The United States are in serious jeopardy of becoming that which we are told is our greatest fear: A tyrannical regime which removes liberty and doesn't let the People vote.

We apparently have indoctrination camps which are a sign of a fundamentalist regime which teaches them to become warriors for Belief...which face it...everyone believes in their own personal way. If children are being brainwashed in any way to act in a manner that causes his neighbour to be afraid, he is wrong.

Religious beliefs must not intrude the Secular existence we are granted by our Founding Fathers; Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Any god who would justify suffering wrought by man against man is no god. The God i'm familiar with would not in any way shape or form make me feel that torturing another Human is Right.

I'm not really good at the watercooler politics discussion, but a friend of mine at work (good guy, I consider him a "recovering Republican" -- he thinks Ann Coulter is a nutjob) decided to try and get me riled up last night. He is convinced that Hillary Clinton is already the '08 nominee. He said that he was "very afraid" of what would happen if she got elected. He was "afraid of the war that Hillary Clinton would get us into."

?!

There's some projection for you.

So we discussed Iraq and he in typical fashion brought up Bill Clinton who "had us in more places than Bush did"; reasoning being that we shouldn't expend our resources on peacekeeping missions and only respond militarily when our national security is threatened. So I got to go through the whole, "Saddam didn't attack us!" "Yeah, but he gassed his people!" thing. I am unfortunately not up on the alleged plethora of microwars Bill Clinton got us into. My friend apparently is basing his Clinton grudge on the Black Hawk Down incident. My response: "How many killed in that?" "Now how many are we up to in Iraq?" with hand-scale weighing gesture.

So he doesn't think we should involve ourselves in peacekeeping missions. He insisted that there was satellite proof of WMD's being moved out of Iraq right before we struck. I laid out the whole hypothesis that Valerie Plame/Brewster Jennings was blown because they had discovered quite by accident the WMD that was to be planted there and revealed. Of course he said, "Oh you want to argue with conspiracy theories!" and we got into the NSA. He claimed that we've been wiretapped since the 70's and it was nothing new. I countered with "Sure...there's secret stuff that has to go on, but even if you disregard the Plame revenge theory, do you really trust the Administration that bungled her cover for *no reason at all* to have their own room at the major telcos?"

We discussed how if Saddam was an evil dictator that we were morally obligated to take out (since the WMD thing turned out to be wrong) then why haven't we gone after the other nine or twelve "evil dictators" who are just as bad? Oh....that would be a "peacekeeping" mission...and what makes Iraq different? What do they have that the others don't have? It's not WMD...what's under all that sand??? Think hard!

I brought up how Iraq was probably just the launch point for continued gunpoint diplomacy with Iran, how the administration expected Iraq to roll over quickly. He said that he had always predicted we'd be there three years and couldn't believe me when I told him that officials had claimed Iraq to be a "cakewalk". He had never heard those quotes. Luckily Google didn't fail me; I typed in "iraq war cakewalk" and bam-bam-bam. There were the quotes and he was flabbergasted at Rummy and Cheney stating they didn't expect to be there longer than five months.

So yeah. Hillary is a warmonger and that's why we shouldn't elect her. I said, "Well, at least our soldiers would have health coverage."

I have been enjoying my new Tivo. It hooks to the internet wirelessly and based on the time I spend fiddling through program guides, tries and succeeds in recording shows I've told it I like, as well as others that I might not have thought to watch based on its database of programming information.

Now if the Tivo can do that sort of thing, I know that a database of raw phone numbers would be a tremendous asset. The phone companies keep those private records to service their customers. But with the type of search engine software coupled with a database...it'd be simple to come up with large clusters of numbers and just randomly use a phonebook to see who it was.

The government should have no right to demand those sorts of records without a court order. They are not running a telecommunications business. They've proven that when they have secret information (Plame) that it's not safe in their hands.

Lots of threads about cancelling this service or that. The communications industry is not to blame for this. They're providing phone and internet services, not imagining that a government official who requested information wouldn't have the right to it. Cause you know....it all changed after 9/11. Of course we have to go after terrorists. But if we can't even know who was at Cheney's energy task force meeting, surely there are personal and corporate rights even the government should not be able to intrude upon.