Tag Archives: Democratic Party

May 23, 2013 · 11:55 AM

Adventures in Fox polling

Rachel Maddow Blog

From time to time, I enjoy marveling at the kind of questions that appear in ostensibly neutral Fox News polls. This latest entry only helps reinforce suspicions that the network asks questions intended to get an ideologically satisfying result.

C’mon. Does anyone seriously believe an independent poll would ask whether respondents feel like “the federal government has gotten out of control”? I think it’s far more likely Fox wanted to tell it’s viewers about results that reinforce a preconceived narrative, so it asked a question to illicit a predictable response.

As for the underlying point, it’s also worth noting that Fox did not ask whether the public believed “the federal government has gotten out of control” when the Bush/Cheney administration said warrantless wiretaps of Americans were legally permissible.

Let’s also not overlook the larger polling pattern. I’ve long marveled at the kind of questions that make their way into a Fox survey, starting in March 2007 when the network’s poll asked, in all seriousness, “Do you think the Democratic Party should allow a grassroots organization like Moveon.org to take it over or should it resist this type of takeover?” Soon after, another Fox poll asked, “Do you think illegal immigrants from Mexico should be given special treatment and allowed to jump in front of immigrants from other countries that want to come to the United States legally, or not?”

In 2009, a Fox poll asked, “Do you think the United Nations should be in charge of the worldwide effort to combat climate change and the United States should report to the United Nations on this effort, or should it be up to individual countries and the United States would be allowed to make decisions on its own?”

In March 2013, a Fox poll asked, “Former President George W. Bush stopped golfing after the start of the Iraq war. Do you think President Barack Obama should stop golfing until the unemployment rate improves and the economy is doing better?”

As a rule, professional news organizations put a great deal of care into how they word polling questions. To get reliable results that accurately reflect public attitudes, surveys have to be careful not to guide respondents or skew their answers.

It’s possible Fox is less concerned about accurately reflecting public attitudes.

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March 29, 2013 · 12:24 AM

Obama On Gun Violence: ‘Shame On Us If We’ve Forgotten’ Newtown

The POTUS made some good points in his speech…

The Huffington Post

President Barack Obama pressed Congress on Thursday not to forget the heartbreak of the Newtown elementary school massacre and “get squishy” on tightened gun laws, though some lawmakers in his own Democratic Party remain a tough sell on an approaching Senate vote to expand purchasers’ background checks.

“Shame on us if we’ve forgotten,” Obama said at the White House, standing amid 21 mothers who have lost children to shootings. “I haven’t forgotten those kids.”

More than three months after 20 first-graders and six staffers were killed in Newtown, Conn., Obama urged the nation to pressure lawmakers to back what he called the best chance in over a decade to tame firearms violence.

At the same time, gun control groups were staging a “Day to Demand Action” with more than 100 rallies and other events planned from Connecticut to California. This was on top of a $12 million TV ad campaign financed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg that has been pressuring senators in 13 states to tighten background-check rules.

But if political momentum was building after the nightmarish December shootings, it has flagged as the Senate prepares to debate gun restrictions next month. Thanks to widespread Republican resistance and a wariness by moderate Democrats from Southern and Western states – including six who are facing re-election next year – a proposed assault weapons ban seems doomed and efforts to broaden background checks and bar high capacity ammunition magazines are in question.

In one statement that typifies moderate Democrats’ caution, spokesman Kevin Hall said Virginia Sen. Mark Warner is “still holding conversations with Virginia stakeholders and sorting through issues on background checks” and proposals on assault weapons and magazines.

Continue here…

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February 21, 2013 · 4:37 AM

Worried Too Many Minorities Are Voting Republicans Try To Rollback the Constitution to 1913

african-american-voting

Seems like an effort in  futility to me.  This demonstrates yet again, the GOP’s constant folly of walking the thin line between optimism and delusion…

PoliticusUSA

A group state representatives in Georgia are proposing a resolution that would ask Congress to begin the process of repealing the 17th Amendment, which provides for the direct election of U.S. Senators.

One of the representatives behind this effort, Rep. Kevin Cooke said, “It’s a way we would again have our voice heard in the federal government, a way that doesn’t exist now. This isn’t an idea of mine. This was what James Madison was writing. This would be a restoration of the Constitution, about how government is supposed to work. The fact that this coincides with the 100th anniversary gives us a pretty good snapshot of what has happened to the federal government since then. The federal government has grown exponentially since the amendment was ratified. This would restore the constitution to what it was in 1913.”

