American Stasy? Part 1

Last year's Best Foreign Film Oscar went to "The Lives Of Others", a chilling tale about how the Stasy (pronounced Stahzee), the Orwellian East German Secret Police would spy on everyone behind the Berlin Wall with audio and other kinds of sophisticated (at the time) surveillance, often ruining lives and sometimes leading to innocent people being detained or driven to suicide. This went on until the Berlin Wall came down and East and West Germany were reunited some time in the late eighties or early nineties.
Nearly twenty years later the Dubya Bush administration opens mail, eavesdrops on telephone calls, and voyeuristically checks on E-mail correspondence, in the name of phony national security. Perhaps this has been going on for years, including the chilling "See something. Say something." mantra seemingly lifted from "1984". It is bad enough that Bush's minions have blatantly been spying on American's since about the last six years, but now Congress, including many Democrats have given in to granting Bush the power to do what he was doing against the law and against the Constitution. Shame on them.