can he say that?

or can you? or can anyone?

Sen. Harry Reid has a bill in the Senate that will in effect require any blog that reaches more than 500 people and discusses politics must register with the FEC as a lobbyist.

I thought that liberals supported free speech and dissent and all that first amendment stuff. What's going on?...

...as long as I am talking to the people of the United States, whether I seek to influence their vote or not, you have absolutely no right under the Constitution to interfere with or restrict that speech in any way. Let me refresh your memory, sir:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

If this is what the progressives call progress (ed: or change), they need a new dictionary.

p.s. our overgrown government needs to be reminded of some of the other complaints in that wonderful declaration as well (edited for modern circumstances):

(the unelected beltway bureaucracy) has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance

(the unelected beltway bureaucracy) imposing Taxes (and innumerable regulations) on us without our Consent

(the left is) abolishing our most valuable Laws (like freedom of speech and gun ownership), and (the distant bureaucracy is) altering fundamentally the Forms of our (state's rights) Governments

(true patriots) have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us

(the leftist-media complex) has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless (islamofascist terrorists), whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions

pay attention to our founding fathers? what a revolutionary thought!