Aych: They sure have, but frankly it's nothing new.. Look at what J Edgar Hoover did.

... that FISA came about precisely because of what J. Edgar did. FISA was supposed to be the "never again" answer to J. Edgar's excesses. But J. Edgar was working in a different milieu — WW II, the Cold War and the Communist Menace, Viet Nam and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s threats to the American Way of Life. In the face of these things we could afford to legislate control of electronic serveillance since these were never existential threats to the US. But a bunch of guys living in caves in Waziristan, that's something that we can't afford to risk not being able to listen to every phone call in the world because when they're ready to strike again they're going to call up the sleeper cell and say "leave the suitcase nuke in the trash can at the corner of State and Madison" and if we miss that call, we're all dead. (I saw it on 24 so you know it's true.)

So did Nero Wolfe.

It reminded me that with all our complaining and desires for a better America, we still have so much to be grateful for and should always remember that.
— Retired Military Patriot

America should be grateful for being a nation of obese couch potatoes? Decadence is its own reward? Doubtless Romans in the later Roman Empire had much to be grateful for too, just before the lean, mean barbarians tore down the gates.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
— Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village

You're always doing this.

Actually I was referring to the entire adult population of the US, of which I suspect a rather small percentage are aware of Mycroft.
— Aycharaych

You set up the parameters and then when you get an answer that you don't like, you change the parameters so that your position still fits inside them but the answer you have gotten doesn't. You ask how many people, and I say quite a few and then you say "I was referring to the entire adult population of the US" (which I presume disqualifies Brits, which is only fair since Holmes is after all a British creation).

But even granting your new parameters, what do you consider a "small percentage" of the adult population of the US? One percent? Half a percent? I'd consider half a percent a "rather small percentage", but if you figure that the adult population of the US is 200 million (it's actually somewhat higher) then half a percent of that is still 1 million people. In my book that counts as quite a few people. Not as large as the number of Americans who can't point out France on a map, but still significant from a logistical point of view.

You are always on about the number of Americans in prison, but that number is less than 1 percent of adult Americans (not much less, 99.1 if I remember), a rather small percentage of the entire adult population of the US. I'm not trying to say that that number isn't disgusting and outrageous; all I'm trying to point out is that "a rather small percentage of the entire population of the US" is still a significant number and yet you play it up when it suits your purposes and play it down when it doesn't.

You remind me of a TV commercial from many years ago for a new breakfast cereal called, if memory serves, "Buckwheats". I only saw the commercial about twice before it disappeared, but it was very impressive. It showed a single strip of bacon and a single fried egg while the announcer intoned: "New Buckwheats has 50% of the protein of this bacon and egg breakfast but only half the calories." What it impressed on me was the difference between 50% and one-half. One is big and the other is small.

A quick test. Are the following principles conservative, liberal, or centrist?

First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

Second: No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.

Third: Any nation's right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.

Fourth: Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

And fifth: A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.

Your answer may provide an answer to why you object to both Republicans and Democrats using the term "centrist" as a dirty word.