The school checked, found the claims to be baseless and simply a fit of pique by the children in question. Did the school have the right to force the children to log into their Facebook accounts on school property to see the messages? Debatable, but again, the teacher in this case has done nothing wrong. So saying that "everyone failed" and lumping the teacher in is wrong-headed ridiculousness.

Wait, how did the teacher fail in this case? The students clearly failed because at age 12 and 13 you should know enough to not tell lies about people just because you're angry.

School district may have failed by actioning on a Facebook post not made on their computers. That's up for debate, but it is perhaps understandable that they acted to both protect the teacher and their reputations and send a message to other students that this level of name calling is not acceptable.

Parents definitely failed in not monitoring their children or teaching them appropriate impulse control. If you're going to turn control over your children to a school, then you can't act shocked when the school disciplines your child. It's great that some of the parents are considering getting lawyers and giving their children a chance to experience how the legal system works, but perhaps had the parents shown this level of interest in their children to begin with, it wouldn't have happened.

But the teacher here was just doing his job teaching students. Call a teacher stupid? Well, I suppose, although even that shows a distressing lack of respect for an authority figure who, by all accounts, hasn't done anything to warrant it. Call them a rapist, a pedophile and accuse them of mental illness? All of those are career enders for teachers (again, generally because of parents who are only involved in their children's lives when they smell a payday with a lawsuit) and, unless the student has a legitimate accusation, should require consequence.

So I see student fail, school fail and parent fail, but how the hell did the teacher fail? The teacher was maliciously and slanderously attacked for doing his job. Seriously, we've gotta stop treating teachers as second class citizens. Just lumping everyone into the blame game to seem fair or even handed is bad critical thinking and neither fair nor even handed.

Or every John Hughes film ever made....IF THEY WERE SET IN SPACE. But don't worry. Our uniquely rebellious planet will learn that it has an inner strength and doesn't need that bitchy exoplanet's approval. As a sign, Earth will take two perfectly good prom dresses and rip them apart only to reassemble them in a Frankenstein's Monster creation resembling a cross between a potato sack and a straightjacket for Rainbow Bright. Then, after prom, Earth will bang Andrew McCarthy and this will somehow force Jon Cryer to star in a sitcom with the Sheen that didn't marry Paula Abdul. Yeah. That'll show 'em.

More than any other job, teaching depends on a multitude of parties "doing the right thing" in order to be successful. Teachers are definitely one of those, but the best teacher in the world can't overcome parents who aren't involved with their children, a home environment and surroundings that don't value education, children themselves who may have been taught that teachers are "bad" and the public education system is "bad" so they want none of it and school administrations which are more interested in CYA than supporting their teachers. One, maybe two, of these can break down or be sub-par and a child still might get an education. But in many systems, you've got massive cascading breakdowns in all of them. Trying to then point out the faults in just one of them is then little more than blame shifting and finger pointing. Further, because of their intertwined nature, how can you fix one of them without fixing all of them? Any improvement in one area will slowly be ground down by the interference coming from the others. Are there bad teachers? You bet there are. Maybe more than anyone would like to admit because having the desire to work with kids and education doesn't mean having the ability to navigate the current learning environment. But unless this evaluation takes into account the whole picture (kids, parents, administration, teachers and environment), it's just another bandwagon "Let's blame teachers!" torches-and-pitchforks battlecry. Even worse, its just bad journalism. It also means the teachers who the evaluation call "good" are about to get all sorts of hell unleashed on them as parents read these things and then fight, sometimes quite viciously, to have Little Billy put into the top teacher's classroom or, upon seeing Little Sally is in a "bad" teacher's classroom, well, what's the point?

SETI@home can get over 3 million volunteers to scan the sky, but Julian Assange, in an Internet positively filled with people who would love to be a part of something like this, can't find a thousand people to help review documents and redact names that aren't needed and somehow this is Amnesty International's fault? Climb off the cross, Julian, the Taliban needs the wood to build fires and burn alive those you named.

I'm not sure that under Missouri Law the situation is so clear cut.

