In what can only be described as one of the most egregious violations of the First Amendment, a high school senior in Kansas was disciplined for making a disparaging tweet about former Senator and now Governor, Sam Brownback:

Emma Sullivan, a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, was in Topeka on Monday as part of Kansas Youth in Government, a program for students interested in politics and government.

During the session, in which Brownback addressed the group, Sullivan posted on her personal Twitter page:

“Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot”

On Tuesday, Sullivan was called to her principal’s office and told that the tweet had been flagged by someone on Brownback’s staff and reported to organizers of the Youth in Government program.

[SNIP]

Sullivan said the principal ordered her to write letters of apology to Brownback, the school’s Youth in Government sponsor, the district’s social studies coordinator and others.

(emphasis added)

So Brownback’s staff has nothing better to do than sit there and read tweets? And there’s something even more interesting about that. Look at her tweet again:

“Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot”

Now if you know anything about Twitter there is this thing called mentions. It’s when you put the @ sign in front of someone’s Twitter name, for example @intoxination. Twitter then notifies you that you have a mention. This wasn’t done in Sullivan’s tweet, so that means someone from Brownback’s staff isn’t just “monitoring” Twitter, but also searching it. For a conservative like Brownback, I would think wasting tax payer money to monitor constitutionally protected dissent against the government would go against everything he stands for.

But my question is this; where’s the outrage from the right? If President Obama did something like this, it would be all the talk on FOX and the right wing blogosphere. Darrel Issa would launch an investigation into the waste of government funds and calls of “indoctrination” would flood our airwaves. Instead this story is going mostly undetected.

I think in the holiday spirit we should all help our media out in finding stories to cover. Maybe a good way would be to start tweeting disparaging things to Sam Brownback. If you want to do that, his Twitter name is @govsambrownback. Here’s my first:

@govsambrownback is more disgusting than a Mexican donkey show!

Let’s give his staff a little extra work this holiday season, they deserve it.