Friday 'Toons

Some make you laugh. Some make you cry. I hope they all make you think.
























We can't forget Foley...





And finally, something we need to remember more often...

Jim Doyle's Approve/Disapprove Numbers

Most polls show Doyle up over Green by a few percent right now. I thought it might be interesting to look at Doyle's approval rating and see how he's doing. This data is from Survey USA which has been doing a monthly tracking poll on Doyle for about a year and a half. Keep in mind that this is a poll of the voting-age public, not registered or likely voters.

Overall Doyle looks weak. He's at 49% approve and 45% disapprove, which puts him thirty-second out of the fifty governors. The chart above shows how Doyle's numbers have changed over time. With the exception of a brief bounce this past April, Doyle's approve numbers have bobbled in the mid to upper forties,

But it's not quite as bad as it looks for Doyle. His approval is lowest among young people, just 43% from ages 18-34, but gets higher as people get older, reaching an impressive 59% for the 65+ crowd. And the older you are, the more likely you are to vote. I haven't run through the numbers, but this is a very strong effect and if this poll included only likely voters Doyle's approval would probably be four or five percent higher, putting him above the 50% danger point. I'll get into the age factor more in a future post.

Doyle is at 60% approval with moderates, and they make up almost half the sample, but are probably less likely to vote than either liberals or conservatives. It's hard to say from the Survey USA data how likely voters will break along ideological lines in this election, but the gay marriage amendment is going to pull out the extremes, and that effect probably hurts Doyle because many more people in Wisconsin consider themselves conservative than liberal.

The thing to watch is the next set of numbers from Survey USA, which will come out in a few days. As with any tracking poll, the real value is seeing the trends, and if Doyle manages to keep going in the same direction as he has been for the past couple of months, it will bode well for the election.

Why you should't mess with an Astronaut

I'm not sure why this caught my fancy. Maybe it's the parallels with the 9/11 conspiracy stuff, which I think is a load of crap. And yes, I've spent many hours going through all the evidence, on both sides. There clearly was a cover-up, but it was to hide incompetence and lack of preparation, not some nefarious scheme by the Project for the New American Century gang.

Anyway, Buzz Aldrin was an astronaut on Apollo 11, and was the second person to walk on the moon. I remember watching it on TV as a boy. There's a group of conspiracy theorists who think the whole thing was a plot by the US government to trick the world. One of these guys got right in Aldrin's face and called him "...a coward and a liar and a thief." I can't speak personally about the liar and thief parts, but you don't become a fighter pilot and an astronaut if you're a coward. Aldrin may be 76, but he certainly responded like a much younger man...

The GOP's Problem with Message

Independent Expenditures In the 8th CD

This is a dedicated post for independent expenditures in the 8th CD race between Steve Kagen and John Gard. There's a bit of analysis you might find interesting in an older post I did on this race, although the numbers in that post are out of date.

Last updated 11/2/06. With well over two million dollars of independent expenditures in this race it's no longer practical for me to list them individually, so I'm now only posting totals for each group.

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Independent expenditures in favor of Steve Kagen:

$1,101,990 DCCC
$195,601 AFSME
$54,512 SEIU
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$1,352,103 TOTAL

Independent expenditures in favor of John Gard:

$1,078,003 NRCC
$69,000 Republican Party of WI
$40,654 National Right to Life PAC
$11,540 Trust in Small Business PAC
$6,024 Club for Growth
------------
$1,205,221 TOTAL

DPW Chair Joe Wineke at the Dane Dems

Last Wednesday Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chairperson Joe Wineke spoke about the upcoming elections at the Democratic Party of Dane County's monthly meeting. I recorded his speech, and the Q&A session afterwards, and I've posted the mp3 files on the Democracy for Wisconsin server for your listening pleasure.

Each segment is about fifteen minutes long. The recordings are quite good, although it's a little hard to hear the questions during the Q&A because I didn't have a microphone for the audience.

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Joe always gives a good speech, and certainly did so on Wednesday. I'm not going to review the majority of what he said because I agreed with most of it, and you can listen for yourself. My comments are on the things I take issue with. Although they may come across as a bit negative, overall I both enjoyed and appreciated Joe's visit.

I have some concerns about Joe's analysis of the Senate and Assembly races. He really emphasized the national Democratic generic ballot advantage while downplaying head-to-head polling numbers. This starts at about 4:35 in the speech. I understand that he's trying to pump up the troops, but this particular audience is probably the most informed and active in the state, and Joe just came across as rather pollyannaish. We're going to have a very good election year, and Joe certainly deserves to pat himself on the back for that, but I worry that in doing so he may be giving the impression that we can afford to sit back and relax between now and the election. That would be a huge mistake.

Unfortunately Joe also turned a good chance to unify the audience behind Doyle and Falk into a slightly mean-spirited lecture. This starts at about 13:50 in his speech. Joe's "suck it up" comment was probably not a wise choice of words for a group that overwhelmingly supported Peg Lautenschlager, and knows far more than they should about Doyle's peccadilloes. Quite a few people were pissed about that, and Joe's comments certainly didn't help either Doyle or Falk.

But my biggest concern is what Joe had to say when he was asked how we can preserve the grassroots ground infrastructure that we're building for this election so that it doesn't have to be completely rebuilt in two years. You can hear it on the Q&A tape starting at about 5:45, with the questioner restating it at 8:10 because Joe didn't really answer it the first time.

After being asked the second time, Joe implied that ground infrastructure should be built by candidates, not the Party, and then said it isn't the Party's job to maintain the infrastructure, and that individual Party members should do it by themselves. "Why is it the Party's responsibility, why isn't it the people's responsibility to do some of these things?"

