in the release, "and I encourage all those who support free speech on the Internet to make their voices heard."
RedStaters have praised the various lawmakers who have suddenly started joining the policy conversations in the blogosphere, but one had a good suggestion for the RedState board. "Is there some way to get the posts of congresspersons collected at one location, or perhaps get the contributors listed in the sidebar or something?" the reader wrote in the comments to Kingston's post. "I'd like to see who's posted here historically, as well as what they've posted."
Posted by at 07:41 AM | Comments (0)
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Justice To Bloggers: No Shield For You
The Justice Department opposes the call for a federal shield law to protect journalistic sources, and one reason for its opposition is a fear that the legislation pending before Congress could be extended to blogs.
U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg voiced that concern last month in his written testimony for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. He listed five objections to the bill, S. 1419, including the definition of "covered person."
That definition "invites criminals to cloak their activities under the guise of a 'covered person' so as to avoid investigation by the federal government," Rosenberg said, and one way they could cloak their activities is by creating blogs.
"The overbroad definition ... could be read to include any person or corporate entity whose employees or corporate subsidiaries publish a book, newspaper, or magazine; operate a radio or television broadcast station; or operate a news or wire service," he wrote. "Additionally, the definition arguably could include any person who sets up an Internet 'blog' or any other activity to 'disseminate information by print, broadcast, cable satellite'" or other means.
Rosenberg did not elaborate on that point in verbal testimony, according to a draft committee transcript obtained by Beltway Blogroll. He also declined to elaborate in a phone call to his office in Texas. According to spokesman John Yembrick, the prosecutor "said that the written statement and oral testimony should suffice, and he has nothing to add beyond that."
Steven Clymer, a law professor at Cornell University, shared Rosenberg's concerns, according to the draft transcript. Clymer warned that a federal shield law "would signal that illegal disclosures of classified or otherwise sensitive information ... are immune from criminal prosecution as long as they are made to a recipient who could qualify as a reporter under the privilege." And he added that the pending bill is so broad that it could apply to "a disclosure of sensitive or classified information to an Internet blogger."
When quizzed by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, about the bill's application to blogs, Clymer said courts ultimately would have to decide the issue if the current language becomes law. "They may decide that you cannot favor one group of media over another group of media," Clymer said. "And so if you are going to give the privilege to The New York Times, you necessarily have to give it to the Internet blogger as well."
Cornyn, whose prepared statement said the issue of whether any shield law should apply to bloggers merits "serious discussion," responded to Clymer's comment by noting differences between blogs and mainstream media outlets. "Internet bloggers, and perhaps others, don't observe the same professional ethics and have the same review by editors and others that are trying to make sure that they are performing their job in a responsible and accurate sort of way," he said.
Posted by at 09:32 AM | Comments (1)
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The Daily Chaos -- Er, Kos
Years from now, after bloggers have made their indelible mark on American democracy and historians go searching through the Congressional Record to piece together the story of the blogs, they may be a bit confused when they stumble upon a quote attributed to Rep. Zoe Lofgren.
The California Democrat made the comment yesterday during House floor debate on a bill to grant bloggers and other Internet publications a limited exemption from campaign finance law. In calling for passage of the measure, Lofgren warned that without it, the popular, left-leaning blog Daily Kos could be in trouble merely for calling her to comment on a political candidate and then posting her response online.
Unfortunately, she pronounced the name of the site with a short "o" instead of a long one -- and with a bit of a drawl at that. To the House staffer taking the dictation (who apparently does not read blogs), it sounded more like "chaos" than "Kos." So in the Record, this is how Lofgren's warning reads:
"Under current law, unless we pass this exemption, Daily Chaos, which if they call me for a comment on a candidate and it was run on their daily Web site within the specified time, we might have an actual problem here unless they are entitled to the press exemption. It is not clear that they are."
All of you conservative bloggers out there have fun with that one.
