Listen Up Bush: Making the grassroots heard

Josh over at Thoughts From Kansas is campaigning to throw a spotlight on what average Kansans think about President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Working through what’s being called The Roots Project, Josh and other bloggers are calling on their readers to write letters to the editor of Kansas newspapers to call on our senators to “work toward a better solution on warrantless wiretapping.”

Kansas is a testing ground for this kind of grassroots activism. I can’t think of a better place to do it.

Not only is one of our senators, Pat Roberts, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, but Kansas is, after all, THE iconic red state. If we’re upset about this program -- and we most certainly are -- then the opposition to this kind of illegal wiretapping can’t be painted as being out of the mainstream. I applaud Josh and the other bloggers who’ve been promoting this idea, and I join them in asking you to write to your newspaper.

Josh writes:

I've contacted a bunch of like-minded Kansas bloggers from across the political spectrum, and we're going to try an experiment. We're encouraging our readers to write letters to the editor of a few papers in the area calling on Senators Roberts and Brownback to get together and work toward a better solution on the warrantless wiretapping. The two of them reflect the nation's situation. Roberts supports the program and wants no changes. Brownback appreciates the need for surveillance of terrorism suspects, but doesn't think warrantless surveillance is the right approach. That's basically the divide that exists in the nation and in Kansas.

Here is my take on the issue of warrantless spying on U.S. citizens:

“Pat Roberts no longer serves Kansas.”

Even Ike knew better than Bush

The attorney general and my screaming fit

Josh’s posts on letter writing and The Roots Project are here and here.