Two articles just recently crossed my transom, and I think they are worth noting on this hot, sweaty afternoon leading into Yom Kippur. (My mom is laughing in Heaven right now...yes, we're having a heat wave during the High Holy Days.)

The first one is pretty damn scary. I really love Plastic.Com because it's really one of the most intelligent places on the Internet to talk politics. Yes, it skews Left because of most of the participants but we also have some really good (big and small "l") libertarian voices and even a few on the Right who are worthy opponents. Often times things you see here were originally stories or quick links by Plastards of all stripes.

Anyway, a woman whose son was killed in Iraq was arrested a couple of weeks ago for wearing a T-Shirt reading "Bush, you killed my son" and attempting to cause a commotion at an appearance by First Lady Laura Bush. She then gave an interview to the Counterpunch website, and now the shit has really hit the fan for her. She made a few choice remarks, and now she might face prosecution for terrorist threats.

She is not the only one to have to deal with this kind of official harrassment for expressing dissent against the current administration in picturesque terms. Such disparate individuals as a poster on Kuro5hin, and a 15-year-old kid, too young to vote, venting his frustration with the current Administration in a sketchbook have both been visited by agents of the US Secret Service.

Note that all this is wildly unconstitutional according to a Vietnam War-era decision of the Supreme Court, but that was a long time ago, alas. One suspects that the current court would rule more like the dissenting opinion recorded in the decision. And of course, the thought that something is "wildly unconstitutional" never stopped the administration of Bush The Younger in the past.

I am sure if Bush is re-elected I and others in the blogosphere might find ourselves dragged off to Camp Reagan in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (gratuitous Frank Zappa reference) for expressions of frustration in picturesque, sometimes even Swiftian terms. When Ari Fleischer said:

Watch what (you) say, watch what (you) do....

right after 9/11, we had no clue of just how dead serious he and the Administration he was speaking for was.

In lighter news, Jon Stewart managed to get Bill O'Reilly to hoist himself on his own petard on his own Faux News cable TV show. The punchline of this is that the transcript of this incident, which I'm linking to here, is hosted on none other than the Faux News Channel website. Boo. Yah. You got served, O'Reilly. Punk'd in public. Gotta love it.