- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 360
U.S. 2012 Election
- Thread starter a_majoor
- Start date
- Reaction score
- 63
- Points
- 530
Petraeus isnt a Republican.
Besides his recent proposal adding Israel and Palestine to his AO of responsibility has many scratching their heads. Who would want that headache at a time you are fighting on several fronts.
Our new healthcare bill carries a 2.3Triliion pricetag,not even the US can afford that for long. Throw in immigration reform and cap and trade and the economy should be tanking by November with the voters mad as hell. In the best of times mid term elections only see a 40% turnout and the President isnt on the ballot. One expert tonight thought it was possible that in this perfect storm that is brewing the democrats could lose 150 seats. I wouldnt go that far but certainly 80-100 are possible considering the results of recent elections. Even those living in blu states are tired of the tax burden and after tonight it will only get worse.
Besides his recent proposal adding Israel and Palestine to his AO of responsibility has many scratching their heads. Who would want that headache at a time you are fighting on several fronts.
Our new healthcare bill carries a 2.3Triliion pricetag,not even the US can afford that for long. Throw in immigration reform and cap and trade and the economy should be tanking by November with the voters mad as hell. In the best of times mid term elections only see a 40% turnout and the President isnt on the ballot. One expert tonight thought it was possible that in this perfect storm that is brewing the democrats could lose 150 seats. I wouldnt go that far but certainly 80-100 are possible considering the results of recent elections. Even those living in blu states are tired of the tax burden and after tonight it will only get worse.
- Reaction score
- 63
- Points
- 530
Fortunately our Constitution has a real Bill of Rights which should afford some protection for civil liberties. Of the three branches of government the democrats hold two. The Supreme Court may or may not have the stones to stand up to Obama. Many of the States are exercising their rights under the Constitution so in the end we could see a Constitutional crisis.
- Reaction score
- 33
- Points
- 560
Political "kingmakers" may or may not be a danger, but it seems it is easier than ever to become the power and money behind the throne. I am not too disturbed by people doing this in the open, like Vice President Gore or Governor Palin, but the people doing it in secret behind a screen of "institutions", "foundations" and other special interest groups getting money through cut outs (the MO of George Soros) is very disturbing. Canada has a pretty tangled web of connections between Paul Desmarais, Power Corporation and the Liberal Party.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/04/sarah-palin-and-al-gore-are-on-rapidly.html#more
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/04/sarah-palin-and-al-gore-are-on-rapidly.html#more
- Reaction score
- 7,643
- Points
- 1,160
Power without responsibility is a marvelous thing....
Some historical examples come to mind: Moses brother Aaron; Pontifex Maximus and his successors down to the current Pope; John Knox; Cardinal Richelieu; all Westminster Prime Ministers since Walpole. All of them sought to influence and control while leaving others, the legally constituted authority, to suffer outrageous fortune's slings and arrows.
The Prime Minister's may have been the most successful of the all......Keep your eye on Lizzy and Chuck, you never know what they and their horsey friends are going to do next.
Of course Oprah is making a pretty fair stab at it herself.
Some historical examples come to mind: Moses brother Aaron; Pontifex Maximus and his successors down to the current Pope; John Knox; Cardinal Richelieu; all Westminster Prime Ministers since Walpole. All of them sought to influence and control while leaving others, the legally constituted authority, to suffer outrageous fortune's slings and arrows.
The Prime Minister's may have been the most successful of the all......Keep your eye on Lizzy and Chuck, you never know what they and their horsey friends are going to do next.
Of course Oprah is making a pretty fair stab at it herself.
- Reaction score
- 3
- Points
- 430
THE NW YORK TIMES
April 18, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Welcome to Confederate History Month
By FRANK RICH
It's kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap "Dallas," where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season's episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month — the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress — was also a mirage.
Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer — spittle, not spit, as it were. True, there is video evidence of the homophobic venom directed at Barney Frank — but, hey, Frank is white, so no racism there!
“It’s Not About Race” declared a headline on a typical column defending over-the-top “Obamacare” opponents from critics like me, who had the nerve to suggest a possible racial motive in the rage aimed at the likes of Lewis and Cleaver — neither of whom were major players in the Democrats’ health care campaign. It’s also mistaken, it seems, for anyone to posit that race might be animating anti-Obama hotheads like those who packed assault weapons at presidential town hall meetings on health care last summer. And surely it is outrageous for anyone to argue that conservative leaders are enabling such extremism by remaining silent or egging it on with cries of “Reload!” to pander to the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base. As Beck has said, it’s Obama who is the real racist.
I would be more than happy to stand corrected. But the story of race and the right did not, alas, end with the health care bill. Hardly had we been told that all that ugliness was a fantasy than we learned back in the material world that the new Republican governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, had issued a state proclamation celebrating April as Confederate History Month.
In doing so, he was resuscitating a dormant practice that had been initiated in 1997 by George Allen, the Virginia governor whose political career would implode in 2006 when he was caught on camera calling an Indian-American constituent “macaca.” McDonnell had been widely hailed by his party as a refreshing new “big tent” conservative star when he took office in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, in January. So perhaps his Dixiecrat proclamation, if not a dream, might have been a staff-driven gaffe rather than a deliberate act of racial provocation.
