A little old, but I didn’t see any mention of this on my usual blog haunts. While driving in the freezing California rain today (thank you Al Gore) and listening to the radio, Roger Hedgecock drew my attention to this:

A Louisiana driver was stopped and detained for having a “Don’t Tread on Me” bumper sticker on his vehicle and warned by a police officer about the “subversive” message it sent, according to the driver’s relative.

The situation developed in the small town of Ball, La., where a receptionist at the police department told WND she knew nothing about the traffic stop, during which the “suspect” was investigated for “extremist” activities, the relative said.

I guess that would make every Marine who has ever flown one of these flags “subversive”:

Probably just some backwoods hick Louisiana Sheriff who had some poor judgment, right? In isolated incident?

Maybe I would think that myself…except it happened again right here in San Diego County. Via Chandler’s Watch:

On Saturday afternoon, May 9th, Jim Betz, a Patriot and border watch volunteer pulled into the Golden Acorn Casino parking lot to get gas. The Casino complex is about 7 miles north of the border in East San Diego County.

As he was exiting the parking lot about 10 minutes later to head down to the border, he passed a stationary sheriffs car just off the casino property and stopped at a stop sign right in front of him. Jim sat at the stop sign for about 20 seconds until all the cross traffic had cleared. During those 20 seconds or so, the deputy had a clear, close view of the back of Jim’s old Ford Bronco.

Sure enough, about 30 seconds later, Jim saw flashing lights in his rearview mirror and pulled over. Jim had violated no traffic laws and done nothing wrong, so he couldn’t imagine why this cop had followed him and pulled him over. The deputy told Jim he had pulled him over and was citing him for not having a front license plate – an almost unheard of excuse for a traffic stop in California.

As Deputy Hobson went to the back of Jim’s Bronco, Jim and his wife noticed he was back there for quite a while and seemed to be writing a lot on his pad. Jim could see that he was not even looking down at his license plate. He was writing down all the wording on his 4 bumper stickers on a separate pad of paper!

Now why would local law enforcement agencies be selecting vehicles to pull over based on their bumper stickers?

Oh yeah.

Now this is especially galling to me because during any trip down a San Diego freeway, you might see one of these stickers on a back windshield:

Can you imagine the ACLU outrage if someone was pulled over for sporting one of those on their car?

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 9:16 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.