WTF? No more tip jar?

I just clicked over to my tip jar and read this:

Important message: Beginning December 11, 2008, Amazon.com will not support payments through the Amazon Honor System.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? What's this about? I can only find one news story about it. OK, so how are we supposed to beg for money now?

I'm blaming the Bush administration. Maybe terrorists or drug gangs (or both) were using Honor System payments, and so the Justice Department put the squeeze on Amazon, thus putting an end to the tip jar beloved by bloggers.

UPDATE: Wait a minute, forget about terrorists, I blame Eliot Spitzer:

Amazon.com is fighting Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to require out-of-state online companies to collect New York state sales tax on goods they send to addresses in New York — the most recent cash-strapped state to propose the tax.
Spitzer estimates in his budget that the state would gain $47 million by requiring Internet giants such as Amazon.com to collect state sales tax.

That douchebag!

I realize, of course, that there is a certain post hoc, ergo propter hoc quality to my blaming Eliot Spitzer's February shakedown for the December disappearance of the tip jar, but I'm not in a logical mood right now. What a Scrooge-like thing to do, killing the tip jar two weeks before Christmas!

Well, ho ho ho . . . wanna buy a T-shirt?

UPDATE II: VodkaPundit: "This ought to make the Sitemeter fiasco look like tender kisses on the beach."