John has been wanting one of these for a long time and I’ve always resisted, but now he has gone and done something so incredibly stupid, that he truly cannot be denied being today’s Daily Dolt:
The blogger who filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission against Daily Kos says he may appeal Tuesday’s FEC ruling on the matter, which found the popular left-leaning site did not violate the Federal Election Campaign Act as charged. A lawyer for the blog, however, dismissed the claims as a fantasy.
“I’m not entirely surprised,” said John Bambenek, a research programmer at the University of Illinois who submitted the complaint, in a Wednesday interview with RAW STORY. “[The FEC] doesn’t want to get into all the drama of blogs.”
Yeah, that’s it–they don’t want drama. John got his ass kicked by having the complaint dismissed before any investigation his complaint was so weak. More
Reacting to the commission’s unanimous decision–which “found no reason to believe Kos Media, DailyKos.com, or Markos Moulitsas Zuniga violated federal campaign finance law”–Bambenek told RAW STORY that the FEC didn’t address his fundamental complaint.
“I asked a particular question and they answered a different one. They just ruled that blog posts don’t constitute a donation,” he said, acknowledging that the FEC had already given its opinion in 2006 as to whether favorable commentary about a candidate, published by an independent website, amounted to a campaign contribution.
“My question was: Can a political action committee avoid FEC disclosure rules simply by organizing online?” Bambenek continued. “What I did was ask about a group that self-identified as having the sole purpose of electing Democrats.”
Of course, this was all settled in the advisory opinion about Fired Up! The difference being if you are going to deal with writing and advocacy as a site, that’s not being a committee, but if you were to, say, buy advertisements advocating an issue elsewhere that would most likely be a committee. Not real hard to understand. Then again, no one has ever accused Bambenek of understanding simple concepts.
Worse, John is one of these guys who claims to understand the original intent of the Constitution, but apparently knows nothing of the context of the First Amendment when it was passed.
Papers at the time of the Constitution were largely partisan papers largely organized towards giving a Party an advantage. IOW, the First Amendment specifically protected the kind of journalism Bambenek is trying to call a political committee.
[…] Far from the “brilliant timing” his packlike friends extolled, quite a few folks more logical than they pointed out his filing was completely without merit since the FEC had already decided the issue with a position exactly contrary to Mr. Bambenek’s complaint. Perhaps that was why the FEC slammed the door shut on Mr. Bambenek by dismissing his claim in record time. He lost his case in such a spectacular fireball of idiocy that the normally staid FEC chastised the guy for even wasting their time by typing up the complaint in the first place. […]