Day: February 27, 2006

Poll: Bush’s Approval Drops to New Low

Pensito Editors

Ports Deal and Katrina Bungling Cause 8 Point Drop

Is President Bush in a race with himself to the bottom:

GOP voters oppose the ports deal by 58%

The latest CBS News poll finds President Bush’s approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, while pessimism about the Iraq war has risen to a new high.

Americans are also overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush-backed deal giving a Dubai-owned company operational control over six major U.S. ports. Seven in 10 Americans, including 58 percent of Republicans, say they’re opposed to the agreement…

In a separate poll, two out of three Americans said they do not think President Bush has responded adequately to the needs of Katrina victims. Only 32 percent approve of the way President Bush is responding to those needs, a drop of 12 points from last September’s poll, taken just two weeks after the storm made landfall.

Mr. Bush’s overall job rating has fallen to 34 percent, down from 42 percent last month. Fifty-nine percent disapprove of the job the president is doing.

Ban GOP Marriage

Jon Ponder

Ohio Democratic state Senator Robert Hagan’s proposal to ban GOP adoption is a great idea. Hagan says “credible research” shows that adopted children raised in GOP households are more at risk for developing “emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities.”

The main threat to the institution of marriage comes from the political right because so many GOP men and women cheat on their partners and have diseases. They are also prone to alcoholism and often die young.

If banning GOP adoption will prevent one more kid from having a miserable life, I’m for it. But why not nip the problem in the bud by eliminating the root cause of all our society’s ills: GOP marriage.

Over half of GOP marriages in the United States end in divorce. Half! That means that millions of marriages are destroyed by Republicans every year. (By contrast, the number of gay marriages that end in divorce in the United States is miniscule.)

Yes, the main threat to the institution of marriage comes from the political right because so many GOP men and women cheat on their partners and have diseases. They are also prone to alcoholism and often die young.

While GOP households are often unstable and cause a strain on the social fabric, fighting GOP marriage is first and foremost a moral issue. Adultery is the leading cause of divorce in mixed gender marriage — despite the fact that the Bible clearly states, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” (Why is it that GOP people cannot seem to understand that this is a Commandment, not a suggestion?)

Conversely, the Bible’s injunctions against gay sex are found only in a couple of obliquely worded passages among hundreds in the class of sins with eating pork, women wearing pants and improperly covering your poop whilst caravaning in the desert.

Please call or write your representatives and tell them that this country needs a constitutional amendment to save America from the iniquity of GOP marriage.

Stop GOP marriage now — before it’s too late.

Schwarzenegger Admits That His Inexperience Led to Failures

Jon Ponder

“Believe me, I expected it to go faster. In a way this is an on-the-job training. I mean I did not go to school to become a governor.”

— Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, addressing California Republican state convention

“[No one] can prepare for the job of being a governor until you’re there. And that’s when you all of a sudden see the kind of complexities.” — Schwarzenegger

In Washington, a “gaffe” is when someone accidentally speaks the truth. Gov. Schwarzenegger uttered this gaffe in front of a crowd of key constituents: the California Republican Party, at the statewide annual convention earlier this month.

Tim Russert replayed it when Schwarzenegger appeared on Meet the Press yesterday. When asked about the quote, Schwarzenegger appeared to dig his hole a bit deeper:

“[No one] can prepare for the job of being a governor until you’re there. And that’s when you all of a sudden see the kind of complexities.”

No one? Schwarzenegger’s principal advisor (and probably the source of volumes of bad advice) during the Recall campaign and his first year in office was former California governor Pete Wilson, a Republican who had spent a lifetime in public service, starting in the state Assembly, then as mayor of San Diego and as a U.S. Senator, before becoming governor.

As governor, Wilson led his party over a cliff by successfully using immigration as a wedge issue. He put the infamous Proposition 187 on the ballot to drive up rightwing votes in order to win reelection in 1994. It worked for Wilson, giving him another term in office but it moved millions of Latino voters into the Democratic Party, giving the Dems a decisive majority in the state and sending the California GOP into the wilderness.

As bad as Wilson was, his time in office now looks almost successful compared by the utter failure of his protege.

Or take the resume of Schwarzenegger’s immediate predecessor, Democrat Gray Davis: He served in the state Assembly, as chief of staff to Gov. Jerry Brown, as lieutenant governor under Wilson and then as governor.

Davis, who was also a Marine, proved to have wooden political instincts when it mattered — when he was under fire — and he was easily outgunned by Schwarzenegger’s end run around the state’s political system during the Recall campaign by limiting his interviews to national outlets like Entertainment Tonight and Oprah, where he was only asked softball questions.

After criticizing every action taken or proposed by Davis, once in office, Schwarzenegger’s approach to solving the state’s problems was fundamentally the same course Davis had charted.

Even with all their accumulated wisdom, California’s previous two governors were both left office with their reputations in tatters. Leave it to a movie star to think that he could do better than they did just by pretending to know what he’s doing.

Cheney Quietly, Belatedly Turns over Hundreds of Plame-Related Emails

Jon Ponder

The Associated Press buried the lede on this story in the fifteenth paragraph of its story on Saturday:

The defense was told that the White House had recently located and turned over about 250 pages of e-mails from the vice president’s office. Fitzgerald, in a letter last month to the defense, had cautioned Libby’s lawyers that some e-mails might be missing because the White House’s archiving system had failed.

As The Raw Story reminds us, the entire White House staff had been under orders to turn over all such documents over two years ago:

In October 2003, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales told all White House employees to turn in copies of numerous documents relating to the CIA leak investigation. It was sent after the Justice Department told the White House to hand over all records that could be relevant to investigators. According to an article at the time, the deadline was Oct. 10, 2003.

The newly-turned over emails could indicate that not all information had been divulged when the Justice Department first required the information be delivered. It could, however, also signify that Fitzgerald is seeking additional email correspondence based on information he obtained during the probe.

In a letter to Libby’s lawyers last month, Fitzgerald signaled that not all emails during the period in question were properly archived — indicating that some documents may have been lost.

Octavia Butler Dies after Accident

Jon Ponder

Science Fiction writer Octavia Butler died on February 24, 2006, after hitting her head on a walkway near her home near Seattle. She was 58.

She remains the only science fiction writer to receive one of the vaunted “genius grants” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a hard-earned $295,000 windfall in 1995 that followed years of poverty and personal struggles with shyness and self-doubt.

“People may call these ‘genius grants,’ ” Butler said in a 2004 interview with the Seattle P-I, “but nobody made me take an IQ test before I got mine. I knew I’m no genius.”

Perhaps best known for the book “Kindred,” in which a black woman from modern Los Angeles is transported back to the pre-Civil War slave era, she wrote about a dozen other books, including the most recent “Fledgling.”

She received a Hugo Award and Nebula Award.