by politicians and the public's willingness to subject themselves to perpetual fear is so depressing. I really need to stop reading about politics. Between this, the recently announced SC decision weakening the Fourth Amendment, and the inability to live if you are not affluent in Seattle, among many other issues is severely depressing me this morning...

Even if he does not get the nomination, he is a driving force in this country today. What he has to say would be much more honest than the other two, and we already know that HRC prefers more surveillance so whatever she has to say would just be word salad.

a list of those Democrats needs to be posted so people from their states can start a letter campaign and find people to primary them.

Dems are just as bad as Repubs

Before the bodies were removed from the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last week, Democrats began eagerly exploiting that atrocity to demand a new, secret “terrorist watchlist”: something that was once the domestic centerpiece of the Bush/Cheney war-on-terror mentality. Led by their propaganda outlet, Center for American Progress (CAP), Democrats now want to empower the Justice Department — without any judicial adjudication — to unilaterally bar citizens who have not been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime from purchasing guns.

Worse than the measure itself is the rancid rhetoric they are using. To justify this new list, Democrats, in unison, are actually arguing that the U.S. government must constrain people whom they are now calling “potential terrorists.” Just spend a moment pondering how creepy and Orwellian that phrase is in the context of government designations.

'Terrist's are gonna kill yer family' said the Terrorist in Chief Bush2. Like cardboardurinal I'm really hitting don't give a fuck about politics. Terrorism is what the US creates in order to engage in an endless war and a police state with no rule of law. The state needs your universal civil and human rights as they are a 'tool' that's needed to win the war on terra. No one in power including the progressives are going to repeal the Patriot Act and the other odious Act's that have legalized this assault on democracy and those pesky inalienable self evident truths. The 'terrorist watchlist' does not feel good to me, the fact that they have such a thing is way more terrifying then any 'radicalized' terrorist. Fearful, hateful, violent armed people are a symptom of this sick society. They are also a handy distraction that allows the 'owners of the place' to ramp up the clamp down while notching up the violence to 11.

You can't find out who is on it. You can't find out if YOU are on it until they stop you at the airport. You can't appeal it in court, even in cases of mistaken identity. There is no "burden of proof". There is no "probable cause". There's no judge weighing evidence. It could be 3 "jumps" by the NSA, to suck in more names for the machine (thank you EmptyWheel).

The fact that D's are using THIS list as a gun control vehicle just seems wrong-headed, anti-historical (well, not really)--and intended primarily to keep Trump off TV. Maybe it will work, but I think the Fourth Amendment issues with these "Watch Lists" is a big problem.

what act will be our very own Reichstag fire? What event will precipitate the final loss of our freedoms and our descent into tyranny?

This is the kind of bill that forms the first steps into open authoritarian government.

And that's all it will take for democracy to die.

I'm reminded again of the words of Milton Mayer:

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
...
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
...
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
...
To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’
...
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."

They Thought They Were Free

I don't want to live, knowing and regretting, when I could have spoken out but didn't, whether it was through fear or uncertainty.

We may not be heard, but must not let this pass without comment. We cannot, in good conscience, remain silent.