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

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Sadly, Gonzalez wants to make it a federal crime if you don't rate the pages yourself and, oh, if you rate them incorrectly, it's still criminal.

[threnodym.livejournal.com]

Give the public enough makework, and they'll be too busy to demand impeachment. He's more cunning than I thought...

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

How lomg before he wants to apply US laws to those of us not physically in the USA, or using non-US-specific domains?

Like .com?

[kengr]

Oh, that's been happening for *years.

Didn't you hear about the Russian programmer who wrote a program in Russia that was legal in Russia and when he visited the US for a conference, he was asrrested because the program violated *US* law?

Other countries pull that sort of stuff too. For example, commit an act that's legal in the country you are visiting, but not back home and you can be prosecuted when you go back home if the goverment finds out.