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Nancy Pelosi wishes her Democrat Congress Approval rating was as high as Bush's. This is the first time in history that Congressional approval has ever gone down to single digits.

Hmmm, maybe the people *are* paying attention?

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/congressional_performance/congressional_performance

You have a well thought out point of view, and in voting for Obama, I fully realize I'm being optimistic about his chances and how he would do as president... but I'm an optimistic kind of guy. However, as for his chances to win, I disagree, based on the financial markets. Today, I'd venture a rough guess that Obama has a 64.6% chance of winning :-) There's also a great site that projects the winner based on a combination of poll data. Today, Obama is projected to win 287 electoral votes to McCain's 227.

I'll vote for Obama, but I'm also a fan of McCain. If it weren't for McCain's stated objective of appointing more irrational supreme court judges like Scalia and Thomas, I'd likely vote for him.

I'm justing waiting for one of the Republicans to man up and admit that it's time to get out of Iraq. That's something at least 60% of the electorate want (www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/the_war_in_iraq/iraq_troop_withdrawal). It should not be viewed as a partisan issue. The top two's support of Bush's Iraq policy is obstinate party loyalty and will be suicide in the general election.

Although the Republicans claim to be fiscally responsible, its just not the case. I still have trouble believing this chart. (www.lafn.org/politics/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html) It says to me that counterintuitively, the democrats are more fiscally responsible than the republicans. The Iraq war is waste of money. Our interests are not served by being there.

During the last debate, I noticed Romney and McCain smirking the whole time the 'nameless one' spoke. The 'nameless one' has some good ideas, but these two give ideas other than their own no credence. It's one of the flaws of Bush. Romney is a smart guy, but noone knows everything.

Huckabee has as much a shot as that other guy, so we don't need to talk about him.

I'll vote for "He whose name we shall not mention" while in the race. After that, I don't vote for anyone who wants to stay in Iraq.

What happens when Republicans lose the White House in 2008? As a brand, Democrats didn't decline in popularity after their 2004 defeat (or after 2000). But Republicans did decline after their 2006 losses - though they'd started after their 2004 victories, and regained some shortly after the 2006 upsets. Maybe political parties act different.

There's no "near-even" split between parties. Americans currently affiliate as "Democrats" over "Republicans" by something like 37.3:32.7%. That 3.6 points is over 11% of the Republican percentage. Americans voted for Democrats by 11.6% overall nationwide. Right now Democrats have a 15 point advantage over Republicans in the presidential race.

Congress is indeed counted as a whole, which is legitimate. Americans are unhappy with Congress for what Republicans are actively blocking, and Democrats passively accepting. That isn't actually any kind of partisan stalemate, either among the politicos, or the Americans who they're all letting down.

I honestly hope Colbert wins in SC. The only better guy for president would be Jon Stewart!. Either of them would spank those Dem/Rep around in a debate until they cried.

Heh, I'd love to watch this as well. I was curious about what the requirements were to get into the debates, so I did a little googling. I can't find the criteria for the 2008 Presidential election (which are presumably pretty different, considering a number of the candidates in the debate don't meet the criteria below), but for curiosity's sake here's the criteria used in the the 2004 election debates:

http://debates.org/pages/candsel2004.html

* Evidence of Constitutional Eligibility: yup, Colbert's >35 years old and is a natural born citizen (born in DC, actually)

* Evidence of Ballot Access: he needs to get on enough state ballots to be able to theoretically win the election (270 electoral votes). I'm not familiar with the requirements for each state, but I imagine this could be tricky.

* Indicators of Electoral Support: He needs to poll at least 15% nationally. He's already polling ahead of Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich. He also got 13% in polls which pitted him against Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.

Consider thoses numbers came from this poll http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/22_believe_bush_knew_about_9_11_attacks_in_advance and not Fox News you just look even more foolish then your made up numbers indicate.
You are definatly upset about thoses numbers, and should be, but shouldn't you really be upset with main stream democrat sites like huffington report and daily kos where the feeling that president of Iran would be a better leader for the US or the members are upset when US leaders are not killed is talked about and celebrated?
That only 38% of Democrats know for sure that the US President did not help out with 9/11 attacks is just plain sad, but go ahead keep on making up your own "facts" and ignoring reality.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/just_26_favor_senate_immigration_plan

A quick search on Google provided me with the following links, most support or tend to support the claims I made.

http://www.illegalaliens.us/polls.htm

http://www.npg.org/immpoll.html

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44154

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,155413,00.html

Latest polls show it is closer to 3/4 than 2/3. In the meantime, I suggest that you broaden your circle of friends.

