Later today there’s a football game of no real consequence. Sure, I’ll watch and root for the Patriots to make history, but the outcome will have little impact on the infant I hold watching all the highly-defined, fast moving colors. The contests on Tuesday will move our nation closer to November 4th when we’ll all decide whether we all wish to remain the crash test dummies of destructive Republican policy, or exit the highway to hell and reverse direction. The most important thing about Tuesday is that Democratic primary voters get it right and cast the affirmative for a candidate who can win in November and then bring people together to clean up the toxic and smoldering mess left us by the Bush Administration. Yeah, it’s a big one…

While oil prices have squeezed the American family by adding cost to nearly everything, our benefactors at Exxon-Mobil announced an all-time annual profit record of $40.61 billion. Yeah… $40,610,000,000.00

Moving on to war profiteering, Raytheon’s 4th-quarter profits shot up like a Patriot missile 63%. Isn’t it heartwarming that while poor American teenagers and Iraqi civilians are dying in Iraq, Raytheon is profiting.

Speaking of the “military-industrial complex,” the Republican grand-daughter of the Republican President who cautioned us about it, has endorsed Barack Obama. Quoting her Grandfather, she wrote: “As we peer into society’s future,” he said, we “must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”

Finally, there’s an effort by the Administration to provide criminal immunity to our large, corporate telecommunication corporations (Verizon, AT&T;, Comcact, et al) against any charges related to their helping George and Dick spy on you and me. In a “Special Comment” segment broadcast January 31st, Keith Olbermann rants on the issue and describes the actions of an AT&T; whistleblower:

Mark Klein is the AT&T; whistleblower who appeared on this newscast last November, who explained, in the placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood I-T desk, how he personally attached all of AT&T;’s circuits — everything carrying every phone call, every e-mail, every bit of web browsing — into a secure room…

…Room Number 641-A, at the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco — where it was all copied so the government could look at it.

Not some of it; not just the international part of it; certainly not just the stuff some truly patriotic and telepathic spy might be able to divine had been sent or spoken by or to a terrorist.

Everything.

Every time you looked at a naked picture, every time you bid on eBay, every time you phoned-in a donation to a Democrat.

“My thought was ‘George Orwell’s 1984,’” Mr. Klein told me, reflecting back, “and here I am, being forced to… connect the Big Brother machine.”

Here’s all of it:

They spy on you and me, then call us un-Patriotic when we challenge them. That is part of the “change” you’re hearing about and the next opportunity to support it is Tuesday. Go vote.

Oh… Pats 45-10.