Meanwhile, the U.S. Government is using the "ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot act to bar perfectly peaceful people from the United States because they may express points of view that the administration dislikes. These are the actions of a totalitarian state.

The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It’s a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.

In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government’s use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Government is using the "ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot act to bar perfectly peaceful people from the United States because they may express points of view that the administration dislikes. These are the actions of a totalitarian state.

"These are the actions of a totalitarian state."

Can't be emphasized emphatically enough.

The U.S. we thought we knew is already gone. The terrorist's brutal and horrifying tactics have done precisely what they were designed to do : Created a culture of fear, mistrust and oppression, bankrupted the treasury, shattered world opinion, mired us in war and destroyed the moral compass set forth in the Constitution.

No one seems to want to take up that call because of the political repercussions, but the bottom line is that it WORKED. That's the scariest, saddest, most depressing thing I can think of. For all the fine words and heartfelt sympathy for the victims of 9/11, the plot was allowed to succeed. Not the plot to kill people in the buildings, the preventability of which could be argued over for an eternity, but the plot to shake the Nation's very foundations loose from their moorings. We're adrift in a very fundamental way, and it's heartbreaking.

Banned based on a Google?

WTF