Davenport IL Police Confiscate U.S. flags to Protect Cheney

Cathy Berta is a retired elementary schoolteacher. At 66, she’s also a member of Progressive Action for the Common Good of the Quad Cities.

When she heard that Vice President Cheney was coming to Davenport, Iowa, on July 17, she decided to heed the group’s protest call.

“I knew it was going to be extremely hot that day, but I said I’m going to take a stand,” she recalls. She joined about 120 people along River Road next to the Mississippi, and they marched part way toward the home where Cheney was doing a fundraiser for the Republican House candidate, Mike Whalen.

Berta was carrying a sign that said: “No, You Can’t Have My Rights, I’m Still Using Them.”

And she was also holding a little American flag on a stick.

But the police wouldn’t let her, or anyone else, carry the flags.

“I’m going to have to take your stick,” one officer told her, she says.

She describes him as “very courteous, and very embarrassed.”

“I said, ‘I know you’re just doing your job,’ and he just kind of nodded,” she says.

-- Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive. Full article here.