Over at the election law listserv, practicing election lawyer Joe Birkenstock has posted these comments, which he has given me permission to reproduce here:

Mike Krempasky and now Mark Schmitt have warned of the drastic regulatory revisions they say would be required to apply the FEC’s disclaimer requirements to candidate-paid bloggers. I disagree, and since it seems to me that the benefits (providing a candidate-paid blogger’s readers with the means to consider the source of what they are reading) of such a change would outweigh any chilling effects, I wanted to make a suggestion on what looks to me like a pretty trivial re-write that would accomplish this goal.
The FEC’s existing regulations on disclaimers generally are at 11 C.F.R. 110.11. In particular, 110.11(a)(1) would require bloggers, columnists, opinion writers, robo-callers, tv personalities, skywriters, or anybody else making a public communication “for which a political committee makes a disbursement” to include an appropriate “Paid for” disclaimer. It currently does not require such a disclaimer on blogs, however, because the special expansion of the definition of “public communications” in the body of 110.11(a) is limited to “Internet websites of political committees.” (Emphasis added.) Since commentator blogs generally are not the product of or administered as political committees (with the significant exception of Krempasky’s own RedState.org, FEC Committee ID# C00408047), the disclaimer requirement, as a general rule, does not apply anything posted on a weblog.
The problem is, with the existing structure of the regulation you can’t just remove the “of political committees” qualification without ending up applying the disclaimer requirement to any blogs (or any blog posts) that expressly advocate [110.11(a)(2)] or make solicitations [110.11(a)(3)]. I wouldn’t support that – frankly, I doubt anybody in America really supports that.
So why not just restructure the reg? Eliminate the “of political committees” qualification on “Internet websites” for 110.11(a)(1), but not for 110.11(a)(2)-(4). Put another way, apply the qualification to 11(a)(2)-(4), but not to 11(a)(1). This is hardly “serious regulatory surgery,” this is trivial regulatory nail-clipping.
This would require anyone who got paid by a candidate to make a public communication (on a blog, on a radio talk show, in a newspaper column, or otherwise) to include a medium-appropriate “Paid for by” disclaimer on that communication. I’m no fan of much of the thrust of recent campaign finance reform efforts, but I really fail to see the harm in this one.