Our good friend Matt Stoller at MyDD
wants to draw your attention to some recent news regarding the group "Americans for Job Security".
While the pro-"reform" lobby is chasing boogeymen on the Internet, we've got a complete unaccountable 501c(6) non-profit trade association, not subject to disclosure requirements, spending $1,000,000 on television ads for Rick Santorum. They're run by some well-known Republican operatives, including veterans of the Swift Boat smear. AJS even manages to use the same footage in their ads as Santorum does in his own, and for now, they're free to do this under the law.
And yet, Democracy 21 and their allies seem to be silent on this.
But notice: AJS isn't spending piles of money to support Santorum on the Internet -- they're spending it on television. The group doesn't even have a website, from what I can tell.
If the "reform" lobby want to get behind some type of legislation to force disclosure of the contributors behind such spending, or any other sensible means to stem such corruption, the readers of this site would help to lobby like hell to get it passed.
But instead of going after real and actual present harms, they're worried about bloggers. Why? Members of the reform lobby like Common Cause have been our real and natural allies on so many issues, and we should be working together to clean up politics.
But we see robust and unfettered political discourse on the Internet as being part of the solution to dirty politics, and they see it as part of the problem. And I think it's from that difference in mindset -- that failure to grasp what this medium empowers individuals and groups of citizens to do -- that has led us to where are today.
Update by kos: I pulled my post on the same topic. Adam's was better.