Magpie

Saturday, October 14

Not counting our chickens until the fox is out of the chicken coop.

As many of us in the US are getting itchy to see that potential Democratic takeover of the Congress next month, Steve Soto points out something very important: Many of those potential Democratic victories are in districts where the GOP controls the voting process.

[The} one thing we aren't shining a light upon and forcing the media to look hard at is which of these 30-40 races will be determined by electronic voting machinery that is in the GOP's hands. After all, you can cover a fraud quite nicely by arguing that despite pre-election polls, voters had a polling booth conversion because negative ads gave them doubts about the Democratic challenger, when in fact it may not be true.

We know that the GOP took control in 1994 of dozens of formerly Democratic seats not by a national tidal wave, but rather by a small national aggregate margin of well less than 100,000 votes amongst those captured Democratic seats. Similarly, the GOP could maintain control this year through a small-scale district-by-district manipulation of only 15-25 seats involving a similar if not smaller number of "votes." Such a fraud would escape the scrutiny of the media if we don't set the narrative now and focus attention on this possibility so that if and when it happens the results would immediately be suspect. The DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] needs to put together a data base now of who governs the election machinery in all of these vulnerable GOP seats, and on whose equipment each district's voters will be voting....

Democrats need to set the narrative and get the media's scrutiny ramped up now before the election for two reasons. First, we need to get these local officials under the spotlight now before the election so that they will think twice before manipulating a race or allowing a contractor to do so, as happened in Ohio and elsewhere. And we also need to do this now so that the public in each district is conditioned to question any outcomes that fly in the face of pre-election polls.

Amen.

Via Left Coaster.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:09 PM | Get permalink

Arrrgh!

Commenting is down. We'll see how long it takes for Haloscan to fix things.

More: It seems that there's no problem with Haloscan — the outage is from server maintenance at the data center they use. I still have idea when comments will be working again, however.

Still more: Comments are back!

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:15 PM | Get permalink

Fighting gay marriage just ain't what it used to be.

During the 2004 election cycle, the GOP grabbed onto the issue of same-sex marriage as a way to mobilize religious fundamentalists, and successfully parlayed a heavy turnout among that group into a second term for Dubya. The same tactic is being used for this year's congressional election, with anti-gay marriage ballot measures going before the voters in eight states. Unfortunately for homophobes and the GOP, it appears that same-sex marriage just isn't the hot-button issue it was even two years ago.

[The] biggest change, people on both sides of the issue say, is that supporters of same-sex marriage this year are likely to be as mobilized as the opponents.

The social conservatives ... have been offset by equally committed and organized opposition. Slick advertising, paid staff and get-out-the-vote drives have become a two-way street.

"The opponents of these measures have had a lot more time to organize and fund their efforts; that has made for a bit of a different complexion," said Julaine K. Appling, the executive director of the Family Research Institute of Wisconsin, which supports a constitutional amendment in that state defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Proposals like Wisconsin?s are also on the ballot in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia. And while most of the measures are expected to pass, their emotional force in drawing committed, conservative voters to the polls, many political experts say, has been muted or spent.

Recent polls in Arizona, Colorado, Virginia and Wisconsin, for example, have suggested only narrow majorities in support, in contrast to the 60 to 70 percent or more majorities in most states that voted on the issue in 2004. Two recent polls in South Dakota suggested that the same-sex marriage amendment might actually lose, while a third said it seemed likely to pass.

"As it stands right now, conservative turnout is not going to be as strong as it has traditionally been," said Jon Paul, the executive director of Coloradans for Marriage, which is supporting a ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriage.

Some pollsters say people might just be burned out on the subject of marriage and its boundaries. [Emphasis mine]

Another factor making a difference in how anti-gay measures are faring is the fact that more straight people than ever know someone who is lesbian or gay. It's much harder to demonize a group of people after you've had personal contact with them.

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:55 PM | Get permalink

Dubya's not-so-big stick.

Ted Rall nails it.

Ted Rall cartoon on North Korea nuclear threat

[Cartoon: © 2006 Ted Rall]

You can view the full-sized cartoon over here. And if you want to see more of Rall's stuff, check out his website.

Via Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:23 PM | Get permalink

Ah, it's music to a magpie's ears.

