hgc
Penultimate Amazing
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Terrible. The Internet has given rise to the possibility of a real political discourse outside the control of the media elite. This attempts to strangle it in the cradle. It's none of the government's bidness if I "comment on policy issues" to more than 500 people and get paid for it.
The problem is not with S1, but with the bizarre interpretations of the phrase "paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying". Unless a blogger has somebody who's bankrolling him and dictating content, his blog is not a paid effort to stimulate grassroots lobbying as that is defined in the bill.
hgc
Penultimate Amazing
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Yeah. They need to get off their fake asses and impeach Cheney and Bush. Jesus, Nancy, the brass ring is in reach - just grab it! You can even take it on a caretaker basis, run again for your House seat next year, and resume the Speaker's chair in '09. The beauty of it is you get to rob Hillary of the title first woman president!
Huh? What does that have to do with the OP, or anything else in this thread...?
hgc
Penultimate Amazing
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I don't know; I was hoping you could tell me.Huh? What does that have to do with the OP, or anything else in this thread...?
hgc
Penultimate Amazing
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Yeah. I bellied up the bar and said, "fill me a tumbler of obsessive indignation."Ah, you've been drinking and posting again!
Mycroft
High Priest of Ed
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On a corporate level there have been instances where corporations have given prominent bloggers expensive merchandise to encourage them to blog good reviews on them. I have also heard allegations of corporations creating blogs (by employees doing it on company time) for the purpose of trashing competitors and hyping their own products.
I think there has also been allegations in politics where they guys that run blogs such as the daily KOS have accepted money to promote some candidates over others.
This Guy
Master Poster
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Yea, I hate reading legalieze, and political legalieze is even worse.
But, it appears to me from my very limited understanding of what I tried to read, that this would be better handled by a disclosure requirement than a registration. But I tend to lean against any registration that isn't clearly necessary.
On the other hand, if I could find someone foolish enough to give me $25,000/Quarter to run a blog for them, I'd have no problem registering
When you consider the allegations (I'm not sure how much truth there is behind them) that big companies are supporting web sites that in turn post information favorable to the companies point of view/profits, I think some form of disclosure is not unreasonable for both Blogs and web sites.
However, I don't think newspapers are required to disclose their biases, and I don't know that Fox has ever stated openly that "we believe the Republicans are right, and the Dems are wrong, regardless!"
Touchy issue. I'm strongly behind freedom of the press, and I think the Internet is to a large extent, the "New Press". It provides the opportunity for much greater information exchange. At the same time it allows any nut with a PC to express his/her nut case ideas (they even let me play!
). And it allows those with hidden agendas (political or economical) to hide their identities while promoting their points of views. Where do you draw the line, or should there even be a line? How should we provide for disclosure, or should we?I honestly don't know the answers
Beerina
Sarcastic Conqueror of Notions
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The Republicans stomping on Clinton towards the end of his term helped resurrect him in popularity. The Democrats might wisely not want to pursue that course, regardless of how happy it would make the true believers. Especially since most of their current frontrunner candidates are in the Senate and would take a huge hit if it did backfire.
daredelvis
Master Poster
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Are you saying he got paid to promote a candidate on his blog, or that he did some work for a candidate outside of his blog? Did he get paid and not disclose it?
Do you have any evidence for this, or are you just spewing right wing BS again?
Daredelvis
The nature of Blogs however make it good medium for liberals though. Rich corporations can squeeze liberal thought off the radio and TV simply by buying up all the ad space (or in some cases, the stations themselves). It takes a lot of dirty liberal hippies to equal the spending power of one evil corporation. (Here’s a fun exercise. Watch the Sunday morning news shows, and make a list of all the ads that don’t actually seem to sell anything.)
Blogs however can be set up cheaply, can request funding directly from their readers, and the spending advantages of big corporations are squelched. A million dollar website won’t look a thousand times better than a thousand dollar website, and any amount of money they spend will be meaningless if the words and ideas the corporate blog is pushing are not popular.
daredelvis
Master Poster
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Mycroft
High Priest of Ed
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Oops! Did I accidentally gore a sacred cow of yours?
Google "kosola" or "ko$ola" and do some reading to get a rundown of the allegations made.
There were plenty of allegations, but none of them panned out. Basically the blogger known as "Kos" informed his readers that he would be taking time off from his blog to work on a democratic politician's election campaign. He then took some time off from his blog to work on a democratic polititian's election campaign. The right wing echo chamber then tried to gin up some phoney outrage about it, making various silly claims about left-wing blogger payola, studiously ignoring the original postings by Kos about this, even when informed of them repeatedly. Kos told his his readers to ignore the silly people on the right, since it was all silly nonsense and all that would ever come from it is baseless accusations that could be refuted in two minutes by looking at the original posting. Right wingers then made a baseless accusation that he was trying to cover it up, etc...Oops! Did I accidentally gore a sacred cow of yours?
Google "kosola" or "ko$ola" and do some reading to get a rundown of the allegations made.