Posted by at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
I'm not here to revisit arguments for or against campaign finance reform. I'm here today to call for Congress to recognize the Internet as a safe harbor for political speech.
Everyday thousands of bloggers register displeasure or support with Congress, the Supreme Court, the president, even their local elected officials. But now we are on the cusp of a new FEC regulation that could stifle free expression. Without congressional action today, arbitrary restrictions would be imposed on blogs and other Web content deterring participation from the very segment of our population that we want to encourage to be politically active.
Thomas Jefferson was right when he said: "The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right." The Internet, through such safe havens of individual expression and opinion like blogs, has put the power in the hands of the people, where it truly belongs, precisely where Thomas Jefferson wanted it.
Posted by at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
This bill is designed to protect the free speech rights of Americans whose only alleged crime is wanting to use the Internet to express their opinions. These individuals find themselves in jeopardy because an activist court decided to radically expand the meaning of a law beyond what Congress intended. The court decided that the FEC, the agency in charge of regulating our election laws, was in error when it decided it did not have the authority to require the regulation of free speech on the Internet.
As a result of this ruling, all computer users and bloggers now stand to see their First Amendment rights thrown out in the name of "freedom." The ruling effectively says that individuals have fewer free speech rights than giant media corporations that pay people to offer their opinions.
Bloggers don't have to spend millions of dollars on printing presses, nor do they have to invest in TV or radio broadcast towers. They are able to share their opinions and ideas free of charge on the most powerful tool of free speech the world has ever known.
Bloggers are everyday citizens. They are our neighbors, friends, and co-workers who want to be able to share their ideas without asking permission from a gatekeeper in the mainstream media and certainly not from a government official. They are the historical descendants of founding fathers like Thomas Paine and other pamphleteers who contributed enormously to our democracy.
Posted by at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
I understand that many web loggers are concerned that somehow campaign finance law will restrict their speech, and I believe allowing bloggers the assurance that they will not be so burdened is something that we can ensure. Unfortunately, H.R. 1606 goes far beyond exempting bloggers and allows federal candidates and political parties to again make use of soft money in federal campaigns.
If this law were to pass, a member of Congress could simply go to a large donor, corporation or union and control their spending of $1 million in soft money to pay for political advertising all over the Internet. This is precisely the type of behavior prevented when Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002.
Posted by at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
This controversial bill purports to protect the freedom of speech of Internet bloggers but instead creates a major Internet loophole for soft money in our federal campaign finance laws. These are exactly the soft money expenditures the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 1992, BCRA, sought to prohibit.
Internet advertising should be no exception and ought to conform to the same rules as those governing other media. H.R. 1606 is the wrong way to address the issue of bloggers and will only lead to new, corrupting soft-money scandals and campaigns. The Internet has increasingly and rightly been used as a powerful political tool in recent elections, but it is negligent that we would permit it to be a safe haven from our campaign finance laws.
Posted by at 04:36 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
This bill opens a huge loophole in the campaign finance laws. And this act would not add protections of freedom of speech on the blogosphere as it is purported to do. Rather, it would bring large amounts of money back into deciding who can buy the largest microphone in a federal campaign.
It will smother, not enhance, the voices of true grassroots movements. This would compromise not only the blogs it purports to help; it runs a great risk of harming the political procedure. There are too many questions raised by this. The procedure circumvents open debate.
All of us believe that bloggers should not be subjected to censorship. I myself am an occasional guest blogger on political Web sites. Bloggers, like traditional journalists, should be able to communicate with their audience without any fear of violating FEC regulations. However, this legislation is not ready for prime time.
Posted by at 04:33 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
We passed a bipartisan campaign finance reform act three or four years ago to close huge loopholes in campaign spending, including the soft money loophole. Now the Internet is becoming an increasingly important medium for campaign spending and advocacy. According to some surveys, 37 percent of the adult population and 61 percent of Americans use the Internet to determine how they would vote in an election.
