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

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