Three cheers for John McCain
For making it really, really easy for me to not vote for him:
A forthcoming bill in the U.S. Senate lays the groundwork for a national database of illegal images that Internet service providers would use to automatically flag and report suspicious content to police.The proposal, which Sen. John McCain is planning to introduce on Wednesday, also would require ISPs and perhaps some Web sites to alert the government of any illegal images of real or “cartoon” minors. Failure to do would be punished by criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.
[…]
It also covers obscene images of minors including ones in a “drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting.” (The language warns that it is not necessary “that the minor depicted actually exist.”)
I suppose that means this image of a naked bearded man fondling a naked boy would be illegal. (Note, of course, that it’s a tondo painted 470 BC that today resides in the Ashmolean Museum.)
The real problems in the U.S. are obvious: social security is doomed. Congress can’t control its spending and doesn’t want to try. Iraq appears to be entering a civil war. Ten million illegal immigrants are living in the U.S.; a non-trivial minority of whom are involved in organized crime. Public education is a trainwreck in progress.
But no presidential candidate has the spine to tackle these problems. Instead, we get feel-good legicrap like the baseball steroid hearings, the Terry Schiavo travesty, the everyone-knew-it-was-doomed Federal Marriage Amendment, and this.
Are child molesters escaping justice because we lack a law that forces ISPs to face fines of $300,000 for failing to report ancient Greek paintings? I have my doubts.
But there’s a silver lining. I might have actually struggled over the campaign-finance issue, because I thought McCain’s views were, besides that, decent. But now that he’s cast his lot with the panderers, “pay no attention to the abortion that is the federal budget—Here! Over here! We’re saving your kids from perverts!” crowd, it will be very, very easy to vote for someone else.
That he managed to take a giant dump on the Internet industry in the process (since they’ll have to police their customers or face enormous fines) is icing on the cake. I have an idea: every time the Feds want to delegate the functions of government to private industry, they should be required to estimate how much it will cost American business. Ditto federal agency rulemaking. If corporations have to file environmental impact statements, I daresay that the government should be expected to file business impact statements. (We already have the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, so this isn’t entirely implausible.)
That’s the sort of pandering I could get behind.