Yoshie, you selectively focus on certain incidents that are likely to happen under ANY regime, given the circumstances. Did not the Soviets imprison, disperse or execute groups that they perceived as Nazi sympathizers during WWII? US has one of the highest violent crime rates in the developed world - and ANY society imprisons violent criminals (otoh, a large share of prison population are those imprisoned on bullshit drug or "parole violation" charges).
You then use these selectively assembled facts to argue that ther is no difference between Repug and Democract control of political instituions, The fact of the matter is, however, that from that point of view there is no difference between ANY party controlling th epolitical instituions. Do you really think that if by some very remote chance Socialists win presidency - they will let the violente criminasl off the hook and stop surveilance of people who by any objective standard have a higher probaility of engaging in illegal activities?
The fact of the matter is that Democrat rule IS discernibly better than the Repug rule, even though the former is not as good as we would like to see. But ot see that, one needs to consider a wide array of issues: from the land use, to environmental protection, to public tarnsportation, to urbam development, to health care, to labor laws, to international relations, to foreign policy, and to criminal justice - instead of narrowly focusing on issues where few rational people would differ to a sugnifiant degree.
Wojtek