Of course, this isn’t really about states’ rights or the intentions of the Founders. The movement to take away the people’s right to directly elect their senators is about keeping Republicans in power. A recent PPP poll of Georgia found that if Max Cleland could be talked into running for his old Senate seat in the state, he would lead each of the top five Republican contenders. If the Democratic candidate is Rep. John Barrow, he would trail the Republican nominee by an average of four tenths of a point. Depending on who the Republicans nominate, the Democrats may have a chance at picking up a Senate seat in Georgia.

The idea of repealing the 17th Amendment is just the latest extreme example of how far Republicans are willing to go in order to hold on to power. Instead of trying to appeal to the changing face of the electorate, a group of Republicans would rather takeaway the popular election of United States senators. 

Georgia’s demographics are changing quickly. People of color make up more than 40% of the state’s population. There is also an age gap, as 73.2% of Georgia residents over age 60 are white, but only 46.9% of the state’s school age children are white. The electorate in Georgia is shifting towards the Democratic Party.

Instead of changing with the times, some state Republicans have decided that the answer to their problems is to roll back the constitution to 1913.
Why stop at 1913? If they really want to hold off the demographic wave, they should also seek to repeal the 13th Amendment.

After all, the Founding Fathers also intended for slavery to be legal too.

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January 30, 2013 · 5:30 PM

Obama’s Favorability Highest Since First Year In Office – ABC/Washington Post Poll

obama smile

Good news for the POTUS, bad news for Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and their ilk…

Addicting Info

Seems despite every kind of slime, slam, side-swipe, and sucker-punch, Republicans are hitting dry ground in their continued attempts to demonize and marginalize the President. In fact, according to that latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, the President has now garnered the highest favorability ratings he’s had since his first year in office in 2009.

A full sixty percent of Americans polled gave a thumbs-up to Obama, 10 points higher than similar numbers polled in summer, 2012, during the height of the presidential campaign. “Favorability” is differentiated from “job approval,” offering a more emotional response to the President as a person, rather than an assessment of how he’s doing his job. According to ABC, Obama’s favorability numbers trump Bush’s at the start of his second term by 5 points, while trailing Clinton’s by 5 and Reagan’s by 12.

There is also the nuance of how much sentiment is felt and in this poll, Obama did well: more have a “strongly” favorable opinion than a “strongly unfavorable” one, which is the first time the numbers have skewed in that direction since 2010.

As for who likes the President, the groups were broken down as follows:

GROUPS – The president continues to be highly popular within his own party, with 92 percent favorability. Notably, 60 percent of independents see him favorably vs. 36 percent unfavorably, his best since his first year in office. He remains unpopular, however, with 80 percent of Republicans.

Similarly, 87 percent of liberals and 68 percent of moderates view the president positively, dropping to 34 percent of conservatives overall and just a quarter of strong conservatives.

In other groups, Obama’s more popular among women than men by 9 points. And he’s rated favorably by 87 percent of nonwhites, two-thirds of young adults and two-thirds of those in the lower- to middle-income brackets. By contrast, his favorability drops to 45 percent among whites – a group he lost to Mitt Romney by 20 points – and 47 percent of those with household incomes more than $100,000 a year.

Additionally, when asked about their opinion of Obama’s Inaugural address, “broad majorities” of his key constituents – liberals, nonwhites, and, of course, Democrats, highly approved.

In a nutshell, the poll summed it up in a sentence:

President Obama “has advanced to his highest personal popularity since his first year in office, and Americans who’ve formed an opinion of his second inaugural address last week broadly approve of it.”

For full PDF of poll results, click here.

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December 26, 2012 · 7:36 PM

Fox News Lies To It’s Gullible (Low-information) Readers Once Again

Once again, Fox News via Fox News Nation has blatantly lied and it seems like their hoping their readership don’t notice the lie:

Americablog

When’s the last time you met a gay-hating, Obama-hating (they think he’s literally the anti-Christ), Muslim-hating, Catholic-hating (conservative Baptists think Catholics worship Satan) evangelical Baptist church that was full of Democrats?  Oh yeah, they also really really don’t like Jews.  Well, if you believe Fox News (your first mistake), Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church is really a bunch of liberals.  Albeit, liberals who hate gays, Obama, Muslims, Jews and have the same view of Catholics as the Republican-loving religious right.

