Mondo Times Polls

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Results of Recent Polls

This poll ran from June 15 to 21, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

Do you approve of the job President Obama is doing? Yes 774/42% No 1069/58%

Votes: 1843

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, conducted from June 12 to 15, 2009, shows that 56 percent of Americans approve of President Barack Obama's performance, down from 61 percent percent in April.

President Obama's job approval rating fell to 58% in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from June 16-18, a new low for Obama in Gallup tracking.

This poll ran from June 15 to 21, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Newspapers deliver vital information to communities." True 313/76% False 98/24%

Votes: 411

Donna Barrett, the president and CEO of Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., writing at the Newspaper Association of America web site on April 29, 2009. Barrett wrote:

"Enough already. Partial facts and misinformation about newspapers are distorting the view for everyone, including readers and advertisers.

Let's set the record straight: Newspapers still enjoy considerable readership and deliver strong results for advertisers. More Americans read printed newspapers than own dogs. More Americans read printed newspapers than watch the Super Bowl. Newspapers and their Web sites reach a larger audience than ever before.

The crisis facing newspapers is not an audience problem. It is a revenue problem.

Newspapers deliver vital information to communities, as they have since this country was settled. But something has to pay for all of that news. Advertising has traditionally supported the valuable content provided by newspapers. Two developments have devastated that revenue.

The first is the recession. Newspapers are no different than television, radio, Internet, Major League Baseball, NASCAR and all businesses that rely on other businesses for money from advertising and promotion. The recession has led to a significant decrease in ad spending. Everyone is hurting. Newspapers just talk about it more.

Free Internet sites such as Craigslist are the other factor. These sites siphon off considerable classified advertising.

It is tough to compete against free, and free doesn't pay for journalists."

This poll ran from June 8 to 14, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Journalists deserve low pay." True 211/35% False 386/65%

Votes: 597

Robert G. Picard, a professor of media economics at Jonkoping University in Sweden, a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, and the author and editor of 23 books, including "The Economics and Financing of Media Companies." The comment is from the opinion article "Why journalists deserve low pay" published by the Christian Science Monitor on May 19, 2009.

Picard wrote: "Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power, and comforting the afflicted.

"Actually, journalists deserve low pay.

"Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren't creating much value these days.

"Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models."

Picard added: "To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped away by contemporary communication developments. Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.

"Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay.

Well-paying employment requires that workers possess unique skills, abilities, and knowledge. It also requires that the labor must be non-commoditized. Unfortunately, journalistic labor has become commoditized. Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories. This interchangeability is one reason why salaries for average journalists are relatively low and why columnists, cartoonists, and journalists with special expertise (such as finance reporters) get higher wages."

This poll ran from June 1 to 7, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"GM is going to be Obama's Vietnam." True 525/56% False 414/44%

Votes: 939

Automotive historian Bob Elton, quoted in the article "Can "Government Motors" succeed where GM failed?" published by Reuters on May 31, 2009. The article cites "fundamental problems" with General Motors:

"GM, which has posted $88 billion of losses since the start of 2005, has too many plants, too many workers and too many dealerships to be comfortable with a dramatic decline in sales.

The automaker also has more than 3,000 parts suppliers, many of which have strained balance sheets and may require financial support because of extensive production cuts by GM and Chrysler since the start of the year.

"I don't think they're going to be successful in answering the fundamental problems of this company -- they are addressing the financial issues, but not the business issues," said Stuart Hirshfield, a bankruptcy lawyer with the Mintz Levin law firm.

Under the restructuring, GM wants to reduce the number of U.S. plants to 31 by 2012, from 47 facilities now. It has also promised a new small car investment to the United Auto Workers union.

"Although they have made significant progress on the cost side, the product side and the manufacturing footprint are still long-term challenges," Fitch Ratings managing director Mark Oline said.

To fund GM's restructuring, the U.S. government already plans to provide to another $40 billion, on top of $19.4 billion already provided in emergency funds. The total cost could quickly rise if GM falters, analysts caution.

"I think this is going to be Obama's Vietnam," said automotive historian Bob Elton. "Every time he turns around, there goes another $20 billion."

This poll ran from May 24 to 31, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Twitter is a form of torture." True 265/54% False 223/46%

Votes: 488

Adam Sternbergh, from the article "Spam Haiku: Why 60 percent of Twitterers quit," published in the May 17, 2009 edition of New York magazine.

