We have quite a bit of "external" freedom: the right to free speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to "pursue happiness", freedom of religion (as long as you don't piss off certain rabid radio commentators too much), etc. These are all valuable freedoms that are important to honor and protect. However, we don't have very much "internal" freedom: mostly we're locked in to a fairly small set of fixed belief systems which provide our interpretation of life, and we tend to perceive, think, and respond within the limits imposed by these systems. This kind of imprisonment isn't something that can be solved with legislation, extensive self-study is required to crack those walls.

Ever visited another country, outside the United States? We are the diamond of the universe in freedom. No one tells us when to go to bed or wake up. no one tells us how to dress or what to say or how to act. its up to us as individuals. it's called freedom. No one tells us how to vote or for whom. no one tells us which job we are allowed to have and for how long. no one tells us which person we are allowed to marry. no one tells us which automobile to purchase or which political party we are allowed to be a member. Visit any other world country and start your comparison to the freedoms we enjoy in the united states. even on vacation, to another country, i look forward to returning home and almost kiss the u.s. soil, because i live in the united states. Sometimes people lose insight on just how much freedom we have in the united states. other countries are jealous. some other countries attempt to fashion democracy, after the united states. Yes, we are really free. We are the diamond of the universe. treasure it!

The reason America is considered the land of the free is the basic construction of the US Constitution. All rights not specifically given to the government belong to the people. If there is no specific designation it still belongs to the people. Further, the Constitution guarantees these rights to the people. Lack of education among citizens of the US has effectively eroded our freedoms. Ask 10 people, and 9 will tell you that the ONLY rights we have are those in the Bill of Rights. This is completely untrue. We allow government to supercede our personal freedoms for various reasons - ignorance, politcal correctness, indifference, laziness and cowardice among them. Let's take gay marriage as an example: There is nothing in the US Constitution that permits the government to dictate what form marriage takes. We have allowed the state governments to dictate this construct. Why? because the majority of the people who feel passionately about this issue are the ones who voted to ban gay marriage. Many people who aren't "directly affected" don't bother to vote because they simply don't care enough either way. They don't recognize that this erosion of personal freedom DOES affect them, DOES make it a precedent for other intrusions upon our personal freedoms, and allows AGAIN for the government to take on the role of "parent" because the citizens continually vote for the government to take this role upon itself. We American citizens willingly abrogate our freedoms because we haven't cared enough to take on the responsibility that comes with freedom.

I have visited Europe and yes, I did notice that there were a lot of things they did not regulate there that we would. Some of the things were for safety. We have lost a lot of old customs because of regulation. What countries do you think are freer than ours? I feel no place can be 100 percent free, but we do pretty good.

You are free to do as they tell you.

Sure.. As long as you don't violate speech codes at school, you don't say something that could possibly be taken as offensive. By enacting these regulations at schools/work the government tells people that they are weak and cannot handle reality. You are weak, and you can't take it so stay home and curl up under your bed. Can't smoke a fat doobie in public in front of a badge? No I'll get a ticket(some states even jail). Someone might feel their morals are better than mine and should decide for me that I am putting the wrong thing in my body. Don't like it turn the channel, FCC what the hell are we paying them for? Ron Paul - there is some hope for America, the man actually knows about this fabled document called the Constitution. http://www.ronpaul2008.com/

There are levels of freedom that impact various laws. We can't personally spread our arms and fly because it conflicts with the laws of gravity. We can't openly hurt someone as that would infringe on someone elses rights. But in many basic ways we are free to choose most things.

Of course you are...doesn't America allow any man and his dog to carry a gun. It seems to be a big debate over this...some believing that you are taking away freedom from a person if you don't allow them to have a gun...sorry not from US...but this is the way the news shows us in other countries..I could be wrong...Sorry I have picked only one topic to answer this question and not looked at the whole show...but I am sure if I did...I would change my answer...Or maybe it is that your government says: Hey you can have your guns...but we will take away something else.

Damnsight freer than the UK thats for sure

No we are not and it is getting less free everyday.

the people in the USA need to wake up. its not as free as they think and we are losing more freedam everyday. i feel you have more freedom living as a foreigner than as a true american here in the states.

I agree with angl... but ..relatively speaking we are free. As legal residents, we can travel throughout the country at will, we vote, we have newspapers & other media that report more than what our govt wants us to know. We have to vote on any changes in tax structure. We can run our mouths without being silenced by imprisonment. With that said...I would repeal the Patriot Act in a NY minute.

