This made my day
Direct quote from the just published REAGAN DIARIES.
The entry is dated May 17, 1986.
A moment I’ve been dreading. George brought his ne’re-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I’ll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they’ll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.
Photographer detained in NY wants apology
If you’ve recently purchased a Fotosniper, you might not want to bring it..well..anywhere. If just bringing a “point and shoot” camera got one man detained, there’s no telling what may happen if you were to say stake out a government building or trainstation with this thing.
Apparently, 27-year-old photographer Ben Hider was detained for taking pictures of the West-chester County courthouse in White Plains, NY.
Hider said three armed police officers instantly surrounded him, frisked him, emptied his pockets and then detained him in a room for two hours while lecturing him about his citizenship and the terror threat in America.
The police played the “9-11 card” saying that the officers were just doing their job. Turns out a NYC officer recently detained someone for taking pictures outside Grand Central Station. Sure the White Plains guy got an apology and NYC police force is being sued for their actions but will that stop this from happening in the future? My guess is: NO.
I had no idea that I was running the risk of being detained last week when I took photos of MARTA trains (check the Atlanta photos section). I understand that tensions are high and that we are “living in a new world” post 9-11 but detaining tourists for taking pictures is uncalled for. Now that MSN, Google, and Yahoo provide high-res satellite photos of every major building in the world (except for the White House), why would someone risk exposure to do reconnaissance on foot? This should make you think twice before taking pictures of buildings, trains, or any other area that people frequent. It’s almost as if they are saying “buy the postcard.”
Source: The Journal News
Student learns about post 9/11 Bill of Rights
A high school senior last month learned a valuable life lesson that is not documented in any textbook while he was working on his civics project. The lesson that he learned was that the Bill of Rights have been limited post 9/11. According to the online political magazine, The Progressive:
[A teacher] had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights. 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.”
Now, it has been a while since I’ve taken a Civics class but this seems like a reasonable display of the Freedom of Speech covered by the First Ammendment to me. The student’s mistake is that he took the photo to Wal-Mart for developing and they freaked out. The photo lab called the police who freaked out and turned matters over to the Secret Service. The Secret Service then confiscated the poster from the teacher, pulled her out of class and grilled her about her “terrorist student.” This “terrorist” was a member of the homecoming court that had never been in trouble and was simply doing a school project. The Secret Service told her that it would be up to the U.S. Attorney to decide if the student should be indicted. INDICTED?!
The irony in this story is great. While doing a project on the Bill of Rights, the student learns that there ARE NO BILL OF RIGHTS! The government is free to intimidate you at will and destroy any form of speech that they feel “threatens national security.” If you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s probably because I’ve been hauled to Git-Mo in the middle of the night for this post.
Source: The Progressive
Drying Out
It’s been over two weeks since Hurricane Katrina struck the gulf coast. Parts of the south shore are still under water and 40% or more of the north shore is without power or phone service. It’s amazing to think that this time last week people were still stranded downtown. I am currently writing disaster recovery plans for some applications at BellSouth and it amazes me that the city of New Orleans did not have a plan. I’m sure they did have a plan but why wasn’t it followed? It seemed to me that when the levee broke, the top officials down there started running around with their hands in the air. It took a day before they figured out how they would seal the breech. It took over a day before the massive rescue effort was enacted. People were being rescued from their flooded homes and taken to a rendezvous point to wait to be rescued again. People had been anticipating a Katrina-like storm for as long as I can remember. Why then did they not have a plan in place to coordinate everyone? I really believe everyone involved in the rescue effort had the best idea on how to proceed. If they would have stepped back and followed the plan, maybe things would have gone smoother. I hope that when the rebuilding effort begins we won’t see a similar scene take place. A lot of thought needs to go into these things. Americans need to ask themselves if this could happen anywhere else. This is a great time to go through EVERY disaster scenario and make sure that there are procedures in place and duties are assigned so that when the next disaster strikes (and it will), more people will get out alive.
Aaah-nold terminates Davis
Everyone’s predictions were correct. Arnold won by a landslide in the California recall election. Here’s part of Arnold’s campaign that you DIDN’T hear:
