What part of "Congress shall make no law" do the these morons not understand? It's right up there, in the first words of Amendment Numero Uno.

Allen "co-sponsored legislation in March that would bring political Web sites under campaign finance rules if they spend $5,000 or more on their operations," the paper wrote. "He said he would watch how blogs factor into the 2006 races under the FEC rules before deciding whether to press the issue."

The problem with the whole "Congress shall make no law" thing is that it doesn't *stop* there.

Careless of the Founding Fathers IMO.

Well, when everyone from the Congress to the Executive to the Supreme Court buys off on something as blatantly unconstitutional as McCain-Feingold -- it's pretty obvious that the First Amendment (and therefore the whole Constitution) is already pretty much dead.

What sort of insane person would suggest that a govt that ignores one amendment would ignore another one?

The anti-Federalists were correct.

Who cares about the First Amendment anyway? As we've seen, and as Rand has pointed out again and again, the mainstream media is corrupt and biased. So I'm all in favor of the government imposing restrictions on the media. I just wish it was Bush doing it and not Congress.

I sincerely doubt that the Founding Fathers of the United States foresaw modern mass communications. As it is now, in many countries (perhaps especially the USA) elections are decided by who spends the most money on advertising, not on the merits of the various sides' policies.

Restrictions on campaign spending reflect and are meant to address this issue, and are not restricted to the USA. (British regulations in this matter are far more stringent, and all the better for it.)

Therefore, regulation of spending on web blogs is a measure designed to plug a hole in a law or set of laws that are already not really working as intended.

Personally, I think that one way of restoring good legislative process, in the UK as well as the USA, would be to prohibit any legislator from voting on or speaking about any proposed spending that affects his district. Any way of getting pork off the menu has to be a good thing.

And if you don't agree with me, consider this: If rational debate and argument are the stuff of politics, why did the contest for the leader of the West come down to one between Bush and Kerry, and why did Clinton and Carter, one a criminal the other a moron, ever get elected? For that matter, with the same assumptions how did the UK ever end up with Anthony Charles Lynton Blair?

Answer: They all bought votes with other people's money.

Alexander Fraser Tytler (1742-1813):

" A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:

from bondage to spiritual faith
from spiritual faith to great courage
from courage to liberty
from liberty to abundance
from abundance to selfishness
from selfishness to complacency
from complacency to apathy
from apathy to dependency
from dependency back to bondage."

I consider that the UK and USA both are at the penultimate step, or at best the step before that.