This is one of my biggest frustrations with the Party. I did a huge amount of ground organizing for the '04 presidential campaign, first for Dean and then for Kerry, and I watched it all fall apart the day after the election. The volunteer lists and the data we needed for running the ward organizations just disappeared. What little we were able to preserve or recover, some of it from raiding campaign office trash cans when they packed up and left, wasn't enough to use effectively.

To be fair, this isn't just an issue with the Party. In '04 I also worked with the League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn, and the same things happened with them. National organizations, whether it's a campaign or an interest group, just don't give a damn about your grassroots ground organization once it's served their purpose. And, at least around here, candidates usually have little interest in using their hard-earned infrastructure to help other candidates or the Democratic Party as a whole.

My final comment is about the future direction of the Party. To me the most profound thing Joe said was "I used to be part of a big [Democratic] majority, and we lost it because we forgot about values and issues." This couldn't be more true. So what are we doing about it?

I believe that the reason we are not a party of values and issues is because we're a party of elected officials.

Think about that for a minute.

Who controls the Democratic Party?

More often than not, it's elected officials. Often through proxies, as with Joe, but elected officials nonetheless. And the last thing a Democratic elected official wants is to have the Party publicly disagreeing with him. If they can't control what the Party says, they would rather it says nothing at all. No values, no issues, no nothing. As a county party official, I can tell you that the pressure from electeds on the Party to avoid taking public stands is nearly constant.

We can either be a party of values working for the good of all Democrats, or a party of individuals working for their own good, but not both. This is our most fundamental problem, and until we deal with it we can never build a truly strong and successful Democratic Party.

Why diplomacy really is important...

This is the best article I've found yet on the history of the North Korean nuclear issue. It's a bit dated, but still is exactly what you need to understand what's going on, and to give you the ammo you need to debate your wingnut friends (who will continue blaming Clinton for every Republican screwup until the day they die.)

Is it Fascism Yet?

(Click on the image to get a larger version suitable for downloading and printing)

I've had many requests for this image. I can't take credit for it, and I don't know where it originated. There are several versions floating around the web, but they're very low resolution and not suitable for printing. So I resampled the image to increase the resolution, removed the background, fixed a few other things, and replaced the text. It now looks pretty good printed at 8-1/2 x 11.

If anybody knows who the artist is, please let me know.

If Rep. Frank Lasee lived in Pennsylvania...

...I'm sure he'd support this.

Iran - The October Surprise? - Update

In a previous post I speculated that Bush may be planning a blockade of Iran timed for just before the elections. I don't think voters would buy into a outright attack so close to November, but Bush needs something to pull his butt out of the fire, and Rove has been hinting they're planning something big.

But there's another possibility, a terrible apocalyptic possibility, yet one that would give Bush exactly what he wants...

From today's Washington Times:

A former Navy intelligence officer weighs in on how the world will stop Iran from building nuclear bombs: "I really believe the Israelis are going to strike [Iran's] several uranium processing factories soon. They cannot survive a first strike. This time, unlike when they sent eight F-16s to destroy the Iraqi reactor Osirak, I think they will use the Jericho missiles and the submarine-launched, nuclear-tipped Tomahawks to do nuclear strikes. Most of the factories are 150 meters underground and too deep for bunker busters." (Emphasis mine)

And The Nation has confirmed that we're moving significant military assets into the Persian Gulf:

As reports circulate of a sharp debate within the White House over possible US military action against Iran and its nuclear enrichment facilities, The Nation has learned that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have moved up the deployment of a major "strike group" of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast. This information follows a report in the current issue of Time magazine, both online and in print, that a group of ships capable of mining harbors has received orders to be ready to sail for the Persian Gulf by October 1.

[...]

Colonel Gardiner, who has taught military strategy at the National War College, says that the carrier deployment and a scheduled Persian Gulf arrival date of October 21 is "very important evidence" of war planning. He says, "I know that some naval forces have already received 'prepare to deploy orders' [PTDOs], which have set the date for being ready to go as October 1. Given that it would take about from October 2 to October 21 to get those forces to the Gulf region, that looks about like the date" of any possible military action against Iran. (A PTDO means that all crews should be at their stations, and ships and planes should be ready to go, by a certain date--in this case, reportedly, October 1.) Gardiner notes, "You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It's a very significant order, and it's not done as a training exercise." This point was also made in the Time article.

The result of a massive Israeli nuclear attack on Iran could be millions of civilian casualties, and one of the worst political and humanitarian crisis in world history. But it certainly would eliminate the threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future. Bush wouldn't be blamed for the mess, and it would just about guarantee Republican control of the House and Senate in November.

A true win-win situation for the Bush administration.

Picking on Foley - The Downside

While I like to pile on as much as anybody when The Party of Moral Values^TM gets caught with their collective pants down, there's a potential downside for Democrats and progressives in this sordid affair.

It's all too easy for an opposition party to simply wait for the party in power to self-destruct rather than develop the message, agenda, and electoral infrastructure to win on their own merits. And while power corrupts, and Republicans, due to their free market and anti-regulatory agenda, are particularly susceptible to corruption, counting on them to screw up in order to beat them is not a viable long-term political strategy.

Winning is what counts in politics, and success, whether earned or not, is the criteria by which tactics, strategy, and politicians are judged. Should we win big nationally in this election, as it now appears, much of that success will not be due to our own efforts, but to the incompetence of Republicans. Yet within the Democratic Party that fact will be quickly forgotten in a rush to claim the credit and spoils that accrue to the victors.

The danger, of course, is that we won't use our gains to do the hard work of self-examination necessary to ensure that our success continues in the future. "Vote for me because I'm not as bad as the guy you elected last time" is a knife that cuts both ways.

Picking on Foley

It's just too easy...