So, basically Bush and anyone under him can snoop around any American's "private" emails and come up with any conclusions they want about those emails and what they might mean and we Americans are powerless to do anything about it?

What country is this anyway? This is not the United States of America, that is for sure. Maybe we should rename this country the Stalinist States of America, except I think Bush has been worse for our country than Stalin was for Russia. Perhaps we should rename the country the Un-United States of Bush, instead.

I'm pretty disgusted by this latest attack on civil liberties and freedoms. Why doesn't Bush just go and physically tear up the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights documents while he is at it. In his seven years in the White House he has figuratively done just that, so that those documents that we have based this country on for the last 200 plus years means pretty much nothing.

We might as well start declaring our loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, II, for all the freedoms American citizens have lost!

Thanks for your thoughts, William. LWM had sort of indicated that you would naturally share his sentiments about my post. I only meant to say that, if one of my posts ever did attract your scorn, I would be honored by the attention, and listen carefully.

Your post opens up more lines of cogitation than I can possibly pursue. One great protection America has that (say) 1920s Germany lacked, is a fairly strong Federalist system. Though in my view most libertarianism springs mainly from rationalized greed, the libertarian (and traditional conservative) critique of liberals like me, that we've been too willing to turn over the sovereignty of the several states to those centripetal forces, has been dead on. It's worth devoting considerable intellectual energy to working out how as much of every problem's solution as possible can be devolved to state and local levels. Now that real conservatives have disappeared, that intellectual energy will have to be invested by liberals.

Never in our lifetime, of course, has there been such a thing as a liberal majority in either house of Congress. The steady erosion of the racial animus that created the Dixiecrats and sustained the Nixon and Reagan revolutions is one structural alteration that works in our favor. We are only (depending on the issue) 60 or 80 votes in the House and 6 or 12 votes in the Senate away from that grail of a (small d) democratic majority. In numbers, it's the closest we've ever been. And the demographics will work in our favor over the next couple of decades. Lady Liberty may yet have a bright future if she can just hang on through that sea change.

As you say, the question is whether matters will come to a head before those demographics can kick in.

As recriters go bootom feeding to meet quota, the Pentagon is busy creating a high-tech database to reach out and snare unsuspecting students. First there was the obscure provision of th NO Child Left Behin Act that forces high schools to turn over the names and contacts details of all juniors and seniors, effectively names and contact details of all junriors and seniors, effectively transforming President George Bush's signature education bill into the most aggressive miliary recruitment tool since the draft.

Then, in June 2005, privacy advocates were shocked to learn that for two ears, the Pentagon had been amassing a database of information on million o Youn Americans were to help identify college and high school student as young as sixteeen to target them for military recruitment.

The massive database inludes an arry of personal information inclding birth dates, Social Security numers, e-mail addresses, grade point aveerages, ethnicities and what subjects the students are studying. The Pentagon has hired the Massachuetts based company BeNow to run the database. By turning to private firms to do this work, the government is circumventing laws that restrict its right to collect or hold citizen information.

The Pentagon Joint Advertising Market Reseach and Studies GROUP (jamrs) OVEREES THE MASSIVIE DATA MINING PROJECT. The Pentagon which is spending 243 million on JAMARS, is collecting data from commerical data brokers, state, stat drivers licence record, and other sources. JAMARS Web Site dwcribes the consolidated databse located at BeNow as as arguable the largest repository of 16-25 year old youth data in the country containing roughfly 30 million records. The Pentagon has stated that it can share the data with law enforcement, state tax authorities, other agencies making employment inquries, anf foreign authorities, among others. Students will not know if their information as been collectd, and they cannot prvent it from happening.

The main obstacle to getting kids into the militaary--concerned prents--has at long loast been circumvented. Private companies can harvest data on children and prvide private recruters with the information tehy nedd to cotact keds directly. On JAMRS study focused exclusively on how to change mothers' attitudes. In march 2004, 271 mothers from Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angles, and NEew Yity were interviewed in order enable recruiter to better undertand ways to movtivate mothers crrently on the fence to be accepting of military service, and exert some influence on mothers who are curently against the military service.

Now rebllious teens have a new ally in challlenging their over protective mothers, the Pentagon Data mining--which the Pentagon claimee it had topped in 2003 afer and earlier program, Total Information Awarenesss progect, was exposed--is fraught with risk.

It is little wonder that the Pentagon must invent new ways to fnd bodies for te front lines. Support for America's foriegn wars has dropped to new lows among young Americans: one study shows that only 25 percent of teens support the war on Iraq.

adnoto and others for being so clearsighted and holding out against those who are confusing the issue. This might not be adnoto's opinion, but speaking for myself: Those who argue that we should support the Democratic candidate for president remind me, sadly, of precisely those Democratic politicians who say that they are against telecom immunity but at the same time steadfastly refuse to take the action that would be necessary to stop it. The politicians, as some people on this blog, just end up being enablers. Probably passage of this bill is all but certain at this point, so we'll have to focus our efforts on defeating Democrats in November. I of course agree that it would be disastrous to have McCain for president. But -- and most people are too caught up in wishful thinking to see this right now -- it would be even more disastrous to have Obama for president after Democrats have passed this bill. Obama would, as a Democrat who will never put up more than mild resistance against his own party at best, come to stand through his association with this corrupt party for authoritarianism just as McCain would. But if McCain were president, we would still have a realistic chance of keeping the issue of the rule of law and liberty alive as an issue within the Democratic opposition. If Obama becomes president after Democrats pass this bill, the issue will be dead for as far as I can see into the future of this country.

The bill will probably pass, but the real work is just beginning. What we'll have to remember in five months is that voting for a Democrat is not the lesser of two evils anymore, it's the greater. On the other hand, putting Nader over ten percent would change the political dynamics in this country for decades to come. Enough people will have the presence of mind to recognize these things before the election, not after.