Politics Categories of Americans
posted by on October 24 at 17:59 PM
Whenever I start hyperventilating about President Bush’s War on the 4th Amendment, I’m always told to cool it; that Americans just really don’t care about his creepy spying tactics.
I’m told it’s a losing issue for Democrats, that the public would rather give up some of their rights, knowing that a macho president is taking care of them.
Well, bah!
Check out this latest poll, which reports:
Sixty-one percent of voters favor requiring the government to get a warrant from a court before wiretapping the conversations U.S. citizens have with people in other countries, with an outright majority of voters, 51 percent, “strongly” supporting the requirement, the poll of 1,000 likely 2008 general-election voters found.Similar percentages opposed “blanket” or “basket” warrants, under which surveillance of categories of Americans would be allowed.
“Strikingly,” says The Mellman Group’s analysis, “majorities across partisan and ideological lines oppose blanket warrants.” Seventy-two percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents and 52 percent of Republicans opposed them; as did 71 percent of liberals, 57 percent of moderates and 58 percent of conservatives.
On a related note, I was talking to a friend last night who’s close to freshman Democratic Sen. Jon Tester (the Cinderella populist candidate from Montana who ousted longtime GOP Sen. Conrad Burns last year.)
“How’s Tester liking it?” I asked. “How’s he doing?”
Tester’s friend laughed. “He’s doing great. He can do whatever he wants. He ran against the PATRIOT Act.”
Jon Tester is awesome; Montana politics is (are?) fun.
I'm surprised there isn't more outrage among the general public about this spying crap.
Because most people don't have something huge to hide...
@2 - First of all, I think most Americans probably have at least one private fact they would object to people knowing. But second, so the government and police have the right to search through all of your belongings at any time, because if you have a problem with that it means your guilty of a crime?
Dude! They're going to do it, whether (SP?) you like it or not. Get used to it...
Josh, don't stop hyperventilating about it. It's important shit, and even if they will do keep doing it, we need to keep up the tension necessary to keep them in check (or at least try).
I really stopped caring. The apathy of the population about the death of the constitution is pretty old news. Yes, polls will say they do not like it but honestly, what are we doing about it? You should read some Thomas Paine or the Federalist Papers?: Seriously, we should have taken up an armed revolt against the Bush Regime by now. We have shamed Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and all the rest. They would call us cowards. And I wish I was joking.
I miss the Fourth Amendment.
SirFuller(ofshit):
That won't matter if Darth Cheney's minions decide that you do. They can whisk you away without telling you why they've done so, incarcerate you without charging you, forbid you access to a lawyer ... solely because they decide that you're a terrorist. There's no recourse, because anything you might want to use to defend yourself from these unrevealed-to-you allegations will be withheld on "national security" grounds. Who knows, maybe you'll be the subject of exraordinary rendition ... there's nothing to stop it.
And in the paranoid anti-Constitution world of Cheney, Woo, Addington, Chertoff, and Gonzales, that's all well and good.
A poll comissioned by the ACLU and conducted by a Democratic polling firm might not be the definitive answer on this question. At the very least you might want to look at the actual poll questions...
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