get down, you lemmings

Well it seems polls can only tell you so much, depending on how the questions are worded and the order of the questions, as well as the timing (humans being so emotionally malleable to fear mongering)

But here are two polls based on a larger samples taken within a few days of the one Dr Rock referenced. It still boggles the mind, but clearly the USA is deeply split along party lines and ideology, and that's not changing any time soon

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...eax-poll_x.htm
51 percent of Americans disapproving of the NSA program and 62 percent saying that Congress should hold hearings immediately.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12771821/site/newsweek/
53 percent of Americans say they think the NSA "goes too far in invading people's privacy."

If I was a reporter I'd be concerned about my sources being tracked.
But scratch that thought. Sources? Yeah right, what fucking sources?
That's the chilling effect — silence the whistle blowers.

There is a very legitimate concern to spy on terrorists, and prevent another attack like 9/11 or the rail bombings in the UK and Spain, but who polices the NSA and CIA considering the disturbing politicization the White House has inflicted on the management of those agencies?

Without a free press how does the public and Congress learn when and if the line has been crossed? Even when the news is published it can be spun and spun and spun. "The optics of war". Very disturbing.

Here's more on the reporting of "leaks"


The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters' phone records in leak investigations.

"It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," said a senior federal official.



http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/...knowledge.html

I'll have to borrow one of your terms, Dr. Rock: abysmal stupidity. Blame it on whatever you like; the general decline in the education available to most American children, absentee parents, a lower involvement with children as a result of technology or hell, why not junk food? Is it apathy? These kids grew up to be vapid adults. Most people know nothing of the world in which they live and apparently don't care. Our rights and freedoms are slowly eroding and nobody notices. If I wasn't such a city boy, I'd buy my 3 acres and build a self-sufficient property with solar power, pay cash for everything and tell the world to fuck off. As it's against my nature, I'll continue to be robbed of my basic rights and freedoms guaranteed by my Constitution which Dubya has apparently been using during his after dinner reading sessions on the porcelin stool. Yes, the solution to terrorism is to punish the people it harmed.

I was watching a West Wing rerun the other night and I had to laugh...one of the characters found a typo in the Constitution. It was a misplaced comma. I wondered how many in the viewing audience could grasp the significance. What's our starting number...30something percent? Ahhhh, one-dimensional, stupid, apathetic, vapid, grease drooling Americans.

Don;t get me wrong, I think Dubya's a scumbag. Anyone who isn't outraged by him hasn't been paying attention, and there's no shortage of people who don't pay attention, but I think there's a lot more outrage than this survey leads us to believe.

"A total of 502 randomly selected adults were interviewed Thursday night for this survey. Margin of sampling error is five percentage points for the overall results. The practical difficulties of doing a survey in a single night represents another potential source of error."

That's one very skewed sampling, and I haven't gotten into how the survey questions were worded. (Obviously, we don't know.)

You're right, one sampling doesn't tell the story but there have been so many now, a trend has emerged. It saddens me.

Here's the alarmist in me again, with another conspiracy theory (yes, some of you may have seen this in posts I made some time ago...): this is yet another reason that I am really bucking the system on use of my SSN for identification, and my kciking-and-screaming resistance to the "national ID" program. As far as I am concerned, my SSN is between me, my accountant, and tax-collecting entities - no business of the Dept of Motor Vehicles, no business of the public utilities, etc etc etc. (just try to get electric or water service in my area without divulging your SSN) The federal government is putting pressure, in the form of threats of withholding federal funds, on all states which refuse to participate in the national ID program, which is to be administered through the DMV of each state. This information, I imagine, will end up in a database which will also be linked to your search engine activity, your phone logs, your bank accounts, your voting record, your airline travel, and yes, your library card, too. It terrifies me. I have a passport, but believe it or not, there are some places where I have had my passport not accepted as ID, they wanted my driver's license (which, of course, I don't have because I won't give up my SSN)

I'm sure we can trust the powers-that-be to only use the mined information for non-political purposes. Not to worry.