From a news service report on how the Democrats appear to be set to wrest control of the US Congress from the GOP:

"If Bush loses Congress, he is likely to be the lamest duck in memory," one veteran Capitol Hill staffer told IPS. "Unless he shows that he's capable of reaching out to the other side -- to be a 'uniter', not a 'divider', as he used to say, he's going to be a permanent defensive crouch for the last two years of his presidency."

Via Inter Press Service.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:07 AM | Get permalink

Friday, October 13

Getting the North Korea story straight.

Dubya's administration seems to be having trouble telling a consistent story about North Korea's apparent nuclear test earlier this week.

First, here's part of an AP story from Friday morning, as carried by the ABC News website:

Results from an initial air sampling after North Korea's announced nuclear test showed no evidence of radioactive particles that would be expected from a successful nuclear detonation, a U.S. government intelligence official said Friday.

The test results do not necessarily mean the North Korean blast was not a nuclear explosion, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the sampling results.

And now, take a look at part of another AP story as it was posted at the Houston Chronicle's site Friday night:

An air sampling taken after North Korea's claimed nuclear test detected radioactive debris consistent with an atomic explosion, Bush administration and congressional officials said Friday night. They said no final determination had been made about the nature of last weekend's mystery-shrouded blast.

One congressional official said that radioactive material was found in an air sample collected on Wednesday. It was one of several tests to determine the validity of North Korea's claim that it had set off a nuclear test.

"The betting is that this was an attempt at a nuclear test that failed," another official said. "We don't think they were trying to fake a nuclear test, but it may have been a nuclear fizzle." The officials who described the results spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.

So which is it? Radioactivity or no radioactivity? Bomb or no bomb?

Inquiring magpies want to know.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:18 PM | Get permalink

Air America Radio really does file for bankruptcy.

Since the liberal Air America Radio network first went on the air in early 2004, right-wingers have gloried in its financial mis-steps and have periodically (and errroneously) predicted that that network would go bankrupt. As of today, unfortunately, those predictions have come at least partially true.

The network had denied rumors just a month ago that it would file for bankruptcy protection. On Friday, Air America spokeswoman Jaime Horn told the AP that the filing became necessary only recently after negotiations with a creditor from the privately held company's early days broke down.

Horn declined to name the creditor with which talks had reached a logjam. The company will operate in the interim with funding from its current investor group, Horn said.

From what I know of Air America's history, its current problems are largely due to shaky startup financing and questionable business decisions made by management during the network's first year on the air. These were aggravated by the early decision to put on the air a lot of people who had no experience doing radio, which resulted in an air schedule that often sounded like bad college or community radio. While Air America is far more listenable these days, these early mistakes have been hard to recover from.

Despite the hopes of right-wing detractors, however, filing for bankruptcy doesn't mean that Air America is disappearing from the US airwaves any time soon. The network filed under Chapter 11, which gives it breathing space so that it can reorganize and cut deals with its existing creditors. In all likelihood, some of those debts will be erased by the court.

Via AP.

More: There's additional information about the bankruptcy in this Reuters report.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:38 AM | Get permalink

Be the first one on your block. Or not.

Courtesy of Blue Gal, I now know that you can get one of these for your car if you live in the great state of Alabama. Given that Alabama also offers lovely 'Choose Life' license plates, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Alabama's 'Global War on Terrorism' license plate

Alabama's 'Global War on Terrorism' license plate

I do not want to see this on the car ahead of me, thank you.

I guess we should all be thankful that Alabama only issues this plate to veterans of the 'global war on terrorism.' But then, as Blue Gal points out, aren't we all veterans of that war?

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, October 12

Let us not forget.

Without the contributions of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, our great victory in Iraq wouldn't have been possible. Okay, it would have been possible, but Democrats, liberals, and nay-sayers wouldn't have received the abuse they so richly deserved.

Frame from mock documentary, The War of the Words

Frame from mock documentary, The War of the Words

Another blow struck for freedom!

In the style of Ken Burns, Paul H. Henry chronicles the heroic Keyboarders in his mockumentary, The War of the Words. You can watch the first two parts here.

[Don't be drinking coffee or anything while you're watching, unless you don't mind snorting it out your nose.]

Via Atrios.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:16 PM | Get permalink

How to ~~lie~~ mislead with headlines.

