Hightower Lowdown

In monarchies, the peasants aren't even supposed to speak to the royals unless they're spoken to first. In democracies, however, the folks are supposed to be free to speak their minds to those in power.

Under the reign of King George the W. and his Chief Justice Ashcroft, however, the folks are supposed to give fealty to the king—or suffer severe consequences for their disobedience. The unpatriotic Patriot Act puts this new order of things into law. Here are three stories that tell us how the new order works in the streets of America today:

•1 Earlier this year, Sue Niederer of Hopewell, NJ, learned that her 24-year-old son Seth had been killed in Iraq while trying to defuse a roadside bomb. Enraged, she went to a Laura Bush rally wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Seth and the words "President Bush Killed My Son." As Laura nattered on about the heroic nature of her husband's war, Ms. Niederer hollered out: "If the war is so essential to our national security, why aren't the Bush daughters enlisting in it?" Police handcuffed her, hauled her to jail, and booked her for trespassing. The charge later had to be dropped...but the Secret Service is now hounding Sue for posting on a website that she'd like to "rip the president's head off" and "shoot him in the groin area." Of course she didn't mean that literally, but the vindictive Bushites are still out to destroy her. To tell the monarchy of King George the W. to leave Sue Niederer alone, call the White House comment line at 202-456-1111.

•2 Nicole and Jeff Rank, a young couple from Charleston, WV, were arrested on the grounds of their state capitol during a July 4 appearance by George W. for wearing handpainted T-shirts with the "no" symbol slashed across Bush's name. That was it—they didn't shout, heckle, or disrupt anything, but two Secret Service agents demanded that they remove or cover their T-shirts. "No," they quietly said, so the agents instructed local police to arrest them. They were handcuffed, jailed, and charged with trespassing. Even more outrageously, Nicole—who works for a federal agency—was dismissed from her job.

But this arrest was also thrown out of court, and the federal agency backed down and rehired Nicole. Jeff, a registered Republican, says: "Unless common citizens like ourselves are willing to stand and fight for their civil liberties, those very liberties that our nation was founded upon… will wither and erode until they are gone forever."

•3 New York's billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg got into the act during the Republican National Convention. Bloomberg used the New York police as a bludgeon to crack down on dissenters.

Citizen Alex Pincus wasn't even a protestor—just a city resident who went out to a deli and innocently walked into a police dragnet. Pincus asked an officer how to get out of the way, was told "follow me"— then was grabbed by cops, handcuffed and forced to kneel for an hour before being tossed into a filthy makeshift cage topped with razor wire, where he was held for 25 hours without access to a lawyer.

Bloomberg's police kept saying to him and all the others, "This is what you get for protesting." The mayor later admitted that innocent citizens were abused, but the Gooberhead blamed the victims themselves: "If you go to where people are protesting and don't want to be part of the protest," he haughtily sniffed, "you're always going to run the risk that maybe you'll be tied up with it." Yeah—literally tied up! Our liberties are not taken from us in one big bang of a coup d'etat, but rather slipped out from under us inch by inch by autocratic Goobers like Bloomberg.