Rising Temperatures
It's being alleged that ads for "Farenheit 9/11" might run afoul of campaign finance law. It is not an absurd interpretation of the law--it shows the absurdity of the law itself. If you can't run ads saying "Bush is evil," you can't run ads saying, "Come watch our movie about Bush being evil." Is this an infringement on free speech? You bet.

Somebody--maybe Gephardt, I forget--commented during the adoption of the campaign finance law that we couldn't have both free speech and fair political campaigns. True indeed. Freedom is never fair. It just so happens under the Constitution of our country that freedom is protected, not some abstract "fairness" standard where every campaign is equally funded and has equally clever ads.

It's possible Moore will get a free ride by being part of the media, which further underscores the problems with this law. Since when did the media have a greater right to free speech than the rest of us? What does one have to do to get in the protected "media" class? And if the government decides who the "press" is, how much freedom of the press do we really have?

Upholding the campaign finance law has to have been one of the stupidest and most dangerous SCOTUS precedents of recent years. There's a reason the First Amendment is First--free political speech is our first line of defense against every other abuse government might deploy. Unfortunately under current First Amendment law, political speech, the bastion of a free nation, is less protected than erotic dancing, whose benefit to society is only slightly less dubious than its relevance to "free speech" at all.

On an only slightly related note, is it just me or is "Farenheit 9/11" a really dumb title? I assume it's a takeoff on "Farenheit 451" (which I haven't read but my sister says it's good), which made sense: the temperature at which paper burns as the title for a book about bookburning. But what kind of temperature is 9/11? .8182 degrees?