Secret Service protects Bush from high school Bill of Rights project

It's good to know that the Secret Service has the nation's high schools covered. Not alone, mind you, but with the help of the “patriots” at Wal-Mart (the company that buys much of what it sells from China).

The Progressive reports an incident on September 20 at Currituck County High School in North Carolina. Selina Jarvis, chair of the social studies department, had assigned the senior civics and economics class a Bill of Rights project. The assignment: Take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights.

The magazine report quotes Jarvis, who says one student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

The right to dissent is supposed to be one of our rights, but when the student took his film to the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, an employee called the Kitty Hawk police who turned the matter over to the Secret Service. No big surprise there. Some yahoo in a Wal-Mart wants to make trouble for a student and turns the kid in to another yahoo at the police department. So the Secret Service got the tip, realized it would be pointelss to visit the kid, and filed it as "unfounded", right?

Wrong!

The Secret Service sent agents to the high school on September 20 and Jarvis told The Progressive that the Secret Service took his poster. The agents then called on the teacher, who explained what the project was all about.

Wasn't the poster a little suspect, the agents wanted to know. Jarvis: “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!” The agents told Jarvis that the student's poster “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted.”

Fortunately, the U.S. Attorney's elevator goes at least most of the way to the top, the student was not indicted, and the Secret Service drorpped the case.

Jarvis, quoted in The Progressive, has a 1-word description of the incident: “ridiculous”.