Post this (stupid and trollish) comment:

“Looking at those teacher salary numbers in West Bend made me sick. $60,000 for a part time job were you ‘work’ maybe 5 hours per day and sit in the teachers lounge and smoke the rest of the time. Thanks God we won on the referendum. But whining here doesn’t stop the problem. We’ve got to get in back of the kids who have had enough of lazy, no good teachers and are fighting back. Kids like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold members of the Young Republicans club at Columbine. They knew how to deal with the overpaid teacher union thugs. One shot at a time! Too bad the liberals rip them; they were heroes and should be remembered that way.”

And get arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful use of computerized communication systems. Really … not kidding.

The owner of the blog upon which that comment was posted can kiss my ass. He willingly and altogether too quickly handed over the IP address of an anonymous commenter on his web site for a comment that compared to the daily fare at Metafilter (and sometimes at my blog) is mildly outrageous sarcasm. He can bleat all he likes about how he didn’t think they would arrest the guy, or that he thinks it’s unfair they arrested the guy, but they wouldn’t have been able to do any such thing without his help. So … congratulations, Owen, you are now a cog in the wheel of all that is wrong with this country!

And … whichever teacher it was that felt threatened enough by said comment to call the cops to complain can kiss my ass too. If they think that’s a direct threat, they have never actually been threatened by anyone. Welcome to the culture of fear! Sorry, I will not be joining you there. I have better things to do, like enjoying life.

Whether or not America can continue to claim itself a bastion of free speech will be determined by whether or not this goes to trial and if so, what the outcome of said trial ends up being. Land of the free, indeed.

I’d love to rant more about this, but I want to get my errands run early today so I will be done with them. I do want to say this:

My web site is a free speech zone. I may not always agree with what anyone says, and sometimes someone may step over the line of civility and find their comment removed (happens about once every three years), but I will never EVER just hand over someone’s IP address to authorities without a fight. Even if someone says something stupid and trollish that I can’t possibly agree with in any way, I will not be turning people’s information over to anyone without a court order, and even then, I would likely destroy the database before willingly ratting on anyone for something they say on my web site or in email. I’d actually have to be threatened specifically before I would even be concerned enough to look up the IP address in the database, and let me tell you, after having had a few real stalkers to deal with, it takes quite a bit to make me feel threatened.

I have to go shopping. I could sit here for hours babbling about this issue, but I unfortunately have other things to do. Here’s hoping someone involved in this ridiculous (and frightening) situation grows a brain cell or two and rubs them together to get a clue. I don’t have high hopes, because the US has been sliding down a slippery slope faster than a greased pig the last few years, but I am an eternal optimist, or at least try to be, so I do have some hope it will come to the proper conclusion. Only time will tell.