Now I do agree with my friends on the other side of the aisle that, had this bill gone through the regular order, we probably could have worked out some compromises that would have protected the rights of individuals and bloggers and so forth, but we do not have that ability at this point, so it is either an up or down vote on a complete exemption.
In the absence of this compromise, we have to depend on the FEC for regulation. Because if we do not and if this bill passes, we will in effect have an exemption to BCRA that will allow for unlimited advertising and advocacy over the Internet.
I do not believe that bloggers or individuals will ever be fined by the Federal Election Commission.
Posted by at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
The Constitution is clear: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech." Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to the contrary that, in this instance, in political speech Congress may abridge the freedom of speech, and it may do so under the guise of preventing corruption or the appearance thereof in campaign activities. I disagree with that decision, but the Supreme Court has spoken for now, so we must live with it.
I am grateful to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who at least feel, as concerns the Internet, that there are compelling policy reasons why that should not be subject to this kind of regulation. Heaven help the average American if they fall under a regulation similar to what any candidate must now undergo for federal office because that would basically mean that you would have to check with your accountant and check with your attorney before you engage in the Internet communication that might at all be perhaps close to whatever the line would be. In other words, it would have a chilling impact on people's exercise of what we believe should be their free speech rights.
This rise of the Internet is one of the greatest democratic, with a small "d," trends the world has ever known. Anybody with access to a computer can communicate throughout the world his or her views. Why would we seek to regulate such an activity and to place this chilling impact out there?
I commend, by the way, the FEC. They correctly decided not to regulate the Internet. Unfortunately, the big government campaign reformers found that intolerable, filed suit in federal court and were vindicated with the judge ruling that, indeed, the law required the FEC to regulate. In the absence of our passing this kind of legislation, the Internet will be regulated.
Now is the time to draw a clean, clear, bright line and say if you are engaging in speech over the Internet you do not have to check with your lawyer or your accountant. You are a free American, and you have the opportunity to engage in free speech over the Internet.
Posted by at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
Three years ago, Congress spoke: corrupting soft money should not be part of the federal election process. When President Bush signed the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, he made unlimited federal soft-money donations illegal. Democracy was enhanced.
Today, however, the House is debating an attempt to make soft money legal again. H.R. 1606 would allow corporations, labor unions and wealthy financiers to make unlimited soft money donations for campaign ads on the Internet coordinated by candidates.
Bloggers should be free to write whatever they want about candidates for office. But if this bill passes, the public will have no idea whether or not Internet campaign ads are being financed by secret soft money.
Posted by at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
I understand the procedural objections to this, and certainly when I made the suggestion during our hearing that we could probably handle this on the suspension, I believed that was the case. Obviously, there is more controversy than I had believed at the time.
But I still believe that this bill is very much worth supporting, and I do support this bill. What the bill before us does today is really a lot more modest than the rhetoric would lead one to believe. It does not repeal [the prohibition on] contributions or expenditures by national banks, corporations or labor organizations. And all of the hoo-rah-rah about soft money and corporate money -- I am sure it is sincere -- is simply, as a matter of law, incorrect.
What this bill would do would be to allow communications on the Internet to avoid the heavy hand of regulation. And I do believe that is important. Today, if a local candidate has a Web page and they decide to say something very positive about the election of their party's candidate for president, they have a problem under the FEC rule.
I think it is very important since the court was not sure what our intention was when we passed BCRA that we should make it clear that the Internet is not part of the public communications covered by the act.
For the record, I would just like to say that in this case the bloggers have got it right. This bill will keep the FEC out of the business of regulating political speech on the Internet.
Posted by at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
I have to comment on the irony that we have people here defending vigorous, open debate and free speech by invoking one of the most restrictive procedures of the House of Representatives. Apparently, people here believe that James Madison thought that there should be free debate except in the Congress of the United States.
