Friday, January 21, 2011

FINALLY SOMEONE IS TAKING MY SUGGESTION!

I'm declaring February a Palin-free month. Join me!
Dana Milbank Washington Post

Though it is embarrassing to admit this in public, I can no longer hide the truth. I have a Sarah Palin problem.

I have written about her in 42 columns since Sen. John McCain picked her as his vice-presidential running mate in 2008. I've mentioned her in dozens more blog posts, Web chats, and TV and radio appearances. I feel powerless to control my obsession, even though it cheapens and demeans me.

But today is the first day of the rest of my life. And so, I hereby pledge that, beginning on Feb. 1, 2011, I will not mention Sarah Palin -- in print, online or on television -- for one month. Furthermore, I call on others in the news media to join me in this pledge of a Palin-free February. With enough support, I believe we may even be able to extend the moratorium beyond one month, but we are up against a powerful compulsion, and we must take this struggle day by day.

I came to this inner strength by trusting in a power greater than myself: my former Washington Post colleague Howie Kurtz, now with the Daily Beast. A week ago, on his CNN show, "Reliable Sources," I was complaining about the over-coverage of Palin when I found myself saying that "the best thing would be -- it's impossible, of course -- that we in the media should declare some sort of a Sarah Palin moratorium."

It's impossible, I figured, because Palin is a huge source of cheap Web clicks, television ratings and media buzz. If any of us refused to partake of her Facebook candy or declined to use her as blog bait, we would be sending millions of Web surfers, readers, viewers and listeners to our less scrupulous competitors.

The media obsession with Palin began naturally and innocently enough, when the Alaska governor emerged as an electrifying presence on the Republican presidential ticket more than two years ago. But then something unhealthy happened: Though Palin was no longer a candidate, or even a public official, we in the press discovered that the mere mention of her name could vault our stories onto the most-viewed list. Palin, feeding this co-dependency and indulging the news business's endless desire for conflict, tweeted provocative nuggets that would help us keep her in the public eye -- so much so that this former vice presidential candidate gets far more coverage than the actual vice president.

We need help.

I found some hope in last Sunday's New York Times, where columnist Ross Douthat said it is time for the media and Palin to "go their separate ways" and for the press to "stop acting as if she's the most important conservative politician in America."

Let's take it one step further. I call on Douthat (who has mentioned Palin in 21 of his Times columns since 2008, according to a Lexis-Nexis search, and in scores of blog posts) to join my moratorium -- thereby forming a bipartisan coalition of The Post and the Times. I challenge columnists Eugene Robinson (33 Palin mentions), Paul Krugman (14), Kathleen Parker (30) and Maureen Dowd (45) to do the same.

I also call on Keith Olbermann (345 shows mentioning Palin) and Rachel Maddow (183 shows) of MSNBC, as well as Sean Hannity (411 Palin segments) and Bill O'Reilly (664 segments) of Fox News, to take the pledge. Will Politico -- with 96 Palin items in the past month alone -- join this cause? Will the Huffington Post, which had 19 Palin mentions on a single day last week -- stand with me?

Palin clearly isn't going away: "I am not going to sit down. I'm not going to shut up," she told Hannity on Monday. But if we treat her a little less like a major political figure and a little more like Ann Coulter -- a calculating individual who says shocking things to attract media attention -- it won't matter. Sure, we might lose some Web traffic or TV ratings, but we might also gain something. Remember the "Seinfeld" episode where George Costanza, by giving up sex, suddenly frees up brain power to learn Portuguese and Euclidean geometry, to teach Derek Jeter the physics of batting, to become a "Jeopardy" whiz and to solve a Rubik's cube? If we stop obsessing over Palin, we might suddenly become experts in the federal budget or Medicare reimbursement rates.

And so I pledge to you: Sarah Palin's name will not cross my lips -- or my keyboard -- for the entire month of February. Who's with me?

Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post and the author of "Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America." He will be online Monday, Jan. 24, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss this article. Submit your questions before or during the chat.

