On July 30, Kerry/Edwards got 54 percent and Bush/Cheney 41 percent, the poll shows.

I have corrected the title of the post accordingly.

In Iraq, the transfer of sovereignty has led to some reduction in American casualties. [link via Atrios]

Let's see. The transfer of "sovereignty" occurred on June 28. Fifty deaths in thirty days in June equals 1.67 deaths per day. Forty-six deaths in the first twenty-one days in July equals 2.19 deaths per day. Woops!

More and more news publications are putting up registration pages. Whenever I encounter such a page, I create an account that you are all welcome to share. It's either:

Login: dailykos
Password: dailykos

or if the login is an email address, then

Login: kos@dailykos.com
Password: dailykos

Many of you have already created accounts at sites all over the place. I have gotten into many a newspaper using those passwords even though I hadn't created the account.

But if you run across a site that doesn't have a "dailykos" account setup, do us all the favor of setting up such an account. It'll make our web surfing efforts much more efficient and enjoyable.

Pass it on.

A question for those who still cling, against all evidence and reason to the myth of the liberal media:
 
Why is it that Billy Carter and Roger Clinton were covered well enough to become household names, and were frequently treated by the SCLM as embarrassments for Presidents Carter and Clinton, yet the wild and crazy (and sexy!) exploits and adventures of Neil Bush go virtually without mention in the national press?
 
For more on Neil, see here, here, and here.
 
Hint: "Because 9/11 changed everything" is not an acceptable answer.

Yesterday, I received a letter from Bush Cheney ’04 Campaign Manager Ken Mehlman asking our campaign for a tape of a recent fund-raising event. Today, I sent the following reply:

July 13, 2004

Ken Mehlman
Campaign Manager
BUSH-CHENEY '04, Inc.
P.O. BOX 10648
Arlington, VA 22210

Dear Ken:

Over the past several months, allies of the President have questioned John Kerry’s patriotism while your staff has criticized his service in Vietnam. Republicans and their allies have gone so far as to launch attacks against his wife and your campaign has run $80 million in negative ads that have been called baseless, misleading and unfair by several independent observers.

Considering that the President has failed to even come close to keeping his promise to change the tone in Washington, we find your outrage over and paparazzi-like obsession with a fund-raising event to be misplaced. The fact is that the nation has a greater interest in seeing several documents made public relating to the President’s performance in office and personal veracity that the White House has steadfastly refused to release. As such, we will not consider your request until the Bush campaign and White House make public the documents/materials listed below:

! Military records: Any copies of the President’s military records that would actually prove he fulfilled the terms of his military service. For that matter, it would be comforting to the American people if the campaign or the White House could produce more than just a single person to verify that the President was in Alabama when said he was there. Many Americans find it odd that only one person out of an entire squadron can recall seeing Mr. Bush.

! Halliburton: All correspondence between the Defense Department and the White House regarding the no-bid contracts that have gone to the Vice-President’s former company. Some material has already been made public. Why not take a campaign issue off the table by making all of these materials public so the voters can see how Halliburton has benefited from Mr. Cheney serving as Vice-President?

! The Cheney Energy Task Force: For an Administration that claims to hate lawsuits, it’s ironic that the Bush White House is taking up the Courts’ time to keep the fact that Ken Lay and Enron wrote its energy policy in secret behind closed doors. Please release the documents so that the country can learn what lobbyists and special interests wrote the White House energy policy.

! Medicare Bill: Please release all White House correspondence between the pharmaceutical industry and the Administration regarding the Medicare Bill, which gave billions to some of the President’s biggest donors. In addition, please provide all written materials that directed the Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress about the actual cost of the bill.

! Prison Abuse Documents: A few weeks ago, the White House released a selected number of documents regarding the White House’s involvement in laying the legal foundation for the interrogation methods that were used in Iraq. Please release the remaining documents.

We also wanted to wish you a happy anniversary. As we are sure you and the attorneys representing the President, Vice-President and other White House officials are aware, today marks one year since Administration sources leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent to Bob Novak in an effort to retaliate against a critic of the Administration.

In light of the fact that the Administration began gutting the laws protecting the nation’s forests yesterday, we hope you will accept the paper on which this letter is written as an anniversary gift. (The one year anniversary is known as the "paper anniversary.")

Sincerely,

Mary Beth Cahill

Campaign Manager

Classic.

Last week [Tony Fabrizio of the Republican polling firm Fabrizio McLaughlin & Associates] took a close look at undecided voters in 19 battleground states. The memo (PDF) on this poll is eye-opening. Politics 101 teaches us that undecided voters almost always break for the challenger as the election approaches. If these voters haven't decided to support the guy they know best, the theory goes, there must be a reason they are holding out and will therefore end up supporting the challenger if he or she is an acceptable alternative.

