A DUer posted this link a couple of weeks ago...
Most Americans can't name one Supreme Court justice
As Congress gears up to do battle over Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, Americans are struggling to identify the names of her would-be colleagues, according to a new survey released by the legal information website Findlaw.com. Two-thirds of the 1,000 American adults polled couldn't name a single current justice, and just 1 percent were able to name all nine sitting justices. Many respondents believed that retired justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter continue to sit on the court.
The largest proportion of respondents were able to name Clarence Thomas, at 19 percent; Chief Justice John Roberts was next with 16 percent. Bringing up the rear were Anthony Kennedy — the pivotal swing vote in many high court decisions — with 6 percent, and Stephen Breyer, who rang a bell with just 3 percent of respondents, despite sitting on the court for 16 years now.Check out the other questions Americans either couldn't or had a hard time answering...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100602/ts_ynews/ynews_ts2356Some more examples...
• More than a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place, and half of respondents believed that either the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation or the War of 1812 occurred before the American Revolution.
• With a political movement now claiming the mantle of the Revolutionary-era Tea Party, more than half of respondents misidentified the outcome of the 18th-century agitation as a repeal of taxes, rather than as a key mobilization of popular resistance to British colonial rule.
• A third mistakenly believed that the Bill of Rights does not guarantee a right to a trial by jury, while 40 percent mistakenly thought that it did secure the right to vote.
...I knew it was bad, but didn't think it was this bad!