It ain't over till the dumpy lady sings

Get your photographs while you can. we have not bottomed out in our quest to give up our freedom for a Dumbo's feather of imagined security.

*****

[Dr. Ferris:] . . . "We've waited a long time to get something on you. You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you'd slip sooner or later -- and this is just what we wanted."

[Hank Rearden:] "You seem to be pleased about it."

"Don't I have good reason to be?"

"But, after all, I did break one of your laws."

"Well, what do you think they're for?"

Dr. Ferris did not notice the sudden look on Rearden's face, the look of a man hit by the first vision of that which he had sought to see. Dr. Ferris was past the stage of seeing; he was intent upon delivering the last blows to an animal caught in a trap.

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against -- then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."

from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

(Damn! Was she prescient! * That's why Liberal/Socialists revile her so.)

*****

Four the last six years, I have heard complaint after complaint about George Bush and the loss of our rights under the Homeland Security Act. George Bush is a naive piker, who used those laws as they were intended and really did use them only on foreign nationals at war with us. But he will not be President much longer and the law will go on. Our new President has a history of using the IRS and the FBI to accomplish personal political goals and she was only the First Lady at the time. Just wait until she is the President and has the Homeland Security Act. Then you can curse George Bush for giving that accursed law to us.
And while you are cursing Imperial Federal laws, throw a curse in for Senators McCain and Feingold who have so twisted Freedom of Speech that it is only to protect "art" and not the very politics it was intended to protect.

*If you need it: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prescience