Extemporaneous Discourse

Polling summary 1/25/12

Rasmussen sees a different world

Fading Republican base

Bachmann collapses both nationally and at home

Play It Again, Sam

What's the deal with retired people?

Medical marijuana moves through committee in MN

The idiocy of tax cuts

Lies, condemnations, and shame

Looking back, looking forward

Republican post-mortem

Nine days out

Bachmann's "politics of the false dichotomy"

Bachmann bites

McCain's Convention Bounce?

The Palin Pick

More electoral analysis

Back again

Numbers 7/26

McCain casts about regarding the surge

Republicans are merely talking to themselves in GE

Military abandoning support for the GOP

Qualifications?

Republicans still short on cash

McCain "town hall" is a staged sham

BBC: $23 BILLION disappeared in Iraq funding

Where's all that cheap gas from Iraq?

GOP leader willing to settle for losing 8 Senate seats

Republicans unfazed by "Phase Two" report

You'll show us all!

Not like World War Two, Mr. Decider

No Soup For You

McCain: "We've already won in Iraq"

Of imaginary worlds with imaginary Eel Pouts

GOP staggers into oblivion

The end of the ride

The Decider is decidely unpopular

The Sunday Eel Pout

Stunning "progress" in Iraq

Drink up, lads! The GOP is coming to town!

disaster

Down but not out

downtime

Violence up in Iraq

Coleman continues to slide in polls

Iraqi "breakthroughs" now broken right through

Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq is overblown

Democrat ranks swell, Republican ranks dip

The Sunday Eel Pout

India waves the white flag on Chinese incursions

Bush hits new low in national polling

Third District offers GOP ventriloquist dummy

More border troubles in Bhutan

British Foreign Office avoids angering Israel over nukes

2012-01-25T13:12:00.000-06:00

This is a summary of some interesting recent polls. I may reference these in separate posts in the future.

National presidential polling:

CBS/NYT 1/12-17/12; 1,154 adults, 3% margin of error 1,021 registered voters, 3% margin of error

50% Obama (D), 39% Gingrich (R)
45% Obama (D), 45% Romney (R)
46% Obama (D), 42% Paul (R)
49% Obama (D), 38% Santorum (R)

Rasmussen 1/15-16/12; 1,000 likely voters, 3% margin of error

47% Obama (D), 38% Gingrich (R)

PPP 1/13-16/12; 700 registered voters, 3.7% margin of error

49% Obama (D), 42% Gingrich (R)
47% Obama (D), 42% Paul (R)
51% Obama (D), 40% Perry (R)
49% Obama (D), 44% Romney (R)
50% Obama (D), 42% Santorum (R)

Rasmussen 1/11-12/12; 1,000 likely voters, 3% margin of error

43% Obama (D), 37% Paul (R)

Other polling:

PPP (1/19) 1000 Registered Voters, MoE 3.1%, January 19, 2012 - January 22, 2012.

Republicans approve of Congressional Republicans 49/38.
Democrats approve of Congressional Democrats 62/25.
White voters favour the Republicans 37/50 on the Generic Congressional Ballot (GCB).
65+ aged voters break 45/45 on the GCB.
61% of registered voters say that "Mitt Romney will say anything he has to to get elected".
44% of Republicans agree, as do 57% of Independents.
81% of registered voters think that "Making $370,000 in a year is a lot of money".
85% of white voters agree, as do 77% of Republicans and Independents.

PPP Republican caucus: 303 likely Republican voters, MoE 5.6%, 1/21-22

Gingrich    36%
Romney    18%
Santorum 17%
Paul          13%

Tea Party caucus voters have an unfavourable opinion of Paul: 35/48
Gingrich is the Tea Party favourite at 44% support.
43% of the Republican likely caucus voters consider themselves to be "very conservative".
32% of the Republican likely caucus voters consider themselves to be Tea Party members.
Paul is favourable in the broad category of age 18-45, breaking 44/33.
64% of the likely caucus voters are over 45

2012-01-14T11:19:00.003-06:00

First, the composite Party ID of all pollsters:

Independent: 41.5%
Republicans: 25.8%
Democrat: 30.3%

Next, the view from Rasmussen:

Independent: 30.4%
Republicans: 35.5%
Democrat: 34.2%

Now, all pollsters except Rasmussen:

Independent: 41.4%
Republicans: 25.9%
Democrat: 30.2%

So we notice that Rasmussen sees a much more Republican country out there than other pollsters. And Rasmussen can't claim that his mysterious "likely voter" screen is making the difference, since Rasmussen's party ID figures are raw (all adults) figures. All of the figures shown for other pollsters are also an "all adult" sample.

Rasmussen is surveying a country with nearly 10% more Republicans, 10% fewer Independents, and only 4% more Democrats than other pollsters.

PPP surveys registered voters. Let's look at what their figures indicate:

Independent: 25.8%
Republicans: 35.7%
Democrat: 38.2%

All pollsters, excluding PPP, shows this:

Independent: 29.6%
Republicans: 31.2%
Democrat: 37%

This is much closer to the composite than Rasmussen was with all adults. About 4% fewer Independents for PPP, and about 4% more Republicans than the others are finding. The numbers for Democrats is about the same. So, in spite of being labeled as a "Democratic" pollster, PPP is looking at more Republicans than their peers polling registered voters.

The most current poll from GWU shows "likely" voters to break down this way:

Independent: 27%
Republicans: 34%
Democrat: 37%

In my opinion, it's still too early for any "likely voter" (LV) screen to be worthwhile. But Rasmussen's claim that his LV screen is the reason for his outlier status is not borne out by looking at another pollster that is also using an LV screen. Apparently Rasmussen just happens to consistently hit on a gold mine of unhappy Democrats in their sampling, judging by their results.

Since Rasmussen is working from a much more Republican-based sample to begin with, it's hardly surprising that they are skewed toward "unhappy Democrats" in their LV sample. We don't really know what Rasmussen means by a "nationwide" sample. My guess is that Rasmussen's "nationwide" sample includes a lot more rural areas and lot more "red" states than other pollsters.

Rasmussen's 2011 Christmas polling (12/27-12/28) showed Romney with an outlier 6 point lead for Romney over Obama (45/39). Nobody else is seeing that.

As we've seen multiple Republican candidates "flare up" with popularity, Rasmussen has always mysteriously found a 2-point edge over Obama for each person at their peak. Rasmussen said Bachmann, Cain, Perry, etc. would all beat Obama in a match-up by 2 points. Later, the numbers change as the candidate slumps. 2% is such a weasel figure: within the margin of error, and not so large that it could seem suspicious if it switched to an Obama lead.

We're at a point in the cycle where Rasmussen can publish outrageous results, and then later say that "things changed". This is what usually happens with Rasmussen polling, whether it's a national race or a Senate contest. The Republican always shows a good lead at this point, and that lead always seems to diminish or flip as we approach the actual election. Rasmussen failed to do this "reversion to the mean" in 2010, and got stuck with an 8-point Republican bias in polls close to the election. With that, pollsters are much less intimidated to publish figures contradicting Rasmussen than they used to be.

It should also be pointed out that PPP publishes the raw figures (including area codes) for all of its polling. PPP also asks each person surveyed to place themselves in one of four regions: South, Midwest, East, or West. They publish the breakdowns of the sample in every poll, so you can see if they are oversampling one region. By examining the area codes, you can see if PPP is oversampling rural areas or red districts. Both PPP and Rasmussen use automated polling and call landlines. Yet, Rasmussen sees a very conservative America where even Democrats agree that Obama is the source of all our troubles. Oddly, Rasmussen is anything but transparent about his figures.

PPP has done an immense amount of polling for free. They have established a huge amount of base-line data that will be extremely valuable going into the 2012 election. No one paid for these polls; PPP volunteered. Anyone discounting these polls due to PPP being a "Democratic" polling firm is denying themselves the facts. There is also a lot of other polling that PPP has done where it's been paid for by DailyKos/SEIU. Critics love to mix these two groups of polls together to claim a bias and taint the free polling's validity. Don't let them confuse you. Aside from that, Rasmussen makes his money from subscribers that are overwhelmingly right-wing. He also does speaking gigs where he pushes right-wing narratives, so he has a strong incentive to produce dramatically pro-Republican numbers. I'm not saying Rasmussen is dishonest. I'm saying that if you dismiss PPP based on financial bias, you would have to dismiss Rasmussen as well.

By the way, let's look at Gallup's party identification numbers.

Independent: 40%
Republicans: 27%
Democrat: 31%

These figures are an "all adults" sample, like Rasmussen. Gallup also calls cell phones in their sample and uses live interviewers (not automated polling).

There was a two-point increase in independent identification from 2010 (38%) to 2011 (40%). The increase in independent identification came at the expense of Republican identification, which dropped from 29% to 27%, while Democratic identification held steady at 31%.

Gallup also says that, if you include "leaners", that the country splits 45/45 on D/R. That leaves only 10% real "Independents" to determine the election. The scary part is that this is pretty much how things broke down in 2010. The difference is in registered voters, of course. It's ironic that the Republicans screamed about Obama "not listening" to the majority, when things were actually evenly divided among "The People".

2011-12-31T14:10:00.005-06:00

This article in the Washington Post about the Republicans and the Hispanic vote hit a chord with me. Most particularly, this quote:

The percentage of whites in the electorate dropped from 89 percent in 1972 to 74 percent in 2008

According to exit polls from the 2008 election, McCain won 55% of the white vote. That was not enough, of course. Bush won 58% in 2004, but he also did significantly better with Hispanics and Asians. There were also more white voters in 2004 than in 2008, and it's steadily dropping. The Republican Party is 90% white, and much has been made about Obama's decline among white voters. The non-white share of the electorate was 26% in 2008.

54% of the white vote 74% is about 41% of the entire electorate. You can't win with 41%. You have to get a lot of minorities, or you have to get a much bigger share of the white vote. If Republicans can get 68% of the white vote, they win 50% of the electorate.

Whites are already voting disproportionate to their share of the population. This study (figure 5) shows that white voters were 74% of the eligible voters in 2008, yet they made up 78% of those casting ballots. This is only possible because minorities turn out in much smaller numbers relative to their share of the population. Hispanics, for example, are 9% of the eligible voters, but only 6% of the actual voters.

The latest PPP survey (12/15) has a match-up between Obama and a generic Republican candidate. White voters break 54/39 for the generic candidate. So that's about what McCain got, and people don't vote for a generic candidate; they vote for an actual person. 53% of whites think that Obama is "too liberal". Okay, that's right where the match-up breaks down.

Yet only 35% of white voters express approval of the Republican Party, compared to 52% who disapprove. And, in PPP's surveys since 1/11, white voters have a median approval of Congressional Republicans of 37%. It's currently sliding into the high 20's. Currently, 56% of white voters have an unfavorable opinion of John Boehner. Although the Democratic Party is rated unfavorably by whites 35/56, the Republican Party only breaks 35/52 in the same demographic.

So, if the Party and it's elected officials are not any more popular with white voters, why do they break Republican? It seems like coin flip from an objective perspective, but instead 20% of whites side with a Party they dislike. Normally, we would expect a depressed turnout from a demographic like that. But 2010 was a high turnout for white voters, and the narrative from the Right has always been that white voters sat out 2008 because McCain wasn't conservative enough. Remember, Romney was more conservative than McCain in the 2008 primaries; yet he's not conservative enough four years later.

On that 12/15 PPP survey, 48% of registered white voters consider themselves to be "very excited" about voting in the 2012 elections. Another 29% say they are "somewhat excited", and 23% are "not at all excited". This is the indicator of potential turnout that I am going to use. So, if you combine the "very" and "somewhat", you get a total of 77% excited, 23 not.

Compare that to 79% (55%"very") of the 18-29 age demographic. Or the 74% (48% "very") of the 65+ group. Hispanics break down at 75% (49% "very"). Independents are at 69% (41% "very") In short, it looks as if white voters are as excited (or more) about the election as anyone else is at this early date. White voters should turn out.

However, with a slowly diminishing number of voters, you need a larger percentage of them to vote each election just to tread water. 23% likely to sit out the election is maybe more than the Republicans can afford. And about the same percentage of those white voters are expected to vote Republican as they did when the Republicans lost. The more incisive issue may not be Obama's declining share of the white vote, but rather the issue that the Republicans are not seeing much benefit from it on a generic match-up. It's that 20% of white voters that vote Republican while not liking the Party nor it's elected members. They were promised big things in the 2010 election, and they aren't seeing big things. They were asked to give the Republicans a chance to fix things, and they didn't fix things.

Another usually reliable Republican demographic is the elderly. Aged 60+ voters went for McCain by 51% in 2008. Not enough, and McCain was certainly their age. On the generic Presidential ballot question, voters over the age of 65 break 44.5% for Obama (median over all 2011 polling). Currently, 48% choose the generic Republican - about as strong as the percentage when the Republicans lost. Maybe it's the unfavorable (30/55) opinion of the Republican Party keeping those numbers down. Only 49% of the age group consider Obama to be "too liberal". Certainly, that more than the 39% who consider him "about right", but this is a core demographic for the Republicans.

There just isn't a lot of room for improvement in the numbers for white voters and elderly voters. Pretty much all of the whites that think Obama is too liberal are already voting Republican (generically). It's the same with elderly voters. Sure, the number who consider Obama to be "too liberal" could rise, but they've shown remarkable stability for the 65+ age group throughout 2011. People know Obama, at least as far as forming an opinion on his degree of "liberalness".

Meanwhile, the Republicans are left with 31% of Hispanic voters in a generic match-up (12/15), which is exactly what McCain got - when he lost. Generally speaking, Independent voters are split, with only a few points (<5%) for a plurality at best.

So, what do Republicans expect will be the big "game-changer"? A bad economy? We've got that right now and the game isn't changing. Harsh criticism of Obama? Already got that. The Tea Party? They are slowly declining in numbers, enthusiasm, and purity. And the TP adherents most likely voted in 2008 anyway, so that's not a new advantage. If people were going to turn against Obama on those things, they would have already done so. We could very well be looking at the ceiling for the Republicans.

It's looking like the battle lines for 2008 in a lot of ways. The Republican field is largely already known, at least for the viable candidates. Sure, Romney isn't completely familiar to some low-information voters, but he's had substantial media exposure in the primaries. It's, for all practical purposes, daily coverage. And it's going to increase. Romney may have some room to go up, but he also has problems with the base. Consider also that, the longer the primary campaign goes on, the more negative material those low-information voters will be exposed to. His image could actually get worse instead of improving. Gingrich? He's getting pretty well-known, but the general electorate isn't liking what they see. His campaign is not in good shape right now, too. Paul is a coin flip. A lot of people don't know him, but it's hard to say how much exposure would improve things for him.

There are significant chances of internal Republican dissent, conflict, and controversy in this primary season. Usually, the Party is pretty much locked down, people speak the Party line, and it's a binary mindset of us versus them. However, in order to create the Tea Party from whole cloth, the Republicans had to not only gin up large numbers of their own to near apoplexy, but also let them speak freely. The genie can't be put back in the bottle. The Tea Party made these bozos appear important and someone who should be listened to. Now these same bozos are going to be set loose on their own Party. So far, the Party has been keeping them tame, but the cost of that could be to demoralize the bozos.

In 2008, the Party machinery effectively froze out Ron Paul from the process through a huge array of devious and mostly obvious parliamentary tricks. If they do the same thing this time, there could be bitter divisions created that would be unlikely to hurt the Obama campaign. With candidates being locked out the process in VA and TN already, it would seem that the Party organization is going to flex its muscles this time around and tell the Tea Party to play ball with them or go home. Of course, if the Tea Party knuckles under to this pressure, they will lose all of their credibility as anything other than the reliable Republican base. In that eventuality, the Tea Partyers will look back on 2010 as their Summer of Love (so to speak) and become just another group that demands lip service now and then.

The stakes are high for the Republicans. That white vote is just going to keep decreasing, that elderly vote is going to keep sliding away from people that even remember the Fifties, and that Hispanic vote is going to keep growing. By 2016, the current Republican politics won't be viable on a national level, no matter who the Party runs. They've spent four years ginning up their base that Obama is Satan Himself, and the economy is probably only to improve by 2016. If they can't win now, then this whole conservative nightmare goes down in flames. Sure, there would be States that could keep the whole "conservative Agenda" going, but it would be over nationally.

The Republicans not only have to increase the number of whites casting ballots, but also make sure that those white voters are casting ballots for them. It will do them no good to increase white turnout of Democrats, of course. Generally this is done during voter registration drives conducted in the primaries. But this is not really being done, or only sporadically. The Republicans seem to be abandoning the idea of bringing in new voters, and are instead concentrating on 100% turnout of the ones that they already have. The "low-hanging fruit" for the Republicans is long gone. To get higher turnout, the hyperbole, fear, and outrage must be kept constantly maintained, and an entire generation of Republican candidates is going on record with crazy and extreme positions and statements. And Republican voters are becoming more alienated from the general populace by constantly spewing out toxic vitriol and irrational views. Everyone outside of the Republican base has learned to quietly nod at the wingnuts they come into contact with, lest the wingnut unleash spittle-flecked fury upon them. The wingnuts mistake this as agreement, rather than recognition that no discourse is possible with them.

2011-12-30T14:57:00.002-06:00

After reading this story on HuffPo about Bachmann's collapsing campaign, I started to wonder where she would go after it all fell apart.

It's possible that she could make it to NH, but very unlikely. She's not attracting the SuperPACs, and her small-donor base must be getting tapped out. The Tea Party has been waffling about their support for her, and evangelicals seem to be looking "someone else". That's pretty weak, when she is the head of the House Tea Party Caucus and has always been the one willing to say exactly what the most irrational Tea Party adherents want to hear. And her image has always been about as evangelical as anyone can get. I mean, Jesus told her to run for office, after all. Of course, she is also (ostensibly) "from" Iowa, and it's not as if there in no "cross-pollination" in politics between Iowa and Minnesota.

The thing is, Bachmann isn't very popular in Minnesota, either.
Here are three polls from Public Policy Polling on Minnesota voters:

These polls cover far more than the shorthand titles I have given them indicate.
On the first link, Q12 is a match-up between Obama and Bachmann for President.

Q12 If the candidates for President next year were
Democrat Barack Obama and Republican
Michele Bachmann, who would you vote for?
Barack Obama................................................ 56%
Michele Bachmann ......................................... 35%
Undecided....................................................... 9%

Okay, she'd lose by twenty points in her home state. But Minnesotans still like her, right?

Q5 Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion
of Michele Bachmann?
Favorable .............. 33%
Unfavorable........... 59%
Not sure ................ 8%

I guess they don't like her.
Note that the percentage that would vote for her is almost the exactly the percentage who consider her favorably. In this case, people would be voting for her, rather than against Obama. If she is the "anti-Obama" then why does she not draw a huge number of voters who may be willing to overlook their opinion of her to defeat the "reviled" Obama?

Of course, he may not be:

Q1 Do you approve or disapprove of Barack
Obama’s job performance?
Approve .......................................................... 51%
Disapprove...................................................... 44%
Not sure .......................................................... 5%

If Bachmann gets 35% of the vote, but 44% disapprove of Obama.... Then there's 9% of Minnesotans that dislike Obama, but who would still prefer him to Bachmann. Even winning them over wouldn't keep her from losing.

Let's look at the second link, where we see a match-up with the incumbent Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar and Michele Bachmann:

Q7 If the candidates for US Senate next year were
Democrat Amy Klobuchar and Republican
Michele Bachmann, who would you vote for?
Amy Klobuchar ............................................... 57%
Michele Bachmann ......................................... 37%
Undecided....................................................... 5%

Okay, so Bachmann would lose by 20 points in statewide office. So it's not just that Minnesotans don't consider her "Presidential material", it's also that they don't want her representing the State at all. As a Representative, Bachmann doesn't represent the entire State; only her district.

And that district is a gerrymandered R+7 . That Cook PVI rating of R+7, means that the district tends to vote 7 points more Republican than they do Democratic. Yet it took Bachmann three tries to get a majority (rather than a plurality), and even then did not hit the expected 57%. That is not a strong showing.

But that's not all. The crosstabs are revealing. Bachmann only wins 77% of those that voted for McCain in 2008. And only 66% of those Minnesota McCain voters have a favorable opinion of Bachmann.
That's the base of the Republican Party, and Bachmann isn't scoring that big with them in her home State.

On top of that, the gender gap is appalling in her "favorables". 62% of women have an unfavorable opinion her, compared to 28% favorable. Well over two-to-one. Only 32% of women would vote for Bachmann over Klobuchar, down around her base support of 37%.

The third poll shows that Minnesota is 31% Republican, and "very conservative" voters are only 15% of the registered voters. That's a small base of "very conservative" potential votes, and only half of her own Party. She wins election because these "very conservative" voters are concentrated, not because she has statewide support.

We don't know yet how the redistricting will go in Minnesota. Some say she could lose her district. Others see her as merely weakened. Remember, she only got 46.41% against Tinklenberg. 52.5% against Clark doesn't leave a lot of breathing room. Aside from that, if her campaign collapses, There can be no more pretense that she is wildly popular for "speaking the truth", nor of any hidden Tea Party cavalry that will sweep in and win the day, nor any vast evangelical army that will hold out for the purest candidate and support her to the bitter end.

Basically, the rest of the Republicans in the country don't particularly care for her, and her hard-core supporters seem willing to "settle" rather than go down with her. She's seen as a joke, within her own Party, not just in "elite media circles" and decadent urban liberals as she would like everyone to think. Although it would be nice to see her lose in NH and SC, just so her supporters can't try to resurrect a myth of her hidden staunch support in other areas of the country.

Even if by some political miracle she stayed in past Super Tuesday, that would be ultimately worse. She would have lost then. Losing is the ultimate sin for Republicans, but more so for Minnesota Republicans. The last time the MNGOP gave a loser a second chance was Boschwitz against Wellstone part II. They won't make that mistake again.

The basis of Bachmann's "popularity" in her district, in cultural terms, is like a thumb in the eye to the metro area. Bachmann was supposed to "blow the minds" of all the urban liberals with "the truth", and leave the Twin Cities sheepishly admitting that they had been wrong all along by voting Democratic - even worse, for a Muslim. A lot Bachmann's support comes from "white flight" urban refugees, and anyone who dumps all over the "urban hellhole" they fled from and the mindset that maintains it, is all right in their book.

The collapse of Bachmann's campaign creates doubt in the minds of her district supporters, who are far more accustomed to certainty in thought. She's suddenly not the gorgeous girl that everyone wants to dance with. Instead, she's ended up serving punch and watching the coats. Could it be that those decadent urban libs are laughing at us, instead of being terrified by our awesome heroine Michele? Did we really vote for, and donate so much of our money to, a punchline? Uh-oh.

So what is her other option? To drop out and endorse someone else, throwing her fickle evangelical "supporters" and hesitant Tea Party "masses" over to a winner.

The question, then, is where does she throw that (largely insubstantial and possibly fictional) support? Romney's probably out of the question, but it could help to prop up his "evangelical cred" to have Bachmann's endorsement. It would symbolically sever her from the Tea Party, however. If it didn't, it would de-fang the Tea Party by showing them to be just another Republican constituency that "goes along to get along" and falls in line on command from the "Party elite".

If not Romney, how about Perry? The two constituencies overlap somewhat, but Perry isn't doing considerably better than Bachmann on the national scale. She might be a useful tool for the Perry campaign in the early States, but not so much in the Super Tuesday sweep. And Bachmann's proclivity for saying "interesting" things wouldn't lend gravitas to a candidate that already looks like a lightweight.

Santorum is sinking as badly as Bachmann, and Gingrich doesn't seem like Bachmann's cup of tea. So maybe Ron Paul. She could bolster Paul's evangelical cred and push that Tea Party line forward. On a symbolic level, it could counter the co-option of the Tea Party narrative.

Nationally, Bachmann is doing only marginally better than Paul in the latest polling.
Paul loses 46/41 with 13 undecided when matched up with Obama. Bachmann loses 50/41 with 10 undecided. It's not just about Iowa, after all. Perry also breaks 50/40 with 10 undecided. Seeing a pattern there?

However:

Q11 If the candidates for President next year were
Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt
Romney, who would you vote for?
Barack Obama................................................ 45%
Mitt Romney.................................................... 47%
Undecided....................................................... 8%

So Romney can peel off an extra 6 or 7% that the other candidates can't. And that margin of victory is within the margin of error (3.7%) for the poll. That's not a compelling case for "electability" over Bachmann, Paul, or Perry but it's better than nothing.

What those match-ups show is that Bachmann, Paul, and Perry all are drawing from pretty much the same well as far as the general Electorate goes. Among strictly Republican primary voters, Bachmann draws 39% of Perry supporters as a second choice, and only 12% of Paul supporters. Among those that self-identify as Tea Party supporters, Bachmann has 58% favorables, compared to only 29% for Paul and 53% for Perry. And 59% of those Tea Party supporters say they "might end up supporting someone else".

While nationally (primary voters only), Bachmann gets 53% "favorable" from the "very conservative" bloc, Paul only gets only 27%. Both are about evenly matched for the "somewhat conservative" bloc. So it looks as if Bachmann might give Paul a boost from the most conservative segment of the Party, as well as the Tea Party, with minimal redundant support. PPP doesn't break down the evangelical vote in these polls, unfortunately. Bachmann also has a comparably attractive 42/36 favorable breakdown among female primary voters, when looking at Paul's dismal 28/53 numbers. So Paul could maybe get some more female supporters if Bachmann latched on to his campaign.

Unfortunately, Bachmann is the "kiss of death" to Paul's much touted "youth vote" in the primaries. Bachmann is despised, 24/57 unfavorable in the 18-29 age group. Paul pretty much breaks even at 43/38 with that age group on his own. With seniors, it's almost the reverse.
Senior primary voters (65+) hate Paul (25/58), while Bachmann breaks even (41/41). Senior primary voters essentially split between Gingrich and Romney, so Bachmann would be a solid contribution there with her 5%. Bachmann's weak 10% support with the youth vote is not much of a prize for any campaign.

Still, Paul's support is cult-like in its devotion to him. A Bachmann endorsement would hardly scare off support, and would probably bring in Tea Party and "very conservative" voters. Both of these demographics are relatively immune to fallout from Bachmann's "interesting" remarks.

Dare we even dream that Paul goes with Bachmann as his running mate? Paul's campaign has a strong chance of "going the distance", while not necessarily winning the nomination. The same Party apparatus that froze him out of the process in 2008 is still in power, but he has the bare minimum of money and support to make it to Convention....though he will die there.

This would raise the stakes considerably for Bachmann. If she becomes the next Palin and goes down to rejection by her Party, that's a lot worse than dropping out early and being credited with a pat on the head for being a "team player".

She certainly couldn't bring much support in Minnesota in terms of crossover votes in the primary, and her shine with Minnesota Republicans is faded. Only 26% of MN Republicans think she should run for President in the first place, and a relatively few (43%, considering it's her own Party) think she should run for the Senate. Even worse, only 10% of her home State's Republicans think she should run for the House. And 46% of the State's Independent voters think she should run for no office at all. Likewise, 48% of the white Minnesota voters say she should not run for any office. Among all age groups, she ranges from 44-49% saying the same thing.

51% of Minnesota women voters say Michele should not seek any office (including her House seat). Only 10% of the State's "very conservative" voters think she should run for the House. Instead, 44% of the "very conservative" bloc think she should run for the Senate - though she'd lose to Klobuchar by twenty points, as indicated earlier. Delusional? You bet.

2012 could spell the end of Bachmann as an elected official.

2010-12-23T16:19:00.002-06:00

You may or not know this, but I play bass in a band. It's fun, but it's not fun talking to people about it. The first question always is, "What kind of music do you play?". People ask this as if it were relevant or simple. I answer with one word: "Rock". It explains nothing and satisfies no one. If I say, "original free improvisational rock with a four-piece combo", of course, I get a blank look.

There are only two reasons that 90% of people ask the question.
First, it is simply to be polite and feign an interest. The second is that they want some kind of pigeon-hole to put your art into so that they can make invalid comparisons or less-than-astute assessments of commercial success.

Basically, what we do is make up songs on the spot. It's pretty hard to make it work, and even harder to sound "polished". You don't get "points" for being creative - only for being easily relatable to another established group. If you say, "We play Aerosmith covers", then the person knows exactly what you are talking about and they now have something convenient with which to compare your music against.

Playing covers is, however, mostly a dead-end for any band. Sure, you can get gigs in crappy bars for $100-200 a night (which you then divide between four people), and you can do that for a decade or so until you work your way up to $500-600 a night gigs. You probably will get caught not paying royalties to the original artist long before that, however. The other reason it is a dead-end is because it's artistically empty: you are judged by how much you sound exactly like the original artist, not by how well you do interpreting the original song or how well your ability stacks up against the original group.