For many of us, the key issue is not the substance. (Yes, I think we ought to legislate.) It is the outrageous, high-handed arrogance we have seen now become, unfortunately, second nature to the majority -- that brings an important bill invoking constitutional principles and history and modern technology, and how you integrate those, and the question of campaign finance, into the most restrictive procedure.
We have 40 minutes to debate this. No amendments are possible. Apparently this is the perfect bill. This must have sprung like Minerva from the forehead of Zeus in perfect form, and here it is. God forbid that the United States Congress or House of Representatives should be able to amend it or change it.
It will be here. Take it or leave it. And of course the assumption is that people who agree that we should not be restricting the free use of the Internet will be so intimidated by the fear that if they voted "no," they will be criticized [and] they will fall in line.
No, I do not think that works any more. I think the American public is smart enough to know that the end does not always justify the means and that the irony of purporting to defend free speech by shutting it down in the Congress of the United States is too bizarre.
There are issues to be debated here. Forty minutes and no debate. The rules are suspended because free speech is so important to these supporters that free speech must be sacrificed as we get it. They are going to destroy the village in order to save it. If someone would explain to me, I would yield my time, why we could not have this as a regular bill under regular procedure.
Is there some reason unbeknownst to me that kept us from having this as a bill that came to the floor, that people can go to the Rules Committee and we could have amendments and we could debate it for more than 20 minutes on each side? Let us defeat this now and send it to a rule. Under this procedure I will oppose it. I will not support the diminution, the continued reduction of democracy in the House.
Look, this involves the Constitution. It involves the complex issues of campaign finance regulation. It involves how you take technology and how you adapt basic constitutional principles to it, and that is to be debated by 20 minutes on each side, and that is to be performed with no amendments.
It is a joke. It is self-parody: Let us all defend free speech by not having any. I hope that this is voted down and that we then can have an appropriate debate under the rules of the House, with amendments and with full discussion.
Posted by at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
My bill is a simple one. It is only one sentence long. It achieves one goal, but that goal is a worthy one: the protection of free speech on the Internet.
Without this legislation, I fear that the cold, callous and clumsy hand of federal regulation may stifle political speech in cyberspace. The newest battlefield in the fight to protect the First Amendment is the Internet. Today, the Internet is free from FEC regulation. Clearly, it should remain that way.
The Internet is a marketplace of ideas that welcomes all participants on equal footing. It is extremely cheap. In fact, if one has access to the Internet at home or a public library, it can be free, absolutely free. A Web site's success is driven by the quality of its content, not the quantity of funds that are poured into it. It is one of the most democratic forms of speech that we know today, and it is an outstanding opportunity for all individuals across our nation to participate in our democratic process and impact public policy.
The Internet is the new town square; and campaign finance regulations are not appropriate there. Not only would such regulation be a nightmare to administer and enforce, it would place complex responsibility on ordinary citizens that would functionally restrict their political free speech and violate their First Amendment rights.
Today, thousands and thousands of Americans run blogs that are focused on politics, and millions of viewers visit their favorite bloggers' Web sites for commentary often not found in the mainstream media. Without H.R. 1606, I fear that bloggers one day could be fined for improperly linking to a campaign Web site, or merely forwarding a candidate's press release to an e-mail list, and the list goes on. If bloggers are compelled to hire lawyers to navigate this complex, gray, murky world of federal regulation, many will simply cease to operate. That would only leave the wealthier participants in this blogosphere, and undermine public access to information and the chance for smaller groups to participate in our democracy in this fashion.
Those opposing the bill claim that some day, somehow, somewhere, there may be corruption. Yet the FEC itself could not see the threat of corruption that is present in a "medium that allows almost limitless, inexpensive communication across the broadest cross-section of the American population." Let those who cry corruption cite examples and carry the burden in this debate to abridge the First Amendment rights of our citizens.
