Month: September 2006

Poll: Bush Approval Rockets to 42 Percent – Thanks, WalMart Shoppers!

Buck Banks

Fool factor: The latest Reuters/Zogby poll is just full of interesting nuggets:

Fifty-eight percent of the respondents gave [President Bush] negative marks in the survey, which included 1,000 likely voters nationwide. The survey, conducted Sept. 22-25, 2006, carries a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percentage points.

Bush has rebounded from a low of 31 percent job approval in early June. Just two weeks ago, 39 percent gave him positive marks for his job performance. The Reuters/Zogby survey shows that members of the President’s political base are giving him better marks than they did a few months ago, as 44 percent of men, 44 percent of Catholics, 46 percent of married respondents, and 52 percent of regular WalMart shoppers rated his work well.

Just one in four – 24 percent – gave Congress a positive job performance rating, while 75 percent gave negative marks.

Democrats remain in the lead is the “generic” congressional election contest, where respondents are asked whether they intend to vote for the Republican or the Democrat in their local congressional election on Nov. 7. Their 42 percent to 33 percent edge has held steady despite Bush’s improvement in job approval. Remarkably, 20 percent said they are yet unsure which candidate they will support when they cast their vote – a disconcerting factor for incumbents, more than 95 percent of whom won re-election two years ago.

Democrats appear to be more energized to support their own party’s candidate – 82 percent said they would vote Democratic, compared to 75 percent of Republicans who said they plan to vote for the GOP congressional candidate this fall. Democrats need to win 15 seats in the U.S. House in order to wrest control from Republicans for the first time since the 1994 election, and need to pick up six Senate seats to take over in the upper chamber.
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Ecuadoran Presidential Candidate Rafael Correa Clears Up Meaning of Chavez’ Comments

Trish

“Whoops, did Chavez say Bush was like the devil? Well, that’s kind of insulting. Let me just clarify that, because I wouldn’t want the devil’s feelings to be hurt.”*

“Calling Bush the devil is offending the devil”

“Calling Bush the devil is offending the devil,” Correa said. He said that “the devil is evil, but intelligent.”

“I believe Bush is a tremendously dimwitted president who has done great damage,” Correa said. He later said the statement was a personal opinion.

*Paraphrasing Correa there, kids.

Congressional Report: Iraq Now Costing $2 Bil per Week

Jon Ponder

And it’s all borrowed money! Right. Bush broke it — your grandkids will be paying for it:

A new congressional analysis shows the Iraq war is now costing taxpayers almost $2 billion a week — nearly twice as much as in the first year of the conflict three years ago and 20 percent more than last year — as the Pentagon spends more on establishing regional bases to support the extended deployment and scrambles to fix or replace equipment damaged in combat.

The upsurge occurs as the total cost of military operations at home and abroad since 2001, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will top half a trillion dollars, according to an internal assessment by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service completed last week.

It’s facts like these that belie the fakery of the conservative ideology. Republicans say that fiscal responsibility is important to them but it’s the first thing they shoved off the raft when they claimed power.

Conservatism is really about power for power’s sake — a construct that is a zero sum game. To acquire power, Republicans must take it away from from their opponents. If unchecked, they won’t stop until they have taken it all, leaving the rest of us, well, powerless.

When the conservatives have America’s social structures will be just like Mexico’s, with all the financial and political capitol held by a few oligarchs.

The saddest part is, the Republicans are paving their way to power on the backs — and the votes — of the uneducated, unwealthy dittoheads that their objective is to subjugate.

Poor and uneducated Mexicans have the sense to know they are being trampled on — that’s why they’re coming here illegally. The poor and uneducated in America are deluded political sheep.

Iran Just Following Israel’s Lead with ‘Deterrence by Uncertainty’

Buck Banks

Maybe, maybe not: Political observers are drawing parallels between Iran’s approach to developing nuclear capabilities and the way Israel developed its own nuclear program — in secrecy that breeds uncertainty.

In developing its nuclear program Iran is using strategies that allowed its enemy Israel to assemble the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal without admitting it had one, according to a leading expert on the Israeli program.

The elements the Israeli and Iranian nuclear programs have in common are secrecy, concealment, ambiguity, double talk and denial.

“Whether deliberately or inadvertently, there are elements of resemblance between the way Iran is pursuing its nuclear program today and the way Israel was pursuing its own program in the 1960s,” Avner Cohen, author of a landmark study entitled “Israel and the Bomb,” in a telephone interview.

“This is a great irony of history but Iranian policymakers and nuclear technocrats may be strategically mimicking the Israeli model,” said Cohen, senior research scholar at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies.

