oppressors get upset, hilarity ensues

Let me premise this by saying I'm not one of those people who thinks we live in an honest, full blown police state, but I do care a lot about Constitutional rights (I did grow up in a town called Liberty, after all) and probably follow related news more than the average bear.

Well, sometimes our surveillance society ends up being comical as much as anything else. Check out these two stories I saw together this evening.

First, the Pittsburgh G-20 Twitter-Terrorist (I have that copyrighted, CNN!) appears to actually be under real government investigation. It wasn't enough that the police spent 16 hours searching his home for...something (the warrant wasn't real clear on that). A federal Grand Jury indicted him on a separate line of inquiry about alleged violations of the Anti-Riot Act. Yes, the guy tweeting publicly available locations of police who shouldn't even have been deployed so that protestors could avoid them is accused of inciting a riot. That's just brilliant. Next thing you know, people who advocate nonviolence are going to be locked up in jail as dangerous criminals. Oh wait, we have a great history of doing that, from this guy to that one.

The second thing I ran across was this devious sex criminal. How do I know she's devious? She's a Philadelphia Phillies fan, of course. She posted an ad on Craigslist. The Philly police, naturally having nothing else to do, read through Craigslist, found her ad, and asked her to meet a guy in a bar. They talked for awhile until some sort of implied offer for World Series tickets involved, gasp, sex. Then presto, guy replying to ad about World Series tickets turns out to be a cop, girl wanting World Series tickets turns out to be a danger to society.

Thank you Pennsylvania for removing two hardened, dangerous, violent criminals off our streets!

this is inappropriate

and way behind the times because it's a rerun but must be shared widely anyway.

Colbert's MILF comment about Dow 10,000 was absolute classic comedy.

Now that's a Market I'd Like to see Fluctuate.