The FEC declined to regulate public communications online, equating the give and take on the Internet to candidate forums and rallies and debates that are open to the public. Just like on the street corner, people can talk back to a blog by writing their own posts or establishing their own sites. How do you talk back to a radio ad except with another radio ad that costs perhaps tens of thousands of dollars to run? This is very different. Web sites and messages are very effective, very democratic, and very affordable tools, a different means of communication.
Despite congressional silence on this matter, in 2004, a federal court instructed the FEC to regulate Internet communications, and that process is under way. Because the vast majority of Web sites are independently and inexpensively operated, regulatory burdens are going to limit the Internet's usefulness as a political forum.
I am gratified to see the thoughtful and energetic response of the blogosphere to these proposed rules. It is just this type of free exchange of opinions that we are trying to protect today. The bottom line is that campaign finance laws must enhance, not hinder, electoral participation. And I should note that campaign blogs and all official campaign activities will still be regulated by the FEC after the passage of this legislation.
Over 200 years ago, in this House of Representatives, James Madison stated, "The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments." Today, Congress finds itself debating the very same rights under far more modern realities.
New regulations are not the answer each time a new technology emerges. The bipartisan Online Freedom of Speech Act protects the First amendment rights of Internet users and prevents the FEC from making needless and arbitrary distinctions. When the choice is between more regulation and more freedom, we should always err on the side of freedom.
Posted by at 12:33 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
This legislation, under the guise of protecting bloggers, actually undercuts the progress made by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and reopens the floodgates of corrupting soft money in federal elections.
The debate today is about what is the best way to approach coordinated expenditures that are campaign-related on the Internet. We all understand that the Internet is a wonderful tool for political activity. Its accessibility and generally low cost are invigorating to the body politic. I belong to MoveOn.org. I read my e-mails every time they are up. But, by the same token, it's increased usage by candidates and parties, and the increased resources being put into this technology for campaign advertising suggest that we need to be cautious about attempts to exempt all Internet activity from federal campaign finance laws.
Let me say a couple of words about bloggers because bloggers have generated and received a lot of attention here. No one wants to regulate bloggers -- not the campaign finance reformers, not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the Federal Election Commission. That is clear. The question is whether to exempt individual speech, as I have proposed, or create blanket exemptions for entities as varied as labor unions and major corporations who make soft money contributions at the behest of candidates, on behalf of candidates, and at the direction of candidates.
That is why The New York Times editorialized yesterday in opposition to H.R. 1606, and they argued that the bill uses freedom of speech as a fig leaf.
The issue here is not individual speech. The issue is corrupting soft money. The primary constitutional basis for campaign finance regulation is preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption of candidates or officeholders. Creating a new way for members of Congress or the Cabinet to solicit and then coordinate or control unlimited amounts of soft money is precisely the scenario campaign finance reform banned.
We are talking about legislators. For example, let us say we had a prescription drug bill that was written by the pharmaceutical industry. This Congress could pass that bill in the middle of the night, and then members of Congress who passed the bill could actually ask those same pharmaceutical interests to write six-figure checks for campaign ads for them to appear on the Internet.
But let me give another example. What could happen is you could have an energy bill, provisions of which were written by the oil and gas industry. Let us say a company like Exxon, as a result of it, had the highest profits they have ever had, record profits because of gasoline prices going out of control. The same people who advocated for that energy bill that Exxon supported could go to Exxon and say, "Could you use some of those profits to support my campaign with a massive online campaign ad buy."
This is no minor affair. This is a major unraveling of the law.
It is important to note that the bill under consideration today uses the exact same language that the FEC tried and that a federal court struck down. The judge in that case, Colleen Kollar-Kottelly, wrote that the provisions would "permit rampant circumvention of the campaign finance laws and foster corruption." She went on to say that the provision would :severely undermine" the campaign finance law.
We are considering today a bill that flies in the face of public concerns about corruption and is likely to create new corruption and new scandals. The bill that we are considering will also allow political parties to use soft money to pay for Internet ads bashing candidates.
