"Unregulated"

This is not, perhaps, the biggest deal in the world, but it's simply not true, as the president keeps saying and the media keeps repeating, that money donated to 527s is "unregulated." It comes with pretty strict disclosure rules. What it is is uncapped in the sense that you can give as much of it as you want-to-slash-can-afford, which isn't the same thing at all. I don't blame the president for this one all that much since it's a more-or-less direct takeover of old Democratic Party talking points about the dread specter of soft money, but the speed with which Bush has gone from right to unprincipled to insanely wrong on the topic of soft money caps is rather astounding. I would really like to know what launched the media on their jihad against soft money back in the mid-nineties -- it's far and away the clearest example of media bias (as opposed to some sort of ineptitude or cowardice) I've ever seen, it's continued for years and years, and proceeded unabated as the partisan valence of the topic shifted.