Confirming this theory, Fabrizio found that undecided voters in 2004 are overwhelmingly anti-Bush and pro-Kerry. By almost every criterion they look like Kerry voters, according to the memo:

They are more than twice as likely to see things headed down the wrong track as compared to voters overall. ... They give President Bush a net NEGATIVE image rating. ... They give President Bush a net NEGATIVE job approval rating. ... A solid majority sees the Country as being WORSE OFF than they were 4 years ago. ... They are significantly more pessimistic about the current state of the nation's economy. ... They are significantly more pessimistic about their own current financial condition. ... They are twice as likely to see the number of jobs in their area as DECREASING instead of increasing. ... They are significantly more likely to favor the federal government doing more as opposed to doing less. ... They are more likely to be pro-choice on the issue of abortion. ... They are more likely to have seen or heard advertising critical of President Bush than John Kerry in the past year. ... John Kerry holds a slight net POSITIVE image rating [among the undecided voters].

As the memo notes, "Clearly, if these undecided voters were leaning any harder against the door of the Kerry camp, they would crash right through it." [link via Political Animal] 

At the end of the session, Bush reportedly told the group, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job." [link via BuzzFlash]

God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did . . . .

Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There's a higher Father that I appeal to.’"

Beyond not asking his father about going to war, Woodward was startled to learn that the president did not ask key cabinet members either.

"The president, in making the decision to go to war, did not ask his secretary of defense for an overall recommendation, did not ask his secretary of state, Colin Powell, for his recommendation," says Woodward.

So if these accounts are accurate, Bush: 

• appeals to God for advice on matters of state;
• does not consider former President Bush's advice of value;
• did not solicit advice on whether to go to war with Iraq from Secretary of State Powell or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld;
• believes that he receives advice from God, including directions to "strike at al Qaeda" and "strike at Saddam;" 
• acts on that advice; and 
• believes that God speaks through him (remarkably inarticulately, I might add).

Scary stuff.

FIVE STARS   our pet president, July 18, 2004

Reviewer:

Erica F. Verrillo (Williamsburg. MA)

For anybody who wants to know about pets, or goats, or simply wants to avoid the responsibilities of national leadership, My Pet Goat is a "Must Read"!

"A real page-turner! When you pick this one up, you'll wish you never had to put it down!" George W. Bush

 

FIVE STARS   Y'all Are Missin the Point!!, July 17, 2004

Reviewer:

A reader (That ranch with all the brush, Crawford TX)

Everybody is sayin, what's he thinkin while he's settin there in that classroom for all that time? I was thinkin somethin very important. It was the most imporant thoughts I ever did have. When I heard they blowed up all those people, I thought "How terrible! I might be held responsible for my incompetence! How can I make this not my fault? There must be someone I can blame! Since I never make any mistakes that I recall!"
So all these kids are readin about this goat. GOAT! I think! SCAPEgoat!
Whose fault is 9/11? SADDAM, the GOAT!
Whose fault is why we're not invadin right away? DAVID KAY and FRANCE, those GOATS!
When we didn't find none WMDs, whose fault y'all think that was, mine? Nosirree, TENET and the CIA! GOATIE GOAT GOATS!
Iraqis hate us? Dead-ender goats! Abu Ghiraib? A Few Bad Apple goats! Everything else? The Liberal Media goats! Hell, remember when I fell offa my bike? I blamed the DIRT! DIRTY GOAT DIRT!
Know how I released "all" my service records, except for the 3 months that woulda proved I didn't go AWOL? The AP sued to get those, and hey guess what! The microfilm was destroyed, but ONLY for those same 3 months! And there's no paper hard copies of those months either! You got it, THE GOAT ATE 'EM!!!
So stop makin fun of the greatestiest book ever. It gave me an idea I'm gonna use FOREVER!

 

FIVE STARS   If You Don't Like This Book, You Must Hate America!, July 17, 2004

Reviewer:

A reader (Fake Ranch, TX)

Why, it's not like one of them long, boring Sacuritie... Sekeriti... Seekurety... uh, Spy Stuff Memos that always give me a thinkache! It's gots a lotta pictures an real big print! It's great reading for when you're curled up in your hidey-hole, waiting for Mr. Rove to tell you it's safe to come out!

Check out all the reviews yourself, and let Amazon know whether they're helpful to you.

For three days this week the nation was transfixed by the spectacle of the United States Senate, in all its august majesty, doing precisely the opposite of statesmanlike deliberation. Instead, it was debating the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would not only have discriminated against a large group of citizens, but also was doomed to defeat from the get-go. Everyone knew this harebrained notion would never draw the two-thirds majority required for a constitutional amendment, and yet here were all these conservatives lining up to speak for it, wasting day after day with their meandering remarks about culture while more important business went unattended. What explains this folly?

Not simple bigotry, as some pundits declared, or even simple politics. While it is true that the amendment was a classic election-year ploy, it owes its power as much to a peculiar narrative of class hostility as it does to homophobia or ideology. And in this narrative, success comes by losing.

For more than three decades, the Republican Party has relied on the "culture war" to rescue their chances every four years, from Richard Nixon's campaign against the liberal news media to George H. W. Bush's campaign against the liberal flag-burners. In this culture war, the real divide is between "regular people" and an endlessly scheming "liberal elite." This strategy allows them to depict themselves as friends of the common people even as they gut workplace safety rules and lay plans to turn Social Security over to Wall Street. Most important, it has allowed Republicans to speak the language of populism.