People like covers not because they are really, really great songs, but because they are familiar. They remind them of some other time, or other experiences, hopefully pleasant. They also give the listener some frame of reference to compare against, so that they can tell if the band is "good" or "bad".

It's also a losing game because the original song is recorded in a studio with multiple "takes" and multiple tracks. "Multiple tracks", for those who don't know, means that you record your guitar or whatever, and then you go back and play more on top of that. So, unless you happen to have an extra musician for every track on hand, you will never sound exactly like the original song - which means you are "bad".

It's a situation in which you can never win. You can never be "better" than the original song; you can only make a Xerox copy of it - at best - and come out equal.

Your original song will never remind anyone of other times or other experiences, because it is new. No one will be able to compare your original song with another version, because it is new. The best you can hope for is that the brainless consumer can link that song in their minds to a song that they already know - e.g. "It sounds kinda like that Bon Jovi song".

What brings this up is that we had a guest at the jam last night. After listening to three or four songs, this guy had an incredible insight: why not play songs that he has heard before?

Yeah, we never thought of that. Wow.

So we picked a song and ran through the chords in about thirty seconds. We then played it, and it sounded rough and raw - probably how the original band sounded the first time that they played it. Yet, to our guest moron, somehow it was supposed to sound exactly, note-for-note, identical to the original artist. He even mentioned that the guitarist didn't sound 'right', because the original guitarist used an effect pedal that we didn't have. So now we are supposed to not only duplicate the original artist note-for-note, but duplicate all of their equipment, too. That's how you would know that we are "good", after all.

I've dealt with this idiotic attitude all of my life as a musician. You can play a fantastic pattern at blinding speed and with impeccable precision, but the average moron will just shrug at that and "helpfully" suggest, "Play that song by Bryan Adams!". Yeah. I'll play that song on the bass. Sure. I'll make it sound exactly like a guitar, a keyboard, and a second guitar all in one. I spend my days memorising every note of every hit song in case somebody asks me to play it, too. Why would I write my own music when there are so many popular songs out there that I can copy? No matter what I play or how well I play it, I will never be "good" unless I can play that one song ...and the next one after that, too.

Painters figured this all out over a century ago. As a a painter, you are "good" if you produce something that is exactly like a photograph. Okay, so you spend two weeks and a hundred hours working on a painting that looks exactly like a photograph. You ask $500 for the painting ($5 an hour!), and the "customer" just laughs because they can get the photograph itself for free.
But they will say that you are "really good", though. Hooray!

For the musician, the proposition is even dumber. You memorise two dozen Aerosmith songs, you get to buy all of the equipment that Aerosmith has given to them as an endorsement, and you turn yourself into the equivalent of a player piano. Not good enough, because you don't look like Aerosmith. Your vocalist doesn't even sound exactly like Steve Tyler, much less be able to pass as his clone. You lose, loser! You impress no one! We yawn at you! We want Aerosmith, only with no cover charge if don't mind. Why would I pay a lot of money to hear an exact duplicate of Aerosmith when I have the CD at home, right?

Even more infuriating is this mindless belief that a song gets on the radio because it is really, really good - and that if your band can only play something really good, then you'll get on the radio, too! A song gets airplay because the music label pushes it and bribes the stations to play it, dumbass. It could be a recording of one guy vomiting while another plays a kazoo with his ass, and it would get on the air - if a record label put up the cash. And the average music consumer would love it, because they are supposed to. It's on the radio, isn't it?

What the run-of-the-mill "helpful" moron does not know is that you don't get to be a "successful" band (i.e. making a good living doing nothing but playing music) by going down the moron road. That path leads to the being a "tribute" band that gets a gig every four months in scattered states and in dingy clubs. And the "helpful" moron is unlikely to even show up to see you, because it's too far to drive, or the venue is dingy, or a TV show is on that night, or they don't want to actually pay money to see a band.

You get to be successful band by playing original music and developing a 'following' of people who appreciate what you do and actually show up for gigs when you get one. If your band can draw 30 paying customers to a bar, and if they actually spend money on food or drinks, then you just made the venue manager some money that they wouldn't have made without you there. You'll get called back. You'll get noticed by a booking agency, and you'll get steady gigs. You'll get good reviews and more people will check you out. Maybe you'll get an record deal with an independent label, which won't make you money but will allow you to get free studio time.

The question is, why does the average "helpful" moron have this standard when it comes to music that they don't apply anywhere else?

If a plumber shows up to un-clog your toilet, do you judge his ability based on how much his plumber's snake resembles one used by a "more-successful" plumber? When you take your car to a mechanic, do you judge their ability based on how much they resemble Mr. Goodwrench? Even more to the point, would you suggest to a mechanic that they try to more closely emulate Mr. Goodwrench's appearance in order to convince customers that they are a good mechanic? Would you propose that the mechanic replace your alternator for free so that you can decide if maybe they are "good enough" to change your oil? Would you be stupid enough to tell the mechanic that he should change his garage to look exactly like a Jiffy Lube so that people will know that he's "good"? Would you try to find out if the mechanic had ever fixed Bon Jovi's car? When they put the new alternator in, would you ask them to take it out and put it in again, just so you can find out if they do it exactly the same as the first time?

No. And the reason people apply this kind of warped reasoning to music is because they know nothing about it. They don't know if a musician is doing a good job or just faking it. They don't understand the structure of a song, or the principles of musical arrangement, or even what a chord is. They don't know what an overdub is, or compression. They don't understand why a live performance can't be the same as a studio recording. They don't even really care how much talent or skill you might have. If you can't exactly mimic a familiar-but-less-skilled musician, then you are worthless.

Last is the ridiculous standard of musical "success". How much money do you make watching TV? Well, you must not be doing it very well, then. How many people show up to watch you fish? Oh, so you're a lousy fisherman, I guess. Nobody pays you to jog? You must not be doing it right. Try jogging in the same outfit that some rich person wears, and then you'll automatically make as much money as they have.

Burger King makes way, way more money than a gourmet chef toiling away in a tiny restaurant. Does that mean that Burger King has the highest quality of food, or the most charming décor, or the finest service?

Take the average top-ten pop hit. It's got music played a sequencer (a computer programmed to play notes in a certain order to a certain rhythm), and a vocalist whose voice is corrected by Auto-Tune. They probably didn't even write the song themselves, but paid someone else for it. An engineer takes their work and hones it down into something highly-polished. None of it has anything to do with talent or musicianship. Yet, to the average "helpful" moron, this is the apex of musical skill and all that someone like me can do is try to copy it.

People play music, or make any kind of art, because they like it and because it does something for their soul. A very, very tiny percentage of those who engage in artistic endeavours make enough money to earn a decent living, and those people are more of a marketing success than any kind of stellar talent.

2010-07-20T20:18:00.004-05:00

Tonight I went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription while on my way someplace else. It should have been quick. It wasn't.

When I got near the counter, there were six people ahead of me. All were visibly annoyed. I saw why: an elderly man was taking a very long time.

The guy was mostly deaf, which meant that he was answering questions that no one had asked him, and he was answering them at length. They were also questions that no pharmacist would ever be asking a customer. The pharmacist was yelling, trying to be polite, while the retired guy just sat there grinning and babbling. His prescription was on the counter. We all were waiting for him to pay for it, a captive audience. He was told that he needed to pay $27.94, but he had other ideas and other unasked questions to answer.

So we all found out that his sister had been there earlier in the day, and had picked up three prescriptions. We also learned that she had been feeling poorly for about a week, maybe six days, but the guy couldn't be sure. And we stood there as this grinning fool tried to figure out exactly how many days his sister had been sick, by way of reciting virtually everything that had happened to him in the past six days.

"That'll be $27.94," the pharmacist once again stated, pointing at the figure on the receipt.
The idiot instead held forth on his theories of the cause of his sister's ailment.

None of this had any bearing on the elderly guy's prescription whatsoever. We were all waiting for this man to pay his $27.94 and let us conclude our 90-second transactions. Some scowled, some rolled their eyes, others audibly sighed.

"$27.94", the pharmacist said for the third time.

The grinning fool just blinked. "I've got Blue Cross", he said.
The pharmacist explained that there was a co-pay of $27.94 that was his responsibility.

The elderly man shook his head, turned to the rest of us, and announced apropos of nothing, "I worked at Wal-Mart for fifteen years".
Unsurprisingly, nobody was intrigued by this revelation.
In some mysterious way, elderly people perceive a lack of interest as an invitation for greater exposition. We all got to hear about every damn job this fool ever did at Wal-Mart, and the jobs he wasn't considered for. We were subjected to his story of how he got his nephew a job there - a good kid, in case anyone was wondering. Wasn't much good at cutting keys, though.

I'm not at all sure how someone gets the idea that a pharmacist needs to know your detailed employment history before you can pay for a prescription, much less how they imagine that people waiting in line would need to know these things. Or how your nephew stacked up against other employees.

"$27.94", the pharmacist said for a fourth time, waving his hand to distract the babbler's attention from the contents of a woman's cart, lest it become the next topic of his rambling and pointless speech.

"The doctor said this would fix me right up," he said, pointing to one of the bags of his yet-unpaid-for prescription.

"I'm sure it will", the pharmacist said.

"That's what he said!", as if someone was arguing with his statement. "Fix me right up!".
We then were privileged to hear his detailed description of his primary care physician, and his evaluation of the physician's skills. The babbling fool then announced that he had walked to the pharmacy, and he detailed his exercise regimen. And more babble about irrelevant stuff, including the condition of sidewalks.

Three minutes after this last grinning expose into details of his life that nobody cared about, he paid his $27.94 and shuffled away. He had wasted ten minutes of seven peoples' time with inane babble, and he behaved as if he was doing us all a great service.

I have a retired neighbour who buttonholes me as I'm leaving for work frequently. Even though I say that I'm ten minutes late for work, he'll just nod and launch into another tedious story of someone that I don't know and the minute trials and victories of their life. He's retired; time means nothing to him. Today, a friend of a friend of his bought a lawnmower. This is apparently supposed to be deeply important to me, though I don't have a lawn.

"Gotta go," I said, moving toward my car.
"Suuure. You should see this lawnmower!," he said, as if I had just asked for more details on the amazing lawnmower - which he then divulged at length.

Now, I am not some kind of anti-social jerk. If I have time, I'll willingly sit and pretend to be mesmerised by the mundane details of almost anyone's life. I'm an excellent listener.
But courtesy does not allow someone to demand your time whenever they please, and it kind of compels the person engaging you to at least make some kind of feeble pretence that the topic is in some way of interest to you.

I understand that a lot of retired people don't have anyone to talk to, and that is both sad and pathetic. Some will wring their hands and bemoan the loss of simpler times when people would sit around and babble about anything that crossed their mind. Maybe in those simpler times your boss didn't care if you were fifteen minutes late for work because you just had to sit and listen to someone tell you about an amazing lawnmower. I doubt it, though.

Where in the social contract does it say that someone can demand ten minutes from seven total strangers (eight, if you include the pharmacist) with absolutely no consideration of their schedules? Who are these people to decide that your time is less valuable, or that your lives will be enriched by hearing about their sister's illness, their work history, and their opinion of their physician? What mysterious clause in the social contract releases the babbler from any relevance or brevity in conversation?

Note to you retired people: You are not making the world a kinder, gentler place. You are selfishly imposing yourself on others. You are undermining the rules of conversation by completely ignoring the other person with inane babble that absolutely no one else could find interesting. You are making people less willing to talk to you, because you are inconsiderate.
Yeah, it sucks that you're lonely. It's sad that these tedious recitations of disconnected facts are what compose your life. I get it. But really, nobody cares about any of the inane blather you are "sharing". And you don't care that other people have places to go and things to do, either. So drop the pretence that you are upholding some kind of societal benefit or lost rules of etiquette.
I certainly didn't set aside an extra ten minutes to hear a stranger talk about his mundane life, and the people waiting for me didn't, either. How awful of us.

Also, here's a tip: get a goddamn hearing aid if you want to talk to people. The guy in the pharmacy had Blue Cross, as we all learned. He could get a hearing aid and have it paid for. Don't force people to yell. We don't find your hearing loss to be charming or endearing. If you aren't willing to listen to the people you are talking to, then you aren't meeting your obligation in a conversation. But you aren't really interested in a conversation anyway, are you? You just want an audience and some attention. In simpler times, people like you were called "boors".

2009-02-22T10:57:00.003-06:00

Medical marijuana bills are moving through the State House and Senate.
The usual stupidity is coming from the Right, of course. Tom Prichard, president of the Minnesota Family Council, had this illuminating remark:

“This bill would allow marijuana dispensaries to set up shop across the state, in homes and storefronts on main streets and neighborhoods and apartment buildings. Why? The only reason I can see is that it is to legitimize, frankly, the broader acceptance of marijuana in the community’s eyes.”

Why, Mr. Prichard? Why would anyone set up dispensaries for marijuana if the bill passed? Perhaps, and I'm just throwing this out there, so that people who have prescriptions for medical marijuana could get those prescriptions filled.

You see, Mr. Prichard, there are operations known as "pharmacies" that "set up shop across the state", even in "storefronts on main streets and neighborhoods", in order to allow people with prescriptions to obtain their authorised medication. Insidious, isn't it?

Yes, virtually every neighbourhood has these outrageous operations (known commonly as "pharmacies") that contain inventories of powerful stimulants, barbiturates, pain-killers, and other narcotics - and they brazenly sell these highly-addictive and readily-abused substances to anyone with the cash and a prescription.

The only reason, as surely a man of Prichard's keen insight can plainly see, for these "pharmacies" is to legitimise the broader acceptance of narcotics in the community's eyes.

The arguments by these loons like Prichard begin and end with "it's illegal".
Yes, and that's why the State is considering legislation to make it legal. Duh.
I guess it's only acceptable to try to legalise things that are already legal.

Let's be clear here. The proposed legislation is not a bill to legalise marijuana and make it available to everyone. It is a bill to allow those with a prescription to be able to fill it. It's no more insidious than allowing someone with a prescription for codeine to be able to fill it.

Does allowing someone to buy codeine with a prescription "legalise" codeine? No, it doesn't. Does it say to the community, "Hey, go ahead and abuse opiates all you want. No problems. No dangers. See, we even sell it out in the open, so it must be great stuff."?
Not really. No, it doesn't. It's illegal to buy, sell, or even possess codeine without a prescription. And there's that word again: prescription. The word that keeps vanishing in the Right's conversation of the issue.

So, yes, if medical marijuana does get approved, there will, in fact, be "dispensaries" to provide those with a prescription to purchase it. Perhaps these nefarious "dispensaries" will even be included in the so-called "pharmacies" that dispense Oxycontin legally. Shocking to consider, but true.

So the major reason for opposing doctors' issuance of medical marijuana prescriptions seems to be that someone could actually fill their prescription. Did anyone at the hearing laugh out loud at Mr. Prichard? If not, they should have.

But the crazy testimony doesn't end with Prichard:

James Stinziani, who said he was part of the “LaRouche operation,” said that the push for medical marijuana was simply a conspiracy drawn up by billionaire George Soros. “What is happening here — if anybody is familiar with George Soros — he is pretty much supporting and funding the major drug operations in the United States.” He accused medical marijuana supporters of being in league with Soros.

Yup. A doctor who may prescribe medical marijuana for their terminally-ill patient is really only trying to push Soros' murky agenda. It's so clear that I won't even attempt to deny it.

It's far better to have terminally-ill patients obtain their marijuana from black-market sources, where the quality is dubious and uncontrolled. At least then we have a shot at putting cancer patients in jail where they belong. And recreational users of marijuana will obviously stop buying it if terminally-ill people can't get a prescription for medical marijuana, because then they will just know that marijuana is Not A Good Thing. Prescriptions mean abuse, but not for narcotics. Marijuana is some kind of special case where prescription sales equate with non-prescription abuse, because we don't have a problem with people abusing prescription medications, right?

It's like saying the State shouldn't issue car titles because people steal cars, and it sends the message that car theft is somehow okay. All of those auto dealerships are pumping more cars out there on the streets every day, just inviting people to steal them. I'll wager George Soros is making millions in auto loans every year, besides. Let's tackle car theft at the source: the cars themselves and the people who profit from them.

2009-02-08T13:27:00.003-06:00

Having just done my taxes, I thought I would look at the "stimulus" effect of the proposed Republican tax cuts. It isn't much.

I paid $5840 in federal taxes for 2008. That's just with-holding, not including my refund.
So bear in mind that the "stimulus" I will calculate here will actually be less.
The with-holding works out to $112.30 per week. Let's say the Republicans won me a 10% cut, which is far more than they are proposing.

This would put a whopping $11 (and change) in my pocket each week. Wow. All of my problems are solved, right?

Of course, the real figure once my refund is included is $9.50 each week. Now consider that most of the Republican plans would afford me about a 5% cut in federal taxes, and we see that this wonderful conservative solution would pump the staggering sum of $4.75 into my pocket each week. That isn't even gas for my scooter or a six-pack of cheap beer where I live.

Republicans love to conflate all taxes into the discussion, but the federal government can only cut my federal taxes. They love to combine FICA, Medicare, state and local taxes, and property taxes when they talk about the huge windfall their tax cuts would mean to an ordinary person. The reality is, however, that federal tax cuts produce a "trickle-down" effect of increased taxes down the line. Less federal aid to states means higher state taxes or reduced aid to cities. In my state, with a loony Republican governor, it means the latter. This means cuts in aid to cities, which means my property taxes go up. There goes my $4.75 a week.

Of course, we have already had eight years of tax cuts, which has brought us to this glorious situation. The wealthy have flatly refused to hold up their end of the bargain. They don't invest in job creation; they off-shore jobs instead. They don't invest in small businesses; they buy them out to reduce competition and lay off the workers. They don't invest in capital improvements (updated equipment and machinery, expanded facilities) or worker training; they instead squeeze out a few more pennies from what they have already. They cut workforces, impose hiring freezes and pay cuts on staff, and increase the workloads of those already employed.

In short, it doesn't work.

The wealthy are essentially on strike for a better deal, and the entire economy is being held hostage. What they want is basically a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the wealthy.

2009-01-05T22:47:00.004-06:00

Today, Israel's invasion of Gaza was condemned by Qatar, Turkey, and Mauritania.
Qatar and Turkey host large American military bases, while Mauritania is one of very few Arab League nations that have chosen to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco are all under heavy domestic pressure to back away from Israel.

story from The Daily Star:

Erdogan blames Israel, Hamad charges 'war crime' and Mauritania pulls envoy
By Agence France Presse (AFP)
Compiled by Daily Star staff
Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Regional leaders have stepped up their criticism of Israel's blistering assault on the Gaza Strip, as Mauritania withdrew its ambassador to the Zionist state in protest and Turkey's premier accused Israel of provoking the outbreak of fighting. For its part, Qatar continued to push for an emergency Arab summit over the Gaza attacks, which the nation's emir described as a "war crime."
"The Israeli aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip is a war crime," Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani said late Sunday in a televised address. He also renewed an earlier call on fellow Arab leaders to hold an extraordinary summit in support of Gaza.
"The mobilization on the Arab street and several peace movements in the world have proven that this is the least the people expect from us. I believed and still do that we can do something," the emir said.
Sheikh Hamad said that "calls for a mutual cease-fire treat the culprit and the victim as equal and justify the aggression."
Mauritania, one of only three Arab League countries that has full diplomatic ties with Israel, has withdrawn its ambassador in protest over the Gaza offensive, a Foreign Ministry source said on Monday.
Since Israel's offensive in Gaza started 10 days ago, Mauritania has seen daily protests, mostly from students who demanded that Nouakchott break all ties with the country.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday blamed Israel for the ongoing conflict in the battered Gaza Strip, saying it "provoked" the Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the enclave.
The premier noted that Israel had continued a stifling blockade on Gaza despite pledging to lift it under the terms of an Egyptian-mediated truce, which Hamas had complied with by reining in fighters launching rockets into Israel.
Erdogan told Al-Jazeera: "A return to the situation before the truce happened because Israel continued the blockade, so I consider Israel the one which provoked and incited, not Hamas." - AFP, with The Daily Star

And for what? Apparently to remove Hamas from power. From The Guardian:

Livni's determination reflects a growing confidence in the upper echelons of the Israeli establishment that the assault will fatally damage the foundations of Hamas's control and, in time, drive it from power. Intelligence and military officials have told the cabinet that "not much" remains of the Hamas administration in Gaza and that its ability to take control again has been undermined by the destruction of a large part of the physical infrastructure of administration, including the parliament building and many government offices.

The intelligence services also told the cabinet that they believe the Israeli bombardment is turning Palestinian popular opinion against Hamas and that terms can be forced on the Islamist party that will further weaken its control.

Israeli officials have generally been reluctant to say that the attack on Gaza is intended to force Hamas from power out of concern that it would undermine the international support they have won by portraying the assault as a purely defensive measure to stop Hamas rockets.

So, much like the strategy the U.S.-sponsored "contras" employed in Nicaragua, the idea is to make life so abysmally miserable and the task governing so impossible that a "good" government takes over. We also see the Israeli government is employing sham justifications for public consumption, while promoting a hidden agenda that their allies would be ashamed to support.

2009-01-02T12:19:00.002-06:00

As I see it, this year the bottomless arrogance of the Republican Party was tested and came up wanting.

The Party selected McCain as a candidate in an attempt to win over the centre. Of all the possible nominees, McCain was the one who least represented Republican "core values" and had even made a nominal reputation opposing his own Party. It was a fairly smart move on the part of the Party to distance itself from Bush.

From there, it all went wrong.

The Party pushed McCain to the right, forced 'advisers' on him who were really little more than smear artists, and turned their man into the "anti-Obama" rather than a candidate with superior policies and qualifications. Resting on their laurels, they utterly failed to create state organising efforts or conduct voter registration drives in the period between McCain's nomination and Obama's nomination. Chronically behind in polling, the Party then selected Palin in a horribly misguided belief that women will vote for another woman regardless of their policy positions. And thus, any hope of winning over the centre was lost.

Beyond that, the Party arrogantly took for granted that any state that voted for Bush in 2004 would do so again. By "energising their base", the McCain campaign further repelled the centre. To seal their fate, they then pinned all their hopes on racism.

Now they are left with a Party firmly convinced that the new President is a Muslim radical with a secret agenda, bent on destroying America. Early indications seem to be that the Party intends to move further right, and deeper into the artificial reality created by their media voices. With no capacity for self-reflection (that's for wimps and those who don't understand God's Will), they once again arrogantly believe their own spin. And even more importantly, they believe that the vast majority of the country also believes it. This is not the path back to power.

We still have the same punditry that cheered on the McCain campaign and dutifully passed on all of the Republican smears as truth. In 2009, we can continue to count on the pundits to wring their hands in public over Obama's "excessive liberalism", to second guess every decision, and to constantly point to signs of Obama's "fading popularity". Any policies that do not come straight from the wingnut realm will be portrayed as "divisive". The economy will not improve overnight, and most people realise this. The majority also see that what passed for a "plan" from the Republicans will only make things worse.

The Republican Party lacks the ability to win the electorate over to their side, but they have the ability to make Obama look unpopular. We have to keep asking where the Marxist hell that these people predicted would emerge from Obama's election is. We have to keep making clear what the Republicans would do if they were in office. And we have to stand up to those who insist that not continuing Bush's policies is "divisive".

2008-12-29T15:00:00.004-06:00

Well, here we are, post-election and nearly post-holidays.
Apparently the nation has "been defeated", as McCain put it before it the election. Socialism is now to be the order of the day, if the weak and desperate spin of the McCain campaign is to be believed. Let's pause to look back at what the Republicans offered to the nation in their defeated effort.

They offered FEAR, and lots of it. Obama has something to hide, and "questions remain". The "questions" were, of course, answered, but the Republicans simply didn't like the answers or didn't believe them. Thus, these 'questions' remained. And there never really was any way to "answer" these so-called 'questions', because they weren't really questions at all; they were slanders designed to induce vague doubts that could not be proven or really disproved. All that was clear was that Republicans were completely convinced that Obama was some kind of Marxist radical who had a diabolical (but absolutely vague) scheme to destroy America. There was no evidence, merely associations backed up by an incredible amount of exaggeration, speculation, and wild leaps of logic. Republicans believed in the validity of these 'questions', largely because other Republicans believed in their validity, and that was good enough for them.

One of the biggest (and stupidest) gambles the Republicans made in the election was in believing that their Party still had credibility. Thus, if the Republicans said Obama was a Marxist radical bent on destroying America, then the electorate would believe it. The Republicans had spent so much time in their echo chamber, isolated from the rest of the world, that they had really come to believe that those outside of their artificial world agreed with them. Anyone outside of the bubble could have seen that the Republicans stopped trying to persuade anyone over to their beliefs years ago. Instead, they wrote off the non-Republicans as some tiny core of "far-leftists" who were universally despised as traitors, defeatists, and degenerates. Their messages were drenched in circular logic and the premises of those messages were only accepted by the "faithful". Apparently, everyone "knew" that the typical Democrat really longed for a Soviet-style state, cheered on terrorists, and rejoiced at our nation's every troop casualty. On top of this, the typical Democrat was "known" to have no "values", and they celebrated every abortion, engaged in promiscuous and dangerous sexual acts, were addicted to hard drugs, and would probably kill you if you didn't have several guns already.

Thus, it was inconceivable to the typical Republican that Americans would embrace a Democratic candidate. It was "obvious" that the Democratic party stood for Satanism, Stalinism, and the Sixties. The Republicans merely had to point this out, and McCain was guaranteed to win.

The truth is that Republican credibility suffered a mortal blow in 2005, and never really recovered. Katrina showed the inept and incompetent Administration lackeys, who were given jobs solely based on loyalty and their ability to parrot talking points. As Iraq became a quagmire, the Decider made wildly upbeat and optimistic statements on an almost daily basis, backed up by his Party. Expressing doubt or scepticism was clearly a sign that one was a traitor or a terrorist sympathiser who wanted America to "lose". The nation saw a Party that not only demanded blind obedience and faith, but that also put on a bizarre Tinkerbell-like performance: if we all clap loud enough and believe in the Decider, then we will win the War On Terror. In general, the nation saw an Administration that chose the outcome it wanted and then believed that the outcome was guaranteed simply because they envisioned it, with facts and arms twisted to conform with that vision. The economy began a slow slide that ended with a sharp drop off the cliff just before the election, and the Republicans continued their sunny, logically-deficient optimism until it was far too late to back-pedal.

And yet they still believed that they had credibility.

The GOP had essentially turned itself into a religion instead of a political organisation. They were the Believers, in more ways than one. No dissent was tolerated, for that would be a sign of Doubt. If one did not believe, completely and blindly, in the Party, then one did not believe in America and one wished for the nation's demise. Just as fundamentalist Christians dismiss all other religions as cults, idol-worshipping, or just a variation of good old-fashioned Satanism, so too did the Party set up a false dichotomy in the political arena. There were only Patriots and Communists, and the only way to be a good Patriot was to be a good Republican. To believe otherwise was contrary to the "religion", and since the majority of Americans did not want to see the country destroyed, then they would surely vote Republican.

This is why we see the promulgation of the "centre-right country" myth. It is a feeble and desperate attempt on the Republicans' part to preserve their "religion". The country still believes in everything that the Party believes in, per this myth, but the electorate failed to cast their votes for the Party. Thus, if a Marxist hell is avoided, it will be because the electorate firmly believes in the Republicans' ideals, not due to anything that the Obama Administration does or does not do. If Christians are not persecuted and hunted down, it will be because the vast majority believe in the GOP and will not permit the Democrats to carry out their Satanic schemes. And so forth and so on. The religion of the Republican party is thus preserved among the Faithful.

Aside from ramming fundamentalist Christianity down the nation's collective throats, what else did the Republicans offer in the McCain campaign?

War, and lots of it. There are always unfortunate situations that require military action, especially when this is the only permissible tool in the policy toolbox. Thus, the only way to be safe is to bankrupt our economy in more quagmires, which we can never disengage from lest it be seen as a sign of weakness. To do anything less is the equivalent of lining up our nation's children and shooting them - which is probably one of the Obama Administration's secret plans, anyway.

Police-state powers, and lots of them - to preserve our freedom, of course. Total, absolute secrecy is regrettably required, because the "terrorists might be listening". Scapegoats must be created and identified, with guilt presumed beforehand. Some will not confess immediately, in order to make our leaders look bad, but eventually it will become clear that we were right all along to suspect them if we are allowed to "take the gloves off". Who really knows what torture is, anyway? The Party with blinding moral clarity and simplistic answers at the ready is oddly philosophical here, isn't it? Suddenly, "moral relativism" can be embraced in this situation.

