Staggering up from a holiday-binge induced coma, this correspondent fears a Rip Van Winkle hallucination because it's looking a lot like Italy... in 1939.

A few raghead camel-jockeys handed our Law & Order zealots their best hook for eviscerating the Constitution and Bill of Rights since McCarthyism. Defense is double-plus good and the Bush-Lite administration is merrily planning a full-on Military Industrial Complex orgy with every weapons system in sight - as though terrorists plot fielding tank divisions and supersonic fighters.

And of course they're also cutting taxes, too (mostly to the benefit of rich asshole buddies, as opposed to the rest of us), leading to deficit spending - which is a striking contrast to last year's guess at major budget surpluses. (The parallels to Enron's pump and dump are scary, but not very surprising.)

This is all more than mildly annoying, but what did we expect? We "elected" these people (or so they and a majority over at the Supreme Court tell us).

But it's all just money (even though it is _our_ money). Easy come, easy go, wasting our taxes is what government does best, so who cares - guns or pork? This would all be more or less business as usual (the Republicans give away money to the rich, then the Democrats give some to the poor and middle-class) except for the present assault on basic liberties, rights, and citizen data.

You read it right, bucko: "All your data are belong to us" - sayeth the Feds. Their pretense for this is the claim that cross-indexing every scrap of your data - all your purchases, where you live and with whom (for ten years or so), your education, drivers licenses and vehicle tags, arrests and misdemeanors, civil actions, credit information, even IP addresses, web posts, and email - will enable them to single out "suspicious" airline passengers, preemptively.

All of your data will be fed into a web of interconnected databases to track your every move, record your every public act, and log your every statement, "private" or not - all for a dubious justification of making airplanes safe.

A parallel initiative put forward by the desperate corporate bastards running the airlines would let people submit to "voluntary" background checks to get exempted from obnoxious security checks at airports. It's bad enough that a government agency wants to shred our privacy and Constitutional protections, but having airlines extort our privacy to avoid draconian security checks is simply an unconscionable proposition. Here comes a stratified class society courtesy of an unholy collusion between "our" (yeah right) government and a cabal of bigass overleveraged airlines desperately seeking to create profits.

In the 1930's sometime, Mussolini said "Corporatism is Fascism." Of course he meant that as a recommendation for Fascism, but it was perceptive of him. And after all - as was said in Chamberlain's Britain all too glad to appease the Axis Powers way back in those days - fascism made the trains run on time.

When my recreational drugs run out, I'm going to get me some Greyhound stock.

Check it out yourself

zales@pigdog.org