New Poll asks the questions others won't

Recently, certain pundits in the blogosphere have started to take to task certain mainstream polling firms for refusing to ask questions of the public that are relevant to the public debate. They claim that, by framing questions in certain ways, these mainstream firms are enabling the Republican-based narrative which tends to show the ship of state righting itself in stormy waters. Many bloggers, and others besides, feel that the state of American democracy has reached crisis point and worry about the role of executive power in a world where the president claims powers based on an amorphous 'war' with no clear enemy, which even they claim may go on for 50 years. How do we find our way back to checks and balances after a generation of quasi-monarchical rule?

The results of the first Start CHange/ MyDD poll are illuminating:

http://www.startchange.org/poll

This is what they claim as regards methodology:
Our poll was conducted from January 16 to 26 through a random telephone sample of 1004 registered voters nationwide. For the entire sample, the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1% with a 95% level of confidence.

THe people they asked were evenly divided between Dems, Repubs, and Indies.

Here are some of the things they found:

Only 26% of Americans have confidence that the federal government’s response to a terror attack would be “timely and effective. Almost twice that number -- 46% -- have little or no confidence in the federal government’s ability to respond to a disaster or a terror attack.

By a 49-43% margin, Americans believe that Congress should investigate whether or not President Bush broke the law with his secret wiretapping program.

If it is determined that President Bush broke the law, by a 50-39% margin, Americans believe he should be impeached and removed from office.

WE need to start realizing that when the President is trying to sell his obviously illegal program of domestic spying as 'terrorist surveillance', even though it is already well known that it has brought in thousands of innocent Americans, with no results to speak of (the best they can come up with is a phony Brooklyn Bridge story), and tramples on the legislative and judicial branches, the people have to quit giving equal time to their propaganda, and stand up for truth.

The only way that can happen is to gain a Democratic majority in Congress and press them to take Bush and his regime to task through the impeachment process, before the damage he does becomes permanent.