Any self-respecting child of the 60s will greet the news that the FBI is shadowing anti-Iraq war demonstrations to investigate the ... the what?-demonstrators, leaders, tactics? with a shudder. Now we find the the NSA has been doing illegal phone surveillance of American citizens within the boundaries of our country.

I am proudly liberal, Anti-WTO, Pro-choice, Anti-war; you name it. That's just a sampling of the issues for which I have demonstrated, petitioned and written forceful letters to the editor. Anyone who values her skin wants the punks, anarchists and vandals that are eager to attach their caboose to her train when a demonstration is under way, out. If not, your principled protest and damned hard work gets labled "radicalism" and you're lucky if you don't get maced. Immedialte crowd control, applied with proper restraint, is the province of the local constabulary, not the Federal Bureau of Investigation and certainly not the National Security Administration.

Police are who one usually wants to take on the immediate and forceful dampening of illegal acitivity at your average rally. Surveilance can contribute nothing to the forces of order because the guys are undercover. Being undercover and accountable to no one but John Ashcroft and George Bush, I have little confidence that I will ever know how the information gained by this surveilence is used. The FBI has, in past decades, been used to illegally spy on civil rights organizers and supress completely legal protest activity.

Tell you what Mr Rumsfield, since you're so interested in the anti-war Americans, save yourself the trouble of creating one of those damnable files that keep getting revealed in the bowels of our federal law enforcement agencies. The ones enumerateing participants in completely legal protest activities who are assumed to be: secretly breaking laws and plotting in conspiracies to break laws and advocating the breaking thereof, on the sole authority of the list compiler, by virtue of the fact that whomever is compiling the list disapproves of the views of the compilees. To save you the trouble I'm creating the ultimate and all-inclusive registry of anti-Iraq war protesters. I hope to publish the list and let you get back to the task of hunting real terrorists. Perhaps each registrant would contribute a small amount of money to help the anti-war effort as the cost of being included on that list of those who oppose the war in Iraq.

How do I justify the opinion that I, a liberal Democrat with a wide interest in internation affairs, am forming that it is time to limit my comfortable level of consumption to items and services that are produced near to home?

Silicon Valley surveys predict that 500.000 American service-sector jobs will be moving overseas to join the manufacturing sector which has already booked for low-wage, regulationless profitability. Large chunk of the economy that. Will the jobs left onshore be sufficient to employ the high school and college student who will be leaving my household within the next 6 years?

I'm beyond forming protectionist opinions, and all the way to looking for practical ways to screen the products that I buy and services that I use for American content. I don't shop at Wal Mart, but I don't intend to and I can't afford to consume only American-made.

Even the highest skill level of engineering at the most cutting edge technology companies is being performed by an international work force supplemented by bargain level workers from developing countries. The solution may be to create home-grown engineers and, on the whole, that may be what needs to be done. One problem with that, locally, is that the dominant company in my home town makes computers with the imported labor force because "we can't get local talent with skills that are advanced enough to perform for us". Then the company holds my local government hostage to a demand for property tax relief when it locates its factories in my town. Schools are financed by local propery taxes and lo and behold these are the same schools that are going to an eight month school year because they can't finance nine months for above-mentioned high school student. Bummer