Obama is ok with wholesale spying on your electronic communications.

McCain is ok with disappearing anybody some anonymous person in the government says is a Terrorist. He called the Supreme Court decision not to grant that right to the president one of the worst in history.

I'd rather be spied on than disappeared.

RAMBLING PART BELOW---TRYING TO EXPLICATE CONGRESSIONAL MOTIVATIONS---SKIP IF YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT WHY THE BEASTS DO THESE STRANGE RITUALS

And, there is something hollow sounding about all the hullabaloo now.... Wholesale spying on your electronic communications is routinely done by businesses (hell, that's Google's core business plan). And I suspect most people have pretty much accepted the fact that their communications will be intercepted, and just HOPE that the people in power won't come after them.

I also suspect most congresscritters have accepted That's Just the Way it Is as well.

Personally, I think that Government needs to be restricted MORE than anybody else, which is why the death penalty is simply wrong. You as an individual might think that some people deserve to die for what they have done, and I wouldn't hold it strongly against somebody if they did a revenge killing of someone who killed their child, for example. But I really don't want the Government to have the power to decide who lives and who dies. However, the vast majority of people in this country are fine with giving that power to the Government. Pro LawNOrder and all that BS that has gotten us the largest prison population in the world.

So, FISA destroying a liberty that, for practical purposes, doesn't exist anymore, and giving immunity to phone companies for doing things that a lot of people just assumed they were doing anyway, is viewed as a small price to pay for getting Bush to go along with legislation (eg. housing bill, or any of those earmarks every one of them brags about on their webpages) that Democratic Congresscritters feel is their main reason to be there. Promising to protect the Constitution and your right not to be spied upon isn't how they got elected, after all. They promised to bring home the bacon, and FISA is the price.

Oh, they also promised to scale back the war... but that isn't being covered so much in the MSM anymore so they hope you've forgotten....

And, of course, the Telecoms pay them to do it... what's not to love?

I have a better idea: Let's preserve the republic rather than decide which dictator you want reading your email and listening in on your phone conversations.

When you are given the choice of two dictatorially minded people, you choose the one that you think will allow you the time and resources to try and preserve the Republic.

By choosing Obama, you may have four to eight more years to try and fight back before they start dragging people like you who openly say such things on blogs off to prison. Yes, it is a delaying tactic, which we can still (barely)afford to do, because we are still living under tyrant wannabes, rather than a true tyranny.

Are you a Hockey fan? Maybe this you will understand... voting for a third party candidate is like when you remove you are 2 points behind with 1 minute to go in the last period, so you remove your Goalie in a last ditch effort to score because you have nothing left to lose. We are not yet to that point. And, to mix sports metaphors, voting for Obama is like intentionally walking instead of pitching to the home run hitter when all your outfield has fallen asleep and your pitcher's shoulder is hurt. You do the intentional walk and hope you can wake up the outield (the Congress) before the next batter comes up.

and to be honest, I don't really think Obama is any more tyrannically minded than anybody else out there seeking the most powerful political post in the history of mankind. Probably less so. But, principled politicians can rarely, if ever, be so successful. Politics is, after all, almost a synonym for compromise and expediency.

The founders understood this, which is why they built a system where no politician is trusted. The system is breaking, if not broken. Try to fix the SYSTEM and not keep hoping to vote for that mythical being, the truly plausible AND principled presidential candidate.

Vote for the one who is not proudly claiming how he will take a sledgehammer to what's left of our Republic.