Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

If it's true that George Bush formulated plans to facilitate unlimited access to all our phone calls and e-mails and faxes in the first days of his presidency, it must be true that he thought of it before the election. It's hard to believe that the idea only came to him on the first morning he woke up with his head on a White House pillow. Given the strong evidence and testimony that he had no concerns regarding any threat of international terrorism and particularly ignored the threat from al Qaeda, one can fairly conclude that clamping down on freedom in the cause of power was an end in itself.

Of course it's not that the government's freedom of your information is an end in itself, seeing the way the ability to write law and to interpret law has been arrogated by the tyrant Bush anyway. It's more likely just a way to facilitate unlimited fishing trips through a sea of data hoping to come up with something they can prosecute you for or intimidate you with.

Stonewalling congress and the courts regarding evidence of high crimes is far, far beyond the previous limits of arrogance set by the late Richard M. Nixon and so is the attempt to bring corporate henchmen under the umbrella of executive privilege by granting them immunity from the law.

The concept of ATT as a freebooter, a private party given license to steal information from Americans that the government believes it owns and needs to prosecute its war on drugs, war on whistleblowers and dare I say it, its war on liberty, is hard to swallow, but remember, licensing mercenaries like Blackwater and it's affiliates to do the illegal is a practice as alive today as it was in the days when kings used letters of marque to license pirates and privateers to prey on their enemies. The difference now, of course, is that Bush has issued letters of marque to be used against what a naive person would consider to be his own people.

Today, Chris Dodd plans to mount a filibuster against legislation that would grant immunity from prosecution to Telecom companies even though Bush insists, with an odd circularity that they have committed no crime. Although I fear the effort is doomed, perhaps there is a faint hope that the country will take some time out from debating which candidate Jesus would vote for if his churches get around to endorsing democracy, and stand up for their right to due process and the protection of the constitution. Is it too much to ask that some of the other candidates put down their Bibles and tell us what they think about enforcing the constitution and the rule of law?