So we have fear, war, and paranoia as the primary campaign themes. The only real policy issue that was covered by the McCain campaign was health care. In reality, the Republican scheme would have caused millions to lose their coverage, since employers would drop their health plans in response. Certainly, nothing in the Republican plan requires the employer to do so, but it seems obvious that if the government is providing a deduction for individuals to buy their own health insurance that the employer can safely get out of the health care business. And somehow, simply giving people $5000 to buy insurance is not socialism, though it is a refundable tax credit. And giving everyone $5k doesn't cost any money, because it's just taxes the government wouldn't be collecting in the first place, right? Really, though, you would never even see that money. It would go straight to the insurance company. And McCain promised that his Administration would "work with" insurance companies on the issue of pre-existing conditions. What does that mean, exactly? It means nothing, except that you would not be covered for pre-existing conditions, meaning that only the healthy would have health coverage. What a step forward. Likewise, any idea that a "high-risk pool" would ensure coverage under the $5k limit was abandoned as 'regulation'.

In states where auto liability insurance is mandatory, there is a "high risk pool" mandated to be maintained by the insurance companies. This means that if you have had seven accidents in the past year and a DUI on your record, you can still obtain insurance at an astronomical cost from the "high risk pool". You cannot be denied liability coverage if you are a licensed driver.

Now, suppose you are a sick person with leukaemia and require about $15k a year in medical treatment. What insurance company will provide you with coverage for only $5k a year? None of them. Either that, or they would sell you coverage and deny all claims based on a "pre-existing condition". How would a McCain Administration persuade an insurance company to lose $10k a year when they "work with" them on coverage for pre-existing conditions? The answer is, they don't. The likely result is that our hypothetical patient would get $5k of the $20k needed to obtain health insurance, meaning they would still pay as much for health care as they did when they were 'uninsured'. This is how the insurance industry would "work with" the Administration on pre-existing conditions.

Meanwhile, the loss of $5k per taxpayer in revenue is a definite "cost", isn't it? Is there a real difference in the bottom line between the federal government paying a certain amount of money and not getting a certain amount of money to begin with? Only in ideological terms.

Republicans argue against "single-payer" not only on ideological grounds, but also on cost.
"If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free", is the glib mantra. The problem is that, under the McCain proposal, more people would have coverage than they do now and costs would go up. The only way to limit cost is to deny treatment, or provide treatment in a pro-active manner. The latter method costs money up front, and saves money in the long term. The former method means that more uninsured individuals show up in the emergency room with avoidable conditions at a greater cost for treatment. It is notable that one of the McCain "advisers" on health care policy claimed that everyone is "insured" under the current scheme because they have access to emergency room care. Likewise, the idea that the average person is going to "shop around" and contest payments is absurd. Who has the time to "shop around" for the lowest price on an office visit, then "shop around" for the lowest price on a certain lab procedure, then search out the lowest price on follow-up care, and then "shop around" for the lowest price on a prescription? Is there transportation to get you to the slightly cheaper lab, doctor, or pharmacy 40 miles away? What happens to continuity of care when you spread your medical treatment out between a dozen different providers? Mistakes are made, efforts are duplicated, links are missed, and costs go up. But we manage to avoid the ideological hazard of 'socialism', so it's okay.

So we see that the McCain campaign was not only peddling very, very few actual ideas, but that these ideas were bad in practical terms. By and large, they were trying to sell fear and doubt, with a side of jingoism.

But what really killed the Republican effort was the economy.
This was not some magical mishap that befell the Party, but rather the logical result of their policies. The real collapse of the "mortgage industry" was not in making bad loans, but rather in the sale of insurance for those bad loans. Insurance on mortgages was traded by institutions that had no idea how risky those loans were, to people who had no idea that they were on the hook if those loans failed. They were merely pieces of paper that gained value every time they were traded, as if by magic. We allowed institutions to act as banks without the regulations governing banks. And the Republicans pointed to the money being made by these institutions as "proof" that regulations were bad. At the same time, those tax cuts that were supposed to be invested domestically in the creation of jobs were, once again, ploughed into offshore ventures or kept "within the family" by way of huge bonuses. Just as with Reagan's supply-side economics, the wealthy once again failed to step up to the plate and instead took the money and ran. Pointing this out, of course, is "class warfare" to Republicans. Republicans are fond of putting their shills on parade and parroting talking points, such as "I've never been employed by a poor man". You know what, though? If nobody has money to buy what the rich man is selling, that shill won't get employed in the first place. History has shown that the wealthy have repeatedly balked at employing that shill, when they can move their operations to China and employ people at less cost. Then Wal-Mart sells the wealthy person's products at a lower price, killing off local jobs. The end result is we all end up working for Wal-Mart, looking over our shoulders at some poor desperate sap who is willing to take our job for ten cents less an hour, while our government has less money to invest in infrastructure or training to improve the economy, and the wealthy get a bigger pile of cash which they refuse to risk by lending to us.

But we avoid those terrifying ideological hazards of 'socialism'. Instead, we work harder for less money and no benefits, with no job security, while every means to better ourselves is eliminated by budget cuts due to declining tax revenue. That is the economic vision the Republicans offer. We keep more of our "hard-earned money", while making it ever more unlikely that we will see it to begin with and working even harder to earn it.

I would respect the Republicans more if they were willing to take the wealthy to task for failing to hold up their end of the supply-side "bargain", but they won't. Instead, they abjure the middle class to spend more, while berating them for accumulating the consumer debt that enables them to do so. Oddly, the solution is always more tax cuts for the wealthy, because this time the wealthy will use it to our benefit. Really. We really, really mean it this time. And if that doesn't work, well, there's always more tax cuts for the wealthy. It can't fail now. And so forth and so on.

And so, the last defence for the Republicans is the Culture War.
Yes, re-fighting the Sixties is completely relevant to people who never lived through it, right?
It turns out that it really isn't. Not only that, but the people who did live through it aren't at all interested in re-visiting it. Ward and June Cleaver are dead. We aren't going back to the Fifties, which was a time of widespread poverty that is glossed over in nostalgia. Besides, a case can certainly be made that the worst excesses of the Sixties were in response to the heavy-handed repression of the Culture Warriors to begin with. The "values" that the Republicans are really pushing are bigotry, conformity, unquestioning obedience to authority, and "knowing one's place" in the social order. It doesn't matter who you are, it matters who people think you are. All of the other "values" preached by the Republicans are readily sacrificed with pride in the name of preserving the values I just mentioned. Thus, beating someone up that doesn't conform is your sacred duty, not some aberration of "values", for example. If the police arrest someone for a crime, obviously it is because they were guilty, so let's not "second-guess" authority. Any violation of the Republican's putative "values" is also acceptable if nobody finds out about it. It's an ugly paradigm that guarantees that those on the bottom will stay on the bottom, as part of God's Will, or something.

Now that a Democrat is soon to be in the White House, we can expect that the Republican concept of "criticising a sitting President during time of war is tantamount to treason" to conveniently disappear. Once again, dissent will be one's sacred duty, and not something that only whiners and traitors engage in. Republicans who presided over Bush's record debt will now be very concerned about fiscal restraint. We also will be admonished about the limits of Executive power by those who once asserted that those limits did not exist. Government "intrusion" will soon be something to be terrified of, not at all like the warrantless wiretaps, data mining, and rampant use of 'security letters' that the Bush Administration was so brave in carrying out. We can also look forward to the very odd phenomenon of criticising foreign policy as part of 'supporting the troops', when just yesterday it was 'undermining the morale of the troops'. Magically, criticising the Bush Administration and it's policies will suddenly become "divisive" by those who will showed no quarter in employing the basest of slanders against their opponents.

Because, you see, the Republicans are "the good guys", and anything that the good guys do is okay. When the bad guys do the same thing, however, it merely proves how bad they really are. For example, if Georgia attacks Russia and gets slapped down, that is disproportionate and evil. If Gaza does the same thing, anything goes in the name of self-defence. It's not so much that there are two standards as that there is one standard that is only applied in selected cases. For all of the talk about "American Exceptionalism", the bottom line is that it really means that America is excepted from the rules it applies to to other nations, and Republicans are excepted by virtue of being the voice of "true Americans".

So watch for that.

2008-10-25T18:03:00.004-05:00

I just had to get this McCain quote up for posterity.
If Obama wins, McCain says "the nation" will be defeated, and he's got Obama right where he wants him. Hilarious.
From the BBC:

"I will never allow this nation to be defeated ... my friends, we've got them just where we want them. We love being the underdog and we're going to win!"

Nine days to go.
Fivethirtyeight.com has Obama projected to win 348 electoral votes. 270 are needed to win.
McCain's "master plan" is tragic in its hopelessness. He is going "all in" in Pennsylvania to get its 27 EVs, which will serve to partially counteract some of his other expected state losses.

The problem is that McCain has never led in any reliable polling in that state. The closest he ever got was a tie on Rasmussen 9/14, which looks like an outlier in retrospect. Subsequent Rasmussen polling showed a steady increase in Obama's PA support:

9/21 Obama +3
9/24 Obama +4
9/28 Obama +8
10/6 Obama + 13

Bear in mind that Rasmussen has generally been showing lower levels of Obama support in PA than most other pollsters. For example, SurveyUSA (whom I consider to be a Republican-leaning pollster) showed Obama as +15 on 10/6 when Rasmussen showed +13.
On 10/22, SurveyUSA placed Obama ahead by 12%.
Yet this is where John McCain is making his final stand, and this is right where he wants Obama to be.

Even if McCain wins PA, he must win Florida or it is all over. That scenario is not supported by the polling, either. Rasmussen polled McCain ahead by 1 point 10/21, well within the margin of error. Other pollsters show Obama 3 or 4 points ahead.

Missouri is another must-win state for McCain. Rasmussen polled it in Obama's favour by five points on 10/19.
If McCain loses North Carolina, Obama moves in to the White House. Polling there is mixed, with Rasmussen giving McCain a two point lead (within the margin of error), while other pollsters show Obama with a single-digit lead in the state.

Indiana is a state that McCain cannot afford to lose, either. Like the others mentioned, if McCain loses it, there is no way he can reach 270 EVs. SurveyUSA polled Obama ahead by 4% there on 10/22.
Ohio is another must-win. Rasmussen favoured McCain by two points (again within the MOE) on 10/19.

There is also the western option: Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico all favour Obama (19 EVs right there) , while ND and MT are toss-ups (6 more).
Georgia, with her 15 EVs, is three points away from going to Obama.

McCain now has to get very lucky multiple times in order to win. It's like flipping a coin seven times in a row and calling it correctly.

But the truth is that these polls under-estimate Obama's support. Rasmussen relies on a tight "likely voter model" that excludes a lot of Obama supporters. If you are first-time voter in this election, Rasmussen would not count you as a "likely voter". Even though statistics show that newly-registered voters turn out to vote nearly 90% of the time, Rasmussen would not consider a newly-registered voter to be "likely". Even if you voted in the primaries, but not in previous general elections, Rasmussen would not count you as a "likely voter". That hardly seems realistic. And Rasmussen is not alone in maintaining this tight model.

Consider the massive registration drives conducted during the Democratic primaries/caucuses, in which new records were set in registering new voters. Consider the massive turnouts in the primaries. Consider the truly unprecedented ground game of the Obama campaign in mobilising voters to turn out this election. None of that is being taken into account by any pollster that uses a common likely voter model. In fact, in comparisons between "registered voters", and registered voters who self-identify as likely voters, Gallup has shown very little difference (about 2%) between the two groups. And the Democrats hold a huge registration advantage in these seven crucial states.

Many of the pollsters seem to simply be assuming that Democrats won't turn out this year, despite the historic character of this election. They are far off the mark.

Republicans are looking back to 2004 for reassurances, but that was a pre-Katrina world, a world in which the Decider was still popular and Iraq was not yet judged a miserable mistake, and the economy was not in a state of disaster. Republicans have completely ignored 2006 and the mid-term elections that brought them sweeping losses. No, it's still 2004 to them, and they are relying on imaginary 2004 voters to rally and save the day.

And, in spite of Obama showing higher "favourables" than McCain, the Republicans are still pushing Obama as a scary candidate. People simply are not afraid of Obama. They have seen him at the debates, the Convention, and in campaign stops, and they have seen a reasonable, well-spoken, and intelligent man. The more McCain pushes his wild terror of Obama, the more rabid and un-hinged the Republicans appear to the public.

So Obama is leading the national tracking polls by about eight points, and he is leading in the states he needs to win 270 electoral votes, with the chance to pick up a few more.
And this is, apparently, right where McCain wants Obama to be.

Devilishly clever of him, isn't it?

My prediction is that Obama wins with 349 electoral votes. The second most likely outcome is 375 EVs, in my view.

2008-10-25T12:02:00.004-05:00

Michelle Bachmann has a putative "apology" making its way onto the airwaves here in Minnesota.
The video is here.

In this "apology", she never apologises for anything. This is as close as she comes to an apology:

"I may not always get my words right, but I know that my heart is right, because my heart is for you - for your children, and for the blessings of liberty to remain for our great country."

Nothing in those words apologises for her remarks accusing Obama or fellow Congressional members of being "anti-American". She is instead sticking with her line that she never said what she said; that her remarks were merely misconstrued. Bachmann seems to be saying that she tends to say a lot of crazy stuff, but her heart is in the right place.

And, coming from someone who works for the government, this is bizarre:

"Once again, our nation is at a crossroads, and it's a time for choosing. We could embrace government as the answer to our problems, or we could choose freedom and liberty."

It's hard to see how this fits in with her previous characterisation of Democrats as "anti-American". She questioned Obama's allegiance to the country based on his weak association with Bill Ayers, not because of some "Big Government" agenda. She has always been one of those Republicans that condemns as "treasonous" anyone who criticises the President or the Iraq occupation. She has consistently voted to retain the most onerous parts of the Patriot Act, and has strongly defended the illegal wire-tapping programme. Bachmann has never seen any legislation promoting a police state that she didn't like. And she has seldom failed to impugn the patriotism of anyone opposing more government intrusion and surveillance.

This has always been the basis of her "anti-American" thesis: that "liberals" are, in effect, working for "the enemy". Now, however, she has made a radical shift and claims that 'liberals" are "anti-American" because they want Big Government and are opposed to "freedom and liberty". This isn't an apology, it's a distraction.

Many people have seen Bachmann on television and wondered about Minnesota voters. How could Minnesota have elected this crazy woman?

The answer is her made-to order, gerrymandered district and the weak Democrat who ran against her in 2006.

Bachmann was elected in 2006, at the same time as Keith Ellison was elected to the House and Amy Klobuchar was elected to the Senate. These were both Democrats, and both won by large margins. Ellison is notable for being a Muslim-American; the first in the House. So the idea that Minnesotans are crazy wingnuts should find a full stop right there. Bachmann's district is a long and fairly narrow swath to the north of the Twin Cities metro area. This mostly exurban and suburban district has undergone a profound change in the past twenty years. The long-time rural citizens have seen a massive influx of "refugees" from the urban core. They were fleeing pretty much the same thing: minorities, crime, and the ordinances of the city. They were also attracted by much lower prices for land and much cheaper housing, and the chance to raise their children free of "corrupting influences". They bought themselves long commutes into the urban areas as part of the bargain, and were hard hit by the increase in gas prices.

Mostly, however, these refugees brought all of those "corrupting influences" along with them into their new Paradise of liberty. Huge housing developments crammed people into treeless refugee zones that were not much more spacious than the urban yards they left behind. Property taxes went up markedly as localities had to expand waste-water treatment, roads, parks, landfills, etc. The new residents found their neighbours' proximity distasteful and begin to demand ordinances to deal with the problems of sharing space with farms and with the activities of their fellow "freedom-seekers". Police departments expanded. Strip malls moved in. "Big box" retailers squeezed out the local businesses. What were once friendly communities became mere groupings of individuals jealously guarding their tiny fiefdoms, screaming for the local government to simultaneously "do something" about their neighbours and to "get off our backs".

The inherent contradiction with exurban development is that it requires strong regulation to avoid massive inefficiencies and steep tax increases, while the people you are trying to attract are fleeing increased regulation and high taxes.

The metro area was facing a wave of communities further and further away demanding increased amenities without increased taxes. The Metropolitan Council at last put its foot down and drew a boundary for waste-water and water services. These exurban communities would have to find local solutions to get rid of their sewage, dig local wells, and lay their own water lines. This meant that these "enclaves of freedom" had to enforce ordinances covering septic tanks and drain tiles that simply dumped the refugee's filth into local streams. The alternative was severe contamination of the drinking water. Environmental regulations stopped people from simply dumping waste oil on the ground or draining their radiators into storm drains. Treatment plants had to be built to deal with a massive local increase in waste from the new residents who wanted an urban lifestyle in a rural infrastructure. Landfill space became scarce, and developments were being built closer and closer to them; regulations were demanded for noxious odours and vermin.

Thus, the influx of "liberty-seekers" became their own undoing.

And local politicians were simply not up to the task. These refugees moved into local politics, bringing a simplistic libertarian view and a visceral hatred of taxes. Thus, precious lead time was squandered with stop-gap solutions that made no one happy and merely made more expensive options inevitable. This made it even easier to frame "government" as the "problem". And the interests of the long-time residents consistently lost out to those of the new refugees.

Culturally, the district was a seething battleground of people unable to come together for the common good due to the "get off my back" ideology of the refugees. Evangelical churches made big inroads, due to the refugees' desire to raise their children in an uncorrupted environment. And so the stage was set for Republican domination of the district. The evangelical church communities were organised into political influence groups, and the Republican message of less regulation and "traditional values" found fertile ground. The one thing everyone agreed on was their profound hatred of the "other": racial minorities, immigrants, non-Christians, and those "communist" city folk.

Into this breach stepped Michelle Bachmann.

Strongly evangelical, she claimed that God chose her for Congress. Who can argue with God, after all? If one didn't vote for her, you were then voting against God. Jumping fully on the fading Bush Bandwagon, her election was seen by Party officials as some kind of rebound in a year when Republicans were generally kicked out of office. In spite of a fairly narrow win margin, she behaved as if she had been crowned Prom Queen. She proudly tied herself to the national neo-con agenda and forgot all about her little backwater district. She said all of the right things, sucked up to all of the right people, and voted as she was told to by the Republican Party masters. Bachmann was the perfect drone for movement conservatives.

The voters in her district were completely taken for granted. When gas prices hit these refugee commuters hard, she had a typical and grossly simplistic solution: drill, baby, drill. Regulations were the problem, not her constituents' choice to live an hour away from their jobs or their lifestyles' complete dependence on multiple vehicles. When foreclosures threatened the dreams of these urban refugees, it was the damnable regulations that were to blame. And when the economy crashed, it was again "hyper-regulation" of banks and investment firms that caused it. Meanwhile, she made regular appearances on local Christian radio programmes to keep up the drumbeat of hatred against gays, Muslims, and "baby killers".

While many see her remarks on "Hardball" as her downfall, the truth is that the handwriting was on the wall with the Petters' scandal. Bachmann endorsed a con man with a shady history, and on the strength of that voucher many Christian charities and churches were fleeced on a large scale. Pastors lost their homes, charities shut down, and churches were in a financial crisis.
Bachmann did some public hand-wringing for evangelical consumption, but this was one case where she could not blame regulations for the situation. If Michelle was truly guided by God, how this could immense lapse of judgement have occurred? Faith was shaken, angry people wanted answers, and so Bachmann did what movement conservatives always do: created a distraction.

Never mind about Bachmann's links to the con man Vennes - the real thing we all need to fear is the "anti-American views" of Obama and other members of Congress. She creates another false dichotomy similar to her endorsement by God: if you don't vote for me, people who hate America will gain power. Bachmann is on the job, folks, guarding against excessive regulations and the treasonous elite out to destroy us. That makes you trust her again, right?

Bachmann really said nothing different on Hardball that she hasn't said before to neo-con audiences, or that movement conservatives don't say on a regular basis to each other. It's the Party line narrative: Democrats hate America, they want us to lose in Iraq and in the GWOT, they are guilty of treason, they have a socialist agenda, they hate Christians and God, etc.

Bachmann's real mistake, the one for which the GOP has taken her to task for, was to speak those internal talking points to the masses. To the Republican faithful, Bachmann is merely a big-mouth, not a crazy McCarthyite.

And so she claims she was taken out of context. She claims she never said what everyone can plainly see in the video she said. She denies saying that she thinks "liberals are anti-American", when nobody ever said she did. She said Obama is anti-American due to his "associations with Ayers", and she said that members of Congress should be examined for potential anti-American views - not "liberals".

Then she announces an "apology" in which she frames the issue as a struggle between "liberty" and "government", which has nothing to do with putatively "anti-American views".

If Bachmann loses this election, it will mean that movement conservatism cannot prevail in a district tailor-made for that philosophy. It will mean that her "politics of false dichotomy" are not strong enough to prevail in Minnesota. And it will mean that the neo-cons will lose another pawn in Congress.

2008-10-19T16:12:00.002-05:00

Michelle Bachmann did an interview on "Hardball" in which she said, regarding Obama, "Absolutely, I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views".

Not content with that, she called for a McCarthy-esque witch-hunt on members of Congress, to determine if they are "pro-American" enough.

"The news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they would, I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out are they are pro-America or anti-America."

Chris Matthews gave her repeated opportunities to back down and moderate her remarks, but she continued to stand by them. She was just repeating the standard far-Right talking points, after all. She fully expected a pat on the head from the Party for being such a good parrot. Apparently "everybody knows" this stuff, so who could take issue with it?

Now, however, the media is just a bunch of Big Old Meanies who "misunderstood" her.
The video is here. See for yourself.

"I think the people that Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large."

How can you take that any other way than what it says? Especially when you also say, in reference to Obama:

"Absolutely, I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views"

Michelle, you just said that Obama has anti-American views. You said that you were concerned about that. You can back-pedal about his "anti-American views" and say that they just aren't your views, but why would that make you "concerned"?

One can only wonder what Bachmann's proposed "investigation" of Congress would be like.
It doesn't take a genius to see that she is "concerned" about Bill Ayers. So we would likely see an investigation into everyone that each member of Congress has ever worked with, along with PTA boards, charities, and maybe even church choirs. Then we would have to look at everyone that every member of Congress has ever visited, because one of the scary things about Ayers is that Obama visited his house. We could then look at college professors, legislative aides, donors, neighbours, and of course, friends.

Since Obama has clearly and repeatedly expressed his love for America, such declarations will mean nothing to the investigators. Obviously, the truly "anti-American" among us would simply lie. Such an investigation would have to rely on others to "rat out" these traitors, possibly in exchange for clemency. Sadly necessary, if we want to ally Bachmann's "concerns", though.

How else are we to get to the bottom of what has Michelle Bachmann so "concerned"?

Sure, it's an ugly job. But can we really afford to have someone in Congress who once went out to dinner with a college classmate without doing a thorough examination of their political views? Surely no "real American" would show up at the home of someone who, for example, thought that the Iraq War was a mistake, even if it was only to drop off a graduation gift for the traitor's child. And wouldn't we all like to know, if it were possible, that the woman who runs the checkout at the grocery store our Representative shops at once failed to put their hand over their heart at a baseball game? Or that one of their old college professors was married to a Muslim?

Seriously, the Republicans have already said that things like failing to wear a flag pin on your lapel is a suspect sign. They have already said that anyone who criticised the Iraq effort was a traitor and a terrorist sympathiser. These are the kind of criteria that would be applied to Bachmann's investigation.

But perhaps I just "misread" her. Perhaps she should clarify what qualifies one as being "anti-American". But I bet she won't.

Bachmann knows that the "base" agrees with her. Her mistake was simply in saying it out loud and on camera, not in believing it. The public isn't supposed to know that, unless you are a loyal Party member and an evangelical Christian, that you are considered to be a cowardly, despicable traitor in the eyes of the far-Right. Bachmann failed to keep that secret.

This is the American equivalent of the Taliban. They think they are the "real Americans", and they get to write the definition of what "American" is.

2008-08-31T01:14:00.002-05:00

I still think that McCain will not get much of a Convention bounce at all. Seriously, a bounce from what?

At the DNC, the Democrats unified their Party, slammed McCain, and introduced Obama to the nation while wiping out the idea that he is scary, unpatriotic, and wants to raise taxes - all to an immense audience across the nation.
They got a bounce from that, and Obama is up by 8.

What will the Republicans do?

Talk up the Iraq war, drilling, God, God and a bit more God thrown in for good measure. They will repeat several dozen times that McCain is a war hero and a POW. They will repeat all of the smears that have failed to gain traction over the past year.

This is all just re-hashing what they have already been saying for a year now. But people think that now, because it's said at a bloody Convention, that the nation will sit up and change their minds?
The Republican base is already solidified going in to the Convention. They have been un-enthusiastic, yes, but always ready to vote as they are told.

So what does anyone imagine they will get a bounce from?

I am so bloody sick of people pointing to 2004 and thinking that everything will play out the same way. This is an incredibly unique situation that is hardly comparable to 2004 or 2000. The entire electoral map has changed, but everyone still continues to think in terms of 2004: PID, Republican organisation, turnout, how Kerry did in certain states, 2004 exit polling, etc.

It's not 2004 anymore. Isn't that obvious? The Republicans have too much ground to defend. They have put their strongest candidate (most moderate), one that has made a career out of standing against them, against the Democrats...and the Republican is losing. In effect, they have put the candidate who least represents their core values against the Democrats, and even that hasn't done them any good. The McCain candidacy itself is a sign of desperation on the GOP's part, but everyone just wrings their hands over CW that doesn't match reality. It's so pathetic.

2008-08-30T10:36:00.006-05:00

Wow. The Republicans' heads are spinning around.

By picking Palin, McCain takes the "Obama is too inexperienced" issue right off the table, which was his only non-smear issue.

By picking Palin, McCain gives up on the independents. Palin is a complete 28%-er who backs Bush completely. She is also a creationist, hard-line pro-life, and evangelical Christian. You don't pick up independents with someone like that. If independents had those views, then they wouldn't be independents - they'd already be Republicans.

By picking Palin, McCain actually alienates women voters. It takes a Republican Kool-Aid drinker to believe that women will vote for McCain simply because a woman is on the ticket, especially since that woman is completely out of the mainstream political views that the strong majority of women hold.

This is a move to appeal to the Republican base, which it will. The problem is, though, that McCain already has 87% of that base locked up. And that base is a lot smaller than it was in 2004, while the number who self-identify as Democrats has increased by 10% to record highs.

Palin will definitely improve the turnout among Republican evangelicals, but their numbers have also dropped since 2004 in a generational split.

Palin will be under intense media scrutiny in the next two months to a degree that the Governor of Alaska never was. It is almost certain that she will make some gaffe, which Republicans will be forced to defend. They will cry that the media and the Democrats are "picking on a woman", while at the same time crying about "picking on a war hero". It will be the ultimate whiner's ticket, and it will sound like these two aren't ready to face 21st century challenges.

Meanwhile, all McCain has left against Obama are smears: Ayers, Rezko, secret Muslim, crazy radical, and unpatriotic. None of these have gained traction despite being given heavy play in the primary and by McCain surrogates for several months. And Biden, HRC, and Bill will be attacking McCain constantly on his weaknesses. Being a "war hero" just won't cut it.

And the big issue about this pick that makes even Republicans pause is that McCain is 72 and has recurring cancer. If McCain dies or is incapacitated in office, then Palin takes over. Can anyone imagine Palin commanding two wars (plus any new ones that McCain has started while in office), staring down Putin, handling negotiations with Iran, Venezuela, or Pakistan? Can anyone imagine Palin convincing our allies to go along with whatever crazy foreign policy McCain has left her? Telling the rest of the world not to "pick on a woman" is not going to work in those circumstances.

Palin is not a scholar along the lines of Obama. She has no foreign policy experience, whereas Obama has been to Iraq, toured Europe, been briefed extensively on military matters, and has served on the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. Palin would inherit all of McCain's "yes men" advisors, and be completely out of her depth on the national and international stage. If the crises the country faces in the next four years all involve attending hockey games, then she can handle it. If it's more complex than that, we are all - Republican, Independent, and Democrat alike - in big trouble.

2008-08-13T18:17:00.002-05:00

I cover polls a lot on this blog. This is because it is the only refutation to wingnut assertions.
Currently, Obama is leading McCain on Gallup by 48 to 42 in the national polls. Obama has led for almost two months now, proving that McCain's negative ads are only speaking to his base and not to the general public. Independent voters, the group that is supposed to make all of the difference to McCain's chances, still break evenly among the two candidates (Obama 43%, McCain 41%). Usually, effective negative campaigns drag down the victim's "favourables". In this case however, it is McCain's favourables that have dropped for the past month, with a current virtual tie (Obama 58%, McCain 56%).

On Rasmussen, Obama has been between 43 and 47% since early June. He's been between 44 and 45% for the past two weeks. In spite of the attacks, Obama's support seems stable among likely voters. McCain has been between 40 and 44% since early June, and in that same range for the past two weeks. There was a tie for two days in early August.

Both Rasmussen and fivethirtyeight.com give Obama the win in electoral vote projections.

