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The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is eerily similar to Germany's Enabling Act of 1933, the passage of which followed Germany's own "Sept. 11" in the burning of its parliament building, the Reichstag, on Feb. 27, 1933. The 1933 Enabling Act allowed Germany's own "Decider," Adolf Hitler, to take that country from one of a people's parliamentary government into one of a dictatorship and into the horrors of Nazism that spread throughout Europe for the next 12 years. The rationale given to the German people in 1933 for the removal of their liberties was that dictatorial powers were necessary to protect them from terrorism.

I encourage the reader to turn off your television set and learn about the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the Patriot Acts, the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act of 2007, which now allows our "Decider" to declare martial law without states' consent, and then take a few minutes to read the Bill of Rights, if not the entire U.S. Constitution.

Those who refuse to listen to anything unless it's from a member of the "Party of Lincoln," might consider the following from President Lincoln himself: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

And to those sycophants masquerading as "love it or leave it" Americans living in our "land of the free and home of the brave," Lincoln had this to say: "To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men."

Being a loyalist is easy. Being a patriot takes the courage to speak out in protest, albeit courage that any one of us can muster. Mark Twain wrote, "In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."