52% Favor Repeal of Health Care Law
A majority of voters continues to favor repeal of the national health care law, but the number who Strongly Favor it has fallen to a new low. So has the number of voters who see the law as bad for the country.
 
        A majority of voters continues to favor repeal of the national health care law, but the number who Strongly Favor it has fallen to a new low. So has the number of voters who see the law as bad for the country.
 
        Barack Obama is a politician who likes to follow through on long-term strategies and avoid making course corrections. That's how he believes he won in 2008, and since then he's shown that he's not much into details.
 
        President Obama leads Donald Trump by 15 percentage points in a hypothetical 2012 match-up, but the president is unable to top the 50% level of support even against an opponent some are deriding as a joke.
 
        Both short and long-term confidence in the U.S. housing market continue to fall, with homeowners now expressing the highest level of pessimism in two years.
 
        President Obama well may have begun another undeclared war -- this time on states that try to enforce their own death penalty laws -- on the dubious grounds that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved drugs intended to kill convicted killers.
 
        Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are the most popular and best-known members of President Obama's Cabinet.  Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary, is nearly as well-known but not nearly as well-liked.
 
        Talk, talk, talk. That’s apparently all voters expect out of Washington, DC, because they don’t anticipate serious budget solutions any time soon.
 
        It's that time of year again, the time of year when high school seniors who have done everything right their whole lives discover that it wasn't good enough to get them into the colleges they dreamed of attending. Ditto for college seniors applying to graduate school.
 
        Having hesitated to fully enter the fiscal fray, President Obama has at last delivered a plausible, principled response to the budgetary flim-flams of the far right. But one speech, even a very good speech, won't fulfill his obligation in this fateful argument.
 
        Unemployment claims jumped last week, signaling continued weakness in the nation's economy, so it's no surprise that voters continue to rate the economy as the most important issue they vote on.
 
        Most voters remain concerned about the safety of nuclear power plants in this country, but support for building new plants in America appears to have rebounded slightly even as the nuclear crisis in Japan continues.
 
        With Japan now admitting its ongoing nuclear plant crisis is as bad as Chernobyl, concern about radiation from that plant reaching the United States has risen, and Americans are more worried about the overall impact on the U.S. economy.
 
        Between 1932 and 1994, Democrats controlled the U.S. House of Representatives for 58 of 62 years. Since then, however, party control has changed three times, with Republicans controlling the House from 1995 through 2006, Democrats from 2007 through 2010, and Republicans since then.
 
        If Barack Obama’s political standing is helped by a slowly recovering economy, talk among Democrats will quickly turn to taking back the House. However, control of the House of Representatives after the 2012 elections will still belong to the Republicans.
 
        American pizza-eaters rate Pizza Hut number one among pizza chains, closely followed by Papa John’s. But nearly one-out-of-five adults say they rarely or never eat pizza no matter who makes it.
 
        For years, America’s left-leaning mainstream media outlets have belittled and rebuked members of the new media — questioning their credibility, impugning their integrity and assigning all manner of self-serving motivations to their contributions to the marketplace of ideas.
 
        Veterans affairs is consistently one of the most sensitive areas for any politician, but 80% of voters are seemingly unaware of the man President Obama has put at the head of the federal department charged with handling that issue.
 
        A public school in Chicago now prohibits students from bringing lunch from home in an effort to promote healthier eating, but Americans strongly reject that idea. Not only does an overwhelming majority believe children should be allowed to bring lunch to school, but most also think lunches from home are healthier than ones bought in a school cafeteria.
 
        President Obama’s new deficit-reduction plan doesn’t even try to project a time when the federal budget will be balanced. Congressman Paul Ryan’s Republican alternative puts a balanced budget at least 25 years away. No wonder most voters don’t foresee a day in their own lifetimes when the budget will be balanced again.
 
        Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank attracted some attention when he promised not to mention Sarah Palin for a month. He kept his promise. The republic and the Post survived.