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WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
Magpie is a former journalist, attempted historian [No, you can't ask how her thesis is going], and full-time corvid of the lesbian persuasion. She keeps herself in birdseed by writing those bad computer manuals that you toss out without bothering to read them. She also blogs too much when she's not on deadline, both here and at Pacific Views.

Magpie roosts in Portland, Oregon, where she annoys her housemates (as well as her cats Medea, Whiskers, and Jane Doe) by attempting to play Irish music on the fiddle and concertina.

If you like, you can send Magpie an email!



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Saturday, May 27, 2006

Working overtime to save Dubya's ass on the NSA's illegal spying.

It's an old tradition here in the US: When the government wants to keep people from noticing that it's doing something shifty, it announces that shiftiness late on a Friday. That ensures that 'invconvenient' news doesn't make it onto most peoples' radars. And, of course, the best kind of Friday for burying news is the Friday before a long weekend.

True to form, lawyers for the Justice Department waited until late yesterday to file papers asking federal judges in two states to dismiss lawsuits aimed at the NSA's illegal domestic spying programs, ensuring that the news would get lost as And, of course, the reason the feds want the dismissal is 'national security.'

The lawsuits that are worrying Dubya's administration both ask the federal courts to order a halt to the NSA's domestic spying program on the grounds that the president had no constitutional authority to authorize wiretapping and eavesdropping without a court warrant. The New York suit was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights; the one in Detroit by the American Civil Liberties Union and several other groups.

The Justice Department claims that if these two lawsuits are allowed to go forward, Dubya's administration wouldn't be able to show that the NSA's spying was legal without providing information that might aid suspected terrorists and cause 'exceptionally grave damage' to national security.

Shayana Kadidal, an attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, called the administration's motion "undemocratic."

Ample safeguards could be put in place to allow the case to continue without disclosing classified information, he said. The Center has also argued that the court already has enough information in hand to decide whether the spying program was legal, based on admissions the administration has already made about the effort.

"The Bush administration is trying to crush a very strong case against domestic spying without any evidence or argument," he said in a written statement. "Can the president tell the courts which cases they can rule on? If so, the courts will never be able to hold the president accountable for breaking the law."

Justice Department attorneys said in their legal brief that the legality of the president's actions could only be properly judged by understanding "the specific threat facing the nation and the particular actions taken by the president to meet that threat."

"That understanding is not possible without revealing to the very adversaries we are trying to defeat what we know about them and how we are proceeding to stop them," they wrote.

The Dubya administration's moves to quash the two cases are no surprise given its other recent moves to keep the NSA program from being scrutinized by outsiders. Only a few days before USA Today broke the story about how US phone companies were providing records of domestic phone calls to the NSA, Dubya gave national intelligence directory John Negroponte the authority to let companies that cooperate with the feds on national security matters keep that cooperation out of their legal and financial records. And in another move, the Justice Department denied security clearances to its own ethics investigators in order to keep them from examining how department lawyers decided to put their stamp of approval on the NSA's spying program.

All of which leaves us with the question: If the NSA's spying program is so legal and so necessary, why is Dubya's administration doing its utmost to keep anyone from learning anything about that program — and especially to keep the courts from deciding any cases involving NSA spying?

Inquiring magpies want to know.

You can find more info on the Center for Constitutional Rights' lawsuit here, and on the ACLU's lawsuit here.

Via AP and CBS News.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:42 PM | Get permalink



Ooooooh, shiny!

A neat little applet that displays a website's HTML code as a graph!

Here's what the graph for Magpie looks like in an early stage of unfolding (at just over half-size):


A different view of Magpie

I think the big blob at the bottom is Magpie's archive.


The applet is the work of Sala at Aharef. Here's part of his explanation of what the applet does:

Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser's job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the "View source" tab somewhere in your browser's menu.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph....

You can find out what each colored dot represents — and see some really cool examples — if you go over here.

And you can make your own graphs if you go here. I warn you, though: Watching the graphs unfold can be addictive.

Via Pharyngula.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:37 AM | Get permalink



Friday, May 26, 2006

No comment.

Polish television has banned ads for alcohol, lingerie, contraceptives, and tampons during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI.


Not for the pope. Nosirreee!

Tampons? No thank you!


Via BBC.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:21 PM | Get permalink



When Turkey increased the legal penalty for 'honor killings' ...

