the unequivocal notion

The editorial in last Friday’s Idaho State Journal had an interesting tidbit from Representative-elect Steve Hartgen and his view of anonymous bloggers and commenters.

(no linky, it doesn’t appear to be on their website just images of the PDF that was forwarded to me)

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Of course the ISJ gets their little jab in there at the end — perhaps they should have asked Nixon about anonymous sources and their “credibility” or any other myriad of cases that have been looked into because of anonymous sources.

Anyway, I’d like to know how exactly soon-to-be-Rep. Hartgen plans on funding such a ridiculous idea. I mean it’s not like there is any room in the coming year’s budget to tack on some sort of fantasy-cyber squad to police the ‘tubes in Idaho. This basically smacks of censorship of the internet, something that we don’t do to the ‘tubes here in America, I frankly don’t understand why Hartgen is looking towards Cuba, Iran or China for guidance on how to manage the the internet in Idaho.

It’s easy when you’re on the majority side to say that you shouldn’t be afraid to post comments or blog anonymously — when you’re on the other side things are quite different.

If Hartgen or anyone else in Idaho politics that can’t handle the pressures of having people talk about them perhaps they need to get into another field, you know, private work vs. public work. As taxpayers we’ll be paying Hartgen’s salary and as such we can say whatever we want about him, putting our name to it or not.

Updated 12-23:

Yesterday the AP put out a story concerning Hartgen’s proposed legislation.