A man in West Virginia was fired for heckling President Bush at a campaign rally, according to the Saturday Gazette-Mail:

Glen Hiller, of Berkeley Springs, was escorted from the Hedgesville High School event on Tuesday after shouting comments about the Iraq war and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction there.

The crowd had easily drowned out Hiller with cheers of “Four More Years, Four More Years.”

Arriving at his job with Octavo Designs in Frederick, Md., on Wednesday morning, Hiller said he was told that he had embarrassed and offended a client who had provided the tickets to the rally.

“I was told that my actions reflected badly on the company and that a client was upset,” Hiller said.

A woman at Octavo Designs who declined to identify herself confirmed Hiller had been fired because of his conduct at the rally.

So he was rude. Heckling the powerful is one of the last resorts for free speech. “There is no venue for the regular guy to ask a question,” Hiller said. “We don’t have access to people in power. And those events are completely scripted and controlled.”

Our democracy is a little bit worse today because a guy was fired for yelling his opinion at the President. And until President Bush condemns the Swift boat ads, don’t dare talk to me about “civil discourse.”

PS: Even if Bush disavows the lies about Kerry’s service record, I’m going to favor heckling, albeit not up to the point that it drowns out the speaker.

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Halley points us to a piece by Dan Bricklin wrote a while ago that explains RSS so clearly that you could varnish your furniture with it. Nice writing.

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AKMA suggests that every newspaper syndicate Spinsanity. Can we get an amen?!

Or, even better, maybe newspapers could start reporting on what’s true and not just what candidates claim.

Speaking of AKMA, I’m enjoying watching him think through issues around James. This writing and thinking in public, a Web trend accelerated by blogging, is a big deal.

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Ernie the Attorney links to the world’s worst site, an attempt to aggravate, um, aggregate the most common errors made by tyro web designers.

The site is bad but, jeez, I’m sure I’ve been to worse. No registration required, no page transitions, no frames (except for Tripod/Angelfire inserting itself as an IE search companion, apparently not as part of the joke), no popups, no pornography, no spyware (as far as I can tell), no size=1 font, no redirect of the back button. The music and animated gifs are real annoying, though.

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The drives can be large, but this drive imager, Snap shot, is only 130K. It comes highly recommended by Miles at TinyApps, which is a very good sign. I’m trying it out now, and if it all goes as it seems like it will, I’ll be plunking down my 40 euros for the unrestricted version. (The restriction is that after 30 days, you can’t read the backups. [Correction: Nope. You can read the backup, but can’t make any new ones after 30 days. Sorry.])

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Tom Matrullo gives us a perspective on Charley we simply don’t get through the media.

Finding the office was not a simple matter. Once there, I found several FEMA people milling about, avoiding eye contact with us, and 15 or so phones, some of which worked. The FEMA agents did not try to take questions or offer information. They simply told us to dial an 800 number. It was 7:30 a.m., and the room was already filling with people who had somehow found out where the FEMA center was located. Apparently in George W. Bush’s Washington, disasters may only occur after 8 a.m. and prior to 6 p.m. We waited for the emergency experts to arrive at their desks, then we got busy signals for more than an hour…

He ends with a list of services the government should actually be providing…little things like portapotties and a people who look for the missing.

Tom’s post is a reminder of why we have blogs. And, Tom, let us know if we can help.

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The free speech crowd ought to extend its concern for preserving the right of individuals to speak their minds. We ought to be just as zealous protecting our right to speak together.

We ought to promote the ability of people to talk with others, across all our divides.

We ought to fight the degradation of conversation by commercial forces.

Someone wake up Mario Savio, print up some buttons, and set up tables at UC Berkeley. Free the Conversations! Free the Conversations!

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Blogversations matches bloggers with advertisers. As far as I can tell from the not-enough-informational site, the blogger writes about some topic the advertiser suggests and gets paid for it. It’s clear from the site’s defensive writing, however, that Blogversations knows its project is in danger of being misunderstood … or, perhaps, understood.

Unclear from the site: Is the fact that the bloggers are getting paid made apparent? And where do these “conversation” occur? Unfortunately, there’s no obvious way to get more information about what Blogversations is proposing except by registering.

By the way, their phrase “markets are discussions” sounds oddly familiar…

(Thanks to John Battelle for the link.)

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Thanks to a recommendation by danah boyd, I’ve created an i-neighborhood for Brookline. The i-neighborhood site is an interesting experiment in adding a virtual layer to existing real world neighborhoods. (There’s an interesting discussion of the nature of neighborhoods over at danah’s site.)

As of now, I am the only member of the Brookline i-neighborhood, and thus am, at last, lord and sovereign.

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The feature I’d most like to see in any new social network: Import from some other social network. Get me out of the middle of re-re-re-re-confirming that I am so-and-so’s dear friend.

These social networks in my experience continue to be all maintenance and no value.

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