Ask a North Korean.

Nothing that America has stood for in the past, (and as our past becomes more revealed it seems so much of what we stood for was sugar coated), is what America stands for today. Our President told us it was our patriotic duty to go out and shop after 9/11. That is hardly what our President told us to do after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Freedom is a relative construct. Are we really free? Really? Probably not. Amid our freedoms, which are delineated to some degree in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, it doesn't provide total freedom. While it specifically prohibits the mandatory quartering of troops in our homes, that can be placed aside in times of crisis, such as the British invasion in 1812 /1813. With regard to gay marriage, which I wholeheartedly support, the US Constitution says in the tenth amendment, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." I wish that the people were always given freedom above the state, well, sometimes maybe not, but I suspect that, with regard to gay marriages, it is a matter that is up to EITHER the people or the states. It's something that federal resources and opinion should never play a part. In the free commerce clause, doesn't it state that no state shall pass laws conflicting with other states, and, when that does occur, the US Supreme Court is the court of (first) resort. So, now that gay marriage has been legalized in several states, ought it not be required to be legalized everywhere? That would be my argument, but then, what do I know ... ?

You have been warned to stop asking questions. Prepare for the goon squad.

Why dont you go down to North Karia and see how they live. Then mabey when you come back you see just how good we have it and stop F'in complaining.

We have freedom of speech and worship here. That is more than many other places. "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." So declared Jesus as he was teaching the multitudes in the temple in Jerusalem. (John 8:32) Jesus also said: "The hour is coming, and it is now, when the true worshipers will worship the Father with spirit and truth, for, indeed, the Father is looking for suchlike ones to worship him." —John 4:23. Freedom is as close as your Bible. God's Word of Truth frees us from many of our own man made burdens.

We're free, free enough. Atleast compared to some ocuntries. But I believe we shouldve made much more progress then this and that the goverment screwed up so many people and didnt help them build themselves back up completly after tearing them down. But I wouldnt complain too much, I'm glad to be here, it could be much much worse. We just seem to be stuck in one stage and many have grown comfrtable with where we are.

Free to do what we are told or go to jail. Actually we are free and I think that is mainly because we still have the "right" to keep guns because an unarmed population is a defenseless population!

Yankee-Echo-Sarah!!!

I don't think this is so much as a political question, as it is a philsophical(i can't spell, sorry!) are any of us totally and truly free? we all have rules and regulations that we follow...rather those rules be made up by our culture, government, religions, families, or ourselves, there are always gonna be rules, moral codes, ect that we live by.

These are the 10 steps toward dictatorship. Decide for yourself. 1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda has noted, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end." Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth. It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms. 2. Create a gulag Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place. At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well. This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising. With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street. Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately. But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too. By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions. 3. Develop a thug caste When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution. The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution. Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities. Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order". 4. Set up an internal surveillance system In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched. In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny. In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent. 5. Harass citizens' groups The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone. Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition. 6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list. In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens. Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list". "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee. "I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution." "That'll do it," the man said. Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life. James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest. Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list. It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off. 7. Target key individuals Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors. Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933. Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them. Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job. Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow. 8. Control the press Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already. The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration. Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career. Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers. Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers. You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit. 9. Dissent equals treason Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution. Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade. In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors". And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly. Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.) We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR. Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now. 10. Suspend the rule of law The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens. Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'." Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction. Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that. Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion. It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster." As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone. That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs". What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise. What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite. Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world. We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now. "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry. -- Naomi Wolf, "The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," Chelsea Green Publishing, Sept 2007

democracy is placing a people in a larger cage than others to convince them they are free

If this is true, it looks like all Americans have been enslaved for many years. If nothing else, it makes the "bail out" proposal look very interesting. Is our economic distress really America's WAKE UP call? Is Congress using the "bail out" to keep Americans enslaved? -

I think US citizens are just about as free as anyone can be in a Western democracy. My only hesitation would be in poverty stricken families with no access to good education. Otherwise, if one has the ambition one is free to go and get to where one wants.

YEA WERE FREE free to do what ever we want.. as long as it's humane and civilized. nobody wants the freedom to kill, rape, or hurt people. unless their psycotic, insane, cereal, mass murders, killers who enjoys seeing pain, blood and guts.. dissembled body parts.. ect.

