Take my rights but not my SUV!

Some pundits have suggested the Bush has succeeded in framing the eavesdropping debate in terms of whether the gov't should let terrorists make phone calls under their noses.

Mathematican John Allen Paulos illustrates how selective this Administration is when it asks us to sacrifice our privacy for security.

Defenders of these governmental intrusions generally point to the threat that terrorists' access to international telecommunications channels [to legitimize warrantless wiretaps] and children's access to pornography pose [to justify broad subpoenas of Google searches].

There is a trade-off, they intone, between liberty and security. This is, of course, true in a general sense, but what I find interesting is that so many of the defenders of these policies would never make similar arguments in other contexts, say about the need to limit unfettered access to handguns.

The second amendment ... has led, in part, to almost 400 of my fellow Philadelphians (and nearly 12,000 people nationally) being killed last year by guns — not by terrorists, not by porn addicts, but by hot-headed people with guns. Some have even argued we all have a right to own machine guns.

Why are these unrelenting deaths by handguns not considered a matter of national security requiring a minuscule loss of liberty in the form of stricter gun laws?

And why, to cite another example, is limiting environmental extravagance not considered a matter of national security requiring a minuscule loss of liberty in the form of more energy-efficient vehicles? |John Allen Paulos| (emphasis added)

Luckily a new poll indicates the 3 Americans out of 4 think the Bush administration has gone too far in dismantling the Constitional system of checks and balances.