The current GOP government is the biggest, most massively powerful and dangerous government in American history, after conning voters into thinking they were voting for "limited government" and "smaller government". Bush's government and the rubberstamp Congress has given itself the power to arrest people, hold them forever without trial, torture them forever -- and all of this is perfectly legal. Of course none of it is constitutional, but that no longer matters because the GOP has been systematically destroying the checks and balances of government set up by America's founding fathers. The kind of government behaviour that would have been unthinkable from 1792-2000 is now barely even reported in the media. The bigger picture is that the US is currently drifting further and further towards a dysfunctional, corrupt 3rd world type government. Republican Party insiders like Tom Delay, Carl Rove, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, etc set up a vast money laundering system that would be the awe of drug lords and mafia kingpins. This system for the most part still exists and its purpose is to both reward themselves, their friends, and families with money and wealth, and perpetuate the GOP and this system in power forever. Many people didn't realize it at first but it is becoming clear now that the onslaught of corruption in government over the last decade is not just the product of electing politicians with no ethics and too much power, it is a natural political consequence of electing politicions with a contempt for government. The Republican Party created in the real world conditions to match their propaganda depictions of a dysfunctional government. There are of course groups in the world that have worse intentions than the GOP, but the Republican Party is the one and only organization in the world powerful enough to destory America, they seem to be doing a good job of it, and that's why they scare me much more than anyone else does. You wouldn't know this by turning on your TV but there are dozens of things statistically more likely to kill Americans than terrorism -- among them is being struck by lightning. > >> I carefully read the entire proposed rule at: >> >http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/ContentViewer?objectId=09000064801a110e&dispositi on=attachment&contentType=pdf >> >> and while the proposed rule 'could' be misused in an arbitrary >> fashion, the goal of the rule is to catch terrorists at the last >> moment. You have to weight that into the equation. > >1) Good intentions aren't enough. Laws are *guaranteed* to be abused >at some point, so they have to be written defensively. Otherwise we'd >just annoint a king and say "use your best judgement." > >2) It's not worth it. Just like I don't have bars over my windows, >because it isn't worth it.