I don't think they were expecting the killings to be replaced by 'honor suicides.'

From a Reuters story:

Rising suicides among women in the mainly Kurdish southeast has prompted the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Yakin Erturk, to visit the region, where rights activists say families are forcing young women into suicide because the government has clamped down on so-called "honor killings".

Hanging, poisoning and shooting are the most common methods, they say.

Turkey, which started European Union entry talks last year, has toughened legislation on honor killings, carried out against women seen to have tainted the family's name, for example by having a child outside marriage or merely by being the subject of rumor.

Men, previously treated leniently by judges who considered "honor" a mitigating factor in murder, now face life sentences under a new penal code passed last year. Activists say that has made families put pressure on the woman in question to kill herself to spare the male relative from jail.

From a story in the UK Independent:
The practice of honour killings in Turkey has received widespread attention, and some observers fear that changes to the penal code passed last year have had the unintended consequence of channelling domestic violence into less direct forms.

Women's groups have claimed that in some instances women have been locked in a room with a knife and a gun and told by relatives to end their lives.

[UN special rapporteur] Erturk expressed her horror at the reported number of deaths but said there was no hard evidence to support speculation concerning forced suicides....

While Turkey has one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, some areas of the country are registering higher numbers of women than men taking their lives. "This trend is the reverse of what we've found in the rest of the world and is a great concern," said Ms Erturk. "At this stage I've got more questions than answers."

Other observers have blamed the suicides on despair among young women forced to live severely restricted lives. Leyla Pervizat, a women's rights researcher in Istanbul, warned against blaming a change in the law for the unexplained deaths and cautioned the media against looking for easy answers.

"I'm not surprised this is happening," she said. Turkey is in danger of following the path of Pakistan, Ms Pervizat added, where intense media interest in honour killings was making male-dominated communities find other ways to punish or control women.

"They're going to kill women one way or another," she said.

Thanks to Vanessa at Feministing for the pointer to the Reuter story.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:49 PM | Get permalink



It's in the newspaper.

So it must be true.


On the skids

'Booze problems'? No, not our Dear Leader!


Via Media Matters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:17 PM | Get permalink



A particularly incompetent book-banner goes down in flames.

A little over a week ago, we posted about a book-banning effort in the Chicago-area town of Arlington Heights, led by a right-wing school board member named Leslie Pinney. According to Pinney, the following nine books needed to be dropped from a high school reading list because they were full of explicit sex, violence, and vulgar language:
  • How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent by Julia Alvarez
  • Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
  • The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
  • Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Awakening by Kate Chopin
  • The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
  • The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan

The last two books on the list are especially curious, yes?

What made us notice the story about Pinney's book-banning efforts was her admission that she'd never read any of the books. Instead, she'd just trawled the internet looking to see whether any of the books on the district's reading list were objectionable. While Pinney didn't identify the source for her information, we suspect it was a group called Culture Campaign, who are well-known book-banners. [The group's website contains excerpts of several books on Pinney's list here.]

All of this is a long-winded way to get to the latest development in the story: Last night, the school board decided the fate of the nine books on Pinney's list and — happily — Pinney lost. In fact, she lost big. After the votes were tallied, Pinney was the only member of the school board to support a ban on the nine books. That outcome was despite on-line efforts by several right-wing groups, including Culture Campaign, to mobilize support for Pinney.

Knowing the tenacity of right-wing wackos, however, I doubt this loss puts an end to Pinney's book-banning career. Watch this space.

Via Chicago Tribune.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:40 AM | Get permalink



Keeping the airwaves safe for ... who?

Last week, the US Senate passed — without debate — a bill that dramatically increases the fines that can be levied on TV or radio broadcasters who air 'indecent' or 'profane' material. Under the bill, individual violations can cost a broadcaster up to US$ 500,000, and three violations can cost a broadcaster their license. A similar bill has already been passed by the House of Representatives and, with congressional elections coming up in November, you can bet that Dubya will sign whatever anti-indecency legislation winds up on his desk.
No, you can't watch that!Knee-jerk legislators and right-wing media 'activists' would have the country believe that Congress is acting in response to the public's demand that that feds act to stop a tide of indecency that's swamping the airwaves and endangering the nation's young people. But nothing could be further from the truth. According to an excellent post by Jonathan Rintels, the entire issue of broadcast indecency has been created and stage-managed by a handful of right-wing groups:

The FCC received approximately 6,500 complaints about an episode of CBS's hit show "Without a Trace," which featured a brief scene of a teen sex orgy. With so many offended Americans complaining, no wonder the FCC imposed a $3.6 million fine on CBS and its affiliates, even though the "Trace" scene was hardly remarkable to anyone who has ever watched music videos or soap operas.

