What Sequence of Assassinations

[funkedup]

... is required to make Powell the President and Rice the VP?

[Tarmac]

Uhhh....


Big Brother is watching you.

[Furious]

they are looking for you right now.

[Charon]

Actually Funked, you could receive a visit by the secret service for such a statement, and likely would if anybody reported it. Just like the high school kid recently. Harsh but true.

Charon

[AWMac]

Aha! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!  

[Raubvogel]

*looking feverishly through phone book for nearest Secret Service office*

[funkedup]

Puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeeese

There's nothing illegal about discussing the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.

Here's the order:

The Vice President Richard Cheney
Speaker of the House John Dennis Hastert
President pro tempore of the Senate Ted Stevens
Secretary of State Colin Powell
Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld
Attorney General John Ashcroft
Secretary of the Interior Gale A. Norton
Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman
Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans
Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao
Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy G. Thompson
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Melquiades Rafael Martinez
Secretary of Transportation Norman Yoshiro Mineta
Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham
Secretary of Education Roderick Paige
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Anthony J. Principi

Rice is not on the list.  But the new President gets to nominate the VP so she would still have a chance at the job.

[Ripsnort]

Lets go with
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld
Attorney General John Ashcroft

That outta make them liberals squeal like piggies! hehehehehe!

[funkedup]

Ashcroft would probably do less damage as VP than as AG.

[miko2d]

funkedup: There's nothing illegal about discussing the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.

 Sure. After spending 24 hours chanied to a radiator in a holding cell you would be released. Happened to my acquaintences once when they accidentally gave reason to believe they had a bomb on a plane. It was a decade ago.

 miko

[Tarmac]

Well, if they do show up be sure to ask them about their new non-treasury status.  I hear they love to talk about that.

[Charon]

Hey, I like a good laugh as much as anybody. Maybe one of us should contact the Secret Service and just see how funny it really is. I would bet $10 that Funked would at least get a phone call, and that the humor would be a bit thin at that point.

Secret Service Agents question a Bellbrook High School student for wearing a controversial t-shirt. The shirt has a picture of President Bush on it and the words, "not my president." Because this issue is so sensitive, even we don't know the students name.

But we can tell you this whole thing was brought to the attention of school administrators after two students came forward and complained. According to the Assistant Principal, the student had worn it before and the shirt didn't cause any problems until cross hairs appeared on the President's forehead. The Assistant Principal confiscated the shirt, called the FBI and agents then called the secret service.

From that point, the Secret Service took over the investigation and met with the student and essentially treated the situation as a potential threat on the president. There are more than 800 students at Bellbrook High School and the Assistant Principal says they're all good kids, but he's especially proud of two of them.

They tell us we're all responsible for homeland security, and they did what they're supposed to do and we're very proud of them for taking the stance that they did.

or, how about this one?

A.J. Brown, a 19-year-old freshman at Durham Tech, was thanking God it was Friday. It was 5 p.m., the school week was over, and in an hour she'd be meeting her boyfriend to unwind.

Then: Knock, knock ... unexpected guests at Brown's Duke Manor apartment. Opening the door, she found a casually dressed man, and a man and woman in what appeared to be business attire. Her first thought, she says, was, "Are these people going to sell me something?"

But then the man in the suit introduced himself and the woman as agents from the Raleigh office of the U.S. Secret Service. The other man was an investigator from the Durham Police Department.
"Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material," the male agent said, according to Brown. Could they come in to have a look around?

"Do you have a warrant?" Brown asked. They did not. "Then you're not coming in my apartment," she said. And indeed, they stayed outside her doorway. But they stayed a while--40 minutes, Brown estimates--and gave her a taste of how dissenters can come under scrutiny in wartime.

And all because of a poster on her wall...

Brown and fellow activists often discuss government encroachments on free speech and political organizing, she says, as do some of her favorite hip-hop artists. She loves her music--and that may have been what sparked the turn of events that brought the Secret Service to her door.

Brown suspects it began with the noise complaints. On Oct. 22, a Monday evening, she stayed up late playing some new CDs for her boyfriend. By her own admission, she was playing them too loud. Around midnight, a Durham police officer came by to tell her to turn it down, and she obliged.

Two nights later, someone from Duke Manor called in another noise complaint, and again a police officer came to Brown's door. This time, she says, her music wasn't playing at an offensive volume. The police officer speculated that the call may have been about someone else's stereo. During this visit, and unlike the first, the officer had a full view of the wall that faces Brown's front doorway, a detail that would become relevant two days later: On that wall hung The Poster.

Brown got it at an "anti-inauguration" protest in Washington, D.C. Distributed to hundreds of activists, it depicts George W. Bush holding a length of rope against a backdrop of lynching victims, and reads: "We hang on your every word. George Bush: Wanted, 152 Dead"--a reference to the number of people executed by the state of Texas while Bush was governor. Brown believes that the message caused the Durham policeman who paid the second visit to her apartment to recommend a third.

