reasonablenut

I generally try to keep this blog about guns, technical matters about guns, and politics about guns.

Tonight, I must deviate. Read the whole article and it will scare the crap out of you.

I generally side with SCOTUS that free speech is not an absolute right. Kiddy porn and the "yelling fire in a theatre" scenario seem to me to be reasonable checks on this right. However, this, in no means, voids the substance of the amendment. And while the Founding Fathers didn't even know what the hell a movie-theatre was, it was a bit difficult to anticipate; but they did.

If one reads background material, like the Federalist Papers, one understands that this right's intention was not muckraking or porn, but was deliberately geared towards political speech.

Two hundred years+, we don't know what the fuck we're talking about.

What rules will apply to the Internet that did not before? A: The commission has
generally been hands-off on the Internet. We've said, "If you advertise on the
Internet, that's an expenditure of money--much like if you were advertising on
television or the newspaper."
Do we give bloggers the press exemption?
The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem? If
someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a
contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal
maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures
have to be disclosed under federal law.
Certainly a lot of bloggers are very
much out front. Do we give bloggers the press exemption? If we don't give
bloggers the press exemption, we have the question of, do we extend this to
online-only journals like CNET?

I figure that monitoring everything on line will increase the FCC staff 4-fold, at a minimum. That's a lot of jobs that need doing. Conclusion: Tax the internet.

The only reason the Fed has prevented states from taxing it is because they have yet to figured out a good way to do it. After all, If some lowly governor can't collect the green, how can the Fed?

Easy. Just regulate access, tax any imput (including pictures of my nekkid sister [check the archives]), MAKE DAMN SURE THERE IS NO POLITICAL SPEECH, and just kick back and watch some SCOTUS-approved porn that doesn't include the discharge of a rifle.

Shut up, give up your guns, and walk the line.

UPDATE:

While a lot of bloggers got pretty riled ( see here, here, and here for example), some people are taking a milder tone. Huffman has pointed out that a lot of blogs have unnecessarily gotten their panties bunched up about something that is, for all intents and purposes, unenforcable. The ability to enforce a law is central to its effectiveness and the governments control of the subject being regulated.

Given Joe's areas of expertise, my inclination is to defer to his opinion on this one. Maybe I got a bit lathered up about a rumor about a regulation that enacts a law that is unconstitutional and unenforceable.

Americandrumslinger acknowledgdes my anger while focusing on the more important things in life, like guns and women.