Sue the Bastards

The most frightening thing about the eavesdropping thing isn't that Bush broke the law. It's that the man ADMITTED it, and admitted to an impeachable offense, and essentially said, "So what you gonna do about it?" - and nobody did anything about it.

The Republican Party is willing to turn the United States into a dictatorship, as long as a Republican gets to be dictator.

Well, some citizens are trying to do something about it, and may actually succeed:

Of all the lawsuits seeking to halt the National Security Agency's program to eavesdrop on certain Americans' electronic communications, a new one filed last week in Oregon may provide the federal courts with the most detailed glimpse yet into the clandestine counterterrorism effort.

The biggest challenge for such cases - which have also been filed in New York, Michigan, and California - is that plaintiffs don't have access to records of highly classified government surveillance activities and therefore can't be sure they were personally subjected to covert phone- tapping or e-mail reading by the US government.

The Oregon suit may manage to leap over that imposing legal hurdle. Lawyers and their clients apparently have seen phone logs and other top-secret records inadvertently provided, and then hastily recovered, by government officials.

"In the [court] motion there is material under seal, which we will rely on in our case," says lawyer Tom Nelson...."We can't get into what's there, but we have very specific information on what happened, when it happened, and what was intercepted. We obviously think it will be helpful in court in proving our contention."

Don't you love "imposing legal hurdle" for "government-created Catch-22"?

"We won't tell you who we're spying on!"

"Well, then, we'll sue you find out!"

"You CAN'T sue us if you don't know who we're spying on!"

Scarily, 35% of the country is still willing to put up with that crap.

But the number is getting smaller every day.