The GOP's rude awakening on health-care repeal Eugene Robinson

This whole health-care thing isn't quite working out the way Republicans planned. My guess is that they'll soon try to change the subject - but I'm afraid they're already in too deep.

Wednesday's vote to repeal President Obama's health insurance reform law was supposed to be a crowning triumph. We heard confident GOP predictions that cowed Democrats would defect in droves, generating unstoppable momentum that forced the Senate to obey "the will of the people" and follow suit. The Democrats' biggest domestic accomplishment would be in ruins and Obama's political standing would be damaged, perhaps irreparably.

What actually happened, though, is that the Republican majority managed to win the votes of just three Democrats - all of them Blue Dogs who have been consistent opponents of the reform package anyway. In terms of actual defectors, meaning Democrats who changed sides on the issue, there were none. This is momentum?

The unimpressive vote came at a moment when "the will of the people" on health care is coming into sharper focus. Most polls that offer a simple binary choice - do you like the "Obamacare" law or not - show that the reforms remain narrowly unpopular. Yet a significant fraction of those who are unhappy complain not that the reform law went too far but that it didn't go far enough. I think of these people as the "public option" crowd.

A recent Associated Press poll found that 41 percent of those surveyed opposed the reform law and 40 percent supported it. But when asked what Congress should do, 43 percent said the law should be modified so that it does more to change the health-care system. Another 19 percent said it should be left as it is.

More troubling for the GOP, the AP poll found that just 26 percent of respondents wanted Congress to repeal the reform law completely. A recent Washington Post poll found support for outright repeal at 18 percent; a Marist poll pegged it at 30 percent.

In other words, what House Republicans just voted to do may be the will of the Tea Party, but it's not "the will of the people."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." By this standard, House Republicans are geniuses. To pass the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," they had to believe that the work of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is both authoritative and worthless.

The CBO, which "scores" the impact of proposed legislation, calculated that the health-reform law will reduce federal deficits by at least $143 billion through 2019. Confronted with the fact that repeal would deepen the nation's fiscal woes, Republicans simply claimed the CBO estimate to be rubbish. Who cares what the CBO says, anyway?

Er, um, Republicans care, at least when it's convenient. Delving into the CBO's analysis, they unearthed a finding that they proclaimed as definitive: The reform law would eliminate 650,000 jobs. Hence "Job-Killing" in the repeal bill's title.

One problem, though: The CBO analysis contains no such figure. It's an extrapolation of a rough estimate of an anticipated effect that no reasonable person would describe as "job-killing." What the budget office actually said is that there are people who would like to withdraw from the workforce - sometimes because of a chronic medical condition - but who feel compelled to continue working so they can keep their health insurance. Once the reforms take effect, these individuals will have new options. That's where the "lost" jobs supposedly come from.

The exercise in intellectual contortion that was necessary for the House to pass the repeal bill will be an excellent tune-up for what's supposed to come next. "Repeal and replace" was the promise - get rid of the Democrats' reform plan and design one of their own. This is going to be fun.

It turns out that voters look forward to the day when no one can be denied insurance coverage because of preexisting conditions. They like the fact that young adults, until they are 26, can be kept on their parents' policies. They like not having yearly or lifetime limits on benefits. The GOP is going to have to design something that looks a lot like Obamacare.

Meanwhile, Obama's approval ratings climb higher every week. Somebody change the subject. Quick!

Olbermann Leaves ‘Countdown’ on MSNBC (my motto was NEVER BELIEVE YOUR OWN B S)

Updated Keith Olbermann, the highest-rated host on MSNBC, announced abruptly on the air Friday night that he was leaving his show, “Countdown,” immediately.

The host, who has had a stormy relationship with the management of the network for some time, especially since he was suspended for two days last November, came to an agreement with NBC’s corporate management late this week to settle his contract and step down.

In a closing statement on his show, Mr. Olbermann said simply that it would be the last edition of the program. He offered no explanation other than on occasion “all that surrounded the show – but never the show itself – was just too much for me.”

