Poll takers

The Era of Stupid continued

WTF?

Energy Committee Chairman Candidate Says God Promised no More Catastrophic Climate Change after Noah

Bush's book (novel):

Still Spinning The Spin

And I thought Georgie didn't pay any attention to polls. In his own words:

PRESIDENT BUSH: (Chuckles.) Well, first of all, you have got to know I don't pay attention to polls. I just don't.

So what is this?

Bush On Social Security: 'Privatization' Was A 'Poll-Tested Word'

Booman:

The Tea Party candidates explicitly opposed all these efforts except the targeted tax cuts, and their number one issue is the deficit, which most tax cuts will only exacerbate. More mainstream Republicans also oppose all these solutions. So, basically, people said they want the government to create jobs but they voted in people who don't support using any of the tools the government has to create them. That's stupid.

Obama's poll numbers

How desperately the media wants to force them down for the trauma and the drama of it all. How they want Obama to fail.

Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers:

Political associates of President Obama are dismissing the recent wave of stories about his dropping poll numbers, claiming that it is a press-driven effort to find a negative story about the White House. "The press is looking for a story on this one," says Cornell Belcher, the Democratic pollster who worked on the Obama presidential campaign. "The press is looking for a negative story," he added. Belcher said instead that when compared with other presidents, Obama's poll numbers are strong, despite recent drops in approval ratings for some of his policies and initiatives.

What's more, Belcher said the president is receiving deep support from minorities who are hurt most by the recession. "Part of what helps make it so Teflon—though which no one seems to really get—is how unbelievably strong his numbers continue to be among minorities, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. And the black and Hispanic numbers are particularly interesting because the fact of the matter is black and brown people are the ones who are disproportionately impacted in economic downturns and unemployment upticks," he says.

Belcher says another surprise is that as the economy continues to get worse, the president is maintaining support not seen in recent years for a president. "People are once again actually beginning to think the country is headed in the right direction, which is astonishing. And let's be clear, the economy sucks, yet the guy's job approval is still solid. When his approval numbers are below 50 percent, ... the country is moving again in the wrong direction, and Republican ... approval numbers actually move out of the 20s, I'll be worried," said Belcher.

President Barack Hussein Obama: Poll ratings for June 2009

		Approve	Disap- prove	Approve minus
		%	%	Disapprove
	ABC/Washington Post	65	31	34		6/18-21/09
	CBS/New York Times	63	26	37		6/12-16/09
	NBC/Wall St. Journal	56	34	22		6/12-15/09
	Pew	61	30	31		6/10-14/09
	FOX/OD RV	62	31	31		6/9-10/09
	Ipsos/McClatchy *	64	32	32		6/4-8/09
	Diageo/Hotline RV	65	31	34		6/4-7/09
	Marist RV	56	32	24		6/1-3/09

Blog sprinkles

The best April Fool's pranks this year.

The top ten conservative idiots.

The GOP is the party of Beavis and Butthead:

I’d really like to see some genuine bipartisanship in America. But that can’t happen until we start having at least somewhat sane partisans.

Obama's polling:

For the third Friday in a row, Gallup's polling shows 62% of those surveyed saying they approve of the job the president is doing. Also for the third week in a row, 27% say they don't approve.

Joe the Plumber stumped about Employee Free Choice Act.

Moles:

“Are you saying that you think Vice President Cheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward,” asked Gross. “I’ll make it worse,” answered Hersh, adding that he believes Cheney “put people back” in government to “stay behind” in order to “tell him what’s going on” and perhaps even “do sabotage”...

When you are foreclosed, you may not take the built-in bathtub with you.

Politifact truth-o-meter site.

So never refer to someone as looking tasty:

There are already too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one of most influential science advisors in the US government.

Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability".

The death of Tom Hurndall:

Hurndall was trying to save Palestinian homes and infrastructure but frequently came under Israeli fire and seemed to have lost his fear of death. “While approaching the area, they (the Israelis) continually fired one- to two-second bursts from what I could see was a Bradley fighting vehicle… It was strange that as we approached and the guns were firing, it sent shivers down my spine, but nothing more than that. We walked down the middle of the street, wearing bright orange, and one of us shouted through a loudspeaker, ‘We are International volunteers. Don’t shoot!’ That was followed by another volley of fire, though I can’t be sure where from…”

Tom Hurndall had stayed in Rafah. He was only 21 where – in his mother’s words – he lost his life through a single, selfless, human act. “Tom was shot in the head as he carried a single Palestinian child out of the range of an Israeli army sniper.” Mrs Hurndall asked me to write a preface to Tom’s book and this article is his preface, for a brave man who stood alone and showed more courage than most if us dreamed of. Forget tree huggers. Hurndall was one good man and true.