Sternbergh wrote: "It’s likely you’d no sooner heard of Twitter than you learned that Ashton Kutcher was already using it. So was Anderson Cooper. Suddenly, every gnarled politician in D.C. was sending out “tweets” (instant group messages) to their “followers.” (I’m by no means an early adopter, but when John McCain beats me to a new gizmo, I worry.) Even Oprah is tweeting, prompting the Times to announce, “Twittermania has only begun.”

"But one nagging question lingers: Just what is it good for? The implications of hive-mind citizen reporting are interesting, certainly. And it can work as a real-time search engine. But otherwise, being pestered by a constant stream of people’s thoughts sounds to me less like a communications breakthrough than a form of torture devised by Philip K. Dick.

"Recently, Nielsen reported that 60 percent of people who use Twitter once fail to return the following month. (At a similar stage of its growth, Facebook only lost about 20 percent.) In response to this report, one online commenter argued that new users simply don’t get that Twitter is perfect for “involving your brand in relevant conversations.” Eureka! Maybe this explains why so many writers, pundits, politicians, and celebs tweet, even as the rest of America shrugs. After all, those are exactly the types to think that (a) their every stray thought is publishable poetry and (b) it’s crucial to constantly insert their name—their brand—into the conversation.

"Which brings us back to Dan Baum. As it turned out, he had not only a story to tell but a product to sell: his book Nine Lives. A gossip site called Baum’s confessional “a watershed moment for Twitter, and storytelling in general,” and it’s true that a few of his updates achieved a koanlike beauty (e.g., David Remnick’s final dismissal: “?‘That’s not possible,’ he said, and that was that”). But reading this entire tale on Twitter was like reading a novel, line by line, inside a thousand fortune cookies. Not ideal for storytelling, no, but man, what a fantastic gimmick.

"That’s Twitter: A tool to mass-blast the public with whatever message you choose, whether you’re promoting your book or yourself. This practice used to have a different name: spam. But “tweeting” sounds much more cuddly than, say, “shilling,” and Twitter’s a much cuter name than Wiki-spam."

This poll ran from May 11 to 17, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Newspapers are the most trusted news medium." True 210/33% False 435/67%

Votes: 645

Deborah Armstrong, senior VP of sales and marketing at Mediaspace Solutions, a company that places newspaper advertising. Quoted in the article "Higher ad-to-edit ratio not a good thing," published in the July 2008 issue of Editor & Publisher magazine. Armstrong said: "Newspapers are the most trusted news medium. That sense of trust helps your ad when readers see it."

This poll ran from May 4 to 10, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"The only way to win in a casino is to own one." True 505/77% False 147/23%

Votes: 652

Casino developer and operator Steve Wynn, talking with Charlie Rose on the CBS Television Network program 60 Minutes from April 12, 2009.

Wynn has recently opened a new Las Vegas casino called the Encore. At age 67 he is a living legend in the gambling business, having built the Mirage and Bellagio casinos. He sold the Bellagio and Mirage Resorts in 2000, pocketing more than $600 million.

Born Steve Weinberg, Wynn grew up in the gambling business. His father, Michael Wynnn, was a compulsive gambler who owned a string of bingo parlors. When Steve was 10, his father took him to Las Vegas for the first time. Wynn told Rose: "My father had a terrible problem with gambling. He was a guy that enjoyed that activity so much that he lost control of it."

When Wynn was an infant, his father changed the family name from Weinberg to Wynn. Michael Wynn died during heart surgery at age 47, leaving the family with a gambling debt of $350,000. Steve Wynn took over the family business, made a success of it, and paid back the money his father owed.

Wynn told Rose the only way to win in a casino is to own one, "unless you're very lucky." Rose asked Wynn if he had ever known a gambler who went to Las Vegas, won big and walked away. "Never," Wynn replied.

This poll ran from April 27 to May 3, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

Would you miss reading the local newspaper if it shut down? Yes 651/73% No 237/27%

Votes: 888

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press published the results of a study about how concerned Americans are for the future of newspapers on March 12, 2009, titled "Stop the Presses? Many Americans Wouldn't Care a Lot if Local Papers Folded." They reported:

"As many newspapers struggle to stay economically viable, fewer than half of Americans (43%) say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community "a lot." Even fewer (33%) say they would personally miss reading the local newspaper a lot if it were no longer available.

