• CNET News.com: “Create an e-annoyance, go to jail” (via Metafilter)

Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

“The use of the word ‘annoy’ is particularly problematic,” says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “What’s annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else.”

Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called “Preventing Cyberstalking.” It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.”

Nope. This didn’t help. Still feeling gassy.

Luckily, I’m a gassy Canadian…

• Halifax Daily News: “We’re in the sights of America’s right”

One American pundit, Tucker Carlson, said Canada is “like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat him on the head.”

I have many things I would like to say to Mr. Carlson in response to his oh-so-cogent attack on Canada, but I have decided to leave the work to the Insulting Name Generator.

(Typing noises. Short pause. Giggles.)

Tucker Carlson? You are a “zebra bastard zebra zebra zebra zebra fucker Herpesmonkey”.

I’m certain the zebras appreciate your hard work.

• The Nation: “No Place for a Poet at a Banquet of Shame”

The poet Sharon Olds had been invited by Laura Bush to attend the National Book Festival in Washington D.C. on September 24, 2005.

Ms. Olds declined in a letter, which she also had published in The Nation.

Her letter is a beautiful, eloquent, and ultimately punishing refusal to be counted in even the smallest way as supporting the Bush government. Read it.