Day: January 14, 2013
Congress’ Approval Rating Still Low
14%
Congress’s approval rating at the beginning of 2013, according to a new Gallup poll. “The lowest individual congressional job approval rating in Gallup’s history is 10%, measured in August of last year. The highest is 84%, measured in October 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”
Expect a Lower Turnout for Obama’s Second Inauguration
600,000 to 800,000
Number of people District of Columbia officials estimate will attend Obama’s second swearing-in, a steep decline from 2009’s estimated 1.8 million people who witnessed the first African-American president sworn into office. George W. Bush’s second inauguration attracted between 300,000 and 400,000 people. Bill Clinton’s drew around 450,000.
Powell: GOP Is Having Identity Problem
I think the Republican Party is having an identity problem.
— Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, on “Meet the Press.”Gun Nut Who Suggested That America’s Founders Would Have Allowed Slaves to Bear Arms Is a Protege of Dick Morris
Larry Ward, the chairman of Gun Appreciation Day, a crypto-racist rally scheduled to coincide with celebrations next week of Martin Luther King’s birthday as well as the second inauguration of America’s first black president, actually said this on national television on Friday:
LARRY WARD: I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history.
This is a new classic in right-wing counter-factual history — right up there with Michele Bachmann’s claim during the primaries that “the Founders fought tirelessly to end slavery” or former GOP Senate leader Trent Lott’s assertion on the 100th birthday of South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 on the neo-Confederate Dixiecrat party ticket, that “…when Strom Thurmond ran for president, we [Mississippians] voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
