gekkogecko,

Your post above opens with an assessment of what U.S. law enforcement officials can and can’t do.

OK. With serious reservations about the assertion that if one disagrees with you one is delusional, I can accept that.

You follow this with a determination that I am not delusional.

Good. We agree about that.

We begin to part ways with the next assertion. Working on the assumption that “the cases where this is the situation are gradually being eroded”, would you please list the cases where searches and wiretaps have been executed on U.S. citizens without first securing a warrant from a Federal judge? You need not limit this list to only those instances were the justification is “fighting terrorism” unless you wish to. This would seem to be the kind of list that the ACLU would be aware of, but if there are alternative reputable (no fruitcake bloggers please) sources for this information, feel free to use them instead – or in addition to – any other list supporting your claim.

I have been wrong frequently enough in the past to know that I may be wrong about this, but I have the suspicion that – and let me repeat this to ensure that we are singing from the same score here - the list of the cases where searches and wiretaps have been executed on U.S. citizens without first securing a warrant from a Federal judge will be a rather short one - certainly in comparison to the size of the list of the searches which had been first blessed at the Federal bench. Further, when you have this list you may wish to check how many of these searches and wiretaps – or any evidence gathered from them - were subsequently ruled as admissible for a prosecution.

A list of six claimed unsavory attributes of the current administration follows.

OK. Your claims may be debated, and may be in a subsequent post, but let us take them as presented.

You conclude that because the current administration is (supposedly) guilty of the six listed attributes and behaviors, it follows then that federal prosecutors in Boise Idaho, Boston Massachusetts, Seattle, Washington, and throughout these United States are executing unconstitutional searches and seizures on American citizens.

Forgive me for asking, but why would a federal prosecutor in, say, Sacramento, California feel comfortable organizing an activity which she knows in advance will be thrown out of court, and at the same time receive a legal lashing from a Federal judge? Are we to believe that she would do so because an administration which she may not have voted for “manipulated intelligence information”, or “lied about and fabricated said intelligence information”?

I hope you’ll not take it too amiss if I say that I find this line of reasoning – particularly when wholly unsupported (although hopefully that is only a temporary situation) by any evidence, to be a trifle strained.

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Eudaimonia