Top story down in the "Opinions" box at WaPo today is the Happy Headline: Sunshine for the Virtual Town Hall. Now of course we have a certain reaction to the words "Town Hall," but the writer would like us to take it in the generic sense.

What does he want? He wants us naked. He thinks it will make us more polite.

What he wants is abolition of anonymity in comments. What he'd like is for everybody to have to sign their full, legal name to every comment, with anonymous, or more properly pseudonymous, commenting priviliges granted by the moderator when in the moderator's opinion the commenter is a whistleblower or otherwise Worthy and In Need Of protected status to speak freely. Sort of like when Republicans talk.

The example he gives is telling:

Imagine going to a meeting about school overcrowding in your community. Everybody at the meeting is wearing nametags. You approach a cluster of people where one man is loudly complaining about waste in school spending....You notice his nametag -- "anticrat424." Between his sentences, you interject, "Excuse me, who are you?"

He gives you a narrowing look. "Taking names, huh? Going to sic the superintendent's police on me? Hah!"

In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process. But on the Internet, Mr. anticrat424 is continually elevated to the podium, where he can have his angriest thoughts amplified through cyberspace as often as he wishes. He can call people the vilest names and that hate-mongering, too, will be amplified for all the world to see.

Got any straw left, Mr. Grubisich? I could use some to mix with the horseshit in the compost bin.

What his proposal would do is indeed precisely allow "sic[cing] the superintendent's police" on commenters. What would knowing that ""anticrat424"'s real name is George Turniptruck accomplish? It would let you look up Mr. Turniptruck's qualifications to discuss improvements to educational bureaucracy and policy, true.

But it would also let you look up the fact that he works as a school janitor at East Radishburp Junior High in Henderson Tennessee. This information will also be available to Mr. Turniptruck's superintendent, indeed, and also to any possible future employers after said superintendent sacks Mr. Turniptruck's ass from the ranks of the Puke Patrol for lipping off to his betters.

What we are going to charitably assume is that Mr. Grubisich is trying to promote is comments which offer solutions to problems, or at least bring attention to problems so that other people can propose such solutions. But what does knowing a person's identity have to do with that?

The catch may be found, as usual, lower down in the article. Refering to the proposal to allow moderators to grant "anon" status, he says:

This would require sites to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. How often would such intervention be required? Not enough to require most sites to hire extra staff.

So the point is to find a solution that doesn't require creating jobs. Way to go Mr. G. Sorry, but that is just what's required, if you want "civility" of the sort you propose: full time people, in fact three of them to cover a 24 hour day and some parttimers to cover days off, vacations and the like, to hit the kill switch on rants.

If these moderators too often kill comments which just happen to, oh, let's say, tell problems which are embarassing to the Powers That Be, then you'll have a Town Hall indeed. Or you could tell newspapers to be newspapers, and tell the truth, and stop trying to be blogs, which are just different things entirely.

For starters, get some "ombudsmen" or "public editors" or whatever you want to call them, who actually do what the job is supposedly designed for: conveying reader objections to management and prompting change in the paper, rather than providing just another megaphone from management to the Great Unwashed whining about what meanies they are.