Free Republic

Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines. Smith should know. He's one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet. In 2002, the FEC exempted the...

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that terror suspects held in Cuba must be allowed to meet with lawyers, and that the government cannot monitor their conversations. In a sharp rebuke of the Bush administration, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the administration "attempts to erode this bedrock principle" of attorney-client privacy with "a flimsy assemblage" of arguments. The Supreme Court ruled in June that the 600 foreign-born men then held in the Navy-run prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could challenge their captivity in American courts.

WASHINGTON - A judge has struck down more than a dozen of the government's current rules on political fund raising with just weeks before Election Day, concluding federal regulators improperly weakened the nation's campaign finance law. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the Federal Election Commission (news - web sites) to write new rules to govern key aspects of fund raising, including when candidates and outside parties can coordinate activities. The judge did not specifically address how candidates and political parties in the heat of current campaign should act in the absence of the rules. The law's main provisions, banning...

Analysis I've been reading Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's decision to affirm the DoJ-Microsoft Seattlement in great detail this weekend, with one thing in particular growing from a small seed of a doubt, but gradually fomenting into a terrible and inescapable conclusion. I want to be a Judge. No, seriously - it's a Judge's life for me. Any other job now looks simply like too much hard work. Consider the evidence. CKK was appointed in August 2001, at which point she started reading up on the intricacies of middleware and OEM agreements as background, we presume. She then presided over 30 days...