Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Not Exactly the Heartiest of Welcomes. . .   Gallup: New Poll Holds Warnings on Alito Nomination By E&P Staff Published: November 02, 2005 11:55 AM ET NEW YORKA new Gallup Poll released today finds a mixed response to new Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito--but strong opposition if it becomes clear that he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. And by a 50% to 40% margin, those surveyed say they would back a Democratic filibuster to stop his nomination, if it comes to pass. Gallup said that about the same number of Americans rate Alito's selection either excellent or good (43%) as rate it fair or poor (39%). Harriet Miers initially received a very similar rating, but John Roberts' rating was more positive: 51% excellent or good, 34% fair or poor. Other findings: --“It doesn't bother most Americans (75%) that Alito is a man nominated to replace the first woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court.” --“If it becomes clear Alito would vote to reverse the abortion ruling Roe v. Wade, Americans would not want the Senate to confirm him, by 53% to 37%.” --“If most Senate Democrats oppose the nomination and decide to filibuster against Alito, 50% of Americans believe they would be justified, while 40% say they would not.” Gallup said results are based on telephone interviews with 603 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Nov. 1, 2005, with sampling error at ±4 percentage points. E&P Staff   Find this article at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001432535 2:16:07 PM    comment []

Deliverance for Democrats? Not so fast. It's going to take a lot more than indictments to defeat the GOP. By Todd Gitlin Nov. 02, 2005 | George W. Bush's season of defeats does offer the appearance of deliverance for Democrats. The notorious second-term jinx has brought him low in proportion to the heights of power he once scaled. Bush got what he wished for -- unbridled power -- and so succumbed to the ancient curse: May you get what you wish for. But while Harry Reid's move Tuesday to throw the Senate into closed session to demand answers on Iraq intelligence was a good start, Democrats need a lot more of such fighting spirit to prevail, despite all Bush's troubles. First the good ship Harriet Miers was torpedoed after movement conservatives rose up in righteous revolt (but for James Dobson, who was whispered who knows which sweet nothings to keep him in line). Then the cleanest of prosecutors galloped in, wearing the whitest of hats and astride the whitest of horses, as investigating judges have done in recent years to take down Italian corruption when political parties were on the take and journalists had more amusing fish to fry. Patrick Fitzgerald alleged numerous lies on the part of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's "Cheney," and couldn't say whether Cheney himself was culpable in the White House campaign to smear Joseph Wilson, a conscientious objector to their war campaign. In the process, Fitzgerald grazed awfully close to the vice president and simultaneously decided to keep a Washington grand jury in business while he looks into a whole stud farm of Augean stables: Karl Rove's, above all, but also the Italian secret services that in 2002 colluded with who knows whom to circulate forged Nigerien documents that helped Bush ease his way into the calamitous Iraq war. If it wasn't bad enough for Bush that Libby was out, Fitzgerald let it be known that he was not necessarily done cleaning out bad guys. And to add insult to injury, along came Bush's once-staunch ally, Silvio Berlusconi, his own reelection campaign looming nigh, to declare that in 2003 he tried to talk Bush out of going to war against Saddam Hussein. Berlusconi has been telling this story for at least a year. So much for the fervor of Bush's "coalition of the willing." Meanwhile, Bush had to say farewell to the pliable Alan Greenspan, durable keeper of the Fed and sprinkler of holy water on Bush's immense deficit pileup. The president then decided to go respectable with Ben Bernanke as the replacement rather than go wild on the supply side with somebody else. Bush's dreams of dragging Social Security into the quagmire of privatization and consigning the inheritance tax to eternal hell are blasted. Piling up in the background were a heap of other October surprises: Tom DeLay's appointments with Dallas prosecutor Ronnie Earle, Bill Frist's appointments with financial investigators, Jack Abramoff's appointments with prosecutors hither and yon (and who knows which of his cronies are facing their own showdowns), and New Orleans' many appointments with preventable misery and loss. Corruption and negligence have become the hallmarks of an