So it has come to this.  The United States is now a banana republic.  The trappings and institutions are still there, left over from a previous time, but the military runs everything.

It's much more sophisticated than, say, Honduras or Nicaragua.  People in those places know the game, and they play accordingly.  Here, people continue to believe things are what they used to be, ignoring all the evidence to the contrary ... I guess in hopes it will go away by itself.

Obama says he didn't know what the NSA was doing.  That's the one that rang the bell for me.  Of course he didn't know!  Nobody knows, that's just the point!

And then the NSA guy gets up there and says him and his buddies work with their counterparts in other countries, collecting and sharing.  This is no big deal, it's business as usual, folks.

Yeah, that's what's bothering me.

Congress says it's gonna really look into this and get to the bottom of it.  Are you shitting me?  These people are so way, way past Congress!  They don't even have budgets any more, and even when they did the stuff these guys did was all fuzzed out so nobody knew.  You can't shut off their money because if you threaten to they'll claim the "terrorists" will overrun us, and of course nobody wants to go on record being for that.

So they've basically got the perfect scam going.  Not only no oversight, no possibility of oversight, and as much money as you can think up reasons to ask for.

Myself, I'd shut off their money and take my chances with the terrorists.  The terrorists don't seem poised to take over my life, so they seem like less of a threat in the long run.