Headlines are powerful. Whether they appear in a newspaper, in a Google listing, or on a TV screen, they color the way people understand a news story. In some cases, a headline might provide the only information about a story that someone has.

One of the easiest ways to mislead with a headline is to say something that's true, but which ignores important additional information. While this method is an excellent propaganda tool when used deliberately, the more usual way it appears is when headline writers uncritically repeat the spin from goverment officials or corporate flacks.

In today's online edition of the LA Times, there's a really good example of this kind of headline.

LA Times deficit headline

The Times mindlessly repeats the party line.

What's wrong with this headline? The deficit is the smallest in four years, isn't it?

Well, yeah. But the significance of that fact changes significantly if you know that there was a large budget surplus just six years ago. And if you know that Dubya's tax cuts and spending spree are the reasons why that surplus turned into the current deficit. So while the headline is true so far as it goes, the headline writer's choice to use a yardstick only four years long lets Dubya's spinmeisters get away with their attempt to make the prez look like a deficit-cutting savior.

It's not like it would have been hard to write a better headline, either. For example, this one from MarketWatch points to the size of the drop in the deficit: US deficit falls to $248 billion: Treasury. And this one from Jamaica's Gleaner newspaper merely indicates that the deficit is falling: US budget gap narrows. (Both of these headlines ignore the question of whether the administration has massaged the deficit figures to make them look better, but we'll ignore that for now.)

Unfortunately the LA Times isn't the only media outlet that's run such a misleading headline on its deficit story. This magpie found similar ones at the Houston Chronicle, CBS News, Boston Globe, UK Guardian, and San Jose Mercury News (to name only a few). If the headline writers at these places don't know better than to repeat propaganda, their editors surely should have.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:38 PM | Get permalink

Suspicion.

The other day, I suggested that there might be a connection between the way US gas prices have been dropping since early August and the GOP's sagging political fortunes. It turns out I'm not the only one who suspects that the oil companies might be manipulating gas prices to help Republican chances of keeping control of Congress in next month's elections.

ABC/WashPo poll numbers on gas prices

[Source: Washington Post/ABC News poll of 1204 adults, conducted 5 Oct to 8 Oct;
Graphic: Washington Post]

Of course, anyone who'd really believe in an oil company conspiracy is just paranoid, right?

Via Washington Post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:03 AM | Get permalink

That &#!!!!%! crystal ball never works right!

Back before the 2004 election, Washington Monthly asked a panel of 16 writers to imagine what would happen if Dubya got his second term. Having the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see that most of the panelists got things way wrong.

Nonetheless, there were occasional examples of prescience, like this one from blogger Kevin Drum:

If Osama bin Laden detonates a suitcase nuke in Los Angeles, all bets are off, of course. That aside, the most likely course is a continuing low-level insurgency in Iraq, a mediocre economy, and a halfhearted second-term agenda from the White House. If you combine that with a thin legislative majority, an outraged Democratic Party, and a public increasingly leery of Bush's Texas-style conservatism, what you get--aside from a few rancorous battles over Supreme Court nominations--is a presidency adrift.

It's the perfect breeding ground for a major scandal, and George Bush is exactly the right guy, with exactly the right personality, to step right into it.

Or, especially, this from CNN's Paul Begala:

Bush sees the world in black and white. You're either for him or against him; a saint or a sinner; a friend or a foe. If given four more years in the White House, there's little doubt that the politics of retribution and bitter partisanship will dominate every day.

Check out the whole lot of predictions here.

So the next time a pundit tries to foresee the future, you might look into the accuracy of their past preditions. In all likelihood, they won't turn out to be any more accurate that the ones from the Washington Monthly's panel.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:02 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, October 11

Reports of Ma Bell's death were greatly exaggerated.

Dubya's Justice Department has rubber-stamped the proposed merger between AT&T and BellSouth. The merger creates what will be by far the largest telecommunications company in the US — and essentially re-creates the old Bell System phone monopoly broken up by the feds in the 1980s. The FCC has the last word on the merger, and that last word could come as soon as tomorrow.

Bell System logo

It's back!!!!

When I used to be a directory assistance operator for Pacific Telephone (owned lock, stock, and barrel by the old AT&T), I had a bumpersticker on my car that said:

AT&T: We don't care. We don't have to.