administration that promised to install honor and efficiency where Democratic rascality and moral slovenliness governed before. Even senators of his own party have broken with Bush over the White House's laissez-faire policy toward torture. Non-surprises also served to dash the president's aura of competence. There was that nasty little number: "American Deaths in Iraq Number 2,000." There was Bush's approval rating at least provisionally stuck on the wrong side of 40 percent. If Bush was still doing Bible study, he might have paid close attention to the Pharaonic plague chapters of Exodus. No surprise, then, that George W. Bush's administration looks, this week, to be held together more by spit than cement. The lame duck quacks like a lame duck and walks like a lame duck so what else could it be? Presidents' second terms have a way of leaving a sick taste in their mouths, not to mention the mouths of many others, but it's hard to recall another administration whose second term has unraveled so far so fast. Yet Bush is not without resources. His nomination of Samuel Alito to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court may prove a stroke of intelligence in winning back offended movement conservatives, pundits and think-tankers who want a reliable judge. In any event, the nomination exhibits Bush striving to get back in charge -- or look as though he's already there. Stubborn as always, he resists with aplomb the calls, even from within Republican ranks, to clean up his inner circle. A man not devoid of cunning, even with Rove distracted, he prides himself on staying his course even when there is no obvious one. Bulldozer steadiness has worked for him before. (Perhaps it's the only thing that's worked for him before.) Blessed with a rock-hard faith in himself and whatever voices stay ringing within his ears as the likes of Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson bail out, Bush plunges on. There is, however, some rational basis for his monumental self-confidence. He has long understood that politics is rarely a contest for ideological preeminence, lasting glory or a dare of the universe. Far more deeply and often it amounts to a crude contest between winners and losers. Politics is a zero-sum game. Schadenfreude may be fun, but it doesn't translate into victory. And victory is the only prize that matters. Bush must know, in other words, that whatever liberals may wish and however fervently they may wish it, the party in power will not fall of its own weight. Its seams can open up into gulfs -- chiefly between the Christian right and those whose hearts beat loudest for deregulation and tax cuts -- but still the imposing Republican Party machine rolls on, in proud possession of every branch of the national government and the midterm elections a long, long year away. Bush can squander his mandate, can fail to cash in on his claimed accountability moment, but his enemies, the Democrats, cannot win power back by default, or indictments, alone. They can only win power back the hard way, the way the Republicans did over the last three decades -- by merging the energies of movement and party, stitching together alliances, mobilizing ideas and running attractive candidates. During the 2004 election campaign the Democrats demonstrated a (for them) unprecedented ability to move activists into practical politics, to raise money and discipline themselves. It was an impressive -- and insufficient -- effort. Still, the commitment they mobilized soon moved Howard Dean into the Democratic leadership on a platform of building up the party's withered infrastructure. One measure of Dean's success was that by the time the party made its choice, all his rivals were beating the drum for internal reform as well. No sooner was Dean in charge of the party than he began to deliver -- to universal applause. Even Democrats who deplored what they consider his foot-in-mouth disease were thrilled that, at long last, the national party had started to put in place, state by state, a funded national staff. It shouldn't have been a breakthrough to ensure that the party mustered permanent staff in transparently pivotal states like Ohio. Incredibly, it was. At the moment, the Senate Democrats are off to a rollicking comeback, taking the Senate floor yesterday under Minority Leader Harry Reid to blast back at Republican tyranny over Congress by brandishing an obscure rule to insist that the Senate debate the prewar intelligence hanky-panky it somehow has failed to investigate. The Democrats may not know what to do about the war -- a thorny conundrum indeed -- but at least they are refusing to let GOP malfeasance off the hook. But the next steps will be more challenging still. The Democrats have to offer a national face for next year's midterm