Still think this is a free country?

If you are still under the delusion that the United States is a free country, then read this. Key sentence: 

“I told them I was not doing anything illegal by taking photos and they kept saying, ‘we’re not disputing that it’s illegal, we just find it odd,’” he said.

It is another example of the Al Capone method of interpretation of law.

Update: 

The Ruling Class

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

…Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that “we” are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation’s paradigm that “all men are created equal”? ...

…Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members.

In other words, we don’t face Democrats, or Republicans, or any other political or structural entity.  We face a Ruling Class Regime that has, over a period of a century or so, taken hold of the levers of control over every major aspect of American life: Politics, government, academia, media, charity, religion (to a somewhat lesser but still potent effect), and the economy, a regime that shares an understanding and agreement on a particular worldview, and the means, methods, and goals that necessarily accompany the achievement of that worldview.

As I wrote in in 2003: 

Because the present-day Republicans and Democrats are both big-government activists, they have a foundational philosophy that is the same:  

America is a problem to be fixed, and Americans are a people to be managed.

More true now than ever.