Mr. Olbermann thanked his viewers for their enthusiastic support of a show that had “gradually established its position as antiestablishment.”

In a statement, MSNBC said: “MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”

NBC executives said the move had nothing to do with the impending takeover of NBC Universal by Comcast. With viewers and fans of Mr. Olbermann suggesting that Comcast was responsible for forcing Mr. Olbermann out, Comcast also released an official statement late Friday night:

“Comcast has not closed the transaction for NBC Universal and has no operational control at any of its properties including MSNBC. We pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBC Universal’s news operations. We have not and we will not.”

MSNBC announced that “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell would replace “Countdown” at 8 p.m., with “The Ed Show” with Ed Schultz taking Mr. O’Donnell’s slot at 10 p.m. Mr. Olbermann did not discuss any future plans, but NBC executives said one term of his settlement would keep him from moving to another network for an extended period of time.

Mr. Olbermann signed a four-year contract extension in 2008 for an estimated $30 million. He had hosted “Countdown” at 8 p.m. since 2003 and it became the foundation of the channel’s surge to its status as the second-ranked news channel on cable television, after Fox News, surpassing the one-time leader CNN.

Mr. Olbermann’s outspoken, and sometimes controversial, support of liberal positions and Democratic candidates redefined MSNBC from a neutral news channel to one that openly offered a voice to viewers on the left, much as Fox News has done for conservatives.

Mr. Olbermann challenged Fox News publicly on numerous occasions, especially the top-rated cable host Bill O’Reilly.

Ratings for Mr. Olbermann’s show grew, though he never approached Mr. O’Reilly’s level of popularity. But he helped expand the MSNBC brand by his frequent invitations to Rachel Maddow, who was eventually offered her own show on MSNBC.

Ms. Maddow became the 9 p.m. host following Mr. Olbermann and has built such a successful show that some NBC executives felt less concerned about losing Mr. Olbermann as the signature star of the network.

According to several senior network executives, NBC’s management had been close to firing Mr. Olbermann on previous occasions, most recently in November after he revealed that he had made donations to several Democratic candidates in 2010 — one of them, coincidentally, was Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who has been the subject of many of his recent shows after being shot in an assassination attempt.

The top MSNBC executive, Phil Griffin, said the donations had violated NBC News standards and ordered Mr. Olbermann suspended. His fans responded with a petition to reinstate him that attracted over 250,000 signatures. Mr. Olbermann returned two days later. In his response he said the rules on donations had been “inconsistently applied.”

Why Parents Fear the Needle

DESPITE overwhelming evidence to the contrary, roughly one in five Americans believes that vaccines cause autism — a disturbing fact that will probably hold true even after the publication this month, in a British medical journal, of a report thoroughly debunking the 1998 paper that began the vaccine-autism scare.

That’s because the public’s underlying fear of vaccines goes much deeper than a single paper. Until officials realize that, and learn how to counter such deep-seated concerns, the paranoia — and the public-health risk it poses — will remain.

The evidence against the original article and its author, a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield, is damning. Among other things, he is said to have received payment for his research from a lawyer involved in a suit against a vaccine manufacturer; in response, Britain’s General Medical Council struck him from the medical register last May. As the journal’s editor put it, the assertion that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine caused autism “was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud.”

But public fear of vaccines did not originate with Dr. Wakefield’s paper. Rather, his claims tapped into a reservoir of doubt and resentment toward this life-saving, but never risk-free, technology.

Vaccines have had to fight against public skepticism from the beginning. In 1802, after Edward Jenner published his first results claiming that scratching cowpox pus into the arms of healthy children could protect them against smallpox, a political cartoon appeared showing newly vaccinated people with hooves and horns.

Nevertheless, during the 19th century vaccines became central to public-health efforts in England, Europe and the Americas, and several countries began to require vaccinations.

Such a move didn’t sit comfortably with many people, who saw mandatory vaccinations as an invasion of their personal liberty. An antivaccine movement began to build and, though vilified by the mainstream medical profession, soon boasted a substantial popular base and several prominent supporters, including Frederick Douglass, Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw, who called vaccinations “a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft.”

