Rasmussen: Voters Trust Collective Conscious of American People More than U.S. Government

Again I say, what is America coming to?
Maybe it's just the city slicker who grew up in Atlanta traffic in me, but I've never had an abundance of confidence in the sprawling masses zooming by me, eating their cheeseburgers and shouting into cell phones at 75 mile per hour.
Not to say this is some kind of binary relation where the balance of that confidence was placed in phony on the left or the phony on the right who just happened to have convinced 50 percent plus one of area voters to send him or her to swampland, or the Gold Dome for that matter.
From the story on Rasmussen Reports:

"Polling conducted from January 18 through January 24 found that 76% of voters generally trust the American people more than political leaders on important national issues. Seventy-one percent (71%) view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors. On each question, a majority of Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters share those views.
These results help explain why most voters are angry at the policies of the federal government, and most think that neither political party understands what the country needs.
“The American people don’t want to be governed from the left, the right or the center. The American people want to govern themselves," says Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports. “The American attachment to self-governance runs deep. It is one of our nation’s cherished core values and an important part of our cultural DNA.”"

The Internet, Alternate Realities and Where We're Going As a People

I awoke this morning to see this Rasmussen Reports poll in my inbox.

"...[A] new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 23% of adults think they personally spend too much time using the Internet, computers and mobile communications devices.
Seventy-one percent (71%) disagree and believe the amount of time they spend this way is appropriate.
Seventy-five percent (75%), however, believe young children spend too much time on computers and other electronic equipment.

That might not mean much to me on any other given day, but last night--after a long City Council meeting that could have been done in under a half-hour, had Council not convened an almost hour-long executive session for the second meeting in a row--I cracked open Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement about the effects of an America that is increasingly disengaging from society to interact in isolationist online and real-life communities that adhere to the singular world view of one's choice.
What good is the World Wide Web if you use it solely to bolster your own view point?
The growing way in which many people use these information resources to cloak themselves in a smug certainty that they are right and everyone else is wrong, misguided or delusional is alarming. And it is turning us all into one another's enemies.
Take this earlier Rasmussen poll:

I take some umbrage from this as I was accused of of being guilty of this during the last election cycle. But without naming names, I think it couldn't be more ridiculous in this one isolated incident involving me because the candidate they were saying I was biased against was the one that I supported in my non-newspaper reporting life.
But the kicker on this isn't the number of people who think the press is biased or more liberal or whatever, it's the numbers about a minute and thirty seconds in that I want to emphasize.
Only 21 percent of people are going to get their political news from the Internet this election year. That's just about the same 23 percent who say they spend too much time on the Internet.
The vast majority (considering there are four options here) will be tuning into the nightly news for their political pickins, and print and radio will scour the bottom for a combined 16 percent.
So lets look at it this way.
In a year when the entire state legislature will be up for reelection--we'll see how many actual contests there are this year--three-fifths of us will be relying on the television to give them information on candidates. Just under a quarter will be plotting their own course for campaign coverage and the rest will hope that they can get what they need from local sources.
For Milledgeville that's a little disturbing. There are no local television stations, so almost 60 percent of us will not hear anything about our local races for the Georgia General Assembly. Just under a quarter of us will get to read what the candidates want us to know about them. And 9 percent of us will rely on the efforts of one person who must balance the elections with the needs of city and county governments, plus whatever church barbecues, new wing restaurants and motorcycle club poker runs that pop up during that time.
It is scary to think that the ever expanding media landscape is doing exactly the opposite of what is possible, and that we the public are the reason it's happening.
Just consider this some kind of open thread rant.

Barnes Polling Neck and Neck with Ox and Handel

Oh yeah! Don't forget Nathan Deal--I always do.
Polling people Rasmussen Reports just released this polling information about a survey pitting former Governor Roy Barnes against the top three Republican frontrunners in this year's goobernatorial election.
Barnes comes out on top by razor-thin margins in all but the Ox contest in which he is down by two percentage points. No candidate pulled a majority in any of the races except if you match Ox up against Attorney General Thurbert Baker.
Baker is running a distant second to Barnes in polling for the Democratic nomination.
Read the full report here.

"45% Say Random Group From Phone Book Better Than Current Congress"

If only there was some alternative universe where we could put this assertion to the test.
Rasmussen Reports determined this figure in a December poll.

"A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 45% of likely U.S. voters now think a group of people selected at random from the phone book would do a better job addressing the nation’s problems than the current Congress. That’s up 12 points from October 2008, just before the last congressional elections. Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree, and another 19% are not sure. "

And it also appears that a majority of voters think our elected officials are paid too much--and with figures like they're quoting, I agree:

"Members of both the House and Senate are paid $174,000 per year. The political party leaders in both houses and the president pro tempore of the Senate earn $193,400 annually. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is the highest paid member of Congress, earning $223,500."