Apparently the youth vote, once again did not materialize, contrary to opinion, which confirms what Chuck Todd was saying on NBC. This election was about Bush, Bush, and Bush.

CIVIL LIBERTIES We don’t know all of the ways that the administration has violated Americans’ rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Last month, Attorney General Michael Mukasey rushed out new guidelines for the F.B.I. that permit agents to use chillingly intrusive techniques to collect information on Americans even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing.
Agents will be allowed to use informants to infiltrate lawful groups, engage in prolonged physical surveillance and lie about their identity while questioning a subject’s neighbors, relatives, co-workers and friends. The changes also give the F.B.I. — which has a long history of spying on civil rights groups and others — expanded latitude to use these techniques on people identified by racial, ethnic and religious background.
The administration showed further disdain for Americans’ privacy rights and for Congress’s power by making clear that it will ignore a provision in the legislation that established the Department of Homeland Security. The law requires the department’s privacy officer to account annually for any activity that could affect Americans’ privacy — and clearly stipulates that the report cannot be edited by any other officials at the department or the White House.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has now released a memo asserting that the law “does not prohibit” officials from homeland security or the White House from reviewing the report. The memo then argues that since the law allows the officials to review the report, it would be unconstitutional to stop them from changing it. George Orwell couldn’t have done better.

....

One last-minute change Mr. Bush won’t be making: He apparently has decided not to shut down the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the most shameful symbol of his administration’s disdain for the rule of law.
Mr. Bush has said it should be closed, and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and his secretary of defense, Robert Gates, pushed for it. Proposals were prepared, including a plan for sending the real bad guys to other countries for trial. But Mr. Cheney objected, and the president has refused even to review the memos. He will hand this mess off to his successor.

See... this is exactly what I mean. Why in the world would you vote to continue this kind of stuff? Sure, they're not investigating and infiltrating my sunday school class. But they could put us all under surveillance if they wanted to. Without any evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Sure that's not likely, but as we've seen, technological advances in surveillance have resulted in pretty much all phone traffic being screened now.

Apparently it takes all kinds of hearings and legislative work to undo this stuff, that's why they're cramming it in now.

Will Obama be any better? He voted for FISA and the Patriot Act. He claims he added some protection for civil liberties into it, but that's a little bit like instead of me deciding to cut both your legs off, I just decide to cut off each leg up to your knee. It was still not a good bill.

McCain would've been just as bad or worse though.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -- H.L. Mencken