Why is there even a question? Just don't accept donations that have been tax-deductible and then say butt out . .

Links to the primary material can be found via --
BlueOregon: FEC not the devil after all?

Do you think that little roving bands of enforcers, on two wheelers, wearing officially unofficial garb, busting up a few heads (or maybe just a little financial intimidation OEA-style) is an OK policy for managing the flow of information.

If a candidate does not offer tax deductibility on donations then they could place an add, a paid add, on BlueOregon, without either BlueOregon or the electoral candidate being within the federal government's reach under their federal tax regulation authority.

Remember, that the OEA, under state law, would not have been able to scale up their private action damages to match their own spending (then triple it) had Bill S. not accepted tax deductible donations. The only claimants would have been his donors, who might have simply withheld future donations. The OEA attack was a sad thing for free speech, don't you know . . . quite independent of whether someone does or does not like what Bill S. has to say.

What are they, the mysterious they, going to do? Start closing down blogs of noncooperative blog authors, or those that allow anonymous comments? The limits of what can be done are best illustrated by the battles over the anti-abortion sites that published their official unofficial hit lists. I would dare say that no candidate, no serious candidate, would ever reach that level of threat of imminent physical harm as part of their campaign to get votes from the swing voters (but one never knows).

Mandatory participation (noted at page 4), as a condition of running for federal (or state) elective office, in a tax deductibility program for all donations to thereby give the federal (or state) government its' sole piece of authority to regulate speech is so obtuse as to make me dizzy. The extension of this obtuse claim of authority to regulate speech to bloggers who might accept paid adds for those candidates is beyond obtuse. What about the blogger that chooses to write rather than give money to campaigns, and never accepts any adds? Must they report something to the feds, just for the sake of completeness, and comply with some restrictions?

All it would take is one state to be willing to put a federal candidate on the ballot, notwithstanding a hostile rejection of all tax deductibility for all donations, and then get the required votes. Then their peers would be faced with claiming that the election was invalid because the state's elected representative did not accept federal-tax-deductibility for their donations. Should this really sound so radical?