The BBC reports that a court has thrown out COPPA, an Internet-based nanny state law passed “for the children”:
A US federal judge has overturned a law designed to protect children from viewing internet pornography, saying it violated the right of free speech….
“It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government’s addressing the problem at its source,” government lawyer Peter D Keisler wrote following the four-week hearing, the Associated Press news agency reported.
If it is not reasonable to expect parents to care for their children, shall all children be rounded up into communal homes, watched over by Tyne Daly? Give me a break. If we’re going to ignore so clearly and completely the First Amendment (in the true sense because this is the US Congress we’re talking about here, so there’s no ‘incorporation’ involved), can we at least not channel Hillary Clinton while we do it? Thank you.
By the way, Werewolf (also known as Mafia) is a very fun game to play. It’s filled nicely the gap the Lakers have left by being hurt and losing lately.
Heh, Watched my first basketball game in some time last night. Kobe of course doesn’t let me down by scoring 60 points, joining the select company of Chamberlain, Baylor, and Jordan as being the only four players to score 50 in at least three consecutive games.
Hopefully the fans in New Orleans won’t be disappointed tonight.
The Washington Times quotes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on immigration, and despite all the reports that he’s doing a great job in the role, I think he really stuck his foot in his mouth here:
There’s a pretty broad desire to have an accomplishment, to do something, even among members who voted against final passage last year. There is still a lot of sentiment that a comprehensive bill would be the right thing to do,” said Mr. McConnell, Kentucky Republican.
It is fundamentally anticonservative to have the idea that doing anything is necessarily better than doing nothing. And while I know the Republican party is not a conservative party, I do believe it governs best and is at its most popular when it incorporates conservatism into its rhetoric and policies. So it’s time for McConnell to shape up on this issue: Senator, call for heightened enforcement (perhaps coupled with earmarked funding?) of the Reagan-era IRCA instead of pushing for a new ‘reform’ package!
Draft Fred Thompson for President, please.
Odom’s hurt again, with something that needed season ending surgery last time? Walton’s going to a specialist now? It’s all on you, #24.
50 years after the famous events at a local high school, did you know that there is still federal monitoring of Little Rock school ‘integration’? It’s ending now, though, and the reason for it is an embarassment to our courts and our government. Says the Associated Press:
U.S. District Judge William R. Wilson Jr. said the district is substantially complying with a 1998 desegregation plan worked out in the 27,000-student district.
With blacks gaining a majority on the school board last September, the judge said he felt comfortable that the district would keep working to improve academic achievements among its 19,000 black students.
District Court Judge Wilson, apparently a Clinton appointee, validates and feeds into the worst racist lunacy in this country with that sort of reasoning. For shame.
The Democratic Party ‘netroots’ don’t deserve Howard Dean. Here they went and elected a motivated guy to head their party, determined to expand the base and reach out to non-traditional Democrats. And yet, they go do things like this, according to Michelle Malkin:
The Daily Kos declares war over the Nevada Democratic Party’s choice of Fox News–get out the smelling salts!–to host the Democrats’ first presidential debate in August.
….There’s even a petition to “freeze out Fox News:”
Because only showing up on Olbermann’s show is exactly in the spirit of Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy, isn’t it? Clearly this movement is bereft of ideas, and is just working on emotion (mostly hate). When they can get this badly self-contradictory, there’s just no other way to explain it.
Via Academic Elephant, it turns out that I spoke too soon in teasing Senator Kerry. He now wants to set a deadline to withdraw the troops, and enforce that deadline by cutting off funding for body armor.
I guess that makes him a Real Leader in his view. I wonder why he’s not running for President, then?
I have in my possession an internal document from the Senate in which Senator John Kerry blasts the Congress for its gutless debates over non-binding resolutions against the mission of our troops in Iraq.
Following are some passages I find particularly interesting:
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of telling Iraqis they are now in control of their own country….
Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Iraq someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say they we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Bush won’t be one to, and these are his words, “cut and run.”
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President’s last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says and says clearly:
But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is terrorism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the terrorists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight terrorism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now….
We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America which as the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war.
We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Iraq now….
We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership?
OK, I confess, this stuff is actually pulled out of Kerry’s old Winter Soldier testimony, with President Bush subbed in for President Nixon, and Iraq filling in for Vietnam. The ideas expressed remain unchanged, though, and should be equally applicable. If the Congress believes the war is a mistake, why are they telling the troops in the field now, that they are the last men to die for that mistake?
There is no redeeming value, no defense of any kind, for the non-binding resolutions the Congress has debated. Either the war is right, and the resolutions are undermining our effort, or the war is wrong, and the resolutions are cowardly for refusing to rescue the troops from it. Shame on the Democrats, and shame on the Republicans who join them in this.
I have been demoralized since the election, but this political point-taking on the backs of our troops must not stand.