impending doom: FEC’s plans 4 crackdown on political blogging

It is clear that there are clouds forming on the horizon in the case of bloggers being regulated as an extension of McCain Feingold (from Superhawk at Rightwingnuthouse):

There are those who believe that the current controversy over potential FEC regulation of political internet sites that’s roiling the blogosphere is nothing more than a puff of talcum powder blowing through the cable modems of overreactive pajamahadeen, a will-o-the-wisp rumpus that will disappear once cooler heads prevail and it becomes clear that the FEC is our friend and would never seek to regulate us anklebiters.

Oh yeah?

Then he quotes the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, March 5 – Federal election commissioners are preparing to consider how revamped campaign finance laws apply to political activity on the Internet, including online advertising, fund-raising e-mail messages and Web logs.

But it is unclear how much appetite the F.E.C., criticized in the past by advocates for election reform as being dysfunctional and ineffective, really has for trying to govern Internet activity. In interviews on Thursday, several commissioners warned about the complexities of trying to assign a dollar value to online campaign activity and said they hoped any new regulations would not stifle personal political involvement.

This is no longer a matter of whether or not they’re going to do it, people. This is a matter of HOW they’re going to do it, and HOW they’re going to implement it. We need to step up the vigilance on this score and start calling people on this, guys. If you consider how labor intensive it will be for the government to watch everything we put out there on our blogs including political cartoons, whether or not we’re linking from emails supporting certain candidates or even from opposing candidates’ websites in parody or to point out fallacies in their thinking, this is about the biggest intrusion on our freedoms and privacy by Big Brother that I can think of in recent history.

The fact that they’re trying to calm us down so we just forget about it is even more reason for concern:

“People should not be alarmed,” said Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democratic commissioner.

Oh, really?

The Republican commissioners interviewed agreed that it would be difficult to place a value on most political activity conducted online, and thus to determine whether it fell under the campaign contribution limits. “If you have a very successful blogger who attracts a lot of attention based on the commentary he or she is undertaking, and maybe that activity is coordinated with a candidate, what is the value of that?” said Michael E. Toner, the third Republican member of the commission.

“Everyone here believes this is one of the most important rule-makings the F.E.C. is going to do this year,” Mr. Toner added, “mainly because the Internet got millions of people involved in politics. What we do here is going to have a major consequence of how people are involved.”

What does that sound like to YOU?

More from TruePravda, Outside the Beltway, Redstate.org , The Power of Many, Michelle Malkin (roundup), more from Michelle here and here, Blogcritics ( gives links to where you can reach your elected representatives)

Or google it up everyone’s writing about it…the prognosis is not good. Time to start writing and calling your representatives, folks.

Cross posted to the Wide Awakes