You know what? Fuck the NSA, and fuck all this spying. Can anyone honestly say that google caching all my searches for three days does jack shit for national security?

Better yet, who the hell are the NSA to look into my personal life? I can't stand the blatant abuse of civil liberties that has been rampant since Clinton took office, only to be comtinued o the nth degree by Bush Jr. I should be able to search the internet without having to worry about some jackass looking at all of my information. Better yet, I shouldn't have to worry about a government official wiretapping my phone.

With all this new technology, it seems to me that as we progress as a nation, we retrograde in terms of civil liberties. Does anyone in Washington know the constitution? And what ever happened to the Republican party being advocates of little government? Did that die with Reagan? I think he'd be turning in his grave if he knew how Bush has turned this government into one huge spying machine (on its own people, not our enemies).

I don't think Reagan was an advocate of small government, even though he said he was. The deficit ballooned while he was in office due to his spending and tax cutting. He was more an advocate of slicing programs like welfare, school lunches and college grants versus keeping the feds out of our personal lives. (abortion, bedroom issues etc) I don't think he would have protested much about spying in "war time".

Rumsfeld is from his administration, and is in full support of spying and keeping people in prison at Gitmo without being charged. That aint small or good government in my book.

I'm a true conservative at this point. I want government, especially this one, completely out of my life. ;)

I hated Reagan. He lied or was incompetent about the Iran/Contra issue.
And his response to the AIDS crisis when it first came up was abysmal. 30,000 Americans were dead before the administration would deal with the issue semi seriously. Lives were lost that could have been saved had we jumped on this sooner. But "those people" were the only ones that got it, hence it wasn't important.

Rock, don't believe all you read - especially from US reporting news stands.

I don't ever remember being offered a Vote, NOR taking a survey...
Nor does anyone else that I asked around me...
So what happened to all the people in Michigan's vote?

WE WERENT ASKED So where'd this data come from, and WHY wasn't my vote counted?

Yet another Ploy by the Shrub & Co. flunkies trying to corrupt the minds of american Citizens.

New Definition of Terrorist: An american citizen whom is well aware of his rights given to him by God and the United States Constitution, and is willing to fight to the death to defend those rights.

I'm with you guys - lets shout, make some noise, burn some shit down etc etc.

But in the end it wouldn't work, as most american citizens are deeply frightened on how corrupt our country has become, and how our Laws have been twisted and tailored to assist the corrupt. Therefore they wouldn't stick together to fight for what's right. They're out to save their own asses, and that's sad.

Constitution? What's that?

George Bush/Karl Rove mistakenly call it "Charmin." It still does a dandy job of wiping up their shit.

oh, gimme a break. that fucking scumbag CREATED these bastards and everything they stand for. wake up, this government IS the fucking reagan administration back from vacation. that asshole was the living refutement of godwin's law like little georgie w only WISHES he could be.

And we forget that public schools after the American Revolution had one purpose. We are not talking about the religious schools of New england in the 1600's set up to teach the Bible.

We are talking about PUBLIC SCHOOLS owned and operated by state governments for the PURPOSE of EDUCATING the CHILDREN TO BECOME GOOD CITIZENS AND KNOW HOW THE GOVERNMENT WORKS AND WHAT THE CONSTITUTION SAYS.

The founders knew that without an educated citizentry that is knowledgable on what the Founders did and why, the Republic would come to an end.

Public schools weren't supposed to be about reading scores and math scores, public schools were supposed to be also be about critical thinking, synthesis, evalution; those high order thinking skills that separate the ignorant and the dumb from being educated.

The study of the social sciences should be at the core of what we teach in public schools. Citizenship should be the most important area of the social studiese taught.

Reading is a tool to use to open up the world. The reading out of the words from the page is the tool we use to open up the world out there. Oral reading is not the world itself; it is the tool, though it is a necessary tool in order to achieve our goal to see the world through the written page.

Dr, you hit the nail on the head. I am convinced now that most Americans would have the constitution torn up if you promised each of them a wide screen TV. I still can't believe what is going on here, but it is.