As Cohen sees it, the elements the Israeli and Iranian nuclear programs have in common are secrecy, concealment, ambiguity, double talk and denial.

Iran’s probable strategy, he says, is to create the perception of having a secret weapons program, or being close to it, without actually testing a bomb or declaring its possession or impending possession.

That echoes the Israeli program, which began in the late 1950s at the Dimona nuclear complex in the Negev Desert. Since then, Israel has declined to confirm or deny it has nuclear weapons, saying only it would not be the first to “introduce” them into the Middle East.

Over the decades, Israel’s attitude has been “let the world guess” or as former Prime Minister Shimon Peres called it, “deterrence by uncertainty.”

Read more here.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

It is painful to look at your father and realize the old man should not be allowed to manage his own money anymore. This is the discovery the country has made about the party in power. They are inept. The checkbook needs to be taken away. They will rant, they will screech, they will wave their canes at you and call you all sorts of names, but you have to do what you have to do.

— Garrison Keillor

Submitted by Tom Erickson

Poll: Most Americans Support Seeking Diplomatic Solution to Iran’s Nuclear Threat

Buck Banks

It’s coalition time again: A new Reuters/Zogby poll released today finds us Americans viewing Iran about the same as we viewed Iraq before Bushco invaded — favoring a multilateral, international, diplomatic approach.

A majority of Americans want the United States to increase diplomatic efforts over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, while 70 percent oppose the use of U.S. troops to thwart Iran, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Thursday.

Asked the best course of action for the United States in dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, 45 percent said Washington should join with allies to increase diplomatic efforts and another 17 percent said the United States should step up diplomacy on its own.

One in four respondents, 26 percent, said they supported the use of U.S. ground troops in Iran, while 70 percent opposed it. Nine percent favored air strikes on selected military targets in Iran.

The Reuters/Zogby poll found 42 percent supported a strike on Iranian facilities if carried out by the Israeli military, with 47 percent opposed.

The national poll of 1,000 likely voters, conducted on September 22-25, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

Iraqi Government Shiites Are Protecting Death Squads from U.S. Justice

Jon Ponder

Friends like these:The predominantly Shiite government of Iraq, which we helped get elected, is protecting Shiite death squads who are slaughtering Sunnis:

Senior U.S. military officials have stepped up complaints that Iraq’s Shiite-led government is thwarting efforts to go after Shiite death squads blamed in the execution-style killings of Sunni Arabs in neighborhoods across this capital.

Although deadly Sunni Arab rebel attacks remain frequent in Baghdad, U.S. officials, including Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, say death squads affiliated with Shiite militias have become the main factors ratcheting up the capital’s death toll from sectarian killings.

Civilian deaths in Baghdad during July and August totaled more than 5,100, according to United Nations figures, and most were caused by the sectarian strife.

However, the 8,000 U.S. troops sent to Baghdad in recent weeks to restore order have been largely prevented from confronting those militias, many of which have ties to Iraqi government officials.

A little background: Saddam Hussein was a member of the Sunni minority, which subjugated the Shiite majority. When the U.S. held elections, the Shiites, who belong to the same Muslim sect that rules Iran, took over.

CO Gov: Dem Ritter Leads GOP Opponent, 50% to 34%

Jon Ponder

Good news in the Rockies:

Less than two months before the election, Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter (D) has jumped even further ahead in Colorado’s gubernatorial race. He now leads Republican Representative Bob Beauprez 50 percent to 34 percent. Ten percent (10 percent) are undecided.

The race was most competitive early in the year, when Ritter tended to edge out his likely Republican opponent by a point or two. That lead increased to five points in the months just before the August 8 primaries. Right after them, Ritter enjoyed a nine-point lead.

In the new Rasmussen Reports poll, conducted a few days after the candidates’ first televised debate, Ritter actually adds only two more percentage points to his support to reach 50 percent. But Beauprez’s support slides by five.

The Republican’s fundraising efforts seem to have hit a shoal, with his Democratic opponent reportedly raising three times as much during the month of August. In addition to the GOP’s national malaise this election year, Beauprez has had to contend with stateside partisan infighting over a controversial tax measure, Referendum C, narrowly passed by voters last year. The measure, which Beauprez opposed, allows Colorado to keep funds that would have been returned to taxpayers under the state’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) law.

‘Compromise’ Torture Bill Allows Bush to Hold U.S. Citizens Indefinitely for No Reason

Jon Ponder

Every patriotic American ought to find this to be unacceptable:

Buried in the complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops “during an armed conflict,” it also allows him to seize anybody who has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

What makes this even more of a travesty is that Sen. John McCain — and dozens of Democrats in the House, as well as who knows how many in the Senate — are signing onto it.