But a Wall Street Journal review of the numbers found that of those 6,500 complaints, all but three appeared to originate as computer-generated form letters.

The PTC claims credit for submitting thousands of complaints to the FCC about the April 7, 2003 episode of Fox's "Married by America' that the Commission ultimately fined $1.2 million. But blogger Jeff Jarvis, former TV Guide critic, used the Freedom of Information Act to discover that "all but two came from the so-called Parents Television Council's automated kvetch-machine."

According to an investigation done by the conservative Progress and Freedom Foundation [pdf], when the PTC emails its list-serve to complain about a show, a single click on its email complaint form can generate six or more "complaints" since the FCC counts separately each complaint to each Commissioner's office and other FCC offices. Making these numbers even more phony, there is no requirement that the complainer's children or even the complainer himself actually view the offending show, let alone be offended by it. It's the PTC/FCC version of click-fraud.
[Emphasis mine]

Given the Senate vote to increase the fines for indecency, the click-fraud practiced by the right wing has been a very successful tactic in helping them to put their stamp on the programming offered by US broadcasters. As Rintels notes, broadcasters are already having to deal with inconsistent and vague FCC decisions on what constitutes indecency, and already having to deal with an earlier round of fine increases. Once the new fines are law, we can expect already timid broadcasters to be looking over their shoulders even more than they already are, and for programming that pushes any sort of boundaries to get even harder to find.

And, I'd suggest, we can expect the right-wing's 'morality police' to get even more aggressive if Democrats are unsuccessful in taking control of at least one house of Congress this fall.

You can read the rest of Jonathan Rintels' post here.

Via Huffington Post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:27 AM | Get permalink



They were wrong then, too.

With the recent surge in oil prices, the US nuclear power industry has cranked up its efforts to convince people that the solution to the nation's energy crisis is to build tons of new nuclear power plants.

Of course, the nuclear industry has made some other equally stupid arguments for nuclear power over the years.


If the Shah likes it, you know it's good!

1970s advocacy ad for nuclear power.


A cheap shot, true, but it sure does make the point.

Via Lenin's Tomb.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:48 AM | Get permalink



The really inconvenient truth.

In his current column, economist Paul Krugman joins the parade of media types who are pondering the Al Gore documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. Like some of his colleagues, Krugman looks at Gore's prescience in worrying about global warming way before it was politically advantageous to be doing so, and about the political price that he had to pay for being the kind of wonk who did worry about it. And, like some other reviewers, he also looks at how Gore and his film are the target of a disinformation campaign being waged by the energy industry and its right-wing sock puppets.

But, Krugman being who he is, he pulls a meaning from the story of Al Gore and his environmental documentary that most other reviewers have missed: That story tells us more than we probably want to know about the state of US politics and why the nation finds itself in increasingly dire straits:

I won't join the sudden surge of speculation about whether "An Inconvenient Truth" will make Mr. Gore a presidential contender. But the film does make a powerful case that Mr. Gore is the sort of person who ought to be running the country.

Since 2000, we've seen what happens when people who aren't interested in the facts, who believe what they want to believe, sit in the White House. Osama bin Laden is still at large, Iraq is a mess, New Orleans is a wreck. And, of course, we've done nothing about global warming.

But can the sort of person who would act on global warming get elected? Are we — by which I mean both the public and the press — ready for political leaders who don't pander, who are willing to talk about complicated issues and call for responsible policies? That's a test of national character. I wonder whether we'll pass.

If you're a NY Times subscriber, you can read the full column here, behind the pay firewall. Otherwise, we suggest going offshore.

A big thanks (yet again) to the Peking Duck.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:03 AM | Get permalink



Thursday, May 25, 2006

Ooooooh, shiny!

Covers for literary classics re-done in the style of trashy pulp books!


I always suspected something like this

'While the men are away, these kittens will play!'
[Cover: Rebecca Cohen/Coco Co]


I'm not usually a big fan of Slate, but they definitely hit the mark by asking book designers to re-vision the covers for a half-dozen classics. My only complaint is that they didn't do covers for more books.