Tips on how to survive the depression.

Wingnuts eating their own.

Is this a dogwhistle to fundamentalists who think a one world currency is another omen of the incoming END of DAYS?

Controversial British MP George Galloway has been denied entry into Canada by a federal court judge.

And now it's Chinese and Vietnamese pepper.

Defrocking a priest:

The Episcopal Church has defrocked Ann Holmes Redding, the Seattle Episcopal priest who announced in 2007 that she is both Christian and Muslim.

Bishop Geralyn Wolf of Rhode Island, who has disciplinary authority over Redding, informed the priest of her decision in a letter today.

Wolf found Redding to be "a woman of utmost integrity and their conversations over the past two years have been open, honest and respectful," according to a press release from the Diocese of Rhode Island.

"However, Bishop Wolf believes that a priest of the Church cannot be both a Christian and a Muslim."

Oh, and by the way:

The top U.S. commander in the Middle East, General David Petraeus, warned today that Israel might attack Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, Bloomberg reports.

To take someone down

You have to get lower than he is... the bottom of the barrel will do:

"We will lose on legislation. But we will win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010," said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., an outspoken conservative who has participated on the GOP message teams. "Our goal is to bring down approval numbers for [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint."

Left 4 Dead

Obama rocks!

Election blog sprinkles

Distributorcap of DistributorcapNY has an amazing list of odd information about our elections and presidents.

Chuck Todd of MSNBC lists the info on each state of the Union and what to expect.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight:

I continue to find a hair's worth of tightening on balance in the state-by-state polls -- even as Obama's position in the national trackers seems to be roughly as strong as it has ever been. This, ironically, is the exact reverse of the position we saw earlier in the week, when the national polls seemed to be tightening even as the state polls weren't.

However, Obama's win percentage has ticked upward again for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he's gotten some relatively good numbers out of Pennsylvania since our last update, with PPP and Zogby giving him leads of 8 and 14 points, respectively, and Rasmussen showing his lead expanding to 6 points after having been at 4 before. (The Zogby poll is probably an outlier, but may serve to balance out outliers like Strategic Vision on the other side).

Secondly, McCain's clock has simply run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.

Athenae of First Draft muses on how good it feels.

Jed Lewison of the Jed Report about the coal bankruptcy quote:

All you need to know to understand the video is that the Drudge, FOX, and the McCain campaign joined forces with Newsbusters to push a story that the San Francisco Chronicle had concealed an eleven month old recording that supposedly contained devastating audio of Barack Obama proposing to bankrupt the entire coal industry.

Not only was that story false (more detail below), but it turns out that Barack Obama and John McCain have the same position on clean coal technology, and Ohio's Republican senator said McCain's plan to fight global warming would "put coal out of business."

Paul Krugman muses what will happen to the Republican party after an Obama victory:

I’m not saying that the G.O.P. is about to become irrelevant. Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Congress has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

Glenn Greenwald of Salon on why Bush cannot help the Republicans campaign:

George Bush is the person in whom the Right placed its blind faith, the one they glorified and held up as the ultimate standard-bearer of what they believe in. And now he -- and they -- lay in shambles and disgrace. No matter what metric one uses, it's difficult to overstate what a profound failure the Bush presidency is, and everyone -- including Bush -- knows that. The most important aspect of this Tuesday's election is to finalize their humiliating repudiation and to bury them for what they've done.

If only Georgie would tell us to go shopping again...

Because we obviously don't elect Republicans to govern and to lead because they truly hate government and governing, but to be father figures and lay comfort on us poor folks:

Concerns about the direction of the country and personal finances rose sharply, and dissatisfaction with Bush, Congress and the administration's economic and foreign policy all climbed.

Bush's approval rating fell 4 percentage points to 23 percent, a record low for pollster John Zogby, and positive marks for the U.S. Congress fell 5 points to tie an all-time low at 11 percent.

