Okay, maybe I'm missing something. Exactly which Amendments of the Bill of Rights have been trampled on wholesale, other than in your imagination?

First Amendment? Are newspapers being shut down? Who has been fined or imprisoned for expressing an opinion? Having someone respond to that opinion by telling them they're unpatriotic, or just plain full of shit, is not a violation of the right of free speech.

Second Amendment seems all right. Bush interprets it like it was originally intended, although his opinion has no real legal force.

As for the rest: Are they quartering soldiers? Have houses been ransacked without cause? Have someone's wife and kids been locked in a brig? Is the main issue how we're treating Taliban prisoners? Aren't they getting enough air conditioning?

Hello...NOTHING HAS HAPPENED YET. At least wait for it before you blow a gasket.

Okay, I'm being a bit facetious. Look, there are aspects of the Patriot Act that make me uncomfortable too. Hell, I'm a libertarian. In my opinion the entire thing was hastily put together and passed in a panic. But odds are that had Al Gore been President, something very similar would have been passed anyway. Republicans have no monopoly on this kind of stuff (it was Roosevelt who dumped the Japanese into camps) and if anyone shows less likelihood of becoming Fearless Leader it's George W. Bush.

In case you didn't know, legal boilerplate for massive rights abuses on the part of our wonderful government has been on the books for years in one form or another, the details usually showing up only in some paranoid right-wing website or other. The actual crackdown on human rights has yet to occur.