"Not unexpectedly, those who get local news regularly from newspapers are much more likely than those who read them less often to see the potential shutdown of a local paper as a significant loss. More than half of regular newspaper readers (56%) say that if the local newspaper they read most often no longer published -- either in print or online -- it would hurt the civic life of the community a lot; an almost identical percentage (55%) says they would personally miss reading the paper a lot if it were no longer available."

This poll ran from April 20 to 26, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

Have you heard of Susan Boyle? Yes 973/81% No 233/19%

Votes: 1206

Susan Boyle is a 47 year-old woman from Blackburn, Scotland who auditioned for the TV show Britain's Got Talent on April 11, 2009.

Britain's Got Talent is a British amateur talent competition owned by Simon Cowell. The show is similar to American Idol, where Cowell also appears as a talent judge.

Before her performance, Ms. Boyle said that she has never been married, never been kissed and lives with her cat Pebbles. The unassuming, plain-speaking and plainly dressed woman was greeted on stage by a mix of skepticism and discomfort from the audience and judges alike. She then sang I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables to wild applause and a standing ovation, with the judges tripping over themselves and each other to praise her performance.

Judge Simon Cowell called her singing "extraordinary." Fellow judge Piers Morgan said her "stunning" performance was "the biggest surprise I've had in three years of this show."

Before her performance, Ms. Boyle was unemployed. She sings in the choir of a local church and has lived alone in her childhood home since the death of her 91-year-old mother two years ago.

On April 17, Ms. Boyle appeared on CNN's Larry King Live, where she sang My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion. Ms. Boyle has also been invited to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Major news media around the world have described her extraordinary and very sudden rise to fame.

At the end of the day on Sunday, April 19, 2009, the two YouTube videos showing her performance had been viewed more than 40 million times. Ms. Boyle will do a record for Simon Cowell's record label.

Susan Boyle Stuns Crowd with Epic Singing - Watch more Funny Videos

This poll ran from April 13 to 19, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Reading everything on the net for free is going to have to change." True 130/24% False 404/76%

Votes: 534

News Corporation Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch, speaking on April 2, 2009 at the Cable Show, the cable industry's largest annual gathering, in Washington, D.C. Dow Jones Newswires reported:

"As for the woes of the newspapers and other media businesses, Murdoch said the proliferation of content available online for free is breaking the industry's business models.

"Nobody is making money with free content on the web except search," said Murdoch, noting the trend is particularly worrisome in the newspaper publishing, where News Corp. owns a variety of assets. "People are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that's going to have to change."

News Corp. owns Dow Jones, publisher of this newswire.

Murdoch predicted that his chief U.S. rival in newspapers, the New York Times Co. (NYT), will have to charge online for access to its flagship newspaper.

"The inventory of display advertising on the web is doubling every year," said Murdoch. "They're never going to make money on an advertising model to replace what they're losing."

The Wall Street Journal, also owned by News Corp., has maintained a successful online subscription business for years, but the New York Times has been unsuccessful with its efforts to charge readers for Web access."

This poll ran from April 6 to 12, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

Is General Motors too big to fail? Yes 203/25% No 596/75%

Votes: 799

In the article "Obama Walks a Fine Line," published in the Wall Street Journal on March 31, 2009, writer Gerald F. Seib argues that General Motors is not too big to fail.

Seib wrote: "There will be some explaining to do on the left about why at least one auto maker -- Chrysler -- is being forced into bankruptcy, and another threatened with the same, while financial firms such as American International Group get whatever help is needed to stay solvent.

"I'm somewhat troubled again by the constant different treatment of auto companies and their employees and the treatment of some of those good-hearted people such as AIG and all those financial companies that have money showered upon them," said Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, who is generally upbeat about the plan.

"There are, of course, good reasons for disparate treatment of the financial and auto sectors. As important as GM and Chrysler are to the American economy, their demise wouldn't pose the same kind of systemic risk that would come with the demise of a giant financial institution entangled with customers and long-term contracts rippling across the globe. Big as GM is, it probably isn't too big to fail.

"More subtly, the public fuming over the rescue of financial firms is precisely why the administration probably couldn't do a flat-out bailout of GM and Chrysler even if it wanted to. Writing a big check to tide over the two auto makers for a while would have been the far easier path. But there is too much anger, and too little money, lying down that path now. "These companies -- and this industry -- must ultimately stand on their own, not as wards of the state," Mr. Obama declared in announcing his plan.

