A couple more points on the Santorum story…

First, I should make clear that I don’t care — not even one little bit, one way or the other — if the Scranton Times-Tribune was trying to use its ad campaign to slyly boost Bob Casey’s candidacy. I think the charge is ludicrous on its face, but maybe if I were in the paper’s circulation area and seeing the ads every day I’d have a different sense of it.

The point is: This is a newspaper, and it should be immune at every level from harassment by politicians and/or the government. And, as I take great pains to detail in my column, this is far from an isolated case. Campaign-finance laws are now routinely used to harass press outlets with which various politicians and activist groups become unhappy.

And, second, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is trying to make hay out of the fact that the ads in question featured a “fake” front page. Yes, they did. It’s actually called a “mock” front page, and it’s extraordinarily common in the newspaper business. Anyone who makes a fuss over this is either an utter ignoramus when it comes to the newspaper business, or he or she is being extraordinarily disingenuous. (It would be my guess that the Santorum folks fall into the latter category.)

Mock front pages are used at various points in a paper’s launch, both to test out new designs (internally or in focus groups) and to advertise the paper. These mock front pages can say anything the papers’ editors want, and they usually emphasize what types of stories readers can expect to find if they pick up a copy.

Furthermore, since the merged Times-Tribune didn’t even exist when this ad campaign was created — well, the front page HAD to be a mock front page. No real ones even existed.

Here’s a speech by Democratic campaign lawyer Robert Bauer on just how bad campaign-finance reform is for progressives.

A quick sample:

More than anything else, progressives have to depend on politics — energetic and uninhibited politics — to advance their program. This is where a campaign finance reform supporter heads down the wrong path. The campaign finance reform supporter assumes that entrenched power, possessing the lion’s share of the resources, will have an insurmountable advantage that may be overcome only with legal controls. So we have detailed regulation of the rules of politics in the name of “political equality,” which, it is assumed, will give the “average citizen” a fighting chance.

This is delusional, on several grounds.

Well worth reading, as is everything Bauer writes, for both Democrats and Republicans.

Allison Hayward that is, for FEC commissioner.

Bush could (and will) do a lot worse.

OK, one more on campaign-finance reform before I have to run.

Bob Bauer asks why The Washington Post, so skeptical of politicians’ intentions in all other matters, is so eager to grant Congress “constitutional leeway” when it comes to campaign-finance reform.

To wit:

Why would the Post turn over to these types of leaders the temptations of writing the rules for their own political survival and prosperity? Why in this instance, in the writing of campaign finance rules, do these individuals allegedly infected with self-interest, instinctively mendacious, given to pandering and straddling, and in a generally “fallen” state, suddenly become a mighty “Congress” wisely entrusted with broad “constitutional leeway”?

There’s actually an answer, and it’s not pretty. Read the whole thing.

Also, one correction to my TCS column. My knowledge of the Washington state media market is… limited.

Readers wrote in very quickly to tell me that the Seattle Times is actually the largest daily newspaper in the state. Not the Seattle P-I. (Though, apparently, the P-I is the only paper in the state with statewide circulation.)

Mea culpa.

Some also wrote in to say that the Seattle Times is a conservative paper. I think that’s relative. The paper endorsed Kerry. And, relevant to my article, it supports the gas tax (making it admirable of the paper to have opposed Judge Wickham’s ruling).

That is all.

There’s been a fun turn of events in the Washington state free-speech case.

The gas-tax opponents who were slapped for not reporting radio commentaries as “in-kind” contributions to their ballot-initiative campaign have fired back.

In complying with the judge’s order, they’ve made new campaign-finance filings listing every single radio broadcast and newspaper article about the initiative as “contributions,” since all of the news coverage fueled signature gathering and fundraising.

Of course, these disclosures are every bit as absurd as reporting the commentaries of two talk-radio jocks who support the I-912 campaign — Kirby Wilbur and John Carlson — but that’s just the point.

You can click to see the filing itself…

Also, Stefan Sharkansky seems to have done some good work digging through just who the shameless weasels behind the Keep Washington Rolling, pro-gas tax campaign are.

That’s: shameless weasels.

So, here are a couple of the supporting documents for this Washington radio story. I guess this is the new open-source journalism. I like it, because I think readers should see this sort of primary material.

Anyway, here’s the judge’s ruling. The offensive stuff is mainly on the second page.

