The Knoxville News-Sentinel covers the free-speech zone angle. Interesting police spin:

Knoxville Police Department spokesman Darrell DeBusk said people with signs – whether for or against the president – will be restricted to designated areas. Anyone who ignores officers’ commands to honor those restrictions will be subject to arrest.
. . .
Police officials, DeBusk said, established the “First Amendment zone” after several meetings with Secret Service agents. The agents told police what areas would be off limits for security purposes, and police selected the most appropriate locations for protesters.
“People can come and go as they please,” DeBusk said. “This is a service for them where they can be seen and be safe.”
[Emphasis added]

Nice of the police to provide this service of herding those exercising their rights into a government-approved areas.
Bush is scheduled to trumpet his “No Child Left Behind Act.” But many local educators–the ones actually doing the teaching–don’t like the law.
Undoubtedly Bush will also make a bunch of claims about what his administration is doing to support education. But Misleader (via Musings of a Philosophical Scrivener) reminds us that the rhetoric often doesn’t match what really happens away from the cameras.

It’s difficult to top this one:

A northeast Houston man has been charged with fatally stabbing his 13-year-old daughter, whom he mistook for the lover he believed his wife had been visiting, police said.
Prudencio Mendez Vasquez, 46, of the 10500 block of Onslow is charged with murder and aggravated assault in the death of his daughter, Michelle, and the wounding of his wife, Micaela, 41. Police said Vasquez slipped into the back of his wife’s parked pickup and, evidently believing her boyfriend was in the front passenger seat, stabbed the girl repeatedly about 11:30 p.m. Sunday.
When Vasquez discovered what he had done, investigators said, he stabbed his wife, then himself before a passer-by grabbed the knife and called police. Vasquez remained in fair condition Monday at Ben Taub Hospital. His wife was treated and released.

Via People’s Republic of Seabrook.

I got so caught up with the Second Coming that I missed this nugget in yesterday’s Washington Post:

The new details of the government’s search for a dirty bomb help explain why officials have used dire terms to describe the reasons for the nation’s fifth “code orange” alert, issued on Dec. 21 by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. U.S. officials said they remain worried today — in many cases, more concerned than much of the American public realizes — that their countermeasures would fall short.
“Government officials are surprised that people [in the United States] aren’t more hyped about all this,” said one source familiar with counterterrorism preparations.

I think this is the media’s fault. They haven’t devoted nearly enough coverage to the terrorism threat. [/sarcasm]
Seriously, what do they expect people to be doing? Dashing about in flak jackets?
Perhaps people have lost their hype because they’ve concluded the government is rather clueless in assessing danger, with good reason:

Officials said intelligence can be misleading, and some in law enforcement acknowledged that there is no way to know the actual urgency of the threats. Officials said one of their key challenges is determining whether al Qaeda is planting provocative but false clues as a diversion or as deliberate disinformation to test the U.S. response. Some foreign governments have voiced concerns that the United States is overreacting.

Authorities done a great job in passing along that confusion to the public. Be it the revolving color wheel, the commands to shop boldly amongst the sleeper cells, the official pronouncements on dirty bombs, duct tape, scuba divers, almanacs, and what not. It’s all a sordid mess. Should we be surprised if people are tuning things out?
If government officials want the public to be concerned about a specific threat, such as a dirty bomb, they should tell us to look out for a dirty bomb. But they can’t just floating out these vague warnings or a continuously changing threat-flavor-of-the-week and expect people to remain in a perpetually-stoked state.

South Knox Bubba has details on the planned protest during Bush’s upcoming visit to Knoxville.
In anticipation of the visit, I’m unilaterally declaring this site a free-speech zone.

Believe it or not, it’s been ten years since Tonya Harding’s goon’s took a whack at Nancy Kerrigan’s leg. Where has the time gone?
Since then Kerrigan has essentially disappeared from the public spotlight, as figure skaters should. Harding, however, has attempted to capitalize on her “fame.”