I didn’t know she was still alive, honestly, but now I am sad she’s gone. Edith Bunker was a great character, and Stapleton made the role what it was.

I was a huge fan of “All in the Family” as a kid. To this day, at the end of the workday, Mrs. P. and I will often ask each other: “How was your day, Archie?”

If any Patterico readers are in Tennessee near Manchester — or even extreme northern Alabama or northwestern Georgia — you might consider covering the federal government’s latest attack on free speech.

From the Tullahoma News (Via Instapundit and Judicial Watch):

A special meeting has been scheduled for the stated purpose of increasing awareness and understanding that American Muslims are not the terrorists some have made them out to be in social media and other circles.

“Public Disclosure in a Diverse Society” will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, June 4, at the Manchester-Coffee County Conference Center, 147 Hospitality Blvd.

Special speakers for the event will be Bill Killian, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and Kenneth Moore, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Knoxville Division.

Sponsor of the event is the American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee — a 15-member board formed two years ago when the General Assembly was considering passing legislation that would restrict those who worship Sharia Law, which is followed by Muslims.

Killian and Moore will provide input on how civil rights can be violated by those who post inflammatory documents targeted at Muslims on social media.

Posting inflammatory documents can violate federal law? Federal criminal law?! Do tell! I’d like to hear more!!

“This is an educational effort with civil rights laws as they play into freedom of religion and exercising freedom of religion,” Killian told The News Monday. “This is also to inform the public what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are.” . . .

. . . .

Killian said Internet postings that violate civil rights are subject to federal jurisdiction.

“That’s what everybody needs to understand,” he said.

Killian said slide show presentations will be made.

Matt Welch of Reason.com says:

I sincerely hope they make that Power Point public, since I’m unaware of any federal civil rights prosecutions for “inflammatory” Facebook postings, and want to keep up to speed with the Obama administration’s increasingly brazen encroachment on free expression.

I don’t think we can count on sitting back and waiting for the Obama administration to make such things public. We have to take the initiative and do a little citizen journalism.

And so . . .

Here is the Google Maps location for the Manchester-Coffee County Conference Center in Manchester, Tennessee.

I’m writing Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit to see if he might be going, but it’s almost a three-hour drive from his university, so that might be difficult. My message to Prof. Reynolds: if he goes, I will personally deposit $100 in his PayPal account and encourage my readers to do the same (not that the money likely matters much to him, but I think it’s important to demonstrate support for such projects).

We may not be able to get Prof. Reynolds to go (though I hope we can), but we should get someone to go. If any of you is closer, make the trip. I can’t advise you as to whether recording it would be legal, but maybe someone else would know. In any event, I believe any first-hand account of this meeting would be interesting and would get wide coverage, given the interest this story has generated.

Let me know in comments or by email if you think you might make the trip.

UPDATE: Thanks very much to Instapundit for the link. (New readers please bookmark the main page, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook.)

Unfortunately, Prof. Reynolds will not be able to go. So it’s up to you, the readers.

UPDATE x2: Bill Hobbs says he is going, and will record it:

@patterico @iowahawkblog @aceofspadeshq I’m going, armed with camera & vid cam. I have experience in journalism & politics. Should be fun.

— Bill Hobbs (@billhobbs) June 1, 2013

He says he will post the video on YouTube.

I encouraged him to give the law enforcement officials a couple of examples of inflammatory speech by Muslim clerics, and ask if those statements are governed by federal law. That would make some good video!

UPDATE x3: Milton Stanley says: “My wife & I will be there. I’m a regular reader of Instapundit, and I’m a reporter for the Manchester Times. The meeting is not my beat, so I won’t be covering it for the paper, but I will be there taking notes and possibly making a recording.”

I have offered Mr. Stanley a guest spot here to post his coverage if he likes. I don’t know if his employer would allow him to publish a guest post on a blog, but if they do, he is welcome to at patterico.com.

Because I have zero tolerance for making a five-year-old wet his pants over a cap gun:

A kindergartner who brought a cowboy-style cap gun onto his Calvert County school bus was suspended for 10 days after showing a friend the orange-tipped toy, which he had tucked inside his backpack on his way to school, according to his family and a lawyer.

The child was questioned for more than two hours before his mother was called, she said, adding that he uncharacteristically wet his pants during the episode. The boy is 5 — “all bugs and frogs and cowboys,” his mother said.

The cap gun was not loaded with caps — but if it had been . . .

According to the family, the boy’s friend had brought a water gun on the bus a day earlier. On Wednesday, unbeknown to his parents, the boy stowed his cap gun — from Frontier Town near Ocean City — inside his backpack as he left for school.

He told his mother after the incident that he had “really, really” wanted to show his friend.

The mother was called by the principal at 10:50 a.m. and was told that her son had the cap gun and pretended to shoot someone on the bus. She said that both the kindergartner and his first-grade sister, sitting nearby on the bus, disputed that account.

The mother said the principal told her that if the cap gun had been loaded with caps, it would have been deemed an explosive and police would have been called in.

Have any of you ever had a cap gun? I was a big fan of the Lone Ranger show when I was a kid, and I had a pair of white and silver cap guns designed to resemble the Lone Ranger’s weapons. They looked something like this:

And — horror of horrors! — I shot them with the caps in the gun!!!

Little did I know I possessed explosives.*

“Zero tolerance” has become code for “excuse to take overbearing actions that have no basis whatsoever in reasonable.” It’s high time we ended “zero tolerance” policies and replaced them with that old-fashioned policy called . . . common sense.

Via Hot Air.

Enraging:

It was the Obama administration that sealed the fate of the Pakistani doctor jailed for helping nail Usama Bin Laden, by divulging key details after the fact and dooming any chance Shakil Afridi’s cover story could win his freedom, according to a confidential Pakistani report.

When former Secretary of Defense and ex-CIA Director Leon Panetta publicly acknowledged Afridi’s role in the ruse which helped the CIA pinpoint Bin Laden’s presence in an Abbottabad compound, any chance that Pakistani authorities could help him get out of the country vanished, according to what some have called Pakistan’s version of the 9/11 Commission, a 357-page report from an independent body set up to probe the aftermath of the 2011 raid by Navy SEALs in which the Al Qaeda leader was killed.

“The statement by the U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who was the CIA Director when May 2 happened, confirming the role of Dr. Afridi in making the U.S. assassination mission a success, rendered much of what Afridi told the Commission very questionable if not outright lies,” states the report, which has not been released, but which FoxNews.com has viewed.

Afridi was technically given a 33-year sentence for colluding with a local militant group, but “American lawmakers, diplomats and administration officials all believe the charges are a proxy for his role in assisting a foreign spy agency.” He was arrested days after the bin Laden raid, and it seems clear he is being punished for helping ascertain bin Laden’s location.

Luckily, the Most Responsible Administration in the World decided to open their yaps and take away any plausible deniability for him. Hey, buddy, thanks for that help nailing the world’s top terrorist — and sorry about that 33-year sentence we helped you get!

Anyone else want to help us catch some terrorists? Anyone? Anyone?