The number of Americans who believe the country is on the right track fell from 23 percent to an abysmal 16 percent, another record for pessimism, as uncertainty about the economy and rising gas prices fuelled growing doubts about the future.

"Bad economic news is settling in and Americans are getting anxiety ridden," Zogby said.

See? We need someone to give us sympathy in our hour of need!



The frightened population needs reassurance:



And then we need to given something to strive for:



There. Don't you feel better? I knew Bush understood us:

The Deciderer's cash surge for the economistic problems

Does not have people leaping for joy and going shopping:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Eight in 10 Americans believe that the government's $110 billion effort to help consumers will not boost the economy, according to a poll released Friday.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted April 28-30 found that 82% of Americans believe the stimulus package will fall short - compared to 70% in February.

The program, passed with bipartisan support earlier this year, will give tax rebate checks to about 130 million Americans. Most single Americans earning $75,000 or less who filed a tax form will receive up to $600, and married couples earning $150,000 or less could get up to $1200.

Treasury has sent out nearly 30 million payments totaling $27.2 billion. But of the more than 1,000 people polled, only 13% thought the stimulus was sufficient to help economic conditions.

The White House begs to differ.

"It will boost the economy - it's impossible that it won't," said President Bush's Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto. "It's like saying if I pour water into a cup, will it get wet?"

In other words, you're not clapping hard enough, dammit!

Help Stony Brook University Political Science guy do his dissertation project!

The purpose of this survey is to examine how people think and feel about the political issues, parties, and candidates in the upcoming election. In the survey, you will be asked a series of questions about two political candidates, John McCain and Hillary Clinton. We are very interested in how individuals that find information on the web think about politics, and your participation would be greatly appreciated. In total, the survey should take about 15 minutes to complete. The survey is completely anonymous and you can skip any questions you do not wish to answer.

I take it 1) Pffffft! and 2) Definitely! won't suffice?

Ok, ok... off to take the survey.

It's not like golf, Georgie.

The low numbers mean you are losing not winning.

Attaturk at Rising Hegemon catches the polling:

U.S. TROOP LEVELS IN IRAQ SHOULD BE…?

Now
Increased -- 6%
Kept same -- 21%
Reduced -- 39%
Remove all troops -- 29%

Pre-speech, 9/4-8/2007
Increased -- 11%
Kept same -- 19%
Reduced -- 35%
Remove all troops -- 30%

By the way, on the Michael Ledeen "Real Americans versus UnAmericans" front...

President Bush’s overall job approval rating remains at 29 percent, similar to what it was a week ago. His rating on handling the war in Iraq is holding at 25 percent.

And nobody wanted to listen to Bush talking:

We're going to need a lot of bleach and mops

To clean up the mess when Georgie leaves the White House:

When it comes to Europeans' views of US President George W. Bush, his war in Iraq, and his foreign policies, 77 percent disapprove of him and his policies, while 17 percent voiced approval. This compares with American views, which show an approval rate of 32 percent and disapproval rate of 63 percent, according to an August survey released by the Gallup Poll.

Teasing out whether the issue was the US war or Bush himself, the Europeans seemed divided in the trans-Atlantic survey, with 38 percent choosing the war and 34 percent Bush himself.

The survey, now in its sixth year, polled 1,000 people in 13 countries by telephone, including Britain, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Romania and the United States. It is administered by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a non-partisan policy institute, and the Compagnia di San Paolo, an Italian research foundation. The margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.

Georgie finally bests his dad!

His polls are even LOWER than Bush the Wimp's! 28 percent!

President Bush’s approval rating in a new Newsweek survey, “an all-time low for this president in our poll, and a point lower than Gallup recorded for his father at Bush Sr.’s nadir.”

In case you are wondering

Cheney at 18%.

Fighting for vague reasons

With no clear definition of victory for an undetermined amount of time for people who hate us. Sounds like a plan!

Let's start with some poll numbers presented at the Doha conference by Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor and a fellow of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, which co-sponsored the conference with the Qatari foreign ministry. The polling was done last year by Zogby International in six countries that are usually regarded as pro-American: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In these six "friendly" countries, only 12 percent of those surveyed expressed favorable attitudes toward the United States. America's leaders have surpassed Israel's as objects of anger. Asked which foreign leader they disliked most, 38 percent named George Bush; Ariel Sharon was a distant second at 11 percent; and Ehud Olmert was third with 7 percent.

