Bush and Obama have used a long series of legal tactics to keep their tracking of all telephone calls secret from Americans.

The US government has made sure that nobody is allowed represent the Americans that the US proposes to spy on, even when that is all Americans.

Senator Spy Feinstein says this tracking has been going on since 2006, if not longer, and we should just accept it.

"This is called protecting America," she said, and she's right — that's exactly what Big Brother calls it.

US citizens: sign the ACLU's petition calling on Obama to stop massive tracking of Americans' phone calls.

UK activists, accused of a crime that is tantamount to "holding a protest", received light sentences for their protest at a fossil fuel plant.

Obama recently nominated Cornelia Pillard to the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit. I looked her up in Wikipedia. I can't be certain from what it says there, but she seems to have argued for several positions I think of as dangerous.

It looks like she is a supporter of mandatory arbitration clauses, which many companies impose so they can get away with mistreating customers and employees. This is a crucial area for US courts, and I would not want someone with these views to be on track for possibly being on the Supreme Court some day.

It appears she has also participated in efforts to bend over backwards to give thugs impunity, and limit the right to a jury trial.

In other words, she is the sort of candidate that I'd expect someone soft on like Obama to nominate. I will not sign the petition urging the Senate to vote on her nomination.

Obama has nominated two other candidates for that court. With the small amount of research I can do, I did not get enough information to have an opinion about them. Maybe they would be good people to put on the bench, but I'd like to see if someone has actually evaluated them from a progressive viewpoint before I support them in any way.

Irrationally overreacting flight attendants and congressional fearmongers made the TSA back down from applying a little common sense.

This one decision is not terribly important in itself — it means one annoyance more, rather than one annoyance less — but it demonstrates how vulnerable the US remains to appeals for repression in the name of a minuscule amount of "security".

This inability to weight different dangers bodes ill for the US response to the bigger threat of total monitoring of phone calls, which is also supposed to be for "security against terrorists". (Of course, the most important of those so-called "terrorists" are really dissidents and whistleblowers.)