| |
May
23
|
 |
We’ve been covering the anti-Myspace bill introduced by UPS man and U.S. Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick, for a while now, and it’s time to give someone else the floor.
First, a bit of background: Fitzpatrick’s bill, officially the (yuk yuk) Deleting Online Predators Act — DOPA, I presume? — would force schools and libraries to block children from viewing social networking sites, such as Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, etc. It’s unclear if this would block social networking sites that are more about, say, photo sharing, like Flickr.
Anyway, obviously this bill is trying to stop children from being the victim of old dirty men trolling for them online, or something, and that’s fine. Naturally, of course, it does nothing really to stop the problem of child predators, but it makes for nice election year press, doesn’t it?
Some of that nice election year press comes, conveniently, from Bucks County Courier Times columnist J.D. Mullane, who wrote about the issue today, specifically Fitzpatrick’s Democratic opponent, Patrick Murphy, who blasted the bill:
I told Murphy it was a blunder to talk about “constitutional rights” when the issue is protecting children from pervs.
It’s OK to be high-minded on all that “rights” jazz when you’re trolling for votes during primary season. But when the general election season begins, as it has, it’s best to respect the family-oriented sensibilities of the suburban heartland, which defines most of Bucks County, but especially defines where I live, Levittown.
In my house, children have no “constitutional rights.” I am the law, judge and jury. My word is final. Three weeks ago, I was at the top of my game in this role during an incident that involved, coincidently, MySpace.com.
With Mullane on the case, no predator is safe! And neither are your rights!
A blunder in race for Congress [Bucks County Courier Times]
May 19: Rhetoric On Anti-Myspace Bill Reaches New Levels
|
|
dmac | 1:29 PM | 2 Comments
|
May
19
|
|
Okay, Mike Fitzpatrick. (That’s him, at right, helping UPS deliver some packages. No, really.) You almost had us fooled. You were a Republican congressman who seemed pretty levelheaded, without any sort of wild extreme right-wing positions. And you seemed pretty on the ball. But of course, now, you have to go and try to block access to Myspace — and other social networking sites — from being accessed in schools or libraries.
(The bill actually blocks access for people under 18, but the thinking is that schools and libraries will just block it. Schools are mostly under-18 anyway, and almost all libraries don’t have room for a separate over-18 section.)
The Democratic candidate for house, Patrick Murphy, has rightly denounced the legislation as re-effing-diculous, and an overreaction that would do nothing to solve the problem of child predators online:
“You don’t protect children by infringing on people’s constitutional rights,” Murphy said Thursday. “It’s shortsighted and wrong. It’s a political ploy from a typical politician.”
A ploy? Indeed. It’s a typical election year ploy: Fitzpatrick gets to introduces this bill; he happens to be coincidentally up against a war vet would could prove to be somewhat popular one, too. (He’s a good guy, it seems, so he won’t attack his service record.) And so, when Murphy denounces the legislation, Ol’ Fitzy can paint him as a lover of child molesters:
“Pat seems more interested in the constitutional rights of online predators than he is about protecting young children,” Fitzpatrick said. “He ought to be ashamed for opposing it.”
Using the newly created Mike Fitzpatrick Overstatement Machine™, we’d like to translate our response — “this bill is more of a political ploy to win votes than something that will protect children; also, guess who doesn’t have computers at home: the poor” — into a Mike Fitzpatrick overstatement:
“Mike Fitzpatrick ought to be ashamed at creating this bill that’s just a ploy for him to win votes come November. He seems more interested in staying in office than helping his constitutients. Also, he’s introducing the worst bill since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and he hates the Constitution.”
Look for more from the Mike Fitzpatrick Overstatement Generator™ any day now!
Heated exchange follows Fitzpatrick’s Myspace bill [Bucks County Courier Times]
Mike Fitzpatrick - Photos [House.gov]
Monday: U.S. Rep. Has No Friends On Myspace
|
|
dmac | 3:37 PM | 52 Comments
|
May
15
|
|
 The government is a big fan of doing things to screw things up for kids. Kids can’t vote — nobody really votes until they’re about 65 anyway — and so the government can do whatever they hell it wants to do.
