Quote:

the G-man said:
Hillary tries to shield "our children" from the video game plague

    A year ago Hillary Clinton said the electronic entertainment kids enjoy is "a kind of contagion," a "silent epidemic" threatening "long-term public health damage to many, many children and therefore to society." Now she wants to find out if it's a problem.

    This month a Senate committee approved a bill sponsored by the junior senator from New York that authorizes government-funded research on "the effects of viewing and using electronic media, including television, computers, video games, and the Internet, on children's cognitive, social, physical, and psychological development." Fittingly, since Clinton likens these diversions to a plague, the research would be overseen by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Last year Clinton claimed "we have this data that demonstrates there is a clear public health connection between exposure to [depictions of] violence and increased aggression." This year, explaining why she wants to spend taxpayers' money on more studies, she sounds less confident, saying "we need to better understand the effect of the constant barrage of media on our children."

    Before a single CDC grantee has begun research to confirm there's a problem, Clinton already has proposed a solution: the Family Entertainment Protection Act (FEPA), which would make it a federal crime to sell anyone under the age of 17 video games with "mature" or "adults only" ratings. FEPA also would instruct the Federal Trade Commission to evaluate the industry's rating system, conduct secret annual audits of retailers, investigate "hidden" game content, and collect consumer complaints about ratings and content descriptions.

    Upon introducing FEPA in December, Clinton and her co-sponsors claimed "parents are struggling to keep up with being informed about [video game] content." Yet all they have to do is look at the box or check titles at the Web site of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board. Newer game systems even allow automatic blocking of titles with parent-specified ratings.

    Thierer argues the threat of fines or criminal charges for failing to keep M-rated games away from minors could lead game developers to stop rating their products, in which case Congress would respond by establishing a mandatory government-run labeling system. Such content regulation would go even further than state laws restricting video games, all of which have been overturned on First Amendment grounds, largely because courts rejected Clinton's assertion of "a clear...connection" between video games and anti-social behavior.

    Clinton complains that "young people are able to purchase [violent and sexually explicit] games with relative ease." While it's true retailers usually sell M-rated games to the FTC's 13-to-16-year-old "mystery shoppers," Thierer cites survey data indicating that "92 percent of the time parents are present when games are purchased or rented." Present or not, parents have the power of the purse strings, especially with products that cost $40 to $60 each.

    As with sex and violence on television, which the mandatory but rarely used "V chip" was supposed to block, Clinton's real complaint is not that parents don't have the power they need. It's that they're not using it the way she thinks they should.



Well, maybe parents shouldn't bitch about the stuff their kids are seeing. No politician pulls an issue out of their ass, they hear from voters.
All this shit is due to whiny soccer moms who can't tell their kid not to get GTA, so they want the government to make it illegal for them to buy it.

Oh, and G-man. Your comment about stem cells was way out of line.

Bow ties are coool.