Americans overwhelmingly believe that the government is broken, according to a national poll released Sunday.
But the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey also indicates that the public overwhelmingly holds out hope that what's broken can be fixed.
Eighty-six percent of people questioned say that the system of government is broken, with 14 percent saying no.
Of the 86 percent, 81 percent say that the government can be fixed, but 5 percent say it's beyond repair.
The percentage of Americans who believe the government is broken has increased by eight points since 2006.
"That increase is highest among higher-income Americans and people who live in rural areas," said Keating Holland, CNN polling director. "Maybe it's just a coincidence, but those are the groups that make up the bulk of the Tea Party activists today."
The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted February 12-15, with 1,023 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
#1
Is there any surprise at the high negative response to this bogus poll? Often surveys are forced to use vague terminology. Sometimes the questions are phrased to elicit the maximum input from respondents. And, as in this case, sometimes polls are specifically created with an agenda in mind.
First, in this context, what exactly are the definitions of broken or fixed? Of course the answers are whatever definition the respondent wants to project.
Next, what is the definition system [of government]? Is it representative democracy, the predominantly bicameral process, political posturing, or maybe a set of parliamentary rules? Or is it, again, whatever definition the respondent wants to project.
Finally, what is the definition government? Which do they mean; local, state, federal, or all of the above? Which branch of government do they mean: legislative, executive, judicial, or all of the above? Does this also include government agencies and organizations such as the IRS and the Post Office? Is this strictly civilian or does it include the military? Does this refer to only elected officials or does it also include people that are appointed to their positions? Again, its whatever definition the respondent wants to project.
One can only speculate on CNNs motivation. Perhaps asking such a spurious question is a political calculation. Maybe its to advance he White House narrative of gridlock? Then again, CNN is broadcasting a weeklong segment titled Broken Government. Perhaps, a good guess may be that CNN is a cluster-fuck of shameless whores that will dispense with any and all shreds of integrity in the hopes of bolstering their rancid ratings.
#2
It only takes a brief look at the fiasco ' corruption and mismanagement going on in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to realize how broken and uncaring US government is !
What was only fifteen years ago a fantastic government institution supporting innovation and protecting the rights of small inventors and bussinesses (the main dynamo behind American innovation, economy and job creation) to being the lapdog eating scrapes off the hand of big corporations and corrupt congressmen.
Somehow Americans have lost their healthy instincts that made them a great power of the past. A Government that cannot see how its organs are being mangled and destroyed for the sake of a few selfish dollar driven individuals is indeed broken.
Posted by: Elder of Zion ||
02/24/2010 12:04 Comments ||
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#2
Moreover, according to an April 2009 CNN report, President Obama's Intelligence Director, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, told colleagues in an April 16 memo on the subject of "enhanced interrogation techniques," that "High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa'ida organization that was attacking this country." This sentence was omitted from a version of the memo released by Blair's office to the press.
Typical Obama administration technique of deception through willful omission. Little new here, but nonetheless interesting from a historical standpoint.
John Yoo is entitled to dance a jig on the grave of Eric Holder's credibility. And he does. He sums up the ludicrous witch hunt conducted by the Office of Professional Responsibility, which examined whether he and Jay Bybee violated their ethical obligations in providing legal advice on enhanced interrogation techniques:
"Rank bias and sheer incompetence infused OPR's investigation. OPR attorneys, for example, omitted a number of precedents that squarely supported the approach in the memoranda and undermined OPR's preferred outcome. They declared that no Americans have a right of self-defense against a criminal prosecution, not even when they or their government agents attempt to stop terrorist attacks on the United States. OPR claimed that Congress enjoyed full authority over wartime strategy and tactics, despite decades of Justice Department opinions and practice defending the president's commander-in-chief power. They accused us of violating ethical standards without ever defining them. They concocted bizarre conspiracy theories about which they never asked us, and for which they had no evidence, even though we both patientlyand with no legal obligation to do sosat through days of questioning."