One commenter on fivethirtyeight.com broke the electoral vote situation down this way:

What we are talking about, though, is that Obama has a ton of winning maps, while McCain has very few. Kerry+IA/CO/NM is a win, and he's up in all of those. Same with IA/CO/NV. Now, those fairly likely scenarios aside, if he wins Kerry+IA (which he should) then a win pretty much anywhere else, like OH, VA, NC, FL, IN puts him in extremely good shape. That's why the 50-state strategy is such a better idea than the campaigns Gore and Kerry ran, and why people do think it's going to be different this time. It might not be, but the odds are a lot better at least.

And that is essence of this election, and what makes it so very different from 2000 and 2004. The Republicans would love to make this a battle over Florida and Ohio, but the Obama campaign is too smart for that. It's fairly certain that the 2 or 3 state "battleground" approach is the route Hillary would taken as well.
Republican support is so weak that states that once were solid red are now within reach for he Democrats. And the idiotic "battleground" approach has left several states with little in the way of organisation. Those mired in the old paradigm see the "50 state strategy" as a waste of effort, but Obama is doing the work that the Party needs done by organising these putatively "red" states. Even if none of them break for Obama, the Party has fantastic data for House and Senate races, as well as future Presidential races. However, the odds are that a certain number of these states will "flip", and then Obama wins. McCain has only one or two "paths" to victory.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is targeting only 19 states. Among those 19 are very safe states for Obama: Maine, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Washington. And with the abbreviated Republican primary season, the GOP was cheated out of a Party's best chance of updating and expanding their lists of contacts. They are left with the old lists from 2004 in many cases. Thus, we are seeing the McCain campaign rely more on ads than usual.

The GOP won in 2000 and 2004 by conducting massive registration drives and bringing in millions of new voters. This year, however, the numbers netted by the GOP in nearly every state fell far below those of the Democrats. In Indiana alone, the Democrats registered more voters during the primary than voted for Kerry in the previous election.

Conventional wisdom says that 5% is the maximum lead that can be overcome by a ground campaign. Right now, the polling shows Obama with a 5 point lead in Wisconsin, and an eight point lead in Pennsylvania. New Mexico is projected to go to Obama by 5.5%, with Iowa about the same. Ohio and Virginia are still evenly split. McCain leads in Florida by a little over 3%. Obama is projected to win by a bit over 2% in Colorado.

The issue is that a lot of these polls use the "likely voter" model to skew their data. The Obama campaign has registered hundreds of thousands of new voters who will not show up as "likely voters". We are left to believe that none of these people will vote if we accept the likely voter screen on the polls. Another issue is the weighting of the polls in party identification.

The Republicans seem stuck in a rut, obsessing over Obama's inability to gain a decisive advantage. They seem to forget that McCain has failed to score any advantage. More than that:

The primary "underperforming" that's going on in this election is John McCain. Where Bush consistently polled in the 45-47% range, on average, all year in 2004 in swing states, McCain polled all summer in the 40-42% range, on average. In an electoral system where +/- 3% in national polling gives rise to +/- 350+ EV landslides, that's a huge ground that needs to be made up. If you want to see the difference, go to electoral-vote.com and click on states like IA, PA, WI, MN, MI, OH, VA. McCain is generally polling 3-5% less than Bush across the board.

With numbers like this, relying on past scenarios for a Republican win is dangerous.
Other polls show McCain's support among evangelicals is 9% weaker than Bush's 2004 numbers. And this time around, evangelicals are less of a monolithic bloc. In Texas, McCain is polling 11% weaker than Bush in 2004. Republican states such as Nevada, Montana, North and South Dakota, and North Carolina are all within 5%. McCain has immense defensive work to do that Bush never did. And of those five, he only has ground campaigns targeted for Nevada and North Carolina. That is 9 electoral votes he has given up on, or at least decided to rest on his laurels in.

McCain is also relying on a national campaign with national issues. Obama is targeting states based on local issues. The objective is to win states, after all.

The jingoism the Bush campaign employed is now yielding diminishing returns. Iraq is regarded as a mistake; whether we "win" or not is unimportant in the big picture as far as using it as an issue to rally around. And, sure, McCain is a war hero. Everyone knows he's a war hero already, though. The people likely to vote based on that are already on his side, and he's still behind Obama. He's not going to become any more of a war hero in the coming months. Likewise, McCain has hit a ceiling on his "favourables". Everyone already knows him. Everyone likely to like him already does. He can only go down or stay steady.

Lastly, his ad campaign to tear down Obama has not only met with no perceptible results in the polls, it says nothing about him. Putting down Obama does not make McCain look any better, and these ads show no contrast between McCain and Obama. At best, they make McCain the default alternative to Obama, which is very weak tea.

2008-08-13T16:20:00.003-05:00

I'm back again after a sojourn in the blogosphere wilderness.
I've been a reader and commenter on other blogs that I don't usually frequent in an effort to broaden my perspective. This has also brought me into contact with quite a few Republican and right-wing trolls, which is refreshing because it shows that their movement is bankrupt.
A few of my observations:

Obama's lead dropping even a point on any given day somehow means that McCain is "winning". To most people, if your candidate is still behind, it means they are losing.
There is always something, some minor event, which is allegedly going to "break things wide open" for McCain. Perhaps a GOP hack makes a disparaging remark about Obama. OMG! McCain is gonna win now fer sure! Or Regnery Press releases another one of their slimy character assassination books ("ObamaNation") - now the public is going to find out the "truth" about Obama and he is going down in flames. It never dawns on these fools that they said the same thing two weeks ago, and Obama is still ahead.
Republicans still think the public believes every unsubstantiated assertion they utter. Apparently the GOP has immense credibility to the nation at large, at least in the minds of these partisans.
If a state has a military base within its borders, it means that state will vote for McCain. Obviously (to the wingnuts) voting for Obama means that you don't support the troops, and the presence of a military base means that the vast majority of the state's residents support endless war.
Obama wants our troops to die at the hands of terrorists, per wingnut CW. This is so incredibly obvious that Obama won't even try to deny it, which is "proof". Yeah.
Spending a few days (seven years ago) in a rural part of a state that holds less than 10% of the state's population gives you a keen insight into how that state will vote. Thus, there is "no way" that Michigan will vote for Obama - polls be damned.
Likewise, if a wingnut polls a half dozen people in the rural area of a Deep Red state where he lives, you can easily infer from that "poll" that Obama doesn't have a chance to win on the national stage. 'Nuff said.
One wingnut heard from another wingnut, who heard from their pastor, that Obama is a "socialist". Again, the result is that McCain will win "in a landslide".
Unless Obama himself explicitly denies something, then it's completely true. And if he does deny something, he's a liar, so it's true anyway.
Everybody hates liberals, and the only way they ever get elected is because illegal immigrants vote them in. Uh-huh. Likewise, numbers of registered voters don't matter because Democrats don't vote - they are too busy watching TV and doing drugs. That's why McCain wins this time.
Everybody hates popular people. Nobody is excited about McCain, so that unpopularity means that he wins. Obvious, isn't it?

Overall, Republicans are deeply stuck in a world where it is 2002 forever, and 2006 never happened. Rush Limbaugh and Bill Kristol are believed by everyone. The "success" in Iraq proves that America wants yet another war, as long as this means a lot of Muslims will die. Christians are a persecuted minority, but yet they are so strong and numerous that this is a "Christian Nation" that shouldn't tolerate Muslims.

One would also think that the current portrayal of Obama as the Antichrist would be a good way to get evangelicals to vote for him. If Obama wins, that means the Rapture is at hand, and the evangelicals claim to want that. Sadly, the fundamentalist hypocrisy is so deep that they don't even see the contradiction. If they truly believed that Obama was the Antichrist and that the End Times are at hand, wouldn't they be repenting and selling their possessions to donate to the poor? Instead, it's just another opportunity for slander in the name of being a good Christian.

So, I'm back from the wilderness to tell you that the GOP is screwed.
They are delusional victims of their own rhetoric, resting on their laurels and hoping for legions of imaginary voters to heed the Idiot Call and follow their orders.

2008-07-26T18:52:00.003-05:00

Obama now moves into a seven point lead nationally.

Currently, fivethirtyeight.com gives Obama 296 electoral votes, with the possibility of an Obama landslide at about 20%. Rasmussen gives Obama 210 electoral votes without "leaners".
Pollster.com gives Obama 284 EV.

Surprisingly, Obama is only behind by single digits in five Deep South states.
I'm not saying he can win those states, but considering that the GOP is essentially a regional Party these days, it really doesn't look good for the mid-terms. When a 15 point lead in Alabama is the strongest Southern showing for McCain, any sane Republican should start to worry.

2008-07-26T17:19:00.002-05:00

John McCain continues to flounder in his public remarks on his signature issue, Iraq.
Now he is claiming that the "Awakening" (Sahwa) was part of the surge, despite the undeniable facts from the U.S. military itself that the "Awakening" began about six months before Bush even proposed the surge.

“Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others,” Mr. McCain said. “And it began the Anbar Awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history."

Of course "that sheik", Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, was assassinated around the time Petraeus gave his September report. That's just a matter of history. Let's look at Bush's January '07 speech in which he proposed the surge:

Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops.

Now does that sound as if the "Awakening" started before or after the surge was proposed? Bush gave orders in January 2007 to increase the troop levels by 4000 to support the "Awakening". The sheer gall of McCain's statements becomes apparent when one realises that the Administration (and the GOP) spent the first six months of 2007 stridently claiming that the surge had not even started yet. Though many considered the surge to have begun in mid-February, the Republicans shrieked that the surge would only begin when the troop levels were at "full-strength" in late July or early August 2007. Again and again, they repeated that Petraeus' September report was premature because the surge had only been in progress for two months.

Seemingly oblivious to his own previous talking points, McCain neatly re-defined the term "surge" as "a counter-insurgency campaign". If "the surge" and the "counter-insurgency strategy" are simply the same thing, then why did the Republicans deny that the surge did not really start until July '07? Why do we only hear of this new definition of the surge a year after the Republicans claim that it actually started?

“First of all, a surge is really a counterinsurgency strategy,” Mr. McCain said in Bethlehem, Pa. “And it’s made up of a number of components. And this counterinsurgency was initiated to some degree by Colonel MacFarland in Anbar Province, relatively on his own. And I visited with him in December of 2006. He had already initiated that strategy in Ramadi by going in, and clearing and holding in certain places. That is a counterinsurgency. And he told me at that time that he believed that that strategy, which is quote ‘the surge,’ part of the surge, would be, would be, successful.”
“So then, of course, it was very clear that we needed additional troops in order to carry out this insurgency,” he said. “Prior to that they had been going into places, killing people or not killing people, and then withdrawing. And the new counterinsurgency, the surge, entailed going in and clearing and holding, which Colonel MacFarland had already started doing. And then of course, later on, there were additional troops, and General Petraeus said that the surge would not have worked, and the Anbar Awakening would not have taken place, successfully, if they hadn’t had an increase in the number of troops.”

So there you have it. The surge is whatever McCain says it is. The invasion itself was 'clearly' part of the surge, since the surge nor the Anbar Awakening could have taken place without it. Bush's election was part of the surge. Perhaps McCain's own birth was part of the surge. To say that the surge, itself an increase in the number of troops, would not have worked without an increase in the number of troops sounds a bit silly, but here we are. Everything good is the result of the surge, whatever it is and whenever it happened.

Meanwhile, the Sahwa want more money...or else.

Prof. John Cole writes candidly regarding the "success":

The only evidence presented for the thesis that the "surge" "worked" is that Iraqi deaths from political violence have declined in recent months from all-time highs in the second half of 2006 and the first half of 2007. (That apocalyptic violence was set off by the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra in February of 2006, which helped provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war.) What few political achievements are attributed to the troop escalation are too laughable to command real respect.

Proponents are awfully hard to pin down on what the "surge" consisted of or when it began. It seems to me to refer to the troop escalation that began in February, 2007. But now the technique of bribing Sunni Arab former insurgents to fight radical Sunni vigilantes is being rolled into the "surge" by politicians such as John McCain. But attempts to pay off the Sunnis to quiet down began months before the troop escalation and had a dramatic effect in al-Anbar Province long before any extra US troops were sent to al-Anbar (nor were very many extra troops ever sent there). I will disallow it. The "surge" is the troop escalation beginning winter of 2007. The bribing of insurgents to come into the cold could have been pursued without a significant troop escalation, and was.

Aside from defining what proponents mean by the "surge," all kinds of things are claimed for it that are not in evidence. The assertion depends on a possible logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. If event X comes after event Y, it is natural to suspect that Y caused X. But it would often be a false assumption. Thus, actress Sharon Stone alleged that the recent earthquake in China was caused by China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters. That is just superstition, and callous superstition at that. It is a good illustration, however, of the very logical fallacy to which I am referring.

Of course, McCain's claim that "casualties and deaths are at their lowest point" is also false.
McCain is not only wrong about that, either. He has been wrong, so very wrong, for a long time.
Cole sums it up:

Look, it is more important that McCain was consistently wrong. He was wrong about the desirability of going to war against Iraq. He was wrong about it being a cakewalk. He was wrong about there being WMD there. He was wrong about everything. And he was wrong about the troop escalation making things better. The casualty figures dropped in al-Anbar, where few extra US troops were ever sent. They dropped in Basra, from which the British withdrew. Something happened. Putting it all on 30,000 extra troops seems a stretch. And what about all the ethnic cleansing and displacing of persons that took place under the nose of the "surge?" McCain has been wrong about everything to do with Iraq. And he is boasting about his wisdom on it!

Our invasion and occupation of Iraq has removed Iran's greatest foe and increased the profile of Iran throughout the region. The majority Shia 'nation' of Iraq is far closer to Iran than it ever has been. Millions have fled this "success" to live in squalor. Over a hundred thousand Iraqis have died. The 18 Iraqi brigades that Bush was so confident would take over when he made in his speech in January '07 still have not materialised. Provincial elections are moving further away, not closer.

McCain continues to distort the issue of withdrawal "timetables" as well. Obama's 16 month timetable is considered 'surrender' because it is not based on "conditions on the ground".
Yes, surely we must believe that even if Iraq should somehow collapse, Obama will be looking at his watch, and when the 16 months are up he will pull out all of the troops regardless of the conditions on the ground. We believe that, right?
Does McCain have confidence in the surge or not? If so, then let's not worry about "timetables". If not, then all of his talk about "winning" is just froth. Maliki says 16 months is a reasonable timetable, and this whole ugly mess was supposed to be about "liberating" Iraqis and letting them "stand up". If we never make plans to leave, then we never will leave. McCain is now just stalling in hopes of getting some oil concessions out of this mess.

2008-07-05T14:16:00.008-05:00

There seem to be two main thrusts to the aimless campaign of Sen. McCain: security and patriotism.

The "patriotism" angle is nothing more than what the GOP has trotted out for the past five or so years. The term "patriotism" is re-defined to mean "unquestioning support for the Republican agenda", with the corresponding corollary being all Democrats are traitors. Ann Coulter even took the time to document this sad meme in her book "Treason". Unfortunately for Coulter and the GOP, the public isn't buying this concept. With Bush's approval rating sinking to a new low last month, this attempt to shame the public into support for Bush (and by extension, McCain) just hasn't paid off.
As one would expect, though, this approach works well on the Republican base, so the GOP considers it a winning strategy because they believe that the vast majority of the public really, truly, deep down agrees with them. That's why we see the wingnuts constantly employing terms such as "real Americans" or "true Americans" so often. They live in a bubble world where everything that is good is due to the Republicans, and everything that is bad is the fault of the Democrats. Meanwhile, the numbers of those self-identifying as Democrats has risen to record highs. It is a startling exercise in self-delusion that deserves to be dissected and analysed by the MSM after Obama wins, which means that it will probably be overlooked and ignored. With this "patriotism" meme, the GOP is graciously offering us all a chance to love America, which apparently is considered impossible to do if you are a Democrat.
So, faced with a choice between loving America and hating America, naturally (in the mind of the wingnut) the public will come down on the side of the GOP and make the requisite embrace of torture, huge tax cuts for the wealthy to spur investment that never seems to happen, police-state surveillance that would never be abused, hatred of immigrants, hatred of Muslims, ramming fundamentalist Christianity down our throats, endless wars which are vitally necessary and which we will most certainly 'win', and a belief that America can do no wrong.

The second thrust is that of "security", in which we are supposed to be simultaneously terrified and completely confident. Shadowy, ill-defined, and incredibly malicious 'terrorists' are constantly seeking to kill us in this meme. When they aren't, they are trying to force your daughter to wear a burqa or make us all bow down to Allah at gunpoint. Only the heroic Republicans can save us, because they see through these evil schemes and have the courage to do the nasty things that are needed to 'win'...at least in the mind of the wingnut. At the same time, all is well because we are constantly getting valuable intelligence from detainees at Guantanamo and we are 'winning' in Iraq, which somehow means that we are fighting "them" over there instead of fighting them here. By fighting sectarian militias struggling for dominance in Iraq, we somehow are crushing Al-Qaeda, which has become a generic enemy which can freely be employed to describe anyone who disagrees with us regardless if they are Sunni or Shia. Extensive warrantless wiretaps are allowing us to keep tabs on these shadowy evil-doers and thwart their schemes. Brave citizens are constantly keeping their vigilant eyes on any brown-skinned people, as well as any potential lighter-skinned Quislings among us. Fear not, America, the wingnuts are on the job.

As always, though, those nasty polls have a habit of countering the wingnut bubble world, which is why they are continually dismissed out of hand as "biased" - unless they support the wingnut meme, in which case they are crowed over as "proof".
In this case, Rasmussen (an organisation that I personally consider slightly leaning to the Right) has released new results showing that the seeds of the Republican "security" meme are unlikely to fall on very fertile ground in this election campaign. Note that Republicans seem to be ones most likely to buy the "we are safer today" line, while the independent voters (the ones that are supposed to be swinging to the "maverick" candidate) are not really lapping up this meme in any convincing numbers.
Further, the issue that McCain is most relying on to win over voters is the wonderful success in Iraq. This is a tough sell, however, when half the country thinks Iraq will go down in the history books as a failure. The figures for those who think Iraq will be considered a success are eerily similar to the approval numbers for the Decider. Who would ever have thought that?

Of course, the wingnut optimist would point to this and say that these results merely show the potential for the "fear meme". If we really don't think we are safer, then Republicans can beat the drum of fear and drive the voters to the Party that offers security. The trouble with this is, of course, that the Republicans are really only offering a continuation of the policies that have made only 39% think we are safer.

Full story from Rasmussen:

Just 39% of American voters think the nation is safer today than it was before the 9/11 attacks. A larger percentage (44%) disagree. Again, there are big partisan differences on this question. Seventy-percent (70%) of Republicans believe the nation is safer, while just 18% of Democrats agree. Just over a third (34%) of unaffiliated voters believe the country is safer today.

Voters are split on the situation in Iraq in terms of the near future. While 34% think the situation in Iraq will improve in the next six months, 32% believe it will get worse. Another 25% think things will stay about the same.

In the long-term, half of voters (50%) think the War in Iraq will be deemed a failure. Just 32% believe it will be go down in history as a success. Those numbers have changed little over the past month.

Okay, but just how big an issue is "security" for the voters? If the "patriotism" meme is more or less just Republicans talking to themselves, is the "security" meme likely to gain them more traction with public in general?
Rasmussen again:

However, 24% say that national security issues are most important. Among these voters, Republicans lead on the Generic Ballot 51% to 34%. Democrats also lead among the 11% who see domestic issues like Social Security and Health Care as most important. McCain leads among the 9% who say fiscal issues are tops and among the 6% whose primary interest is in cultural issues.
During Election 2004, more than 40% of voters consistently rated national security issues as most important and just one-in-four thought economic issues were the key voting issue.

And which issue is the most important to voters? Can that offer some kind of encouragement to the McCain campaign?

When it comes to issues, 41% of voters consider economic issues to be the highest priority. Among these voters, Democrats lead 59% to 25%.

Uh-oh.
These numbers support my contention that not only is the GOP living in the past and running on the winning issues of the last election, but also that the McCain general election campaign is little more than a primary campaign in which the Republicans are simply talking to themselves. Time and time again we see Fox News "analysts" looking back to the 2000 and 2004 elections and drawing conclusions from those days as if the 2006 elections never happened. The punditry class as a whole seems to similarly be living in 2004 and is basing their views on voters that simply do not exist in sufficient numbers for McCain to win on.

Thus far, very little of the attacks of the attacks the GOP has thrown at Obama have gained any traction at all: secret Muslim, secret Hindu, scary preacher, Rezko, Ayers, secret communist, traitor, scary wife, elitist, defeatist. The sole issue that has gained some traction is "inexperienced". Ironically, this is the only issue employed thus far that has a basis in truth, so the GOP has been somewhat slow in taking full advantage of it, since they seem to have a strong preference for slander. However, how experienced was the Decider in 2000? McCain has not held any executive office, either. And since all of McCain's 'experience' only leads him to be Bush's third term, how much value can be derived from it?

2008-07-03T20:58:00.005-05:00

Early last month, a commenter without a profile named Jason left the following:

If you think the military on the whole does not support their President, you are mistaken, and therefore attempts to characterize them as some poor captive audience that would surely speak up if they could are misguided.

The comment was in response to Bush's penchant for making speeches before military audiences, where anyone who booed him would be subject to severe punishment. March was the last time Bush made an appearance to anything but hand-picked or military audiences, when he was booed and jeered at the opening pitch of the Nationals game.
Now we see:

In its annual reader surveys, the Military Times specialist news group found Bush's approval rate among the military had plummeted from 60 percent in 2005 to just 48 percent in 2007.

Gosh, Jason, it sure seems like someone in the military might want to boo the President if they could get away with it.
Now we find out that the support for McCain among the military and their families is at most 50%. Late last year we found that that support for the Iraq effort was slipping within the military community as well. The Republicans are running a war hero whose campaign mentions his service and POW status every single day, and the military isn't buying it.

McCain has long had a "problem" with veterans groups for his stinginess on vet benefits. Backing the neocon vision of Eternal War hasn't helped win over military families, either. It's somewhat ironic that, while the wingnuts froth over "military service" and re-define the word "patriotism" to mean "complete support of the Republican agenda", more than half of those people actually serving would be considered unpatriotic by the Right because they don't support Bush, McCain, or the premise of the Iraq occupation. Thus we have a complete logical breakdown on the wingnut end: criticising the troops is unpatriotic, but the troops don't support Bush, so the troops are unpatriotic, but that is criticism, so the wingnuts are unpatriotic.

The neocons and wingnuts overplayed their hand years ago when they conflated dissent on the Iraq occupation to treason. Too many people knew too many dissenters whose patriotism was not in question for that to work. Now a strong majority says that Iraq was a mistake or not worth fighting for - in other words, unpatriotic traitors, America-haters, and defeatists. With that sorry gambit, the wingnuts lost the magic talismanic power of the word "traitor", much like the words "liberal", "appeaser", and "terrorist sympathiser" no longer elicit guaranteed rage from the public. Republicans, however, have not realised this because they know that such words work on them. Thus, the GOP will continue its bizarre effort to cast 60% of Americans as treasonous, while simultaneously imagining that these 'traitors' will vote for them. And they will continue to invoke 'the troops' in attempts to stifle dissent, even though half of those troops disagree with the GOP.

full story from AFP:

Iraq undercuts Republican support among military

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Five years into an unpopular war in Iraq, many US military voters are eschewing their traditional Republican ties to support Democrat Barack Obama for president against John McCain, observers say.
...
"I think now you're going to see -- not that it's going to be overwhelming -- but a back away from the Republican Party ... At least (the military vote will) be split this year rather than overwhelmingly Republican," said Korb, a deputy defense secretary under president Ronald Reagan.
He predicted that McCain, the 71-year-old Republican senator for Arizona, will get "at most half of the military votes," instead of the three-to-one ratio that Republican President George W. Bush won in 2004.
The main reason for the defection is the Iraq war, where 4,113 US troops have died since the 2003 invasion and for which the US government has come under fire even from the military, despite recent security improvements.
...
A Los Angeles Times survey of 1,467 people, including 631 soldiers, veterans and their families, in late 2007 found that 57 percent of military respondents believed the Iraq war was not worth fighting -- nearly the same as the overall population (60 percent).
Asked which party they trusted most to handle important issues, the military families chose Democrats over Republicans 39-35 percent, compared to a 39-31 percent ratio among the general population.

And clueless Republicans are still looking backward to 2000 and 2004 for confidence, even though things have changed radically for the GOP.

2008-07-01T14:51:00.004-05:00

Let's look at the comment by Gen. Wesley Clark that seems to have the wingnuts all up in arms and completely rabid:

CLARK: He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has travelled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn't a wartime squadron. He hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn't seen what it's like when diplomats come in and say, "I don't know whether we're going to be able to get this point through or not, do you want to take the risk, what about your reputation, how do we handle this publicly? He hasn't made those calls, Bob.

SCHIEFFER: Can I just interrupt you? I have to say, Barack Obama hasn't had any of these experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.

CLARK: I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.

What, exactly, is untrue about Clark's statement of opinion?
If "riding in a fighter plane and being shot down" really is a qualification to become President, then we have never had a qualified President, have we?
It's hard for me to see how the general is "attacking McCain's military service". McCain and his supporters have made a great deal about McCain's military service. Hillary even joined in with her "threshold for Commander in Chief" remark. Clark is merely stating that McCain's particular military service, however honourable, does not automatically make him qualified.

I have a very good friend who served in the Navy handling heavy construction equipment. Does this make him qualified to be President? If I say "no", am I attacking his service?
Just as it would be highly unlikely that a President would be called upon to handle heavy construction equipment, it would be highly unlikely that a President would be called upon to fly a fighter jet, even he or she weren't 70 years old. And Commander in Chief is only one of the roles the President has to play, as Clark pointed out. In the same interview, immediately previous to the remarks above, Clark specifically honoured McCain's service.

The real issue, however, is that one particular Party devoted itself to smearing a Presidential candidate's military record four years ago. One particular Party mocked that candidate's Purple Heart by handing out purple Band-Aids. One particular Party contended that non-combat service in the National Guard was far more honourable than another candidate's combat experience in the same war. How does this happen?

It happens because Republicans want us to believe that military service only matters if you are a Republican. They have no problem attacking a former four-star general who has been decorated by portraying him as a traitor and anti-military. It's perfectly "patriotic", in their view, to attack the military service of Gen. Wesley Clark, while simultaneously beating him up for putatively doing the exact same thing. This is not about military service. It's all about calling anyone who disagrees with you a traitor, and that is simply un-American.

But Obama hasn't served in the military? So what? McCain is one mentioning his time as a POW on an almost daily basis and having his surrogates tell us about how McCain's military service makes him the only qualified candidate. If Obama said that going to college in Hawaii made him the only qualified candidate, certainly the Republicans would question that premise. And would they be "attacking his educational achievements" if they did so? No, just the premise that this makes him uniquely qualified for executive office.

The President is more of a CEO than a military commander. Which candidate admits that he doesn't know how to use a computer? What corporation would hire a CEO with that lack of skills? Which candidate graduated near the bottom of his class? Shouldn't this be considered for qualification for such a position?

It’s crucially important that we have a political debate in this country that’s at least sophisticated enough to be able to handle the following rather basic idea: Arguing that a person’s record of military service is not a qualification for the presidency does not constitute “attacking” their military credentials; nor can it be described as invoking their military service against them, or as denying their record of war heroism.

Unfortunately, we have one particular Party that does not have much going for it on the issues, and that Party is relying on military service as a defining qualification. Nearly eight years of practical experience has shown us, however, that a President with military experience has made a complete disaster of the military efforts he engaged in. Thus, it's not particularly abstract to consider that "riding in a fighter plane" really doesn't provide you with any critical insights needed to wage a successful military effort. Experience has, indeed, validated General Clark's opinion.

2008-06-14T16:23:00.003-05:00

The GOP sets fund-raising quotas for House Representatives depending on their status. Those in the leadership positions are expected to raise more money than other Representatives.
It's not looking very good, either. Less than half of their "target" has been met so far.

Rep. Davis of Virginia has only raised $50,000 of the $605,000 he was expected to come up with, and he is the head of the NRCC. On the Senate side, the NRSC had $19.4 million on hand as of April 30. The Democratic counterpart had $37.6 million on hand, by comparison.

One of the reasons that we are seeing so much slander from Republicans this cycle is because it generates free media attention. A campaign can come up with any kind baseless charge or rumour, and the media will run with it without investigation, qualifying it with the cryptic "some are saying...", and the opponent's campaign will then have to spend money debunking and discrediting it.

