McFreedom

According to them, he's the only Senator whose office says "he does not comment on holds."

By the way, my guess on the Holder is Senator Stevens (R) from Alaska. He's got a personal grudge against the Porkbusters folks from that whole Bridge To Nowhere thing, and he's about to retire, so he's expendable.

New legislation to shine some sunshine into Washington has had a "secret hold" placed on it. People are now running around trying to expose the holder.

As best as I can tell, the way this works is, some Senator asks his party leader (either Mr. Frist for the Republicans or Mr. Reid for the Democrats) to hold the legislation. Many stories report that "Senate rules" "prohibit" these leaders from disclosing who the holder is. Many stories compare it to "classified" information.

WHICH rules? What are the sanctions? Senator Frist has said he "is a co-sponsor of the legislation, attempted to bring the legislation up for the vote it deserves before the August recess, and will continue to press for a vote as soon as the Senate reconvenes." He's also "vowed to get into the act, promising to try to pass the bill again when Congress returns from its break next month." So, Reid and Frist - both sponsors of the bill. One of them, by definition, has to know who the holder is (unless it was Jim Jeffords, I suppose). Can't we ask either of them, "Was it a member of your party?"

Beyond which, Frist has been most vocal on this issue. Why doesn't he tell us? I'm sure the official censure from the Senate has to be minor. He could probably even avoid that limited penalty by some vagueness. If it's truly a Democrat who's behind it, why not say something like "I'm sure no Republican would be stupid enough to block such an important bill." I can think of two reasons he won't deny it - either it's a Republican behind it, or he's engaging in quid pro quo with his colleagues across the ailse. Either way, we should in no way tolerate his suggestion that this is an important issue to him.

Pressure should be applied to Mr. Frist, if he wants so badly to "get into the act." Either he knows who it is, or he knows it's a Democrat. Either way, bloggers (and the press) should be putting a lot of pressure on him to either let us know who it is or eliminate 55% of the suspects. Allowing him to get away with being outraged but not actually helping us shows that either he's stupid, or we are.

This is, of course, not scientific - but then, most audience surveys are voluntary and have self-selection problems, anyway. Geek news site Slashdot is currently running a poll, "What is Your Least Favorite Acronym?" It offers as choice the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Record Industry Association of Americ (RIAA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB, the video game adult-content ratings agency) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA, the primary anti-software-piracy group).

As of this writing, there are 46,629 total votes. Anti-piracy groups (MPAA, RIAA and BSA) have an incredible 75% of the vote, with the RIAA taking 58% on its own. The IRS is only 16%. If you hate anti-piracy groups more than the IRS, it must be because you don't make any money and must pirate your entertainment rather than paying for it. Put another way, as a grownup with a job, if I wished I could get more music the easiest and most satisfying way to do so would be for the IRS to let me keep my money and buy more CDs with it.

Interestingly, 3% said the FBI, setting an upper barrier on the number of true-hardcore civil libertarians and wannabe crackers reading Slasdhot. Finally, 3% also said the ESRB, which means that there is a noticable demographic of Slashdot users who don't pirate significant amounts of anything and don't pay a significant number of taxes, but are annoyed at the ratings the video games they buy are assigned. Either that, or the margin of error on the poll is greater than +/- 3% (which seems likely).