Monday, August 20, 2007

Illegal $80k T-shirts and Bush's super secret crowd control Manual

Freedom of Speech? Self expression? Not in George W. Bush's Amerikkka.......at least for a little while. Nice try Georgie, but your nemsis the ACLU is on the case. You won't be hearing about this story on ACLU-bashing Faux News anytime soon
Check this out, from Pandagon's website:

Feds pay $80,000 over anti-Bush T-shirts, contents of Presidential Advance Manual revealed
15 Comments Posted by Pam Spaulding in Bush Admin, Legal Issues
The Bush administration assault on freedom of speech continues, but the government ended up on the short end of the stick this time. Nicole and Jeffery Rank of Corpus Christi, Texas, were handcuffed and tossed out of an Independence Day rally at the West Virginia state Capitol, where Bush delivered a speech. Their “crime”?

The front of the Ranks’ homemade T-shirts bore the international symbol for “no” superimposed over the word “Bush.” The back of Nicole Rank’s T-shirt said “Love America, Hate Bush.” On the back of Jeffery Rank’s T-shirt was the message “Regime Change Starts at Home.”
A White House spokesman said the $80K settlement was “not an admission of wrongdoing.”
The other news about the settlement, however, is that some of the contents of a purported “sensitive” Presidential Advance Manual have been revealed, which, as ABC’s Blotter reports, “laid out the White House’s meticulous efforts to protect the president and his public image from dissent.” Some nuggets:

“As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event,” the manual instructs. The government turned over a heavily redacted version of the manual to the ACLU in the course of the lawsuit.
The first step to keeping demonstrators out of events, the manual tells the president’s event staff, is to encourage the Secret Service to “ask the local police department to designate a protest area…preferably not in view of the event site or the motorcade route.”

Inside the event space, the manual advises, White House advance personnel should preposition “rally squads” that can swarm any protesters at the event and “use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform.” The rally squads can be formed using “college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities,” the manual notes.

The document is available on the ACLU web site.

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