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Somebody else (don't remember) has posted this insightfull link on sampling errors:

http://www.pollingreport.com/sampling.htm

In a survey to find how many americans support Gay marriage, overwhelming majority opposed the idea - even though majority of them never had a 'gay' experience before!

Just so the rest of the world doesn't think that it's a small minority of Americans who are doing this, a set of polls on evolution vs Creationism. The majority of Americans believe that we were created by a god in 6 days 10,000 years ago. The religious right's ability to keep proper science out of the class is starting to bite us in the ass as it will get harder to aprove biotech and other "controversial sciences" for funding. The same scientific ignorance causes Americans to abhorr homosexuality as a sinful path chosen by evil people rather than realizing it's a natural mindset encoded into the brain before birth. My only hope for the science in this country is that someone in the government will realize that we should spend money on education instead of war before the median scientific knowledge of our "first world" country falls below that of "third world" countries.

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Wired article as proof

But don't just take my word for it, look for yourself. You can see the results of many different polls just before the 2000 election here. Remember the popular vote was pretty damn close between Gore/Bush, with Gore getting 48.38% and Bush getting 47.87% nationwide. Notice that almost all the polls shortly before the election favored Bush, several times significantly above the Margin of Error.

• The mainstream supports debates that include third parties, the duopoly doesn't.
• The mainstream wants corporations to pay their share of taxes, so middle class taxes can be lowered. The duopoly wants to give them more special interest subsidies and tax breaks.
• The mainstream is tired of this war. Neither party wants to take a definitive stance against the war, even the same John Kerry who said in fighting against the war in Vietnam, "This is not the fight of one day or one war, but the fight of our entire lives."
• The mainstream isn't voting in many states. A lot of people are frustrated with politics for many good reasons.

"all candidates on enough state ballots to win an electoral college majority who either 1) register at five percent in national polls or 2) register a majority in national polls asking eligible voters which candidates they would like to see included in the presidential debates."

According to that criteria Nader, Cobb, Peroutka or Badnarik would have to receive over 50% in a national poll for their inclusion in the presidential debate, since none of those candidates register 5% nationally. I have not seen any polls on including the candidates in the debates (if anyone has please post!) but I suspect all four wouldn't meet the criteria.

Sorry Ralph, some of us still love you anyway!

Personally, I'm a fan of The Poor Man, Sadly, No!, and uggabugga. I hate Atrios, but at least he keeps you abreast of what's going on. For election coverage, there's Andrew S. Tannenbaum's electoral-vote.com and the polling report I have a whole list of `em. I'm not gonna give you all the links, that's what Google's for: World O'Crap, Matthew Yglesias, the All Spin Zone, Hullabaloo, Daily Kos, This Modern World, War Liberal. Democratic Veteran, The Al Franken web site, The Majority Report, Media Matters for America, TBOGG, democratic underground, hoffmania, and a few others...

Actually, I'm not convinced that Nader will draw more Democratic voters than Republican ones.

In 2000 he represented a more liberal choice that many Democrats found attractive, especially with their particularly uninteresting candidate. Nader convinced people that Gore and Bush presented no real differences, and the candidates didn't do much to fight that perception: they were both boring.

Four years later the Democratic candidate is not significantly more interesting, but the opponent is far more unattractive to Democratic voters. For Democrats, its not simply the unfortunate opportunity for Republicans to control the government any more; it's now a matter literally of life and death.

Therefore, Democrats line up behind Kerry. But many Republicans are uneasy about Bush, both on privacy and budget issues as well as the more obvious Iraq question. But there's no way they're going to vote for Kerry; Republicans are far more likely to believe the accusations of the SBVfT (I just can't bring myself to spell out their name). Some will vote for Nader as a no-vote vote.

So at this point, I believe that Nader may well be swinging the race Democratically to the degree that he makes a difference at all. The most recent Gallup poll supports this notion: the three-way race is 52/41/3 (Bush/Kerry/Nader), and the two-way is 54/43 (Bush/Kerry). In other words, Nader draws equally from both sides.

That's just general vote, of course. In 2000 Nader's dropping out needed to have swung less than 600 votes to change the outcome, due to the electoral college. But with the numbers I see, that ax may swings both ways in 2004.