To illustrate this post, I had a really hard time choosing between the Little Women cover above and this one for Alice in Wonderland.

Via Blog of a Bookslut.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:55 AM | Get permalink



The smartest guys in the room.

They're guilty, guilty, guilty.

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:26 AM | Get permalink



Not speaking English can be hazardous to your health.

As Mikhaela points out, passing an English-only law in the US is our only way to avoid certain disaster.


The perils of not speaking English

[© 2006 Mikhaela B. Reid]

And that's just the beginning of the story. To see the rest, go here.

And if you want to see a whole bunch more of Mikhaela's political cartoons, I'd suggest going over here.

Via Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:31 AM | Get permalink



Not like we in the US need to read this book or anything.

A first-aid manual for the Dubya years?In 1993, a short book by Gene Sharp called From Democracy to Dictatorship was published in Thailand, intended for use in Burma by opponents of that country's dictatorship. Written by political scientist Gene Sharp — an expert in nonviolent political struggle — the book is a practical introduction to using nonviolent techniques to bring down dictatorial governments. Since 1993 it has been translated into 17 languages, and has seen use in the political struggles against dictators and authoritarian governments in countries such as Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and Georgia.

Why am I bringing up Sharp's book here? Take a look at this excerpt and maybe you can answer that question for yourself:

Among the weaknesses of dictatorships are the following:
  • The cooperation of a multitude of people, groups, and institutions needed to operate the system may be restricted or withdrawn.
  • The requirements and effects of the regime's past policies will somewhat limit its present ability to adopt and implement conflicting policies.
  • The system may become routine in its operation, less able to adjust quickly to new situations.
  • Personnel and resources already allocated for existing tasks will not be easily available for new needs.
  • Subordinates fearful of displeasing their superiors may not report accurate or complete information needed by the dictators to make decisions.
  • The ideology may erode, and myths and symbols of the system may become unstable.
  • If a strong ideology is present which influences one's view of reality, firm adherence to it may cause inattention to actual conditions and needs.
  • Deteriorating efficiency and competency of the bureaucracy, or excessive controls and regulations, may make the system's policies and operation ineffective.
  • Internal institutional conflicts and personal rivalries and hostilities may harm, and even disrupt, the operation of the dictatorship.
  • Intellectuals and students may become restless in response to conditions, restrictions, doctrinalism, and repression.
  • The general public may over time become apathetic, skeptical, and even hostile to the regime.
  • Regional, class, cultural, or national differences may become acute.
  • The power hierarchy of the dictatorship is always unstable to some degree, and at times extremely so. Individuals do not only remain in the same position in the ranking, but may rise or fall to other ranks or be removed entirely and replaced by new persons.
  • Sections of the police or military forces may act to achieve their own objectives, even against the will of established dictators, including by coup d'etat.
  • If the dictatorship is new, time is required for it to become well established.
  • With so many decisions made by so few people in the dictatorship, mistakes of judgment, policy, and action are likely to occur.
  • If the regime seeks to avoid these dangers and decentralizes controls and decision making, its control over the central levers of power may be further eroded.

  • Does any of that sound familiar to all of you Magpie readers in the US?

    Mind you, I'm not suggesting that Dubya's administration is a dictatorship now, or that it's likely to become one in the immediate future. But I am suggesting that the analysis of dictatorships and the tactics for nonviolent struggle that Sharp offers in his short book are of more than academic interest to US political activists. Leaders of the Democratic party could especially benefit from a look at what Sharp has to say.

    The Albert Einstein Institute offers versions of From Dictatorship to Democracy in many languages. You can purchase the English-language version here or download a copy in PDF form here.

    | | Posted by Magpie at 12:18 AM | Get permalink



    Wednesday, May 24, 2006

    Global warming may be happening faster than we think.

    That's the conclusion of two separate scientific studies, one in North America, one in Europe.

    According to researchers, most previous estimates of the progress of global warming haven't taken into account the feedback between higher temperatures in the atmosphere and the natural production of greenhouse gases. As global temperatures rise, more greenhouse gases are produced. This raises temperatures and causes the production of even more greenhouse gases. And so on.

