October 07, 2005

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Thursday, 12 Gathring 2005

Thanks and a tip to lambert at Corrente for pointing out this info-nugget:

Apparently there is still enough pork in the federal budget to pay for harassing students who take pictures showing the Drunken Cokeheaded Usurper in an unfavorable light:

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that's what happened on September 20.

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."

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

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.

[-snip-]

"Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room," she says. "Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he'd never been in any trouble."

Then they got down to his poster.

"They asked me, didn't I think that it was suspicious," she recalls. "I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!"

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.

[-snip-]

Jonathan Scherry, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., said, "We certainly respect artistic freedom, but we also have the responsibility to look into incidents when necessary. In this case, it was brought to our attention from a private citizen, a photo lab employee."

[-snip-]

Gee, we wonder what would happen if we took some pictures like that, except used the Clenis or PapaDoc Putsch or Carter or Ray-Gun as the subject, and then took it to a Wal-Mart to be developed?

We have a number of interesting thought experiments to propose in the near future. For example, we wonder what would happen if a radio host were to say this?

I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every baby born to rich white elitists in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down

Would they still hold on to their phoney-baloney job?

There may be a few more of these radical ideas floating around this webspace in the near future. Stay tuned for further bloggy goodness!

Posted by (: Tom :) at October 7, 2005 08:54 PM