This poll ran from March 26 to April 5, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"There are too many mediocre magazines." True 368/91% False 35/9%

Votes: 403

Gabriel Sherman, from the article "The Magazine Isn't Dying," posted on March 17, 2009 at The Big Money web site, a service of Slate.

Sherman wrote about the shutdown of Best Life, describing the magazine as "a relic from a bygone era."

He added: "The news of Best Life's demise came on the same day that American Express Publishing announced it was folding Travel+Leisure Golf, an 11-year-old spinoff of its venerable travel title. Taken together, the latest magazine failures signaled to many publishing observers that magazines — long thought to be partly insulated from the digital forces battering the newspaper industry — are locked in their own death spiral. For evidence, they point out that since last March, more than two dozen major magazines have folded.

"But a closer look at the types of magazines that have closed reveals a more nuanced and, in many respects, hopeful portrait of the magazine business. According to a list compiled by Advertising Age, titles that have shut down in the past year come from the shelter, technology, travel, luxury, and teen categories. The reason for each category's challenges are obvious, from a meltdown in the housing sector to teenagers' wholesale abandonment of print for Facebook and Twitter.

"Yet the general conclusion that many extrapolate from these recent shutdowns is wrong. It's not that magazines are dying; it's that magazines that were created solely for advertising or market-share purposes are. New magazine titles often fail from a combination of bad timing, bad thinking, and a bad choice of brands to extend. Put simply, there are too many mediocre magazines (as anyone who gazes at the newsstand at Barnes and Nobles would conclude)."

This poll ran from March 17 to 25, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

Do you approve of the job President Obama is doing? Yes 1280/50% No 1260/50%

Votes: 2540

On March 3, 2009, NBC News (MSNBC) reported that President Obama's popularity rating "is at an all-time high." Mark Murray wrote: "Despite the country's struggling economy and vocal opposition to some of his policies, President Obama's favorability rating is at an all-time high. Two-thirds feel hopeful about his leadership and six in 10 approve of the job he's doing in the White House."

This poll ran from March 2 to 16, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Newspapers help to control corrupt tendencies in government and business." True 525/51% False 512/49%

Votes: 1037

Paul Starr, Stuart professor of communications and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and the author most recently of "Freedom's Power" (Basic Books). In the article "Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)," published in The New Republic on March 4, 2009, Starr wrote:

"News coverage is not all that newspapers have given us. They have lent the public a powerful means of leverage over the state, and this leverage is now at risk. If we take seriously the notion of newspapers as a fourth estate or a fourth branch of government, the end of the age of newspapers implies a change in our political system itself. Newspapers have helped to control corrupt tendencies in both government and business. If we are to avoid a new era of corruption, we are going to have to summon that power in other ways. Our new technologies do not retire our old responsibilities."

This poll ran from February 23 to March 1, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"The vast majority of stuff we find on the web is useless." True 272/58% False 194/42%

Votes: 466

Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management at Google, from his post "From the height of this place" on the Official Google Blog on February 16, 2009. Rosenberg wrote:

"Publishing used to be constrained by physical limitations. You had to have a printing press and a distribution network, or a transmitter, to publish to any sort of critical mass, so broadcasting was the norm. No more. Today, most publishing is done by users for users, one-to-one or one-to-many (think of Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube). Free speech is no longer just a right granted by law, but one imbued by technology.

"The era of information being more powerful when hoarded has also passed. As our economist Hal Varian has noted, in the early days of the Web every document had at the bottom, "Copyright 1997. Do not redistribute." Now those same documents have at the bottom, "Copyright 2009. Click here to send to your friends." Sharing, not guarding information, has become the golden standard on the web, so not only can anyone publish, but virtually everyone does. This is both good and bad news. No one argues the value of free speech, but the vast majority of stuff we find on the web is useless. The clamor of junk threatens to drown out voices of quality."

This poll ran from February 16 to 22, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"McDonald's serves high quality food." True 296/22% False 1060/78%

Votes: 1356

Jim Skinner, the CEO of McDonald's, quoted in the article "At McDonald's, the Happiest Meal Is Hot Profits" by Andrew Martin, published in the January 10, 2009 edition of the New York Times.