In America, popular opposition peaked during the smallpox epidemic at the turn of the 20th century. Health officials ordered vaccinations in public schools, in factories and on the nation’s railroads; club-wielding New York City policemen enforced vaccinations in crowded immigrant tenements, while Texas Rangers and the United States Cavalry provided muscle for vaccinators along the Mexican border.

Public resistance was immediate, from riots and school strikes to lobbying and a groundswell of litigation that eventually reached the Supreme Court. Newspapers, notably this one, dismissed antivaccinationists as “benighted and deranged” and “hopeless cranks.”

But the opposition reflected complex attitudes toward medicine and the government. Many African-Americans, long neglected or mistreated by the white medical profession, doubted the vaccinators’ motives. Christian Scientists protested the laws as an assault on religious liberty. And workers feared, with good reason, that vaccines would inflame their arms and cost them several days’ wages.

Understandably, advocates for universal immunization then and now have tended to see only the harm done by their critics. But in retrospect, such wariness was justified: at the time, health officials ordered vaccinations without ensuring the vaccines were safe and effective.

Public confidence in vaccines collapsed in the fall of 1901 when newspapers linked the deaths of nine schoolchildren in Camden, N.J., to a commercial vaccine allegedly tainted with tetanus. In St. Louis, 13 more schoolchildren died of tetanus after treatment with the diphtheria antitoxin. It was decades before many Americans were willing to submit to public vaccination campaigns again.

Nevertheless, the vaccination controversy of the last century did leave a positive legacy. Seeking to restore confidence after the deaths in Camden and St. Louis, Congress enacted the Biologics Control Act of 1902, establishing the first federal regulation of the nation’s growing vaccine industry. Confronted with numerous antivaccination lawsuits, state and federal courts established new standards that balanced public health and civil liberties.

Most important, popular resistance taught government officials that when it comes to public health, education can be more effective than brute force. By midcentury, awareness efforts had proven critical to the polio and smallpox vaccination efforts, both of which were huge successes.

One would think such education efforts would no longer be necessary. After all, today’s vaccines are safer, subject to extensive regulatory controls. And shots are far more numerous: as of 2010, the Centers for Disease Control recommended that every child receive 10 different vaccinations. For most Americans, vaccines are a fact of life.

Still, according to a 2010 C.D.C. report, 40 percent of American parents with young children have delayed or refused one or more vaccines for their child. That’s in part because vaccines have been so successful that any risk associated with their use, however statistically small, takes on an elevated significance.

It also doesn’t help that, thanks to the Internet, a bottomless archive of misinformation, including Dr. Wakefield’s debunked work, is just a few keystrokes away. All of which means the public health community must work even harder to spread the positive news about vaccines.

Health officials often get frustrated with public misconceptions about vaccines; at the turn of the last century, one frustrated Kentucky health officer pined for the arrival of “the fool-killer” — an outbreak of smallpox devastating enough to convince his skeptical rural constituency of the value of vaccination.

But that’s no way to run a health system. Our public health leaders would do far better to adopt the strategy used by one forward-thinking federal health official from the early 20th century, C. P. Wertenbaker of the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service.

As smallpox raged across the American South, Wertenbaker journeyed to small communities and delivered speech after speech on vaccinations before swelling audiences of townsfolk, farmers and families. He listened and replied to people’s fears. He told them about the horrors of smallpox. He candidly presented the latest scientific information about the benefits and risks of vaccination. And he urged his audiences to protect themselves and one another by taking the vaccine. By the time he was done, many of his listeners were already rolling up their sleeves.

America’s public health leaders need to do the same, to reclaim the town square with a candid national conversation about the real risks of vaccines, which are minuscule compared with their benefits. Why waste another breath vilifying the antivaccination minority when steps can be taken to expand the pro-vaccine majority?