I think I'm going to need a new one.

If you don't know why the merger is a bad thing — especially why it could be the kiss of death for net neutrality — go over here.

Via MyDD.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:39 PM | Get permalink

Another one of Dubya's 'commas'.

A couple of weeks ago, our Dear Leader told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that, in years to come, the current violent period in Iraq will be regarded as a 'just a comma' on the road to democracy.

A comma? That's easy to say if you're a privileged world leader living thousands of miles away from Iraq. But things look very different if you are one of the millions of Iraqi women, as this report by Baghdad correspondent Peter Beaumont shows.

Iraqis do not like to talk about it much, but there is an understanding of what is going on these days. If a young woman is abducted and murdered without a ransom demand, she has been kidnapped to be raped. Even those raped and released are not necessarily safe: the response of some families to finding that a woman has been raped has been to kill her.

Iraq's women are living with a fear that is increasing in line with the numbers dying violently every month. They die for being a member of the wrong sect and for helping their fellow women. They die for doing jobs that the militants have decreed that they cannot do: for working in hospitals and ministries and universities. They are murdered, too, because they are the softest targets for Iraq's criminal gangs.

Iraq's women live in terror of speaking their opinions; of going out to work; or defying the strict new prohibitions on dress and behaviour applied across Iraq by Islamist militants, both Sunni and Shia. They live in fear of their husbands, too, as women's rights have been undermined by the country's postwar constitution that has taken power from the family courts and given it to clerics.

Beaumont offers a ton of details to back up those words, which you can read if you go here.

Via UK Observer.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:39 PM | Get permalink

Finally, a link to the Iraq study itself.

You can read it here [PDF file] and make up your mind about the epidemiologists' claim that Iraq has seen 655,000 'excess' deaths is credible. [I'd argue that the fact Dubya thinks the study is garbage is a strong point in its favor, but then I just hate America.]

One of the graphics in the study really stood out to me.

Graph showing causes of death in Iraq

[Source: The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002–2006]

Do you see that category called "Violent death, unknown source"? In the most recent period studied, more than one-quarter of all 'excess' deaths in Iraq were from this cause. Although the authors of the study don't make this claim, I think it's clear ther the 'unknown source' is almost certainly the death squads that are a direct result of how Dubya's administration tried to turn Iraq into a US colony in the immediate post-invasion period.

No wonder Dubya thinks the study isn't credible.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:12 PM | Get permalink

What the hell does Dubya mean here?

From today's White House press conference:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq. A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December, at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure, and do you consider this a credible report?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me and it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to -- that there's a level of violence that they tolerate. And it's now time for the Iraqi government to work hard to bring security in neighborhoods so people can feel at peace.

I don't expect much from the prez in terms of coherence, but the highlighted remark is nonsensical even for him. Was he getting a lot of static in his earpiece, I wonder?

And if you were wondering about whether the numbers that the reporter cited are credible, you might want to look at this post from Juan Cole.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:28 AM | Get permalink

The human toll of the Iraq invasion and occupation.

It may be far higher than anyone had guessed. A new estimate by a team of Iraqi and US epidemiologists suggests that, had the US-led invasion of Iraq not occurred, about 655,000 fewer Iraqis would have died since March 2003.

[The estimate] is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.

The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then -- a finding likely to be equally controversial. [Emphasis mine]

Via Washington Post.

More: I was a bit tired when I posted last night, so I forgot to add some information that really puts the new estimate in perspective: The current population of Iraq is a bit over 26 million people; the current US population is just over 300 million. If you adjust the figures in the estimate for the larger population of the US, the numbers are the equivalent of 5750 unexpected deaths per day. If the US had suffered conditions like that of Iraq since March 2003, 7,532,000 people would have died.

Even if the researchers methodology was so wrong that their figures are twice the real death rate from the Iraq occupation, it's easy to see that the number of deaths in Iraq sinc March 2003 is still appalling.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:17 AM | Get permalink

In an alternate world.

The internets work like this.

Pizza print status message. Honest!

I just hate having to wait for the pizza to print!

I can do without the spam, but I sure do want one of those printers.

Via GreedTube.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:05 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, October 10

Does anyone know how to reboot this thing?

