Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Several interesting stories have popped up recently about actions that honestly look bipartisan.

Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances appears to consist mostly of conservative groups right now, including Americans for Tax Reform, the Eagle Forum, and the Second Amendment Foundation — but before you panic at the inclusion of Norquist and Schlafly’s pet orgs, the American Civil Liberties Union is also on the list, and the organization’s goals are popular with civil libertarians: the group’s goals are to get several of the more onerous provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act repealed or struck down. According to their web page, priorities include resisting pressure to repeal the sunset provisions, an overbroad definition of domestic terrorism, and the infamous “sneak and peek” warrants, among others.

Maybe small-government conservatives are starting to realize that the Bush Administration has presided over one of the most focused, energetic efforts to broaden federal power that America has ever seen, and that being able to send an FBI agent into your home without your knowledge is a great deal more worrisome than passing a new environmental regulation.

Recent rumblings from Congress have brought up the possibility that blogs referring to political parties might constitute campaign speech and thus be considered an in-kind contribution to a political party, requiring regulation (long summary, but you can observe the freaking out in process with a plain Google search). Speaking as a blogger whose site not only supported the Kerry campaign but linked to its site, requested donations and asked for volunteers, following up after the election by encouraging Democrats to run for local political office, any Congressman who tries to limit the amount I can say about my preferred candidates will be in for some unpleasant blogviation himself. The mere floating of a trial balloon on the matter has aroused bloggers on both side of the red-blue divide, leading to sites like the McCain-Feingold Insurrection. The site I link to is, again, mostly conservatives at the moment to my knowledge, but he’ll explicitly link to leftist blogs who care to participate and from my poking it looks like at least a few are. A fair number of the sites there seem to be against the notion of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform entirely, which personally I’m not, but the speech issue seems to be crossing sides.

Following up on an idea I floated earlier on the NFZ, I’m looking around for a small-time conservative blog that might be willing to exchange post summaries with the NFZ on a weekly basis, in an attempt to fight the growing tendency of political pundits (like us bloggers) to huddle with our own kind and lose information input from diverse points of view. I’d like one that’s coherent and polite, and if possible one that posts about once or twice daily, like the NFZ. The idea would be not just to cross-link, but to post an article each weekend giving a brief description and link to each article the other blog has posted since the last announcement. Commentary optional but highly likely; it’s fine if they call us fuzzy-thinking hippies for an article on environmental issues, as long as they link to it with an honest description of the article’s thesis, and presumably they’d take it in stride if we insert the word anarchocapitalist into a description of their latest rant on government regulation. All in good spirits, of course. ^_^ If you know of such a blog, drop us a comment; we’re still in the planning stages (it may not happen), but I’d like to explore the possibility.