You all remember the last panel from the May PDF conference.

Well, I told my friend Judith Martin about it.

Here's her take.

Reactions of an informed viewer to the morning sessions of the Federal Elections Commisison hearing on Internet Communication. This FAQ is presented in summary form. It took much longer for these actual conversations to occur. It was, after all, a lazy summer morning in Washington, D.C.

Question: Does anyone want to subject bloggers to campaign finance regulations?

Answer: Not that they want to talk about on the record.

Q: So what's the best way to protect bloggers from campaign finance regulations?

A: Well, it's not through a media exemption, either case-by-case or blanket exemption.

Q:. What's wrong with case-by-case exemptions?

A: See the entries here on PDF of everyone else named Mike, and Chris Nolan.

Q: Okay. What about a blanket exemption?

The IPod marketing scheme was evidence enough, but now he's constructed a grassroots action chain that starts in the middle of U2 concerts and proceeds via text messaging to the "One" campaign urging the Bush Administration to ask Congress for more foreign aid to Africa.

Read about it in Sebastian Mallaby's column in today's Washington Post:

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/22/AR2005052200889.html

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had this to say on Tony Snow's Fox News Radio show April 19:

"We've got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States? That's just outrageous. And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous."

I am puzzled by this comment. What does DeLay think is so bad about someone doing online research? Or, to put the question more cynically, what does DeLay think he has to gain by saying as much?

Is it that DeLay and/or a key constituency group of his equates the internet with such evils as pornography, relativism, internationalism, intellectualism, and liberalism?

If so, that's a classic right-wing tactic, but it does not square with the fact that millions of Americans, including many on the right, use the internet to conduct research. My colleague John Horrigan has the relevant data at www.pewinternet.org .

Another hypothesis: DeLay was castigating Kennedy for venturing beyond the doctrine of "original intent," and brought up the Internet as a symbol of the contemporary outside world. But this narrower criticism --Kennedy is using an inappropriate judicial methodology-- also doesn't parse. Online legal research is a standard practice today.