Obstetricians, midwives and pediatricians should present the facts about vaccines and the nasty diseases they prevent early and often to expectant parents. Health agencies should mobilize local parents’ organizations to publicize, in realistic terms, the hazards that unvaccinated children can pose to everyone else in their communities. And health officials must redouble their efforts to harness the power of the Internet and spread the good word about vaccines.

You can bet that Wertenbaker would have done the same thing.

Michael Willrich, an associate professor of history at Brandeis University, is the author of the forthcoming “Pox: An American History.”

Myth of the Hero Gunslinger

PHOENIX — To many gun owners, the question of whether to arm even more people in a country that already has upwards of 300 million guns is as calcified as a Sonoran Desert petroglyph. It’s written in stone, among the fiercest of firearms advocates, that more guns equals fewer deaths.

But before the Tucson tragedy fades into tired talking points, it’s worth dissecting the crime scene once more to see how this idea fared in actual battle.

First, one bit of throat-clearing: I’m a third-generation Westerner, and grew up around guns, hunters of all possible fauna, and Second Amendment enthusiasts who wore camouflage nine months out of the year. Generally, I don’t have a problem with any of that.

Back to Tucson. On the day of the shooting, a young man named Joseph Zamudio was leaving a drugstore when he saw the chaos at the Safeway parking lot. Zamudio was armed, carrying his 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. Heroically, he rushed to the scene, fingering his weapon, ready to fire.


Suppose, in the few seconds of confusion during the shootings, an armed bystander had fired at the wrong man.
Now, in the view of the more-guns proponents, Zamudio might have been able to prevent any carnage, or maybe even gotten off a shot before someone was killed.

“When everyone is carrying a firearm, nobody is going to be a victim,” said Arizona state representative Jack Harper, after a gunman had claimed 19 victims.

“I wish there had been one more gun in Tucson,” said an Arizona Congressman, Rep. Trent Franks, implying like Harper that if only someone had been armed at the scene, Jared Lee Loughner would not have been able to unload his rapid-fire Glock on innocent people.

In fact, several people were armed. So, what actually happened? As Zamudio said in numerous interviews, he never got a shot off at the gunman, but he nearly harmed the wrong person — one of those trying to control Loughner.

He saw people wrestling, including one man with the gun. “I kind of assumed he was the shooter,” said Zamudio in an interview with MSNBC. Then, “everyone said, ‘no, no — it’s this guy,’” said Zamudio.

To his credit, he ultimately helped subdue Loughner. But suppose, in those few seconds of confusion, he had fired at the wrong man and killed a hero? “I was very lucky,” Zamudio said.

It defies logic, as this case shows once again, that an average citizen with a gun is going to disarm a crazed killer. For one thing, these kinds of shootings happen far too suddenly for even the quickest marksman to get a draw. For another, your typical gun hobbyist lacks training in how to react in a violent scrum.

I don’t think these are reasons to disarm the citizenry. That’s never going to happen, nor should it. But the Tucson shootings should discredit the canard that we need more guns at school, in the workplace, even in Congress. Yes, Congress. The Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert has proposed a bill to allow fellow members to carry firearms into the Capitol Building.

Gohmert has enough trouble carrying a coherent thought onto the House floor. God forbid he would try to bring a Glock to work. By his reasoning, the Middle East would be better off if every nation in the region had nuclear weapons.

At least two recent studies show that more guns equals more carnage to innocents. One survey by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that guns did not protect those who had them from being shot in an assault — just the opposite. Epidemiologists at Penn looked at hundreds of muggings and assaults. What they found was that those with guns were four times more likely to be shot when confronted by an armed assailant than those without guns. The unarmed person, in other words, is safer.

Other studies have found that states with the highest rates of gun ownership have much greater gun death rates than those where only a small percentage of the population is armed. So, Hawaii, where only 9.7 percent of residents own guns, has the lowest gun death rate in the country, while Louisiana, where 45 percent of the public is armed, has the highest.

