Completely Predictable

And predictED, by all of us dirtyfuckinghippielibrulterrists who have been screaming about the murder of the Fourth Amendment since the un-Patriot Act passed in October 2002.

This is what happens when you let war criminals enjoy cushy retirement instead of spending their last dimes futilely defending themselves in court before going to prison for life.

This is what happens when you break your promise to close the place where Americans tortured innocent teenagers to death.

This is what happens when you declare that no court can even review your claimed right to murder American citizens in cold blood, without so much as an attempted arrest.

This is the police state that emerges when a Democratic president and Congress fail to reverse the unconstitutional abominations of the previous republican administration.

Digby:

Glenzilla talks about the latest domestic spying government power grab and offers this observation:

What these Obama proposals illustrates is just how far we've descended in the security/liberty debate, where only the former consideration has value, while the latter has none. Whereas it was once axiomatic that the Government should not spy on citizens who have done nothing wrong, that belief is now relegated to the civil libertarian fringes.

He's right, of course, but I think we tend to lose sight of another problem in allowing the government to have unfettered power to go on fishing expeditions in citizens' private business. The fact that it's ineffective against terrorism is problematic enough and monitoring everyone's financial transactions with overseas banks in this age of globalization is somewhat terrifying. But it's the inevitable mission creep that's really chilling.

Check this out:

Kathy Parker, a 43-year-old Elkton, Md., woman, who was flying out of Philadelphia International Airport on Aug. 8.

She says she was heading to Charlotte, N.C., for work that Sunday night - she's a business support manager for a large bank - and was selected for a more in-depth search after she passed through the metal detectors at Gate B around 5:15 p.m.

A female Transportation Security Administration officer wanded her and patted her down, she says. Then she was walked over to where other TSA officers were searching her bags.

"Everything in my purse was out, including my wallet and my checkbook. I had two prescriptions in there. One was diet pills. This was embarrassing. A TSA officer said, 'Hey, I've always been curious about these. Do they work?'

"I was just so taken aback, I said, 'Yeah.' "

What happened next, she says, was more than embarrassing. It was infuriating.

That same screener started emptying her wallet. "He was taking out the receipts and looking at them," she said.

"I understand that TSA is tasked with strengthening national security but [it] surely does not need to know what I purchased at Kohl's or Wal-Mart," she wrote in her complaint, which she sent me last week.

She says she asked what he was looking for and he replied, "Razor blades." She wondered, "Wouldn't that have shown up on the metal detector?"

In a side pocket she had tucked a deposit slip and seven checks made out to her and her husband, worth about $8,000.

Her thought: "Oh, my God, this is none of his business."

Two Philadelphia police officers joined at least four TSA officers who had gathered around her. After conferring with the TSA screeners, one of the Philadelphia officers told her he was there because her checks were numbered sequentially, which she says they were not.

"It's an indication you've embezzled these checks," she says the police officer told her. He also told her she appeared nervous. She hadn't before that moment, she says.

She protested when the officer started to walk away with the checks. "That's my money," she remembers saying. The officer's reply? "It's not your money."

At this point she told the officers that she had a good explanation for the checks, but questioned whether she had to tell them.

"The police officer said if you don't tell me, you can tell the D.A."

So she explained that she and her husband had been on vacation, that they'd accumulated some hefty checks, and that she was headed to her bank's headquarters, where she intended to deposit them.

She gave police her husband's cell-phone number - he was at her mother's with their children and missed their call.

Thirty minutes after the police became involved, they decided to let her collect her belongings and board her plane.

"I was shaking," she says. "I was almost in tears."

When she got home, her husband of 20 years, John Parker, a self-employed plastics broker, said the police had called and told him that they'd suspected "a divorce situation" and that Kathy Parker was trying to empty their bank account.

The job of the police is to find criminals and the bigger the police state, the more police looking for criminals there are. And the constitutional constraints against giving the government unrestrained power to nose into anyone and everyone's lives to find criminal behavior that isn't obvious has always been considered a hindrance to their jobs. (This is the old "if you haven't got anything to hide, then why should you care?" argument.)

They are clearly finding lots of creative ways to use the powers of the surveillance state to do just that:

SNIP

Essentially what they are saying is that at American airports if the government finds someone's behavior "suspicious" they have a right to detain them and search them for evidence of terrorism. If they don't find evidence of terrorism, but they still find the person "suspicious" they can then call in police, who will look for evidence of non-terrorist related crimes. What constitutes suspicious behavior? Only the "specialist" knows for sure. And if you demand to know why they are calling the police, that constitutes "escalating behavior" which gives them cause for further inquiry.

This is how the creeping police state slowly takes over. They use the excuse of national security to chip away at the constitutional constraints that prevent the government from abusing its authority. The citizens are in a constant state of paranoia, worried that what they know is innocent will "look" guilty and afraid of asserting their rights because the act of asserting them is considered evidence of something to hide. There are thousands and thousands of people in every aspect of American life now granted the authority to do this in the name of anti-terrorism..

Remember how we all sneered at the repugs who thought the Smirky/Darth police state was just hunky-dory? They'd be screaming bloody murder if it was a Democratic administration doing it, we assured each other.

Well, friends, a Democratic administration IS doing it, and the repugs STILL think it's hunky-dory, because it's the kind of authoritarian repression that turns them on. And it will come in so useful when President Palin institutes the Talibantastic Xian Dominionist theocracy.

So it's up to us, the Dirty Fucking Hippies, to protest the unconstitutional, anti-democratic, anti-American policies of the president we busted ass to elect.

Because this shit is Wrong. No matter who's in charge.