I totally agree with Snowden's dad. If we have to give up our liberty to the state the terrorists have won. If we stop being the land of the free and home of the brave because we fear a bunch of guys might set off an attack at some future date, what makes us special anymore? We're just another country.

We lived under the very real threat of total nuclear alienation during the Cold War, and though there were significant abuses, the Constitution remained more or less intact. But now we are supposed to cower and live like children because of the chance that a terrorist strike, which even at the most horrific level is likely to be limited, and certainly not worth abandoning living like human beings with dignity over, will disrupt the economy? America doesn't die with a terrorist act. It dies when it stops standing for liberty and the dignity of the average citizen.

The revelations about the extent of domestic surveillance have been a big story since they broke earlier this month. And the story keeps getting bigger: MSN reports that the IRS is "acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers' digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records." Soon it will have your health-insurance information, too.

Yet the tight focus on electronic surveillance keeps the bigger story out of the frame.

The bigger story concerns the increasingly asymmetric relationship between citizens and the state. The formerly secret program of domestic spying neatly illuminates one aspect of that asymmetry: The government knows, or can know, an awful lot about you. But you are not supposed to know even that it knows, let alone what it knows.

More of what the government does is classified than ever before. If you do not know what the government is doing then, obviously, you have no say over its activities. This flies in the face of the Declaration of Independence, which states that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." How can you consent to something you know nothing of?

The principle animating democratic and republican government is accountability to the governed. Yet more and more government action lies beyond the citizens' reach. As law professor Jonthan Turley explained in a Washington Post piece that appeared before the surveillance leaks, "our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch of government, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency." (Viz., the NSA.)

Basically, if you're ever in any trouble with police (no, we don't condone breaking laws) and want to keep your mouth shut, you will need to announce that you're invoking your Fifth Amendment right instead of, you know, just keeping your mouth shut.

...It all seems ridiculously terrifying, this idea that in order to claim your Fifth Amendment, you now need to know how to call the on-the-fly legal equivalent of "safesies." Your right to remain silent just got more complicated, and it will require potential criminals to be more informed about their protections and the linguistic details on how to invoke them. "But does it really mean that the suspect must use the exact words 'Fifth Amendment'? How can an individual who is not a lawyer know that these particular words are legally magic?" Breyer wrote.

via Jay J. Hector

I once thought something bad had happened to Gregg and asked them to go out and see that he wasn't lying on the floor, hurt.

The lady said they could maybe get somebody out around 3 p.m. the next day.

"At that point, just send the coroner!" I exclaimed.

Jonathan Turley blogs about it:

The mother said that she was aware that there was a criminal complaint made against her 11-year-old son and simply told police "I will release my son to you upon viewing those orders.' She says that the officer responded:

"He said, 'This is how you want to play?' He took two steps back, turned around to the officer and said, 'Take her.' They turned me around, handcuffed me, and took me in."

She spent the night in jail and police left the boy at the house. He was never arrested. Her lawyer says that it turns out that there was no warrant since the encounter occurred on May 29 but the directive to apprehend was not signed until May 30.

Turley further explains:

What is most remarkable to this story is that the family's lawyer told the media that the Slaton Police Department was only willing to apologize if the family waived any right to sue it for the unlawful and abusive arrest. That demand alone, if true, should result in the immediate termination of the police chief as well as the disciplining of any prosecutor who conveyed the demand in my view. Citizens should not have to trade away legal rights to receive an apology for allegedly abusive police conduct.

This is not an accident.

There's a story up at Consumerist about how Kraft ran an ad of some guy at a picnic with only a bit of picnic blanket over his manlog, and the "One Million Moms" got their panties all wadded over it.

Now, it's possible the ad agency for Kraft thought they'd get some viral attention for it, but again, the problem is, you don't sell to women with pictures of naked men. They prefer a handsome man in their life to an ugly one, but, in general, we just don't sit there and drool over the parts like men do.

Best bit over at Consumerist:

The moms are urging fellow anti-picnic nappers to boycott Kraft: "Christians will not be able to buy Kraft dressings or any of their products until they clean up their advertising."

Um, do these moms never go to the movies, turn on a TV set?

Let's avoid getting all hysterical, shall we?

Kraft's greatest error is that they're wasting their money. Shall we leave it at that and move on to something actually horrible to be outraged at, ladies?

P.S. On a creepy note, the ad, at closer examination, says "Silverware Optional," calling to mind Loreena Bobbitt.

UPDATE -- some research to support this from one of my old columns:

A study by sex researcher Meredith Chivers (with electrodes in an area on a woman that only TSA agents, her lover and her gynecologist go) revealed that women are turned on by erotic video, but find footage of a naked guy exercising about as sexually arousing as long, slow pans of the snowcapped Himalayas.

Lucy, who was 15, had been in kidney failure, but our vet had given us meds and instructions on how to take care of her, and she was doing well for about a month.

Thursday, in the wee hours, I could see that she was no longer comfortable. The details are too sad. I wanted to take her then to the 24-hour hospital to have them take her out, but I was very upset and was worried I would have an accident and hurt myself or other people on the road.

I waited until 8 when the vet opens, and our wonderful, compassionate vet squeezed me in and gave her an injection of barbiturates, which just took her out gently and peacefully, like she was going to sleep, while I held her and petted her.

