Connecticut has a friend in Alabama. According to an AP story (via Huffington Post) the Alabama Dept. of Homeland Security had a website labeling as terrorists environmentalists, gay rights workers and anti-war groups.

 

The website has been taken down, but who wants to bet that the lists go on, even they are not publicly accessible? The AP noted that the site will return, sans specific identifications of groups. Most importantly, though:

 

The site included the groups under a description of what it called "single-issue" terrorists. That group includes people who feel they are trying to create a better world, the Web site said. It said that in some communities, law enforcement officers consider certain single issue groups to be a threat.

Single issue? End the War on Drugs? Watch out, you may be Hezbollah. Seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Might as well be in Al Qaida.

 

And, this latest report begs the question: how many other state homeland security departments are doing this?

 

And not to sound like a raging paranoid freak, but at what point do they start rounding up the people on the lists wholesale and detaining them? Why else collect lists?

 

This is the problem with the post-9/11 world created by Bush-Cheney Co. - everyone who doesn't think like them is suspect, from U.S. Attorneys with stellar records to pacifist activists seeking social justice.

 

While 2009 can't come soon enough, has our culture passed the point of returning to a republic? I feel like we have been invaded by the Nazis.