The poll data show a deep suspicion of American motives: 65 percent of those surveyed said they didn't think democracy was a real U.S. objective in the Middle East. Asked to name two countries that had the most freedom and democracy, only 14 percent said America, putting it far behind France and Germany. And remember, folks, this is coming from our friends.

Update:

Peter Bergen is a print and television journalist, and the author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (Free Press, 2001), which has been translated into 18 languages. A television documentary based on the book was nominated for an Emmy in 2002. The Washington Post, in reviewing his new book, The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda’s Leader (Free Press, 2006), called it “a detailed, well-researched narrative that persuasively answers dozens of questions that are still painfully relevant today.” Mr. Bergen is CNN’s terrorism analyst and an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, Rolling Stone, Washington Monthly, The Nation, The Times (UK), The Daily Telegraph (UK), The Guardian (UK), The Sunday Times (UK), and Prospect (UK). He is a member of the editorial board of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and has testified on Capitol Hill. Mr. Bergen holds a B.A. in modern history from New College, Oxford University.

Peter Bergen writes at his web site:

As the security situation in Iraq has deteriorated, President Bush has depicted the war in Iraq as crucial to the wider war on terrorism. He claims that terrorists who otherwise "would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders" are being drawn to Iraq and defeated there, like moths to a flame.

And when faced with the question of whether more terrorists are being created worldwide than are being killed in Iraq, administration officials have ducked. "There are not good metrics," declared former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last year.

Today, drawing on data from the comprehensive terrorism database maintained by the Rand Corp. and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for thePrevention of Terrorism, we release a study that for the first time examines the metrics - andyields a resounding finding: The rate of fatal terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups, and the number of civilians killed in those attacks, has risen sharply since the invasion of Iraq. Comparing the period before the war (Sept. 12, 2001, to March 20, 2003) and the period since, there has been a 607% rise in the average yearly incidence ofattacks - and a 237% jump inthe fatality rate.

Moths to a flame? Hardly. Rather, the Iraq war is a flame that has helped ignite global jihad.

And he ends up by warning us:

Yes, few American civilians have been killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But it is naive to believe that this will continue to be the case. The evidence shows the war has damaged America's global efforts to defeat Al Qaeda.

Mother Jones offers a graph and a 101 course in understanding the complexities of Iraq:

Fatal Jihadist attacks from 2002 to 2006. Think you can tell when our invasion of Iraq occurred?

Fruitcake polling higher than Bush

(Via Katrinacrat Blog) Radar makes note of things that rate higher than Bush:

According to the latest CBS News poll, the president's overall approval rating has dipped to 28 percent—the lowest number in his presidency and dangerously close to Nixon's all-time low of 24 percent. To lend a little context to this historic feat, we found some other people and things with equal or greater popularity.

OTHER THINGS WITH A 28 PERCENT APPROVAL RATING

• Boxer Briefs

• Kelly Osbourne

• Body Hair on Guys

• Reptiles

• A Wall Along the Mexican Border

• Text Message Flirting

• Porn

• Cottage Cheese

THINGS WITH AN APPROVAL RATING HIGHER THAN GEORGE W. BUSH

• Brussels Sprouts (51%)

• Coke Zero (41%)

• Hillary Duff (52%)

• Jennifer Love Hewitt (36%)

• Fruit Cake (40%)

• Kevin Federline (45%)

• Rosie O'Donnell on The View (46%)

• Crocheting (72%)

• Fishing (49%)

• Legalizing Prostitution (58%)

• The Dentist (45%)

• Hanson (53%)

• In-Laws (68%)

• Figs (76%)

• The Name "Shiloh Nouvel Jolie Pitt" (29%)

• Ciara's Goodies (55%)

• The Pussy Cat Dolls (56%)

• Ryan Seacrest (60%)

• Spiceworld (57%)

• MTV VJ John Norris (35%)

• The Barenaked Ladies (73%)

• Russian Pop Duo T.A.T.U. (58%)

• The "Dude, You're getting a Dell!" Guy (42%)

• The Backstreet Boys (66%)

• Nickelback (57%)

• Sum 41 (63%)

• Hootie & The Blowfish (84%)

• Stepping in Dog Shit (35%)

• Walking in the Rain Without an Umbrella (60%)

• Small Breasts (50%)

• Getting Kicked in the Balls (41%)