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McCarthyism Watch

H

hipsterdufus

This is a thread documenting some of the outrageous violations of our Civil Rights that look and feel a lot like the McCarthy era of the 1950's.

Feel free to add your own.

Here's the first entry:

Driver fights ticket for bumper sticker

By CHANDLER BROWN
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/28/06
It was 9:30 on a recent Friday night when Denise Grier saw blue lights in her rearview mirror.

She pulled over on Chamblee-Tucker Road, unaware of her infraction.

"The officer asked if I knew I had a lewd decal on my car and I thought, 'Oh gosh, what did my kids put on my car?' "

As it turns out, the decal was an anti-Bush bumper sticker Grier slapped on her 2001 Chrysler Sebring last summer. The bumper sticker — "I'm Tired Of All The BUSH—" — contains an expletive.

Full story here:
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/dekalb/stories/0328metsticker.html
 
Woman fired for Bumpersticker

Woman Claims She Was Fired for Bumpersticker
By Matthew Rothschild
March 11, 2006

Linda Laroca has a bumpersticker on her car that says, “1360 Air America Progressive Talk Radio.”

That allegedly got her into trouble with her boss at Advantage Sales and Marketing, according to an article in North County Times by Teri Figueroa.

Laroca appeared on the Ed Schultz radio show on March 10 and gave this account.

She and her boss were speaking in a parking lot when her boss noticed the bumpersticker.

“Isn’t that the Al Franken leftwing talkshow?”

Laroca says she thought maybe this was a trick question so she hesitated and then said yes.

“Don’t you know our country is on high alert?” her boss responded, according to Laroca. “For all I know you could be Al Qaeda. You’re fired.”
http://progressive.org/mag_mc031106
 
VA Nurse Investigated for “Sedition” for Criticizing Bush

VA Nurse Investigated for “Sedition” for Criticizing Bush
By Matthew Rothschild
February 8, 2006

Laura Berg is a clinical nurse specialist at the VA Medical Center in Albuquerque, where she has worked for 15 years.

Shortly after Katrina, she wrote a letter to the editor of the weekly paper the Alibi criticizing the Bush Administration.

After the paper published the letter in its September 15-21 issue, VA administrators seized her computer, alleged that she had written the letter on that computer, and accused her of “sedition.”

Here’s what her letter said.

“I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government,” it began. “The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes!” She mentioned that she was “a VA nurse” working with returning vets. “The public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she wrote, and she worried about the hundreds of thousands of additional cases that might result from Katrina and the Iraq War.

“Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence,” she wrote. “This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil. . . . We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.

Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.”

After her computer was seized, Berg wrote a memo to her bosses seeking information and an explanation.

Mel Hooker, chief of the human resources management service at the Albuquerque VA, wrote Berg back on November 9 and acknowledged that “your personal computer files did not contain the editorial letter written to the editor of the weekly Alibi.”

/snip

The ACLU of New Mexico is working in Berg’s behalf. It has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to this incident. And it is asking “at the very least” that Berg “receive a public apology from Mr. Hooker to remedy the unconstitutional chilling effect on the speech of VA employees that has resulted from these intimidating tactics,” according to a letter from the New Mexico ACLU to the VA’s Office of Regional Counsel.

Hooker refused to return a phone call, and the VA’s Office of Regional Counsel refused to comment but referred questions to public affairs.

"While VA does not prohibit employees from exercising their freedom of speech, we do ask that such activity occurs outside government premises and not during their official tour of duty,” says Bill Armstrong, a public affairs specialist for New Mexico’s VA Health Care System. “When we have reason to believe that this policy is not being adhered to, we have the obligation to review an individual's computer activity."

The VA in Washington also refused to comment on the sedition charge.

“We don’t discuss internal personnel issues,” says Phil Budahn, a VA spokesman in Washington, D.C.

Berg has an additional concern: that the VA may have got the FBI on her case.

/snip

Meanwhile, Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, has taken up the Berg case.

“I am writing to express my deep concern regarding news reports that Ms. Laura Berg . . . was investigated for sedition after writing a letter that was critical of the current Administration,” Senator Bingaman wrote to R. James Nicholson, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, on February 7. “In a democracy, expressing disagreement with the government’s actions does not amount to sedition or insurrection—it is, and must remain, protected speech.”
http://progressive.org/mag_mc020806
 
BU L L
S H I T


I hope this don't get me a ticket too! :shock:
 
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...he's DEAD!
 
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