When I look at the widespread bastardry afoot in Washington these days, I have a hard time deciding whether I'd feel more joy feeding our executive and legislative branches alive to large snakes, or using the snakes on the people who upped my rent $50 a month this year. Ideally, the snakes would not go hungry, if you know what I mean! Without naming anyone ÷ like Bob Graham or our President of the ninth tee for instance ÷ several proposals have gotten me particularly piqued lately, though for the sake of brevity I've listed a mere two under their proper headings.

1. Totally unrelated to protecting the public: Bill S-890.

Poor John McCain. His handlers have obviously been feeding him from the trough next to the paint buckets. I mean, that's the only way to explain his "Gun Show Loophole" bill, which is pretty inane considering said loophole only exists on John's home planet. You see, it's already a felony for anyone who's not a citizen to be at a gun show, let alone illegally buy anything, or even possess ammunition. Ironically, the word "terrorist" does not appear once in the bill ÷ but he pushes on, calling for permanent registration of any gun sales ÷ even private ÷ and gun show background checks, also to be kept permanently. Registration leads to confiscation, which leads to dependence. I don't see how keeping us from protecting ourselves protects us from terrorism, at which the feds have been as useful as Anna Nicole Smith's lone brain cell at doing the job.

2. Vaguely related to protection if you hold it up in a certain light and squint: Phased-in national ID cards, included in the Patriot Act.

Through this new pinnacle of asininity, the feds have called for a unified local/state/federal information system to track anyone they think might be naughty and, to be fair, everyone else too. For this, we're donating $150 million in taxes. (Oh boy, coerced surveillance of ourselves!) The same morons who blew several terror leads in favor of busting an interstate prostitution ring are going to have total access to all our personal information, but, fortunately for us, they seem to bungle everything else that stumbles their way, so we may just be fiendishly inconvenienced by the whole thing.

Of this prelude to barcode branding, Jane Harman, Democrat from that great bastion of liberty called California, has said, "We don't automatically have to call it a national ID card · but we can certainly think about smart cards for essential functions, but we need the database to support that." Aside from the obvious attempt to dupe our already war-addled public, I'm worried that we could soon find ourselves needing identification to function in public or to buy necessities. What's next, in-home cameras and chips implanted in our skulls? Federal hunters stalking us so they can tranquilize, tag and release us? OK, that last one was hyperbole · I hope.

And the worst part? What they'd want to prevent ÷ unrestricted movement of people, particularly foreigners ÷ would just be made easier. How many people do you know who have scanable fake ID's? Really, if an 18-year-old can cough up 100 bucks for a fake that fools the MVD, I'd be curious to see how long it'd take for bin Laden to get his own personal card. ("Here's your plane ticket, Mr. John Smith from Lincoln, Nebraska! Sorry for the inconvenience; a grandma got uppity with us while we were rifling her luggage and we had to loose a few warning shots into her knees.") If they can legitimize their place in public to the person behind the computer, how do we expect to stop anything?

Here's the dirt on the whole issue of sacrificing our freedoms: In our Bill of Rights, it's not written that our rights "are the government's to bandy about as they damn well please." It says they "shall not be violated."

In other words, Congress can't take away something they had no right to in the first place. To simplify this, our rights belong to us because we're people, not because the State gives them to us; it's what we fought and died for, and what we're now fighting and dying to lose.