Hidden in this Rushkoff rant on the closing of America the permanent loss of liberty and values due to an opportunistic government without any hint of a basic respect for liberty of anybody of a differing opinion (see below for details) is a great term that I will immediately start using, instead of the tired terms flack, pr-person, spin doctor, etc. he simply calls the prefessionals of the rhetoric business influence professionals. That has just the right bland yet ominous connotations it needs to have to describe the sad state of politics and other systems of influence.

As an example I still can't understand at all how Scoble sleeps at night. Having an organisation that is conversationally open is good. Working for that organisation and using, seemingly without any reservations, your own personal identity to market the organization is not.

Here's a partial shortlist of suspecious looking actions or rhetoric by the current administration and its cronies. What's interesting about the list is how total it is. It's not just anti-terrorism. It's everything.

• The Florida election
• Total Information Awareness
• Secret no-fly lists
• "Enemy combatants"
• Supreme court upholding right to secret arrest without court hearing
• Abu Ghraib
• "They absolutely positively have weapons of mass destruction"
• Senior Govt. officials simply not making themselves available to the press
• The FCC response to The Nipple Incident
• The proposed constitutional amendments to make homosexual marriage unconstitutional
• Quiet acceptance of RIAA wall to wall lawsuits
• The monopoly enhancing deregulation of newsmedia
• Using the Secret Service to make a joke of the right to free assembly (be keeping protestes at a media-wise convenient distance from the president)
• "Freedom fries" (the total outrage against France combined with the "They absolutely positively have weapons of mass destruction" lie is as undermining of America's well earned standing as defender of freedom as the systematic torture in Abu Ghraib)