If you go to the discussion for a given story and click on an author's name, the site provides a spam-free way to send E-mail to the author of any post, via the E-mail address you used when you signed up. Periodically, I get responses to messages on the site via this mechanism.

Today, while researching something else, I noticed errors in the mail log, typically caused by people who use this feature without correctly entering their own E-mail address (which causes a bounce loop). After patching it to a valid (but probably wrong) address so it would go through, I got a fairly long rant about this message.

I'm still of the era that believes that posting private E-mail on the site is wrong, but since the young man in question didn't provide a correct E-mail address so I could reply to him personally, let me at least make a few notes:

• If you want people to take you seriously, do not send a 31-line, one-paragraph message with spelling and grammar errors on every line, particularly if you're trying to brag that you are a "med student" who graduated from Tecumseh High School in 2001.

  I can't imagine anyone taking you seriously when you write, "As a outsider of the town it is easy to hold on to such clams as 'privicy rights' but the fact is it is not as much of a threat as you think it is." First, someone obviously felt threatened enough to sue because she was removed from the band for failing to give up her privacy. Second, it's hard to feel threatened while holding onto clams.

• You say you were there the night the mayor, in your words, "WAS ACCUSED OF GIVING TO A MINOR." Presuming you mean giving alcohol to a minor, which is a crime ("giving to a minor" is not). You say that "he was not in any way acting or doing the things that the sensationalist media clamied." That second "clam" reference aside, I noted that the claims (see what an extra "i" can do for a word) about his activity came from "the police report and later news stories." If the police had this wrong, you should tell them.
• I'm glad you're fond of the mayor and think that "he is a great leader that only has the welfare of tecumsehs youth in mind!" However, when you come out of nowhere with an unintelligible message that almost never reached me because you can't even enter your own E-mail address correctly, you're not in position to scold me about listening to the "'he said, she said' side of things." The police said one thing, now you're saying another (including that invading other people's privacy is not much of a threat), but you want me not to listen to that?

If this kind of grammar, spelling, and logic is what Tecumseh High School is turning out these days, I don't think random drug testing will help. And none of your points in any way eliminate the basic, skull-spinning hypocrisy of the town's leaders, so let me try this a bit more slowly.

Random drug tests are a result of an assumption that all students are taking drugs, or want to take drugs, and that they must face random tests to be scared into staying clean. Presuming innocence means you must assume that students are not taking drugs unless you see evidence that they are. Testing only kids who look like they're using drugs is not "random," it's evidence-based. Tecumseh demanded the right to randomly force any student in an extracurricular activity to drop his or her pants and urinate in front of a witness, without any evidence that the student was taking drugs, because Tecumseh's leaders assumed that all kids would take drugs - presumed them guilty - unless there was a threat of being caught.

Tecumseh fought this case all the way to the US Supreme Court, and in one of the previous court's darker moments, actually won. The good kids in Tecumseh who participate in band and choir and FFA now have to pee on command or get kicked out of it. The slackers who never get involved in anything don't get tested and can take all the drugs they want without random testing. Tecumseh fought for and won the right to presume that kids in extracurricular activities are using illegal drugs.

Yet when the same town's own leadership was witnessed - by police officers, who swore it was true in legal documents - handing out alcohol to minors, the reaction from the same town's leaders was "well, slow down here, they're innocent until proven guilty." They demand the presumption of innocence for themselves and refuse it for their children. Leaders who demand rights for themselves that they won't extend to others, particular to the best students in their own high school, are hypocrites.

I recognize that the mayor and the school board are not necessarily the same, and I'm glad you can find many fine things, in your opinion, that the mayor has done for Tecumseh's youth (though perhaps English tutoring would have been a better idea than a kegger on school grounds). But if you want to defend searching students' bodily fluids while excusing what the police saw the mayor do, then perhaps you should obey your own closing advice: "get smarter or shut up!"

And I'll put my "morals and or values" up against yours anyday, Patch Adams, so don't start a fight you can't win.

Have a nice day.