AridzonaShooter: Ramblings

I've not yet followed the links.  But.  To the extent this is accurate, and I have no reason to believe it's anything but, this just plain sucks.  Maybe it's time to hang a couple of these bastards.

Go, read:

Via http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view447.html#Wednesday

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from http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/
atlas_shrugs/2007/01/democrats_to_am.html

UPDATE Another FU.  More on the new fascism in America. This from a commenter at the Puff Ho (!) here via Jon;

Here's a luscious tidbit that Auntie Nancy wants to ram down your throat. Forget about grass roots lobbying or encouraging members of your organization to call or email your representatives in Congress. Doing so might cause an IRS audit or some government agents breaking down the door to your offices and confiscating your computers.

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Some controversial features of the bill:

# It makes changes to the legal definition of "grassroots lobbying" and requires any organization that encourages 500 or more members of the general public to contact their elected representatives to file a report with detailed information about their organization to the government on a quarterly basis.

# Such report (above) would require, among other things, the detailing of the organization's expenditures, the issues focused on and the members of Congress and other federal officials who are targeted. A separate report must address each policy issue the group is advocating.

Causing additional heartburn among the critics is a broad exemption they say is wholly unfair and unbalanced. Significantly, the reporting requirement spelled out above would not apply to messages targeted at an organization's members, employees, officers or shareholders. In effect, this would let most corporations, trade associations and unions off the reporting hook.

William J. Olson, the co-counsel for the Free Speech Coalition, summarized his impression of how the unfairness would operate:

"The Public Citizen/Pelosi bill would allow corporations, unions and even foreign interests to spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars mobilizing their shareholders, officers, employees and members, yet hide those expenditures," Olson opined.

"On the flipside, their bill would require real citizen associations to essentially obtain Congress's consent to communicate about important policy matters that impact on them. It's not just the imbalance that is wrong; it's a frontal attack on the First Amendment and political speech," Olson concluded.

UPDATE: Jon did a little checking and provides these links for more  info on this issue: Shadow Monkey on Pelosi's attack on Grass Root group here. More from Human Events here and Forbes here.