#207 - Social Conservatives and Fiscal Conservatives Make Strange Bedfellows

From a recent post to the Harvard Republican Blog, via Helpful Reader Eric:

John Ashcroft's War on Porn

Next time someone tries to sell you the line that the Bush Administration's meteoric spending growth is mostly for Homeland Security, remember that agencies like the FBI don't spend all their time stopping terrorists. Sometimes, they engage in idiocy like this:

In this field office in Washington, 32 prosecutors, investigators and a handful of FBI agents are spending millions of dollars to bring anti-obscenity cases to courthouses across the country for the first time in 10 years. Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs such as HBO's long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains.

The above quote is from an excellent article in the Baltimore Sun. Here's another tasty bit:

Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the division in charge of obscenity prosecutions at the Justice Department, says officials are trying to send a message and halt an industry they see as growing increasingly "lawless."

"We want to do everything we can to deter this conduct" by producers and consumers, Oosterbaan said. "Nothing is off the table as far as content."

It is unclear, though, just how the American public and major corporations that make money from pornography will accept the perspective of the Justice Department and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Any move against mainstream pornography could affect large telephone companies offering broadband Internet service or the dozens of national credit card companies providing payment services to pornographic Web sites.

Cable television, meanwhile, which has found late-night lineups with "adult programming" highly profitable, is unlikely to budge, and such companies have powerful friends.

Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, which offers "hard-core" porn on the Hot Network channel (at $11.99 per film in Baltimore), was co-chair of Philadelphia 2000, the host committee that brought the Republican National Convention to Philadelphia. In February, the Bush campaign honored Comcast President Stephen Burke with "Ranger" status, for agreeing to raise at least $200,000 for the president's re-election effort.

So Bush's corporate cronyism and voracious appetite for fundraising will probably save good old fashioned profitable American porn...but only after the Justice Department spends several million dollars paying prosecutors, investigators, and agents to look at it.