    The higher temperatures that result from this feedback mechanism would be bad enough, but the situation is aggravated as humans burn fossil fuels — as they have increasingly done for the past two centuries. As a result, say scientists, temperature increases may be 15 to 78 percent higher than most current estimates.

    But since Dubya says that we don't really know that global warming is caused by human activity, I guess none of us have to worry, huh?

    Via Reuters.

    | | Posted by Magpie at 10:03 AM | Get permalink



    Monday, May 22, 2006

    What he said.

    GOP senator Pat Roberts' recent lame-ass defense of Dubya's assault on civil liberties — 'You have no civil liberties if you are dead' — sparked Robert Parry's these eloquent comments by Robert Parry on the stakes of trading liberty for safety.

    Roberts's dictum echoed through the mainstream media where it was embraced as a pithy expression of homespun common sense. But the commentators missed how Roberts's preference for life over liberty was the antithesis of Henry's option of liberty or death.

    Roberts's statement also represented a betrayal of two centuries of bravery by American patriots who gave their own lives so others could be free.

    After all, it would follow logically that if "you have no civil liberties if you are dead," then all those Americans who died for liberty were basically fools. Roberts's adage reflects a self-centeredness, which would shame the millions of Americans who came before, putting principle and the interests of "posterity" ahead of themselves.

    If Roberts is right, the Minutemen who died at Lexington Green and at Bunker Hill had no liberty; the African-Americans who enlisted in the Union Army and died in Civil War battles had no liberty; the GIs who died on the Normandy beaches or Marines who died at Iwo Jima had no liberty; Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights heroes who gave their lives had no liberty.

    If Sen. Roberts is right, they had no liberties because they died in the fight for liberty. In Roberts's view — which apparently is the dominant opinion of the Bush administration and many of its supporters — personal safety for the individual tops the principles of freedom for the nation.

    The rest is here. Don't miss it.

    Via Cursor.

    | | Posted by Magpie at 2:17 PM | Get permalink



    NSA wiretapping: It just keeps getting worse.

    From a new article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh:

    The N.S.A. also programmed computers to map the connections between telephone numbers in the United States and suspect numbers abroad, sometimes focussing on a geographic area, rather than on a specific person?for example, a region of Pakistan. Such calls often triggered a process, known as "chaining," in which subsequent calls to and from the American number were monitored and linked. The way it worked, one high-level Bush Administration intelligence official told me, was for the agency "to take the first number out to two, three, or more levels of separation, and see if one of them comes back"—if, say, someone down the chain was also calling the original, suspect number. As the chain grew longer, more and more Americans inevitably were drawn in.

    FISA requires the government to get a warrant from a special court if it wants to eavesdrop on calls made or received by Americans. (It is generally legal for the government to wiretap a call if it is purely foreign.) The legal implications of chaining are less clear. Two people who worked on the N.S.A. call-tracking program told me they believed that, in its early stages, it did not violate the law. "We were not listening to an individual's conversation," a defense contractor said. "We were gathering data on the incidence of calls made to and from his phone by people associated with him and others." Similarly, the Administration intelligence official said that no warrant was needed, because "there's no personal identifier involved, other than the metadata from a call being placed."

    But the point, obviously, was to identify terrorists. "After you hit something, you have to figure out what to do with it," the Administration intelligence official told me. The next step, theoretically, could have been to get a suspect's name and go to the FISA court for a warrant to listen in. One problem, however, was the volume and the ambiguity of the data that had already been generated. ("There's too many calls and not enough judges in the world," the former senior intelligence official said.) The agency would also have had to reveal how far it had gone, and how many Americans were involved. And there was a risk that the court could shut down the program.

    Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. "In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in," the consultant explained. "But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they?re doing is a violation of the spirit of the law." One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later.
    [Emphasis mine]

    The rest of Hersh's article is here.

    Via New Yorker.

    | | Posted by Magpie at 1:45 PM | Get permalink



    The Atlantic hurricane season starts 10 days from now.

    The US National Hurricane Center says that the North Atlantic will have a 'very active' hurricane season this year, with 13 to 16 named storms, out of which 8 to 10 will attain hurricane strength. Of those hurricanes, 4 to 6 will become Category 3 storms or higher.

    Given that a trailer can be damaged by winds of "just" 50 mph/80 kph, how do you think those tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents still living in FEMA trailers are going to be faring once the wind starts blowing?

    And how well do you think FEMA is dealing with the danger the trailer residents are facing?

