Jeff Jarvis has an excellent post today about the Internet As the First Amendment. He says: The internet is the... View Article
Continue readingIn Broad Daylight: Another Day of Congress News
Follow up on Curt Weldon’s Russian ties and the Pentagon contracts he tried to secure, a “dead beat congresswoman,” one... View Article
Continue readingFollowing @johnculberson
Rep. John Culberson is member of Congress who understands what’s happening on the Web today. He’s a congressman who is... View Article
Continue readingFrom Russia With Love
Bribes, congressional wives, lobbyist children, far-flung countries, and jet-setting congressmen. Add it all together and you’re reading the ingredient label... View Article
Continue readingVisible Discussion of the Invisible Hand
After a few posts on the Open House Project blog, the conversation about the CITP paper “Government Data and the... View Article
Continue readingIn Broad Daylight: News from Congress
Today’s news from Capitol Hill includes the never ending Jack Abramoff investigation, congressional staff still running for K Street, and... View Article
Continue readingPersonal Financial Disclosure Forms: What They Can Tell You
The Personal Financial Disclosure forms that lawmakers are required to file annually are the little explored powerhouse of information about... View Article
Continue readingBig News In Investigative Journalism
Craig sez: ProPublica launches. The site has some nice features: Scandal Watch, 7 different RSS feeds, and a nice “breaking... View Article
Continue readingThe Internet As Conduit For Congress and the Public
Yesterday, the Congressional Management Foundation released the report, Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement, in which... View Article
Continue readingReflections on Election Laws
Bob Bauer, political campaign attorney who invented the legal justification for "soft money" and now council to the Obama campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, authors the Web site More Soft Money Hard Law on the side. Late last week, Bauer posted a transcript of comments he gave to a panel of the American Constitutional Society on the topic of "Can Campaign Finance Reform Actually Work?" In his comments titled "Enforcement Expectations and Hard Calls," Bauer writes that we should temper our expectations about campaign law by what we want enforced. "On the basics," Bauer writes, "the law has been plentifully enforced." But hard issues exist in election law, and "tough calls" inherently exist. He warns against putting too much expectation on the law, and to strive to reach "comprehensible and rationally administrable" regulations. As an example, he praises the Federal Election Commission for adopting broad exemptions of campaign finance laws regarding blogging and other Internet uses for campaign-related purposes.The FEC wrote rules that places Internet activities within the media exemption, activity that should largely be free of regulation, he argues.
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