Kentucky Representative Tim Couch [R] filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

Their [sic] full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.

Representative Couch says he filed the bill in hopes of cutting down on online bullying. He says that has especially been a problem in his Eastern Kentucky district.

All populist-seeming inclinations aside, “bullying” is a byproduct of any kind of free speech. Surely the lawmaker knows this? Will he also, then, “require” that people writing anything for print media, too, provide their email and physical home addresses? Imagine the rightful Hell print media would raise over that, even aside from “right to privacy”-based arguments.

The writer of this story, for example, has posted it online without any accompanying contact information beyond a work email address. Why should internet comment-posters or bloggers hold to a stricter standard? (This article, anyway, gives no indication that Couch requires a blog's original author to post his/her name and contact information — only comments are mentioned.)

Action News 36 asked people what they thought about the bill.

Some said they felt it was a violation of First Amendment rights. Others say it is a good tool toward eliminating online harassment.

Represntative Couch says enforcing this bill if it became law would be a challenge.

Enforcing the bill if it becomes law is the same as policing free speech — which like any restrictions on expressions of thought, not only doesn't work, but only tends to encourage those very thoughts.

Because the Drudge Report today posted the story, and as of now it's the third-to-top Google search result for the terms Rep. Tim Couch, kentucky (not to be confused with a well-known quarterback of the same name), I'm guessing Couch will soon withdraw the preposterous bill, despite whatever “online bullying” problems are supposedly overly prevalent in his district.

By the way, other writers may make the joke about whether Eastern Kentucky even has “online” anything. This blog will not be so impolite.

“You ever see a picture of her back then? Whew,” [Spencer] told Daily News columnist Ben Smith during a plane ride to Rochester last Friday. “I don't know why Bill married her.”

“She looks good now,” he added.

An objective glance at the former Ms. Rodham's high-school yearbook photo actually shows the opposite — well, that is, regardless of one's view of the “New York” Democrat senator now, it would be a painful stretch (ha, ha) to conclude she was “ugly” back then.

And yet somehow, this whole situation reminded me of a certain omnipresent advertisement on the internet. ...

Do we need newspapers? No. Do we need news and journalism and an informed democracy? Of course we do. But paper? Why? Too often, I hear editors pleading to save newspapers and newsrooms as their status quo is threatened by plummeting circulation, imploding advertising, impatient shareholders, multimedia youth and the Internet. Everyone is to blame for newspapers' pickle, it seems, but the newspapers themselves.

Yet perhaps the era of newspapers as we now know them is simply over. Especially since broadcast killed competitive newspapers, they have become one-size-fits-all vehicles that cannot possibly be all things to all people; they may be convenient, but they are also inefficient and shallow compared with the depth of the Internet. Newspapers are inevitably stale next to broadcast and online. They are inefficient advertising vehicles for highly targeted sales - classifieds and very local retail. Newspapers are terribly expensive to produce and distribute in a marketplace where your competition is free.

Will blogs replace the Old Media? Of course not.

Christian Pecaut, 25, a Stanford graduate who is promoting the film at the University of California, Berkeley campus, said the film is “catchy, hip,” with an “upbeat soundtrack.”

Everybody should be worried. Just on a personal basis, my son is a junior in college and I've seen him pick up a newspaper maybe three times in his entire life. He gets everything from the Internet. He hasn’t adopted the habit of reading newspapers. I know that young people historically — at least modern historically — may not pick up newspapers a lot, but they used to at least get the habit. I don’t see younger people getting in the habit of reading a newspaper. But I do see them getting in the habit of getting news from the Internet. We have to figure out how to move from print to the Internet and I don’t think newspaper companies are doing such a great job of doing that.