Day: November 15, 2005

Bush: How Low Can He Go?

Buck Banks

Rockin’ the bottom: From National Journal’s PollTrack

The media is flush with reports about President Bush’s falling ratings, and today is no exception: A new CNN/Gallup/USA Today survey shows Bush’s job approval at 37 percent, a 4-point drop in just a few weeks and its lowest number to date.

Four other polls released this month have also put the president at new lows:

  • Newsweek: 36/58 (Nov. 12)
  • Fox News/Opinion Dynamics: 36/53 (Nov. 10)
  • Pew Research Center: 36/55 (Nov. 8)
  • ABC News/Washington Post: 38/60 (Nov. 3)

Has Bush hit bottom? Conventional wisdom suggests that eventually the president will be left with only the hardcore base of supporters who will stick with him no matter what, and his ratings won’t have any further to fall.

That makes Bush’s coattails the next logical battleground. A new Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research survey shows Democrats coming out 8 points ahead of Republicans in a generic 2006 congressional matchup. That gap has actually narrowed slightly since the previous poll, taken before Democratic gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia.

The split widened when respondents were asked about the Senate specifically: Fifty-three percent said they would choose the Democratic candidate and four in 10 said they would choose the Republican if the election were held today. (The GQR survey puts Bush’s job-approval split at 41/54, with both the approval and disapproval rating down one point from the previous poll.)

And 62 percent of a half-sample said they’d prefer the country to go in a different direction than the one Bush is headed; 35 percent said they wanted to continue in Bush’s path. The other half-sample gave Congress a similarly harsh review, with 64 percent saying they wanted it to change course and about a quarter saying they wanted it to stay on its current path.

Forty-six percent of CNN/Gallup/USA Today respondents said the country would be better off if Democrats were in charge of the legislature, and 34 percent said the same of Republicans. Those numbers are about the same as a mid-October survey that found 45 percent preferred Democrats and 32 percent preferred Republicans.

But pundits have also pointed out bright spots for the GOP. Presidents’ second-term beginnings are notoriously difficult, and Bush’s low ratings aren’t unprecedented. Other presidents — Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, according to analysis [PDF] from the Republican consultant at the George Washington Battleground Poll — have garnered similar numbers. And another number from CNN/Gallup/USA Today suggests the country is still conflicted about its president: Respondents were equally split at 49 percent when pollsters asked if he is a strong or weak president.

When Christian Kids Kill – Metal Detectors Proposed for Home Schooling

Jon Ponder

Nature or nurture? The latest crime out of Middle America on cable news is the murder of a couple found dead in their home in Lititz, PA. The husband and wife had been shot in the head at close range. Their 14 year old daughter, Kara Beth Borden, was missing, as was her boyfriend, David Ludwig, age 18.

The teenagers were on the lam for about 24 hours and were caught this morning in a police chase near Indianopolis. Ludiwig is accused of murdering Kara’s parents because they opposed his relationship with Kara because their age difference. What is not known at the moment is whether Kara was an accessory or a victim in the matter.

One thing we do know is that both Kara and David were home-schooled at the behest of their devoutly Christian parents – a fact that provoked the Pugbus fake news site to come up with a spoof story, “Home School Movement Needs Metal Detectors, Says Pat Robertson.”

Another sign that we have entered a new era is the fact that both Kara and David maintained multiple websites. From these we learn that they were into Christian rock and that they had a tight circle of friends.

(Spero News went through the kids’ sites so you don’t have to.)

Whether she’s a victim or a perp, Kara is blonde, which all but assures that, before it is all over, cable news will provide us with way more about her than we’d ever want to know.

Ritter: Iraqis Thwarted CIA-Organized Coup against Saddam in Clinton Era

Jon Ponder

Too bad it failed: In the mid-1990’s, the CIA infiltrated the UN’s weapons inspection efforts in Iraq and used their position to engineer a coup against Saddam Hussein. This is according to Scott Ritter – who was one of the actual weapons inspectors in Iraq at the time – in an interview that just went up on Buzzflash:

Iraqi intelligence discovered that the CIA was “using the inspection process to facilitate a coup d’etat by another group of Iraqis that was being handled by the CIA outside the framework of the weapons inspections.”

BuzzFlash: At some point during this process, Iraqi intelligence officers learned that the CIA was planning a coup. How exactly did they learn about the coup, and what happened as a result?

Scott Ritter: By … 1996, the Iraqis had put together a fairly sophisticated matrix of who the inspectors were and who they ultimately worked for. So whenever we submitted a roster of inspectors to the Iraqis, they were pretty locked in on what kind of inspection it would be, and what kind of emphasis there would be, and who on the inspection team they should be concerned about. So they have a good feel for that.

But the Mukhabarat [the Iraqi intelligence] also had to deal with aspects of protecting Saddam Hussein that had nothing to do with UNSCOM [weapons inspectors], such as the CIA’s own efforts to recruit people inside Iraq to target Saddam. And what the Mukhabarat did is they were tracking these two separate issues and found that there was crossover – that the CIA was using the inspection process to facilitate a coup d’etat by another group of Iraqis that was being handled by the CIA outside the framework of the weapons inspections.

And the Iraqis tracked this. They infiltrated the coup and they pulled the plug on it, executed the plotters and terminated the CIA’s effort. But in the process, they got definitive proof that the CIA was using the inspection process as a vehicle not only to gather intelligence, but to trigger a coup d’etat. And it destroyed the integrity of the inspection process.

The CIA infiltration into the weapons inspection efforts – and its discovery by the Iraqis – dampered, if not ruined, the efficacy of U.N. weapons inspections in the future as a peaceful means for disarming predator states.

Ritter also believes that had the CIA undercover effort not been exposed the inspections might have worked:

[…]

Ohio Beats Florida in Electoral Weirdness — For Now

Buck Banks

Voting with hope: As I prepare to exercise my right to vote today in Miami city elections — two weeks late, thanks to Hurricane Wilma — I wonder how it’s going to go and whether indeed my vote will be counted properly. That may seem a quaintly paranoid notion to many of you, but given the recent electoral history of my fair state, or Jebby World, as I like to think of it, the question is a reasonable one.

Note, too, that we have a long tradition of voting corruption in Miami, ranging from deceased voters to manipulation of absentee ballots. In fact, the very first election in Miami in 1896 was fraught with trouble as a bunch of good old boys from up at Lake Worth who didn’t want Miami to incorporate busted in and stole the ballot box.

At least I don’t live in Ohio, where something went REALLY wrong with their voting process last week. The disparities between pre-vote polling and the actual vote counts beggar all odds. Brad Friedman summarizes the situation on HuffingtonPost while noting that the “mainstream” press has yet to pick up on the story.

Carter: It’s About the Values, Stupid!

Buck Banks

Voice of reason: Former President Jimmy Carter has been making the media rounds touting his new book, “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis,” published this month by Simon & Schuster. Now, while Carter is an avowed born-again Christian, he does not believe that his personal beliefs should be imposed on others, especially through the laws and institutions of the United States.

Carter, who turned 80 this year, has a soft-spoken style that is well-reasoned and full of conviction. In an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, he lays out the main principles covered in his book. Here are a few of them:

  • Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of “preemptive war,” an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.
  • Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties.
  • Instead of reducing America’s reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of “first use” of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.
  • Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America’s working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).
  • I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.
  • As the world’s only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.