Fleshbot: democracy in action

And while we're rocking the vote today,...

Fleshbot — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 14:46:24 EDT

And while we're rocking the vote today, let's not forget that it's time to cast your ballot for this year's Maxim Hometown Hottie from among this gallery of ten finalists. It's a tough choice, but we'll be throwing our support behind a certain candidate whose name ends in a vowel and looks good in a bikini—which unfortunately doesn't really narrow down the playing field as much as you might think. (maximonline.com)

The War On Porn: Your Tax Dollars (Not) At Work

Dashiell Bennett — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:08:37 EDT

If you think we have a pretty good job—surfing the internet for porn 19 hours a day—you'd be right. But we recently learned about two retired police officers who are also paid to look at smut online, only instead of blogging about it, they have to decide if the website owners should be prosecuted by the federal government for obscenity. Best of all ... you're paying for it! How does that work, you ask?

Their salaries are actually paid by Morality in Media, a conservative anti-porn group that likes to complain about things like hotel room TV. They got the money from the Justice Department, which has awarded them two $150,000 annual grants to run their own website ObscenityCrimes.org (helpfully linked from Justice's own government-run site.) That money came courtesy of a Congressional earmark from Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, which of course originates with your tax dollars.

Visitors to the site can report online content that they find offensive, then the two ex-cops review it and make their recommendation. (The site advises citizens not to seek out porn themselves, because without proper training you will surely become addicted and die.) It seems like a really useful and important service, until you learn that 67,000 complaints have verified and referred to the Justice Department for prosecution and the number of people actually prosecuted is exactly zero. None. Zip. Nada. In other words, Congress spent $300,000 on two guys watching porn. Now, we don't want to tell them how to spend your money, but we would have done it for half that. Maybe less, but don't tell our boss.

· Federal Effort on Web Obscenity Shows Few Results (nytimes.com, via thecarpetbaggerreport.com)

Previously: The War On Porn: Behind Enemy Lines

Vote Boob! (And Other Body Parts)

Fleshbot — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 11:20:30 EDT

As we lurch into the 2008 campaign season, let us not forget all the precious things we have that make this country great—like the privilege of being able to vote for your favorite porn sites and share wank material with fellow pervs all over the world. (You don't think those commie pinkos in the former Soviet Union were able to do stuff like that, do you?) VoteBoob is the latest Digg-style community porn rating system to come down our pipe, and by now you should have a pretty good idea how these sorts of things work: users sign up to rate and comment on smut links submitted by other users, with the idea that the good stuff will rise to the top while the dreck gets pushed down to the level inhabited by, say, Kim Kardashian and her ilk. If it all looks familiar, it may be because the site is a virtual clone of the longer-running MoSexIndex, which remains the model of how these things are done. Still, in these hectic times we can't have too many sources helping us to make some of life's most important decisions—otherwise, we'd all be voting for whoever Fox News told us to, and where would be the fun in that?

· VoteBoob (voteboob.com)
· Thumbnail: Jenna Jameson's Porn Debut, via voteboob.com)

Previously: Fantasti.cc Videos: Community Rated Smut, Eroshare, Splutr: More Social Porn, MoSexIndex, Blosker: Social Smut