I heard about this from Cee in her Political Mailing List. According to this article, two high school students at Oakland High (in Oakland, CA) were interrogated by the Secret Service after making comments about the US President in a classroom discussion.
What makes this incident particularly troublesome, in my opinion, are the following points:
- The SS were called in by the teacher
- The students were interrogated without legal counsel or parental guidance
- This happened in California
As sad as it is, the fact that they were interrogated for comments made in a classroom dicussion doesn't surprise me. You'd think schools would be considered a safe haven for freedom of speech, but the cruel fact of it is, is that public schools in the US (and most other countries) are nothing more than institutions for social indoctrination. At that level, concepts like "education" and "freedom of speech" are really purely theoretical and/or hypothetical.
It seems like BlogMatcher got its 15 minutes (well, or more) of fame on blogdex today. Right now, it's also at place 23 on Daypop Top 40 although the biggest referrer for the day is Kengo's blog.
I'm not sure what triggerred this, but it might have something to do with a minor change I made to the BlogMatcher indexing engine. All I did was to set the referer to blogmatcher.com, but that could've started sort of a referer feedback loop. There are 32 blogs that link to BlogMatcher at the time of writing, and roughly half of those blogs actually talk about BlogMatcher, while the others simply show BlogMatcher in the referer list (or not at all).
