Post an Opinion, Go To Jail

9 05 2009

Goto_jail

There are times when I really don’t enjoy living in California, this is one of them.

The idea for a law, by  Rep. Linda Sanchez, Democrat, of California is sheer lunacy. She has proposed a bill that would make it a federal felony to use blogs, text messages, and Internet messaging (“electronic means”) to harass someone and cause them “emotional distress.”

So if my local paper, the Enterprise Record, posts a web story that “causes somebody emotional distress”, do the aggrieved  then just dispense a lawyer from a vending machine in front of the newspaper office and walk in with a lawsuit? There will be DMVesque line with a wait.

It’s coming to that it seems.

Linda Sanchez (D-CA) coming after bloggers

“Greg Pollowitz at NRO Media Blog sends the alert (via The Volokh Conspiracy) that Rep. Linda Sanchez, Democrat of California, has proposed a bill that would make it a federal felony to use blogs, text messages, and Internet messaging (“electronic means”) to harass someone and cause them “emotional distress.” Eugene Volokh pulls these snippets out of H.R. 1966:

Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both….

["Communication"] means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received; …

["Electronic means"] means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.

(h/t to Helogenic Climate Change)

Here is her official website where you can contact her and let her know what you think about this idea. Be nice.

http://lindasanchez.house.gov/index.cfm?section=contact


Comments : 148 Comments »

Categories : politics, ridiculae

The “precarious state of the U.S. polar bear population”

9 05 2009

Today’s MSM is woefully inept at catching mistakes. Worse, reporters are often woefully inadequate at getting facts straight in the first place. And, with instant electronic distribution, it is much like the imaginary Roman vomitorium; eat, regurgitate, rinse, and repeat.

Yesterday’s LA Times story on the Obama administration deciding not to use polar bears as a global warming tool that we covered on WUWT had this howler:

“…the precarious state of the U.S. polar bear population…”.

LATimes_USpolarbear

Polar bear populations may in fact may be larger than they were decades ago.

“In the 1950s the polar bear population up north was estimated at 5,000. Today it’s 20- to 25,000, a number that has either held steady over the last 20 years or has risen slightly. In Canada, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory of Canada has found that the population there has increased by 25 percent.”

Even if the data from the 50’s is a “guess” it doesn’t take much brainpower to realize that if they are now protected, and hunted less, the population will increase. There’s precedence stories like this for many rebounding animal populations that are now protected.

In fact, there appears to be “no impact” on polar bears at all, according to this testimony before congress (PDF, from page 3)

“…Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), where both agencies issued “no jeopardy” biological opinions.”

It seems many other news outlets were content to pickup and regurgitate this story. A Google search on the phrase yields 283 results (as of 9AM today) and some big name media names are attached, like the Chicago Tribune.

US_polarbear_pop_search

283 Google results on that phrase as of 9AM 5/9/09

To be fair, I missed the funny twist too. But sharp eyed WUWT reader Paul Coppin caught it and wrote: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 54 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, media, ridiculae