The Nature of Things

The Kaiser Family Foundation has been polling the public regarding reaction to last week's Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of  the Affordable Care Act. Guess what they found? It seems that most people (56%) are ready to move on .  They believe that opponents of the law should stop trying to overturn it and start addressing other burning issues facing the country. (Click on image to enlarge it.) So now I guess we can expect the Republican Tea Party to stop throwing its hissy fit and move on to things like shoring up our decaying infrastructure; creating jobs to help pull the economy out of its depression; finally acknowledging and taking steps to slow the heating up of the planet; creating more effective oversight of Wall Street and financial institutions; working to make sure that the food and drugs consumed by Americans are safe; providing more and better support for the public school system in this country; working to protect the rights of voters and to ensure ...

An interesting thing has been happening around the country this week and, as often occurs with interesting things, it doesn't seem that it is being reported by the mainstream media as much as it would appear to deserve. I'm talking about poll after poll that has been taken within the last couple of weeks by just about every polling organization in the country, and for once they are all unanimous and unambiguous in their results. The people have spoken and they have said that they don't want collective bargaining rights taken away from public sector employees. Furthermore, when they are asked how they prefer to have the budget gap closed, they overwhelmingly prefer the "soak the rich" method. By a large margin, they believe that the rich should pay higher taxes. The results from a New York Times/CBS poll released earlier this week are fairly typical. But even a poll by Rasmussen, the notoriously pro-Republican/conservative polling organization, found similar...

If you had to guess which is the happiest country in the world, what would you say? Do you think it would be the United States? Actually, considering all the bitching and griping that Americans do, I would have thought that this country would rank somewhere close to the bottom, but, in fact, according to a recent report from the Gallup polling organization , we do rank as one of the fifteen happiest countries in the world. We are near the bottom of the fifteen, though, ranking number 12. So what are the happiest countries in the world and what makes them so happy? If you look at what they have in common, for one thing they each have a strong social safety net. They have stable governments that generally work to make the lives of their citizens better. They are all democracies of one stripe or another. They have cohesive societies where citizens take their responsibilities rather seriously. There are other factors, individual to each country, of course, but these are some of the ...

Don't you just love polls? They tell us such interesting things about ourselves. Of course, everything hinges on the way the poll question is worded, and, for that reason, one has to look at who conducted the poll and consider what axe they have to grind before deciding whether to take the results well-salted. But I really doubt that the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune newspaper have any desire to make Texans look particularly bad, so I tend to believe that their poll is on the level. Here are just a few of the "facts" that the pollsters found that Texans believe: - 38 percent agreed with the statement "God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago." - 22 percent said life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time. - 51 percent disagreed with the statement, "human beings as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." - 41 percent were aware that humans did not live a...