Bradley Smith, one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission (FEC), reports that his outfit is set to crack down on internet speech about political candidates and elections. It will do so by treating at least some of our political utterances as in-kind campaign contributions, especially when we back them up by linking to a candidate's website. This move is the outgrowth of the restrictions that the McCain-Feingold places on political speech, and a decision by a district court judge in Washington D.C. (Clinton appointee Colleen Kollar-Kotelly) that the internet, unlike the MSM, is not exempt from these restrictions. Smith and the two other Republican commission members wanted to appeal the decision, but the three Democratic members demurred.

As George Will and others have noted, the limits on speech imposed in the name of campaign finance reform operate to enhance the MSM's monopoly position when it comes to presenting information and opinion about politics. In the past, the threat to that monopoly position came from candidates, their well-to-do supporters, and other wealthy issue-oriented individuals. Now a new set of usurpers has emerged. They are called bloggers, but they are mostly just citizens with access to a computer who think they have something to say. Bloggers, for example, played a major role in the extraordinary defeat of Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle. Daschle had relied on the leading state newspaper not to report facts showing the extent to which he had become a liberal "creature" of Washington. But bloggers were able to present this information to voters to Daschle's great detriment.

The political establishment and its speech police is not amused. They have not defeated "big money" only to have their designs ruined by a bunch of pajama-clad upstarts.