Well, the good news is that the process of Heglian dialectics is still at work (you know.. thesis...antithesis... synthesis). The last year (or so) has been full of complaints about the lunacy of the Patriots Acts One and Two. My objections have long been that anything deliberately named like this must be some sort of nasty secret because our masters invariably think of us all as boobs. And they're almost always right.

Now comes the fresh breeze of compromise in the form of the Craig-Durbin Act which manages to save the good stuff in the original language while limiting the "unlimited" aspect of the new powers our betters gave themselves so that they could protect us from ourselves. It's not a done deal, but it is refreshing to see that there are still a few guys around in government who are not knee jerk liberals OR knee jerk nazis either. The guys at the ACLU have a fairly good blurb about the new legislation -- Safe and Free .