The amendment may have failed as law, but as pseudopopulist theater it was a masterpiece. Each important element of the culture-war narrative was there. Consider first its choice of targets: while the Senate's culture warriors denied feeling any hostility to gay people, they made no secret of their disgust with liberal judges, a tiny, arrogant group that believes it knows best in all things and harbors an unfathomable determination to run down American culture and thus made this measure necessary.

. . . .

Of course, as everyone pointed out, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. It didn't have to be that way; conservatives could have chosen any number of more promising avenues to challenge or limit the Massachusetts ruling. Instead they went with a constitutional amendment, the one method where failure was absolutely guaranteed — along with front-page coverage

Then again, what culture war offensive isn't doomed to failure from the start? Indeed, the inevitability of defeat seems to be a critical element of the melodrama, on issues from school prayer to evolution and even abortion.

Failure on the cultural front serves to magnify the outrage felt by conservative true believers; it mobilizes the base. Failure sharpens the distinctions between conservatives and liberals. Failure allows for endless grandstanding without any real-world consequences that might upset more moderate Republicans or the party's all-important corporate wing. You might even say that grand and garish defeat — especially if accompanied by the ridicule of the sophisticated — is the culture warrior's very object.

The issue is all-important; the issue is incapable of being won. Only when the battle is defined this way can it achieve the desired results, have its magical polarizing effect. Only with a proposed constitutional amendment could the legalistic, cavilling Democrats be counted on to vote "no," and only with an offensive so blunt and so sweeping could the universal hostility of the press be secured.

Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it. [link via Legal Fiction]

[Publius:] I fear I've become too jaded to get outraged anymore, but if I weren't, I would surely be outraged by this. Billmon has an excellent post on the recent schemings of Jeb Bush's Florida machine. As Billmon explains, Florida refined its list of felons who could not vote (in light of the abuses in 2000), but refused to submit copies of that list to the press. CNN sued and eventually obtained the copies of the list, which lo and behold, had a bunch of African-Americans but almost no Latinos. Here's the article that Billmon links to:

The state had tried to keep the list a secret. It fought a lawsuit aimed at opening the records to the public. A series of errors emerged once a Tallahassee judge rejected the state's arguments and released the records on July 1. The error that proved final — and garnered national attention — was that Hispanics were largely overlooked because of glitches ["glitches" would be more appropriate] in how the state records information about race and ethnicity. The list was created by cross-checking voter registration and criminal records. Of the more than 47,000 voters on the potential felon list, Hispanics made up one tenth of 1 percent — this in a state where nearly 1 in 5 residents is Hispanic. Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a written statement Saturday saying the exclusion of Hispanics was "unintentional and unforeseen." "We are deeply concerned and disappointed that this has occurred," Hood said. . . . Many Hispanic voters vote Republican.

The Cuban population votes overwhelmingly Republican. And I suspect that's why only 50 — yes, 50 — Latinos were on a list of 47,000 names.

---

[Kevin:] It's really true, isn't it? Sometimes your outrage meter just redlines and then stalls — and then you stare blankly at your computer screen for a while and finally decide to go watch People's Court instead of blogging about anything for a while.

I'm just kidding about that People's Court thing, of course, but I'm glad Legal Fiction prompted me to post about this. I mean, really, think about what happened: we're in Florida, site of the biggest election meltdown in the country's history. An inaccurate list of felons is a big part of the meltdown. The state, headed by the president's brother, promises to do better in 2004. The eyes of the nation are on them. The state produces a new list. But....

It won't show the list to anyone. In fact, it resists showing the list with all the power at its disposal. Finally, when it no longer has any choice due to a lawsuit and a judge's order, it gives up the list. And....

It's wrong again! In a way that just happens to favor Republicans! Again! But it was just a mistake, honest! We are deeply concerned and disappointed! Honest!

Sometimes it's just more than you can stand.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, if you aren't reading Legal Fiction, you should be. Publius is "a law clerk in the South" and writes consistently good, thought provoking stuff. It deserves a place on your bookmark list.

These bastards stole the election for Jeb's big brother in 2000, and they're hell-bent on doing it again.

11. The Democrats have an 8 point advantage in party ID without leaners and a 14 point advantage with leaners. . . . This party ID advantage, if it holds, gives the Democrats a built-in advantage on election day, which the Republicans then have to try to desperately counter by maximizing turnout of their base.

For the likelihood that this strategy will work, see my July 15 post.

Teixeira in the referenced July 15 post noted that in presidential election years, Democratic turnout typically exceeds Republican turnout by 3-4%. Teixera greatly doubts that Republicans can equalize turnout this year, given "recent party ID trends and apparent mobilization levels among Democrats and Democratic organizations." But even if the Republicans somehow did equalize turnout, Bush would then run into the Independent buzzsaw: in the last four Gallup polls, Kerry has beaten Bush by an average of 14% among Independents. Bush could only overcome that if he achieved a Republican turnout about 4% higher as a proportion of voters than Democratic turnout. That would require a high mobilization of Republicans, not at all counterbalanced by Democratic mobilization -- which is "a complete fantasy."