High school kids learn about free speech in the Bush years

When I was in junior high and high school, we learned American history. In eighth grade, my history teacher made us memorize the preamble to the Constitution. We were encouraged to do researh.

Today, students are expected to keep their mouths shut and not do anything creative or research anything controversial.

A group of New Orleans high school student recently learned a lesson about the cost of telling the truth.

Scout Prime at First Draft:

You may remember the video made by New Orleans high school kids that I posted last week. It effectively utilized humor in a critical treatment of the Army Corps of Engineers and the American Society of Civil Engineers and called for support of an 8/29 investigation.

Well  ACE and ASCE are not happy about it and want the video pulled from YouTube though it is true that ASCE was paid $1 million by ACE and that...

The American Society of Civil Engineers confirmed the launch of an
internal ethics probe of its staff and members based on complaints by a
University of California-Berkeley professor, who served on a separate
independent panel investigating levee failures.

SNIP

The video was produced by Stanford Rosenthal, a senior at Isidore
Newman School and the son of Levees.org President Sandy Rosenthal, who
said her group would remove the video from the Web by Tuesday night,
although she believes the allegations it contains are accurate. It has
become an Internet phenomenon, garnering tens of thousands of viewers
in just a week.

"I told them, yes, we'd take it down, but our Webmaster is 17 years
old and is on a field trip and out of town," Rosenthal said Tuesday.
"That same youngster is going to be honored this week with the
outstanding youth and philanthropy award of the Association of
Fundraising Professionals." The student she is referring to is her son.

SNIP

"The reason we're taking it down, quite simply, is we just don't have
the personnel or resources to wage a legal battle with the ASCE,"
Rosenthal said, "even though we stand by every word of the public
announcement and contend it's completely accurate." (my emphasis)

I see now that the video is no longer publicly available at YouTube (though it can still be seen at the Times Picayune site)

In the name of free speech and truth, here's the video:

(h/t: Skippy)