Americans don’t just have the right to bear arms, they assert their rights to express their opinions on their chests. In Florida, former City Commissioner Bruce Tumin doesn’t appreciate how his City Hall spends taxpayer’s cash, including an estimated $20,000 to paint a mural on the roadside. The day the mural-painting project began he turned up wearing his protest - a white polo-shirt sporting the city seal and the word debt. Two days later he received a letter from the city attorney threatening him with legal action unless he stopped wearing the seal-emblazoned polo.

Tumin says the city is targeting him because of his message. ‘They want to keep me silent,’ he complained. ‘I want to tell people the truth.’ But a city official said the letter was not vindictive and had nothing to do with Tumin’s stand on city spending. ‘Once you are out of office, you are out of office,’ a spokesman said. ‘You don’t wear city seal unless you are a city employee.’

 Apparently, using the city seal without permission violates state statutes and is a second-degree misdemeanour. This isn’t the first time Mr Tumin has used the seal to show his dissatisfaction with city spending. He didn’t like commissioners overspending by $3 million on a fire station and wore the polo-shirt to the public dedication of the new building.

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