Lie By Omission

[elfs]

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, following in the grand tradition of attorneys general by being utterly opposed to the Constitution of the United States, yesterday asked Congress to pass laws requiring all web pages on the internet to be rated, much as movies and video games are rated (what's next? ratings for books? At least one Christian "family" group has endorsed the idea).

Gonzalez cited a study by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that showed (you've seen these billboards) that one in five children between the ages of 10 and 17 was "sexually solicited" (whatever that means).

What Gonzalez did not tell Congress was that, in that one-in-five result, most of the "solicitations" came from other children in the same age group. Come-ons from one teen to another are the on-line equivalent of adolescent sexual fumbling, rather than a vicious preying upon our children by dirty old men.

Impeach the whole lot of them. Now.

Comments

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

So, thirty seconds with a search engine got me the NCMEC page (http://www.missingkids.com/), and from there I found the document they cite to get that fnording one-in-five statistic. Here are links to the topline report (2 pages) (http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/internetsafety_surv.pdf), and the full report (62 pages) (http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/publications/NC62.pdf) - they go into enough detail in the report itself that there are a whole slew of interesting things you can learn from it, once you get past the sensationalist headline.