United Liberty

The Federal Trade Commission is now requiring bloggers and online writers to disclose any payments or gifts for promoting products or services:

The Federal Trade Commission will try to regulate blogging for the first time, requiring writers on the Web to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.

The FTC said Monday its commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the final Web guidelines, which had been expected. Violating the rules, which take effect Dec. 1, could bring fines up to $11,000 per violation. Bloggers or advertisers also could face injunctions and be ordered to reimburse consumers for financial losses stemming from inappropriate product reviews.

The commission stopped short of specifying how bloggers must disclose conflicts of interest. Rich Cleland, assistant director of the FTC’s advertising practices division, said the disclosure must be “clear and conspicuous,” no matter what form it will take.

The next step is regulating blogs that promote or oppose political candidates. Once you set something like this in motion, they’ll want to expand it to other areas.

A new Gallup poll shows Americans believe that government is doing too much and it putting too many restrictions on business:

These two measures are based on questions Gallup has asked each September since 2001, and intermittently before that. The 57% level of public concern about big government in this survey is, among other things, coincident with an extensively increased government involvement in the economy, and the extensive focus on a large-scale government effort to reform healthcare that was underway as this survey was being conducted.

Forty-five percent of Americans say there is too much regulation of business, while 27% say the amount of regulation is about right and 24% say there is too little regulation.
[…]
the 45% “too much” reading is the highest of the decade and is higher than the one Gallup reading prior to this decade, in March 1993. However, a March 1981 Los Angeles Times poll using this question wording recorded a 54% “too much” level. This was just after Ronald Reagan took office, and may have reflected Reagan’s emphasis during the 1980 presidential campaign on the need to reduce government involvement in American society.

If I were Barack Obama, I’d start paying attention to these numbers, especially as he pushes cap-and-trade and his leviathan of a health package.

Once again showing that the government will regulate anything and everything, there are now regulations for yard sales, which is an Ameican tradition:

The “Resale Round-up,” launched by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, enforces new limits on lead in children’s products and makes it illegal to sell any items that don’t meet those limits or have been recalled for any other reason.

The strict standards were set in the 2008 Consumer Product Safety Improvement after a series of high-profile recalls of Chinese-made toys.

The standards were originally interpreted to apply only to new products, but now the CPSC says they apply to used items as well.

[…]

n order to comply, stores, flea markets, charities and individuals selling used goods — in person or online — are expected to consult the commission’s 24-page Handbook for Resale Stores and Product Resellers (pdf) and its Web site for a breakdown of what they can’t sell.

V

iolators caught selling anything on the enormous list face fines of up to $100,000 per infraction and up to $15 million for a related series of infractions.

CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson says the fines are intended for large companies with serious infractions.

“CPSC is an agency that has used its penalty powers over its 30-year history against companies,” Wolfson told FOXNews.com. “CPSC is not seeking to pursue penalties against individuals hosting a garage sale or yard sale, we are encouraging them to take the right steps to not resell recalled products.”

But FOX News Legal Analyst Bob Massi says the law makes no distinction for families and small resellers.

Here is some common sense from Ron Paul, who asks some tough, challenging questions of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, whose answers are the usual sort of double-speak one can expect.

Over the weekend the United Kingdom’s internet regulatory agency, The Internet Watch Foundation, blacklisted Wikipedia over concerns of “indecent images” of minors under the age of 18. The image is of the album art for a 1976 Scorpions album titled “Virgin Killer”. Beyond the problem of a centralized authority having the fiat power to blacklist sites without court order, this particular case is quite intriguing because while the image itself is quite disgusting, according to Wikimedia Foundation-

“We have no reason to believe the article, or the image contained in the article, has been held to be illegal in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world,”

Barney Frank claims that Democrats wanted to “regulate the subprime” situation before it got out of control. While in fact it was one of the few instances where Democrats actually favored less regulation (for the GSEs where most suprimes derived from), while Republicans favored greater regulation over the sector. Frank spreads lies on the television. Wow, thats a first.

But not because of the reasons you may believe

Part I - “The False Claims” can be found HERE.

Part II - “Hoover’s Socialism” can be found HERE.