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."

...

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. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

The seemed fishy so I went looking for mainstream press coverage. Seems like the story checks out, but the "liberal" media is very short on details. One particular detail the "liberal" media is careful not to mention is the name of the film development house that called the police. The "liberal" media is very careful not to threaten advertising revenue from sponsors. Obviously part of their left wing agenda.

1. This isn't the first time I've heard of Walmart calling the police because they are suspicious of the contents of photos they've been asked to develop. I would not suprised if they aren't specifically trained to report suspicious information they are handling. Don't have anything developed or printed there.
2. This should not have actually resulted in Agents going to a school. At some point some amount of actual reason should have kicked in here. One moron at walmart is understandable. When the Agent and the US Attorney are also morons one begins to wonder.
3. The message here is clearly that freedom of speech barely exists. We will at least try to find a reason to prosecute.

AlterNet: Wal-Mart Coverage: Civics Student...or Enemy of America?

Mologogo is a free GPS friend-tracking service that works on Nextel phones with Java and GPS, including a $60 Boost Mobile pre-paid handset.

Boing Boing: Cheap GPS friend-finding

Yahoo Inc. said Wednesday it will bar chat rooms that promote sex between minors and adults and restrict all chat rooms to users 18 and older.

The changes come under an agreement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning.

``This is about protecting kids,'' Bruning said.

Protecting kids my ass. When you completely eliminate kid's ability to use a service you haven't protected them, you've restricted their freedom. You're punishing them for something somebody else might do. Whats even more annoying is that these journalists think that the bigger story is that they banned the sex chat rooms. Its obvious that these attourneys, the journalists, and the readership are all completely oblivious to the idea that teenagers are people who might have fundamental rights that they are infringing in their zeal to protect them. This is the first time I recall seeing Eliot Spitzer do something I felt was over the top.

Yahoo bans all minors from all chat rooms.

Stephen Ulph, an analyst at the US-based Jamestown Foundation, said the letter presented a number of problems. There had been no clarification as to how it was intercepted and no independent corroboration of its authenticity. He also found it remarkable that a letter between two al-Qaeda leaders should spell out strategy in such an explanatory way, as if these basic details were the subject of doubt.

And here are still more people who don't buy it...

FT.com / Home UK - Experts query authenticity of ‘al-Qaeda letter’

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GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself

Mr. Bush has said he wants to nominate someone in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- a Supreme Court justice who will interpret the law, not make it. But what exactly does that mean?

In a new book Justice Stephen Breyer, often at odds with Scalia and Thomas, outlines his judicial philosophy, and makes the argument that his is in fact a more democratic philosophy. The book is called Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution.

Strict Constructionalism makes sense to me as a legal theory. I'm interested in smart explanations of other approaches. Breyer has recently been poking at Scalia. Apparently he has written a book with the specific intent of presenting an alternate political philosophy. This link is to an hour long recording on it.

NPR : Supreme Court Justice Breyer on 'Active Liberty'

A federal judge promised a quick decision Wednesday on a motion to temporarily stop election officials from requiring photo identification at the polls.

This is interesting. Georgia now requires a photo ID to vote in person. As the ID costs $20, some people are calling it a poll tax. Supporters argue that if you don't want to pay the tax you can vote absentee. Detractors argue that voter fraud only occurs absentee and they don't know of any cases of in person voter fraud, so there is no point.

Georgia Poll Tax

One clever MySpace user looking to expand his buddy list recently figured out how to force others to become his friend, and ended up creating the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. In less than 24 hours, "Samy" had amassed over 1 million friends on the popular online community.

BetaNews | Cross-Site Scripting Worm Hits MySpace

Now here's something curious: The Map from the NYT shows the various increases in bankruptcy rates on a county by county basis. The results were not exactly what I would have suspected, given how various counties voted in the last Presidential election:

Is it just me, or are is the map above surprisingly similar to those red/blue maps we saw so much of right after the election?

The really curious thing is that the Gore voters from 2000 are filing for less bankruptcies since 2000, while the Bush voters are filing for more. (Does that make any sense to you?)

The Big Picture: Insolvency Epidemic

Read this whole letter - and see if you can discern what's going on here. Leaving Iraq anytime in the next 5 years will be very very bad.

This is an odd letter. Basically:

Please don't get pissed off cause we think you're cool and all but you can't see the forrest for the trees, so stop doing what you are doing right away. Also, could you please document all your processes so we can fire you are take over your operation? Oh, and if you happen to have $100,000 could you help a brother out? BTW, we think your web site is totally COOL!!!11 I've enclosed a copy of my latest spoken word album. If you could host it that would rock.

The cryptic signoff must mean that they don't trust their couriers to keep their mouths shut about who they are delivering messages for.

I said last month that Zarqawi was undermining Al'Q's broder strategic interests by declaring war on the Shia. Al'Q's leadership agrees with ME?! Now THATS something I never thought I would say!

I must say I was impressed with this gem of wisdom:

Judiciousness precedes the courage of the courageous which is second. And when the two blend in one free soul it reaches everywhere in the heavens.

I might offer the same advice to the Bush Administration on Iraq... And Mr. Bush, if you are reading, and you happen to have $100,000 lying around, I could really use it.

All joking aside...

1. America is going to leave Iraq. Sooner or later, it will happen, and the result will be inevitable.
2. An Islamic theocratic state is going to be established there.
3. People involved with the state will be connected directly to Al'Q.
4. It may be a greater threat to the region then Saddam's Iraq was.

This seems the most likely outcome to me. I am not happy to hear that Al'Q is getting exactly what they want. But I don't see how this is going to pan out differently.

The question is how much power will Al'Q have in the resulting state. Hopefully little, and Al'Z will continue to screw it up. The character of the resulting state in Iraq will have a huge impact on the future of world, and while people like Al'Z and the Iranians and the Americans are trying to influence it, it really comes down to the Iraqis. I hope Bush has read them well, but I fear that three very different cultures are easy to tear apart.

Having said that, I detect weakness in Zawahari. He sees the future of his movement in Iraq. That puts Al'Z in a very powerful position vis-a-vis Al'Q.

Letter from Zawahari to Zarqawi