Uncle John's Band

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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.