Right Wing Nut House

Glenn Reynolds links to this excellent Patterico post about more non-reassuring assurances from proponents of regulating speech on the internet. Here’s Russ Feingold:

The FEC must tread carefully in the area of political communications on the Internet. Political news and commentary on the Internet are important, even vital, to our democracy, and becoming more so. For starters, the FEC should provide adequate protection for legitimate online journalists. Online journalists should be treated the same as other legitimate broadcast media, newspapers, etc. and, at this point, I don’t see any reason why the FEC shouldn’t include legitimate online journalists and bloggers in the “media exemption” rule.

Be worried. Be very worried. Patterico explains:

Are you comforted by this? Russ Feingold thinks you should be able to express your mind on the internet - if the government views you as a “legitimate” online journalist, that is. At least that’s Feingold’s view “at this point” - it could always change, you know.

Are you starting to get it? This is why you don’t ask the government for permission to express your views. Because if you ask, you concede that government has the right to decide what is deemed “legitimate.” And government might change its mind.

Where’s Ronald Reagan when we need him?

It’s time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, “We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

Address to the nation, October 27, 1964

At the time Reagan uttered those words liberalism was about to reach its zenith. Johnson’s crushing defeat of Goldwater ushered in a decade that saw the creation of an alphabet soup of federal agencies (including the FEC) that ended up tying the American economy and the American people in knots. To this day in many ways, we’re paying for that explosion of nannyism in a loss of freedom and control over our own lives.

Dan Lovejoy echoes Patterico in even stronger language:

While I certainly agree with the spirit of the exemption, I think it shouldn’t happen. Rather than being exempted, bloggers should continue to write in defiance of this disgusting assault on liberty. I don’t want permission from the government to speak freely. I don’t need the permission of congress to write what I want to write. Creating an exemption recognizes the validity of the law in the first place. Wrong tact - wrong policy. It is a morally reprehensible law that should be completely ignored by media of all stripes.

Grr..

It’s refreshing to find this kind of defiance. It makes you believe that the spirit of our ancestors hasn’t been completely subsumed by modern America’s penchant for looking to goverment for permission to live the life you want to. In many ways, it’s not really our fault. When government tells us what we can eat, smoke, drink, drive, and who we can hire, fire, house, and teach it proves that the people have lost control to “that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital” who not only believe they know what’s best for the rest of us, but have made abundantly clear after the results of this last election that we don’t deserve to even think for ourselves.

When our defeated opponents say that we’re too stupid to know what’s good for us, why should we surprised when these very same people want to regulate our thoughts and ideas, hence our speech?

While defiance is an excellent frame of mind, I don’t believe it’s going to help in the current situation we find ourselves in. That’s why I signed the online petition. I’m hoping that the backlash against the FEC will be so furious that the whole execrable McCain-Feingold regime will be come crashing down.

The FEC will meet on Thursday, March 24 to issue the Notice of Proposed Rule making . This meeting will be open to the public. Some from the blogging community may want to attend and try to assess the threat for themselves.

The draft is usually posted on the Monday or Tuesday before the meeting on the FEC website. Watch this site for updates.