Arizona, where people can carry guns into bars and almost anyone can get a concealed weapons permit, is one of the top 10 states for gun ownership and death rates by firearms. And in the wake of the shootings, some lawmakers want to flood public areas with even more lethal weapons.

Tuesday of this week was the first day of classes at Arizona State University, and William Jenkins, who teaches photography at the school, did not bring his weapon to campus. For the moment, it’s still illegal for professors to pack heat while they talk Dante and quantum physics.

But that may soon change. Arizona legislators have been pushing a plan to allow college faculty and students to carry concealed weapons at school.

“That’s insane,” Jenkins told me. “On Mondays I give a lecture to 120 people. I can’t imagine students coming into class with firearms. If something happened, it would be mayhem.”

He’s right. Jenkins is a lifelong gun owner and he carries a concealed weapon, by permit. He also carries a modicum of common sense. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

TIMOTHY EGAN NYTimes

THIS ONE OF THOSE STORIES - More than 20 years later, missing New York baby is found

Carlina White was separated from her family in New York City when she was kidnapped as an infant 23 years ago.

NEW YORK (AP) — More than two decades ago, a newborn sick with fever was snatched from a New York City hospital, her frantic mother returning to the emergency room to find an empty crib. On Wednesday, police said the baby — now a woman — has been found.

Carlina White was just 19 days old when she disappeared from Harlem Hospital on Aug. 4, 1987. Police searched for her kidnappers but never found enough evidence to charge any suspects. Her mother, Joy White, always had a feeling that her baby was alive, her family said.

On Jan. 4, a woman known as Nejdra Nance, who was raised in Bridgeport, Conn., and now lives in Atlanta, contacted White, sending along baby photos that looked nearly identical to shots of Carlina posted on a missing children's website. Nance told White she thought she may be her daughter.

"She said she just had a feeling, she felt different from the people raising her," said Nance's maternal grandmother, Elizabeth White, 71. "She searched, and then she found Joy."

Joy White contacted the New York Police Department to see if it could help investigate whether the woman was really Carlina White.

"It sounded legitimate and credible, so I had missing persons reach out to her," said Detective Martin Brown, who fielded the call. DNA tests performed on Joy White, her ex-husband, Carl Tyson, and 23-year-old Nance matched, police said. Nejdra Nance was Carlina White.

As part of their investigation, police are talking to retired detectives who handled the case years ago. Because she was so young when she was kidnapped, it's impossible for Nance to know if she has lived with the same family the entire time.

Nance was on her way back to New York from Atlanta on Wednesday, said Elizabeth White, and Joy White was en route to the airport to meet her. But they already reunited once recently, when Nance came to New York with her 5-year-old daughter, Samani.

"It was wonderful, she didn't even seem like a stranger, she just fit right in," Elizabeth White said. "We all went up there, we had dinner together, her aunts were there. She brought her beautiful daughter. It was magic."

Elizabeth White said she didn't ask Nance too many questions about how she grew up or how she knew she was not a member of the family with whom she lived. She didn't want to push Nance too much.

"That will all come," Elizabeth White said of the history. "What's important now is our baby girl is home. She's home."

Poll Finds Wariness About Cutting Entitlements

As President Obama and Congress brace to battle over how to reduce chronic annual budget deficits, Americans overwhelmingly say that in general they prefer cutting government spending to paying higher taxes, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Yet their preference for spending cuts, even in programs that benefit them, dissolves when they are presented with specific options related to Medicare and Social Security, the programs that directly touch the most people and also are the biggest drivers of the government’s projected long-term debt.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans choose higher payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security over reduced benefits in either program. And asked to choose among cuts to Medicare, Social Security or the nation’s third-largest spending program — the military — a majority by a large margin said cut the Pentagon.

While Americans are near-unanimous in calling deficits a problem — a “very serious” problem, say 7 out of 10 — a majority believes it should not be necessary for them to pay higher taxes to bridge the shortfall between what the government spends and what it takes in. But given a choice of often-discussed revenue options, they preferred a national sales tax or a limit in the deduction for mortgage interest to a higher gasoline tax or taxing employer-provided health benefits.