Other than that, very liberal.

This story is a perfect example of why Fox News is not a “news” network, but rather, is little more than a propaganda arm of the Republican party.  And the far right wing of the GOP, at that.

As you may know, the evangelical anti-gay activists at the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas regularly picket the funerals of gay people.  They’re the kind folks who operate the “God Hates Fags” Web site (those are also generally the type of signs they hold at their protests).  Over the last several years they’ve started to picket the funerals of non-gay people as well, including US service members, though it’s not entirely clear why, other than as a means of getting attention.

Well, this time they’re picketing the funeral of the dead children in Newtown, Connecticut.  Anonymous hacked the church’s Web site after the protests were announced, and it’s still rather difficult to pull the site up – I was finally able to get to their home page: GodHatesFags.com.  Here it is, in all of its “left wing” glory:

God Hates Fags home page

Hmm… Let’s see. The Democratic party is on the record supporting gay marriage. The Republican party is on the record opposing gay marriage. And the Baptist “God Hates Fags” church is virulently opposed to gay marriage. Let’s all guess which political party is more like to garner their sympathies.  But that didn’t stop Fox News.  Fox thrives on the fact that their viewers are dumb, unaware of the facts, and awfully gullible.  Nothing better than a gullible blank slate if you’re trying to peddle lies.  So here is how Fox News describes Phelps’ church when it was protesting the funerals of the children mass-murdered by a gun nut in Newtown, Connecticut (check the description under the photo):

Fox News says Fred Phelps is "left wing"

Did you catch that?

“Bikers turn out to protect Newtown mourners from left-wing Westboro cult”

Left-wing Westboro cult.

Uh huh.

This is how Fox News operates.  You can argue that MSNBC has a bias, and the network does – now, and in response to Fox.  But while MSNBC has a liberal bias, Fox just lies.

Now, as Kerry Lauerman points out in this Mother Jones piece from 1999, Fred Phelps was a Democrat before he went bonkers over 20 years ago.  Yeah, and I was a Republican back then as well.  I’m not a Republican now.  And it would be factually incorrect to call AMERICAblog a “right-wing Web site” because its founder was a Republican over twenty years ago before his political views shifted markedly.  Same goes for Fred Phelps, whowas a Democrat over twenty years ago, before he ventured into anti-gay crazyland, but then turned on Democrats when he saw the party embracing gays in the 1992 presidential election.  That’s when Phelps’ anti-gay animus exploded.

But don’t tell that to Fox News.  Fox News isn’t about nuance. Fox News isn’t about the truth.  Fox News is the propaganda wing of the Republican party, and truth isn’t their goal.  Electing Republicans is their goal.  At all costs.  That’s why their viewers are routinely found to be the most uninformed of any, and why studies have found that you’ll be more informed on the issues if you simply don’t watch Fox News.

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December 14, 2012 · 1:12 AM

Orly Taitz Sues To Stop Electoral College Vote

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, the self-described Birther Queen, Orly Taitz might just be a candidate for the nearest “nut-house”…

OrlyTaitzOwl2

The Huffington Post

Birther queen Orly Taitz has teamed up with a convicted felon who challenged President Barack Obama in the West Virginia Democratic primary to sue Vice President Joe Biden and Congress, in an effort to block the Electoral College vote.

Taitz announced on her website Wednesday evening that she had filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of federal prison inmate Keith Judd, along with two minor presidential candidates and Republican and Libertarian candidates for members of the electoral college. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Sacramento on Monday, is an attempt to prevent Congress from counting the Electoral College vote for Obama. Taitz did not announce the suit until Wednesday.

Taitz, an attorney and dentist based in Santa Monica, Calif., used the court papers to reiterate claims that Obama is a citizen of Indonesia and was not born in the United States. She alleges that Obama has used forged documents, including a fake birth certificate, Selective Service card and Social Security number from Connecticut, to run for president. Taitz has filed numerous state and federal court cases nationally seeking to have Obama thrown off the ballot.

