Uncle John's Band

As noted below, Attorney General John Ashcroft is getting tough on crime.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal's Vin Suprynowicz looks at how Uncle John's favorite piece of legislation, The PATRIOT Act, is being used in ways that it wasn't supposed to be.

One highlight/lowlight Suprynowicz writes about:

David Socha, a 17-year-old on his way to Hawaii, was arrested in July at Logan Airport in Boston and charged with a felony for having a note in his gym bag which read: "(Expletive) you. Stay the (expletive) out of my bag you (expletive) sucker. Have you found a (expletive) bomb yet? No, just clothes. Am I right? Yea, so (expletive) you."

No, the young man's outrage over the suspension of his Fourth Amendment rights was not particularly prudent -- though I'm glad to see some of the spirit of John and Samuel Adams survives.

But should he really have been arrested and charged with "making a terrorist threat"? What threat? And what has happened to our First Amendment rights? Young Mr. Socha's protected political statement was zipped inside his own luggage.