A Different Street

Via Crooks and Liars (via Street Prophets), a brief review from Bob Edwards’ blog (man, I still miss that guy on Morning Edition) of a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth about the American Voter. Some key statistics from the review:

- Only 2 in 5 voters can name the three branches of the federal government.

- Nearly half (49%) of Americans think the president has the authority to suspend the Constitution.

- Only 1 in 7 can find Iraq on a map.

- A majority (70%) continued to believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, even after the 9/11 Commission reported that the claim was groundless.

- Only 1 in 5 know that there are 100 federal senators.

- Only one-fifth of Americans between ages 18-34 bother to keep up with current events.

Crooks and Liars finds the second item to be the most worrisome, but for some reason it’s #4 that upsets me. Karl Rove is probably tenting his fingers together and muttering “Excellent!”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Community, News and politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.