Experience teaches us that professionals who are political will find ways to exploit any perceived loopholes. For example, the national party soft-money loophole started as a minor blip in the 1980s and exploded into a half a billion-dollar binge by the 2000 cycle. Corporations and billionaires will be enabled to pay for Internet-related expenses of requesting candidates or requesting parties, and the public will not have a clue where this money comes from because virtually all they will see is the Internet advertising designed and created by candidates.
That is one of the reasons why this bill is opposed by Common Cause, opposed by Public Citizen, opposed by U.S. PIRG, opposed by Democracy 21, and opposed by the League of Women Voters. That is why The Washington Post editorialized this week that this would be carving a huge cyber loophole in the soft-money ban. That is why The New York Times said yesterday, "Make no mistake about it. This bill is to protect political bagmen, not bloggers."
In protecting bloggers, we need to approach this the right way, and this bill is the wrong way.
I have introduced a bill with [Christopher Shays, R-Conn.]. Under this legislation, communications over the Internet by individuals on their own Web sites would be treated the same as they are in H.R. 1606. But our substitute would not blow open the same gaping loophole for paid advertising.
Unfortunately, because the leadership has chosen to bring this up under a suspension of the rules, we are unable to offer our substitute. The suspension calendar is for naming post offices and other non-controversial matters. It is not a place to create new loopholes in the campaign finance laws. Limiting the democratic process and stifling the debate is an unacceptable way to undertake such an important matter of public policy. It is wrong to do so. It is unfair. It is an abuse of power.
So why are we rushing through this suspension? I urge my colleagues to oppose this suspension so that we might be able to have a full debate, including consideration of the Shays-Meehan alternative bill to protect bloggers, without creating new avenues for corruption.
I am a friend of the Internet. In fact, I sponsored legislation that would exempt bloggers from FEC legislation. But the issue is how we draw the lines to balance. We do not exempt the Internet from laws controlling child pornography; we do not allow child pornography on the Internet. We do not exempt the Internet from consumer safety laws. We do not exempt the Internet from intellectual property or copyright laws. We do not because we think those laws are important.
Posted by at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
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Excerpts from the Congressional Record, Nov. 2, 2005
The advent of the Internet age has brought about a host of new ways for citizens to participate in the political arena. Web sites, e-mail and blogging have provided new avenues for political activists to reach out to potential voters, to raise issue awareness, to solicit contributions and to mobilize the get-out-the-vote efforts.
The Internet has also generated a more widespread flow of news information through not only mainstream media sources but also independent Web sites and blogs. Most importantly, it has created a completely new opportunity for all citizens to exercise their right to free speech by opining on the most important issues of the day as they see them, as the citizens see them.
Unfortunately, all of this activity is actually under attack today. When Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act in 2002, the law apparently was unclear on what impact it would have on political speech on the Internet. The Federal Election Commission interpreted the law to say that Congress did not intend to regulate the Internet when it passed BCRA. The bill's sponsors disagreed, and they sued the FEC in the courts.
A recent appellate court decision will force the FEC to implement a rule that would cover Internet communications. If the Congress does not act now and make it clear that it does not want the Internet to be regulated, the FEC will adopt a new rule to regulate the Internet; and by passing H.R. 1606, also known as the Online Freedom of Speech Act, Congress can prevent this from happening.
This bill has very, very strong bipartisan support. In testimony before the FEC and before the Committee on House Administration, both liberal and conservative bloggers expressed their support for this exemption. Senate minority leader [Harry Reid, D-Nev.] has introduced a companion bill and written to the FEC to express his belief that the Internet should not be regulated.
The regulations proposed by the FEC could limit the ability of online activists to talk to campaigns, to give discounts on advertisements, to spend money maintaining their site, to link to candidates' sites, to advocate the election of a candidate, or to send political e-mails.