Obviously, the Republican's cash shortfall will reduce the number and quality of ad buys. It will also, however, restrict the number and quality of promotional events and campaign workers. And with Republican enthusiasm markedly down this cycle, it will be harder to fill volunteer positions. The only upside is that Bush's economic policies have created more unemployed people with more free time to work on campaigns for free, but that's a factor working in "favour" of both Parties.

Republican House and Senate campaigns have thus far made heavy use of "cookie-cutter" ads, a generic, one-size-fits-all ad in which the candidate's name and picture merely fills in the appropriate blanks. While cheap, it fails to appeal to local issues and ties the candidate to the Bush Administration by virtue of its national nature.

The only good news for the GOP is that the RNC has raised almost double the amount the DNC has raised so far. But this money is for the convention and Presidential campaign, and the McCain ticket is unlikely to boost down-ticket races (e.g. House and Senate) significantly. Also, McCain is generally failing to gain traction against Obama in spite of recent major media buys.

story from AP:

WASHINGTON - House rank and file Republicans are tens of millions of dollars short of meeting fundraising targets set by their own campaign committee in advance of this fall's elections, according to figures circulating among the leadership, heightening concerns inside the party about major losses in November.

Most recent figures show that GOP lawmakers have brought $27 million into the coffers of the National Republican Congressional Committee in the past 17 months, far short of the target of about $58 million. Compounding the challenge, they will soon be asked to raise another $20 million or more to help candidates in selected battleground districts.
...
Republicans concede that the perception of another impending defeat makes potential donors even less inclined to contribute.

On top of this, one of the NRCC's accountants has swindled them out of a lot of money:

Compounding the problem, the committee has spent months trying to untangle the affairs of a former key staff member, Christopher Ward, who is alleged to have stolen at least $725,000 from the organization. An internal probe alleged that the former treasurer used his authority to siphon money from 2001 and 2007. The FBI is also investigating.
Ward's lawyer, Ronald Machen, declined comment on the internal probe. The NRCC said it spent $500,000 to pay for the investigation and another $300,000 to upgrade its accounting operations.

Did they really spend $800,000 chasing after $725,000? It looks that way. The money Ward is alleged to have embezzled is only 1% of the total target amount, and it was allegedly embezzled over a period of six years, so it's not as if this is the big reason for the fund-raising shortfalls.

Overall, the NRCC, which began the election cycle with a debt of more than $10 million, showed cash on hand of $6.7 million as of April 30 in its most recent report to the Federal Election Commission. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reported cash on hand of $45.2 million.

2008-06-14T13:54:00.002-05:00

McCain's "town hall meeting" on Thursday in New Jersey was covered by a blogger.

Far from an open forum in which he tackled tough questions, it was instead a campaign rally in which the questions were provided ahead of time to selected individuals that McCain was directed to by aides. He answered a total of seven questions from the audience, and abruptly ended the "town hall" when it went off-script.

The seating for the event was arranged ahead of time, and with cameras in mind. Those cameras were also directed to be turned off by McCain's staff whenever it was convenient.

The seating was staged. There were about 20 people with Veteran's hats and all were seated directly in line with McCain's podium in the front and back. Your cameras from home would make it appear that half the people there were veterans. In reality it was about 1%. Mixed into the Veterans was one angry woman who had a sign claiming she was a Hillary supporter voting McCain. This one sign was placed directly in the spot where the cameras were most likely to pick it up. She was planted there. It also appears that there was one singular woman who pulled the same stunt Thursday night at the so called Fox News McCain town hall meeting in New York. These people aren't real Clinton supporters, this too is staged.
...
The questions and answers were not chosen among random people. 5 of the 7 questioners came from the VIP section including a woman in a wheelchair who was placed there ahead of time by a senior McCain staffer and then pointed to for a question even though she never raised her hand. They were plants. A couple of them were reading from index cards. A sixth questioner was also a plant in the bleachers about 40 feet to my right. He was a local Republican mayor whom the locals were familiar with.

So we have five questions coming from a group of pre-selected people in the "VIP section", some of which were reading from index cards. One of the two questions coming from the audience came from a known-to-be-sympathetic local Republican politician. The last question, which was from the audience, was the one that ended this charade, and was the only question that McCain was asked during the entire affair that wasn't scripted or pre-arranged.
How did this minor gamble work out?

The 7th questioner was chosen because McCain thought a 9 year old child was going to ask the question. But the father took the mike, told how his wife and child flew out of Newark on 9/11 and that could have been them. He then asked a very simple question, "Why haven't we gotten Bin Laden?"

A bunch of Obama people and others cheered. (I refrained, I was to be the next question.) McCain got pissed, started rambling about the Diamondbacks and Yankees and Rudy Giuliani on a screen, said as President Bin Laden would be caught (Guess this means Bin Laden is still safe for another few months) and people were laughing that McCain wasn't answering the question.

You could see the veins in McCain starting to burst, he got very uncomfortable that his scripted rally just got derailed by this gentleman and then he ended the rally by thanking everyone and saying God Bless America.

So this is the kind of forum that McCain expects Obama to submit to?
Seven questions, 70% of which came from people that the campaign hand-picked, vetted, and most probably handed the proper questions to beforehand, another from a known Republican politician, and the last one was intended to be from a child, and this was supposed to be some kind of open forum where "tough questions" are asked?
The moment it goes off-script with a question from a well-meaning and sympathetic audience member, the whole thing is called to an end. This unscripted question wasn't even really answered.

During the 2004 campaign, Bush also only appeared before pre-screened audiences in staged affairs like this one. He continues to only publicly speak before military audiences and hand-picked crowds, or in front of organisations known to be sympathetic in which everything is arranged beforehand. No dissent can be displayed in Republican America. A fairy-tale world in which everyone loves the Decider is all that the media is allowed to show, and McCain is emulating that practise.

Meanwhile, Democrats are criticised for refusing to appear on openly hostile outlets such as Fox News by people who think that this kind of "town hall meeting" is for real.
This might play well with the Republican Faithful, but the rest of America will not be persuaded by this North Korea-style of public discourse. Republicans, however, really believe that America - the "true" America, the Silent Majority America, the "real people"- still supports them and will swallow this kind of act.
They are in for a surprise in November. Their delusion is what is preventing them from cancelling elections altogether due to some concocted "emergency".

2008-06-10T14:47:00.003-05:00

A BBC investigation into the mysterious financial black hole known as the Iraq invasion has just been released. Not surprisingly, Bush's contractor buddies ripped off taxpayers for multiple billions, and the Administration has issued orders to prevent further investigation. Are we now to 'discover' that the BBC is part of the "Far Left" that no longer takes every single utterance of the Decider as gospel truth? Perhaps.
The Republicans have created a weird "rule" that allows any facts to be dismissed out of hand based on the putative and alleged association of the source with anyone who disagrees with the Administration. Perhaps some investigator's spouse once attended a conference in which someone else said something critical of the Bush Administration; obviously the entire report can then be cast as the work of "Bush haters". The only people who can say anything critical of the Administration are those within it, and in this case, they are dismissed as "traitors".

Story from the BBC:

A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.
For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC's Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources.
A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations.
The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies.

War profiteering
While George Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted.
To date, no major US contractor faces trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq.
The president's Democrat opponents are keeping up the pressure over war profiteering in Iraq.
Henry Waxman who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said: "The money that's gone into waste, fraud and abuse under these contracts is just so outrageous, its egregious.
"It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history."

Why is the Bush Administration preventing any investigation into this? Will "the terrorists" somehow benefit by a public revelation of where these billions went? Perhaps, since the Bush Administration has continually equated those who criticise both the cost and pretext of the invasion as "terrorist sympathisers", they may make an extremely flimsy case based on 'national security'. In other words, if the public knew what went on behind the scenes, they would be opposed to the Iraq effort, and that would make us less safe as a nation. Of course, that ship has sailed, with over 2/3 of Americans now saying the whole thing was a mistake. But it doesn't have to make sense for the Administration to use it as a justification.

The truth is that the Administration is preventing the investigation of these allegations so that more evidence can disappear: hard drives erased, documents "mistakenly" discarded, suppressed audits classified as secret for decades, etc.

Again and again we have heard stories of how the Administration has actively blocked investigations of corruption within the Iraqi government as well. While promoting and crowing about the efforts of an "anti-corruption team" into Iraqi ministries, the Administration was simultaneously severely limiting what this "team" of two men could investigate. The result was that they could investigate nothing, and they sat playing computer games for months while Bush claimed credit for their "work". Several stories have also come out regarding arms purchases, where the U.S. or Iraqi government was billed for brand-new, high quality equipment only to receive used, out-dated, or broken equipment instead, with the difference going into a crony's pocket. The BBC investigation uncovers another case of just this kind of abuse:

He and his associates siphoned an estimated $1.2 billion out of the ministry.
They bought old military equipment from Poland but claimed for top class weapons.
Meanwhile they diverted money into their own accounts.

It is truly staggering that Republicans can cry shrilly about "earmarks" and "pork", while at the same time blocking investigations of over $23 billion in fraud in invasion and occupation expenditures. The justification is that there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Why is there no evidence of wrongdoing? Because the Bush Administration has continually prevented any investigations based on unprecedented secrecy. Thus, the Republicans claim this is merely an example of the "criminalisation of politics", in which poor Republican operatives are being persecuted for being on the wrong side of the Aisle.

When one starts with the premise that the Republicans and their minions can do no wrong, it is very easy to justify stonewalling investigations. And once something is investigated, it is suddenly "in the past" and it is time to "move on" and "put it behind us". Of course, this is only a last-resort position, because the first line of defence is always that the investigators are biased. In other words, the investigators did not decide at the outset that nothing wrong was done, or that the investigators had been critical of some aspect of the invasion and occupation in the past, making them obviously part of the vaguely-defined "Far Left".

The GOP had better brace itself for a steady stream of this kind of revelation for years to come once Bush leaves office. Their traditionally weak defence is only effective on the faithful, and only possible with the complicity of the Executive to conceal facts. Mid-term elections will feature Republican sound bites of unswerving loyalty to Bush contrasted with revelations of corruption that they defied anyone to investigate.

2008-06-10T13:16:00.003-05:00

Remember when one of the arguments in favour of invading Iraq was that gas prices would drop below the 2003 level? This was one of the populist points made repeatedly. If you opposed the invasion, then you wanted gas prices to remain at $2 per gallon, because "we would get the oil" and that meant really cheap gas somehow (though refinery capacity has been the chief bottleneck for gasoline price drops for decades now).

Remarkably, this bogus claim was also used in the First Gulf War.

And, even now, it's is being put forward as a reason for invading Iran, because this time "we" will get the oil -- or rather, the multinational oil companies will get the oil, and we all 'know' that they will act in our best interests.

Not so remarkably, the Gulf States failed to see our invasion of Iraq as a shining success that made them safer and more secure, and thus declined to increase production at the Decider's request.

2008-06-10T12:08:00.003-05:00

The NRSC is the GOP organisation responsible for regaining the Republican majority in the Senate.
The leader of the NRSC, John Ensign, has availed himself of the peculiar Republican propensity to define "success" as "whatever the current situation is". Thus, the GOP is forever "succeeding" in everything that it does.

Now, the NRSC has re-defined "success" as losing no more than eight Senate seats.

From TPM:

In a further sign that Republican hopes are fading badly, the head of the Senate GOP's campaign committee has set a new goal for the party this Fall: Not to lose too many Senate seats.

NRSC chair John Ensign has moved the goal posts, according to the Savannah Morning News, saying that the GOP will have succeeded if they don't lose more than eight seats.

Ensign pointed out that if the Dems win nine seats they'll get to the filibuster-proof magic number of 60 -- at which point, Ensign warned, "they will be able to do pretty much whatever they want."

So if the Dems can't get to a 60-seat super-majority, the GOP will have won. Talk about lowering the bar.

Story from SavannahNow.com:

Democrats now have 49 seats, with two independents who vote with them.

Republicans hold 49 seats now, with 23 up for re-election this year, and five GOP senators retiring, giving away the incumbent advantage.

Democrats only have to defend 12 seats this year.

An eight-seat loss would be a very bad year for any party, even the party holding the White House at the end of a second term, when voters typically hunger for change. So, it's surprising for a party leader to speak in such frank terms about major losses.

Why would the number of seats matter if it's anything less than 51 and taking the majority, a circumstance Ensign describes as unlikely? By holding at least 41, the GOP would prevent the majority party from the 60 votes required to end filibusters and to push an unpopular bill to a vote on the floor through the cloture procedure.

"With 41 votes in the U.S. Senate, you can (1) block bad legislation, and (2) you can make the majority respect the minority's rights. And you can help craft good legislation," Ensign said. "If the Democrats were able to get to 60 votes - literally even if they get to 57-58 votes because they always seem to pick off a couple or three Republicans on a lot of votes - and if they win the White House ... they will be able to do pretty much whatever they want."

In other words, the Republicans would be unable to continue their obstructionist campaign.
In reality, however, there are a number of conservative Democrats who would putatively take some of those Senate seats, so the phrase "do pretty much whatever they want" is really just fear-mongering. Still, much of what we have seen for the past six months (at least) are straight Party-line votes by the Republican senators on issues that can easily be turned against a senator up for election. The GOP has chosen to sacrifice senators in order for Bush to prove that he's still "relevant". This also means that the next mid-term elections will see roughly the same number of Republican senators up for election, who will still presumably be running on the Bush agenda, since that's what got them elected in the first place.

Kel at The Osterley Times covers the doubts among other Republicans over McCain's campaign.
She also has video of McCain claiming that Putin is the President of Germany.
The Democrats are also making gains in fund-raising.
Al Franken has won the DFL nomination to take on Norm Coleman in Minnesota.
John McCain says that the Constitution states that America is "a Christian nation".

McCain says, "I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation." He continues, "I think the number one issue that is in the selection, that which people should make a selection of the president of the United States is, 'Will this person carry on in the Judeo-Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?'"

The United States Constitution, of course, specifically states that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Recall that this "Christian nation" line was the basis for the right-wing freakout over a Hindu prayer being made in the Senate. Recall also that fundamentalist evangelical Christianity only came into existence in America more than a century after the Constitution was signed and ratified. McCain is now using the metaphorical corpses of the Founding Fathers as ventriloquist dummies for an argument in favour of something that they never advocated or were aware of. McCain is using the term "Christian" as interchangeable with "born-again fundamentalist Christian", which is a gross distortion and nothing near "straight talk". Indeed, in many of the former colonial states such fundamentalist views would have been punished as heresy, but now we are being led to believe that evangelical Christianity was not only in existence at the time, but also accepted and prevalent.

2008-06-10T09:21:00.003-05:00

The "Phase 2" intelligence report proves exactly what so many people (like me) said in the build-up to the invasion. It wasn't that there wasn't any media pointing this out, it was that one had to dig deep and go to foreign news sources to find out about the dubious claims the Administration made.

It is completely clear that the Bush Administration, and their minions in the Pentagon, went out of their way to only look for information that supported their assertions. Iraqi exiles, many of whom had not been to Iraq in decades, were used as sources (and handsomely compensated) for reports that described the inner workings and policies of Hussein's administration. These exiles were, in fact, coached in their "evidence" by being told in advance which "facts" would be paid for and which ones wouldn't, as well as being told which "facts" would discredit them as a source. Beyond that, it appears that this propensity for gullibility allowed the Iranian intelligence services to shape the "information" provided in order to facilitate Iran's goal of seeing their greatest foe, Saddam, removed from power.

The reason that so many foreign intelligence services concluded the same thing as the Bush Administration is that these foreign services were provided the same false information that the Administration presented as fact. In one case, the Niger yellowcake "fact", the British intelligence services questioned whether this assertion relied on a known-to-be-discredited report from a few years previous. In fact, the assertion did, but the Administration had simply re-packaged the discredited report and pressured some all-too-compliant flunkies to present it as something new, so that it could be said with a straight face that this was "new intelligence". Over and over again, foreign intelligence services started with the premise that the Administration's assertions were sound, and again and again "discovered" the same phony informants providing the same phony "facts" and vouched for by the U.S. In short, the Administration misled not only America, but our allies as well.

Thus, the world was led to believe that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was willing to (and planning to) give them to Al-Qaeda. The world was also led to believe that Al-Qaeda was allied with Saddam, and thus the invasion would be "payback" for 9/11. Saddam was also alleged to have nuclear weapons, though we weren't exactly sure about that. But if he did, that meant he would provide them to Al-Qaeda, wouldn't it? I mean, if Botswana had nukes, they could provide them to Al-Qaeda, so hadn't we better invade Botswana, too? This line of reasoning could be used to justify the invasion of any nation on the planet. Any country that had a brewery could, conceivably, produce biological weapons. And they could, conceivably, sell them to Al-Qaeda. Any country that had a high-school chemistry lab could produce chemical weapons, and thus could make these weapons available to Al-Qaeda.

So the Administration set up a generic, one-size-fits-all case for the invasion, occupation, and installation of a "friendly" (i.e. puppet) government of any nation. Then it created a NIE that boldly proclaimed the right of the U.S. to invade any country that could be a threat, even if it was not a threat at the time. And when the President made his statement that "you are either with us or against us", it was clear what was implied: any world leader that failed to say what they supposed to say, or do what they were expected to do, was a potential target for invasion.
And then they pointed to the support of these world leaders as some kind of vindication of their case.

It was circular logic on an astounding scale, given credence by the mistaken belief that the U.S. wouldn't actually lie so boldly, so profoundly, so comprehensively about something.
But, of course, we now know that they did. The entire world knows it, too. The foreign leaders that jostled to be first on the list to crawl up Bush's rectum have now been removed from office and discredited. Their careers are over. And if a real threat were ever to emerge, the U.S. would be hard-pressed to persuade the international community of it's credibility. Thus, Bush has made us weaker, more vulnerable, and less prepared to deal with terrorism. On the plus side, we got rid of one of several dictators in the Middle East and one of dozens in the world. In doing so, we removed the primary obstacle to Iran's regional dominance and virtually created a failed state to take Saddam's place.

Kel at The Osterley Times has video of MSNBC's report on the Phase 2 report.

You may also wish to check out the DailyKos post titled "The Two Realities" for a look at how the neo-cons and their media minions are spinning this report. An excerpt:

Basically, there are two interpretations of the report. One conclusion is that Bush, Cheney, and other war proponents drastically stretched the true meaning of what intelligence they did have in order to make a case not borne out by that evidence. They took some true intelligence, and some known-to-be-untrustworthy intelligence, and some "intelligence" that consisted of nothing more than nonsense fabricated by the administration intended to heighten the perception of imminent massive threat, and presented it to the public, and Congress, and even the United Nations in an attempt to make the case for preemptive war against a secondary power with no connection to the actual terrorist attacks we were supposedly responding to.
The other interpretation, which Hiatt elucidates masterfully, is (1) Who Cares, It's Old News, and (2) Well, They Didn't Lie About Everything, So There, and (3) You'd Better Let Them Stretch Intelligence All They Want Next Time Too Or You'll Be Sorry Because The Terrorists Will Get You.

With regard to the summary of Hiatt's points, it sounds incredibly weak.
It is "old news" precisely because the Administration has stonewalled for so long. It is relevant because, as I said before, the world (and the American public) will now be deeply suspicious of any assessment of any future threat, even if it is real. It is also relevant because the neocons and the Bush Administration continue to conflate Iraq with 9/11 and continue to assert that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has made us safer at home. This is simply another case of the Republicans diverting attention from their lies and errors by asking the world to "move on" and "stop pointing fingers", while admitting nothing. Does anyone remember how the Republicans described (and some continue to describe) those who questioned the invasion and occupation as "traitors", "America-haters", and "supporters of terrorism"? One wonders where this grandiose aversion to "finger-pointing" was then. Iraq was, and still is, the primary "achievement" of the neocons, but now they are asking us to stop looking so closely at it. It is the primary justification for the Republican efforts to circumvent the Constitution, but this is now something that is "old news" and need not be examined further. Even as McCain (and most of the other Republicans that were up for their Party's nomination) contends that Iraq is the "pre-eminent challenge of our century", they still try to dismiss the basis for it as a settled issue.

Iraq is the foundation of Republican self-identification. One cannot be taken seriously in the GOP even today without acknowledging that the invasion was necessary and fully justified, and should be pursued to whatever capricious and ever-shifting definition of "success" or "victory" the Party comes up with. Thus, it is completely relevant to discuss that the rationale for the invasion and occupation was flawed, false, and distorted. As long as the GOP continues to support, defend, and take credit for the invasion of Iraq, then the examination of the underpinnings of that policy are fair game.

Some of the "facts" that the Administration presented turned out to be untrue, but the Administration contends that it was merely the victim of faulty intelligence. However, it is clear from former Administration officials that there was an eagerness to discard contrary evidence, and to prevent anything that might lead to contrary evidence from even being examined. In short, the Bush Administration created a situation that encouraged faulty intelligence to be provided to them, and penalised those who worked to provide a contrary case. Thus, if the Administration was a victim, it was a willing victim.

Let's not lose sight of what the Bush Administration's plan was: an easy invasion and a hand-off to Ahmed Chalabi's puppet government, and a happily-ever-after ending. Then bask in the glory of success and a permanent Republican majority, backed by a police state.
The Republicans gambled and lost.
However, the mere fact they could have gambled and won is now being trotted out as some kind of lame-ass excuse for the faithful.
So if anyone takes their mortgage payment and spends it on lottery tickets, then the mortgage company is just being a bunch of small-minded bastards if they move to foreclose on you, because you could have won millions. So let's not "point fingers" at people over why we are now living in a cardboard box in the alley. Let's "move on" and focus on getting a spot a the local homeless shelter. Let's "come together" and stop the "useless bickering" over who gambled away what and who ended up suffering. And, most importantly, let's not come away from this thinking that we shouldn't try to go for those millions again, because we could win next time. Don't you want to win?

Yes, the Republicans now want the world to acknowledge the brilliance of their policies, based not on the real outcome, but rather the best possible outcome. And this has been one of the primary trademarks of the Republicans, as I have said before: The best possible outcome is the only likely outcome. If you fail to believe that, then you somehow fail to believe in America. This means you that "hate America", and everything you say can be dismissed out of hand.
Nothing has changed. The circular logic of the neo-conservatives remains a fixture and staple of the GOP. The neo-cons remain eager and ready to employ this circular logic as often as is possible, because there is simply no price to be paid when they gamble and lose.

2008-06-01T17:37:00.003-05:00

Just a note about the fracas at the RBC.

For all of you idiots going on about voting rights, civil rights, and "count every vote", I will just remind you that we are talking about a primary election here, not a general election.

You have no 'right' to vote in a primary election. A primary is sponsored and sanctioned by the political party, and they can make whatever crazy rules they like. The Party can require that you pay $10,000 before you can cast your vote. They can require that you worship an idol, raise the dead, slay a dragon or defeat the Black Knight in mortal combat as a prerequisite to participation. The Party can say that all red-headed voters count as ten votes and blondes count as one-fourth of a vote. The Party can dismiss any delegate based on bad breath, bad hair day, body weight or insufficient breast size. They can make a corpse a delegate if they please. They can settle the nomination based on an arm-wrestling contest if they desire. It's an internal Party process to decide the nominee of the Party, not a general election. Nobody's "vote" is being taken away, because nobody that voted in the primary voted in a "real" election. It's that way for every Party, because that's our system. A Party is not government, it's a Party. If a Party chooses to be open to everyone, fine, but it's not some Constitutional requirement.

Second, all of you idiots saying that you are going to vote for McCain in the general election unless you get your way in the Party process are just dooming your own candidate. Unless Hillary plans to run on the Republican ticket in 2012, her ability to get Democrats to vote for the Republican candidate is not a real plus, is it? Destroying the Democratic Party is not going to get a woman elected President, unless you think Laura Bush might run in 2012. Perhaps you think voting for an elderly white male is going to make some kind of feminist statement. Yeah, that'll shake things up, won't it?

You're a bunch of electoral suicide bombers, and you're gonna show us all, aren't ya? Yeah, you're going to show the one Party that has a chance of nominating a woman as a Presidential candidate in the future that sticking your toe in that water is toxic. You're gonna teach us all that you won't vote for the Party nominee unless it's a woman, so what Party wouldn't want your fickle and highly conditional support? Well, the GOP, for one.
I mean, after seeing the GOP hijacked by Christian fundamentalists for all of these years, I'm sure that Democrats are looking at you fools and thinking "hey, we could get hijacked by single-issue voters, too! Cool!". You're making it abundantly clear that you could not care less about who is more "electable" by promising to vote for the Republican candidate. Do you perhaps think that you win some kind of prize if you vote for the winning candidate?

Here's the thing, idiots. You are fighting over who is going to get the privilege of defeating John McCain in November, and you morons are threatening to vote for McCain. See how stupid that is? See how counter-productive that is? You don't beat McCain by voting for him. So if you want a Party that is invested in beating John McCain to take you seriously, perhaps vowing to vote for him is not the most persuasive line of reasoning. And for all of you noble idiots standing up for voter's rights, I'm sure that voting for the Party that disenfranchised Florida in 2000 will make a bold statement about your concerns.

Yeah, you'll show us all. You'll make us all sorry Hillary ever got on the primary ballot in any state. You'll show us that you can't generate enough contributions to bail your own candidate out of her $30 million debt. You'll stand up for racists and Islamophobes everywhere and show how much power they really have in America. You'll show future generations of women that you're not afraid to vote against their interests if it involves some kind of tantrum. So strap on that electoral suicide vest and get out there and show us how worthless your support really is to our cause. Because the rest of us aren't going to stop believing in progressive candidates or issues simply because you want to hold your breath until you get your way.

2008-06-01T14:40:00.002-05:00

Yeah, I know this is turning into a weekend blog, but the Minnesota weather is finally nice and I don't want to sit at home more than I have to.
There are however, two stories that I want to touch on, and they don't include the Democratic nomination race.

First, Australia is pulling out of Iraq.

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - Australia, a staunch U.S. ally and one of the first countries to commit troops to the Iraq war five years ago, ended combat operations there Sunday, a Defense Department official said.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was swept into office in November largely on the promise that he would bring home the country's 550 combat troops by the middle of 2008.
Rudd has said the Iraq deployment has made Australia more of a target for terrorism.
The combat troops are expected to return home over the next few weeks. Local media reports said the first of the soldiers had already landed in Australia on Sunday afternoon.

One of Bush's strongest foreign allies, Howard, was defeated in an election last November by Kevin Rudd. Howard was one of several Bush allies thrown out of office over the past few years, which is merely proof to the wingnuts that the entire planet now has BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome).
Australia is bringing home her combat troops, however:

Several hundred other troops will remain in Iraq to act as security and headquarters liaisons and to guard diplomats. Australia will also leave behind two maritime surveillance aircraft and a warship to help patrol oil platforms in the Gulf.

Second, Bush gave another of his tedious speeches in which he repeated pretty much everything he's said a million times before. As usual, it was made to an essentially captive audience that was not allowed to express themselves. The "twist", such as it is, is that now Bush is saying that Iraq and Afghanistan are like WW2.

During a speech held at the graduating ceremony of the Air Force Academy cadets, U.S. President George W. Bush said the war waged by America in Iraq and Afghanistan is a “great struggle” and compared it with World War II, The New York Times reported.

Considering the fact that the WW II was regarded by many world leaders, military chiefs and historians as “the war of all wars” or “the war to end all wars” – let’s hope they were right at least on the first one – Bush’s assertion is in a very strong contrast with another one in which he said the U.S. military wasn’t exactly prepared for the aftermath of the first stages of the war.
...
The strategy of United States’ current enemies is to cause it to lose nerve and “retreat before the job is done”, said the President. He exemplified the situation using the experiences of Germany and Japan, which were defeated by the U.S. in WW II only to later become democratic states and allies.

This has been the primary neocon knee-jerk reflex.
Iraq and Afghanistan are counter-insurgency campaigns that are as different from WW2 as can be. There is no "terrorist capital" to overtake. There is no bunker headquarters to storm. The terrorists do not control territory as the Axis forces did, nor do they have air, naval, or armoured divisions. They do not have an industrial or economic infrastructure that can be bombed. The terrorists do not have the ability to conscript an army. In fact, their entire "command structure" is non-existent to the point of being what we termed "irregulars" in WW2.
WW2 was a completely conventional war. The Global War On Terror is much closer to a law enforcement effort (like the War On Drugs) than a conventional military conflict. But you don't get jingoistic cheer leading for law enforcement efforts like you do when you conflate something with a conventional war. It's like saying that the Highway Patrol is engaged in a 'war' on speeders. Yeah, our "boys" are moving in on the Speeders' capital city, breaking through the trenches with our tanks. Once we capture the head of the Speeders Army, we will finally be free of the terrible threat from these lunatics that want to threaten our families and destroy our way of life. Doncha wanna win?

