Renee Parsons — Obama and Propornot

A few weeks prior to the November 8 Presidential vote, I began the draft of an essay expecting a future attack by the government on the First Amendment citing President Obama’s most recent mellifluous verbal assault on free speech as HRC’s campaign speeches indicated that protecting a diversity of opinion would not be a top priority in her Administration.

Now in retrospect, it appears that Obama and HRC were both, most likely in the loop and knew what was coming as they prepared the way with subtle (and not so subtle) references to taming that messy, wild. wild west otherwise known as the world wide web.…

During a visit to the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh on October 13th, the President, known for his smooth, glib reassurances so successful at placating the public, suggested that “we are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to” and that “democracy requires citizens to be able to sift through lies and distortions” and further that “those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.” The President continued that “there has to be some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests.”...

This is an important contribution to this debate. The best part about PropOrNot is at the end.

Counterpunch
Obama and Propornot
Renee Parsons, member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter, and an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC