Real and wannabe censors are up to their old tricks again. Real censors are the Democratic members of the Federal Election Committee (FEC). The wannabe censors are also members of the FEC, and are Republicans. If the latter didn’t think anyone should be censored in any venue – print, radio, television, or Internet – they wouldn’t accept appointments to the FEC, nor wish to be in the same room with the real censors.
That being said, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA, McCain–Feingold Act of 2002) is the typical miscegenational product of bipartisanship between Republicans and Democrats that advances further government controls. But then, that’s all one can expect of pragmatic bipartisanship efforts, in which the Republicans forget or discard their alleged principles, but the Democrats don’t and get some or all of what they want: More controls.
I happened by chance to hack into the personal blog of the Vice Chair of the FEC and discovered this startling and secret memo passed on to her fellow Democrats on the Commission. The text of it follows, and seems to be addressed, not to her ideological ilk, but to a hypothetical individual for whom Ravel nurtures a revealing, disturbing, if not psychotic animus:
My name is Ann M. Ravel, Vice Chair of the FEC. I’m a pal of Cass Sunstein. Remember him? And David Brooks? And Justice Stevens? They wanted to regulate your speech, too, or at least “nudge” you painlessly to politically acceptable and responsible speech. Now, don’t tell me that you, a lone blogger eking out an existence in Milord Obama’s trashed economy, aren’t a one-man political action committee, that you aren’t incorporated anywhere, not even in Delaware, you don’t sell your drivel to others or pay anyone to run it, and that your only expenses are your time and whatever it costs you to write and publish in the way of printer ink and paper. It doesn’t matter to me if you’ve spent a zillion dollars or the cost of a store-brand chicken pot pie, your speech ought to be regulated, and, if necessary, squelched.
And if you persist in running off your mouth about things you aren’t qualified to even think about, I can sic the IRS or the DOJ on you. All it will take is a phone call and a pen twirling between my fingers, just as my boss, President Obama, boasts he can do. He’s my guy!