Now, as for Illegal Immigrants, do you know how much of the prison population are "undocumented aliens"? How many of them are murderer's, and how many victims? Just because you don't like the terminology I use, doesn't mean it isn't factual. The problem is that when one ignores time (3200 in 3 hours vs more over years ..) doesn't make the facts any less factual. Funny thing about statistics is one can make any case one wants with them, if they have the right data.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/3/27/114208.shtml

Yes, you are insisting on moving the goalposts, and pretending that you're not.

You said the two parties aren't very different. I pointed out that among their differences are that Republicans tried to privatize and eliminate Social Security, while Democrats saved it. You are now trying to change the point to a completely different one, that Social Security has problems. That's a straw man. The kind of fallacious argument that Republicans are expert in, especially Bush, who very commonly fails to make some radical change, then reverses rhetoric to claim credit for the opponent's version that succeeded.

For bonus points, your actual plan is ignoring the unsupportable debt that has been propping up Bush's underperforming economy and mostly stagnant (with artifical stimulant) stock market. All of which is actually collapsing in a global wildfire right now, as global central banks flood markets with extra cheap credit in a panic to avert a total economic collapse. Even as China threatens to use its half $TRILLION in US debt holdings as a weapon against us. But none of that exists in your world, because it would make privatizing Social Security into private investments clearly suicide.

How perfectly Republican of you.

So I decline to debate any revision of Social Security with you. Because it's not an honest debate. You're not interested in working together to find ways to improve Social Security. You're waiting for me to stop defending Social Security from your attacks, so you can try to destroy it (and keep its money for your efforts).

That kind of ultra dishonest politics is why Republicans have blown the trust of America. Why Republican Party membership is plummeting into marginality: significantly less Republicans now than either Democrats or independents. Bush's approval comprised of about 75% of the Republican 31% and about 75% of the 1/3 of independents who are really Republicans but too ashamed or dishonest to admit it. Since you won't abandon that failed political rhetoric strategy, or the corporate anarchy agenda that it protects, you're not going to convince anyone to join you.

So I part with you now. I'll see you after the 2009 inauguration, when a Democratic Congress and White House have gained all the tyrannical powers Bush and his Republican Congress created. Which their corporate media trained Americans to ignore. So probably Hillary Clinton can treat her political enemies the way that Bush treated his, including the gulags in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the secret CIA torture camps flying around the world from medieval Muslim dictatorships to "New Europe" ex-soviet allies. OK, probably the CIA will remain covertly opposed to Democrats, part of some Republican plot to retake power in 2012, just like Bush Sr led the Republican Party from the Nixon near-impeachment to pick up with Reagan in 1980. Keep your fingers crossed. And kiss your country goodbye.

Of course impeachment is "political": it's proposed in Articles in the House, and tried in the Senate. Only the presence of the Chief Justice "presiding" over the Senate trial offers anything not "political", though even that presiding is by Senate rules, not the Judicial Branch rules for trials.

But "political" doesn't just mean "partisan". It means "people system". Have you ever served on a jury? It's as social as it is logical or just. Because politics and justice are just the rules by which their substance, human interactions, are conducted. Impeachment conviction does not prove legal guilt of a crime. It proves only that the convicted officer cannot hold that office. Which is a purely political consideration: even a horrendously unpopular, though innocent, ham sandwich cannot hold an office that the majorities of both Congressional chambers, in a public process acceptable to them, holds unfit to stay.

Remember that the government is defined by the Congress. The Executive's role is to merely faithfully execute Congress' stated will, with the greater expediency of a single person rather than the majority of 535 people which stated that will. Congress is in fact not the "coequal" branch many people claim when defending it. Congress is in fact the superior branch, demonstrable in many ways, perhaps most undeniably in Congressional power to override vetoes and pass laws without Executive consent, as well as the required Congressional consent to install the highest Executive officials, and even Congress' power to impeach. The Executive has no powers to match or balance those.