I suspect that some people are Free-er than others...

Hell no I have to fight all the time how does that make me free, ie I am attacked and defend myself. If I do it to well the Government will place me in jail but they have no problem with me being attacked.

I “Freedom,” said the ancient Roman lawyer Cicero, “is participation in power.” ------- II James Madison's views on who should be allowed to "participate in power." JAMES MADISON (1751-1836), was one of the founding fathers of the American revolution, and the fourth President of the United States of America. He was also one of the prime movers at the Constitutional Convention. The following Madison quote is from James Madison's personal records of the Constitutional Convention. "Viewing the subject on its merits alone, the freeholders, [property owners without debt], of the Country would be the safest depositories of Republican liberty. In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of property." [ MADISON August 7th. In Convention ] THE RECORDS OF THE FEDERAL CONVENTION OF 1787 The Madison quote is located in Volume II at p. 202 - 204 You must do a search for the quotes in - [ MADISON August 7th. In Convention ] WARNING: This can take some time and effort. (Farrand's Records Library of Congress) http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwfr.html ---- III My (partial) view of who actually "participates in power." NEW WEB SITE: (under construction) Political Power in the U.S. http://tinyurl.com/2sdtvk

We are only as free as we make ourselves. This country has become complacent and lazy and resting so far on our laurels that we might never wake up again... until its too late? Time is short and it is indeed almost too late... I hope we get on the ball again during this campaign and do the right thing and not the thing that pleases us as indivisuals based on personal opinion and outlived ideologies. We need to do what is right as a nation again... not just as spoiled selfish greedy indivisuals! "A House divided against itself will fall."

doesnt fell like it with all these damn taxes and more and more laws limited our own choices.

To an extent.

To most (myself included), the illusion of freedom is enough to keep us satisfied. Some of the more philosophical people however, will never consider themselves truly free as long as they have obligations. How can you ever be free, with people/society depending on you? You have to pay taxes, you have to go to work, you have to fufill social obligations, etc. Rather than focusing on the things which keep you from complete freedom, think about how unhappy your life would be with complete freedom. If you let someone do everything they desire, they will ultimately be unhappy. The human mind needs misfortune, so that the good times seem that much better. This is the same reason celebritys can be famous and wealthy and still be unahappy.

since this a physical, spiritual,psychological, social question I will answer that way. physically: we can move and jump we can fly in airplanes and helicopters to overcome difficulties, we can go can come, we can kill and heal. so yes we are free to move, however I cannot teleport with a blink or stop time with a wave so in that respect no we are in a confines but we have the ability to try which brings us back to free. Spiritually: we can love or hate, we can act or not, we can choose GOD or not, we can meditate or laugh or cry and we can change those as we wish tho it may be hard. however we cannot be GOD, we cannot change what we did wrong in the past or make somebody choose Jesus (just a point of view). Psychologically: I can choose to think or to relax, I can read a book and whisk myself to never never land, or be in the Belly of the Whale, I can want to Kill or want to abstain, I can pick if I like pink or hate pink or think its ok at any certain time or amount and can change it at any time. however if someone drugs me it can change the way I think or if I have electricity pulsed through my body it is hard for me to make my arm work or stop feeling pain, however it does not make me me it simply restricts my choice at that time, I can overcome if I am strong enough or change my life. Socialy: I can go and watch a movie or sit in the movie theater and sleep, I can kick a police officer or shoot people or I can jump out of my car and help the people that were just in a wreck, I can tell my govt that they suck or they are the best, I can tell my wife I love her or hate her, or tell my best friends to get out of that extramarital affair. however if I do bad in society then I may go to jail or get the death penalty or go to an insane assylum and be in a straight jacket which I cannot get out of easily.however even in their I can do as I so choose within the confines, but I still have a chance to escape I just have to figure out how, (good behavior or build a hot air balloon and go over the wall.) . whichever way you look at your life you have choices and in those choices is where you build your constraints. some are good and some are bad, but you are the master of your life no matter how difficult it seems. GOD BLESS. Remember:Jesus says the one who the SON sets free is free indeed. +3

I'm quite free to NOT serve a non-existent god.

I think the circle of hate that would come from true freedom might be very difficult to handle. I.E. I kill you for your horse and someone who cares about you kills me cause i killed you then someone who cares about me kills that person. It would keep going on and on. Now murder is an extreme example.