My letter to the FEC

The following is my letter to the FEC. Today is the deadline, if you're at all nervous about the infringement of your freedom of speech in the blogs you read every day, you're going to want to write them also at Internet@FEC.gov. You have to include your snail mail address for them to accept your comment.

To whom it may concern:

I find the fact that the FEC is looking to regulate free speech amongst Web logs (Blogs) offensive and a violation of my freedom of speech. As shown in last election, blogs can be an incredibly reliable source of information and quite often break news prior to any mainstream media outlet. In addition, they often report on stories that aren't being played in the mainstream media for whatever reason.

People get involved thanks to blogs, and they stay involved thanks to those same blogs. People get information from them, get opinions from them, reshape their own opinions due to them, and find out they had opinions which they didn't even realize they had, all thanks to blogs.

For the FEC to think that this is nothing more than a natural extension of McCain/Feingold, is a mistake. In my personal opinion, the Supreme Court was wrong to rule that law constitutional. However, it's the law of the land, but it's intention was not to regulate free speech (despite the fact that it does overwhelmingly). It's intention was to regulate the financial contributions that influence political campaigns (which again it failed at horribly). Blogs are not financial contributions, they are speech. My blog is my speech. My speech is my thought. By regulating what I'm allowed to 'think' in public, the FEC oversteps some bounds that I would believe should have any American quaking in their beds.

I know several people from anecdotally that have become more involved in the political process thanks to the blogosphere. We had our best turnout in history in the last election, and I sincerely think that a lot of that can be attributed to the contributions of the Internet and the organizations that used it so effectively. People were more interested, more engaged, and more involved. If the FEC were to step in here, now, in the infancy of blogs, it would do more damage to free speech than the possibility of someone abusing the system would do.