The California National Guard is Watching You

Dr. X's gently tendered pararnoia about my EXTREMELY WHIMISCAL reference to revolution is, it turns out, justified. Researching the Patriot Act and related surveillance issues today, I stumbled on this alarming new nugget of nascent fascism - an intelligence unit of The California National Guard is monitoring anti-war dissent. (This is a nice example of how the ACLU works, by the way, a thoroughly researched, strongly but cooly worded demand for action with an unambigious implication of very unpleasant ensuing publicity and legal action. This goes on all the time, often leading to a consent decree, a legal mechanism used frequently to protect civil liberties, that was just recently gutted. ) Not the cops. Not even the FBI. The state MILITARY.

As Van Winkle (!) of the California Terrorism Information Center puts it

You can make an easy kind of link that if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism (at that protest). You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.

I hate to resort to sarcasm, but I cannot tell you how reassured I am that the CATIC has reduced the pool of suspected terrorists in America to that 57% of the population that think the war was a bad idea.