OPR's investigation was so biased, so flawed, and so beneath the Justice Department's own standards that last week the department's ranking civil servant and senior ethicist, David Margolis, completely rejected its recommendations.
But who is ultimately responsible for this three-ring circus? The attorney general, of course. Attorney General Holder could have stopped this sorry mess earlier, just as his predecessor had tried to do.' Yoo then describes the efforts of outgoing Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy Mark Filip to critique the OPR's sloppy work and end the investigation before they left office. But OPR decided to run out the clock and push the investigation into the lap of the Obama administration.' And Holder let the investigation churn on and on until it was apparent that its work could not be defended and that the Justice Department risked humiliation were it to follow OPR's error-ridden recommendation. Finally, David Margolis was brought in to clean up the mess, reverse the recommendations of OPR, and do what Holder could have done on his first day on the job: end the entire inquiry.
Yoo makes a key point: this is not simply about the persecution of two fine lawyers. It's not even about the untold damage done to the Justice Department, which may find it difficult to find top-flight attorneys willing to stake their careers and savings by rolling the dice that some future administration won't second-guess and investigate them. No, as Yoo points out, it's about stopping the Justice Department from actively interfering with the serious business of the fighting a war against Islamic terrorists. ('Ending the Justice Department's ethics witch hunt not only brought an unjust persecution to an end, but it protects the president's constitutional ability to fight the enemies that threaten our nation today.')
Now Holder needs to end the equally spurious reinvestigation of CIA agents who utilized enhanced interrogation methods and whom career prosecutors had previously declined to prosecute. And then he might reconsider whether Mirandizing terrorists and giving jihadists public trials are really helping us win a war. Or is it criminal warlike activities? That's the problem, all right. And if Holder can't give up the pipe dream of running a war from the ACLU handbook and conducting witch hunts to please the MoveOn.org crowd, Obama should find an attorney general who will.
#1
OPR's investigation was so biased, so flawed, and so beneath the Justice Department's own standards that last week the department's ranking civil servant and senior ethicist, David Margolis, completely rejected its recommendations.
The assassination of Hamas functionary Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is widely believed to have been the work of the Mossad. But why would Israel's legendary intelligence service allow the identity of its agents to be compromised? The affair looks set to damage the Mossad's reputation -- and unleash more bloodshed
#3
Gone awry? They got the team in, popped the target, and extracted everybody. Sounds like success from where I'm sitting.
And so what if everybody knows the Mossad did it? The message of that is, "We can get you, no matter where you are, you can't stop us, and we'll be home safe hoisting our blueberry almond martinis in celebration before the EMTs are done pulling the IVs out of your room-temperature carcass. Have a nice day."
Posted by: Mike ||
02/24/2010 8:32 Comments ||
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#4
So they were Catholic Jewish leprechauns you were saying then, Besoeker?
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
02/24/2010 9:23 Comments ||
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#5
It'll come out on Sunday, Bes. That's Purim, you know.
Posted by: Eric Jablow ||
02/24/2010 9:29 Comments ||
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#6
That is correct Mitch, a most tangled and intriguing web of history. Many are direct decendants of the Irish Transvaal Brigade. Superb horsemen, artillarists and demo men as well. No great lovers of the Queen & Khaki or the Arab mind you. [rediculousness off]
What shall befall the ancient race
The poor , unfriended faithful race ?
Where ploughmans song made the hamlet ring ,
The hawk and the owlet flap their wing ;
The village homes , oh , who can trace -
God of our persecuted race ?
Rev. M. Tormey
#7
Sky News is reporting a total of 26 suspects. Dubai Police said that of the 15 new suspects, six had British identities, three Irish, two French and three Australian.They had traveled to Dubai from six different European cities and Hong Kong, the statement said. The group includes five women one who used a British passport, three traveling on Irish passports and one with an Australian passport.
Yep, Irish Jewish Leprachauns is the best explanation so far. Covert ops are supposed to be covert and this is more like an elaborate movie plot.