On Friday, Oct. 26, two Secret Service agents, along with Durham police investigator Rex Godley, came to Brown's apartment. Special Agent Paul Lalley, who did most of the talking, spoke first. "Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material, or something like that, in your apartment," he said, according to Brown. Then the female agent asked if they could come inside.

When Brown pressed them for a warrant and refused to allow them in, she says, "They started to talk to me about how, 'We're not here to take you away or put you in jail.' They were like, 'We need to follow up on every report we get.' I said, 'That's understandable, but how would you even know what's in my apartment?'

"They just said they had gotten information from some place," she says. She speculates that it was from the police officer who visited for the second noise complaint.

Godley, the Durham police investigator, won't say where the authorities got their tip about Brown's poster. "The only thing I can tell you is that we were assisting the Secret Service on one of their cases," he says.

Lalley referred questions about the visit to Special Agent Craig Ulmer, who heads the Secret Service office in Raleigh.

"We went in the first place because we received a tip about a threat against the president," Ulmer says. He refuses to identify the source of the tip, except to say that it was a "concerned citizen" and not a law enforcement officer. It's Secret Service policy to keep such sources confidential.

"We can't discuss who gives us information like that, because we want people to bring us information," Ulmer says. "If we burn our bridges, so to speak, we're not going to get help from the public."

Ulmer added that the poster "was in plain view, even from the window, so anyone could have tipped us off."

The agents persisted in their effort to get a peek inside the apartment. "They were being friendly, trying to get me to let them in," Brown says. After a while, Brown called her mother, an IBM employee who is in the Army Reserve. "She said to absolutely not let them in," Brown says. Not sure what else to do, Brown passed the phone--with her mother still on the line--to one of the agents.

The standoff continued, and eventually the agents explained why they had come by: "We already know what it is; it's a target of Bush," one of them said, according to Brown--apparently a reference to the poster. She informed them it was no such thing. They then said, "Well, it's Bush hanging himself." Nope, she told them.

Finally, Brown relented a bit, agreeing to open the door and show them her poster wall. "They looked in, and the lady was like, 'Ohhhh, that's not that bad.'" The male agent added, "We've seen worse."

Still, Brown's brush with the authorities wasn't over. "Since they were just gawking at my wall, I decided to explain it."

The wall features Brown's favorite art and mementos: a high-school photo project showing the perils of smoking cigarettes; a Pink Floyd poster ("It has that phrase, 'Mother should I trust the government,' so I had to get it"); posters for two Japanese cartoon shows; several pictures she took at protests and rallies; and a headband with "Democracy" on it. And, of course, the Bush-as-hangman poster.

Having seen the poster, Brown says, the agents questioned her further, asking: "Do you have any Afghanistan stuff in your apartment, or anything pertaining to that? Any pro-Taliban stuff?"

"I kept saying no," Brown says, "and I was like, personally, I think the Taliban are a bunch of amazinhunks." With that, the investigator and the agents bid her adieu.


Brown was temporarily rattled by the visit from the Secret Service, she says, but the poster's still up, and she's still committed to her activism. "I'm definitely going to be vocal," she says. "If things get really hairy and they decide to come after activists, then I'd have to just grit my teeth and go through it."

Ulmer rejects the notion that Brown was targeted because of her politics, and he insists that the Secret Service would have checked this tip out even if it had come in before the events of Sept. 11. "We were doing our job in this particular case," he says, "and I don't think we could have done it any better."

"The Secret Service takes all threats against the president seriously, and we go out to check on every one. A citizen thought that there was a threat, and we went and talked to Ms. Brown and we found that there was not a threat." The poster, he says, was "misconstrued" by the tipster. "So it's not a big issue. The issue is that someone misinterpreted some writing."

But when "some writing" on a poster is investigated by federal authorities, constitutional issues come into play. Some legal analysts are warning that the new national security vigilance, and new laws passed to counter terrorism, might impinge on free speech in big and small ways.

"A poster of Bush, even if he's in a noose, is protected speech during wartime or peacetime," notes Alex Charns, a Durham attorney who specializes in civil rights. Such speech is all the more protected, he points out, when it's displayed within a person's home.

"If a trained police officer doesn't know the difference between political speech and a threat to the president, then we're all in trouble," Charns says. "If the Secret Service has nothing better to do than check on political posters, that's a bad sign."

I mean, we could find out how funny this really is But I, for one, won't be naming any names.

Charon

[ra]

What's so great about Powell and Rice?

[Ripsnort]

Originally posted by ra
What's so great about Powell and Rice?

Sounds like an oriental dish at the Thai restaurant I visit...

[midnight Target]

On a lighter note....

My buddy was offered a defense contractor job.. you know, working inside one of those clean rooms and requiring a security clearance..

He was fresh out of college and sharing a house with some other guys when the FBI came around to "get some background".

While interviewing the first guy the FBI agent asked "Does _____ show any homosexual tendencies?" (he isn't gay BTW). His roomate looked the agent in the eye and said "Well, lets just say I let the soap stay on the shower floor if I drop it."

The agent was not amused.



Yes he still got the job.