If not, I think we're in big trouble.

Democracy error message

Via 27B Stroke 6.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:09 PM | Get permalink

Maybe we shouldn't hold our breath ...

... waiting for that Democratic landslide in November's congressional elections.

Chris Bowers at MyDD suggests that the party's gains are likely to be more modest.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:19 PM | Get permalink

My brain hurts.

If you've had any doubts about how far to the right debate in the US has been dragged during the last decade or so, a story from Montana should eliminate those doubts toot-sweet.

It seems that Democratic governor Brian Schweitzer had the nerve to suggest — in public, no less — that the Earth wasn't created a few thousand years ago, and that it's a good thing for people to know that the planet is actually billions of years old. The Great Falls Tribune picks up the story:

Speaking to a crowd of school children, parents and teachers in Bozeman on Friday about global warming, Schweitzer asked how many in the crowd thought the Earth was hundreds of millions of years old. Most of the children in the audience raised their hands.

He then asked how many believed the planet was less than a million years old. At least two people, including [GOP state legislator Roger] Koopman, who was in the crowd, raised their hands.

During an interview later with the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Schweitzer noted Koopman?s response. He said some people believe the planet is only 4,000 to 6,000 years old, despite geological evidence to the contrary.

Schweitzer said he needs support from a state Legislature that will help move Montana?s agenda forward, "not people who think the Earth is 4,000 years old."

Koopman called the comments insulting.

I'd suggest that the insistence of people like Koopman that the rest of us should have to subscribe to their creationist religious views the real insult.

Via Majikthise.

Note for the pedantic: Yes, I do know how to spell tout de suite correctly. I just didn't.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:40 PM | Get permalink

Remember Lebanon?

You know, the place where Israel fought its most recent war? The one that ended back in August?

Well, the war isn't over for the people who live in south Lebanon, says journalist Chris Allbritton. Residents continue to deal with Israel's cross-border incursions, damaged or destroyed houses, lost livelihoods, and — worst of all — huge amounts of unexploded ammunition left behind by Israel's military.

The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center in Southern Lebanon estimates there may be up to 1 million unexploded cluster bomblets in the area, many American made.

Lebanese workers remove a broken table in a damaged classroom at a school in Bint Jbeil, Lebanon. The school was destroyed during the Israel-Lebanon war earlier this year. [Photo: Mohammed Zaatari/AP]

Ali Herz, 26, is a typical, if lucky, victim of the weapon.

He went to check his neighbor's house in the southern town of Majd es-Slim two days after the cease-fire. But as he pushed open the heavy black iron gate to enter the garden, a sharp explosion threw him backward and shrapnel peppered his legs, face and chest.

"I thought that my legs might have been cut off, and I felt something had been knocked out of my mouth," he said recently, recuperating in his parents' home. He suffered a wound to his head, and he couldn't open his eyes, "because of the blood." Herz now walks with a permanent limp and can't work as a mechanic

As of earlier this month, the Mine Action Coordination Center said cluster bombs had killed 21 and wounded another 102.

"I've never seen so much like this," said Magnus Bengtsson, the supervisor on an emergency ordnance disposal team clearing cluster bomblets from a neighborhood in the small town of Hanaouay, five and half a miles southeast of Tyre and eight miles from the Israeli border. "It's more than I expected."

Bengtsson and his team are with the Swedish Rescue Services Agency. The group was contracted by the U.N. contracted for mine clearing but now helps with the immediate dangers.

As he walked through an empty field the size of a soccer pitch, Bengtsson pointed to a small, D-battery-sized object on the ground. It's an American-made m77, he said, which is designed to take out both people and armored vehicles, including tanks. The shaped charge can penetrate up to 5 inches of armor, and the casing is scored so it sends out deadly shrapnel to a radius of about 20 feet.

A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces said, "All the weapons and munitions used by the IDF are legal under international law, and their use conforms with international standards."

The cluster bomblets are preventing up to 200,000 people from returning to their homes, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, although it is unclear how many of those people still have homes. The Higher Relief Council estimates 30,000 homes were destroyed in the war, and travels through many of the villages south of the Litani River show the damage has been extensive, although mainly confined to Muslim -- and especially Shi'a -- villages.