#9
It gets worse (or better, depending on one's perspective. According to The Times:
Preparations appear to have been in train for months. When Mabhouh landed in Dubai, Mossad agents were waiting for him. They had flown in from Paris, Frankfurt, Rome and Zurich in advance using their forged passports, some based on the details of British nationals living in Israel who were unaware their identities had been stolen. The agents had also obtained credit cards in the name of the identities they had stolen.
Yesterday Dhahi Khalfan, the Dubai police chief, said investigators had found that some of the passports had been used in Dubai before. About three months ago it appears Mossad agents using the stolen identities followed Mabhouh when he travelled to Dubai and then on to China. About two months ago they followed him on another visit to Dubai.
I do wish they would use that overused word alleged whenever they talk about the Mossad having dunnit, like they all do when talking about Maj. Dr. Hasan allegedly shooting up the army base and killing and wounding so many in his personal jihad.
#10
That is correct Mitch, a most tangled and intriguing web of history. Many are direct decendants of the Irish Transvaal Brigade. Superb horsemen, artillarists and demo men as well. No great lovers of the Queen & Khaki or the Arab mind you. [rediculousness off]
There's actually more to the Jewish Irish leprachaun theory, no joke. Having Scots-Irish and German ancestry, I was surprised to find Ashkenazic,Sephardim, and Mizrachi matrilineal DNA matches. If you check the terms on Wikipedia, you will find we (me and my genetic matches, mostly in the British Isles and coastal Europe) actually come from three different traditions reflecting different diasporas. Have you heard of the Lost Tribes theory? The northern 10 tribes, called Israel during the Divided Monarchy, were largely deported during the Assyrian invasion of 722 BC and again during the Babylonian exile. The southern tribes, plus the Levites, were called Judea, and banned from Jerusalem following the Roman occupation in the first century. The twelve tribes are mentioned as reunited several places in biblical prophecies but most contemporary Jews are thought to have been from the line of Judea. One theory is the Gauls, the ancient name for France, originally came from the region of Galatia in Asia Minor, spreading generally in the same coastal area as the Celtic tribes, renowned warriors and archers, settling in the UK, coastal France and Spain. Another legend mentioned in the History of the Irish Race is of an Egyptian princess, Scota, fleeing with the seafaring tribe of Dan and settling in Ireland. Scotia is an ancient name for Ireland. While these are just theoretical at this point, I do believe the genome project will settle some issues finally. I do know the Israelis are also doing research looking for cohen, or priests, and some of these projects are linking their research. I do encourage you to check Wiki on the Lost Tribes and other terms if interested.
#12
Credit cards under fake names? OOHHHHH now thats a real crime! I mean geeze if it was the jooo mossad then they owe the banks a bunch of money and better pay up. How could they after we spent all that stimulus money.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
02/24/2010 17:00 Comments ||
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#13
Agreed.
Also, many on the MSM-Net argue that POTUS OABAM = so-called "OBAMUSLIM/OBAMUNIST" cannot be trusted to protect and defend Israel despite Oval Office claims to the contrary - bu this scope, + iff Radical Islam dies indeed escalate its Jihad PRESENT-YEAR 2012 = END OF OBAMA FIRST TERM, thrn its behooves Israel to capture iff not kill their most dangerous MilTerr oponents before IRAN, ETC. + MILTERRS GO FORMALLY NUKULAAR.
IMO MABHOUB ASSASSINATION = ISRAEL IS EXPECTIN' SERIOUS FUTURE GEOPOL TRUBLE.
Climate Fraud: The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up.
We've not seen or heard much of the former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel Prize recipient recently as the case for disastrous man-made climate change collapses.
Perhaps he's off reading how scientists were forced to withdraw a study on a projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding two "technical" mistakes that undermined the findings.
The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, allegedly confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that sea levels would rise due to climate change. The IPCC put the rise at 59 centimeters by 2100. The Nature Geoscience study put it at up to 82 centimeters.