elections. House races in particular are local. Americans may deplore the party in power, but they also deplore the party out of power. "The mess in Washington" doesn't look to them like a mess with a single author -- it looks like a mess for which both parties are culpable. Democrats have to offer convincing reasons for tossing out the party in power. Lacking those reasons, enough of the electorate may simply decide to sit on their hands and keep the Republicans in charge of all the levers of power. The Democrats' most impressive sign of life is that, across the center-left political spectrum, they now recognize a need to put forth a national program -- their own "Contract With America." It's far from sufficient to talk incessantly about the value of "reframing the debate," as if the losing party suffers primarily from flimsy public relations. It won't do any longer to thrash away against "the mess in Washington." They have to look like a remedy for the mess. While American politics are stubbornly local -- the views and tones that win elections in New York are not necessarily the ones that win in Nebraska -- Democrats have to find their own heart of brightness. One formidable barrier they face is their own inertia -- the weird, self-reinforcing passivity that makes them look spineless and inauthentic, too calculating by half. They need more of the daring that Reid showed this week. (The unanswerable and decisive argument put forth by the Republicans in 2004 was that even if you didn't always agree with Bush, at least you knew where he stood. In countless ways this mood failed to correspond to the truth, but never mind -- Bush played a decisive president on TV, and that was enough to make up a critical margin of minds.) On Iraq, the Democrats cannot permit themselves to stay their own wobbly course. With the country torn up about the ongoing debacle in Iraq, the Democrats have to sound like a governing party for a change. They have to recover from their appalling collapse of 2002-03, the one that led the party's senators to split down the middle on Bush's war resolution. As November 2006 draws closer, semi-dissident Republicans will make gestures in favor of partial troop withdrawals. If Bush continues to languish in the polls, they will pretend not to be from his party. Democrats have to face the fact that Bush's recklessness has produced a situation in Iraq where there are no good options. Still, they should, at the least, renounce permanent bases and peg troop withdrawal to the achievement of substantive goals. The time is long past when the Democrats can delude themselves that they'll ingratiate themselves with the country by intoning in chorus that they support the troops while ducking the debate about how to do precisely that. On the economy, with all the Republican debts coming due, Democrats have to stick up for rolling back Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. On the court, Bush having nominated a more judicious version of Antonin Scalia, the Democrats have a rendezvous with filibuster. Friendly extremism in the pursuit of states' rights is one hell of a vice. The only way the Democrats can win back at least one house of Congress is to look and sound like fighters. And the only way to look like fighters and sound like fighters is to be fighters. Whining about the Republicans' structural advantages -- real as they are -- will not do. Whining about media skew and inattention -- real as they are -- will not do. Bush is not only a lucky politician but the chief of an apparatus of rule. He has three more years in the White House and it will take more than the force of gravity to bring the whole corrupt, thoughtless, mendacious lot down. -- By Todd Gitlin 1:58:22 PM    comment []

Copter Crash, Bombing Leave Four GIs Dead By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer 39 minutes ago Four U.S. troops were killed — two in a helicopter crash Wednesday and two from a roadside bomb — as American ground forces fought insurgents around the city of Ramadi, and a suicide car bomb south of Baghdad killed about 20 Iraqis. The U.S. command said the AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter went down about 8:10 a.m. near Ramadi, killing the two Marines aboard. The military said the cause of the crash was being investigated. But Associated Press Television News quoted an Iraqi man who said he saw the crash and that insurgents "fired at the helicopter and shot it down." On Tuesday, a Marine and a sailor died in the city 70 miles west of Baghdad when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb, the U.S. command said. The four U.S. deaths raised to 2,032 the number of members of the military who have died since the beginning of the war in 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 93 