Craigslist Caves In

craigslist caves in

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has said today that, ”a blatant Internet brothel” — has been accused by law enforcement officials across the United States of promoting prostitution through its erotic ads.

“Craigslist is heeding our clear call for conscience and common sense, sending a strong signal that Internet sites must police themselves to protect others,” Blumenthal said.

“As head of the multistate attorney general task force,” Blumenthal said, “I was informed by Craigslist late last night that it will eliminate the ‘erotic services’ section within seven days, create a new section called ‘adult services,’ and manually review every ad posted there to bar flagrant prostitution and pornography.”

Well, that’s just fantastic a multi-state attorney general task force can go forth with their heads held high and hold internet sites to the task of policing the content their members and users post. The problem is its unconstitutional and if by some chance it is ruled constitutional we should think carefully about what it really means.

Try this scenario on for size. A woman wants her husband dead. For argument’s sake let’s not speculate why, she just does. She drives to her local home improvement store and proceeds to buy liquid drain cleaner. That night she gives her husband a massive dose of the cleaner in his drink.  He dies in agony within mere moments with her looking on. Later, the local district attorney has all the evidence he needs to prosecute a case against her and he will win without question. The D.A. even has a signed confession from her. So, he prosecutes the home improvement store for providing the materials necessary to murder the man and convinces his state’s attorney general to fight to get drain cleaner removed from home improvement stores. Future crimes of this nature will be stifled as a result of the new muti-state task force that proceeds to have drain cleaner removed from all of the home improvements stores across the country. In a small town in East Texas another woman sits in her kitchen loathing her husband, wanting him dead. She goes to her local home improvement store and buys rat poison to kill him. Soon we find Americans using the restroom in pits because their toilets are stopped up and we can look forward to being overrun by rats.

Any simpleton that believes it is good to start censoring Craigslist users better think again. This is not the end, next you will hear more public officials looking to waste your time and money going after site owners that have users posting profiles on dating sites that have false information.  Now, as an internet web site owner you no longer provide tools for your customer to use, you have to censor and observe your users to determine wether or not they buying insecticide, rat poison or drain cleaner because they may abuse it. Better yet, as a web site owner you probably need to visit with every person that uses your site, perhaps you can even make users fill out an ‘internet use evaluation form’ and if it appears that they are unstable after independent review you can deny them access to your site. Even better, the federal government can make us all apply for an internet use license to generate jobs, steal more money from us and violate our rights further.

Maybe, just maybe, Blumenthal could get back to the work of actually taking care of criminals instead of interjecting his immature and unconstitutional ideas on an unsuspecting population that really has no idea just how deep this can go. I hear lot’s of cons (conservatives) whining about President Obama taking away their civil liberties but once again the double standard applies. I have read that many support Democratic Attorney General Bluementhal in this matter. The question for most cons is not, “How should we protect our civil liberties” No, the real question is, “which civil liberties are okay to lose to make America the way they want,” instead of the America we were promised. In-between the libs and the cons, sit ordinary people clinging to our few remaining civil liberties as they get hammered to pieces by both sides. We watch helpless as they both turn us into a socialist regime faster than we can hand over another trillion dollars to save more international banks or hire another thousand undocumented workers to treat as indentured servants. We should all stock up on drain cleaner because its already getting messy