One way of getting around the state's new campaign-contribution caps is by forming a lot of different campaign committees. State law forbids people from forming more than one committee (except for independent expenditures, political parties, and state legislative leaders), but nothing in the law prevents "friends" and allies from forming their own committees to receive and give money.

For example, House Republican Leader Tom Cross has his own PAC (Citizens to Elect Tom Cross) and his allowed "caucus" PAC (the House Republican Leadership Committee), and he also appears to control or at least influence four other committees: Illinois Crossroads PAC, Citizens to Change Illinois, the Illinois House Victory Fund, and the Move Illinois Forward PAC.

Before we go any further, let me stress that none of this appears to be illegal. The House Republicans don't deny they're doing this, with one official saying that they even include these campaign accounts in the presentations they give to large donors.

There's not a lot that a state legislative candidate can do when his or her party's presidential nominee starts to tank.

The presidential race drives turnout to the point where down-ballot candidates must struggle mightily to rise above the noise and get their messages heard by distracted voters.

And because there are no statewide races in Illinois this year, that means there are no truly high-profile campaigns to "break up" any presidential advantage or momentum. Congressional races are all that state legislators have now to cushion the blow from the top, and down-ballot candidates are increasingly pinning their hopes on those contests.

At what point does caring about mankind mean enough to you to at least question the propaganda you have been fed over and over? The subject of 9/11 is horrifying on so many levels. Eleven years later, much more is known about one of the worst events in American history. The mainstream media has grossly neglected critical forensic evidence that contradicts the 9/11 Commission Report's explanation of events. Instead, it has deliberately embarked on a campaign to characterize those who question the official explanation(s) of 9/11 as conspiracy theorists, extremists, or unpatriotic, labeling such skeptics as "Truthers." Well, this editor has been called worse.

"You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement was scrutinized." - George Orwell, 1984

Brace yourselves for the next wave in the surveillance state's steady incursions into our lives. It's coming at us with a lethal one-two punch.

To start with, there's the government's integration of facial-recognition software and other biometric markers into its identification data programs. The FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is a $1-billion boondoggle that is aimed at dramatically expanding the government's current ID database from a fingerprint system to a facial-recognition system. NGI will use a variety of biometric data, cross-referenced against the nation's growing network of surveillance cameras, to not only track your every move but create a permanent "recognition" file on you within the government's massive databases.

By the time it's fully operational in 2014, NGI will serve as a vast data storehouse of "iris scans, photos searchable with face-recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos." One component of NGI, the Universal Face Workstation, already contains some 13-million facial images, gleaned from "criminal mug shot photos" taken during the booking process. However, with major search engines having "accumulated face-image databases that in their size dwarf the earth's population," it's only a matter of time before the government taps into the trove of images stored on social-media and photo-sharing Web sites such as Facebook.