<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Drooling on the Pillow

Sunday, April 03, 2005

License and Registration, Please 

Via Instapundit:

According to Personal Democracy Forum, San Francisco is considering a city ordinance to regulate blogs.
Just when you thought the Federal Election
Commission had it out for the blogosphere, the
San Francisco Board of Supervisors took it up a
notch and announced yesterday that it will soon
vote on a city ordinance that would require local
bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission
and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000
in the aggregate.

Blogs that mention candidates for local office that
receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a
registration fee and will be subject to website traffic
audits, according to Chad Jacobs, a San Francisco
City Attorney.
The person your emails should be flying toward is Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, who authored this astonishing piece of 1st Amendment shredding.

Call me crazy, but I've got a feeling we won't be seeing too many newspaper editorials against this move.

UPDATE: Well, now that I got that off my chest I went and read the proposed ordinance. What they are referring to is "electioneering communication" and it seeks to regulate "issue advocacy". The definition is slippery to me since I only read English. I'd love it if a lawyer or anyone who can read a page of an ordinance without everything going white on them, would look at it (a PDF of which is linked to above) and tell me exactly what the mazeroski they're saying.
Posted by: Sluggo / 11:01 PM
|
Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com Listed on BlogShares