FWIW, the Time poll that showed a double digit lead had some serious issues. First it was taken during the convention. The one poll taken during the DNC gave Kerry a thirteen point lead, and was ignored as it should have been - polls taken during a convention are inherently misleading. Second Time changed their methodology. For this one poll - they pushed on undecideds during the convention. The poll was conducted entirely unprofessionally - pushing undecideds while a convention is heppening is ludicrous. It almost looks like they were trying to get a bandwagon effect to swing other polls to Bush, though Time is typically professional, so I doubt this and hope that they were just really off the ball.

Yeh you seem to be one of them. I support Bush and I'm not an ignorant fuck. Go watch Farenheit 911 again, and keep perpetuating your false beliefs. Get a clue and stop labeling people you don't know. When he has a has an Approval Rating http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm of 45% I don't think you can say that Bush is the most hated Administration you've seen. If you look at other presidents he is right in the middle with most of the others http://www.gallup.com/poll/focus/sr040210.asp Next time try not to be an ignorant fuck and learn a little something about what your talking about.

Among Republicans, he has an 82% approval rating.

Among Democrats, he has a 16% approval rating.

Basically, conservatives all love him, and liberals all hate him.

Your "Mass Protests" were not. During the run up to the war, the majority of Americans supported the use of military force against Iraq.

Read here.

While the protests in the big cities were blanket-covered by the media, they represented a incredibly small portion of the voting population. And those were people who were not going to vote Republican anyway, so Congress and the President lost nothing by ignoring them.

Sorry to bring reality in, but those protests were not significant.

-Donut

Just look at different poll ratings of the current president...they can differ by as much as 10% while asking the same question. see Bush job ratings

The only real use for these telephone polls is to spot trends, not to get hard data points. Telephone polling is able to spot trends in the population of people who own and answer landline phones. I think this is a subset that covers all kinds of demographics and can therefore spot general trends.

Here's an interesting chart that plots approval ratings for many recent Presidents (Clinton, Reagan, Carter...). I don't know how accurate it is, but it is nice to have some visualization.

35,000 Internet users isn't exactly public opinion. That's 4 orders of magnitude less than the population of the US.

Bush's job approval rating is currently 52%.

They are civically uninformed on a wide variety of issues, and push to make things worse in many cases.

You may think they push to make things worse; you may also think Bush's solution to stimulate economy is a good one. They may think they push to make things better, and may also think Bush's economic solution is a bad one. Either way, there are plenty of knowledgable, educated policy-makers (economists, in the above example) who debate these issues every day. To each their own I say, but to blindly charge them as being "civically uninformed" is just silly.

Thanks to moveon, an antisemite is the leading Dem candidate.

According to the recent polls, Lieberman is the leading candidate. If he is "antisemite", then Bush is a "compassionate conservative" (or whatever the latest feel-good label is).

I'll assume you mean Howard Dean, but to say moveon is responsible for his high placing in the polls is giving them far too much credit. They haven't 'endorsed' any one candidate yet, and Howard Dean has gotten where he is without any help from moveon (that I'm aware of). Howard Dean is also certainly *not* antisemitic - he has said his views are "closer to that of AIPAC's" - far too 'pro-semitic' in my opinion.

The majority of the people in the United States support the current government. Look at the poll numbers (67 percent as of last week). Hell, even 71% of Americans were supporting the way in Iraq. To believe that the majority of Americans do not support the current administration is foolhardy.

That doesn't, of course, mean that they're right about everything. They certainly aren't, but they're also not in the minority. Pretending that they've stolen the popular will, or unfairly snatched an election (the election was too close to call and within the margin of error, neither side would have been able to claim a clear victory, no matter what any court, or any liberal, might want to say) just isn't fair. If you've got a problem with policies, argue the policies. Calling the President names and implying that he's illegitimate isn't practical.

I don't see any more problems in America then I do in the rest of the free world. I've seen enough "human rights" cases going before the EU Court to make me want to retch. I've seen Australians constantly having ridiculous laws passed by their parliament. And hell, don't get me started about the messes in Asia, Africa and South America. I don't think that my country is perfect, but it's damned better off than most countries and will continue to be so as long as we're able to maintain our national charachter.

The MPAA is a red herring. Don't worry about silly DMCA laws quite so much. They're bad, but they're not the end of the world.

According to Democratic President Candidate polls, Reverend Sharpton has a lot of credibility in the Democratic Party.