Judd received 41-percent of the vote against Obama in May’s West Virginia primary, the most of any candidate against the president. In her court filing, Taitz claims that Judd would be the Democratic Party nominee if Obama was removed from the ballot and could not be voted on by the Electoral College next week. Taitz also filed on behalf of Edward Noonan, who won the American Independent Party presidential primary in California; Thomas Gregory MacLeran, who filed to run as a Republican for president; and Republican James Grinols and Libertarian Robert Odden, who both ran for elector in Minnesota.

Continue reading here…

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November 4, 2012 · 1:06 PM

Orange County Early Voting Hours Extended Sunday Following Judge’s Ruling

Another win for the good guys…

The Huffington Post

A judge extended early voting hours in one Florida county on Sunday after the state Democratic Party sued in an effort to give people more time at the polls.

Some voters had faced waits several hours long on Saturday, the last scheduled day of early voting. The judge ruled on a lawsuit filed late Saturday in Orange County after an early voting site was shut down for several hours. The Winter Park library was evacuated when a suspicious package – a cooler – was found outside. It was later detonated by a local bomb squad.

Bill Cowles, the Orange County elections supervisor, said that voters who show up on Sunday will be asked to use a provisional ballot because the Republican Party of Florida had appealed the decision. The extra hours will be offered at only the Winter Park library.

The state party also filed a federal lawsuit Sunday morning seeking more voting time in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

Voting in Miami-Dade County and Palm Beach County didn’t wrap up until early Sunday morning because voters standing in line when the polls closed were allowed to vote.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and other Democrats asked Gov. Rick Scott this past week to use his emergency powers to extend early voting. The Republican-controlled Florida Legislature last year cut the number of days available for early voting from a maximum of 14 days to eight days.

Scott and state election officials, however, turned down the extension requests. Secretary of State Ken Detzner maintained that there was not a true emergency that justified the extension. Chris Cate, a spokesman for Detzner, said that the state did not plan to appeal the decision to reopen the Winter Park location.

The federal lawsuit says counties should offer absentee ballot voting at local election offices if early voting cannot be extended. Both Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties said they planned to do that.

“I decided to open because we are allowed to do so,” said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher.

Bucher noted that voting in her county did not wrap up until 2:30 a.m. Sunday. Her office started accepting absentee ballots at 9 a.m.

Christina White, deputy supervisor with Miami-Dade County, said the county also decided to accept absentee ballots for four hours on Sunday at its main office.

“We are hoping that (the Democratic Party) is happy with that,” White said.

Broward County is also allowing voters to pick up absentee ballots on Sunday, but only if they made an appointment in advance.

Absentee ballot voting differs from early voting in that voters must fill out their ballot, place it an envelope and then sign it. The ballot envelopes are opened later and then fed into voting machines.

During early voting, voters place their ballots directly into the voting machines.

The Orange County lawsuit asked that early voting be extended at Winter Park and that the court ask local television and radio stations to let voters know about it.

The lawsuit included sworn statements from several voters who said they waited in line for hours and were turned away because voting was suspended at the site. A volunteer with the campaign of President Barack Obama said that the crowd of voters dwindled from 300 to just 40 after voting was halted.

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November 1, 2012 · 1:21 PM

(Another) Anti-Gay GOP Candidate Exposed As Pedophile, Indicted On 113 Charges

Eric Bodenweiser, front runner for State Senator in Delware.

Can we finally admit that the GOP’s claim to ‘Family Values’ is just an empty political talking point? -AI

Addicting Info

It’s almost a cliche at this point: Conservative candidate declares how much he hates “The Gay” as a way to prove just how much of a family man he his. Family values are important, don’tcha know? Vote for me! I hate gays and I believe in protecting our children!

So he can molest them, instead.

Such is the story of  Eric Bodenweiser, front runner for State Senator in Delware. Via Washington Blade:

The indictment includes 113 felony sex charges, including 39 counts of unlawful sexual intercourse — first-degree and 74 counts of unlawful sexual contact — second-degree. Although the indictment doesn’t identify the gender of the victim, the Gape Gazette identified the victim as a boy who allegedly was sexually abused by Bodenweiser between Oct. 1, 1987 and Aug. 31, 1990 when he was between the ages of 10 and 13.

The real story here isn’t that the GOP has yet another pedophile in its ranks, the Democratic Party has had some as well. The take away from this is the artificial nature of the GOP’s opposition to homosexuality. It seems that every other week, another secretly gay Republican comes tumbling out of the closet or another “pro-family” right winger turns out to be a sexual predator.