    Chad Heeter shows us how things look from Hancock County, Missisippi, where 8915 people are still living in FEMA trailers.

    [FEMA's] website essentially dumps the problem in the laps of the trailerized, suggesting that it's their responsibility to closely monitor weather patterns, as in the event of a tropical storm or a Category-1 hurricane they would have to be the first -- in some cases, the only people -- to evacuate. Oh, and they'll need to leave the trailers behind. It's illegal to move the FEMA trailers.

    Under hurricane conditions, the website points out, "such shelters are particularly hazardous...no matter how well fastened to the ground." A chart on the same web-page makes the dangers vividly clear. A Category-2 hurricane will simply destroy all mobile homes in its path.

    FEMA suggests that, on recognizing the signs of an oncoming storm, trailer residents should head for the nearest storm shelter. One problem: there is only one certified Red Cross shelter in Hancock County, 20 minutes inland from the trailer communities in Waveland, and that shelter has a scanty capacity of just 250 people. (The current estimated population of Hancock County is over 40,000 people.) Of course, such shelters, essentially reinforced concrete bunkers, could be built right in these trailer communities, but don't count on that happening in the brief days before the next storm season gears up to rush across the overheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

    Via TomDispatch.

    | | Posted by Magpie at 11:25 AM | Get permalink



    The GOP can forget about the Latino vote.

    After the 2004 US election, Republicans were gloating about their unusually high showing among Latino voters — a group that's historically been solidly Democratic. Depending on whose numbers you trust, Dubya may have picked up as much as 40 percent of the Latino vote — a significantly higher percentage than in 2000. That high showing in 2004 had a lot to do with the GOP's embrace of 'traditional family values' and patriotism, which played well among more socially conservative portions of the Latino population.

    It looks like Dubya and the Republicans can kiss their dreams of bringing Latinos into the GOP column goodbye, however, as a two new surveys show that their handling of the immigration issue is erasing the GOP's 2004 gains and then some.

    A survey of 800 registered Hispanic voters conducted May 11-15 by the nonpartisan Latino Coalition showed that Democrats were viewed as better able to handle immigration issues than Republicans, by nearly 3 to 1: 50 percent to 17 percent. Pitting the Democrats against Bush on immigration issues produced a 2 to 1 Democratic advantage, 45 percent to 22 percent....

    Even if the GOP does maintain Bush's margins among Latinos in 2008, another study found that Democrats are likely to achieve a net gain in future elections, simply because Hispanics are growing as a share of the electorate.

    Ken Strasma, a Democratic strategist who specializes in using demographic data to target potential voters, and the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University conducted a study concluding that, if past voting patterns hold, the growing Hispanic population means that Democrats will increase their 2004 vote totals by nearly half a million votes in 2008.

    "The impact is even stronger farther out in the future, as Hispanic vote growth would move two Southwestern battleground states -- Nevada and New Mexico -- into the Democratic column by 2016, and add Iowa and Ohio by 2020," the study said. If the 2004 election had been held in an electorate based on the one forecast for 2020, with all other factors held constant, the higher Hispanic vote would have given Democrat John F. Kerry a slight victory in both the electoral college and the popular vote, the study added....

    In focus groups, [Democratic pollster Sergio] Bendixen said, Hispanic anger over some of the proposals before Congress has not crystallized into partisan resentment of the GOP, but the general tenor of the debate has prompted many Latinos to see "Bush as a friend who has let them down," and who has caved in to anti-Hispanic pressures by proposing to put 6,000 National Guard troops on the Mexican border.

    For decades, Hispanic voters, with the exception of Cubans in Florida, have favored Democrats to Republicans, by as much as 70 percent to 30 percent. President Bush, a former governor of Texas who speaks Spanish, decided in the 2004 campaign to aggressively pursue the Hispanic vote....

    Via Washington Post.

    | | Posted by Magpie at 11:05 AM | Get permalink



    Sunday, May 21, 2006

    Gone fiddlin'.

    The fiddle called and I just couldn't refuse.

    I've been practicing all day and will be off playing Irish tunes with friends tonight. Regular posting will resume tomorrow. In the meanwhile, check out some of those fine blogs listed over on the left. You can't go wrong.

    | | Posted by Magpie at 6:35 PM | Get permalink




    Liar, liar, pants on fire!


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