are we free?

The United States was able to defeat Nazi Germany and helped bring down the USSR, but is the U.S. government now quickly becoming just like them? Once upon a time, America was the land of the free and the home of the brave, but today the government has become an oppressive monster that is intrusively embedding itself in our lives in thousands of different ways. Today we are all viewed as potential threats to the "system" that the government has imposed, and therefore everything that we do must be watched, tracked, traced, recorded and controlled. Lip service is still given to ideals such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and freedom of movement, but all of those freedoms are rapidly dying a brutal death. To our forefathers, living the American Dream meant living as free men and women, but today it means living under deep socialist tyranny where the government takes care of us from the cradle to the grave and uses an increasingly oppressive Big Brother police state control system to guarantee our safety.

The following are 20 signs that America is no longer the land of the free....

1 - Government trash snooping has now come to America. The city of Cleveland plans to sort through curbside trash to ensure that people are actually recycling their trash. If it is discovered that they are not recycling properly they will be hit with very large fines.

2- It is becoming increasingly difficult to express free speech online. The city of Philadelphia is actually forcing bloggers to pay them $300 for a business license. In this economic climate, who can afford to pay an extra 300 dollars just to have a blog? So much for free speech in Philadelphia.

3 - All of our DNA will soon be in a database. Barack Obama has been pushing a plan to create a national database that will store the DNA of all individuals who have been arrested, even if they end up not being convicted of a crime.

4 - You should consider nothing you do on the Internet to be private. It is being reported that the Obama administration is now demanding access to all Internet records of all Americans without court review.

5 - Just about anything can be used against you in court these days. In one of the very first military commissions held under the Obama administration, a U.S. military judge ruled that confessions obtained by threatening the subject with rape are admissible in court.

6 - But it is not just Islamic terrorists that are going to get this kind of treatment. According to FBI Director Robert Mueller, "homegrown terrorists" represent just as much of a threat to American national security as al-Qaeda does in 2010.

7 - Be very, very careful about what you post on the Internet from now on. One software company is actually developing software which will be able to identify people from photographs posted on the Internet.

8 - The frightening thing is that the Internet may actually be literally inside the heads of many Americans soon. Intel has stated that it wants microchips inside the heads of their customers by the year 2020.

9- As technology develops, it is inevitable that the government will want to utilize it to track us and to control us. A startup company developing "chipless RFID ink" has already tested its product on cattle and laboratory rats. How soon before it starts getting used on humans?

10- "Pre-crime" is not just for science fiction movies any longer. The Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice has announced that it will begin using analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents and will place "potential offenders" in specific prevention and education programs.

11- Are you ready to start carrying a national ID card? This year U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham have been promoting legislation that would institute a biometric national identification card for all Americans.

12 - These days anyone can be labeled a "terrorist" and denied even the most basic of rights. New legislation being pushed by U.S. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman earlier this year would allow the U.S. military to round up large numbers of Americans and detain them indefinitely without a trial if they are believed to "pose a threat" or if they have "potential intelligence value" or for any other reason that the President of the United States "considers appropriate".

13 - The relationship between the police and the public has fundamentally changed. Once upon a time the police were there to protect and serve. But in 2010 police all too often abuse their positions. Just recently, a 32 year old man was beaten black and blue by two Denver Police officers for no apparent reason at all.

14 - We are now so tightly regulated that we can't even honor good police officers any longer. Memorial crosses erected along Utah public roads to honor fallen state highway troopers have been found unconstitutional by a federal appeals court and must be removed.

15 - In 2010, it seems like the government wants to investigate just about everyone and everything. For example, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently called for opponents of the proposed Ground Zero mosque to be investigated in order to establish who is funding their activities.

16 - The truth is that it is very dangerous to exercise your free speech in America in 2010. For example, Christians are being arrested in various areas across the United States for quietly passing out Christian literature on public sidewalks.

17 - The U.S. government has become so paranoid that now even milk is viewed as a major threat. Organic milk is now considered such a national crisis that the FDA has been conducting military style raids on Amish farmers in the state of Pennsylvania.

18 - We can't even get on an airplane now without first allowing gawking security officials to get a good look at our naked bodies. The new full body security scanners going into airports all across the United States can actually see through clothing and produce very clear and very detailed images of the exposed bodies of everyone who walks through them.

19 - But the government would never save any of those naked images, would they? Well, the U.S. Marshals Service confessed recently that it had indeed saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of one Florida courthouse.

20 - Things have gotten so bad that we can't even sing the national anthem during a visit to a national monument any longer. A group of high school students made national headlines recently when they revealed that they were ordered by a security guard to stop singing the national anthem during a visit to the Lincoln Memorial.