Section 565-021states that second degree murder is when a person, "Knowingly causes the death of another person or, with the purpose of causing serious physical injury to another person, causes the death of another person." Drew, while perhaps a despicable human being, Neither set out nor intended to do physical harm to Meier, not in any provable way. Emotionally upset? Perhaps, but the wording is pretty stark here so it would be futile to try and claim Drew's actions were ever intended to be physical in nature.

This section also has a second clause, defining second degree murder as: "Commits or attempts to commit any felony, and, in the perpetration or the attempted perpetration of such felony or in the flight from the perpetration or attempted perpetration of such felony, another person is killed as a result of the perpetration or attempted perpetration of such felony or immediate flight from the perpetration of such felony or attempted perpetration of such felony." You might be able to gain more traction with this approach. However, the only "crime" that Drew was guilty of was the weird "violation of ToS" runaround that was rightly thrown out. If Drew's actions could have somehow been linked to a felony (and I'm sure some RIAA lawyer could figure out that torturous linkage somehow), then you might have been able to chain a second degree murder charge on her this way. As that was never going to happen, the second degree murder case for Drew is nonexistant.

You might be able to pull off a manslaughter charge under section 565-024, Involuntary Manslaughter, if you could prove that Drew's reckless behavior (1st degree) or criminal negligence (2nd degree) brought about Meier's death. Again, though, this is tough to link. Under section 562.016, reckless behavior is defined as a conscious disregard of "a substantial and unjustifiable risk that circumstances exist or that a result will follow, and such disregard constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care which a reasonable person would exercise in the situation." There are several hurdles here that must be passed and, if Drew were to be convicted under them, that sets an uncomfortable precedent that sort of allows John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory to become the de facto law of the land and anyone who has ever flamed anyone else might suddenly then be held accountable under law. If we're going to throw up our hands and scream bloody murder when Amazon yanks back a book, crying that they're not the police and don't have a legal right to do that, then enshrining either Facebook/MySpace's ToS or Penny Arcade as the law of the land must surely be equally as abhorrent.

Criminal negligence is much the same, but the wording goes: "he fails to be aware of a substantial and unjustifiable risk...". That "fails to be aware" might be something to hang Drew on if Meier had previous suicide attempts, however it's sort of a Catch 22 argument. Could Drew's actions have pushed Meier over the edge? Certainly, but then, if she's that fragile, couldn't anything have pushed her over the edge? How can you argue the uniqueness of Drew's behavior being the deciding factor?

This is why Missouri chose not to prosecute, which led the Feds to step in and try to Capone Drew, nabbing her on the squirrely ToS violation. It didn't work and shouldn't have worked, but it means Drew gets away, at least from a criminal standpoint, with being a real waste of flesh, water and air. Hopefully, she'll get rammed in civil court.

It also points out the simple fact: Due to a level of informational sharing and processing that we as a civilization have not seen since Hammurabi pointed at a slab of stone and said, "I've got something to say!", our legal system is simply not equipped to handle edge cases that are suddenly not so 'edgy' in terms of the Internet. For instance, what counts as harassment online? Sure, a huge email campaign may be obvious, but a social networking page? Is it the act of creating the page? Is it the continued daily existence of the page? Is it only when the page makes issue of itself? Legally, this is still a pretty gray area. Certainly, Meier's parents should feel free to campaign for rectification of this lack of legal definition, both in Missouri as well as at a federal level. We can even call any modifications to legal statutes that come from it "Megan's laws" so everyone can feel warm and fuzzy about doing...something...for the kids...somehow.

This, of course, will come too late to do anything about Drew. That's life when you're reactionary instead of visionary, though.

The fact of the matter is, though, that we're seeing more and more that our real-world legal system is just not agile enough to deal with online interactions. The question we have to ask is how do we approach this? Do we take our standard approach and slap some more bandage laws on it and then pat ourselves on the back and say "Mission Accomplished!" while doing nothing to address the root causes or do we take a long, hard look at the situation and introduce new legal paradigms specifically designed to address these issues? Call me cynical, but if there were an equivalent to Band-Aids in the legal community, I'd buy a helluva lot of Johnson and Johnson stock because, as a society, we prefer to treat symptoms, not causes.

