A resounding majority of Americans — 81 percent — think the country is “pretty seriously†on the wrong track, according to a CBS News-New York Times poll — up from 69 percent last year and 35 percent in 2002.
Only 4 percent thought the country was better off now than five years ago. And two-thirds of respondents said they thought the economy was already in a recession.
That was before Friday’s announcement that employers slashed 80,000 jobs in March — the most in five years. And on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke acknowledged for the first time that the country might be heading into a recession.
Voters wanting a change in direction, the economy sliding — it’s not a good general election scenario for incumbents.
“In another era, a memo declassified just the other day would have been accounted a ‘smoking gun,’ and the nation would have been abuzz with speculation about whose heads would roll and how far. Nowadays? Ho-hum,†columnist Tom Teepen wrote about the Bush torture memo.
The 2003 memo by John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, claimed that contrary laws could not bar the president from authorizing the abuse of detainees. Another memo by Yoo the previous year narrowed the definition of torture to acts that caused major organ failure or equivalent injury. The torture memo helped “drag the nation into international disrepute as a torturing power answerable neither to international law, treaty commitments nor even its own laws and Constitution,†Teepen wrote. Yet will anyone be held accountable?
The well-regarded buffalo design for Kansas’ personalized license plates will bow out in 2010. But then what? Help decide by voting until April 30 for one of the five finalists among the 111 entries received by the state, which offer plenty of sky, windmills, sunflowers and state seals. Some of the finalists look more postcardlike than platelike, and more dated than nostalgic.
A resounding majority of Americans — 81 percent — think the country is “pretty seriously†on the wrong track, according to a CBS News-New York Times poll — up from 69 percent last year and 35 percent in 2002.
