I find two things kid of odd here: one is the overall lack of concern about illegal activities the US gov. has undertaken; the second is the lame defenses...
While we busy ourselves around the world giving lip-service to freedom, we don't seem to care too much about establishing a Stasi/KGB-type intelligence eschalon in the good old US of A. Complacency.
It's not about "ME being so important".. exactly the opposite. It's not about the likelihood of being "electrocuted." (We have a lot of regulations that protect people from being electrocuted BTW). It's about deciding if the US is going to be a country run
according to the rule of law.. or not... whether we've decided that's old hat, boooorrring, tiresome.. or whatever.
Neither am I "preoccupied with" getting clapped into a secret prison without due process. That hardly means I should look kindly on those who pretend the power to do so.
"What won't we allow?"
..just consider what it says about this administration. Not only did Comey think that he had to rush to the hospital room to protect Ashcroft from having a conniving Card and Gonzales manipulate his severe illness and confusion by coercing his signature on a document -- behavior that is seen only in the worst cases of deceitful, conniving relatives coercing a sick and confused person to sign a new will -- but the administration's own FBI Director thought it was necessary to instruct his FBI agents not to allow Comey to be removed from the room.
Comey and Mueller were clearly both operating on the premise that Card and Gonzales were basically thugs. Indeed, Comey said that when Card ordered him to the White House, Comey refused to meet with Card without a witness being present, and that Card refused to allow Comey's summoned witness (Solicitor General Ted Olson) even to enter Card's office. These are the most trusted intimates of the White House -- the ones who are politically sympathetic to them and know them best -- and they prepared for, defended themselves against, the most extreme acts of corruption and thuggery from the President's Chief of Staff and his then-legal counsel (and current Attorney General of the United States).
Does this sound in any way like the behavior of a government operating under the rule of law, which believes that it had legal authority to spy on Americans without the warrants required for three decades by law? How can we possibly permit our government to engage in this behavior, to spy on us in deliberate violation of the laws which we enacted democratically precisely in order to limit how they can spy on us, and to literally commit felonies at will, knowing that they are breaking the law?
How is this not a major scandal on the level of the greatest presidential corruption and lawbreaking scandals in our country's history? Why is this only a one-day story that will focus on the hospital drama but not on what it reveals about the bulging and unparalleled corruption of this administration and the complete erosion of the rule of law in our country? And, as I've asked many times before, if we passively allow the President to simply break the law with impunity in how the government spies on our conversations, what don't we allow?
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/16/nsa_comey/index.html
in case the import of this is not clear: John Ashcroft was way too moderate for these people. John Ashcroft.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/john_ashcroft_a.html
That the Bush admin. would RISK such a scene.. just to get around the FISA court that already approves 99.995% of warrants.. doesn't give anyone pause to ask "WHY"?
Enough jokes about black SUVs.. I'm serious..
"What will it take" to get you to see the criminal intentions here?
It won't get better. It won't plateau. It will get worse. I predict we'll see more as this admin. limps into the sunset.
Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Jay Rockefeller:
"For the past six months, I have been requesting without success specific details about the program, including: how many terrorists have been identified; how many arrested; how many convicted; and how many terrorists have been deported or killed as a direct result of information obtained through the warrantless wiretapping program.
"I can assure you,
not one person in Congress has the answers to these and many other fundamental questions."
) some folks out. I stopped by Fort Bragg and told a couple of Special Ops guys that you've been looking at dirty pictures on the internet. 
