Fareed Zakaria said:
- The White House has no real solution for Syria.
- There is no prospect of working with the Republicans on any major domestic policy.
- The greater threat to global peace and prosperity over the next decades comes from the rise of China and not from IS.
- Americans believe the unemployment rate, levels of immigrants and pregnant teens, age of the population are all higher than they actually are.
Ipsos MORI found:
- People in all 14 countries studied overestimated their unemployment level and immigration levels.
- Americans and the French overestimated the proportion of Muslims in their populations.
- The Swedes ranked lowest in the Ipsos MORI Index of Ignorance: Italy ranked the highest followed by the US.
An Annenberg Public Policy Center poll found that over 50% of Americans do not know whether the Senate or House are controlled by Democrats or Republicans. James Madison said popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.
Bruce Bartlett said:
- Obama has governed as a liberal Republican, with foreign policy on the same track as Bush and health care reform based on Republican ideas from the Heritage Foundation that were implemented by Romney in Massachusetts.
- The recent mid-term election results changed little substantively and was not a Republican wave but about the disappearance of the Democratic base – Obama has given them very little over the last 6 years.
- Nothing is going to change and Republicans are deluded in thinking their control in Congress will allow them to advance their agenda rather than simply continue to block Obama’s.
- Obama has been very weak on job creation and infrastructure investments.
- The next two years will see many vetoes.
Joshua Landis at the University of Oklahoma said the rebels in Syria that are backed by the US own only 1 or 2 percent of the country so for them to take out ISIS and take on Assad is virtually impossible – half a billion US dollars is not going to build an army, and is just there to satisfy Obama’s critics.
Freedom House said of the 15 former Soviet republics:
- Only 3 are totally free, 5 are partly free and 7 are not free.
- 12 do not have an entirely free press.
- Only 6 can be considered electoral democracies.
Watch the video at http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/category/gps-episodes/ or read the full transcript at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1411/09/fzgps.01.html