Now, I want it to be clear just how odious this entire prosecution was. Some people think that going after a radio station to disclose its hosts’ support for a ballot initiative is no big deal. After all, the reformers always say, it’s just disclosure. If you have nothing to hide, why hide it?

Of course, no one is hiding anything by not disclosing. They’re simply going about their business without reporting it to the government. And, in the case of supporting an anti-gas tax ballot initiative on one’s own radio show, a person might just be under the misimpression that he or she is engaged in protected political speech and has no obligation whatsoever to report, disclose or answer to anyone whatsoever.

In Washington state, however, in the jurisdiction of San Juan County Prosecutor Randall Gaylord and his friends, one would be wrong.

As noted in my article, Gaylord was alerted to No New Gas Tax’s brazen violations of campaign-finance law by a law firm on the board of a pro-gas tax group, Keep Washington Rolling. Now, that law firm, Foster Pepper & Shefelman, is said to have a financial interest in the gas tax hike being implemented. (They are, I’m told, looking to handle a bond issue for the state.) But despite these multiple conflicts of interests, Gaylord delegated his prosecutorial powers in this case to Foster Pepper & Shefelman.

That means that in the heat of a contentious campaign to get an anti-gas tax initiative on the ballot, the pro-gas tax side was granted — by the state — the power to prosecute and conduct discovery against its political opponent, No New Gas Tax.

Think about that for a minute: One political faction given — again, by the state — the power to issue subpoenas against another. It boggles the mind.

Then, look at this subpoena, delivered to Fox News affiliate KVI-AM:

Again, it boggles the mind.

An American radio station was ordered, by its political opponents, to turn over tapes of radio shows and logs of airtime spent on various subjects.

This is not an amusingly outrageous story. It is an atrocity against the First Amendment.

And two people should be losing their jobs: Randall Gaylord, for pursuing a blatantly political prosecution against a press entity, and Thurston County Superior Court Judge Chris Wickham, for being an illiterate.

A hero of free speech is leaving the FEC:

SMITH PLANS DEPARTURE FROM FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION

WASHINGTON — Bradley A. Smith, a member of the Federal Election Commission since 2000 who served as the Commission’s Chairman in 2004, has announced his intention to resign from the Commission and return to the faculty of the Law School at Capital University in Columbus Ohio.

In a letter to President Bush dated June 13, Smith said “It has been an honor and a privilege to serve at the FEC for the past five years. Much has been accomplished in this time. . . (t)he result is a fairer, more efficient, more streamlined organization.” His resignation is effective August 21, 2005.

Reflecting on his tenure at the FEC, Commissioner Smith emphasized the important strides made by the Commission in recent years, particularly in its efforts to enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act. “I’m happy to say we’ve made progress in speeding the enforcement process and improving due process for people and groups we investigate while also obtaining meaningful civil penalties where we find violations of the law. In the last three years we have assessed the highest penalties ever against a sitting Senator, an incumbent House member, a party congressional campaign committee, and a state party committee, which was also the largest penalty assessed against a registered committee of any kind.”

Noting that the Commission’s regulations now are nearly 400 pages long, Smith added, however, that he remained, “concerned about the effects our campaign finance laws are having on grassroots political participation. Political activity is more heavily regulated than at any time in our nation’s history.” As examples, Smith noted fines levied against individuals for contributing to family members running for office, and investigations of spontaneous political activity by individuals.

Commissioner Smith, who is the author of Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform, published by Princeton University Press, along with many articles appearing in law reviews and other academic journals, was nominated to the Commission by President Clinton on February 9, 2000 and confirmed by the Senate on May 24 of that year for a term that expired on April 30, 2005. By law, members of the Federal Election Commission nominated after 1997 may serve one six-year term, with the terms of two Commissioners expiring every two years. They may continue to serve after the expiration of their terms until a replacement is appointed.

The First Amendment will be poorer for Smith’s departure from the FEC — and all of us a little more vulnerable to the depredations and usurpations of men like John McCain.

UPDATE: I should also note this interview that Tech Central Station just did with Smith. It goes into the absurdity of campaign-finance law… especially as relates to the Internet.

So, Sean Treglia — the hapless former Pew program officer who gave the incriminating speech about how Pew worked to “create an impression that a mass movement was afoot” calling for campaign-finance reform — has leveled some ugly charges against me.

In a letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, responding to William Schambra’s excellent article about how blogs covered Pewgate, he gives an account of a conversation we had before my original story ran in The Post.

