But I take some heart from Bush’s crappy approval ratings, the country’s burgeoning awareness of the Iraq disaster, the administration’s lies and deceptions. Too late for it to do much good, but still. It’s something.

In the best possible scenario, we win back one or both houses of congress in 2006, and start the long and arduous process of blowing the lid off of 6 years of bad dealings in the white house; in 2008 we elect someone honest and capable and courageous enough to start putting the country back together.

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But not nearly so crazy as it seemed just last year.

This Act is one of the more – if not most – dangerours things to come out of Congress since all of the anti-Communist stuff of the ’50′s. Again, it came out of Congress, the elected representatives of the people, and one can only wonder as to the state of mind of the American citizenry when they elect such representatives.

The first thing I noticed at the end of this posting was that there was only one comment – j-a’s, and true, I’ll say – and that in itself validates your comments on the passivity of our citizenry. While the odds say that there are lots of people that feel like you and I, Ramseys, within the 300-odd million that we are now, I’d say that there aren’t a lot of us (relatively speaking) , let alone anything close to numbers that could change the mentality of our Congress.

En fin, as we say in South America, I suspect that we’ll have to wait until we the people are up to our chins in the water before we do something about this.

The one hopeful note is that the Iraq disaster seems to be resonating more (negatively) in the minds of Americans, and that may prompt more of them to reflect on the real need for something as invidious as the Patriot Act; we’ll see….