And, right on cue, here comes legislation that’s going to ban schools and libraries from allowing access to social networks like Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, etc. Of course, since the legislation is so broadly written, basically anything allowing one to communicate with someone over the Internet would have to be blocked.
This legislation was drafted into action by up-for-his-seat-in-November U.S. Rep Mike Fitzpatrick, who represents Bucks County and parts of Northeast Philly and Montgomery County. And you know what’s going to happen: Anyone who even thinks of going against this bill is going to be declared a friend of child molestors, perhaps even a pervert, as the bill is called the Deleting Online Predators Act — Ho ho! Get it! Deleting predators! Ha! — and is supposedly going to stop online predators forever.
NB to whoever wins the Democratic primary in that district tomorrow: Paint yourself as the pro-Myspace candidate. You might be able to even get some 18-year-old high schoolers to vote.
Bill Seeks to Block Access to MySpace in Schools [Los Angeles Times via BoingBoing]
|
|
dmac | 2:18 PM | 0 Comments
|
Mar
1
|
|
 Last night, NBC 10 had an “education session” for parents to teach them how to snoop on their kids. They told them all about monitoring software and Myspace and Facebook and maybe even told them how to read their kids’ diaries. I don’t know.
Anyway, according to the privacy expert NBC 10 interviewed, the Internet is a scary, scary place. For example, Myspace is “an Internet site where teens think they’re harmlessly posting their innermost thoughts and feelings to friends, but experts say they are unwittingly exposing themselves to pedophiles, stalkers and perverts.”
Indeed! The worst idea for kids, according to Internet safety expert Parry Aftab, is to post a photo online:
The only problem is she’s posted a picture. The detective recommends she take it down.
“Photos are used to manipulate and put on naked bodies. They put horns on them,” Aftab said.
Predators and online bullies can manipulate, copy and print pictures in an instant.
Indeed! Just look what I was able to do in an instant to wonderfully tan Good Day Philadelphia reporter Steve Keeley! He’ll never get another job now!
Parents Find Teens Revealing Information Online [NBC 10]
|
|
dmac | 1:12 PM | 3 Comments
|
Feb
1
|
|
Yesterday, the news broke that a reporter from the Dover Post was fired for his blog postings. And, well, he’s updated his blog with what happened in this week’s edition of the paper:
In a truly spineless move, the newspaper I was fired from erased my byline from all of my stories in today’s edition, even deleting my photo credits. They also completely pulled my fluffy yet gonzo Super Bowl etiquette story, likely because it was obvious who wrote it. More people than ever will be reading that rag this week, so I was a little surprised at their strategy.
Whoo! Now, a little bit of searching led me to a few other places that mentioned the story. And, as usual, they’re amazing. So I’m going to play Michelle Malkin and just cut and paste and cut and paste and cut and paste until I have a full semblance of a post! You ready? I’ll let you do all the jokes yourself, since, really, it’s pretty easy. All of it is after the jump.
More »
|
|
dmac | 3:28 PM | 0 Comments
|
Jan
31
|
|
I was a little surprised to hear some blog-related news out of Dover, the town with the weekly newspaper the Dover Post. I mean, I hadn’t thought of Dover since my friend left a job there. Do they even have computers?
I kid, I kid. It turns out, that they have a blog brouhaha on their hands in Dover. A reporter for the Post, Matt Donegan, was fired by editor Don Flood for comments he wrote on his own Myspace blog.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” Flood told The News Journal of Wilmington. “I looked at the site, and sure enough it was there. Immediately afterward I verified with [Donegan] that it was his site and this is what he had written,” Flood said. “And at that point I fired him… [some of the entries were] extremely offensive and just contrary to what we believe here.”
Oh, and what were those entries? Let’s go through a list of entries I combed through said Myspace blog of one Matt Donegan:
- “Thanks for that one, Doctor [King]. Now, because of you, I feel like I’ve been backed over by a black pickup truck today. Further, because of your life, it would be considered a racial crime for me (aka ‘The Man’) to shoot up a house full of black people who don’t know how to keep their car stereos, or voices, at a normal tone in a residential area in the middle of a black night…. It’s that kind of dick move by black people that turns all other people into racists. I bet James Earl Ray was woken up by black people yelling pointlessly in the streets the night before he killed your civil rights leader.”
