From Salon's own pages....

You know, of course, that Obama has your e-mail address. You may not have realized that he probably also has your phone number and knows where you're registered to vote -- including whether that's a house or an apartment building, and whether you rent or own. He's got a decent estimate of your household income and whether you opened a credit card recently. He knows how many kids you're likely to have and what you do for a living. He knows what magazines and catalogs you get and whether you're more apt to get your news from cable TV, the local newspaper or online. And he knows what time of day you tend to get around to plowing through your in box and responding to messages.

This is hilarious. While you folks whine about how you can be heard while calling Aunt Erma in Bristol, Obama very likely knows what kind of phone you're using. This folks, is the current state of datamining... by the "civil rights" candidate no less. Heh.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/16/obama_data/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/washington/16combatant.html?em&ex=1216267200&en=d3c315e2b68a7317&ei=5087%0A

So now not only can we citizens be spied upon without unhindered, we can be "captured" as "enemy combatants" on US soil and "detained" for any length of time.

What a wonderful place to try raising a family we've become.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned. I'm only on page 18 of the comments.

George H. W. Bush once stated that if the American people knew what their elected officials were up to they would have them tied behind wild horses and drive them out of town.

From the first moment I saw democratic representatives back peddling on the issues mentioned in Glenn's post, I thought that there were two possible explanations for it. Either the democratic reps were complicit if not co-conspirators in the crimes or because of the warrantless spying secrets regarding personal negative opinions about Americans or arrogant disrespect for them would be exposed. They were either in on the crimes or blackmailed into silence, because they knew that somewhere there existed a data bank with personal and/or illegal secrets stored there.

I believed then and believe now that they only way to rid ourselves of these arrogant twits is to deliberately vote them all out to replace them with younger fresh blood who as yet are not completely dominated by the need for capital to run their campaigns.

I do not know whether we should blame certain large corporations for investing thirty years into undermining the Constitution, burying civil liberties, and ignoring the rule of law, or if blame should be placed on avarice, callousness, and cynicism that have corrupted politicans to the degree that many of them are actually closet fascists rather than patriots protecting the republic from them.

Two phrases, "It's all about money," and "What's good for business is good for America," although incredibly myopic in scope are easy to grasp and have a sense of reality to them. The important idea here is that these perceptions of reality were created; they are not a force of nature, or due to divine intervention. They are simply individuals who have gotten away with illegal and corrupt behavior they feel entitled to perform for the rewards from their acts.

They either do not care or mistakenly believe that they are being realists when the truth is that they have become complicit actors in a coup against a constitutional form of governance and the rule of law. Worse, is that they have decided that the citizens of this country are apathetic, distracted, immature, self-absorbed conformists who are with some effort manipulated to remain passive in the face of criminal and traitorous behavior.

They have decided that with the able assistance of the propaganda media betrayers, public relations spin, and marketing techniques we can be controlled and manipulated to act against our best interest. They also believe and have some data to backup the assumption that the people suffer short term memory loss; therefore, even the most terrible revelations of abberant immoral behavior need only go through one or two news cycles before it is forgotten and outrage is converted to submission.

"They don't know what they've lost til it's gone. They pave paradise and put up a parking lot." - Mitchell

Once upon a time there was this group of Americans, in New York, who wanted to start a online journal called 'an american place'. It was a very unusual group of people because they came from all walks of life and from all sides of the political spectrum - but there was this 'thing' they shared - a wonderful common interest for dance 'im Allgemeinen' (as Timbermann perhaps would say) and Art 'im Besonderen' - and this common cause let them to overcome all their pesky little differences and turned them into a group of tolerant and very independent thinker - because it is hardly possible to enjoy Groucho Marx and not being 'independent' and so their heroes were the likes of Jefferson, Adams, Marx (Groucho) and Alfred Stieglitz, who had found the first american place and also had 'found' artists like Ansel Adams, who decided to show 'the American landscape' only in Black and White.

And as these founders of a new an american place were very fond of Black and White - but also liked color they thought about some kind of 'Gesamtkunstwerk' - were all the barriers between the Arts had fallen - and as they (begrudgingly) noticed that 'politics' starting to become the new 'Art' - and as they were fearlessly independent (did I mention it already?) they got sick from all this 'noise' from all these partisan sid(t)es because no one listens to a obvious partisan anymore - and they especially got ticked off by Salon - because there was this so called 'left', 'liberal' or 'progressive' woman editor, who struggled so much with her gender reflexes, that everything she wrote could be used in a writers seminar about reactionary subtext and there was this other blogger, who was an excellent journalist, but he had this weakness, that he was a lawyer too - and everybody knows about laywers, and this is such a moronic stereotypical statement, that the group of Americans, we are talking about here - felt a little bit bad - (but only a little bit) - because they all had this stereotypical problem which bordered on Paranoia. They -(as the rest of the world - had identified lawyers) as 'die Ursache allen Übels' (the cause of the whole madness) and they thought it was a tiny bit hypocritical to fight crusaders with crusades - but this lawyerjournalist was such a damn good writer and he shared their love for Jefferson and Adams (perhaps not for Groucho Marx) - that they thought he could be pursued to move over to a truely independent sit(d)e - and they talked a lot about him and one of the Americans was filthy rich (as a lot of them are) - and he said 'we might not get him with the money but we get him with his 'instinct'. And that’s how we solve the puzzle, why even politicians vote against their own policies, philosophies or interest - because they are like this group of Americans, who tried to found a new 'an american place' – and suddenly they got into such a huge and ugly fight because of their instincts and after one of the 'liberal founding mother' of the new place described in drastic words, how she wanted to show it to Obama and to f… terrorist - the group dissolved and irony was back with a vengeance and it never ever will be dead - even if there is another 911.