There is a lot fo talk in the blogosphere about the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act and how the FEC is now saying that they may be required to extend that laws provisions to the internet. Needless to say, this scares a lot of people, seeing as such an extension would be a clear violation of freedom of speech, yet at the same time, the Supreme Court approved the law and is unlikely to strike it down, so if the FEC goes ahead with the internet thing, it could be really bad for bloggers and grass-roots internet politics. Amoing other things, I would not be able to link to a candidate's website.

Now it turns out that the supposedly huge number of people who were pushing for campaign finance reform int he first place was an illusion. The head of the Pew Reseacrh Center admitted such in an interview, saying that they created the illusion of mass numbers of people in favor of reform by paying millions to various media outlets like NPR to do stories on reform. Congress-people saw all this attention and figured people were really in favor, and so it passed. And how did it get through the Supreme Court? Well hearsay has it that Pew supplied them with a whole lot of "facts" and statistics that were simply not true. The SCOTUS can only make decisions based ont he information they have at hand, and since they were given incorrect information, they made a bad decision, one which is unlikely to be changed anytime soon.

To paraphrase one blogger's words (I forget who is was), we'll stop blogging when they pry the keyboards from our cold, dead fingers. Seriously, this is a very important issue, one that strikes at the heart of the Constitution. Since much of mainstream media, though not all, of course, are not big fans of blogging, they won't be on our side. Bloggers are primarily conservative-leaning, at least the more popular ones, and even John Kerry has gone on the attack, asking what can be done about people who keep bringing up dead issues and causing problems (John, Vietnam would have been a dead issue if you'd left it there, you opened yourself up to attack). All signs point to a coming crackdown, though whether it be soon, or years from now, who knows.

What I do know is that I won't be cowed, and neither will a lot of bloggers. If they want to arrest me and hundreds of others for linking to a campaign site, so be it. In this, our most fundamental right as citizens of a free country, I will take a stand. If they crack down, we will begin to see a huge number of civil disobediance cases, more than anytime since the 60's, and I will be right there with them. I hope it doesn't come to that, but I will stand up for my beliefs.