The Secret Service Journal

Court overturns convictions for threatening Obama Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, July 20, 2011 A Southern California man who urged readers of an online message board to "shoot the n-" two weeks before the 2008 presidential election, and said Barack Obama "will have a 50 cal in the head soon," was protected by freedom of speech, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned Walter Bagdasarian's two felony convictions for threatening to kill a presidential candidate and said his advocacy of violence, though "alarming and dangerous," was not illegal. The online posting "conveys no explicit or implicit threat on the part of Bagdasarian that he himself will kill or injure Obama," said Judge Stephen Reinhardt in the majority opinion. The law, he said, "does not criminalize predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the president," ...

DING, DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD! The Guardian ^ | 7/4/11 Rogue 4 July tweets on TV news channel's politics service go viral but Fox News is apparently back in control Fox News has apparently fallen victim to hacking, with its politics Twitter feed repeatedly announcing President Barack Obama had been shot dead. @foxnewspolitics began tweeting the information to its 33,000 followers at about 2am local time, with the posts rapidly being shared around the internet. The rogue tweets appeared to begin after the account sent a message saying Fox had just "regained full access to our Twitter account". The following tweets all related to the supposed death of Obama, with some posts being very specific about the president's injuries. "@BarackObama has just passed. The President is dead. A sad 4th of July, indeed. President Barack Obama is dead," came the first tweet. The string of messages continued: "@BarackObama has just passed. Nearly 45 min...