02/26/10

From Communist News Network (CNN)

CNN Poll: Majority says government a threat to citizens' rights


From CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser

Fifty-six percent of Americans say the government poses an immediate threat to individual rights and freedoms.

Washington (CNN) – A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.

The survey indicates a partisan divide on the question: only 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans say the federal government poses a threat to the rights of Americans.

According to CNN poll numbers released Sunday, Americans overwhelmingly think that the U.S. government is broken - though the public overwhelmingly holds out hope that what's broken can be fixed.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted February 12-15, with 1,023 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the overall survey.

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One commenter on the news item observed:

The 44% that does not think the government is a threat to citizens rights, must be employed by the government or receiving entitlements from the government.

It's scary when there are smarter people roaming the internet making comments than there are in D.C. running the government and analyzing polls.

"A government big enough to supply you with everything you need, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have...."
- That quotable line has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Barry Goldwater, and Gerald Ford.

I suspect that it was one of the latter, because in Jefferson's time, he would not have seen or imagined any country on earth with a bloated, nanny-state government, redistributing the wealth to criminals, the lazy and illegal immigrants.