FEC off

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The Federal Election Commission is gearing up toward a proposed rulemaking later this month (perhaps as early as Thursday) on a bunch of campaign-finance crackdowns on speech, including, some commissioners say, political weblogs. The Washington Post has a good table-setter, which A) includes the detail that one of the most zealous congressional reformistas is Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays, who was probably the single most embarrassing booby on the steroids panel; and B) has this quote:

"We are almost certainly going to move from an environment in which the Internet was per se not regulated to where it is going to be regulated in some part," said FEC Commissioner David M. Mason, a Republican. "That shift has huge significance because it means that people who are conducting political activity on the Internet are suddenly going to have to worry about or at least be conscious of certain legal distinctions and lines they didn't used to have to worry about."

Link via The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.