Polls.

Source: MSNBC

The lovely thing about polls is that they can be influenced thanks to a lot of factors: the age of the person being questioned, their social status, the political affiliation, and even the part of the nation in which they reside. One will say something entirely different from another.

This is one of those cases.

Now yesterday, the poll of the day was the Washington Post/ABC News poll discussed in this post. In that poll, 64% of Americans questioned had no problem with the NSA eavesdropping ordeal, and they especially didn't care if it were their phones being tapped.

Now today, MSNBC brings us this:

Has the Bush administration gone too far in expanding the powers of the President to fight terrorism? Yes, say a majority of Americans, following this week's revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent of Americans think the NSA's surveillance program "goes too far in invading people's privacy," while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism.

President Bush tried to reassure the public this week that its privacy is "fiercely protected," and that "we're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans." Nonetheless, Americans think the White House has overstepped its bounds: 57 percent said that in light of the NSA data-mining news and other executive actions, the Bush-Cheney Administration has "gone too far in expanding presidential power." That compares to 38 percent who think the Administration's actions are appropriate.

Now that's interesting.

So let's conduct our own poll just to see how these things fluxuate.







In case you are curious (and the reason for this post), how do polls work anyway?

Tags: [poll flips], [NSA], [NSA eavesdropping scandal], [how do polls work?], [Bush], [has Bush gone too far?], [53 percent of Americans think the NSA's surveillance program goes too far in invading people's privacy]