Back in the USA, it's same shit, different day

Well, we are back from a week in beautiful Jamaica. Thanks to Bob, Tata, and the preposterously prolific Spiidey for doing such a terrific job keeping up while I was away.

I wonder what our resident wingnut/libertarian commenter BNJ will think of Saint John McCain as a result of this, brought to us via ModFab:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has introduced legislation that would treat blogs much like internet service providers and hold them responsible for all activity in comments and user profiles. Millions of commercial web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.

According to Think Progress, social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures”—such as deleting user profiles—to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. "These sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and, blogs such as DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries."

McCain's proposal is reactionary and politically-based. When he introduced this legislation to the Senate, he offered no evidence that children are being victimized by people who post comments on blogs. But most of us should be accustomed to this "straight talk" from the Arizona Republican who is running for president as a "moderate."

At first glance, this SEEMS to be relatively inoffensive. I mean, after all, who can object to protecting children from sex offenders? But McCain's legislation would, say, hold ME responsible if anyone posting a comment on this blog happens to be a sex offender, whether I know about that or not. The other issue covered is one of intellectual property and is directed specifically at bloggers (like me) who embed videos posted at YouTube into their sites. Imagine the revenue stream to be generated for Viacom if Comedy Central is entitled to damages every time a blogger that embeds a video featuring a clip from The Daily Show.

Doesn't John McCain have anything better to do? Aren't there more pressing issues facing this country than declaring war on MySpace and Daily Kos? For example, perhaps Mr. McCain might look into where he's going to get the foot soldiers for his planned policy of performing escalatio (^®Tom Lehrer) on the Iraqis, or the fact that the very same children McCain wants to protect from sex offenders are going to have to pay George W. Bush's (and his own) bills for the ruinous Republican policies of the last six years.

Can we please stop calling John McCain a "maverick" now? I don't know if he ever really was one, his alignment with Russ Feingold on campaign finance reform notwithstanding. But in his pathetic yearning for the presidency, he's shrunken into just most pathetic sort of hack.