Martin wrote: " It wasn't too long ago that McDonald's, vilified as making people fat, was written off as irrelevant. Now, six years into a rebound spawned by more appealing food and a less aggressive expansion, McDonald's seems to have won over some of its most hardened skeptics.

The chain has managed to sustain its momentum even as the economy and the restaurant industry as a whole are struggling. Month after month, McDonald's has surprised analysts by posting stronger-than-expected sales in the United States and abroad."

This poll ran from February 9 to 15, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

Was Kellogg's right to drop Michael Phelps for smoking marijuana? Yes 1122/65% No 606/35%

Votes: 1728

On February 5, 2009, the Associated Press reported that Kellogg's will no longer use the services of Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer who won a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics. Marketing experts have estimated that Phelps could draw $100 million in endorsement deals.

The AP wrote: "Kellogg Co. said Thursday that it will drop its endorsement deal with Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps following his acknowledgment he inhaled from a marijuana pipe. The 23-year-old swimming star has apologized for his "regrettable" behavior and "bad judgment" after a photo appeared Sunday in the British tabloid News of the World that showed Phelps inhaling from a marijuana pipe.

Most of his major sponsors, such as Visa Inc., Speedo, luxury Swiss watchmaker Omega and sports beverage PureSport's maker Human Performance Labs, stood by the athlete following the news, even if they didn't condone his behavior.

But Battle Creek, Mich.-based cereal and snack maker Kellogg said Phelps's behavior is "not consistent with the image of Kellogg."

This poll ran from February 2 to 8, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Personal computers are too hard to use." True 117/22% False 421/78%

Votes: 538

Journalist Walter Mossberg, who writes the weekly Personal Technology column in The Wall Street Journal. He began working for the Journal in 1970 and covered American and international affairs until he changed his focus to reviewing personal technology in 1991. Mossberg's reasoning behind writing the column was that "...All the columns at the time were geeks writing for geeks. The tone was invariably very condescending toward normal people. Either you were a dummy or you became a techie." Mossberg's debut column began: "Personal computers are too hard to use, and it's not your fault."

Walter Mossberg has been called "a champion of the technology to befuddled Everyman" and "the most powerful arbiter of consumer tastes in the computer world today" by Newsweek Magazine, "the most influential computer journalist", by Time Magazine and Brill's Content Magazine considers him to be one of the 25 most influential people in the US news media. In 1999 Mossberg received the Loeb Award For Commentary for his Personal Technology column.

This poll ran from January 26 to February 1, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Newspapers contain too much information." True 111/25% False 327/75%

Votes: 438

Simon Dumenco, from the article "How the Big Gulp Approach to News Makes Readers Scram" published in Advertising Age magazine on January 19, 2009. His mention of "the Trib" refers to the recent change at the Chicago Tribune from a broadsheet to a tabloid format for newsstand buyers:

"The Trib move just underscores what newspaper executives still don't get: They're in the business of producing a product that makes millions of consumers feel bad about themselves. The brutal reality here is really about content, not form. As much as newspapers think they've evolved over the years -- adding colorful infographics and flufftastic lifestyle coverage -- the problem is that they still produce information in a way that makes people feel unhappy. I'm not talking about ain't-the-news-depressing unhappy. I'm talking unhappy as in readers thinking, basically, I just can't handle that much information; I'm already overwhelmed! I don't have time for this in my life! I can't keep up!

Chances are, if you subscribe to a newspaper and don't have a pre-modern life of leisure, your newspaper actually makes you feel bad too, if you think about it. Issues pile up, often largely unread. You think frequently about the dead-tree obscenity of it all, particularly on Sundays, when the first thing you do is peel off section after section you know you'll never read. But even the sections you do want to read you often can't get through. As for individual pieces -- well, a handful of star reporters and a columnist or two might more or less consistently deliver enlightenment, but time and time again you probably find yourself quitting pieces after the first few paragraphs, or somehow getting all the way through them and then thinking, "That wasn't worth my time." That surely happens frequently, too, if you have a habit of reading newspaper content online -- more so, actually, because content written in classic J-school-taught "pyramid style" can seem all the more lumbering and flabby amidst the milieu of crisply written blog posts and zippy data points."

