A man was arrested in North Carolina for successfully passing a $200 bill. The bill included a picture of George Bush and slogans like “We like ice cream” and “The USA deserves a tax cut.” The cashier apparently thought that was good enough for $150 worth of groceries and $50 change.
It’s not clear to me a crime was committed, at least not the crime of passing counterfeit money. According to the The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition (2001), counterfeiting is the crime of “manufacturing spurious … paper money … in the semblance of the true. There must be sufficient resemblance to the genuine article to deceive a person using ordinary caution.” To me, that doesn’t sound like a $200 bill.