My understanding of freedom of speech and freedom of the press (*NOT*
freedom of 'expression') is that you can speak and print your ideas
(not obscenities and pornography) without fear of the government.
You don't have the right to say/print anything you want (slander and
libel laws). You don't have the right to force me to listen or read your
ideas. You don't have the right to deface other people's property. You
don't have the right to shout obscenities on just the other side of the
property line. (If you think you do, then I have the right to use a bull
horn to preach to you day and night from my side of the property line
:-). Commercial property with public access is still private property.

Would you be equally outraged by a lone Christian being arrested for
silently praying on public property outside of an abortion clinic?  No
signs, so words, just the mere presence causes an arrest.

Michael Baier wrote:
> http://www.metrobeat.net/gbase/Expedite/Content?oid=oid%3A2248
>
> America is a Free Speech Zone
> Brett Bursey goes up against the Bush administration over what Americans
> are allowed say
>
> It wasn’t the first time Brett Bursey had been arrested, nor the first that
> an act of civil disobedience landed him behind bars. In fact, he once
> served two years for spray painting “Hell No We Won’t Go” on the walls of a
> draft board office during the Vietnam War. But it was this arrest, the one
> made during a visit by President George W. Bush on Oct. 24, 2002, to
> Columbia, which just might prove to be the most significant of his life.
>
> The matter at hand: what Americans are allowed to say and where they are
> allowed to say it. For the Bush administration, the answer is simple: when
> it comes to public appearances by the president, only those with something
> nice to say get within earshot of Dubya. As for the dissenting rabble,
> well, they get shuffled off to so-called free speech zones, sometimes
> hundreds and hundreds of yards away from the president.
>
> For Bursey, the answer is even simpler: America is a free speech zone. As
> long as you are on public property, you can say whatever you want. Even if
> the president doesn’t like it.
>
> On that October day, sitting in the back of a paddy wagon, his hands cuffed
> behind his back, Brett Bursey watched as Air Force One touched down at
> Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Earlier, he had been holding a sign that
> read, “No War for Oil,” outside of a rally at a hanger for then-candidates
> Sen. Lindsey Graham and Gov. Mark Sanford. President Bush was set to speak
> in support of the two.
>
> At the time, Bursey was the lone protester. Around him, hundreds and
> hundreds of people who had come to cheer the commander in chief and his
> Republican compatriots. The airport police approached Bursey and told him
> he couldn’t stand next to the crowd with his sign. He went across the
> street. The police again approached him. He was then told he couldn’t stand
> on the state right-of-way across the street from the airport and protest.
> According to Bursey, the police even went as far as to tell him that if he
> put down his sign, the one that criticized Bush and his drive for war, he
> could stay. If Bursey didn’t, he would have to go to a designated free
> speech zone a half-mile away. He refused to move. Bursey was then arrested
> and charged with trespassing.
>
> However, he knew the charge wouldn’t stick. Some 30 years earlier he had
> been arrested for protesting the president. Back then, the commander in
> chief was Richard Nixon, but the charge was the same — trespassing.
> Eventually, the state Supreme Court dropped the charges, ruling that
> protesters such as Bursey could not legally trespass on public property.
> Months after his October 2002 arrest, this new trespassing charge was
> dropped by the state.
>
> However, U.S. Attorney Strom Thurmond, Jr., an inexperienced prosecutor of
> little more than 30-years-of-age, filed federal charges against Bursey. The
> new crime — refusing to leave a restricted area which had been declared the
> temporary property of the president. This particular law was designed to
> stop would-be assassins and kidnappers. Bursey is neither. He now faces six
> months in jail and a $5,000 fine. The trial is set for November 12 in the
> U.S. District Court in Columbia.
>
> Bursey is not the only American who has been arrested for refusing to limit
> the expression of his dissent to so-called free speech zones. The ACLU
> recently filed a lawsuit against the federal government for violating the
> free speech rights of protesters. Their claim: “Local police, acting at the
> direction of the Secret Service, violated the rights of protesters in two
> ways: people expressing views critical of the government were moved further
> away from public officials while those with pro-government views were
> allowed to remain closer; or everyone expressing a view was herded into
> what is commonly known as a ‘protest zone,’ leaving those who merely
> observe, but express no view, to remain closer.” According to the ACLU,
> there have been over a “dozen examples of police censorship at events
> around the country.”
>
> To protest the use of free speech zones by the Bush administration to
> squelch, or at least marginalize, dissent and to help publicize his own
> battle against Uncle Sam, Bursey has taken to wearing a T-shirt emblazoned
> with the phrase “Free Speech Zone” over an image of the United States.
> Below that is “www.scpronet.com,” the Web address for the S.C. Progressive
> Network, a coalition of activists and advocacy groups of which Bursey is
> the director.
>
> Recently, MetroBEAT interviewed Bursey about his fateful day at the
> airport, his case and the ongoing war in Iraq.
>
>
> Let’s just go through the events leading up to your arrest.
>
> I had been in a line of... people that were there to hear the president
> speak inside this hanger. Some of them were carrying signs for Sanford and
> Graham. The event was a Republican rally for Republican candidates, the
> primary Republican candidates being Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford. So
> there’s Sanford and Graham signs around, and I’m in line with these people.
