Obama and Time Travel

Sheriff Joe Arpaio dragged out the birther fantasy yet one more time yesterday, releasing a report that found fault with Barack Obama's birth documents.   I understand that paranoia is insatiable, and if you want to believe that a birth certificate has been forged or altered, no amount of evidence to the contrary will change your mind.  But I wonder if the paranoia is up to embracing time travel as part of the President's clever deception?

An announcement of Barack Obama's birth was printed in The Honolulu Advertiser on August 13, 1961.   The same appeared the day after in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.   These newspapers were in the hands of thousands of people back then - there's no doubt that these announcements of the future President's birth existed back then.

How could Barack Obama and his supporters have contrived to make that happen, if in fact, as Arpaio and the birthers contend, the President was in fact not born in the newly minted state of Hawaii in 1961?

How about time travel?   It's 2007, and Obama realizes that he better do something to make sure his authenticity as a citizen born in America can never be called into question.  So he or someone in his staff contacts a friend at the MIT Media Lab - or maybe at that European nexus of cutting-edge physics, CERN - and prevails upon this contact to give the Obama campaign access to a top-secret time machine.   Obama sends a trusted associate - could be Robert Gibbs - on a mission back in time: go back to 1961, and place those bogus ads in the newspapers.  The future press secretary knows how to get an announcement into a newspaper, even back then, and succeeds.

Is that too much to believe?  Well, there's always the possibility that the President's mother, or someone on hand back in 1961, was clairvoyant, looked into the future, saw that the baby would someday be President, and placed the lying announcement right there and then.

Too bad Medium, Journeyman, and Lost are off the air.  Arpaio and friends could have the makings of a pretty good script.

Gibbs, Egypt, Internet Freedoms, and the US

Good to hear Robert Gibbs talking about the necessity of  "Internet freedoms" as a basic human right in Egypt.  This applies not only to Egypt, but every nation in the world, in our own right here in the USA.

Attempts of totalitarian and dictatorial governments to control their people by controlling their information usually fail, and even when they do not, they weaken the government attempting to impose such controls.  Samizdat video weakened the Soviet Union in the 1980s.   The White Rose did not overthrow the Nazi government, but they bravely defied it and put out the truth for several years with early photocopying machines.   The Iranian government was shaken by its people in an early use of social media in 2009.  China would do well to heed these lessons, too.

As should our own government.  The FCC has no business imposing any kind of regulation on the Web, and their fines of television stations for broadcasting content the FCC deems "indecent" are in blatant violation of our First Amendment.

Egypt does not have a First Amendment, and Gibbs and Hilary Clinton in an earlier statement today were wise to remind it about the importance of freedoms of speech, assembly, and the Internet.   We would be wise to heed that advice ourselves.

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For further analysis and discussion of the importance of Internet freedoms and social media, see my New New Media.

Press Secretary Gibbs Unwilling to Talk About Obama's Position on Fairness Doctrine

I didn't want to let this week end without noting White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' refusal to talk at yesterday's daily press briefing about Obama's position on the Fairness Doctrine.

Here's a little background and upshot:

1. The Fairness Doctrine was introduced in 1949, became a bulwark of FCC policy, and was found constitutional by a unanimous Supreme Court decision - Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC - in 1969. The Doctrine required broadcasters to provide time for contrasting views on controversial public policy issues.

2. I think the Fairness Doctrine was wrong and unconstitutional from the beginning. The Constitution - in particular, the First Amendment - requires government to make "no law" abridging or restricting or regulating freedom of speech and press. A requirement to be "fair" or present contrasting views is clearly an abridgment or restriction of the press's rights. I therefore think the Red Lion decision was one of the worst, most destructive Supreme Court decisions in the nation's history regarding the First Amendment and the freedoms it protects.

3. The FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 as an "intrusion by government" that "restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters". (Red Lion did not insist upon a Fairness Doctrine - the Supreme Court merely said that it was not unconstitutional.)

4. Senator Schumer (D-NY) and others are talking about reinstating the Fairness Doctrine.

President Obama's position on the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine is thus crucial - it is unlikely to be reinstated if he is against it. On the other hand, if he favors its reinstatement, preventing that will be difficult indeed, with the Democratic numbers in the Senate.

This will be Obama's first chance to come out strongly for the First Amendment. It has received a beating the past 16 years - Clinton and Bush 43 administrations were equally unwilling to respect its provisions (see my Flouting of the First Amendment for details). Just in the past few days, NBC refused to air a Superbowl commercial, in fear of FCC fines (see video below).

Obama's saying nothing about the Fairness Doctrine now is ok. But the time may soon come when silence will be deafening to the rights that most protect our freedom - the right to say, write, broadcast as we please, free of government supervision.