Not according to this poll. Sharpton's at the bottom of the pack as of about a month ago, with support from 2% of Democratic voters.

Rev. Sharpton is also, according to latest polling data, a more respected Democratic Presidential Candidate than Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt. That appears to be an individual that is being taken seriously.

The African American community takes him very seriously as shown by his widespread support.

Whichever way you look at it this is the end of the line for corporate deregulation. Regulation is now going to be considered pensioner friendly and stockholder friendly.

Well, at least until the current round of presidential speechifying and toothless legislating subsides Wall Street's fears, and corporate America's hand returns to the cookie jar.

In and of themselves, public scandals tend not to result in meaningful and structural change. To move beyond political grandstanding and weak legislation (and the bills being looked at currently are very weak -- see CitizenWorks for more info) requires a significant, independent-minded citizen's movement. A corporate accountability movement of this type could begin with demanding reforms in governance and accounting practices (like forcing corporations to expense stock options, a measure rejected by congressional Democrats), and move on to demanding serious and structural changes, such as taking corporate money out of politics (which will require public financing of elections, and breaking up the corporate strangehold over the news media.

But expecting a significant trend to reverse deregulation to suddenly spring up amongst politicians who continue to take their orders from major corporate donors is, unfortunately, too optimistic.

At the very least we will see the sweatheart deals arranged by Enron and the Gramms to exclude energy derivatives from oversight being swept away.

Don't count on it. As far as I remember, the current legislation doesn't repeal Gramm's Enron bill.

But at the deeper level I think that politicians are not going to be able to score easy votes by dennouncing regulation.

No, few voters are going to get hot and bothered about changes in corporate accounting regulations. However, most of them know, pretty intuitively, that they're getting screwed by big business. Frankly, most of the world understands that the current economic order doesn't operate for their benefit (particularly folks in the two-thirds world who don't just lose money on Enron stock, but get displaced by Enron-financed dams).

And no, that's not Marxist babbling -- take a look at some polling numbers: 67% think most corporate executives are dishonest, 57% think white collar crime happens very often, and the percentage who name big business as the largest threat to America's future is at an all-time high (38%).

However, the public doesn't trust politicians to solve these (or most) problems, probably a leading cause of why fewer and fewer of them bother to vote. And nobody's going to trust grand-standing Democrats like Lieberman (who spends most of his time on his knees before the insurance industry) to take a firm stance against over-reaching corporate power.

IMHO, the only way we're going to see a viable political movement for corporate accountability is with a strong, progressive, independent third party. At the moment, both in the U.S. and around the world, that's the Green Party. Provided we continue moving beyond feel-good environmentalism, the Greens can be a grassroots and effective voice for change, by bringing up these issues when people are paying some attention to them (during the election season) and offering bold solutions, rather than more of the same focus-grouped bullshit. The Green Party in the U.S. is now organized in almost every state, and has a platform full of creative ways to advance real, grassroots democracy.

In closing (and for the purposes of extending my pomposity a bit further), I'd like to remind folks that corporate abuse of power affects everyone, in millions of ways -- whether you're a white-collar type whose 401(k) is suddenly worthless, a software developer who's forced to deal with ludicrous patents, or a worker whose job just got shipped to Mexico. And it will take all of us to effect the changes so desperately needed.

(P.S. Another great resource on corporate power is the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy.)

Without getting into semantics, both you and the parent have valid points. One expresses by patriotism by protecting the symbol of the nation, the other expresses it by burning that symbol as a deliberate expression of the rights that symbol represents.

My question: You ended your post with a quote from Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Are you saying honestly and truthfully that you are willing to defend, to the death if necessary, the right/privilege to burn a flag? Or are you indicating your willingness to defend, to the death if necessary, the poster's right to say what he said in his post sans actual flag burning. Considering that Americans are in favor of outlawing flag burning nearly 2 to 1, it may not be long before this controversial act of expression is deemed illegal.

How is Bush's fiscal policy a total mess? The US economy is coming back into line after the lightest and easiest cyclical recessions ever. Yes, the tech sector is still a mess. But that's because it was allowed to boom in a stupidly unrealistc way through 2001. And Bush's approval ratings are phenomenal - they're only down on post 9/11 figures. Something, let me assure you, it gives me very little pleasure to post.