American service members died in October, making it the fourth-deadliest month for the troops in the war, and many were killed by homemade bombs that the Pentagon has said are becoming more powerful and technologically sophisticated. The U.S. command said it is stepping up training for newly arrived officers to give them the latest tactics about protecting patrols from such bombs. The Wednesday evening suicide bombing in the Shiite-majority town of Musayyib, 40 miles south of Baghdad, also wounded 61 people. The attack heavily damaged an area with an outdoor market, a restaurant, a mosque and a bus station, said police Capt. Muthana Khalid. The town suffered an even deadlier attack July 16, when a suicide bomber struck a gas station near the same mosque, blowing up a fuel tanker and killing nearly 100 people. Wednesday's blast appeared to target shoppers buying fruit and vegetables just before breaking their daily fast during Ramadan, a month of worship by Muslims. The market was especially busy Wednesday because Eid al-Fitr, the three-day holiday that concludes Ramadan, is about to begin, and many families are buying food and desserts to serve to their families and friends. "The insurgents wanted to cause as many casualties as possible," Khalid said, adding that all the victims appeared to be civilians. The toll was put at about 20 dead because of confusion in counting the bodies, he said. The fighting in Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad, began Tuesday night when militants with guns, rockets and roadside bombs attacked U.S. patrols, said police Capt. Nassir al-Alousi. APTN video from the city Wednesday showed a burning civilian vehicle and what appeared to be a wrecked U.S. Humvee. A crowd of Iraqis gathered at the site, and one man, waving the remnants of a damaged U.S. M-16 rifle in the air, said the attacks had caused U.S. casualties. A U.S. warplane on Wednesday dropped two 500-pound bombs on a suspected insurgent command center near where the Cobra had crashed. It was not know if anyone was hurt. Also Wednesday, 11 Iraqis were killed and 23 wounded by a car bomb, three roadside bombs and seven drive-by shootings. Most of the violence occurred in the capital. In the worst of those attacks, a roadside bomb aimed at a U.S. military convoy south of Baghdad hit a minibus instead, killing five Iraqis, police said. The bomb exploded at 7:30 a.m. on a two-lane highway in Jurf al Naddaf, a town just south of Baghdad, said police Lt. Col. Sabah Hussein. The minibus that was hit was traveling behind the American military patrol, and six Iraqis were wounded in addition to the five killed, he said. The blast occurred in a section of Iraq known as the "triangle of death" because of frequent attacks by Sunni-led insurgents. Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, confirmed the U.S. command will soon open a school for training officers at Taji, an air base 12 miles north of Baghdad. The New York Times reported the school will instruct newly arrived Army and Marine officers in the latest tactics on finding and destroying roadside bombs and dealing with Iraq's many insurgent factions. The Times said Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, had ordered the school's formation because of increasingly flexible and deadly attacks by insurgents. Soldiers and Marines already receive some counterinsurgency instruction in the United States before leaving for Iraq, but the Times said some senior U.S. commanders have expressed concern that the instruction has been uneven and lags behind the fast-changing tactics that insurgents use in Iraq. The academy will give intensive one-week courses, the report said. U.S. ground and air forces launched new attacks Wednesday near the Syrian border, destroying several insurgent "safe houses," killing a militant leader, and stopping an insurgent cell from planting roadside bombs near the town of Husaybah, the military said. In Baghdad, the government announced that a raid Oct. 27 in Mosul killed four insurgents, including Abdul Sattar, identified as a key al-Qaida in Iraq member leading militant operations there. Mosul is 225 miles northwest of Baghdad. The U.S. military said it captured two Yemeni fighters in the Iraqi capital Tuesday night who were on a reconnaissance mission and may have been planning car bomb attacks. It also said its soldiers detained 12 suspected insurgents after a roadside bomb and small arms fire attack on coalition forces Tuesday in eastern Baghdad. Searching a nearby cement factory, U.S. and Iraqi forces found more than 65 AK-47 rifles, 120 AK-47 magazines, three machine guns and three ammunition drums, the military said. Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. 12:02:40 PM    comment []

