This is a note to the nice people at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Some of your money has gone astray. Specifically, it has gone to George Washington University for something called the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, formerly the Democracy Online Project.

GWU put a woman named Carol Darr (right, from the Center for National Policy) in charge of this group, and she has proven to be, well, not to put too fine a point on it, an idiot. Clueless, in the parlance of this blog. To be blunt about it, she is using money given for promoting democracy on the Internet in order to destroy it.

Specifically she has urged that the Federal Elections Commission hold independent bloggers to the same standards we hold political parties. In other words if you write online about politics, and if you have an opinion, then your ability to raise money is controlled, your spending is controlled, you are, in short, under their jurisdiction.

This is nonsense. There is nothing that could do more to destroy the FEC, and to chill free speech, than to try and go after, say, Glenn Reynolds (I put him on the left just for fun -- there's no libertarian side of the page) who has urged support for various candidates, and treat him as we do a political party.

The issue before the FEC involves advertising. Writing a blog item and urging people to contribute to someone is not advertising. It's editorial. The line, if it exists, is crossed when the writer inserts a link to the candidate's contribution page. Trying to regulate that activity is like trying to shut Robert Novak's pie hole. Some might desire to do that, but the First Amendment protests loudly against it.

If I say, oh, give money to Candidate X, and provide a link to Candidate X's Web site, that's not an ad, it's a link. Everyone who works online knows this.

Carol Darr apparently does not. She should not be working on the Internet, and trying to get it treated like newspapers or broadcast. It's none of those. It's the Internet. If she doesn't know that then she's either ignorant (in which case she should be elsewhere) or she's lying (in which case she should be elsewhere). I'm sure there are lots of people on K Street who would love to have her.

Bottom line. The purpose of your grant has been perverted, turned toward the opposite of its intended purpose. You need to know this so you can take appropriate action.

Start by demanding the firing of Carol Darr.

Thank you.