Posted on 01/28/2005 8:33:17 AM PST by TBarnett34
SALEM, Ore. (AP) Two green Adopt-A-Highway signs reading "American Nazi Party" have popped up on a rural road a few miles from downtown, and it's got people upset with the county for agreeing to put up the signs and worried about their neighborhood.
"I know we live in a free world. But that's not part of freedom, anything to do with the Nazis," said Barbara Hamblin, a 64-year-old who lives in a mobile home park just down the road from one of the signs.
"They had to have been off their rocker," she said.
The two signs were erected by Marion County road crews earlier this week, costing taxpayers $250 each.
County officials said they know people are upset. But free-speech guarantees in the Constitution prevented them from turning down the person who signed the American Nazi Party up with the local Adopt-A-Highway program.
"Our hands are pretty much tied from a legal standpoint," said Marion County Commissioner Patti Milne. "This has been very difficult, but the bottom line is they are entitled to participate."
"We can't pick and choose what parts of the constitution to follow," said Milne, a former Republican state legislator.
Marion County put up the signs after a person named C. Marchand applied for a permit under which the "American Nazi Party" agreed to help clean up the road.
A person answering the phone at the number given on the permit application said "maybe" when asked if he was Marchand.
He declined to make any further comment, referring inquiries to a Jim Ramm, who has previously been identified in news reports as leader of the Tualatin Valley Skins, a white-supremacist group that has been active in the Willamette Valley.
No listing could be found for Ramm.
The Web site for the American Nazi Party lists as its chairman Rocky J. Suhayda.
Responding to an e-mail, Suhayda said his group has nothing to do with the two signs in Salem, writing, in part ... "we would never pick up garbage along a highway in this toilet-bowl of a country..."
County officials said they got about a dozen complaints about the signs as of mid-Thursday afternoon, and more were coming in after their existence was broadcast on TV news.
The applicants for the sign may have been borrowing an idea from the Ku Klux Klan.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that free-speech rights prevent Missouri from barring the Klan from participating in that state's Adopt-A-Highway program.
Out on Salem's Sunnyview Road, someone expressed their views about the two signs by bending one of them in half.
The sign is near a house where Patti Buetler lives, practically in her yard.
Buetler said she had called county officials about the sign.
"I don't want to get myself involved in this. All I want is for it to not be in my yard," she said.
Buetler may get her wish.
County officials say the vandalized sign will be replaced, but only if the permit applicant pays for a new one.
"If they want to replace it, the Nazi Party will have to pay," said Dan Estes, spokesman for the county commissioners.
He said that is standard policy the county erects the signs at its expense the first time but charges organizations to replace them if they are vandalized or stolen.
_
Salem staffer Charles E. Beggs and Portland staffer Typh Tucker contributed to this report.
Eye-roller ping.
Responding to an e-mail, Suhayda said his group has nothing to do with the two signs in Salem, writing, in part ... "we would never pick up garbage along a highway in this toilet-bowl of a country..."
LOL! This whole article has to be satire.
he two signs were erected by Marion County road crews earlier this week, costing taxpayers $250 each.
** Why do the taxpayers have to pay for these signs?
Well, if he's gauging the entire country using Salem, Oregon as his microscope, I can kinda see his point...
We taxpayers generally pay for everything that makes no sense.
Just Damn.
There are times I am REALLY embarased to be living in this State.
This is one of them.
People's Republik of Oregon. (PUKE)
Maybe they'll rename it the "Oregon Autobahn".
She's absolutely right. Freedom has limits. But the libs are terrible at determining these.
For a group of the insane to stand in defense of starting a world war, of ripping up German families for an agenda of a super-state, of creating murder camps and death squads which murdered millions, is to announce that they are a danger to the community around them. Liberal judges would then demand that they be treated to every courtesy, just as if they were harmless Hell's Angels. But neither are harmless. And the problem remains, in this country - with the judiciary!
There are planes leaving every day for far worst "toilet-bowls"
Take the first flight out.
"She's absolutely right. Freedom has limits."
So like the signs, the Confederate flag should be banned as they are both seen as "offensive" to some?
Nazis picking up trash?
It just goes to show, Arbeit macht frei.
Sorry, that joke's in very bad taste. But what can you say about this. Do they wear black uniforms and swastika armbands as they march along the highway with their trash-collecting equipment?
Then they should go back to being called the 'Democratic National Caucus'
We don't want to play your reindeer games. If you can't the see the difference between the Confederacy and the Nazis you don't have a clue.
Because some stupid liberal, somewhere, sometime, came up with that dumbass "Adopt-a-Highway" stupidity, to be financed by the taxpayers.
It's nothing more than a scam to get publicity for groups and individuals that have no more interest in picking up trash than I do.
And I ain't the least damn bit interested in going out on the public highways/roads and picking up trash when the jails are full of two-bit scum that could be out there picking it up, instead.
But that won't happen because of the same stinking liberals that started the stupid program are the same stupid liberals that have convinced the public that it ain't right to make them poor, misguided souls get out in the weather and pick up trash.
Meanwhile, your tax money and mine gets thrown at this stupid program day after day, and it's now in every state in the Union.
And the trash is still laying on the roads.
A similiar incident happened once when the KKK decided to adopt a highway.
The state tried to stop them but was overruled in Court.
So they renamed the highway the Rosa Parks Highway!!
It's seen more as a sign of the south, and proper southern values. These weren't always associated with the Confederacy. But I believe that many who sport Confederate flag decals, today, do so in memory of the best of the south in the hope that more people adopt those attitudes, but not the idea of going to war to defend the institution of slavery. But the Nazi flag has nothing but sinister connotations, again, as I wrote from the destruction of the German family unit, to the perversion of the military, to launching unjust wars against their neighbors, all the way to their brutal treatment of all dissenters, even those 'outed' for supposedly missing a day of work by some sadistic shop foreman, to of course the Jews who were the subject of the coastside resort conference. I think it's very different. And yes, the Nazi emblems, those and the new ones created to replace them, should be banned. No question.
Good grief!
A bit odd looking he is.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.