All standard disclaimers apply (specifically, IANAL, but I have slept with several, and the fact that one shouted, "Bang the gavel, BANG THE GAVEL!"during...let's call them "closing arguments"...well, I think that must give me some sort of cache).

There was a douchebag had a dog and Jingo was its name-o?

This comment displays not only a profound lack of information regarding both immigration policy AND simple population movement, but a lack of knowledge about disease vector transmission.

Unless you're suggesting that the US hermetically seal itself off both from all population movement as well as all importation from outside sources, then you're fighting an un-winnable battle.

But yeah, go ahead, blame the "crybaby libtards" because it's more important to have a binary answer than a correct one.

I'm not sure it's acceptable to make judgments of this sort (a quarter of the population was living in poverty in 1959 versus 10 to 15% since the mid-60s) specifically because the way poverty was measured changed in the mid-60s with the institution of the absolute poverty threshold by Johnson and the adoption of Orshansky Poverty Thresholds by the US Office of Economic Opportunity in '65. Functionally, you're just comparing rates because they both have a percent symbol in them as those actual numbers were not calculated using the same metric.

A better way to compare a family living in poverty in 1959 (or 1935, for that matter), would be to look at their relative purchasing power. In 1959, a dollar was "worth more" than it is today. A 1959 dollar, which in 1959 would buy a dollars worth of goods, will today only buy $0.12 worth of goods today. This 89% erosion in the actual purchasing power means that a family living in poverty in 1959 could still be argued to be living better off than a family living below the poverty level today.

There are, of course, major problems with this as well. This highlights the central issue that no one seems to be addressing: current mathematical models are insufficient when it comes to representing the actual situation "on the ground". Thus, you can say, "Well, things were worse in the 1950s because poverty was at 25% then," but clearly there are nearly 40 million people in this country alone who would disagree with you on the basis of their access to health care. While numbers certainly have a place in economics, any model that fails to incorporate an existential axis will be flawed, at best.

Economics is, in many ways, a creation of will; what is believed to be true might as well be true because everyone (or at least those sharing the belief) will behave as if it's true. So, while it's hard to objectively say things are "better" now because of a lower poverty rate, it's also difficult to to say they are worse using a strict number comparison.

What can be said, however, and what is indeed disturbing is the calcification of economic stratification in US society. While times may have been hard in the 1950s, it was still possible to extract oneself from one economic level and be upwardly mobile. As a previous commenter pointed out, this may have be due, in part, to an unsustainable labor-focused market. However, simply because one model is unsustainable, doesn't mean other models can't rise to take its place. Those new models are not appearing, thus it is arguable that it is more difficult now for a person born into poverty to climb out of it than it was for a person born into poverty in the 1950s to change their fortune. The American Equation of "Hard Work = Increased Fortune" is no longer true.

This can be seen in a recent study by Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez where he shows that income inequality is at an all time high for the nation.

So the issue is not so much poverty level, but lack of mobility and all that comes with not being able to move into higher economic classes. As long as this persists, poverty levels are essentially meaningless.

Erm, why is this an issue? There are 365 days in the year to celebrate some 200,000 years of Homo sapiens wandering around doing notable things like inventing crop rotation, stopping throwing rocks and the moon and trying to figure out how to throw themselves at the moon and inventing Hypercolors t-shirts. Even if there's just one notable event or person a year, that's around 548 things to celebrate, honor or remember each day (there were decimals, but screw them because if they can't be bothered, neither can I).

So, yeah, some days are going to be shared. Doesn't mean they have to be mutually exclusive. For example, May 25th is also:

Cookie Monster's Birthday - I tried carrying around a cookie, but I ate it. It was delicious and I poured out some crumbs for my muppet hommies who ain't here.

National Missing Children's Day - read a milk carton, maybe save a life.

National Tap Dance Day - Part of me hopes there's a afterlife just so there can be a Gregory Hines/Douglas Adams smackdown for this day.

Cover The Uninsured Day - Pretty relevant, really.

And, the one you might be most interested in, National Smile Day.

Besides, Memorial Day falls on the last Monday in May (or May 30th, depending on how you feel about 1971 and the federal government), so it's really just a guest on this particular May 25th and maybe it should behave itself better?