- “But hey, what else is new? This God awful feeling that has stayed on me all day like semen after a mid-afternoon root-pulling session.”
- “I just typed a blog about my upcoming trip to wine country - the Finger Fucking Lakes - and this no good, cunt-faced, motherfucking whore bucket MySpace deleted it.” (Editor’s Note: Ahh, the sign of a true blogger — a post about deleting a previous posting attempt.)
- “At least I inherited the mighty fallace [sic] gene, and therefore have no need for computer knowledge, or smarts of any kind for that matter.”
- “This year, I: Started to really hate my job; didn’t get laid nearly enough (not by good looking girls, anyway);”
- “That gym was a god damned zoo. I can’t believe most of those animals are allowed out of the house. There was a mini-brawl between a couple of black fans (95% of them were black), some kid said he was going to steal my camera and half of the people there smelled like pot.”
- Bonus Myspace profile excerpt: “About me: I’m a reporter, like Superman, but I’m also a Superfreak! Want to find out more? You don’t? What a jerkoff! While you’re here, try reading my blog. Most of the entries are about horseshoes or cum shots, but read it anyway.”
Oh yeah, I didn’t see this, but the News-Journal wrote that one of his clubs was the “National Organization for Men Against Amazonian Masterhood” — or NO MA’AM. Of course, you may remember that from Married With Children.
I don’t think I need to tell you that Matt Donegan is officially the bestest blogger ever. He says his blog was meant to be funny, and with all that cursing and constant attempts to get laid via print, how could it not be?
Donegan wrote just yesterday on his blog that he was fired for “exercising freedom of speech.” An excerpt:
Foul language? You bet your fucking ass there is foul language. But racial slurs? Bashing the handicapped? Come on, people. It’s sickening to think that you can’t so much as joke about someone different than you nowadays without someone pinning a KKK hat on your head and calling you “Massa.” Seriously, lighten the hell up already. Political correctness is killing society, slowly but surely.
Of course, someone getting fired for what they wrote on their Myspace page is about the stupidest thing ever. (All around. I think someone getting fired for what they wrote on Myspace makes us all stupider.)
And, hell, is one of my interests really that big pun rap where he goes “I’m sick/ You couldn’t measure my dick/ with six rulers”? You bet your ass it is. So maybe that’s a bad example.
I previously said that Daylin Leach shouldn’t get killed for having a stupid unfunny blog online and I don’t think Matt Donegan should, either. But, obviously, if you write that the Spectrum’s haunted house was “darker than Martin Luther King Boulevard in Camden,” and you think nobody’s going to get pissed if they read it, then, well, you’re stupider than a room full of honkey dropouts.
Editor’s Note: It is NOT the official position of Philadelphia Will Do that black people woke James Edgar Ray up the morning before he assassinated Martin Luther King. Philadelphia Will Do believes he was awakened by a rooster.
Reporter fired for blog posts [The News-Journal]
Matt Donegan’s blog [Myspace]
Sept. 6, 2005: Your Daylin Leach wrap-up
|
|
dmac | 2:33 PM | 59 Comments
|
Dec
20
|
|
I try not to be too serious on this site — as you probably have guessed by now — but I’d like to take time out here to give some friendly advice to a few groups of people. I don’t know if any of them will read this post, but perhaps one day I can make a difference.
- To potential psychopathic killers: Don’t put photos on your Myspace profile (like the above) of you holding guns, or saying you love Satan, or anything. It just makes you look worse.
- To the news media: Just because something is on someone’s Myspace profile doesn’t mean it’s 100% serious. For example, despite what my Myspace profile suggests in a photo, I am not stalking Russian tennis phenom Maria Sharapova.
That is all.
Web Site Shows Murder Suspect’s Gun Collection [NBC 10]
|
|
dmac | 9:13 AM | 0 Comments
|
|
|