Ironically, what Iraq has proven is that a few hundred "irregulars" can get the U.S. to squander a trillion dollars, more than 4000 lives, our civil rights and our alliances in some misguided foreign adventure. Their goal has been achieved, and it never was to cause us to lose our nerve or retreat before the job is done. There is no fixed, finite number of "terrorists" like there was a fixed number of Germans or Japanese.

We are 'fighting' a tactic, not a nation.

How is that like WW2?

2008-05-25T17:47:00.004-05:00

The Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has issued a new fatwa concerning the occupation troops.
See here and here for Prof. Juan Cole's take on Sistani's recent rumblings on the approval of attacks on foreign occupation troops. The latest development is that apparently Sistani has forbidden the sale of food to occupation troops.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani replied:

' Selling foodstuffs to the Occupying Powers is not permitted.'

He is also rumoured to be preparing public statements in opposition to the new SFA between Iraq and the U.S.

Sistani is a very important Shia leader. Although Sunnis would not consider such a fatwa binding on a Sunni, it certainly carries at least symbolic weight among all of the region's Muslims. The "Awakening" (Sahwa) forces have been getting a generally raw deal from the Iraqi government for some time, and a feeling that they are working against their own long-term interests has been growing. On top of this, Maliki is not honouring his end of the truce with the Sadrists and has arrested hundreds of them during Friday prayers. These Sadrists will be held in the torture centres known as the Iraqi prison system, likely without trial. While wingnuts may applaud such a show of "strength", such an action weakens Maliki by proving that he cannot be relied upon in future truces.

Of course, the ban on food sales shouldn't seriously impact the occupation troops, but it does leave the door open for further decrees of non-cooperation with those troops. It also symbolically bolsters the support of Shia leaders such as Sadr.

2008-05-18T17:01:00.006-05:00

The media honeymoon for McCain may be coming to an end.
Kel at The Osterley Times has video of an MSNBC segment in which a rather contorted defence of McCain's recent statements are met with ridicule and chuckling.

The first part concerns McCain's recent imaginary scenario of victory in Iraq by 2013. While the wingnuts have nearly wet themselves in ecstasy over a fictional future, the press has remained puzzled if this constitutes some kind of "timetable" for Iraq. Not so, says McCain in the video, who then goes on to say that we have already won in Iraq, right now in 2008. McCain's media defender dismisses the entire thing as "aspirational", but fails to take up the issue of our recent "win" beyond making a broad claim that "the surge is working".

I am at a loss to see how John McCain's ability to simply imagine a world in which all Republican talking points turn out to be true actually helps his Party in any way. It completely baffles me how we can spend $12 billion a week on a war (really an occupation) that apparently we have already won. Has anyone informed our military that it's "over"?
McCain seems to be living in his own little world, and the media is finally pointing it out.
For more chuckles, check out Oliver Willis' use of McCain's magical ability to change the future.

2013. Wow, we’re finally here. It feels like just yesterday it was 2008 and the world was so different from how it is now, in 2013. My, how things have changed! And strangely, everything changed for the better, especially for me. It’s as if I wrote a fictional account of how things would change and just wrote it from a positive point of view or something stupid like that.

It seems we could have saved ourselves a lot of lives and money if McCain had just imagined Iraq over in 2004.

The second part of the video is about McCain's flip-flop on Hamas, in which we learn that McCain was simply "giving Hamas the benefit of a doubt" back in 2006. More laughs all around.
McCain is a mother lode of comedic value given the dramatic contortions his "Straight Talk" has taken, but the far greater comedic gold will be found in the statements of those who try to explain and defend him. The media smells blood. Not the "lapel pin" type of blood, but rather the "WTF is this guy talking about?" kind of blood.

2008-05-18T09:56:00.004-05:00

I'm passing on the Sunday Eel Pout this week, mostly because I failed to do my homework during the week. If I were to award an Eel Pout, however, it would go to Bush for the dismal failure of his "jawbone" effort in Saudi Arabia.

But Bush’s Saudi Arabia junkets are perhaps more symbolic than anything else. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest that even if the King had agreed to increase Saudi Arabia’s oil production, its effect on lowering gas prices in the U.S. would have been minimal to non-existent.

The Leader Of The Free World still thinks he can arrogantly demand that every country tremble at his whim. Israel's Olmert is the sole remaining world leader who still openly supports Bush's neocon agenda and methods. And Olmert is even less popular domestically than Bush is here. So he hangs his hat on an unpopular hard-line leader, praises Israel enthusiastically and uncritically, gives the Arab world a stern lecture about how they had better shape up or he'll stop liking them as much as he does... and then goes to the most powerful Arab leader in the world asking for a favour. But wait, it gets dumber. The Gulf States (Saudis included) have taken an immense financial beating by sticking with the dollar to denominate oil exports. Without this sacrifice on their part, the U.S. economy would be in a severe depression. And, by way of thanks, Bush slams them and talks down to them, followed by a request for them to engage in yet another expensive action on our behalf.
And, unbelievably, this didn't work.

This "do what we tell you to or we'll kick your ass" approach is inherently weak, but it is the only "diplomatic" tool in the neocon's bag. Whatever "carrots" we have go to three countries: Israel, Egypt, and Colombia. Oh, but we have arms sales, too - expensive weapons systems with gravy train maintenance contracts for the U.S. defence industry, complete with fail-safes that ensure that they can only be used against enemies that the U.S. wants them to be used against. And along with it comes American "advisers" ready to subvert your military or blackmail you by pulling the plug on these weapons systems if you get "uppity".

So, yeah, no Eel Pout this week, but you know who would get it if there was one.

Instead, I'm taking a look at another poll.

Just 39% of American voters now believe the U.S. and its allies are winning the War on Terror. That’s down six points from a month ago and the first time that figure has dropped below 40% since last September.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey also found that 27% now believe the terrorists are winning. That’s up three points from a month ago and up seven points over the past two months.

By a 69% to 14% margin, Republicans believe the U.S. and its allies are winning the War on Terror. Democrats are evenly divided on the question. Among unaffiliated voters, 21% say the U.S. and its allies are winning while 34% say the terrorists have the advantage.

A separate survey found that Americans now trust Democrats more than Republicans when it comes to issues of national security. Another survey has found that the number of people who consider themselves Democrats has grown to record levels.

Just 24% now expect the situation in Iraq to get better in the next six months while (39%) hold the opposite view and believe the situation will get worse. That’s the second straight month that a plurality has expected things to get worse. Prior to April, a plurality had held the more optimistic view for six consecutive months.

Just 28% of Likely Voters now say history will deem the U.S. mission in Iraq a success. That’s down four points from a month ago, six points over the past two months, and is the first time fewer than 30% have been optimistic on this point since last August. Most Americans–52%--now say history will judge the U.S. mission in Iraq to be a failure.

Yeah, polls go up and polls go down, but they sure aren't moving in the direction Republicans would like to see, are they? But delusional Republicans still think they can win by running on the GWOT, security, and Iraq. Watch for more of the "Scary Muslims want to make your daughter wear a burqa!" ads in the coming months. And undoubtedly we will all be treated to the "secret Muslim" talisman that only seems to work on the incredibly stupid and the incredibly brainwashed. And it will run alongside ads telling us that this 'secret Muslim' is also somehow simultaneously controlled by a Scary Black Christian Preacher, just to guarantee that nobody with any critical thinking skills will be included in the Republican target demographic. How could this possibly fail? The Wise Party Elders decreed it, after all.

Oh, and this little bit:

Just 22% now say that President George W. Bush has done a good or excellent job handling the situation in Iraq. That’s down six points over the past month as well. His overall job approval ratings have fallen to record lows in recent weeks. Most voters—55%--now say the President has done a poor job handling the situation in Iraq. A separate survey has consistently found that roughly six-out-of-ten Americans would like to see the troops brought home from Iraq within the year.

And Republicans are jubilant over McCain's imaginary future world in which we have only been in Iraq five more years. Never mind that 60% want us out within 2008. And with a majority saying that Bush has done a poor job in Iraq, yes, let's promise to continue those policies with a McCain Administration and no doubt win big. With 52% (of likely voters, mind you) of the opinion that Iraq will go down in history as a failure, perhaps now is a great time to throw out a fictional scenario in which it's merely a long, drawn-out, expensive marginal success. As long we're ramming icebergs here, maybe McCain should tie himself even closer to the Decider-on-the-downhill-slide. Oh, he's already doing that. Good job, GOP.

The thing that makes (and will continue to make) turning the GOP around so immensely difficult is that it's an inherently top-down organisation. Many of the primaries don't even "matter" in the GOP. They are merely staged to select which poor bozos will go to the County Convention and cast the vote they are told to cast by the Wise Party Elders. The GOP has much more in common with a military (or paramilitary) structure than it does with a modern political party. Those at the top do not deign to listen to those below. Their job is to tell the "footsoldiers" what to think, what to say, who to hate today, which contradictions to ignore, etc. Only now, when the top leaders are realising that they are in trouble, is the average Republican allowing themselves to critically assess the Party. The GOP has spent nearly a decade enforcing absolute ideological obedience within its ranks, purging itself of dissent, marginalising those who may be caught whispering that perhaps the Decider isn't a genius after all, doling out federal jobs based not on competence but ideological purity.... that there simply is no "fresh, new leadership" around to take the reigns. Beyond that, the Party has been so thoroughly infested with leeches and opportunistic sycophants that will say, do, or think anything that the Party requires of them that any fresh, new voices will be silenced and stillborn.

Just look at the chaos within the GOP over the selection of McCain to be the nominee. Someone who hasn't followed the Party line scrupulously his entire career is being put up as the saviour of the Party, and the Party is making damn sure that he toes the line and turns himself into a proper "player" with proper obedience to the Wise Party Elders that made his nomination a necessity in the first place. Tie him to Bush, tie him to the GWOT, tie him to the Scary Muslim Menace, tie him to Iraq, tie him to a shoddy GI Bill - make him fall into line, for Chrissakes! And then still spin him as a "maverick", with a straight face.
Moreover, what does this say to those in the Party that have actually "toed the line" all these years? It says that they're playing a sucker's game.

The GOP is following in the path of the Whigs, who became so "pure" that nobody was good enough to vote for them anymore.

This is just one of the reasons why the DLC is so dangerous on the Democratic side.
We don't really need a Democrat SS to keep us safe from internal dissent. We thrive on internal dissent. Republicans look at Democrats and see "disarray", but this is what keeps us from becoming the Jackboot Party that we see on the other side of the aisle.
It is a mystery to me why the DLC looks to a failing Party as the model for their own victory.

2008-05-17T13:35:00.006-05:00

This week has seen some interesting political developments, but perhaps the most compelling is that Republicans are finally waking up from a bender and discovering that their Party is in trouble.
Two insightful posts are DailyKos regarding this are found here and here.
I would like to analyse when and why the wheels came off for the GOP, the factors that will continue to hold the Republicans back, and what this means for the Democrats and the progressives.

The first thing that must be addressed is the Republicans' disdain for reality in all its forms. When Dubya "won" election by losing the popular vote, there was no voice of reason or restraint within the GOP. Nobody in the Party leadership considered that more than half of the country opposed their agenda, their candidate, and their policies. Instead, they went full speed ahead and simply pretended that America agreed with them. After 9/11, of course, the GOP dug in to a make-believe world of their own creation. The White House bragged that they "create reality", and they removed themselves from contact with anyone who did not completely buy in to the Kool-Aid drinking world they spun out of whole cloth. The examples of this are numerous. Intelligence reports were cherry-picked and controlled to produce the "evidence" they wanted, and then this "evidence" was used to convince other Republicans of the validity of this pseudo-reality. And as Republicans moved into the sheltered confines of a Fox News/talk radio world, they were told that no other media sources could be trusted but them. The average Republican slipped into a world in which Bush was infallible, in which Bush was America, and those who disagreed with Bush must therefore "hate America". Any criticism of anything wrong in the country was dismissed as hatred of America, unless it involved blaming Democrats for whatever might putatively be "wrong". Quite simply, America was incapable of doing anything "wrong" in the Fox News-fueled world. Any facts that seemed to indicate otherwise could be rejected with a wave of the hand and the use of the magic word "America-hater".
I recall pointing out to a Republican that the U.S. actually supported Saddam during his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, that Saddam was an ally of the U.S. for nearly a decade as a counterweight to Iran in the region, that Saddam was one of a multitude of brutal dictators that our government has backed because they are useful to our foreign policy, and that Iran was one of those dictatorships before the Shah was overthrown. All of this is well-known history for those that eschew the GOP Kool-Aid, yet it was all completely dismissed as a lie by this Republican (and several others since) based on nothing more than that my mentioning these facts proved that I "hated America", and thus was not credible. One can scarcely believe the imaginary history that Republicans carry in their heads regarding America. But I digress.

America's enchantment with the Bush Administration had already eroded substantially by 2005 when Katrina hit, but the majority still believed that Bush just had some "tough breaks" in Iraq. When the utterly inept response to New Orleans' flooding occurred, however, the spell was broken for good. Rank incompetence was revealed, gross indifference was displayed, and the country at large wondered how a guy that formerly ran a stable was put in charge of FEMA. If the GOP had taken steps then, even sham efforts, to dispel the idea that they had handed over the function of government to cronies based on ideological agreement, then we likely would be having a different conversation today. Instead, the Republicans denied any failure. They pointed the finger at the Louisiana state government, at Mayor Nagin, at the public for treasonous dissent, the treacherous media, and at the victims themselves. Eventually, "Brownie" was to become a human sacrifice and the only thing that the GOP learned was that incompetence must be covered up better. Secrecy was increased, "disloyal" elements were purged from government jobs, wagons were circled, and the Republican world view became even more firmly entrenched in a "with us or against us" mindset. No longer were we all Americans; we were either traitors or patriots. The "good news" and "progress" in Iraq flowed from the White House on a daily basis, in stark contrast to the undeniable facts that indicated a quagmire without a clear-cut triumph that Americans had truly believed would have occurred by then. And the pseudo-reality that was intravenously fed to the faithful spoke of a brilliant success in Iraq, a popular President that could do no wrong, and darkly hinted at a tiny number of domestic traitors who wanted to destroy America and that were universally reviled, except by terrorists.

The 2006 elections were merely the buzzing of a gnat within the ironclad fortress of the Republican pseudo-reality. Everyone loved them and believed in them, anything they said would be eagerly lapped up by the nation without examination, and the only "problem" was that some RINOs had been taken out of power. Prior to the 2004 election, Republicans had been locked into a perpetual time warp where it was always 1994. After the 2006 elections, they moved in lockstep to a newer false world where it is always 2002, in which they exist today.

This is why I point to polls so frequently in this blog. Republicans really, truly believe they are still wildly popular. And while Republicans dismiss polls (as they do anything that contradicts the pseudo-reality) by saying "polls go up and polls go down", the reality is that those numbers simply are not going up for them. Republican turnout in the primaries has been a pale shadow of the Democrats' numbers, and the number of people identifying themselves as Republicans has dropped while those of Democrats' is increasing to record levels. The GOP agenda has been reduced to an obstructionist campaign, Bush is ignored by world leaders and the domestic public, and elections simply aren't going their way.

For an example of the severity of this Republican disconnect with reality, see the take on McCain's recent speech shown below. McCain posited an imaginary world in 2013 in which America has "won" in Iraq, and Republicans seem to have lapped it up as if it were actually true and a foregone conclusion.

Nice move Mac. In one fell swoop, he exposes the anti-war left for what they are: Pacifist appeasers who don't believe troops should be sent anywhere, anytime, for any reason. They will be left bleating on deaf ears about bringing troops home now.

Normal Americans support military action against America's enemies as long as the cause is just and the exit strategy is known. They are patient and they can live with a date, even if it is 5 years down the road. Before today, McCain was saddled with the perception of a perpetual war combined with the scurrilous 100-years-in-Iraq lie by the left. Unaddressed, that is a deal breaker for McCain at the ballot box. No longer.

The nice part is that he can assess as he goes and decide in 2013, if he wins a second term, whether that is the prudent course at that time.

In the meantime, he has just grabbed a pile of moderate, war-weary Democrats right out of the D column.

Bill Dupray at The Patriot Room

Wow.
Yes, this is what America has been waiting for: A man who has the courage to invent an imaginary world in which Republicans are always right.
Polls show that 33% of Americans want us to withdraw from Iraq now, and the clear majority want us out in one year. However, these must not be "Normal Americans", in Mr. Dupray's view. McCain imagines that we will "win" in Iraq within five years, so it's a done deal, apparently.
Just wondering, though...what if things don't turn out like they do in McCain's imagination? Won't he keep us in Iraq? I mean, Bush had some pretty neat imaginary scenarios, too, but here we are still "surging" along. How is this supposed to appeal to "a pile of moderate war-weary Democrats"? McCain simply imagines that there will only be five more years of a war that the majority of Americans already feel was a mistake, a war that only 19% say that they're looking for a candidate that is willing to pursue until we "succeed", so obviously McCain has the election in the bag. The Decider imagined that the "surge" would put the Iraqi government in control of all the provinces by last November, but that didn't seem to induce giddiness or a massive increase in support for Republicans or the occupation. But now McCain is imagining some stuff, so it's all different, right?
By the way, take a look at this analysis of why McCain's imaginary victory is unlikely.

In the very odd world that Republicans have constructed, merely predicting something means that it will happen. I often laughed over right-wing bloggers who quoted military commanders saying that a campaign has the objective to do such-and-such, and then crowing over it as if this means it has already happened or is inevitable. To doubt such statements is the equivalent of doubting America itself in their minds.

There was a time, a relatively brief time, in which Americans felt unified by the Iraq invasion and cheered unquestioningly like football fans for the "home team", but that time has passed and the buzz has worn off. This doesn't mean that people "hate America", but it does mean that invoking 9/11 and shoving flags and eagles in our faces won't gain much traction any more. Such jingoistic, spectator-sport approaches require big, quick wins with clearly-defined "good guys" and "bad guys". The Long War model never held significant appeal to Americans, and Republicans only pulled it out as 'what they said all along' only after hopes for a big, quick win had already faded. It came off as bait and switch, and we felt deceived. Republicans only offered charges of treason to keep the restless in line. To most, the threat of being "dumped" by Republicans, of being exiled from the Cool Kids Club, of failing to make the grade as a good Decider-droid was toothless and spiteful.

Look, Republicans, it's this simple: nobody believes you any more.
Pelosi and Reid really aren't hated and reviled by the American people. Nobody but you believes that advocating withdrawal from Iraq means that they favour the destruction of America or that they oppose any war for any reason or that they want us all to become Muslims. Nobody but you thinks that the word "liberal" has magical powers to silence dissent. Nobody but you believes that the majority of the country is part of the "Far Left". Nobody but you thinks that it's more important to be loyal to the Bush Administration than it is to admit the existence of problems and deal with them. Nobody but you thinks that dissent against a Republican President is treason, but that dissent against a Democratic President is your patriotic duty.

The GOP has offered America a team of droids that back their Party over the interests of their own constituents. That's a losing proposition in politics. Nobody cares if a candidate is a good Bush Team player or is "on board" with the Party agenda. Merely stating that a candidate fails to support the GOP talking points simply does not disqualify a candidate in the eyes of the American electorate.
It would be really nice if you all continued to believe these things, however, because it will discredit your Party for a good, long time. Please, please keep on pointing to a picture of a Democrat, saying the word "liberal", and expecting to win big. Please keep on saying that Iraq is about making us safer at home. Please keep on telling us that protecting telecoms from lawsuits is the same as fighting terrorists. And please keep on portraying Bush as an infallible genius that only the "Far Left" disagrees with.

It is true that the three special elections in which Republicans have recently lost to Democrats are not astoundingly good news for progressives. These are conservative Democrats. However, those are three robots that won't be in Congress playing obstructionist games at the orders of the GOP. Those are three districts in which voters will presumably learn that casting a ballot for a Democrat doesn't mean that the world will end. Those are three examples that will be lurking in the back of every Republican Congressman's mind when the Party tells them to do something against their own electoral interests. And those are three cases that will come to mind when a Democrat in Congress thinks about caving to the GOP.

The elections in November will prove to everyone outside of the Republican pseudo-reality that the traditional "fear and smear" tactics don't work any more. Even Republicans that hold on to their seats will see the margins dwindle enough to make a bolt from the lockstep march of the Party dictates seem viable. Obstructionism will no longer be glamorous, and Republicans will have to come up with something other than hatred and a police-state fear-mongering. The Evangelical Christians are already peeling away, along with veterans and fiscal conservatives. The Party will have to stand for something more than "We Hate The Democrats". And the Republican dictate that "you're either all in or all out" will have to be abandoned.

2008-05-10T18:46:00.003-05:00

For well over six months now, polls have shown that Iraq remains a millstone around the neck of the GOP. Surely, this was also the case prior to six months ago, but the Republican Noise Machine has been confident that the public opinion will "turn around" once the "facts are out" about the wonderful "progress" in Iraq. Those trend lines in the polls shown below are not encouraging, however.

The majority think the invasion of Iraq was a mistake.
The ramifications of this are profound. This means that the entire idea of Iraq being part of the Global War On Terror, the notion that we are over there to keep them from coming over here, the idea that invading Iraq has made us safer, and the assertions that only the "Far Left" holds these views have all been discredited. To deny this would mean that the majority of Americans support terrorism, are trying to militarily undermine their own country, are looking for bold new ways to make us less safe, and are part of the "Far Left". For the Republicans, the message on Iraq has essentially been reduced to "we're stuck there, so get over it".

Only 19% think it's important that their Presidential candidiate is willing to stay in Iraq until we "succeed", whatever "success" is.
Again, the ramifications of these numbers are significant. The "cut and run" talisman no longer bears weight when over 3/4 of the voters see a willingness to be flexible and leave before we have achieved "success" as desirable in Presidential candidate. McCain's "hundred years" statement, regardless of the context it is put in, clearly puts him on the 19% side. We are now in Iraq to influence whether puppet leaders or Iraqi nationalists will control the country. Nothing about that speaks of any "vital interests" for the U.S. Nothing about that inspires any desire to "kick some butt" or "bring 'em on". Nothing about that lends credence to a willingness to spend $12 billion a week on a military effort to bring about a foreign country's political reconciliation. Pictures of flags and eagles, accusations of treason, and scary stories now fail to suspend the critical thinking skills of the American electorate. The public wants an exit strategy, and the Republicans are only offering a quagmire that may or may not, at some point, become a basically "break even" scenario.

A third of the public wants to withdraw from Iraq, and only about 20% want to continue the "surge".
Apparently 33% of the nation is now part of the "Far Left", because Republicans keep telling us that only the "Far Left" wants to pull out of Iraq. The public, however, continues to see people who are clearly not traitorous nor wild-eyed leftists advocating withdrawal or drawing down force levels. Reality is not on the side of the GOP propaganda masters. Military commanders have stated that we will need to send more troops, not fewer, if we are to achieve "success", yet this option now draws only 8% support. Americans clearly no longer want to "win" in Iraq - or more accurately, no longer believe in what the Republicans consider a "win".

All three of these polls point to Iraq as a serious liability for the GOP, yet the Party has steadfastly lined up behind the most unpopular President in modern history and that Party's presumptive nominee has completely embraced that unpopular President's policies on Iraq. The GOP's traditional alliance with evangelical Christians is also highly questionable, with it being increasingly likely that these voters will choose to sit on their hands come November. A faltering economy is always bad news for the incumbent Party, and the Republicans are split between trying to come up with more and more bizarre ways to define the word "recession" or those who wish to continue to push tax cuts that have proven a failure. 80% of the public believes that the economic stimulus cheques will not make much difference. The percentages of the electorate who believe that upper-income citizens and corporations pay too much in taxes is in the single digits. People all across the country have seen the result of the Bush tax cuts: collapsing infrastructure, income inequality, offshoring jobs, and declines in the educational system. McCain only wants to continue this failed policy.

And the model of governance that the GOP has pushed has increasingly been the object of ridicule. Across the board, citizens have seen gross incompetence and total cronyism from the federal government. Turning over the government responsibilities to people based on their loyalty to the Bush agenda has turned out to be a huge failure. Staggering inefficiency and naked partisanship is the order of the day. Do you think anyone trying to get a passport really cares if the people processing it are opposed to Roe v. Wade or if they have a close personal relationship with Jesus? Do you think that anyone waiting for disaster relief is consoled by the fact the morons that bungled the job are reliable GOP donors? Does anyone who witnessed Doan's "memory problems" really think that's understandable if she was a loyal supporter of the President?
Not really. People want their tax dollars spent wisely by competent people acting in an efficient manner. Whether or not they have sworn unending loyalty to the most unpopular President in modern history is not high on the public's list of priorities. Yet McCain has said nothing in criticism of the rank incompetence Bush has cultivated. In fact, McCain is completely beholden to the Party apparatus that thrust loyalty as the primary consideration in the federal government. Morale among federal employees has plummeted, recruiting competent staff has become difficult, and retaining them even harder. At the same time, the value of having a Bush Administration position on your resume has dwindled. It marks one as an incompetent crony that was hired and retained based not on merit and skills, but rather ideological purity.

McCain has failed to say anything that he would do differently than Bush. Not one thing.

The sleeper issue, however, are House and Senate races. The Democrats can expect big gains in the House, and possibly three or four seats gained in the Senate. Republicans that do hold on to their seats will see their margins of victory dwindle alarmingly. Those not up for election until 2010 will surely see that loyalty to the Bush agenda is nothing more than a suicide pact. Already we are seeing one-size-fits-all "cookie-cutter" ads from the GOP. Just replace the face and the name, and these generic ads could run in any district. Democrats, too, are seeing the potential to be had by standing up to the Republican agenda. The next President will certainly find a Congress much less compliant to traditional Republican talking points and much less responsive to scare themes. GOP intimidation of the media will also become more difficult as it becomes readily apparent that the punditry is seriously out of touch with the reality within the country.

A smaller percentage of the public now believes in the Bush agenda than believes in the existence of magical fairies, yet we don't see pundits weighing in on how magical fairies come down on the issues of the day. No network considers how magical fairies will react to a news story or if magical fairies are sufficiently patriotic. I have yet to see a news anchor ponder over whether a national issue is "good news or not for magical fairies". We have, however, seen Republican policies that essentially rely on copious amounts of fairy dust to solve problems.

Nothing is improving for Republicans in public opinion. Jingoism now shows diminishing returns. The war that was supposed to unite America and guarantee a permanent Republican majority has now become a permanent liability for the Party that even "victory" will not mitigate. Self-identification as a Democrat has reached an all-time high. And if the Republicans lose the White House, the gravy train for right-wing think tanks, crooked contractors, and hate-mongers will come to an end.

Results from a CBS/NYT poll are shown below:

"Looking back, do you think the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, or should the U.S. have stayed out?" N=1,065 adults, MoE ± 3
					.
		Right Thing	Stayed Out	Unsure
		%	%	%
	4/25-29/08	37	57	6
	3/28 - 4/2/08	34	62	4
	3/15-18/08	36	59	5
	2/20-24/08	38	58	4
	1/9-12/08	36	58	6
	12/5-9/07	41	54	5
	10/12-16/07	45	51	4
	9/14-16/07	39	53	8

----------------------------------------------------

Also from a CNN poll:

"Which comes closest to your view about what the U.S. should now do about the number of U.S. troops in Iraq? The U.S. should send more troops to Iraq. The U.S. should keep the number of troops as it is now. The U.S. should withdraw some troops from Iraq. OR, The U.S. should withdraw all of its troops from Iraq."
					.
		Send More	Keep Same Number	Withdraw Some	Withdraw All	Unsure
		%	%	%	%	%
	4/28-30/08	8	21	35	33	3
	12/6-9/07	10	19	30	39	2
	9/7-9/07	10	23	36	29	3
	6/22-24/07	17	16	24	39	3
	11/17-19/06	16	21	27	33	3
	10/27-29/06	15	17	28	34	6

2008-05-01T16:00:00.002-05:00

Yet another data point in the past few years demonstrating the "buyer's remorse" of Bush's election; he's now the most unpopular President in modern history. More unpopular than Nixon.

Narrowly re-elected (49/51) largely due to the public's perceived "success" in Iraq, Bush steadily declined in popularity throughout his second term. Despite achieving record high approval numbers after 9/11, his numbers also slid fitfully downward in his first term. Of those who approve of him, previous polls have shown those who strongly support him are few; his support his soft. While Bush has stagnated in the low 30's to high 20's for well over a year now, what has changed now is the numbers of those who disapprove of him. Apparently fewer people are taking the "no opinion" option in polls and have moved into the "disapprove" column.

Certainly a good deal of this recent decline has had to do with the economy. While Bush may or may not be able to do anything instantly to improve things, it's highly doubtful that his recent optimistic remarks are reassuring to those facing economic troubles. Spending $12 billion per week in Iraq hasn't seemed to help things, either. And playing semantics with the definition of "recession" hardly encourages confidence. The Administration clearly thought that the house of cards created by the housing bubble would hold up until Bush left office, and the downturn could be blamed on the Democrats. Chalk this up as yet another of Bush's overly-optimistic assessments that was not borne out by reality.

