Peoria Mayor Orders Police Dragnet to Find & Apprehend Dangerous Criminal Who Is... Mocking Him In a Parody Twitter Account

The moral of this story is that We must give our government more power and make it clear that "Public Servants" are actually to be serviced by the public.

Here's what the Mayor, detectives, and at least one judge agreed to: That a full police investigation -- with warrants and raids -- was justified, because the owner of the parody account arguably was violating a new law against impersonation of a public official. But this law concerned real impersonation, as when someone dresses up like a cop and gives orders to citizens.

The mayor and his eager band of throne-sniffers decided that the law must also cover obviously-parody twitter accounts.

The Twitter parodist also posted a picture, supposedly as "The Mayor," with a razor cutting white powder. This is obviously a joke, intended to suggest the Mayor was a cokefiend. (But not suggest it in any serious way.)

The mayor and his throne-sniffers decided that this was evidence of cocaine possession, and used that as a further pretext to hound this Thought Criminal.

It's a harrowing story. Read the whole thing. Your blood will boil.

They must all go-- mayor, detectives, judge.

We call their offices "positions of public trust." Those words have meaning. When we grant people extraordinary powers to investigate, arrest, and imprison citizens, we do so in granting them a provisional grant of trust that they will not abuse their positions for personal or political gain, and that they are level-headed people who will not grow monstrous with power.

They have all failed this test. They cannot be permitted to remain in their positions of public trust.

Lawsuit: The ACLU will be filing suit against the city.

More: Ardis takes the position that he was right to sic the cops on a critic because he had to protect his "identity" -- he's suggesting this is a case of identity theft.

"I still maintain my right to protect my identity is my right," Ardis said in an interview with the Journal Star before the council meeting.

"Are there no boundaries on what you can say, when you can say it, who you can say it to?" Ardis said. "You can’t say (those tweets) on behalf of me. That’s my problem. This guy took away my freedom of speech."

Video: Beginning at 27:58, a councilwoman attempts to get answers from the mayor, and he starts answering a minute or so later.

Her conclusion is that this is obviously parody and that the city of Peoria will soon have a judicial decision against it confirming that, and that that will "cost the city a tremendous amount of money."

They mayor insists the twitter feed is not "parody," and insists that "scurrilous" and raunchy jokes are very hurtful.

He also claims that some "sexual doggerel" was about his family. I do not know the tweets, but I have frequently seen the false claim made that "People are attacking my family!" when the family was not actually attacked.

posted by Ace at 04:05 PM

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