Life in Soviet America, or Жизнь в Советской Америки

Imagine that your entire city is flooded. Now suppose that you have a canoe and, being a good caring person, you paddle around in your canoe to save people who are stranded. Being such a good samaritan, at least in Louisiana, will get you arrested by the local goons, thrown into prison, held until your family can come up with $75,000 bail.

It happened to this man, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who was arrested and held for a month on the charge of Canoeing While Muslim.

I found this story here, and you should peruse the other links in that post.

For all of the ranting of the Wingnuts and Teabaggers about "taking back our country" and "freedom" and "liberty", one thing is clear. "Freedom" and "liberty" are, to them, worship words, devoid of any true meaning. Conservatives, the very people who now populate the Tea party, cheered on as the Bush Administration rammed the Patriot Act into law. They cheered as the Bush Administration tried to assume more and more powers of a classic police state: Warrantless searches and wiretaps. Allowing the FBI to rifle through people's records without a warrant. Using illegal searches to justify search warrants. Torture. Arrest without probably cause. Imprisonment without cause. The Confederate party has done more recently than anyone else to make "your papers, please" acceptable.

This, of course, goes back further than the Bush Administration, although they need to be beaten regularly about the full-throated embrace of authoritarian powers by the true Prince of Darkness, Dick Cheney, and his coterie of evil acolytes, (David Addington being the chief one). There was a time in this country when "the knock on the door in the middle of the night" was considered to be a hallmark of nations like Hitler's Germany and the USSR; now that is an accepted police arrest tactic everywhere. At the drop of a hat and with often zero justification, the cops use their black-uniformed, coal-scuttle-helmet-wearing goon squads, all of whom seem to love to wear the same face-obscuring balaclava used by bank robbers, terrorists, and anyone else too cowardly to show their faces to the world.

Our right to be left alone, or freedom of movement, are constantly under increasing encroachment. I have written before about the use of license plate cameras to track the legal movements of Americans. The Feds mine every information database they can (I submit that anyone who thinks that they don't is naive, at best). The NSA listens in on everything they can.

The Confederates largely cheered this on. Not that this is confined to them; I've said before that no Administration would do anything other than to seek an expansion of its own power and this current one is no different in that regard.

The press cannot be counted on to defend our freedoms. Beside caving completely on the Iraq War, the story on Bush's proposal for an American Stasi broke in a foreign paper because American papers wouldn't touch the story. Only after the story broke did politicians (Joe Lieberman being a prominent exception) move to kill the program.

I don't see any politicians campaigning on a platform to roll back the American police state. As long as the powers of the American police state don't infringe on firearms ownership, it seems that the Teabaggers, among others, don't give a shit. They are out here proclaiming that they want to "take back our country" and they are screaming about the false flags of socialism, Islam and Marxism, all the while ignoring the real damage done to American freedoms and liberties by their own political allies. The Teabaggers, in particular, do not understand that freedom to only conform to their ideals is not freedom. Freedom to only pray in the houses of worship that the Teabaggers approve of is not freedom.

I see nobody, other than a few journalists, the ACLU and a handful of bloggers, both liberal and apostate conservatives, who are concerned about the growing power of the American police state. I suspect that we have probably passed the point of no return.

We are so fucked.