I am sometimes asked, "What is wrong with optimism?". Nothing, per se. The question is the context it is in. If you are on the sinking Titanic and the captain is smiling and making assurances that everything is okay while the chilly water swirls around your ankles, then that is a case where optimism is unwarranted and even dangerous. If, after Pearl Harbour, the U.S. had sent it's entire (depleted) fleet into an invasion of the Japanese homeland by a President optimistic that everything would go our way, the loss to our country would have been staggering. It is not really leadership to consider only the best possible outcome in every scenario and simply assume that the best possible outcome will be the actual outcome. Any idiot can cross their fingers, twirl a rabbit's foot, and knock on wood, hoping for the best. Any moron can "double down", confident that a big win is due. Yet this is more or less what the Administration has done in regards to Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, Katrina, global warming, and an array of other problems. And when things don't work out to be the best possible outcome, the Administration has simply blamed the critics for not believing in America. Clapping for Peter Pan may have been a good option in a children's fictional tale, but it simply is not sound policy for running a country.

What is striking, however, is that the major media has completely failed to grasp that Bush has lost the confidence of the American people. His optimistic pronouncements of Middle East peace, "victory" in Iraq, and imminent economic improvement are breathlessly gushed over by the media as ironclad guarantees that we can take to the bank. Even now we see a Republican presidential candidate that merely promises more of Bush's policies, and this is portrayed as sound, new, and visionary by the media. The voters have already come to the realisation that one can believe in America while refusing to believe in Bush, but the media seems to have failed to make this logical connection.

Bush's only "plan", such as it is, to deal with the economic downturn is to offer more tax cuts. This has failed miserably. The economic day of reckoning has been put off for years by the housing bubble, which has nothing to do with tax cuts. The money from the tax cuts simply has not been invested in America, simply has not created jobs, simply has not "trickled down". Instead, it's gone into overseas investments, offshoring jobs, companies that exist only on paper and employ no one, or just tossed on to the pile with the rest of the money. Once again, the best possible outcome has not turned out to be the actual outcome.

story from CNN:

May 1, 2008
Poll: Bush most unpopular in modern history
Posted: 02:30 PM ET

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A new poll suggests that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush his handling his job as president.

"No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president's disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

"Bush's approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon (22 percent and 24 percent, respectively) but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s," Holland added. "The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 66 percent disapproval in January 1952."

CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider adds, "He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974." President Nixon's disapproval rating in August 1974 stood at 67 percent.

The poll also indicates that support for the war in Iraq has never been lower. Thirty percent of those questioned favored the war while 68 percent opposed the conflict.

"Americans are growing more pessimistic about the war," Holland said. "In January, nearly half believed that things were going well for the U.S. in Iraq; now that figure has dropped to 39 percent."

The numbers on the Iraq war come on the five-year anniversary of President Bush's "mission accomplished" moment onboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, when Bush proclaimed that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

The record low support for the war in a CNN poll could be one reason behind the president's unpopularity, but it probably is not the only one.

"Support for the war, the assessment of the economy and approval of Mr. Bush are all about the same — bad," Schneider said.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted by telephone from Monday through Wednesday, with 1,008 adult Americans questioned. The poll's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

2008-03-30T11:24:00.003-05:00

Here in Minnesota, the ice is now too thin to risk one's life for a fish, and too thick to get a boat out, so it's fortunate that I can take one of my reserve eel pouts from the deep-freeze for this week's award. My wonderful revamped PC is still in a local shop, so I am using a borrowed laptop to briefly and hurriedly bestow a reconstituted eel pout on some hapless but deserving victim.

This week's candidates are as follows:

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina proved once again this week that the Republican leadership is completely and hopelessly clueless when it comes to Iraq. As he explained on Fox News regarding the battle over Basra, "Now we have a battle with militias who are operating outside the government. … We must win this fight. The militias that we are fighting are backed by Iran. So this is an effort by Iran to destabilize Iraq." Sen. Graham must not have read his scorecard. The facts are that the Iraqi government's biggest ally is the Badr Corps, the militia of the Supreme Islamic Council (ISCI), which is the most pro-Iranian of all of the militias in Iraq. The Sadrists are the least Iranian-influenced major Shia militia in Iraq. If the Iraqi government succeeds in crushing the Mahdi Army, it will be a major boost for Iranian interests in the country. Nearly everything that the Administration has done in Iraq, from removing the secular Hussein regime that was absolutely hostile to Iran, to pushing elections despite a Sunni boycott that resulted in an overwhelming Shia win, to failing at economic reconstruction that left Iranian religious charities as a lifeline for poor Iraqis, has only increased the profile of Iran within Iraq and within the region. Now Sen. Graham is essentially proposing, as ThinkProgress puts it, "we must defeat militias backed by Iran by siding with a militia backed by Iran". Such idiocy deserves a fresh eel pout.
Karl Rove, in an interview on Fox News, with O'Reilly explains what's at stake in Iraq. Victory in Iraq "will rally the Muslim world to us. It will also create a huge influence in the Middle East. Think about the creation of the democracy in the historic center of the Middle East with the third-largest oil reserves in the world. If we have a functioning democracy in Iraq, that's an ally in the war on terror, a counterweight to mullahs Iran and to Assad in Syria, this will create a very hopeful center of reform and energy for reform throughout the Middle East." Oh Karl, stop. Democracy in the Middle East would be a terrible thing for our foreign policy, as sad as that may sound. I realise that the conventional wisdom is that democracy always creates pro-American governments, but that really is not the case, especially in the Middle East. The governments in the Middle East, whether monarchs or dictators, are far more sympathetic to our interests and far more pliable to our will than the people of those countries. Democracy in Iraq has created a pro-Iranian state in what once was Iran's greatest nemesis. Democracy in Iran, however limited it is, brought Ahmedinejad to power. The royalty in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are the lid on radical Islam, not the engine. Public opinion throughout the Arab and Persian world toward Israel is much more negative than the governments in those countries. What would really "rally the Muslim world to us" would be to stop shoveling $12 million each day into Israel, stop using them as our regional proxy, and stop defending everything they do.

President Bush, who called the violent breakdown in Basra a "byproduct of the success" of the surge, and a "very positive moment". Al-Maliki's now-stalled effort in Basra also apparently "shows the progress the Iraqi security forces have made during the surge." That's why American special forces, along with the British, are helping on the ground and in the air: because the Iraqi Army has made so much progress that they still need our help. And as usual, any development only serves to confirm that we must maintain the surge. Iraqi government "standing up"? We have to maintain the surge to support them. Violence from the Basra conflict spreading to other areas of Iraq? We have to maintain the surge because security is so bad. Casualties up? Maintain the surge or things will get worse. Casualties down? Maintain the surge or the security gains will disappear. Notice also that the Administration isn't talking about Al-Qaeda anymore, which has been the big threat in Bush's mind for a year now. Before the surge, the militias were the big threat, and the surge would disarm them. When the surge failed at that, it was Al-Qaeda that was the big threat, and militias were benign. Now we're in Iraq to stop the militias, but only certain militias, because that's the problem like they said all along.

Ah, such idiocy. They all deserve eel pouts, at least. But there can be only one.
The winner of Minnesota's absolutely unwanted, utterly uncoveted, dismally appropriate, shudder-inspiring, and completely ignominious Sunday Eel Pout is... Karl Rove for his dimwitted claim that victory in Iraq will spread democracy, and that that would mean a pro-U.S. Middle East. If you think it's disgusting now, just wait until it thaws out. Perhaps the awarding of this eel pout can finally bring the Arab world together in agreement that Karl Rove is a jackass.

That's all for this Sunday's Eel Pout Award. Thanks to my neighbour for the laptop loan. I am fairly confident that my new machine will running in the week ahead, and this blog will be restored.

2008-03-29T18:25:00.003-05:00

Just a quick take on the Iraqi situation before I have to return my neighbour's laptop.

Al-Maliki is becoming the Iraqi version of Bush. He threw his Army into Basra with almost no planning and no intelligence. Who could have predicted that armoured vehicles couldn't penetrate the narrow streets of Basra? Who knew that the Basra police would desert and mutiny when it's been clear for years that they are infiltrated by the militias? Who could have possibly anticipated that the conflict would spread to other cities, or that the Army's supply lines would be harried?

Months after announcing a "decisive" battle against a nebulously-defined enemy in the northern part of the country, nothing has taken place that is any different than the routine 'indecisive' efforts of the past. Days after personally overseeing the Basra operation and making a three-day ultimatum (without mentioning the ensuing consequences), Al-Maliki then withdrew far away from the fighting and announced an additional week before the ultimatum would expire and he would then...do what, exactly?

Far from proving the Iraqi Army's "readiness", the week's unfolding scenario only illustrates Al-Maliki's readiness to follow the Administration's orders. American troops have already begun participating, and we have been providing air support for the Basra operation nearly from the start. With discontent growing among the Sunni Sahwa ("Awakening") forces, some of the Sahwa forces are going on strike to protest not being paid. If the continuation of this conflict weakens the Iraqi government's hold on other areas, we could very see our "Awakening" buddies take advantage of the situation and reject the Shia government's control of predominantly Sunni districts. The Sahwa are in this to wipe out the rival gangs, not to bolster the Iraqi government, and the government has not only failed to pay them, but it has actively moved against Sunni interests. And the longer this expensive operation continues, the longer the government loses crucial oil revenue from Basra. This could turn out to be major financial setback on top of a potentially demoralising defeat for the Iraqi government.

How can this be considered any less than a civil war? The Shia government of Al-Maliki has as its strongest ally the (Iranian-inspired) Badr Corps, and the Iraqi Army (along with the Badr Corps) are taking out their primary domestic opposition. The potential ascendance of ISCI can only increase the profile of Iran within Iraq. Just as the removal of Saddam from power took away the strongest check on Iran's regional power, this action by the Iraqi government will, if successful, only reinforce Iran's influence in the region.

Baghdad is also coming apart, and the mortar attacks on the Green Zone are not only much more intense, but have also resulted in casualties. 31 districts within Baghdad are now seeing clashes with Sadrist forces.

The Iraqi minister of defense, Abdul Qadir Jasim, admitted in a news conference in Basra that the militiamen had taken the Iraqi security forces off guard. He added that the Iraqi government had expected this operation to be routine, but was surprised at the level of resistance, and was forced to change its plans and tactics.

Does the above sound familiar? All that we need now is for Al-Maliki to start using terms like "turning the corner" and we'll know for sure that Cheney left his script there. We now have Turkish troops in Kurdistan, the Diyala "pacification is stalled, as is the Anbar reconstruction, progress in Baghdad has been set back, and the Basra conflict has spread to four new cities; this is "good news" to the Decider.

McCain really intends to campaign on the "progress" in Iraq?

2008-03-29T16:17:00.002-05:00

Now that the St. Paul Police Dept. has stocked up on hundreds of new tasers in anticipation of the GOP National Convention here this summer, the next step is too loosen up the liquor laws. Now the Legislature is looking at 4 AM as the last call, and allowing liquor stores to stay open on Sunday, but only during the Convention.

Currently, selected bars are allowed to sell until 2 AM, and all liquor stores across the State are closed on Sunday. Extensive empirical research that I have conducted shows that both Republicans and Democrats have managed to get drunk just fine under the current law. Ironically, it is the Republican legislators that have always fought to restrict bar hours and liquor store sales. Now, the Party of family values needs to be able to drink until 4 AM and pick up a bottle on Sunday to keep that buzz going. That's what "sophisticated" people do, after all.

Perhaps Garrison Keillor was correct when he surmised that, "Republicans seem to need alcohol to maintain their beliefs".

The Twin Cities hosts hundreds of conventions each year, and one must think that these include 'sophisticated' people. Why does this particular convention need special liquor laws? And a ten mile radius from the convention is really quite broad. Are there really that many delegates that will need to drink between 2 and 4 AM that we need hundreds of places for them to do it in? Even all of the way out to Bloomington? And if so, don't the local Republicans deserve the same opportunity to be 'sophisticated' year-round? It should be interesting how many of the neighbourhood working-class bars that Republican delegates would be unlikely to frequent will take advantage of this temporary relaxation of the laws.

story from The Minnesota Monitor

Under an amendment proposed by Rep. Phyllis Kahn, bars in St. Paul and parts of Minneapolis and Bloomington would remain open until 4 a.m. between Aug. 29 and Sept. 8 to accommodate the Republican National Convention.
The amendment to a state appropriations bill would allow late night bar sales within a ten mile radius of the RNC, and would allow for liquor stores to stay open on Sunday throughout the period. Kahn says the amendment is offered to make Minneapolis-St. Paul more "sophisticated" while the Republicans, media and protesters are in town.
The bill would also provide local liquor licensing boards to reject the later bar hours and extended liquor store operations.
The bill was passed by the State Government Finance Division Committee on Wednesday.
A similar Senate bill was withdrawn shortly after being offered earlier this month.

2008-03-23T08:38:00.002-05:00

It is with great frustration that I once again announce that this blog is still on hold, with a special shout out to Microsoft "support" this week. After struggling with the rebuild of my PC myself, then a clueless, incompetent local tech shop that moved at a glacial pace, my machine was actually up and running for a little more than a day on Friday. I was far too busy re-installing apps to blog, but a completely minor issue came up and I decided to take advantage of Microsoft technical support, since the previously mentioned tech shop was mysteriously closed for the holiday weekend.

Three hours later, the Microsoft bozo had managed to turn a minor irritant into a full-blown disaster, wiping out weeks of progress before abandoning me to my own devices. Microsoft's ever-dubious technical support has two priorities, by my experience. The first is to make absolutely sure that the person they are dealing with does not have a pirated copy of Windows. Since they cannot be absolutely sure of this over the phone, they are perpetually suspicious. A full 20 minutes was spent grilling me over the details of my installation in order to determine if I was trying to pull a "fast one" on them. None of these details were passed on the hapless bozo designated to "help" me. The second priority is to come with some kind of pretext to dismiss the support request altogether. I was required to list all of the applications I had installed, spelling out most of them, and each of these were completely unfamiliar to my support bozo. "Winamp?", the clown repeated again and again, as if the name somehow translated into "disaster" in his native tongue. Somehow, the implication is that, if you install anything else beyond the OS, then you are some kind of "wise guy". After uninstalling everything except Firefox, which mysteriously would not uninstall (but worked perfectly), and wiping out everything (including the OS) in a "repair" effort, I was told that my new hard drive (two weeks old, high-end, and the least likely thing to cause a problem) was trash. Until I replaced it, Microsoft technical support could not "help" me any further.

A mistaken attempt to modify a Windows component in a working, stable system had brought me into the clutches of Microsoft technical support, which had left me with a useless machine and a preposterous pretext.

So, I post this from a neighbour's machine. I will take my newly-rebuilt PC back to the clueless and glacially-slow shop, and they will restore it at a snail's pace. And Extemporaneous Discourse will once again rise from the digital ashes. Eel pouts will be awarded, Republican idiocy will be exposed, and all will be well again.

2008-03-09T09:39:00.002-05:00

I still haven't managed to get my new PC up and running, so Extemporaneous Discourse will remain in stasis for several more days.

2008-03-03T18:16:00.002-06:00

I am rebuilding/upgrading my PC this week, so there will be no new posts.

2008-03-01T12:55:00.002-06:00

As Senate Republicans prepare to shill for the surge again, this doesn't come as good news: more Iraqis are getting killed.

Combined with the "setback" over provincial elections, it could get tougher for those eager to crow about "progress" in Iraq. The Iraqi occupation has actually made the terrorism threat worse.

On top of that, the surge cannot really be credited with any "improvement", as John Cole points out:

McCain argues that violence is down in 17 of 18 provinces. That argument itself suggests the irrelevancy of the US to Iraq. There are no US troops to speak of in the 3 northern Kurdish provinces, or in the southern 4 provinces from which the British have largely withdrawn. There are few US troops in most of the 8 provinces where Shiites predominate. There was no troop escalation or "surge" in the Sunni al-Anbar province. So if violence has declined in 17 of 18 provinces, US policy cannot possibly have anything to do with most of that. General Petraeus has had significant successes in Baghdad, though at the unfortunate (an unintentional) cost of further turning it into a Shiite city from which most Sunnis have been ethnically cleansed.

So the areas that are the most stable are the areas where we have no or very few troops, but an increase in troops is supposed to have produced a decline in violence. Baghdad is a walled city that has been ethnically cleansed, so secatrian conflict naturally has gone down. Fallujah has banned all motor vehicles in the city for over a year, so no car bombings. This is "progress"? It's like banning cars and then taking credit for safer driving habits by pointing to a decline in car accidents.

Of course, Turkey is currently in the process of invading Kurdistan, which is hardly a sign of a stable Iraq. Basra, too, is controlled by the militias, not the Iraqi government. But it's stable, so that supposedly is a mark in favour of the surge. How is that?

The American public thought that by now the surge would be over and we would be talking about withdrawal. Instead, the surge will likely continue for the remainder of Bush's term. The Republicans are setting themselves up by presenting a rosy picture in Iraq, especially since the tensions between the "Awakening" forces and the Iraqi government are building. It's a dangerous bid, and senators up for re-election will be forced into making supportive statements that could turn against them in the months approaching the election.

story from AFP

Iraq violence surges in February

by Salam Faraj Sat Mar 1, 4:55 AM ET

BAGHDAD (AFP) - The number of Iraqis killed in February rose by 33 percent over January, reversing a six-month trend of reduced violence, in a setback to the US military plan to curb the bloodshed ravaging the country.

The combined figures obtained by AFP from the interior, defence and health ministries showed that the total number of Iraqis killed in February was 721, including 636 civilians, compared with 541 dead in January.

It reverses the six-month trend of a steady fall in casualties across the country on the back of a massive US and Iraqi military assault, mainly targeting Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The February death toll is up after a steady fall in the preceding six months. The monthly tolls were 541 in January, 568 in December, 606 in November, 887 in October, 917 in September and 1,856 in August.

The number of people wounded in February was 847.

January's death toll reached a 23-month low, with US commanders saying that all types of attacks were down to levels not seen before the February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in the town of Samarra that triggered a wave of violence.

The bloodshed that erupted after the shrine attack peaked in January 2007 with 1,992 deaths reported by the three ministries.

The jump in February's toll seems to have been caused by two major attacks during the month.

On February 1, at least 98 people were slaughtered when a female suicide bomber blew herself up amid a crowd of pet lovers in Baghdad's popular al-Ghazl animal market.

And in another brazen attack last Sunday, at least 48 people were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of pilgrims at a rest stop in the town of Iskandiriyah, south of Baghdad.

2008-03-01T11:09:00.002-06:00

Norm Coleman, the incumbent Republican Senator for Minnesota and extraordinary political chameleon, is again riding low in the polls. A little over four years ago, Coleman was at a 52% favourablity level. Since then, he's been struggling to keep his head above the crucial 50% mark. The latest poll puts him at 49%.

The results fall pretty much along partisan lines: 70% of those who feel terrorism is the top issue support Coleman, 69% of Republicans like him, 67% of evangelicals give him the thumbs-up, and he wins over 72% of those who call themselves conservative. Those would be nice numbers for a Republican primary, but for a general election it looks less sunny. Norm never won a majority in the 2002 election that brought him to power, only a plurality. He has weak support (44%) from Independents and those who call themselves moderates (46%).

At first the classic Bush Team crony, Coleman voted with the Administration 98% of the time in his first year. As the shine began to come off Bush later on, Coleman struck poses to show some space between himself and Bush. He voted against the surge, but has completely fallen into line with the GOP on every vote to change the policies on Iraq. Formerly a pot-smoking, anti-war liberal Democrat, Coleman changed his stripes and jumped ship in 1996. Since then, his positions have shifted with the political wind. He endorsed Giuliani and bought in to all of the crazy, hyper-fear, eternal war, Muslim-hating rhetoric of that campaign. Then the breeze shifted, and he was all about McCain. He is now irrevocably tied to the Bush agenda, and as McCain increasingly embraces Bush in order to manufacture some kind of GOP consensus, Coleman will be forced to return to his role as a Bush crony with all of the attendant unpopularity that such a designation brings. Norm isn't an idiot; he knows that the tide has turned against him. He now has no choice, however, but to make another shift into a diehard GOP stalwart.

Meanwhile, the more-recently (2006) elected Democratic Senator, Amy Klobuchar, enjoys a strong 61% approval rating. She has strong support from moderates (71%) and wins over 58% of Independents. She also has strong support in outstate Minnesota, while Norm has barely a majority there. The message to take away from this is that the senator who rejects the Bush agenda is considerably more popular than the senator that has bound himself, hand and foot, to that GOP agenda. So while Norm is not exactly reviled, he is pushing a weaker message than the Democrats.

As I said before, Coleman gets his strong support from Republicans and those that call themselves conservatives. However, Republicans are only 27% of the state and conservatives are only 26%. Evangelicals are only one-third of the state, and those who consider terrorism as the most important issue are only 7% of those polled. Coleman's strong support comes from the margins of the electorate. Any sane candidate in Coleman's position would make a sharp shift to the centre, but instead conditions have forced Coleman to move even farther to the right. This also does not bode well for this seat to remain in Reublican hands.

2008-02-28T22:22:00.004-06:00

The reversal of the de-Baathification law actually made it more difficult on former Baathists, but that didn't stop Bush from taking credit for the "progress". Now the law to set up provincial elections has been vetoed, and Bush can't claim that as "progress" on his benchmarks.

Let's look at the Decider's own words, when he proposed the surge back on Jan. 10:

I've made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people
— and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act. The Prime Minister understands this. Here is what he told his people just last week: "The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation."

These benchmarks were set by the Bush Administration back when the Decider was making public statements every day about all of the outstanding progress in Iraq and how corners were being turned and so forth. Soon after the 11/06 elections, however, the Decider turned into Grim Bush. Iraq was hard, it would take huge sacrifice, we needed a surge...blah, blah, blah. And even though Bush never specifically promised "success" by a particular date, it seems obvious that he expected great progress by September if the Iraqi government was to regain control of all of the provinces by November.

"To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November." (1/10/07)

Now more than a year has passed, and nobody expects the promise of the surge to be realised before Bush leaves office. The only thing left is for neocons to re-define "stability" as "whatever the situation is". The benchmarks won't be met, and the Pentagon will once again call the benchmarks "unreasonable", even though the Administration essentially wrote its own own test and failed.

story from McClatchy

Iraqi leaders veto law Bush administration hailed as political breakthrough

By Steve Lannen | McClatchy Newspapers

Posted on Wednesday, February 27, 2008

BAGHDAD — Iraq's three-man presidency council Wednesday announced that it's vetoed legislation that U.S. officials two weeks ago hailed as significant political progress.

Also Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he hoped that Turkey's incursion into northern Iraq to fight Kurdish rebels would last a "week or two" but "not months."

Turkish news agencies reported that as many as 77 guerrillas were killed the night before in the most violent night of the week-old incursion on Iraq's northern border. A rebel spokesman said fighters for the Kurdish Workers Party, known as the PKK, had killed 18 Turkish soldiers.

The rejected bill, which sets out the political structure for Iraq's provincial governments and establishes a basis for elections in October, was only the second of 18 U.S.-set political benchmarks that the war-torn nation needs to reach.

Parliament considered it in a bundle with two other bills, a general amnesty and a budget, and approved it on Feb. 12 in what was welcomed in Washington as an example of good government, compromise and progress toward national unity.

Now the question is whether parliament is willing to revise the measure.

"It was a package deal. Now that package is broken," said Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq expert at the International Crisis Group in Amman, Jordan.

At the heart of the rejection of the provincial law is the question of whether Iraq will have strong provincial governors who answer only to their elected executive councils or if the federal prime minister will have a voice in their appointment and removal.

The presidency council vetoed the bill, challenging the role it gave both the prime minister and the governor.

Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., said the law is needed to define the roles of Iraq's provinces and of the central government and to set ground rules for any future discussion of creating a federation of Sunni and Shiite Muslim and Kurdish regions.

"The key issue is whether the presidency council sent the law back for the right reasons and if parliament will improve the law rather than oppose further delays," he said.

A spokesman declined to say which member or members of the presidency council, which is composed of a Kurd, a Shiite and a Sunni, refused to sign the legislation, sending it back to parliament.

He said the Oct. 1 elections aren't compromised.

However, Hiltermann expressed doubt that the elections would take place as scheduled in October. "It's all up for grabs," he said. "Everything is set back."

Political groupings that oppose extreme government centralization, such as Sunnis, Shiite nationalists and Shiite followers of radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr, could see an uphill battle in parliament, Hiltermann said.

Hassan al Sneid, a Dawa Party member in the large Iraqi Alliance, supports the idea of a prime minister wielding control over governors. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is also a Dawa member.

"If the prime minister doesn't have the authority to depose a governor, we will have a president in each governorate," he said.

2008-02-28T21:39:00.004-06:00

In the vast and constantly shifting reasons why we must remain in Iraq, the old reliable standard that gets most of the play is that if we were to leave, Al-Qaeda would take over Iraq and make it a base.

The second most-employed 'reason' is that we have to stabilise the government of Iraq so that it can be "a strong ally in the War On Terror". This reason is slowly being abandoned, at least in practise, by betting everything on the "Awakening". By building a parallel military force that is not loyal to the Iraqi government, the Administration is effectively throwing the government, the National Police, and the Iraqi Army to the wolves. The idea seems to be that they can control the Sahwa more easily, rout Al-Qaeda, and then manipulate them into bringing the Iraqi government 'into line' or even overthrowing them in favour of a more puppet-like regime.

While there are a lot of problems with this approach, a stupid, risky, and expensive plan has never stopped the Administration before. But the premise of this scheme, the rout of Al-Qaeda, is profoundly weak. As John Cole notes in the post below, there are no more than a few hundred AQ. Nearly every day, the military posthumously dubs any number of corpses "Al-Qaeda". Basically, we 'know' they are AQ because we killed them, and we wouldn't have killed them unless they were AQ, or so the circular logic goes. Our "Awakening" buddies that have been killed by friendly fire have even been dubbed AQ until this little "mixup" was corrected later by the Sahwa.

In the post below, Mr. Cole is taking McCain to task over his utterly mistaken attack on Obama when he responded to a hypothetical scenario. McCain falls over himself in a knee-jerk reaction in which he adamantly speaks of a tremendous Al-Qaeda threat in Iraq.

post from John Cole's Informed Comment:

Moreover, the allegation that he makes about there being 'al-Qaeda in Iraq' that could well take over the country is part lie and part insanity. The Sunni Arabs are no more than 20% of the Iraqi population. How could a tiny minority from within them take over the whole?

The technical definition of al-Qaeda is operatives who have sworn fealty to Usama bin Laden. There were only a few hundred of them. I doubt whether more than a handful of such individuals are in Iraq.

So there isn't any "al-Qaeda" in Iraq in the technical sense. There are "Excommunicating Holy Warriors" (Takfiri Jihadis), i.e. devotees of political Islam who are violent and willing to deploy terror for political purposes. They declare other Muslims who disagree with them "not Muslims,"-- thus the "excommunicating" bit. But there are only a few hundred foreign fighters. A small minority of Iraqis has associated with them. They don't call themselves 'al-Qaeda in Iraq.' The major such group is "The Islamic State of Iraq." And to say that they have "bases" in Iraq is pretty grandiose. They have some safe houses and try to take and hold neighborhoods, so far with indifferent success.

The idea that this small minority of violent Muslim fundamentalists could take over Iraq is completely crazy. They haven't even been able to keep their toehold in Baghdad-- the Sunnis have been largely ethnically cleansed from the capital by Shiite militias.

So the Shiites would not allow an "al-Qaeda" takeover of Iraq. Neither would the Kurds. Nor would most Sunni Arabs (as in al-Anbar Province, where the Dulaim tribe is at daggers drawn with the Excommunicating Holy Warriors).

Moreover, the neighbors would not allow the radical Sunnis to take over. Iran would sit on its hands while Shiites were massacred in Baghdad? Secular Turkey would allow this development? Baathist Syria? Hashemite Jordan (which played a major role in tracking down and killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi)?

McCain's assertions that "al-Qaeda" has a strong position in Iraq or has any chance of taking over the country if the US leaves are both inaccurate. One is an error, the other is a dark but insubstantial fantasy.

Obama replied:

'“I've got some news for John McCain, that is there was no such thing Al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade.

“I've got some news for John McCain. I've got some news for John McCain. He took us into a war, along with George Bush that should have never been authorized, never been waged. They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11 and that would be Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, that is stronger now than at any time since 2001. I've been paying attention John McCain!