This poll ran from January 19 to 25, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve." True 228/62% False 142/38%

Votes: 370

Martin Luther King Jr., quoted by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Colin Powell in the article "Let's Renew America Together," published in the Wall Street Journal on January 17, 2009. Referring to the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20, 2009, Powell wrote:

Next week marks a fresh start for our nation. Whatever one's political leanings, each presidential inauguration is an opportunity for Americans to renew the energy required to deal with the challenges we face -- never more so than when the challenges we face are without precedent.

Over the course of their transition, President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden have spoken with confidence and acted with competence. They've unveiled their plans for governing -- plans that recognize it will require federal money to solve our economic problems at home, and diplomatic and military skill to meet our obligations abroad.

But they also realize an equally important truth. While government has a role to play in restoring the American dream at home and rekindling the dream that is America abroad, there are limits to its ability to restore our sense of purpose as a nation. That task falls to us. Particularly in hard times like these, we are charged with living up to our shared responsibility to one another.

My experience is that in times of need, the American people recognize that when one of our fellow citizens is suffering, those of us with the power to ease or eliminate that suffering should come forward. This is not a time to retreat to our homes and wait until it's safe to emerge. It is the time to give more, to step forward and serve our fellow citizens, and to reach into the reservoir of this nation's unrivaled capacity for good.

That's why, at this moment of great purpose, Mr. Obama has chosen the eve of his inauguration to launch "Renew America Together," his call for all Americans to make an ongoing commitment to better the lives of others in their communities and their country. It's fitting that he will do this on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day when we honor the legacy of a man who lived his life in service to others and believed that "everybody can be great, because anybody can serve."

This poll ran from January 12 to 18, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Israel is committing war crimes." True 539/36% False 956/64%

Votes: 1495

The title of an opinion article written by George E. Bisharat, a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. The article, subtitled "Hamas's violations are no justification for Israel's actions," was published in the Wall Street Journal on January 10, 2009.

Bisharat wrote: "Israel's current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes. Senior Israeli political and military leaders may bear personal liability for their offenses, and they could be prosecuted by an international tribunal, or by nations practicing universal jurisdiction over grave international crimes. Hamas fighters have also violated the laws of warfare, but their misdeeds do not justify Israel's acts.

"The United Nations charter preserved the customary right of a state to retaliate against an "armed attack" from another state. The right has evolved to cover nonstate actors operating beyond the borders of the state claiming self-defense, and arguably would apply to Hamas. However, an armed attack involves serious violations of the peace. Minor border skirmishes are common, and if all were considered armed attacks, states could easily exploit them -- as surrounding facts are often murky and unverifiable -- to launch wars of aggression. That is exactly what Israel seems to be currently attempting."

This poll ran from January 3 to 11, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"The U.S. is a nation of couch potatoes." True 817/79% False 217/21%

Votes: 1034

Meg James, from the article "U.S. households watch more than 8 hours of TV a day," published on November 25, 2008 in the Los Angeles Times. James wrote:

Television viewing is on the rise despite competition from video games, iPods and the Internet.

The U.S. is a nation of even bigger couch potatoes than previously realized.

Nielsen Co. left little doubt Monday when it reported that television use is at an all-time high in the U.S., with home TVs turned on for an average of 8 hours, 18 minutes a day.

A decade ago, American households watched an average of 7 hours, 15 minutes a day.

Television continued to be the screen of choice despite increasing competition from computers. During the third quarter -- when the Olympic Games and presidential debates were broadcast -- American individuals watched more than 142 hours of TV a month, which was five hours more than in the same period in 2007, or an increase of 4%, according to Nielsen. That comes out to more than 4 1/2 hours a day.

(By comparison, the typical American gets only 6 hours, 40 minutes of sleep per night, according to a 2008 poll by the National Sleep Foundation.)

The firm's findings might seem counterintuitive because many experts predicted that the Internet would take a big bite out of people's TV time.

"While new media technologies have offered new entertainment options -- from the Internet, mobile phones and iPods -- television viewing has actually gone up," said David Poltrack, chief research officer for CBS Corp. "Viewing levels continue to climb."

This poll ran from December 20, 2008 to January 2, 2009.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

Is there a Santa Claus? Yes 1200/69% No 543/31%

Votes: 1743

In 1897, Virginia Hanlon sent a letter to the editor of The New York Sun:

"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

On September 21, 1897, Francis Pharcellus Church of The Sun replied: "VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

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