Free Republic

On Oct. 24, 2001, then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) shepherded the Patriot Act through the House of Representatives. It passed 357 to 66, advancing to the Senate and then-President George W. Bush’s desk for signing. Hastert took credit for House passage in a 2011 interview, claiming it “wasn’t popular, and there was a lot of fight in the Congress” over it.

KINGSTON, Ontario, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- A Canadian retiree, angry because his credit card payments are processed south of the border, got even by paying his bill a few pennies at a time. Don Rogers of Kingston, Ontario, also hopes that his massive credit card statement will land him in the Guinness Book of World Records. He paid the bill on line in a total of 985 separate payments. What set Rogers off is the idea of his credit card statements being available to U.S. authorities under the Patriot Act. "Us retired guys are the most dangerous, because we have...

Many liberals are complaining that the U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed by Congress after Sept. 11 and administered by Attorney General John Ashcroft, has the whiff of fascism to it. At the least, they should know authoritarianism when they see it -- but more on that later. The legislation gives federal officials ''greater authority to track and intercept communications, both for law enforcement and foreign intelligence-gathering purposes,'' says the nonpartisan Library of Congress' research service, including power ''to combat corruption of U.S. financial institutions for foreign money laundering purposes . . . to further close our borders to foreign terrorists and...