Congress is facing an Executive literally out of control. Whose officers routinely execute anti-Constitutional conspiracies, repeatedly violate essential laws, and ignore even Congressional subpoenas when they're not directly (and obviously) lying to Congress about these essential matters. All of which crimes are destroying essential liberties like privacy and equal treatment under law, as well as robbing the Treasury and killing people in places like New Orleans and Iraq.

The problem is not that Congress doesn't have the power. The problem is indeed politics: the partisan politics that lets Democrats sacrifice America longer so American voters make more sure that the Senate, especially, has a greater Democratic majority. The risk of backfiring is pure partisan politics. This is the politics that you're talking about. The politics that constitutes impeachment is straightforward and appropriate. As appropriate as the politics that installs these representatives by elections. And of course that is the legit politics that is also in crisis in this country over the knife's edge of partisan politics.

If Democrats do not impeach Bush/Cheney, there is never going to be a time to do it, except perhaps if a Congressional opposition majority is large enough not to be tempted into delay just to wait for a reward in the next election instead. But that scenario also makes it that much more likely that a strong and popular enough Congressional opposition majority would impeach an Executive for purely partisan politics. Impeaching on proper grounds, as we have currently, is therefore essential to saving our balanced democracy from the partisan politics that has consumed it and poisoned impeachment as a remedy.

The other way out is for the partisan competition to fail to impeach, which further alienates the electorate from the Parties. Which is already the trend: there are now significantly more independents unaffiliated with either major Party than there are Republicans. At this rate, independents could outnumber even Democrats by this November. If that alienation accelerates as a result of Democrats' "pressure cooker" campaign, Democrats will start to drop faster than they have, though the pressure cooker will force down Republicans, too. Next November could see independ

If you check the current polls, Democrats are currently favored over Republicans in 10 out of 10 key issues, leaving no good grounds for a Republican presidential campaign, and Obama polls ahead of every Republican candidate.

The people are tired and want change, and they currently trust the Democratic platform to bring them this. They're simply dissatisfied with the rate of progress Congress has been having.

If you check the current polls, Democrats are currently favored over Republicans in 10 out of 10 key issues, leaving no good grounds for a Republican presidential campaign, and Obama polls ahead of every Republican candidate.

The people are tired and want change, and they currently trust the Democratic platform to bring them this. They're simply dissatisfied with the rate of progress Congress has been having.

Rove will continue to work for the Republican Party as he always has. Though of course the Party has mostly worked for him, or at least according to his designs, plans and instructions, especially since he became "Bush's Brain". All Republicans have Rove on their Party staff. Including Ron Paul, whose Republican Party membership is part of the Republican government, no matter how "contrarian" he likes to seem.

So I take the good news that you will not be voting Republican in 2008. Which is certainly popular these days, as Americans say Democrats represent them on all the top issues.

Most opinion polls are run on phone#s. Most of those surveyed are on landlines, because most listed phone#s and answered phones are landlines, not to mention their geographical cross-referencability.

So therefore most opinion polls are increasingly biased towards older, richer people. Who tend to be Republicans, even though the country is tending dramatically away from being Republicans.

Should the National Security Agency be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?

Why were exit polls so much more accurate in the days of paper ballots?

I've seen no proof or evidence of this.

If there was some evidence of this...
My explanation: exit polls weren't used as political weapons in the "old days". They now are.
Another explanation: selective polling and oversampling of women (this is definitely done) in the exit polls. I watched the exit poller at my place of voting select about 80% women to 20% men, even though a roughly equal number of women were voting.
Another explanation: majority of polling done during normal working hours, many traditional conservative voters (men with 8-5 business jobs) don't vote until after work

There also seems to be a trend that conservatives are less likely to want to answer political surveys than liberals.

There were polls that up until election time were showing Bush with a small lead. But everyone went with Zogby's poll (since it showed Kerry leading).
Rasmussen Reports seemingly has better polling methods:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/State%20by%20state %20comparisons%202004.htm
They got every state right, except for Iowa (which was very close).

Your comment about him not having "gathered the necessary voter signatures by now rather than waiting until the last sixty days before the deadline" betrays your ignorance of Texas' ridiculous election law.

From this poll you see a very different result - 64% of Americans thinks it's Ok to tap communications between U.S. Citizens and known terrorists.

If in fact the "Americans" tapped are by an large talking to terrorists then most people would say it's OK to tap them. Hardly a good way to go into an impeachment proceeding and certainly a loosing way to approach an election. You'd think after the drubbing Democrats got when attacking Republicans for being too cautious around terrorism that they would have a thought break before self inflicting another bad case of foot-in-mouth disease on themselves.