The FEC would potentially grant some bloggers and online publications what is known as the "media exemption," which would allow these bloggers to operate free of FEC regulation like any standard newspaper or news program. However, the rules were very unclear about how the FEC would determine who qualified for the exemption. Potentially, the FEC's rulings could become content-based restrictions on speech and on free speech.
As we consider this legislation, we must remember that the Internet is not like traditional forms of media. Unlike television and radio, activists do not require large sums of money to post their message on the Internet. Also, the number of people reached and the success of communication are not directly linked to the amount of money that is spent.
In addition, the Internet is not an invasive medium. In other words, the recipients of communication are exposed to the communication only after they take deliberate and affirmative steps to find a particular Web site. Further, the Internet has generated a surge in grassroots involvement in the political process.
Historically, Congress has regulated political speech only where it has the potential to cause corruption or the appearance of corruption. There has been no demonstration that the growth of the Internet has had a corrupting influence on politics. There is, however, ample evidence that the Internet has had a positive effect on our political system by encouraging young people, a whole new generation of people, to get involved in our political process.
Any Internet regulations would be complicated and difficult for a lay person to understand. Bloggers and other online activists should not have to worry about accidentally running afoul of campaign finance laws when they are expressing their own opinions on the Internet.
Regulatory proponents claim regulations are necessary to reduce the influence of wealthy interests. In fact, these complex regulations, if enacted, would actually increase the influence of big money and politics, because then only the wealthy could afford to hire election attorneys to be certain that they were abiding by these very complicated regulations.
The Committee on House Administration had a hearing on this topic back last September, and at that hearing, several members of Congress and of the committee, including myself, actually suggested that the Congress needed to step into this process to clarify Congress' intent on this issue instead of leaving it up to federal agencies and the court system. Congress began this discussion by passing BCRA. By debating and voting on this bill today, the House will clarify once and for all its intent on this issue.
I spent 8 years of my life as the Michigan secretary of state. That was a job where I had a principal responsibility as the chief elections officer of that state. During that time, we made constant attempts to increase voter participation and voter turnout, particularly among young people. And I believe this bill does that.
We must stand up for the right of freedom of speech and for the First Amendment. I urge my colleagues to pass this bill.
Posted by at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)
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Yesterday's House debate about campaign finance marked another milestone for bloggers. Although they technically lost the vote on a bill they inspired, they briefly won the unprecedented attention of "the people's house" in American democracy.
I took the time to check the official transcript of the debate this morning, and lawmakers mentioned the words "blog," "bloggers" or some related terms nearly four dozen times (including in the speeches inserted into the Congressional Record but not spoken on the floor). That is quite an achievement -- one that demonstrates yet again that while bloggers currently lack noteworthy influence on major issues, they are driving the hottest campaign finance debate of the day.
The achievement merits detailed attention here, so I am going to reprint from the Record excerpts of yesterday's debate. You can read them in a forthcoming series of posts, slugged with the members' names.
Posted by at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)
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Bloggers were the focus of attention for about an hour in the House yesterday, and they managed to win the backing of 225 lawmakers for a bill designed to limit the application of campaign finance law to blogs and other Internet communications.
But the final tally, 225-187, fell 47 votes short of the two-thirds majority necessary to pass the Online Freedom of Speech Act under a procedure designed to expedite passage. For now, that puts the debate about applying campaign finance law back at the Federal Election Commission, where a court-mandated rulemaking has been under way since this summer.
Yesterday's House vote is not technically a defeat for the legislation, which would exempt blogs and other Internet communications from the definition of "public communication" under a 2002 campaign finance law. Lawmakers could debate the bill again after approving a "rule" to govern floor time and perhaps allow amendments, which were not possible under the expedited procedure known as suspension of the rules.
Key opponents of the bill in its current form want the chance to offer an amendment aimed at protecting blogs and other forms of communication without creating what they call a new Internet loophole in campaign finance law for special interests. "The issue here is not individual speech," said Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass. "The issue is corrupting soft money."