I'm saying all this about the vet, giving these details, because a conversation I had with a friend helped me not hang on to Lucy to the point where I would be unfair to her. My friend told me that she had gone three times to put her elderly and ailing dog to sleep, and the first two times, ended up leaving in tears.

She helped me not feel guilty and in fact, feel I was doing the right thing, to see that I didn't let Lucy suffer. It was about five and a half hours (from the time, around 3 a.m., that I saw she was going downhill fast, and could no longer have an adequate quality of life), till I got to the vet.

She was a great little companion, and helped me be a more compassionate and patient person, and I miss her terribly.

Gregg, who was her favorite (because he couldn't bear to discipline her), also misses her and has been absolutely wonderful throughout this.

It made it a little easier this weekend that I'd said yes to dog-sit my friend's dog Mingus earlier in the week. At first, he was glum to not be with his owners, in his own home. But I kept coming over to him and petting him and rubbing his ears and massaging his neck and cooing to him, and he got up from under the chair where he'd been "hiding out," and came and curled up in my office next to my chair. Greedy little bugger, he's been pestering me constantly for petting. (Really, he's been taking care of me rather than the other way around.)

I'm taking solace now both in how I didn't let Lucy suffer just to keep her with me and in what a wonderful little life she had. She was loved, and brought Gregg and me and pretty much everyone who came in contact with her joy, and was an incredible little spirit. She's been around Los Angeles, and to New York, and even to Paris a number of times, where everyone who saw her loved her...and what American can really say that?

Arnold Ahlert writes at FrontPage that a few radical environmentalists are having second thoughts. (McKibben is not one of them):

Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, expressed the reflexive, pie-in- the-sky response of radical environmentalists to this politically inconvenient reality. "We need a dramatic shift off carbon-based fuel: coal, oil and also gas," he contended. To what, remains a mystery.

Lynas is also seeing the light in the energy arena. "Nobody can look you in the eye and say you shouldn't be worried" about nuclear energy, he says in the new documentary "Pandora's Promise." Yet he, along with author Richard Rhodes, writer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"; Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog founder; and Michael Shellenberger, a man Time magazine labeled a "hero of the environment," have decided nuclear power is an integral part of our energy future-unless one embraces the Luddite attitude of enviro-radical Bill McKibben. "We might decide that the human enterprise has got big enough, that our appetites need not to grow, but to shrink a little, in order to provide us more margin," he writes in the Guardian. "What would that mean? Buses and bikes and trains, not SUVs. Local food, with more people on the farm so that muscles replace some of the oil."

The NY Post's Kyle Smith gives McKibben a well-deserved smackdown. "Sorry, but only a few hippie hipsters want to raise their own chickens and pedal to work, and even they aren't giving up their iToys," he contends. "Meanwhile, the peasants of India and China want meat and electricity and cars and hospitals, in the tens of millions. A planet that uses less energy is not an option."

... Sadly, Rachel Carson, who wrote "Silent Spring," a seriously flawed tome regarding the dangers of chemical pesticides, notably DDT, did manage to produce enough of a political following to get that insecticide banned in many countries.

The consequences were disastrous: tens of millions of lives were lost to malaria and other diseases. A Harvard study estimated that high levels of malaria reduce economic growth by 1.3 percent annually-meaning that four decades of DDT bans have made developing nations more than 40 percent poorer than they might have otherwise been with effective insect control.

Again, science took a back seat to radicalism. For Carson, et al., the dosage level of DDT was irrelevant, as was the reality that alternative pesticides were equally toxic to other wildlife. Dr. Henry Miller, the Robert Wesson Fellow of Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, puts Carson's effort in perspective. "The legacy of Rachel Carson is that tens of millions of human lives-mostly children in poor, tropical countries-have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors," he writes. "This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century."

Let's say a married CEO of a major corporation has been having an affair with his assistant, one that they have been able to keep secret with secret email accounts. What are the chances that that CEO is going to publicly object to the government's "request" (read: demand) for his customers' records? What are the chances that he will join up with libertarians and publicly call for a dismantling of the entire warfare-state racket?

Slim chance indeed, especially when he knows that the government has copies of all his emails and recordings of his telephone calls in its files and knows that the government will not hesitate to furnish such information to one of its toadies in the mainstream press.

That's the reason that the Cuban communist regime maintains surveillance over all its citizenry. It's the same for the communist regimes in Vietnam, China, and North Korea. Oh sure, they say that it's necessary to keep their people safe, just like U.S. national-security state officials do. But what it's really designed to do is to maintain their tax-and-control racket over the citizenry and to ensure that everyone continues behaving like a good little citizen, one who always defers to authority and never makes waves.

Our right to privacy -- our right to control who sees and hears personal facts about us -- is enormously valuable and one of our civil liberties we need to fight for, along with the rest that are being eroded.

While National Security Agency's harvesting of telephone data is often defended as a necessary component of post-9/11 national security, old court documents claim the spy agency was putting such a program into place months before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

In court papers filed during his 2007 insider trading trial, former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio claimed that Denver-based Qwest was denied lucrative NSA contracts he believed to be worth $50-$100 million, after Nacchio refused to involve Qwest in a secret NSA program that he thought would be illegal.

Subsequent reporting at the time revealed that it was a domestic wiretapping program in which the NSA wanted to snoop on Qwest's vast telephone network without court orders.