If you're feeling the warm and fuzzy Obama-as-second-coming vibe, I hope you'll cool down and make sure he knows that you're in his corner because he believes that a renewed America means an unwavering devotion to our founding documents. "Change" must mean the restoration of our democracy.

Bob Roethlisberger was arrested and jailed over Thanksgiving weekend in a northern suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, on the charge of "Disorderly Conduct" for driving Operation Rescue's Truth Truck bearing signs with photos of aborted babies. The Truth Truck was impounded.

Gwinnett County Police Department officers arrested Roethlisberger Saturday after telling him that signage on the Truth Truck was "vulgar and obscene." According to Operation Rescue, officers ransacked the back of the Truth Truck without a warrant and ordered Roethlisberger to change or remove the signs. When he refused, he was arrested and incarcerated for three days before being released on $1,000 bond.

"I have reviewed the evidence and law in this case and concluded that the physical display of the images in question—as shocking and offensive as they are—does not constitute 'obscene and vulgar or profane language' as specifically prohibited by this statute."

Ultimately, the Court struck down some of the sign ordinance provisions as unconstitutional.  In addition, the Court has awarded the ACLU of Georgia $142,329 in attorneys fees and expenses.  This ruling is significant because it analyzes and deals with the scenario where defendants may attempt to avoid fee liability by repeatedly and unilaterally changing ordinances.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

The House bill, as noted, puts judicial approval where it belongs - at the beginning of the process. In a huge concession to the government's arguments, the House bill does not require judicial approval of individual targets, even if they might communicate with someone in the U.S. Instead, the House bill creates a system of "program warrants" or "basket orders," under which the government can designate the individual targets on its own discretion.

The House bill also takes significant steps to cut off an argument used by the Administration to justify post 9-11 warrantless surveillance outside the requirements of FISA. The House bill's "exclusivity" provision indicates that a Congressional authorization of the use of military force should not be construed to authorize surveillance unless it does so explicitly. The Senate bill, in contrast, merely repeats current law. It therefore invites the argument that Congress might implicitly authorize warrantless surveillance in the future when it authorizes the use of military force.

Giving up privacy has been normalized to a paradoxical degree.

On the one hand, few Americans seem to know that relative to most of the developed world, ours is a surveillance society nearing the level of Russia or China. On the other hand, we have come to accept daily incursions on our privacy and other basic rights for the sake of convenience or "safety."

For someone like me, in her early thirties, there has been a gradual and bumpy trajectory from an expectation of privacy at my jr. hight locker, to getting used to being filmed at the ATM, to feeling like an out-of-touch old lady because I want my emails to be private.

What about kids marinating in the camera-filled, reality TV existence we've created for them? As Allison Orr of Australia's EDemocracy notes: