Somehow the text didn't make it into the post.

Anyway, the point I was making is that I agree with a previous poster that the test was not really fair. Confusing something in the second amendment with something in the first isn't really outlandish. The point should be whether people know their freedoms or not, not where they fall in the constitution. The question about the Simpsons were whether you knew them or not--not what episode of the Tracey Ullman show each character was introduced on.

Putting additional rights into the constitution like owning pets or driving a car is more questionable. But they could be in a "penumbra" somewhere lurking around. I'm pro-choice and wouldn't like to see Roe v. Wade overturned, but it'd really be a challenge if you asked people what part of the constitution contains the right to an abortion

(whose name I forget):

If you don't believe in statistical sampling, then the next time your doctor wants to test your cholesterol level you should insist that he takes out all of your blood.

Other signs of the apocalypse from the McCormick poll:

"One out of five (21%) Americans also agree that the First Amendment grants citizens the right to own and raise pets"

and

"Finally, almost one out of five (17%) Americans believe the right to drive a car is guaranteed by the First Amendment, although the automobile wasn’t invented until 100 years after the First Amendment was ratified."

Is this a great country, or what?

..."maybe Democrats who hope to win back the White House ought to spend a little less time on the separation of powers and the unitary executive and a little more on power ballads and fart jokes."

Maybe the Democrats should afirm each protection of the first amendment (and the others in their turn) and swear to the voters that they will protect each and every one of them (and list the Republicans abuse of these protections)

But, then again, so many Democrats should be thrown out of office to for their lack of fighting to protect these rights. It's time for a complete overhaul of congress. If they've been in office for two terms, they've already been corrupted.

1000 is more than enough to statistically represent the population. Probably with a confidence level of 95%.

A sample of 1,000 is robust enough to determine the preferences for the country, if the sample was selected with statistical rigor. The same math is used in all valid polls that you see.

This is why I think we should stop teaching trigonometry to high school students and instead give them a year of statistics. When was the last time you had to calculate the distance between two mountain peaks while mapping an unexplored territory, as opposed to when was the last time you had to decide whether or not a poll you saw in the media was valid and properly constructed?

Adam, I see what you mean about "most rights are muddled." The people at McCormick who conducted this poll think that there are five rights guaranteed in the 1st Amendment and I count four. (I read the right to assembe and petition the government as one right and they read it as two.)

But rights are always in conflict with someone else's rights and people ought to have a clearer idea of what's guarranteed and what isn't. When 17% of Americans think that the 1st Amendment guarantees the right to drive a car, we've got a serious education problem. Not to mention the 21% who think it protects the right to own pets. Maybe they're confusing it with the right to arm bears?

Eighty-five percent of troops believe they're in Iraq due to Saddam's involvement in 9/11 because that's what they're told by their superiors all the way up to the President. The military trains the troops to blindly follow their leaders without question, so this isn't surprising to me at all.

Doesn't this seem like a very small number if one is trying to get an accurate cross-section of American opinions? Of approximately 300 million Americans, thats .00033 percent. I don't expect them to interview a million people, but to publish and laud such a study as this that has such a weak statistical base seems rather irresponsible. It seems hard for me to imagine that they magically found 1000 people who were in anyway able to reflect the immense diversity in America.

I think people generally know what their rights are, but honestly, all rights are somewhat muddled. The fact that people aren't explicitly able to recite the rights in one amendment isn't a big deal.

If they simply know that they have free speech and freedom of and from religion, it really doesn't matter if they know that's in the First Amendment or think it's in Article V, or for that matter, in Article X!

Indeed, the most astonishing number in the Zogby poll was not the 72 percent of military personnel who think that the U.S. should leave Iraq within a year, but rather the 85 percent who thought that their mission in Iraq was to retaliate for Saddam's role in 9/11.

Were the soldiers in this "Saddam must have done it" 85 percent living in a neoconvict alternative universe before they enlisted, or were they force-fed such arrant neoconvict nonsense in basic training by lifer drill sergeants from unusually remote counties in Deeply Red States?

If the U.S. military is now as utterly divorced from reality as, say, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, can it be long before we are faced not merely with continuing rampant violations of law and consitutional precedent by the Bush Administration, but also with the use of the military to support Rovian political aims, i.e., to intimidate and stifle the exercise of First Amendment rights and the conduct of genuinely free and honest elections?

Is it any longer so far-fetched to imagine this neoconvict administration's use of the U.S. military against political opponents on U.S. soil? Is it any longer impossible to imagine its use of U.S. troops to impose a a militarily-policed political "State of Emergency" on, for example, the Washington, D. C. area and martial law elsewhere, especially in disaffected Blue States?

Given the timidity of Congress and the now-packed Supreme Court in the face of criminal behavior by this administration, it is extremely unlikely that even Karl Rove and Dick Cheney would ever see a need for such a scenario. But what would happen if the delusions, arrogance, and crimes of the neoconvicts were to propel us to a tipping point--as faced by Imperial Russia in 1917, by Italy in 1922, by Germany in 1933, by the Soviet Empire in 1989, or by the American Colonies in 1775?