michael wrote URL i thought this nekkid url was going to be about the infringement of NUMBERst amendment rights for broadcasters and proposed campaign finanice restrictions preventing them from making money on advertisements that are deemed thinly veiled campaign contributions by some arbitrary government board as it was posted to discussion i thought there d be some instead it s a post gazette column by brian o neill lamenting the fact that some people know how to fill out a permit so that they can take advantage of their right to peaceable assembly obviously he s poking fun at the idea that specific groups get specific zones and that it s not up to the police to decide what messages and signs get put into what zones to most expediently keep order the problem is that politics have gotten so muddied nowadays that shouting down and unpeaceably disrupting political rallies that you don t agree with has become common practice the courts have constantly ruled that there are some restrictions on the first amendment they teach you that your very first year of law school i think that given the information as laid out by the story mr o neill has confused free speech with action free speech or even protected speech as practiced by almost every american seems to involve the ability to communicate an idea to an unknown audience action involves directing a specific comment to a specific well defined individual or audience that has immediate harmful and sometimes physical effects that is easily forseeable by any reasonable person i think bill neel of butler needs to go back to school as obviously he must have been sleeping in his civics class or else they didn t teach civics in mini guantanamo oh NUMBER years ago greg 