Forty-nine percent (49%) of Americans view Memorial Day as one of the nation’s most important holidays. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just seven percent (7%) consider it one of the least important holidays, while 43% rate it somewhere in between.
The good news: Last year, California's homicide rate dropped to its lowest level since 1966. Violent crimes were down from the year before.
Voters are slightly less pessimistic about the nation’s future this month.
Americans have mixed reactions when asked how the struggling economy is impacting their families.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor turned the policy temperature down on austerity this week by rolling out a strong economic-growth agenda. Headlined by a 25 percent top tax rate for individuals and business, the Cantor package includes regulatory relief, free trade and patent protection for entrepreneurs. It's job creation and the economy, stupid.
Voters still seem to share Ronald Reagan’s view that government is the problem, not the solution.
I was bouncing back and forth between worrying about my daughter flying to Ukraine (very far away, 4 connections, 1 airline I'd never heard of, very far away) and worrying about what I was going to say to a very smart, tough federal judge who was about to keep me on my feet for hours arguing on behalf of my client.
On the prowl for a good dinner in a Florida town we didn't know well, I went on Yelp. Yelp is a social networking website that lets anyone review a business. One Italian restaurant looked promising, with mostly positive reviews and few grumbles. We went there, had a fine meal and told the chef-owner so. But on mentioning that we had seen the reviews on Yelp, a cloud crossed his face.
Voters still believe U.S. society is fair and decent and tend to think President Obama doesn't agree with them.
While voters recognize the importance of the federal government’s role in disaster relief, many believe the response to a particular disaster may be politically motivated. There is also little confidence the government does a good job making sure relief money is distributed to all areas of need.
In Democratic-leaning New Jersey, both home state Governor Chris Christie and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney are within single digits of President Obama in hypothetical 2012 election match-ups.
Right now, first-term Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND) looks likely to be elected to the Senate seat left open by the retirement of Kent Conrad (D) in November 2012. The Crystal Ball wondered: How rare is it for someone to get such a fast elevation from the House to the Senate? (We realize some House members will insist it is a demotion.) We've scoured the records and identified nine members of the Senate in this category. Only senators in office sometime in the previous 50 years were included.
One of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals. Since Watergate, presidential and executive branch scandal has been an inescapable feature of the American presidency, but the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing. What happened, and what are the odds that the administration's streak will continue?
Just one-out-of-five American Adults have served in the U.S. military, but most of their fellow citizens plan on doing something special on Memorial Day to honor those who gave their lives for their country.
Take a poll of political pundits about next year's presidential election, and most at this point would probably predict that President Barack Obama would win reelection, but with a reduced margin from 2008 in both the popular and electoral vote. Yet if that actually happens, it would be an historical rarity of the first order.
Summer may be just around the corner, but over half of Americans do not plan on taking any trips this season.
A plurality of voters considers themselves pro-choice on the issue of abortion, but most still consider abortion morally unjust most of the time.
Voters clearly aren’t confident that their elected officials will wrestle federal spending under control. In fact, many now think the government’s more likely to go belly up.
Do Americans have the will to cut government spending in order to curb the rampant growth in government debt and liabilities? Not if the politicians they send to Washington have anything to do with it.
In 1954, E.B. White wrote a piece in The New Yorker about a hurricane hitting his part of Maine. The moment it left Boston, he notes in "The Eye of Edna," the radio voices declared the violent storm over -- even as it continued barreling toward the coast of Maine. When the wind "began to tear everything to pieces, what we got on the radio was a man doing a whistling act and somebody playing the glockenspiel."
