[drypowder]

What law exactly has he broken? If such a law exists then Hitlery has a strong case against the NYFD/NYPD members for yelling her off the stage.

[HEY4QDEMS]

This is nuts!

Naming GHWB as the victim is only masking a hidden agenda to silence us.

It's perfect for the DEMs, they silence their disenters and get to blame the Republicans for it.

GHWB should be the first one to speak out against the legal proceeding, that would be the smart thing to do.

[bvw]

Oden said Markovich might have pushed beyond his First Amendment protections by "substantially impairing" Bush's speech, because Bush stopped talking after Markovich abruptly yelled "bullshit!"

"You cannot intentionally disrupt a public address to the extent that the speaker cannot even speak and then hide behind the First Amendment to avoid accountability for your actions," Oden said. "Civility in public meetings is roughed up from time to time, but it's not completely dead. The speaker has a right to be heard, and the audience has a right to hear him, and those are important First Amendment rights, too."

A "Right to be heard" -- very fuzzy headed judicial thinking that. Where exactly would *that* right stop?

Bad judgement in this case -- Markovitz DID let the Presdient be heard, but he added his commentary. We DO have free speech and he spoke up -- not to drown out the speaker, but in commentary to that speech.

[VRWC_minion]

I can see that there must be some sort of limits. Assume any setting where someone is speaking to a group that mostly wants to listen and a group of hecklers take over via actions and sound. If there were no limits on this behavior then no one could make the hecklers leave or even make them stop.

The rights of everyone who wishes to listen are impaired and to me my right to listen is as much a part of free speech as my right to talk.

[BlackbirdSST]

The speaker has a right to be heard, What a blatant LIE! You have a right to speak, you have no right to be heard, unless you are a bush I guess. Blackbird.

[Poohbah]

I come to a speech to hear the speaker, not some dipstick in the gallery uttering obscenities.

If the concealed carry activists had had their way all these years, the heckler's "free speech" would probably have come to a sudden (and permanent) halt, the ushers would drag the corpse outside (buzzards and worms gotta eat, too), the speech would have resumed, and the grand jury would say "he needed killin'."

This anal orifice is getting off very lightly compared to what a truly polite society SHOULD have given him.

[Mr. Bird]

Criminal charges may be a bit much, but without that threat, how to stop this type of activity from increasing? This doesn't appear, to me, to be a protected form of speech. If it is, then I could attend my local council meeting and scream gibberish for the duration of the meeting until they adjourned out of frustration. This wasn't in the public square, it was in the place that the "public" (i.e. government) does business.

How might the participating UT professor feel if I were to attend his class for the sole purpose of disrupting it? He is a public employee, speaking (ostensibly) for a public institution. Would my disruptive behavior be acceptable to him?

As I said, pressing criminal charges seems severe, but if ain't illegal, then it's legal. And if it's legal, we'd have a whole lot of disruption on our hands.

[Landru]

Hey scholar?
Remember the guy who was hauled off after telling Clintigula, "You suck!"??
I believe the *incident* took place at The Taste of Chicago on Government Pier on the lakefront?

Never heard one peep about the "1st Amend" then from anyone, eh?

...guess it all depends on who the POTUS "is" at the time, huh? ;^)

[mindprism.com]

'They' may escort disrupter(s) from a meeting, but only after respecting what society accepts as reasonable expressions of dissent. A one word expletive falls within those bounds, an earlier case of liberals with 5 minutes of foot stomping and shouting does not.

In neither case is criminal charges appropriate unless one physically resists being escorted from the meeting.

[Bob J]

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