Reply #1: There's no wondering about what kind of country we live in. None at all.

[tom_paine]

We live in an Authoritarian Oligarchy roughly 60% of the way along to whatever it's final transformation will be into, Nazi, Soviet, Imperial Roman model, or maybe something wholly new.

We live in a surveillance state and will never ever be free of such again, unless the whole shtstorm collapses, then we will REALLY know what the Bushies' Penultimate and Final Solutions to the Liberal Problem are.

We live in one of the Big Three States of the New Totalitarianism: Amerika, Russia, and China.

China was worse and still is, but we have narrowed the gap and are narrowing more every day. That's for the lives of us Little People. Poltically, America and China are very much alike. Now that China mixes Capitalism with Totalitarianism, they are even more like us that ever as we infuse more and more totalitarianism into our capitalism. Russia has been following the Bushie changes and replicating them in his own country. Why shouldn't he? It's good enough for us.

Putin and Russia get to go a bit farther along than their Bushie Soulmates, because Russians have no history of liberty. Bush is probably envious, but is aiming for the same totalitarian goals as Putin using other methods, and has largely achieved them.

We live in a nation that is Clincally Psychotic and wholly detatched from reality, as the Nazis Germans were. We are subject to perception managment and almost literal mind control using technologies that have advanced tenfold and one-hundredfold from Hitler and Stalin's times.

We live in a nation in which the regulations promulgated by the people who defeated Hitler and Stalin, created by them while watching what Hitler and Stalin could do with a neutralized, parasitized media, have been long ago dismantled. Witness the results: in it's own lunatic way, our media is as bad as anything they had in Soviet Russia. We just have better production values and hot blonde achors.

At this point, we have less than a 2% chance, I think of ever reversing it or restoring the Old Republic of America.