Many considered the study and the IPCC's estimates too conservative in their warnings. After all, Al Gore, in his award-winning opus, "An Inconvenient Truth," laughingly called a documentary, foretold an apocalyptic vision of the devastation caused by a 20-foot rise in sea levels due to melting polar ice caps "in the near future."
Now Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at England's University of Bristol, has formally retracted the study. "One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years," he said.
According to Siddall, "People make mistakes, and mistakes happen in science." They seem to be happening a lot lately, and more than just mistakes. We are talking about outright fraud, the deliberate manipulation and destruction of data.
Last November, Al Gore was hailed by Newsweek as "The Thinking Man's Thinking Man."
Since then we and he have been given much to think about, starting with the damning e-mails from researchers associated with the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. The e-mails revealed an organized attempt to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, to manipulate data to fit preconceived conclusions, and to discredit and shun reputable skeptics.
A key finding of the IPCC, which along with Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, was revealed last month to be utterly bogus. The IPCC claimed glaciers in the Himalayas would likely disappear by 2035. The only thing they had to back it up was a 1999 non-peer reviewed article in an Indian mass-market science magazine.
It's been revealed that researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been systematically eliminating weather stations, with a clear bias toward removing colder latitude and altitude locations. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35, with only one station used by the NOAA as a temperature gauge for Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.
The past is prologue. Two years ago, Justice Michael Burton of London's High Court ruled Gore's film could be shown in British schools only if material explaining its errors were included in the curriculum. Burton documented nine significant errors in Gore's film and wrote that some of Gore's claims arose from "alarmism and exaggeration."
The first error Gore made, according to Burton, was in his apocalyptic vision of the devastation caused by a rise in sea levels caused by melting polar ice caps. Burton wrote that Gore's predicted 20-foot rise could occur "only after, and over, millennia" and to suggest otherwise "is not in line with the scientific consensus."
One by one, Gore's prophecies of doom and those of the climate charlatans he inspired are being exposed as the work of con artists. From the CRU to the IPCC, the climate dominoes are falling one by one. His silence speaks volumes.
#4
I assumed it'd be the nine biggest woppers, but I was scanning quickly. Did I miss the list?
Posted by: Bobby ||
02/24/2010 17:00 Comments ||
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#5
Manbearpig...not to be confused with the cluricaun or modern leprechaun.
Clurichauns are said to be always drunk, however, unlike their cousins, who are often known as solitary and surly, they are known to have a cheerful disposition and quite friendly. Sometimes when overly drunk they are known to be very aloof. Some descriptions paint a contradictory view of the clurichaun however, and describe him as being a surlier version of the leprechaun.
"We process experience and make experience available and understandable. We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere." - Cate Blanchett, Adelaide, 22 February 2002
IT'S time the authorities were told: Cate Blanchett must be stopped. Centuries from now, the survivors of the nuclear holocaust will look back on the star's keynote address to the Australian Performing Arts Market and say: "For the love of God, why didn't anybody do anything?"
It's not like the warning signs weren't there. Blanchett's Adelaide speech presents only two real possibilities, being that Cate is either a) interminably pretentious; or b) incurably insane.
The sad thing is that Blanchett's pointless, convoluted and overblown defence of the arts industry only succeeds in reinforcing the popular stereotype of it as a pompous collective of talentless windbags who constantly bray about how vital they are in an effort to distract attention from the fact that nobody else seems to like them....
...Blanchett says she and her ilk have the power to "change countries, governments, history, gravity", observes that "we change people's lives, at the risk of our own" and also notes: "Our job is to change reality . . ."
It appears that someone got to Cate's reality first. The address sounds less like a grant application and more like a Justice League of America mission statement.
Interestingly, when not boasting of her and her colleagues' superhuman abilities, Blanchett is very strident that the arts industry should not have to justify itself economically because it operates on a deeper level: "We can justify ourselves with economic indicators and KPIs and graphs and acquittals but it just makes us look like any other industry, and we are not . . . the graph is proof and proof comes afterwards. Proof is important to science because scientists start with speculation and conjecture to arrive at reality. Our job is to change reality, to challenge it, not prove it and explain it." She then goes on to say that she doesn't hear the point made often enough that the arts are a great employer - before detailing her Sydney Theatre Company's staffing structure.