He doesn’t mention me by name — worried about libel? — but the account is clearly about me (it was, after all, my article he was talking about).

Anyway, here’s the relevant portion of his letter:

When the blogger presented me with his theory of conspiracy and cover-up, I explained to him that he was misinterpreting the meaning of what I said. In the course of my conversation with him I learned that he had not bothered to watch my entire presentation (someone later took credit for e-mailing him the handful of clips he based his story on); he had not spoken to anyone else in the nonprofit sector to confirm his theory; he questioned no reporters who covered the issue at the time to see if foundation activities were hidden; he spoke with no grantees who worked on the issue; and he had reviewed no grantee Web sites, materials, reports, statements, etc., on which the names of the foundations are displayed prominently.

As it turned out he had not talked to anyone and had not even bothered to conduct any basic research to fact-check and confirm. When I expressed surprise that he was about to write a news story based on some out-of-context clips someone had e-mailed him, he said, “It’s not a news story, it’s an opinion.” I then asked if he wanted his “opinion” to be based on the truth. His response, and I quote, “I don’t have time for all that, I’m going with my story.”

Really, this is too much. I’ve written a letter in response to the Chronicle, but just to put a few things on the record now:

* I of course watched the full video (it’s about 2 hours long) before calling Treglia for his comment. I wasn’t sent clips. I obtained the full video and later created the clips myself to put on The Post’s Web site. Nothing I said to Treglia could have been construed as indicating otherwise.

* How exactly Treglia claims to know what Web sites or reports I looked at or didn’t is a mystery to me. Suffice it to say I looked at plenty of these Web sites and reports and have been careful throughout my writing on this to note that Pew and other foundations’ support was always disclosed somewhere — it was the media that was too lazy to connect the dots (a point Treglia himself made during his talk).

* That last quote (“I don’t have time for all that, I’m going with my story”) is simply made up. I was — as I work at a daily newspaper — of course under time pressure, and I may well have indicated as much to Treglia. But my editors and I were (and remain) fully confident that the story was accurate and well-sourced. The tape doesn’t lie.

For all of Treglia’s accusations, he can’t point to one fact wrong in the story. It’s his right to argue that I’m taking him out of context — but I’m not, and I’ve long been inviting readers to watch the whole tape, which I provide on this Web site.

So, that’s all for now on this. You can also read Winfield Myers’ and Mark Tapscott’s responses to Treglia. Both make a number of excellent points and have been dogged in keeping the foundation folks honest.

Jonathan Rauch has a great idea for campaign-finance reform: “Stop. Just Stop.”

Under the reformists’ agenda, he says:

The problem is not corruption, at least not as traditionally understood; the problem is influence. In yet other words, influence is corruption. And in yet other words, because politics is all about influence, politics is corruption—at least until all contributions to political causes are so small that politicians won’t feel particularly grateful to anybody.

Read the whole thing.

William A. Schambra of the Hudson Institute has this, on how blogs are affecting the coverage of liberal non-profit groups that try to influence public policy (like Pew, the Ford Foundation, etc.). I’m biased, because Schambra credits my reporting on Pewgate with changing how foundations are looked at “forever,” but I think he makes a lot of good points about how blogs will prevent these people from pulling the same crap again:

Any foundation interested in public-policy activism can now expect its implicit political inclinations to be vetted far more thoroughly and publicly than before. It will be much more difficult for donors to operate beneath the radar, justifying their low profile by saying that they are simply objective servants of the public interest. After all, the new networks were born of a reaction against precisely that claim by mainstream news media, and so are inclined to suspect hypocrisy whenever it is made. All foundations — not just those on the right — that want to shape public policy will now be treated as political actors.

Pew discovered what that means, when its response to the allegations by Mr. Treglia came out this way on Fox News: Pew said “it did nothing wrong and is proud of the $40-million it spent to get other people’s money out of politics.” Unfair? Of course. That’s politics; be sure to wear a helmet.

As for the conservative network, I hope it will pay more attention to philanthropy, studying and reporting on its trends, fancies, procedures, and technologies.

He’s right that things have changed. And he’s right that conservatives have to keep on these people like stink on a monkey, because the mainstream media won’t do it. Philanthropy reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post were quite aware of the scam I uncovered when I wrote about Pewgate, but they never followed up — not even to try to discredit me or my reporting (because they couldn’t).

They just ignored it. And they’ll continue to.