Right Wing Nation

Surprise, surprise! John McCain — who calls himself a conservative, for some inexplicable reason known only to him — has proposed yet more restrictive legislation! McCain thinks bloggers should report kiddie porn spam on their blogs or face stiff fines.

Now, before you say, “That sounds reasonable,” let’s look at this a bit more closely. Redstate says:

As a pander to what the Senator endearingly terms “the far-right base” it’s probably good politics — or at least someone in his office thought so. But, as legislation, it’s very poorly crafted and shows a certain cluelessness when it comes to the medium he has repeatedly tried to regulate to death. It also dashes the hope expressed by some that McCain would represent a revival of the Goldwater-Gingrich “leave us alone” coalition that could drive a stake through the heart of Big Government Conservatism. As with CFR, as with Kyoto, as with the gun-show loophole, McCain’s answer is always to regulate first, and ask questions later — the essence of Big Government “conservatism.”

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In case you hadn’t seen the two white boxes up top, RedState is a site “you’d have to join up or become a member of to use,” at least to its fullest extent. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of independently hosted blogs have a membership requirement to post comments. And each of said blogs have been targeted with hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks, often left without the knowledge of the author. If one of those comments happens to contain kiddie porn, are they now liable?

But it’s actually worse than that. I get lots of spam comments and trackbacks, many of them porn, with links to porn sites. I do a pretty good job of keeping them off the blog though it’s inevitable that from time to time, a few will get through, but I do not click on the links to see where they go — for reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a computer. So if a comment gets through and the link leads to a kiddie porn site, I’ll get fined? Am I supposed to start clicking on every link in every spam comment I get and risk getting trojans, viruses and spyware just to make sure they aren’t kiddie porn now?

Come on. That’s crap. And I have yet one more reason not to vote for McCain. Need another? From that same Redstate story:

And it doesn’t stop there. Get this. Senators McCain and Schumer have introduced a separate bill to create an “e-mail sex offender registry.” Sex offenders would need to submit their e-mail address and IM handles like they do their physical address — as if it wouldn’t take them right about 15 seconds to create a new one without any trace of it.

There you go.