This is no great crime, just an inherently contradictory set of statements that show - along with all the hackneyed grandiosity and vacuous motherhood statements - that no critical thought has gone into this statement, which is a shame for someone with such an enviable profile and platform. Rather it bears all the hallmarks of someone who knew that she was preaching to the choir and that by heaping ill-founded praise on her audience and making vague criticisms about capitalism or the system or whoever the enemy is supposed to be she will walk off the stage to easy applause.
Sadly, for genuinely talented and struggling artists, any bureaucrats and economists and benefactors with a lick of sense will look at this speech and see little worth spending their money on.
In the arts world described by Blanchett, they will find (to quote our favourite actress) "an infinity of nowhere".
Posted by: Mike ||
02/24/2010 10:44 ||
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#3
No, P2K. She passed the test. Leave me something, will you? Please don't shatter all of my fantasies. Hey, maybe GolfBravo could get some pix of her.
Posted by: Steve White ||
02/24/2010 12:23 Comments ||
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#8
Gah. It will be a great day for human progress when all actors are replaced by CGI and AI. That is, as long as there is no Avatar II.
Posted by: ed ||
02/24/2010 12:32 Comments ||
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#9
Oh, there can be an Avatar II. That'll be the one where the humans return, burn the surface of their dinky rocky clean and strip mine the entire planet.
And as the human fleet is leaving, a huge time on target salvo of missiles will vaporize the rag tag fleet of blue people trying to escape.
All except the one nailed to the prow of the human flagship.
Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, offered that review of the Soviet Union on his return from a fact-finding mission there. For decades, conservatives invoked that line as proof that a generation of progressives were Soviet fellow-travelers. Conservatives were far from entirely wrong, but the focus on Communism obscured a more enduring dynamic: The Left loves to press its nose against the window on the world and talk about how things are better over there.'
...like butterflies always looking for a prettier flower, these intellectuals keep flitting to the next proof' of America's shortcomings. For some, such as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the prettiest flower out there right now is China. For others, it's France or Canada. For the truly demented, it's Cuba.
The problem with all such efforts is that they look abroad solely for what they wish to see at home. For instance, in an effort to push its green agenda, the Obama administration likes to tout the farsighted vision of Spain, which has invested heavily in windmills and other renewable technology. Never mind that today, Spain's economic crisis is just slightly less dire than Greece's and politicized bets on green technology contributed to its problems....
Tom Friedman has gone so far as to wish America could be China for a day' and to suggest that its enlightened' regime is preferable to our own. It's not that Friedman wants to abolish democracy, jail dissidents, or force abortions. He's more like a drunk looking for his car keys where the light is good. He sees a nation doing things he thinks America should be doing, but doesn't look for what he doesn't want to see: the pollution, the cruelty, the lies and basic evil that are just as central to China's methods as its enlightened' investments in this or that.
What unites all of these people is a form of power worship. These foreign governments and their experts have control over citizens and economies sometimes through democratic consent, sometimes not that the state doesn't have in America. Thus proving American backwardness.
Perhaps we're not backward at all. Maybe America simply values economic freedom over economic security more than most countries do.
Regardless, the track record of such control, over the long haul, is abysmal, particularly in comparison with America's more unplanned approach (indeed, the world's planned economies often feed off American innovation to survive). The Soviets are in the dustbin of history; Japan Inc. is in its second lost decade'; Europe is in an economic crisis; China's problems are hard to see because Beijing likes it that way. We have our own problems, but history shows that the solution to them is not to be found in more centralized planning....
Posted by: Mike ||
02/24/2010 08:51 ||
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#1
The Left's Schoolgirl Crush on Failed Despots invokes the image of Janeane Garofalo getting breathless about Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Americans overwhelmingly believe that the government is broken, according to a national poll released Sunday.
Climate Fraud: The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up.
