Pun Salad

You may have noticed the firestorm generated by Declan McCullagh's interview with Brad Smith where Smith conveys (with alarm) the court-ordered extension of campaign finance regulation to the Internet.

Good links on this topic (which also have good links themselves):

• InstaPundit
• Professor Bainbridge (also linked to by InstaPundit, but he's right, it's a must-read).
• Will Wilkinson
• Roger Simon
• Ace of Spades
• Power Line

I've also seen a number of comments pretty much in the "Help, my ox is being gored" vein, but the above seem relatively substantive. But it all goes back to McCain-Feingold and campaign finance "reform". And beyond Sentators McCain and Feingold themselves there are so many people to blame:

1. The craven congresscritters who voted for McCain-Feingold;
2. The mainstream media; they were, of course, exempt from the law's regulation but largely ignored the First Amendment impact of the regulations on everyone else;
3. President Bush, who signed it (no profile in courage there);
4. The five Supreme Court Justices that voted to uphold the law's major provisions (O'Connor, Stevens, Souter, Breyer, and Ginsburg);
5. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who ruled that the FEC had to apply campaign finance regulations to the Internet.

… and probably some others I've missed.

The only good news about this is that the inevitably intrusive and burdensome regulations will be biting a very verbose and influential class of citizens. There's a slim hope that the resulting backlash will cause this dreadful law to be repealed.