Month: January 2013

Take This Civics Test

Jon Ponder

Here’s a fairly basic civics test. Take it and beat my score. I missed two out of 28. One of my wrong answers was purely a guess. On the other, I tripped myself up on semantics.

This came to me in an email from a friend. In the body of the email, it said:

Okay you red-blooded Americans; let’s see how you do on this test. All it is, is a history/civics test!

18 out of 30 (60 percent) is considered a passing score but nothing to brag about.

Supposedly, 96 percent of all High School Seniors FAILED this test… AND 50+ percent of all individuals over 50 did also!

Take the Civics Test.

We’d love to see your scores in the comments, but please don’t give away the answers!

GOP Pollster: Tea Party Popularity Has Evaporated – Half of Voters View It Unfavorably

Jon Ponder

The only good news for tea baggers is that this poll comes from the Republican outfit Rasmussen, and they are always wrong. The bad news for tea baggery is that Rasmussen skews its results to the right:

Views of the Tea Party movement are at their lowest point ever, with voters for the first time evenly divided when asked to match the views of the average Tea Party member against those of the average member of Congress. Only eight percent (8 percent) now say they are members of the Tea Party, down from a high of 24 percent in April 2010 just after passage of the national health care law.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 30 percent of Likely U.S. Voters now have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party. Half (49%) of voters have an unfavorable view of the movement. Twenty-one percent (21 percent) are undecided.

And we all know what comes next: Tea baggers will blame their collapsing poll numbers on the media and/or liberals.

Obama Clear Winner in Fiscal Cliff Negotiations

Buck Banks

57% to 20%

Margin by which a new Pew Research survey finds President Obama is viewed as the clear political winner in the fiscal cliff negotiations, “but the legislation itself gets only a lukewarm reception from the public: As many disapprove as approve of the new tax legislation, and more say it will have a negative than positive impact on the federal budget deficit, the national economy and people like themselves.”

Gabby Giffords Launches Gun-Control Effort

Buck Banks

In response to a horrific series of shootings that has sown terror in our communities, victimized tens of thousands of Americans, and left one of its own bleeding and near death in a Tucson parking lot, Congress has done something quite extraordinary — nothing at all.

— Former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) and her husband Mark Kelly, writing in USA Today about launching a new gun control effort, on the second anniversary of being shot through the head by a deranged gunman.