That "2% of black people" poll finding has been discredited, by the way. The main flaw in that poll being that about 40 black people were interviewed in it. Most actual polls show Bush getting 10-12% from African-Americans, which is what he got in the last two elections. I tried to Google a proper correction link for you, but naturally the net is flooded with references to the erroneous "2%" story.

Side note: Bush's general popularity has been hovering around 50% lately.

Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum (R-PA) has introduced a bill in Congress to prohibit the National Weather Service from offering any free data. The NWS already subsidizes the commercial weather services by publishing weather data below cost - the corporations just repackage and sell it, with pretty visualizations. Now Santorum wants to take all the public data that US citizens own, and privatize it so only big corporations will be able to be in the weather game. Which means not only individual forecasts will be prohibitive, but teams of distributed processing won't be able to model climate change with real data.

Very, very, very few Christians believe that the bible is literally correct. If the Bible says "and the mountains sang with joy", does that mean that they grew wind pipes and sand a song? No. The Bible deals in metaphor, and a huge percentage of Christains believe so.

Well, in the US at least the percentage of people who believe the bible is literally true stands at around 63%.

What I find funny is that almost none of them seem to be following the words of Jesus. These days Christian and hypocrite seem to be synonyms.

What would be interesting would be to go to some real political sites, with people who have actual backgrounds in this type of stuff, instead of this make-believe one.

Rasmussen Reports

Real Clear Politics

You are obviously a biased democrat. I see that you are maligning Katherine Harris, among others.

Katherine Harris's determinations during the 2000 election were the correct interpretation of the law. She did nothing other than apply the law exactly as it was written, saying that a vote is a legal vote only if it occurs via the procedure established by the legislature, to which the US Constitution grants the plenary power for determining the process for selecting the states electors, which need not even be a public vote.

If you recall, her views were upheld by the lower court's democratic judges, and were only overturned by the Florida Supreme Court (whose decisions were vacated by SCOTUS and exposed as nonsensical). When the issue went to the US Supreme Court, three of the justices above were prepared to overrule SCOFL on this point and reinstate her original position, but the per curium opinion resolved the case on the equal protection issue without addressing whether her interpretation of the statute was correct. It's kind of unfortunate that SCOFL tried to completely take over the electoral process with their stupid standardless statewide manual recount, because otherwise, Harris could have been proven correct in her application of the law.

I believe that the Florida Supreme Court's ruling that Harris abused her discretion by following the law as written is one of the worst examples I have ever seen of judicial activism for partisan purposes. There was NO basis in law whatsoever for their actions and what SCOFL did was truly disgusting partisan legislating from the bench to try to steal an election.

Oh, and Bush wins even without Florida. Though I believe the electoral college futures market is the best predictor. They say Bush will win Florida. While Rassmussen has it as a tossup.

actually, according to Rasmussen, both parties' members seem to follow their leader without the need for idiological agreement.

(and yes, considering Rasmussen has been accused of late for having a left-leaning bias [i disagree], the big W Ketchup [which you'd think is intended to be ironic, but they really are a right-wing group] is amusing to say the least)

Sixty-eight percent (68%) of American adults believe that Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik should be invited to participate in the Presidential Debates this year. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 20% believe Badnarik should not be invited while 12% are not sure.

Nice link.

I also like Rasmussen Reports.

Excellent daily polls on the all important Bush/Kerry race in addition they do state by state polls, the current electoral college position and many many other relevant questions... It is ideal political geek food, a ./ must, enjoy:-)

Excellent daily polls on the all important Bush/Kerry race in addition they do state by state polls, the current electoral college position and many many other relevant questions... It is ideal political geek food, a ./ must, enjoy:-)

By attempting to "set the record straight" only for cases where doing so would promote liberal causes, they become yet another liberal advocacy group, not a credible media fact checker, even if every point they make is true.

Exactly. And talking about how great they are at media analysis is a bit of a joke. They're extremely opinionated; they tell you what the media should do; and, they don't always present the whole side of the story.

If you want plain analysis of data, you look at something like Rasmussen Reports and you just look at the numbers at face value. You'll see, day to day: oh, Kerry's ahead ... oh, now Bush is ahead, etc. These are solid facts without the political mumbo jumbo.