It's much much worse than you seem to believe.
From one who routinely gets tinfoiled here, may I suggest some excellent video and essays that fill in what our educrats so deceptively determined we didn't need to know about our own country? The best Rat/RINO killers I have been able to find!
How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution
http://www.cato.org/realaudio/cbf-02-15-06.ram
The Issue of Tariffs: How U.S. Revenue Collection Was Turned Inside-Out (video)
http://mises.org:88/Sophocleus
Size Matters: How Big Government Puts the Squeeze on America's Families, Finances, and Freedom (And Limits the Pursuit of Happiness)
http://www.cato.org/realaudio/cbf-02-02-06.ram
Big Business and the Rise of American Statism
http://praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm
The Founding of The Federal Reserve (video)
http://mises.org:88/Rothbard-Fed
The Great Depression, World War II, and American Prosperity, Part I (video)
http://www.mises.org/multimedia/video/Woods/Woods5.wmv
Secrets of the Federal Reserve
http://www.barefootsworld.net/fs_m_ch_01.html
Jackson's 2nd Bank US VETO (very important - what he correctly and constitutionally opposed is just what we ended up with in 1913)
http://alpha.furman.edu/~benson/docs/ajveto.htm
The only thing that is correct about the term "progressives" is that they are responsible for wanting to head this country in a new direction... That is, from the top of Olympus, to the bottom of the $hi!pile.