> There’s literally 4,000 people trying to get in this place. So I step out
> of the flow onto this grassy strip along the side of the main road going
> into the airport, and I am on the hanger side. As soon as I step out of
> line, a policeman comes up and tells me I have to go to the free speech
> zone. And I just ignore him. And I argue with him a little bit.
>
>
> And you’re well aware of what the property lines are at this point and what
> the rules are?
>
> Yes.
>
> So this woman, who I kept referring to as the “hysterical woman,” comes out
> and starts screaming that I have to get out of there, I have to go to a
> free speech zone. And she identifies herself as Secret Service. And I fall
> back across the main road, moving further away from the hanger to the other
> side of Airport Boulevard, so I’m still standing on the side of the road on
> state right-of-way. And they follow me. They say, “You can’t be there. You
> can’t be there.” And I say, “Well, I’ll go back that way,” and point at a
> road that’s heading away from [where I’m standing] to Midlands Tech....
> It’s a facility maybe a quarter of a mile down this road, and I point back
> to Tech and say, “I’ll go back down there.” [They say,] “No, you can’t go
> there. The only place you can go is the free speech zone.”
>
> This woman, you can hear her buzzing in the background, “This is airport
> property. Get me an airport policeman.” The airport police are the low man
> on the totem pole. And [the Secret Service] say, “Arrest him.” And [the
> police] say, “Arrest him for what?” “He’s trespassing.”
>
> And now I’m talking to the arresting officer, and I say, “Is the problem
> the content of my sign?” He had told me to put the sign down or leave or be
> arrested. He gave me an option: If I put the sign down, I could still stand
> there.
>
>
> Thirty-four years ago, you were arrested at the Columbia Metropolitan
> Airport during a visit by Richard Nixon. Did you go into this event knowing
> that if you were arrested for trespassing, they would have to drop the
> charges?
>
> Well, no. I hadn’t even thought of it until I’m standing there and they’re
> telling me they’re going to arrest me for trespassing and I’m basically
> realizing, Oh my God, here I am again. I was literally a hundred yards from
> the same location. It was part of that crystallization of that moment when
> I knew that I had to tell them, “No.”
>
>
> And what happened after that?
>
> They put the cuffs on me. Behind my back. In a paddy wagon. And they moved
> me behind the hanger where I could see Air Force One.
>
>
> How was that?
>
> That was really bizarre. Bush gets off the plane. And I can see the whole
> tableau through the bars in the paddy wagon. He goes inside the hanger and
> gives this speech where he says they hate us because we’re so free, and
> here I am handcuffed in the back of a paddy wagon, thinking, “No, Mr. Bush
> they don’t hate us because we’re free. They hate us because we’re
> hypocrites.”
>
>
> Do you think the Secret Service, perhaps under orders from someone in the
> Bush administration, and I’m quoting a statement you made in a press
> release, are trying to “to prevent the media from getting photos of people
> protesting the president or to insulate the president from the reality that
> all Americans don’t support his politics”?
>
> That’s what I expect to prove. We have the evidence that the Secret Service
> is ordering local police to do this. We have testimony from cops who have
> used the term, “within eyeshot of the president.” [One officer testified
> that] the “Secret Service ordered me... not to allow any protesters to be
> within eyeshot.” Another cop says, “No protesters visible.” It’s clear that
> the Secret Service is ordering local police to violate people’s rights. The
> dots we have to connect is who told the Secret Service to do this.
>
>
> What would prompt people within the Bush administration to say, the
> president can’t see these protesters? What does the president have to fear?
>
> Did I tell you what [Texas-based syndicated columnist] Molly Ivins’ take
> was? She said they keep the protesters away from Bush because they’re
> afraid he will go off on them. He’s hotheaded, and they don’t want to allow
> a circumstance to allow Bush to show his ass in public. That’s one. Two,
> and if you are the handlers and you have the power of God, if you are the
> White House staff, you have a lot of power. If you give some guys this
> power that are packaging the president, you’ll see things like flight suits
> on aircraft carriers, incredible backdrops that cost billions of dollars.
> It’s made-for-TV stuff. In that package of presenting Bush, given the power
> that these people have, it’s not a stretch at all to think that somebody in
> the White House advance [team] has just incorporated the Secret Service
> into their function.... [It] could be some lower level minion in the PR
> staff in the White House that’s actually being able to use the Secret
> Service to make sure there are no protesters in any frame of picture taken
> of the president.
>
> What’s the status of the case at the moment?
>
> We are expecting the judge to turn over Secret Service documents by Oct. 24
> that he ordered the government to produce. [Note: these documents concern
> communications between the Secret Service and local law enforcement in
> regards to presidential visits.] The judge had a secret meeting with the
> Secret Service to hear their concerns about presidential security and
> decided that he would give us all but three documents. We are having a hard
> time arguing for their release, as we don’t know what they say. We doubt
> that the documents are going to spell out that the Secret Service is
> ordering local police to violate citizens’ First Amendment rights.... We
> are planning on issuing a subpoena for the White House Secret Service
> Liaison. We can prove that the Secret Service is routinely using the excuse
> of the president’s physical security to protect his political security. We
> intend to prove that these orders came from the White House.
>
> The trial is scheduled to begin 9:30 a.m., November 12 in the new U.S.
> District Courthouse in Columbia. I encourage anyone concerned about the
> restrictions being placed on constitutional rights to be in the courtroom
> with me.
>
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