Americans’ sometimes contradictory impulses on spending and taxes suggest the political crosscurrents facing both parties as they gird for debate over how to address the fiscal woes of a nation with an aging population, a complex tax system and an accumulated debt that is starting to weigh on the economy.

On Thursday, a large group of House conservatives called for cutting $2.5 trillion in mostly unspecified spending over the next decade and House Republican leaders have vowed to make spending cuts a priority in coming months after winning a majority on that promise in November’s midterm elections. President Obama is expected to make fiscal responsibility a central theme of his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, and of the budget he will send Congress next month for the 2012 fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1.

The antitax sentiment reflected in the poll is in line with Republicans’ mantra that spending, not taxes, is the problem for the federal budget. Yet that assessment contradicts the conclusions of several bipartisan and academic panels that proposed debt-reduction plans over the past year.

Those groups — including, in November, a bipartisan majority of Mr. Obama’s fiscal commission — each concluded that the growth in the nation’s debt could not be reined in with spending cuts alone. They said the required reductions, including for Medicare and Social Security, would be deeper than anything the public would accept.

The poll of 1,036 adults nationwide, which has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points, was conducted Jan. 15 through 19 — in the days after Mr. Obama gave a widely praised address at a Tucson memorial service for those killed in the shooting rampage that wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona. Nearly two-thirds of Americans approve of his response to the shooting, the poll showed; 11 percent disapprove.

National tragedies or crises often have a rallying-around effect that buoys a president’s public image. The poll, like others recently, shows Mr. Obama with a slightly improved approval rating. Nearly half of Americans, 49 percent, approve of his job performance, compared with 39 percent who do not.

The public also gives Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt as he and Republicans adjust to their new power-sharing relationship. After a productive lame-duck session of Congress late last year, in which Mr. Obama won a number of concessions from Republicans in return for extending the Bush-era tax cuts on high incomes, the poll showed that nearly eight out of 10 Americans believe Mr. Obama will try to work with Republicans to get things done — including 77 percent of independents and 57 percent of Republicans. Less than half of all respondents — 46 percent — said Republicans will try to work with Mr. Obama.

The president holds no advantage over Republicans, however, on addressing the deficit and job creation. Americans split on whom they trust more to make the right decisions on both issues. The poll holds other warning signs for the president. With the unemployment rate remaining above 9 percent, majorities disapprove of his handling of the economy (52 percent), job creation (54 percent) and the deficit (56 percent).

Fewer people than ever think Mr. Obama has the same priorities for the country as they do: 52 percent say he does not share their priorities, down from 65 percent who said he did when Mr. Obama first took office.

Representative John A. Boehner, a Republican of Ohio who is the new House speaker, is relatively unknown to the national public; the roughly one-quarter who have an opinion of him are split between those with negative and positive views.

A far-better-known Republican, Sarah Palin, also is far more disliked. She is viewed unfavorably by 57 percent of the public, including a majority of independents — her highest negative rating ever in Times/CBS polls.

In a week that saw House Republicans vote to repeal Mr. Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the law overhauling the health care system, nearly half of Americans said the law should stand. About four in 10 people support repeal, but many say they want to undo only parts of the law.

Asked what Congress should focus on, 43 percent of Americans say job creation; health care is a distant second, cited by 18 percent, followed by deficit reduction, war and illegal immigration.

If Medicare benefits have to be reduced, the most popular option is raising premiums on affluent beneficiaries. Similarly, if Social Security benefits must be changed to make the program more financially sound, a broad majority prefers the burden fall on the wealthy. Even most wealthy Americans agree.

As budget woes force a national debate over the country’s domestic priorities, preserving money for education ranks at the top for most Americans.

The poll showed that the Arizona shootings had not changed Americans’ general opposition to banning handguns. However, more than six in 10 favor a nationwide ban on assault weapons and on the kind of high-capacity magazine used in Tucson.

JACKIE CALMES and DALIA SUSSMAN
NYTimes