It's not that we don't trust reform; it's that we don't trust the reformers. With good reason.
At the end of this week, Adam Bonin wrote:
I've got to respond to a blatant attempt to restate the record here in an extremely misleading fashion:
we opposed netastroturf activities—and applauded the FEC’s Internet regulation exempting most bloggers and Internet activists from federal campaign finance laws.
Campaign Legal Center applauded these regulations after fighting them every step of the way. In particular, they sought to have most blogs regulated as PACs, with Mr. Ryan himself arguing at one point that DailyKos was a partisan website but that The Nation was somehow not a partisan magazine. Odd.
One might also review the CLC's formal comments in opposition to granting one partisan blog the media exception to keep them from having to register as a political committee, versus what we bloggers said about it and what the FEC decided.
And yet, the Campaign Legal Center studiously avoided directly answering whether it believed that sites like DailyKos should be regulated under campaign finance law, stating that they were focused on protecting what "individuals" did on "their own" sites. Paul, now that you've seen the 2004 and 2006 cycles, are you finally convinced that such sites should be left alone?
- There you go. We don't trust them, because some of them have been so full of shit.