This magpie commends the Star-Ledger newspaper in Newark, New Jersey for continuing to look at Lebanon long after most of the US media has forgotten about the story. And I highly recommend that you read Allbritton's full story.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:09 PM | Get permalink

Look around you!

While rummaging through the links I accumulated, but didn't post, during Magpie's recent hiatus, I came up with a real YouTube gem.

Look Around You is a dead-on parody of 1970s-vintage educational TV programs. Its particular target is programs aired by the BBC's educational arm, but the parodies look a whole lot like things I remember seeing on US TV during the same period.

Toilet full of nasty germs

Where do germs come from, anyway?

All of the episodes are good, but I particularly recommend the one on music. You can view a whole bunc of them here.

The BBC's web page for Look Around You ain't bad, either. It's over here. And there's more info about the series here at Wikipedia.

Via MetaFilter.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:08 PM | Get permalink

Monday, October 9

And while we're on the subject of bad news for the prez.

I just can't resist pointing out the battering that Dubya's approval rating has been taking in polls covering the end of September and the first days of October.

Table of Bush's approval ratings

The bottom continues to drop out.

If you take a good look at the nine polls shown in the illustration, Dubya's highest approval rating is 39 percent. And the narrowest spread between those who approve of his performance in office and those who don't approve is 16%.

Those are hardly the numbers of a president who's about to lead his party to victory in the mid-term congressional elections.

Via PollingReport.com.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:59 PM | Get permalink

Looks like there's a bad moon a-risin'.

If you're a US Republican looking for re-election, that is.

After Dubya and the GOP got a bounce in the polls last month due to the 9/11 anniversary and the party's month-long terrorism scare-o-thon, a new USA Today/Gallup poll shows that the Republicans' political woes were arrested only momentarily. Here are some details:

Four weeks before congressional elections, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows Democrats hold a 23-point lead over GOP candidates. That's double the lead Republicans had a month before they seized control of Congress in 1994.

President Bush's approval rating was 37%, down from 44% in a Sept. 15-17 poll....

The plummeting GOP ratings ... come after a series of dismal developments for the party. They include high levels of violence in Iraq; a National Intelligence Estimate that contradicted upbeat administration statements on Iraq; a new Bob Woodward book about internal White House disagreements over Iraq policy, and the Sept. 29 resignation of GOP Rep. Mark Foley ...

What must be particularly unnerving for GOP candidates is the how badly their party is faring on the three issues that poll respondents said were most important to them — government corruption, Iraq, and terrorism:

[Respondents] said Democrats would do a better job on all three. The party had a 21-point advantage on handling corruption and a 17-point advantage on Iraq. A longstanding GOP advantage on terrorism vanished; Democrats had a 5-point edge.

Let's just hope that the Democrats can get through the remaining weeks before the election without throwing the GOP any rescue ropes.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:32 PM | Get permalink

Another of Dubya's foreign policy successes.

North Korea has apparently tested its first nuclear weapon.

Of course, the test is really Clinton's fault, I'm sure.

Via BBC.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:17 AM | Get permalink

Sunday, October 8

More bad news for the GOP.

Congressional Quarterly's authoritative ratings of House and Senate races have been revised to show that Republicans could lose control of both houses in the November election.

CQPolitics.com?s Balance of Power Scorecard now shows the Republicans short of a majority of seats in both chambers. And the ratings include numerous contests — 22 in the House — that are in CQ's "Leans Republican" category. As defined by CQ, this category is made up of races in which the Democratic nominees are highly competitive and in which a Democratic victory is highly plausible. In all of these cases, the Republican candidate has maintained some edge, but under current circumstances, such advantages may be fleeting in some cases.

In fact, several additional ratings changes are imminent, and — barring an event that turns the tables in favor of the Republicans — more can be expected through the remainder of this week and the rest of the campaign.

While CQ's ratings have shown a drift toward the Democrats since the beginning of 2006, that drift has accelerated in recent weeks — especially after the revelations of former GOP Representative Mark Foley's alleged misconduct with Congressional pages.

The full CQ article is here. You can view CQ's current Election Forecast [PDF file] if you click here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:26 PM | Get permalink

From our Department of Amazing Coincidences.