The Gubernatorial Report--One Week Till the Election! It seems that, after flirting for awhile with right-wing nutjob Doug Forrester, New Jersey voters have come (back) to their senses. My neighbors to the east are funny that way--last year there was a brief moment where Kerry and Bush were virtually tied, and Republicans were so encouraged as to send the Big Dick in there to campaign. In the end, of course, Kerry won by double digits. . .Virginia is another story. While I'm sure if Tim Kaine didn't have Mark Warner's coattails to cling to he'd be getting clobbered, the fact of the matter is we have a dead heat race in a blood-red state.     Poll Gives Corzine Clear Lead in N.J. Race By JEFF LINKOUS The Associated Press Wednesday, November 2, 2005; 6:41 AM TRENTON, N.J. -- Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine has opened a clear lead over Republican businessman Doug Forrester in the New Jersey governor's race a week before Election Day, according to a poll released Wednesday. Corzine was favored by 50 percent of likely voters, while 38 percent supported Forrester, according to the Quinnipiac University Poll. Nine percent were undecided. The survey of 636 likely voters from Oct. 24-30 has a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. In an Oct. 19 Quinnipiac poll, Corzine had 50 percent to 43 percent for Forrester, with 7 percent undecided. That poll also had a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. The Nov. 8 race is between two multimillionaires: Corzine, 58, was CEO of the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, and Forrester, 52, is co-owner of BeneCard Services Inc., a prescription benefits company. The pair have shattered state spending records, burning through a combined $59 million. Much of the cash has bankrolled an acrimonious television and radio ad war, and the latest campaign finance figures show Corzine has spent twice as much as Forrester on the general election. "The relentless barrage of negative advertising seems to be moving voters behind Corzine in two critical areas _ who will more effectively deal with corruption in Trenton, and which candidate has the better plan to reduce property taxes," said Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. Virginia is the only other state choosing a governor this year. © 2005 The Associated Press       VA: Kaine 46% Kilgore 44%     October 28, 2005--For the first time this year, Tim Kaine has moved ahead of Jerry Kilgore in a Rasmussen Reports election poll. Kaine, the Democrat, now earns 46% of the vote while Kilgore attracts 44% in the race to be Virginia's next Governor. State Senator Russell Potts attracts 4% of the vote, up from 2% a week ago. While Kaine now has a two point advantage, the race remains too close to call. The survey's margin of sampling error is +/- 4.5 percentage points, with a 95% level of confidence. In the previous Rasmussen Reports election poll, Kilgore had a two percentage point advantage, 46% to 44%. In late September, the two leading candidates were tied at 45%. This is the third straight 2005 Virginia election poll with "leaners" included in the totals. Leaners are those who initially do not express a preference for either major party candidate but lean one way or the other when asked a follow-up question. Without leaners, Tim Kaine has a one-point edge, 42% to 41%, over Jerry Kilgore.   Both men now earn more than 80% of the votes from within their own party. Kaine has a 14% advantage among those not affiliated with either major party. In six of the last eight Rasmussen Reports election polls in Virginia, Jerry Kilgore has attracted between 44% and 46% of the vote. One he was a point above that range, and once a point below. In the last four Virginia election polls, Kaine has been in that same range (44% to 46%) every time. However, in the preceding four polls, he was in the 39% to 41% range. Overall, Kilgore is viewed favorably by 56% of Virginia voters and unfavorably by 38%. For Kaine, the numbers are 62% favorable and 34% unfavorable. These numbers highlight a huge difference between the Virginia election and this year's contest in New Jersey. In the New Jersey race, neither candidate is viewed favorably by more than 41% of voters. Seventy-two percent (72%) of Virginia voters Approve of the way that Warner is performing his duties as Governor. Fifty-one percent ( 51%) of Virginia voters Approve of the way President Bush is performing his job. That figure is well above his national Job Approval rating.   The telephone survey of 500 Likely Voters was conducted by Rasmussen Reports October 27, 2005.  The margin of sampling error for the survey is +/- 4.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. 9:01:08 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Michael D. Zungolo. Last update: 12/1/2005; 11:07:39 AM.