Secret Service Turned Away From Newspaper Office

[kskiska]

The Los Angeles Times refused to allow a Secret Service agent to speak to an editorial cartoonist who drew a man pointing a gun at President Bush, the newspaper reported Tuesday.

The agent went to the Times office Monday to speak with Michael Ramirez, whose cartoon in Sunday's Opinion section showed a man labeled "politics" pointing a gun at Bush in a background labeled "Iraq."

Ramirez said it was a takeoff on a famous Vietnam War photograph of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong officer.

(snip)

Karlene Goller, a lawyer for the Times, met with the agent in the newspaper's security office and told him he could not speak to Ramirez. After some discussion, the agent left.

Goller said she was told by a Secret Service official that the inquiry was routine.

The agent later declined to discuss the incident by telephone with a Times reporter.

An Associated Press call Tuesday to the Secret Service office in Los Angeles was not returned.

Ramirez said the agent called him Monday and asked if he could visit. Ramirez said he thought the call was a hoax and said yes.

"So when he showed up I was completely surprised," he said.

more…
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/07/22/state2101EDT0230.DTL

[Kolesar]

1. How about the one with *shit's neck in a noose of the "Sixteen Words"

I wish I could find the link from that one. * had a noose around his neck of the sixteen words in the SOTU speech.

[berry]

7. Go to the cartoon thread in the Meeting Room.

Conrad's amazing cartoon is there with a lot of others. I think this week's title is "you lie, we die". Don't miss it.

[trumad]

2. Ya gotta love the Publicity for this

If the weiners at the white house would have just kept their whiney ass'es shut this would have blown away...

[cboy4]

3. OMG! We really are living under a dictatorship,

and the KGB just showed up at a newspaper. What's next? Will any of us at DU be dragged away to prison for expressing our views about this corrupt administration?

[Dhalgren]

4. If any of us were,

who here would know?

[DeathvadeR]

5. 7 million or so disapeared overnight under stalin's rule.

In December 1934 Sergei Kirov, the Communist Party leader in Leningrad, was murdered. It is now widely believed that his murder was ordered by Stalin, who was frightened, because Kirov appeared to be more popular than he was. As a result of this murder Stalin initiated 'the Purges' as a means of removing any perceived opposition. From 1934 to 1938 at least 7,000,000 people disappeared. these included the Bolshevik leaders whom he had forced out from 1925 to 1927, poets, scientists, managers of industries who did not meet their targets for production and millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, who often did not know what they had done to anger Stalin. Most of the senior officers in the Red Army and the Red Navy were also executed.

[TennesseeWalker]

6. Not quite that bad yet.

..but keep them honest (HA!)