This is a clear indication that the GOP demands conformity on this issue regardless of how the candidate or elected official actually feels. The idea that a pedophile can look at homosexuality and declare that being gay is a threat to children is laughable. That a gay politician must vocally condemn his own sexual preference while hiding it from the public is sad beyond words.

In both cases, it is absolutely mandatory to follow the party line. This quashing of dissent or reasonable discourse reveals that the GOP’s “hatred” of homosexuals is nothing but a political ploy to enrage religious bigots. They don’t really care about sexual orientation outside of the votes such intolerance can get them.

The fact that conservatives constantly (and 100% falsely) seek to tie homosexuality to pedophilia is more proof that the goal is to whip up hatred for crass political gain. Pedophilia is universally despised (outside of actual pedophiles) so what better vehicle to deliver misplaced loathing to a gullible electorate?

Is there anything more grotesque than advocating a hatred not personally fell, demonizing millions of innocent citizens and creating an atmosphere in which homosexuals are bullied to death and killed outright for nothing more than a politician’s need to stay in power?

I think not.

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October 24, 2012 · 12:10 AM

Indiana Senate Candidate Mourdock: Rape Pregnancies Are A “Gift From God”

If Tea Party candidates keep making these gaffes, they will be obsolete before the mid-term election in 2014…

Alan Colmes

Debating his opponent, Democrat Joe Donnelly, Richard Mourdock said women who are raped should be forced to give birth because these pregnancies are a “gift from God.”

“I believe life begins at conception. The only exception I have for to have an abortion is in the case of the life of the mother. I struggled with myself for a long time but I came to realize life is that gift from God, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape. It is something that God intended to happen.”

Watch:

 

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September 28, 2012 · 8:30 AM

How The Tea Party Hopes To Purge Thousands of Ohio Voters

I’ve heard about this on Rachel Maddow’s show.  The far Right will stop at nothing to assure that Barack Obama doesn’t win a second term…

Think Progress

Members of an Ohio tea party group are taking it upon themselves to individually police alleged voter fraud, launching challenges to a targeted list of voters that includes hundreds of college students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans in counties President Obama won in 2008. In all, the group has sought to remove from the voter rolls at least 2,100 registrations in 13 Ohio counties, nine of which Obama won in 2008, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The alleged perpetrators of this voter fraud include Lori Monroe, a 40-year-old recovering from cancer, whose apartment for the past seven years was allegedly listed as a commercial property; and eight members of an African American family, whose four-bedroom home where the family has lived since the 1980s was allegedly listed as a vacant lot. The group has also focused on challenging college students for failure to specify a dorm room number, a claim that every election board has thus far found invalid.

The group behind this crusade has dubbed itself the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, an offshoot of Texas-based True the Vote, which champions voter purges and voter ID laws and has been building a “poll watcher” network, an effort documented by Colorlines’ Brentin Mock:

[True the Vote National Elections Coordinator Bill] Ouren and Americans for Prosperity gathered these recruits in Boca Raton in July to instruct them on how they could become “empowered” vessels for True the Vote’s poll watcher program. True the Vote is most widely known for its advocacy of restrictive photo voter ID laws. But while that might garner headlines, the group’s real focus is on policing the act of voting itself. As Ouren declared during the group’s national summit in April, and repeated again in Boca Raton, his recruits’ job is chiefly to make voters feel like they’re “driving and seeing the police following you.” He aims to recruit one million poll watchers around the country. […]

True the Vote encourages recruits to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote,” as Ouren told a gathering in Houston. In 2010, the group was able to get a list of voter registration data from Republican Harris County registrar Leo Vasquez, who reportedly refused the same to the Democratic Party, for which the party sued. When the King Street Patriots submitted to him their list of fraudulent actions they claimed to see at the polls, Vasquez accepted them without verification and held a press conference with Engelbrecht asserting Harris County polls were “under a systemic and organized attack.”

Of course, these phony charges of voter fraud – a wildly exaggerated phenomenon — do more than harass legally registered voters; they provide an artificial justification for the real and considerable threats to disfranchisement that come from new restrictive voter suppression laws, such as the move to limit early voting in Ohio, now embroiled in litigation.

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