UPDATE: Mike Krempasky of RedState blamed yesterday's setback on Democrats. But then he said the first order of business in moving the bill forward is educating the few Republicans who voted against the measure.
He names names -- and takes a poke at the newest House Republican, Jean Schmidt of Ohio. Five of Schmidt's Ohio colleagues also were among those opposing the legislation. And Krempasky noted that one of the House's few bloggers, Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, voted "nay."
He has made some calls to the offices of lawmakers, including Schmidt, for explanations of their votes. No word yet.
Bill sponor Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, also made another appearance at RedState to discuss the vote. "We proved that we can pass this bill in the House under regular order," he wrote. "Working with leadership, I hope we can achieve this worthy goal before the FEC issues new regulations that will prohibit Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights over the Internet."
At the liberal blog Daily Kos, lawyer Adam Bonin urged readers of that site to contact Democrats who voted against the bill. He also restated the case for applying to various Internet news technologies the broader "media exemption" to campaign finance law.
"True protection ... would best come from a robust expansion of the media exemption to the Internet, allowing for anyone who engages in 'news, commentary and editorial' on the Internet to have the same freedom to do so without regulatory interference as do The New York Times, Fox News, National Review and the Excellence in Broadcasting network," Bonin wrote. "So long as vibrant netroots activity is protected, restrictions on 'soft money' sources can be negotiated -- but since no such bill has been introduced in Congress yet, a blanket exemption ... is preferable to the FEC regulation, which now will soon follow."
Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga mentioned the few Democrats who voted for the bill -- and noted that Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel voted against it. Key activists in the Democratic netroots and the DCCC are divided over political strategy, among other issues.
Posted by at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)
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The House Debate Over Online Free Speech
The House has just begun its debate of the Online Freedom of Speech Act, a bill that would limit the application of campaign finance law to bloggers.
Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., began the debate with a defense of the legislation. Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass., argued against the measure now on the grounds that it would create a new loophole for special interests to exploit. "This is a major unraveling of the law" that he helped write in 2002, he said.
But Meehan added, "No one wants to regulate bloggers."
Posted by at 02:24 PM | Comments (0)
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Bush Rallies The Blog Base
President Bush has rallied the blogosphere's conservative base by choosing Judge Samuel Alito to serve on the Supreme Court, and Blogs for Bush has the evidence.
Soon after Alito's nomination became official yesterday, the blog started the Confirm Alito Coalition, logo included. The logo is quickly spreading across the blogosphere, and links of support back to the original Blogs for Bush entry are mounting.
Contrast that with the 279 blogs that opposed the nomination of Harriet Miers by the time she withdrew from contention, and there is a clear sea change in blogospheric opinion about Bush's skills at picking Supreme Court nominees.
UPDATE: Conservative blogger Hugh Hewitt is conducting an unscientific poll that puts support for Alito among Hewitt's readers at about 95 percent.
Posted by at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)
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This week's House agenda calls for action on a campaign finance measure inspired by the blog swarm against the Federal Election Commission earlier this year.
The text of the bill, H.R. 1606, encompasses barely more than a page but packs a lot of free-speech punch in its few lines. It would exclude the Internet from the definition of "public communication" in the 2002 campaign finance law, thus preventing the application of that law to bloggers who engage in such communication.
Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, said in a post at RedState that the legislation, which he sponsored, will be considered Wednesday. RedState founder Mike Krempasky later added that the bill will be debated under a procedure designed to expedite passage.
"So start calling your representatives and urge them to vote 'yes' on H.R. 1606," Krempasky wrote.
A similar Senate measure, S. 678, was introduced first but has not seen action since being filed March 17.
UPDATE: Adam Bonin, a lawyer who represented a trio of liberal bloggers who testified before the FEC, is urging Daily Kos readers to lobby their lawmakers to vote for the House bill. He addressed the issue in posts yesterday and today.
Posted by at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
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