Matt Rothschild over at the Progressive website has another one of those stories that just makes you want to yell – but not too loud, someone might hear and report you:
On September 20, the Secret Service paid a call to Selena Jarvis, a high school social studies teacher in North Carolina, to discuss a poster one of her students had made illustrating the right to dissent. Details below the fold…
Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”
The student’s made a critical error in his plot against Amurka, however: He had the photos developed at Wal-Mart, where a loyal patriot dropped the dime (boy, I’m dating myself there! What phrase is used today?) on him:
An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.
The Secret Service came to call, took the child’s poster from the room (unknown by the teacher), questioned the boy, and then questioned the teacher:
“They asked me, didn’t I think that it was suspicious,” she recalls. “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!” [You gotta LOVE that comeback!! – KP]
At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted,” she says.
No one was indicted, of course; just another day of erosion of our constitutional freedoms in Amurka.
Didn’t we spend 40 years fighting the cold war – including Korea and Vietnam – because we didn’t believe in this kind of thing? WTF!?!?
This individual has failed to show total and unending allegiance to King George II. He must now be assimilated. All hail King George. < bowing >
become total toadies to Bushit?
I guess what we didn’t believe in was communist or liberal government police states.
It’s clearly obvious that a conservative police state is necessary to protect the fragile little minds of the conservatives.
After all, people with bombs have ideas. So everyone with ideas must be suspect!
(sheesh, where is all this “cynicism about government” I’ve heard so much about? All I see are sheep flocking to the kool-aid bowls. But don’t ask me. My Governor Pawlenty (R-freakin crazy, MN) is one of two governors backing Bush’s push for posse comitatus repeal so federal troops can police citizens in more situations. Some can’t wait for the police state to come to fruition)
.
To overseas projects :: Germany – Italy – Japan – South Korea – Philippines – Israel – Europe – Central & South America. We are even giving Russia and China a shot at democracy and freedom.
Another deficit: we exported Human Rights, International Treaties and Global Terror.
In our Homeland we have Security: 911 attacks, Patriots Act I, II & III, hurricane Katrina & Rita, Bush asks for Martial Law Powers in case of a flu attack …
“I rest my case.”
▼ ▼ ▼
…so very ugly.
Anybody standing up for this kid and/or the teacher? Politicians of any stripe? No?
I need to renew my membership in the ACLU, as soon as the bankruptcy discharge comes through.
you know… This makes me absolute now.
Fuck the DNC… my money is going to the ACLU – and I’ll write and let me “silent leaders” know this, too.
Cause they sure as hell don’t do anything about King George and what he is doing to us and KIDS!
For fuck’s sake this is awful.
What ever happened to it? (Common sense, that is.) Doesn’t someone along the line, like say the local police, say “whatever, this is stupid.” I mean, shouldn’t the Secret Service be busy with actual threats and not thumbtacks in the Preznit’s head on a poster?
Don’t look for patterns.
Any progress on the warrant Pat Robertson thumbtacked to the head of Hugo Chavez, Department of Homeland Crackdown? Or did that act of terrorism prove, on investigation, a genuine endorsement of political freedoms and individual rights by a card-carrying innocent?
A friend’s nephew got in major trouble at school.
Some alternative lyrics to -Glory,glory hallelujah.
What I remember from the kidstuff is:
Glory,glory hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Smacked her on the bean
With a rotten tangerine
And truth goes marching on
This kid had another alternative-
Met her at the door with a loaded 44
He got that line from his mother,and it was written down on a piece of paper and someone nabbed it and he was expelled for ‘terrorist threats’.
I kinda find it silly,however I would not take kindly to that kind of thing in my own household, it was just kidstuff.
School kids chanted the Lizzy Borden chant for years and there was no repeat of the brutal axe murders. So I’m thinking childrens chant are not the cause of violent murder.