“John McCain may like to say that he wants to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell. But so far all he's done is follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq that's cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars and that I intend to bring to an end so that we can actually start going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and in the hills of Pakistan, like we should have been doing in the first place. That's the news John McCain! '

Obama is correct that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before Bush overthrew the Iraqi government. I haven't been able to get anyone interested in it, but there is proof positive that the Baath authorities were very scared of al-Qaeda and that when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi showed up in Iraq, they put out an APB on him and branded him dangerous. (Dick Cheney told fairy tales about how Zarqawi was put up in fancy hotels by a solicitous Saddam.)

This is something that has always irked me about the neocon claims. This is the primary "link" used by wingnuts to tie Saddam to 9/11. Al-Zarqawi was in Iraq, so Al-Qaeda was allied with Saddam.
Hell, Al-Qaeda operatives were in the U.S, Britain, Spain, etc. Does that 'tie' the U.S. to Al-Qaeda? Does that mean we should invade Spain as "payback for 9/11"? Aren't we obligated to invade Britain, a country known to have WMD, to prevent it from being used by Al-Qaeda as a base?

The likely answer, if neocons were honest, to these questions is "only if the Decider says we need to".

2008-02-24T14:53:00.003-06:00

I know that, since the polls have all turned against them, Republicans dismiss any polling out of hand. The exception is any poll that shows Congress has low approval numbers, and even then they leave out the fact that the Republican members of Congress are considerably more unpopular than the Democratic members.

The tide has turned against Republicans so profoundly, yet since they live in a delusional world fueled by Fox News and talk radio, they still really believe that the public supports Bush. The Main Stream Media (MSM) is merely twisting the facts, or so they believe. Others are slightly more candid, and opine that the public has turned against them, but that people have simply been "misled" by the MSM, and that all it will take is exposure to 'the truth' and the public will rub their eyes and come out of their hypnotic state. The 'truth' is generally defined as talk about the "success" in Iraq, scary stories about an Islamic takeover of America, soldiers reading from scripts they rehearsed with their CO, and lots of flags and eagles. The unsaid 'truth' involves a copious amount of hatred, charges of treason, and bragging about torture. Another invasion (or possibly two) is also bandied about as a good way to bring the public around to the Republican view of things.

With the Decider slipping to 19% in polls, and national polls showing McCain losing to Obama at this stage, the usual dose of Republican Kool-Aid has been increased to alarming levels in order to fend off reality. Now, with the Gallup Poll shown below, they will need an IV for the stuff.

Despite the snarling neocon assertion that Americans despise the Democrats and everything they stand for (with those "things they stand for" being selectively defined by the aforementioned snarling neocon), the numbers of Americans describing themselves as Republicans has dropped over the past two months. This isn't the MSM defining people as Republicans, it's people themselves describing themselves as Republicans. On top of that, more than half of the country now has an unfavourable view of the GOP.

While the numbers of those who call themselves Independents have dropped substantially over the past few months, the major beneficiary has been the Democrats - or more precisely, those who call themselves Democrats.

40% of the American public now describe themselves as Democrats.
More than half of the country has a favourable view of the Democratic Party,
Likewise, more than half of the country feels that the Democrats "can bring about the changes this country needs", that they are "able to manage the federal government effectively", and that they have "mostly honest and ethical members in Congress".

The Presidential election, however, is not determined by popular vote. It is determined by the Electoral College (or by the Supreme Court, in Bush's case). The Republicans, by virtue of being the Party in power, still hold substantial sway over the MSM and the "punditocracy", but their message is having a declining effect. The divisions within the GOP, at the current time, also send "mixed signals" to the sheep. The vast majority of Democrats, however, would be happy with either candidate, at least according to exit polling in several primaries. Democratic turnout for the primaries has exceeded Republican turnout, even in the South. This is good news for Congressional elections, since they are not affected by the Electoral College. It is not outrageous to assume that nearly all of those who voted in the primary are likely to vote in the general election. As of right now, the Democrats hold the lead in potential electoral votes if the election were held today.

In one sense, at least, the continuing fight for the Democratic nomination is an advantage for the Democrats. By not having a single person to target, Republicans are forced to delay their slander campaigns. On the Republican side, McCain is increasingly associating himself with the stained and odious Bush legacy, which should hurt him over the coming months. The other sleeper factor is the economy. A declining economy virtually always works against the incumbent Party.

from the Gallup Poll

February 21, 2008

Democrats Have Significant Identification, Image Advantage

Percentage identifying as Democrats near Gallup high

by Frank Newport

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans are now more likely to identify themselves as Democrats than at any time since 2000.

Forty percent of Americans in the Feb. 11-14 Gallup Poll -- in response to the question, "In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent?" -- said they identified with the Democratic Party, while 26% identified with the Republican Party and 34% with neither (most of these considered themselves independents).

The 40% Democratic identification figure is unusually high. The last time 40% of Americans identified as Democrats was August 2000. Before that, there have been just a handful of Gallup Poll telephone surveys -- going back to 1985 -- in which 40% or more of Americans identified as Democrats. The highest Democratic identification in a Gallup telephone poll was 42% in July 1987.

The gap between Democratic and Republican identification -- now at 14 percentage points -- is also almost a record high. The gap was higher only in December 1998 -- immediately after President Bill Clinton had been impeached by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives -- when 41% of Americans identified as Democrats and only 20% as Republicans.

The highest level of identification with the Republican Party, 39%, has been reached at three points: in May 1991 (a few months after the first Persian Gulf War), December 2003 (in a poll in the field at the time of Saddam Hussein's capture), and September 2004 (after a successful Republican convention at which George W. Bush was nominated for a second term in office).

Last year, as often happens in a year in which there is no national election, Americans were increasingly likely to identify as independents. This year, as presidential election voting has begun in primaries and caucuses, the Democrats have been the beneficiary as Americans have become more likely to express identification with a party. As 2007 ended, an average of two Gallup Polls conducted in December showed 32.5% of Americans identifying as Democrats, 37.5% as independents, and 28.5% as Republicans. Now, the shift is evident. Identification with the Republican Party and with no party have slipped slightly, while identification with the Democratic Party has gained.

There are several other indications that the Democratic Party is riding high at the moment. First, the percentage of Americans with a favorable image of the Democratic Party (56%) is significantly higher than is the case for the Republican Party (41%).

In addition, a Feb. 8-10 USA Today/Gallup poll asked Americans to say whether three specific dimensions applied or did not apply to the two parties. The dimensions were: 1) can bring about the changes this country needs; 2) is able to manage the federal government effectively, and 3) has mostly honest and ethical members in Congress.

In each instance, the American public was more likely to say the characteristic applies to the Democratic Party than to the Republican Party. The biggest difference -- almost 20 points -- is on the dimension of bringing about change, perhaps not surprising given the strong emphasis on change in Barack Obama's campaign (and, to some degree, that of Hillary Clinton). Also, because there has been a Republican administration in the White House since 2001, it may be natural for Americans to say the Democratic Party would be most able to bring about change were its standard-bearer to move into the White House.

Bottom Line

The data reviewed here underscore the strong position of the Democratic Party at this point in the election year. A near-record number of Americans indicate that they currently identify as Democrats; the image of Democratic Party is much more favorable than that of the Republican Party; and Americans say the Democratic Party is better positioned to bring about change and is more likely to be able to manage the government effectively.

2008-02-24T10:14:00.005-06:00

Well, it's Sunday, and that means it's time to trudge out on the ice, take a seat in the fish-house, bait our hook and reel another prize for this week's Sunday Eel Pout. The week's outrages, idiocies, and facile indignations will be compiled, and the most unworthy candidates will be awarded The Sunday Eel Pout. Your candidates are as follows:

Richard Perle, one of the primary 'architects' of the Iraq invasion, wrote an article this week in The American Interest that offers several confusing and contradictory statements about the "success" of the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation. The title of the article is "We Won Years Ago", in which he states that we have won because "Saddam will not be sharing WMD with anyone. Judged against that measure, we have already won in Iraq". Yes, Mr. Perle, (the deceased) Saddam will no longer be "sharing" (did he ever threaten this?) his non-existent WMDs. So we've "won" then, right? Not so, says Perle: "...despite the widely, if grudgingly, acknowledged progress of the surge, the war is far from over". So which is it, Mr. Perle? He also brags, by way of a quote from the reprehensible tool named Fouad Ajami, that the invasion has established "a Pax Americana [that] anchors the order of the region". Really? If anything, Bush has shattered the order of the region.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, from the American Enterprise Institute and a former CIA officer, who proposes that we 'pretend' to negotiate with Iran as a pretext for bombing them. Negotiations are "something that must be checked off before the next president could unleash the Air Force and the Navy". We must, however, beware that talks "could bind the United States to meaningless, stalling discussions", so these negotiations must essentially be for show. After this, of course, "the military option would likely become convincing to more Americans".
Alberto Gonzales, former Attorney General and Bush crony, who this week compared Bush with Lincoln. Bush also has presented himself as the contemporary Lincoln. This has been a recurring theme within neocon circles, with Karl Rove, Rudy Giuliani, and Newt Gingrich saying the same thing. Gonzales received $30,000 for his little speech, in which this scholarly figure would only answer pre-approved questions. He further offered that Bush's brilliance "will be revealed in years to come". Perhaps through multiple subpoenas, one would hope.
President Bush, who this week in Africa presented a cut in funding for AIDS, TB, and malaria as an increase in funding. Congress gave Bush $841 million for the Global Project, but Bush reduced it to $500 million since, as one his stooges said, “You don’t want to pile up money.” So cutting $341 million is now considered an increase in Bush-speak.
Arizona Senator John McCain, who this week criticised Obama as naive for saying he would take military action in Pakistan, even without the Pakistanis' permission if they wouldn't give it. As McCain further said, " I would not broadcast to the world that I am going to bomb a sovereign nation in order to accomplish my goal." So, Mr. McCain, weren't you the guy that broke out singing a reprise of "Barbara Ann" calling for the bombing of Iran? Isn't Iran a "sovereign nation"? Is that "naive", or is it only naive if someone else does it? Of course, the Bush Administration last month did exactly what McCain is criticising Obama for proposing. When asked about this, McCain said Obama was "wrong in speaking publicly about the option". So one must wonder if it was also wrong for McCain to speak publicly about bombing Iran. So much for "straight talk". Mc Cain is also eligible for a Sunday Eel Pout for his flip-flop on "taxes for the wealthy".
“There’s one big difference between me and the others–I won’t take every last dime of the surplus and spend it on tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy.” [McCain campaign commercial, January 2000]

So, as we reel in another putative prize and lay it out on the Minnesota lake ice in disgust, the sense of anticipation builds. Which bozo will take this damn thing home?

The winner of Minnesota's absolutely unwanted, utterly uncoveted, dismally appropriate, shudder-inspiring, and completely ignominious Sunday Eel Pout is... John McCain for saying it's wrong to publicly talk about bombing a sovereign nation, unless he does it, but that it's okay to actually do it if you are in the Bush Administration, because it's talking about bombing a country that really bothers a sovereign nation, not the actual bombing. This is McCain's second Sunday Eel Pout.
No, you can't throw it back. It's against the law in Minnesota to throw a rough fish back in the water. You're stuck with it, like every other angler in the North Star State. Feed it to the dog, use it to symbolise what we are fighting for in Iraq, waterboard it until it "talks", but get it the hell out of my sight.

All of the idiots in this week's race were unquestionably deserving of the Sunday Eel Pout, but There Can Be Only One.

Well kids, the hissing of the eel pout can only mean one thing: this Sunday's Eel Pout award is over.

2008-02-23T19:23:00.003-06:00

As I've noted before, China is creating a border conflict with India on India's NE frontier. Chinese forces are building roads, shelters, and camps both in India's Arunachal Pradesh and within Bhutan. Chinese Maoist proxies are moving into the Siliguri Corridor and the Chumba Valley to disrupt Indian and Bhutanese security forces. China openly claims ownership of Arunachal Pradesh, and India appears unwilling to go to war to defend it or Bhutan.

Remarkably, the Indian military is now saying, essentially, that it depends on how you look at it. "Maybe China really does own Arunachal Pradesh. Who are we to say who owns what?", seems to be the Indian Army's latest comment on the border incursions.

Or, as the Indian Army Chief would say, "the Chinese have a different perception" of the border than India does. Wow. Perhaps Pakistan has "a different perception of the LAC" in Jammu and Kashmir than India does, too. You have to look at from both sides, right? So if Pakistan invaded Kashmir, maybe the Indian Army would just shrug and leave. I mean, who put the Indian Army in charge of saying which country's military can or cannot come on to Indian soil? I simply have to wonder just what exactly Indian Army Chief Kapoor thinks the military is for? Parades?

If the Indian military doesn't want to go to war with China, that's one thing. Nobody likes war, especially when it marches to your doorstep. But for the Indian military to pretend this is all just some deep, dark philosophical mystery that has them baffled is just completely ridiculous. Just tell China that they can have everything east of the Siliguri Corridor. Maybe they won't go farther than that. If they do, the Indian military can always ponder some more on the artificial and ephemeral nature of borders. After all, if China is under the impression that an Indian state belongs to them, well, maybe they're right.

The issue is not the "number of incursions", but rather that these incursions now are backed up by thousands of Chinese troops encamped on the border.

story from ExpressIndia

Chinese incursions due to different perception: India

Agencies
Posted online: Saturday , February 23, 2008 at 07:25:57
Updated: Saturday , February 23, 2008 at 07:45:25

New Delhi, February 23: Noting that there were different perception of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Arunachal Pradesh, Army Chief Gen Deepak Kapoor has said India would be "as much blameworthy" as the Chinese side for incursions on the two sides.

He, however, said border infrastructure on Chinese side was better than that of India, giving them an "additional capability to bring additional troops", and the government here is "seriously looking" into this "disparity".

"I think a degree of misperception has been built on this issue of incursions. First and foremost, it is a matter of perception. The Chinese have a different perception of the LAC as do we. When they come up to their perception, we call it an incursion and likewise they do," Kapoor said in Karan Thapar's Devil's Advocate programme for CNN-IBN.

He said the level of total number of incursions in 2007 is "somewhat similar to what it has been in the past. So, the feeling that too many incursions have taken place into Indian territory is not right."

Asked whether Indian troops also incur into Chinese territory as often because of differences of perception about the LAC, the army chief replied: "that's right. Which they would call an incursion into their side. So, therefore, to that extent, we would be as much blameworthy for that kind of incursion up to our perceived LAC."

Kapoor dismissed media perception that Chinese incursion were a sign of muscle-flexing by Beijing indicating something worse to come.

2008-02-23T12:31:00.002-06:00

Yes, the Decider has gone into a tailspin and dropped to 19% support among the American public.

Four polls show McCain at a disadvantage to Obama if the election were held today.
Fox: McCain loses 43/47
Diageo: McCain loses 40/48
Zogby: McCain loses 40/47
Gallup: McCain loses 46/50

Of course, we still have eight months of a declining economy, McCain sucking up to Bush, the Sahwa turning on the Iraqi government, and Afghanistan sliding into failed state mode. We have eight months for Norm Coleman to do his incredible chameleon act and temporarily transform into a Democrat. We still have eight months of Republicans striking poses and the public snickering at them. And we have eight months of Administration hacks putting a flashlight under their faces and telling very scary stories that only their base believes anymore. Uh-huh, the Muslims are going to take over the country and make your daughter wear a burqa. Heard that one already.

story from ARG

February 20, 2008
Concerns over Economy Push
George W. Bush's Overall Job Approval to New Low

George W. Bush's overall job approval rating has dropped to a new low in American Research Group polling as 78% of Americans say that the national economy is getting worse according to the latest survey from the American Research Group.

Among all Americans, 19% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 77% disapprove. When it comes to Bush's handling of the economy, 14% approve and 79% disapprove.

Among Americans registered to vote, 18% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 78% disapprove. When it comes to the way Bush is handling the economy, 15% of registered voters approve of the way Bush is handling the economy and 79% disapprove.

A total of 78% of Americans say the national economy is getting worse and 47% say the national economy is in a recession. A total of 42% of Americans, however, say they believe the national economy will be better a year from now, which is the highest level for this question in the past year. This optimism does not spread to improvements in household financial situations as 17% of Americans say they expect their household financial situations to be better a year from now, which is the lowest for this question in the past year.

The results presented here are based on 1,100 completed telephone interviews conducted among a nationwide random sample of adults 18 years and older. The interviews were completed February 16 through 19, 2008. The theoretical margin of error for the total sample is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points, 95% of the time, on questions where opinion is evenly split.

Overall, 19% of Americans say that they approve of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president, 77% disapprove, and 4% are undecided.

---------------------------------

Among Republicans (29% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 45% approve of the way Bush is handling his job and 50% disapprove. Among Democrats (43% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 1% approve and 99% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job. Among independents (28% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 17% approve and 75% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job as president.

Overall, 14% of Americans say that they approve of the way George W. Bush is handling the economy, 79% disapprove, and 7% are undecided. Among registered voters, 15% approve and 79% disapprove of the way Bush is handling the economy.

A total of 1% of Americans say that the national economy is getting better, 20% say it is staying the same, and 78% say the national economy is getting worse.

Meanwhile, the Fox News poll has Bush dropping one point since last month to 32% approval. Bush has not exceeded 38% in the Fox News poll in the past year. NBC/WSJ has seen Bush's "very favorable" ratings drop from 31% to 14% in the past year.

The last Gallup Poll early this month had 57% saying that the Iraq invasion was "a mistake".

These numbers are what the Republicans are running on. A "mistake" of a war, an economy that 1% says is improving, and continuation of policies that only 19% support. Yet, just as before the 2006 elections, we hear wildly delusional Republicans looking forward to a big victory. For fun, take a look at the predictions from those wacky folks over at Redstate.

2008-02-23T09:53:00.006-06:00

From The Minnesota Monitor, a report comes in about the environmental scorecards for the state's congressional delegation. Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison scored 100% on environmental issues, and Democratic Sen. Klobuchar scored 83%.
Republican Reps. Kline and Bachmann both scored zero on the scorecard.
Interestingly, the Republicans were not washed out. Retiring Rep. Ramstad got a score of 95%. It's interesting because Ramstad is quite a moderate Republican, who is retiring because of what his Party has turned into. He's also my Representative. After denouncing him as a RINO, the Party later begged him to run again so that they would not have to spend money defending the seat. Apparently ideological purity isn't that important in election years.

While my district has been a solid Republican one for a long time, it is not a conservative district. Ramstad never got elected by claiming unswerving loyalty to the Bush Team, like Kline and Bachmann did.
The likely Republican candidate for the district, Erik Paulson, is pretty vague on the issues. He uses broad terms. On security, we need to "think globally" and "reduce our dependence on foreign oil". Pretty bold stuff, eh? On health care, we "need more choices", but not a choice of single-payer health care. Could you vague that up a little more, Erik? He says nothing about Iraq, but he has "traveled throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East", no doubt encountering a wide assortment of hotel staff to give him insight into the world's issues. When I see Republicans talking like this, my first thought is that this a person waiting for the Party to hand him a script. He's a ventriloquist dummy for other people who you wouldn't vote for. My bet is that he'll continue to keep things extremely fuzzy in the campaign, because if he were to come out and explicitly support the neocon agenda he would lose. If elected, however, he will do precisely what he is told to do by the (highly unpopular) neocon base of the Party, and alienate his district. It would probably spell the end of Republican dominance for the district, but they would get their single-term shill. His real qualification for the Republican seal of approval is that he has been able to raise his own money, which means that the Party won't have to spend it's slender resources on the campaign. A free shill is the best kind of shill.

The Democrats are offering Hovland (a Republican-turned-Democrat), Bonoff (a state senator), and Madia (an Iraq war veteran) . All three take a position of getting our troops out of Iraq, with Hovland being a little vague and leaving a fair amount of wiggle room. Still, put that up against Paulson's "I'm waiting for the memo from my Party masters" line. The seat may very well go to the Democrats. Being annointed by the Republicans doesn't mean what it used to in this district anymore.

2008-02-22T07:15:00.002-06:00

I've posted before on the situation in Bhutan here and here.
China is moving its military forces into Bhutan, which is in the way of their effort to take the Indian frontier in a border dispute. With neighbouring Nepal already under the control of Chinese-inspired Maoist forces, and similar insurgents in the Indian state of Assam for several years, Bhutan is in a three-front low-intensity conflict. If an outright border war betwen China and India should ensue, these proxies would become an effective Fifth Column, with Bhutan becoming "liberated" by China in the same way that Tibet was "saved".

As we see in the reports below, these things are already coming to pass. Bhutan is attempting to evict Chinese proxies from bases within their country, while security forces in Assam are struggling with their own proxies and trying to prevent those in Bhutan from setting up bases in Assam. Meanwhile, China continues unhindered in its build-up, as their proxies create a diversion.

story from Calcutta News

Maoist threat: security tightened along Assam-Bhutan border

Calcutta News.Net
Friday 22nd February, 2008 (IANS)

The Assam government has tightened security along its border with Bhutan and expressed serious concern over reports that Maoist rebels from Nepal were going through the state to enter Bhutan and set up bases in the Himalayan kingdom.

'We are aware of the recent developments regarding movement of Maoist rebels and are taking the reports very seriously. We are stepping up security measures,' Asasm Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi told IANS Friday.

Bhutan's security forces have busted two Maoist militant camps and have captured at least eight Communist rebels with weapons in a crackdown that began last week.

'Our security personnel have busted two Maoist rebel camps last week, one each in the districts of Serphang and Samdrup Jongkhar, and captured eight rebels with weapons and incriminating documents,' Bhutan's Deputy Chief of Police Kipchu Namgyel told IANS by telephone from capital Thimphu.

Namgyel said the rebels belong to the Nepal-based Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist-Leninist), a little-known group that is said to have carried out five bomb explosions in the otherwise peaceful Himalayan nation in less than a month.

The busting of the two Maoist camps in southern Bhutan districts, bordering the northeastern Indian state of Assam, has concerned authorities in the Buddhist nation of 700,000 people that is getting ready for its first parliamentary elections March 24.

Paramilitary troopers of the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) have stepped up vigil along Assam's 262 km unfenced border with Bhutan in view of reports of cross-border movement of Maoist rebels.

'We are taking adequate steps in view of the reports to ensure that Maoists are not able to set up any bases in Assam,' the chief minister said.

The Royal Bhutan Police (RBP) has held the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist-Leninist) responsible for the Feb 4 bombing in the southwestern Samtse district and four other explosions in January.

One person was injured and some government and private buildings damaged in the serial blasts. The Communist Party of Bhutan has also threatened to disrupt the March 24 elections to Bhutan's National Assembly or the lower House of Parliament that would formalize the nation's transformation from an absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy.

Bhutan had witnessed a pro-democracy agitation in the 1990s with a section of Nepali-speaking residents in its southern parts rising in revolt against the monarchy.

The crackdown that followed led thousands of Nepali-speaking people from southern Bhutan to flee to Nepal. Now an estimated 100,000 people are sheltered in relief camps.

There are reports that the Maoists are recruiting among aggrieved refugees now based in Nepal. Recent reports say that Maoists from eastern India may have forged links with a rag-tag Assam-based rebel group called the All Adivasi National Liberation Army (AANLA), whose cadres are drawn from the state's tea workers' community.

The Assam Police have claimed to have reports about some AANLA leaders based in the state of Jharkhand, known to be a Maoist stronghold.

The Maoists' entry into Bhutan and the trend of violence has caused much concern among observers in the placid nation, currently on the fast track to experiencing democracy.

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story from The Telegraph

Bhutan purge worries Assam
- SSB alerted to passage of Maoists
OUR BUREAU

Guwahati/New Delhi, Feb. 21: The advent of democracy in Bhutan has triggered security concerns in Assam.

Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) personnel stationed on the Indo-Bhutan border have launched an operation codenamed Night Dominance to prevent Maoists crossing over to escape a crackdown by the Royal Bhutan Army in the jungles of the Himalayan kingdom. The raids on Maoist camps is to pre-empt trouble during the March elections in Bhutan.

Sources in the SSB said that there was a danger of Maoists crossing from either side. “Maoists on the run in neighbouring Bhutan could cross over to the Indian side. Also, there is the possibility of Maoists belonging to the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) trying to sneak into the Himalayan kingdom from the Indian side. The party is Nepal-based and there are reports that they have been using Indian border to cross over to Bhutan,” a senior official said.

Inspector-general H.C. Kharkwal confirmed that all SSB units were on maximum alert. “We have increased the level of troop deployment and arranged for modern equipment like night-vision devices and fast-moving vehicles. We need to be prepared to deal with any situation,” he said.

An intelligence official monitoring the Bhutan scene said at least three camps of the Bhutan Tiger Force — said to be the militant wing of the Communist Party of Bhutan — were busted and several Maoists arrested in the past few days. The rebels are believed to have sneaked into the Himalayan kingdom from Nepal through Assam.

Kharkwal said the SSB was focusing on the stretches through which infiltration was most likely, including the Bengal-Assam-Bhutan trijunction and Gossaigaon in Kokrajhar district.

Sources in the state home department said the increase in Maoist activity in Bhutan and along the border with Assam was discussed during a meeting on Tuesday between the king and the visiting Indian foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon and joint secretary (north) Preeti Saran.

The SSB’s special operation is likely to continue till the elections in Bhutan are over.

Militancy in Bhutan has been intrinsically linked to Assam and vice-versa ever since Ulfa and the National Democratic Front of Boroland set up camps in the Himalayan kingdom. Bhutan launched Operation All Clear in December 2003 to flush out the Assam militants.

Maoist elements in Assam, who became overly active after the episode in which a mob attacked Adivasi rallyists at Beltola in Guwahati last year, are believed to have established contact with their Nepal counterparts. “Bhutan will eventually turn into their meeting place if the situation is not handled immediately,” an intelligence official said.

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story from Kuensel

Militant camp in Samdrup Jongkhar

16 February, 2008 - Two members of the Communist Party of Bhutan, based in Nepal, were apprehended from a militant camp in the forest at Nunai under Samdrup Jongkhar dzongkhag, which a Royal Bhutan army patrol came across on February 15.

The RBA patrol recovered two pistols, four rifles and 15 improvised bombs from the two militants, Sanman Gurung and Aitaraj Rai. An army spokesperson said that the two apprehended militants said that there were 18 militants in the camp.
This is the third camp detected inside Bhutan since January 2008, according to the army spokesperson.

"Which is more important to you in a presidential candidate: someone who commits to staying in Iraq until the U.S. succeeds, or someone who is flexible about when to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq?" N=956 registered voters, MoE ± 3

Commits to
Staying

Flexible

Unsure

2008-02-21T23:10:00.002-06:00

The only Middle Eastern nation with nuclear weapons is Israel. Israel refuses to sign the NPT.
Yet the "real" threat is imaginary nukes in Iraq and Iran. Iran, at least, signed the NPT.
These are the facts that had to be left out of a British report, lest Israel get annoyed.

story from The Daily Star

UK 'suppressed' mention of Israeli nuclear arsenal in Iraq arms dossier

Compiled by Daily Star staff
Friday, February 22, 2008

LONDON: An early draft of a pre-war British weapons dossier on Iraq included concerns over Israel's nuclear capability, but the government fought to suppress the reference before publication, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday. The daily said the Foreign Office convinced a tribunal to keep secret the handwritten mention of Israel in the margin of the dossier, which was drawn up to support the decision to go to war in Iraq.

The reference, suggesting Israel had disregarded the will of the United Nations like Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, was removed before the draft was released this week under Britain's Freedom of Information Act. Israel, seen as a key British government ally, is thought to have the Middle East's only atomic arsenal.

In a witness statement to the Information Tribunal, seen by The Guardian, a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) official warned that any candid reference to Israel's nuclear arsenal would seriously damage bilateral relations.

"I interpret this note to indicate that the person who wrote it believes that Israel has flouted the United Nations' authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein," the official said, according to The Guardian.

"Unfortunately, there is a perception already in Israel that parts of the FCO are prejudiced against the country," Foreign Office official Neil Wigan was quoted as saying.

He argued that the reference scrawled on the draft dossier "would therefore confirm this pre-existing suspicion and would increase the damage."

When asked about the Guardian report, a Foreign Office spokeswoman told Reuters: "We don't comment on leaked documents."

A spokeswoman for Premier Gordon Brown would not comment on the document itself, but said: "Our position in terms of encouraging all signatories of the [nuclear] Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT] to abide by that remains the same." Israel, however, is not party to the treaty.

"But we also recognize Israel's position needs to be looked at in a regional context, bearing in mind they have neighbors such as Iran who deny the right of Israel to exist," she added.

Succumbing to three years of pressure from freedom of information campaigners, London released the once-secret draft document on Monday.

The 32-page dossier, written by a former communications director at the Foreign Office, cites intelligence sources saying Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could easily use them since it had done so before - during a domestic insurrection and in the devastating Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

The document, amended in the margins, makes no mention of Iraq being capable of launching weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a false claim later used in another government dossier to make the case for going to war. - Reuters