I see from this AP report that gas prices in the US continue to fall:

U.S. retail gas prices continued their downward trend, dropping nearly 15 cents a gallon in the past two weeks, according to a survey released Sunday.

The national average for self-serve regular was about $2.28 on Oct. 6, down from about $2.42 two weeks earlier, according to the Lundberg Survey of 7,000 gas stations across the country....

Gas prices peaked Aug. 11 at $3.02 and have dropped nearly 75 cents since then.

So, the closer we get to a November election in which the Republicans will likely lose control of at least one house of Congress, the lower gas prices drop from their August high point. Yes, gas prices always go down after the beginning of September, but this run of price drops began weeks earlier while demand was still high. And the price decreases mean that gas is now 25 percent cheaper than it was in early August — truly an usually large decrease.

Of course, only a cynic would suggest that Dubya's pals in the oil industry would have any interest in defusing voter anger over high gas prices in order to help save the collective butts of the prez and his GOP cronies.

I guess it's just another amazing coincidence!

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:17 PM | Get permalink

What we still don't know about 9/11.

More than five years after the attacks in Washington and New York, a huge number of people in the US believe that the true facts about what happened that day aren't known. (See this Zogby poll, for example.) The recent film 9/11: Press for Truth (Based largely on Paul Thompson's Terror Timeline) lays out a lot of the questions and suggests some of the answers, while mainly avoiding the more paranoid theories about 9/11.

While excerpts of the film have been showing up on YouTube for awhile, someone who either has the permission of the filmmakers or who has no fear of copyright infringement has posted the entire film at Google Video. I just watched it, and I suggest you do, too — I even put a player below to make it easy for you. (If you want to see the film in a bigger window, go here.)

I agree with those who think that right now isn't the time to press politicians and elected officials in the US for further investigation of 9/11. Kicking the Republicans out of control in at least one house of Congress in November is far more critical than getting answers now. But after the election, one of the things we should pressuring Democrats to do is to reactivate the investigation into 9/11 so that the irresponsibility and carelessness of Dubya and other GOP officials in office at the time of the attacks can be revealed once and for all.

Via Ruminate This.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:17 PM | Get permalink

No good deed goes unpunished.

From a McClatchy news service story:

The Navy lawyer who took the Guantánamo case of Osama bin Laden's driver to the U.S. Supreme Court — and won — has been passed over for promotion by the Pentagon and must soon leave the military.

Like there was any doubt what the current administration thinks of troublemakers who believe in drivel like human rights, due process of law, and the Constitution.

You can read the rest of the tawdry details here.

Via Seattle Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:08 PM | Get permalink

We all know what comes out of an elephant's butt, don't we?

A really nice cover on the 16 October issue of Time magazine.

Time's 'What A Mess' cover about the GOP

Getting ready to drop another load.

The tiny print in the illustration reads: What a Mess ... Why a tawdry Washington scandal may spell the end of the Republican revolution.

Let's hope Time's caption writer was having a premonition.

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

Draining the GOP swamp.

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi isn't waiting to see how the November elections come out to start telling the country what Democrats should do if they regain control of the House of Representatives. In an interview with the AP, Pelosi outlined an agenda for her first 100 hours as the next Speaker of the House:

Day One: Put new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."

Day Two: Enact all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Time remaining until 100 hours: Raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, maybe in one step. Cut the interest rate on student loans in half. Allow the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients.

Broaden the types of stem cell research allowed with federal funds "I hope with a veto-proof majority" [...]

All the days after that: "Pay as you go," meaning no increasing the deficit, whether the issue is middle class tax relief, health care or some other priority.

To do that, she said, Bush-era tax cuts would have to be rolled back for those above "a certain level." She mentioned annual incomes of $250,000 or $300,000 a year and higher, and said tax rates for those individuals might revert to those of the Clinton era. Details will have to be worked out, she emphasized.

This magpie would like to see tax cuts rolled back for anyone making over US $200 thousand, a commitment to raising the minumum wage in a single step, and more specifics to the rest of Pelosi's action items. But regardless of the shortcomings, Pelosi's legislative agenda is far better than what we've seen during the last six years that the GOP has run the House.

Here's hoping that Pelosi gets a chance to put her agenda into action come next January.

Via ABC News (US).

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:39 AM | Get permalink