[afterthefact]

The government can monitor your phone calls and can read your e-mails and open your snail mail.

So?

The government can access records of your large financial transactions, such as buying a house.

Again, so?

Law enforcement officers can bust into your home when you're not there, riffle through your belongings, plant a recording device on your computer, and leave without notifying you for at least thirty days -- and maybe a lot more.

Yeah, with a warrant. They don't care what I am doing. If they did, then that would mean I was doing something suspicious that I probably shouldn't be doing, which I'm not.

You no longer have the right to protest where the president or vice president can see you, or at major public events when they aren't even present.

Good, protests are annoying, it's not like they accomplish anything except for starting riots and big fights.

Law enforcement officers can now monitor you in public if you are merely exercising your political rights.

Monitor is a fancy word for "look at," and people look at me all the time. Stop being so paranoid.

They can infiltrate your political organizations.

Don't have one, don't care.

And they can keep track of you at your place of worship. The government can find out from bookstores and libraries the material you've been reading, and the bookstore owner and the librarian can't talk about it, except to their lawyers, for a whole year -- or more.

I'm one of Jehovah's Witnesses, so trust me, we are used to it. It sort of comes with the territory.

The government can hold you in preventive detention for months on end as a "material witness."

I'd probably have to witness something for them to want to do this.

If you're not a citizen the government can deport you on a technicality or for mere political association.

I like how people who act like they hate this country use fear of deportation as a claim against it. Isn't that oxymoronic?

If you're not a citizen the government can label you an "enemy combatant" and send you to secret prisons around the world, where you may never see the light of day again -- much less a lawyer or a judge. And even if you are a citizen, the government can label you an enemy combatant and hold you in solitary confinement here in the United States.

Ok, you are talking about the government the way I talked about police when I was 5. "They can arrest you and take you to jail!" Yeah, if you DO something. Just stop trying to stand out like a sore thumb and they will leave you alone. They aren't going to come after you just for the heck of it, out of pure boredom. "Hey, I'm bored, let's send that guy over there to Guantanamo Bay."

Under George W. Bush's interpretation of the president's powers during the so-called war on terror he can do just about whatever he wants. He cites the Authorization for Use of Military Force bill, which Congress passed on September 18, 2001, as the justification for this enormous leeway.

Yeah, it's been a rough 7 years. Even speaking as a politically neutral person, I'll admit that. But hang in there for one more year. He can go back to pumping gas and making under the table deals with terrorists, and you can get back to the next movement in your everlasting quest for finding something to complain about.