That hope evaporated once McDonnell was asked to explain why there was no mention of slavery in his declaration honoring “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens.” After acknowledging that slavery was among “any number of aspects to that conflict between the states,” the governor went on to say that he had focused on the issues “I thought were most significant for Virginia.” Only when some of his own black supporters joined editorialists in observing that slavery was significant to some Virginians too — a fifth of the state’s population is black — did he beat a retreat and apologize.
But his original point had been successfully volleyed, and it was not an innocent mistake. McDonnell’s words have a well-worn provenance. In “Race and Reunion,” the definitive study of Civil War revisionism, the historian David W. Blight documents the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war’s history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states’ rights against an oppressive federal government. In its very first editorial upon resuming publication in postwar 1865, The Richmond Dispatch characterized the Civil War as a struggle for the South’s “sense of rights under the Constitution.” The editorial contained not “a single mention of slavery or black freedom,” Blight writes. That evasion would be a critical fixture of the myth-making to follow ever since.
McDonnell isn’t a native Virginian but he received his master’s and law degrees at Pat Robertson’s university in Virginia Beach during the 1980s, when Robertson was still a rare public defender of South Africa’s apartheid regime. As a major donor to McDonnell’s campaign and an invited guest to his Inaugural breakfast, Robertson is closer politically to his protégé than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ever was to Barack Obama. McDonnell chose his language knowingly when initially trying to justify his vision of Confederate History Month. His sanitized spin on the Civil War could not have been better framed to appeal to an unreconstructed white cohort that, while much diminished in the 21st century, popped back out of the closet during the Obama ascendancy.
But once again you’d have to look hard to find any conservative leader who criticized McDonnell for playing with racial fire. Instead, another Southern governor — who, as it happened, had issued a Confederate Heritage Month proclamation of his own — took up his defense. The whole incident didn’t “amount to diddly,” said Haley Barbour, of Mississippi, when asked about it by Candy Crowley of CNN last weekend.
Barbour, a potential presidential aspirant, was speaking from New Orleans, where the Southern Republican Leadership Conference was in full cry. Howard Fineman of Newsweek reported that he couldn’t find any African-American, Hispanic or Asian-American attendees except for the usual G.O.P. tokens trotted out as speakers — J. C. Watts, Bobby Jindal and Michael Steele, only one of them (Jindal) holding public office.
New Orleans had last attracted G.O.P. attention in 2008, when John McCain visited there as part of a “forgotten places” campaign tour to deliver the message that his party cared about black Americans and that “never again” would the city’s tragedy be ignored. “Never” proved to have a shelf life of less than two years. None of the opening-night speakers at last weekend’s conference (Newt Gingrich, Liz Cheney, Mary Matalin et al.) so much as mentioned Hurricane Katrina, according to Ben Smith of Politico. When Barbour did refer to it later on, it was to praise the Bush administration’s recovery efforts and chastise the Democrats’ “man-made disaster” in Washington.
Most Americans who don’t like Obama or the health care bill are not racists. It may be a closer call among Tea Partiers, of whom only 1 percent are black, according to last week’s much dissected Times/CBS News poll. That same survey found that 52 percent of Tea Party followers feel “too much” has been made of the problems facing black people — nearly twice the national average. And that’s just those who admit to it. Whatever their number, those who are threatened and enraged by the new Obama order are volatile. Conservative politicians are taking a walk on the wild side by coddling and encouraging them, whatever the short-term political gain.
The temperature is higher now than it was a month ago. It’s not happenstance that officials from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia and Mississippi have argued, as one said this month, that the Confederate Army had been “fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for.” Obama opposition increasingly comes wrapped in the racial code that McDonnell revived in endorsing Confederate History Month. The state attorneys general who are invoking states’ rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons.
“They tried it here in Arkansas in ’57, and it didn’t work,” said the Democratic governor of that state, Mike Beebe, likening the states’ health care suits to the failed effort of his predecessor Orval Faubus to block nine black students from attending the all-white Little Rock Central High School. That battle for states’ rights ended when President Eisenhower, a Republican who would be considered a traitor to his party in 2010, enforced federal law by sending in troops.
How our current spike in neo-Confederate rebellion will end is unknown. It’s unnerving that Tea Party leaders and conservatives in the Oklahoma Legislature now aim to create a new volunteer militia that, as The Associated Press described it, would use as yet mysterious means to “help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.” This is the same ideology that animated Timothy McVeigh, whose strike against the tyrannical federal government will reach its 15th anniversary on Monday in the same city where the Oklahoma Legislature meets.
What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.
At least we can take solace in the news that there’s no documentary evidence proving that Tea Party demonstrators hurled racist epithets at John Lewis. They were, it seems, only whistling "Dixie."
April 18, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Welcome to Confederate History Month
By FRANK RICH
It's kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap "Dallas," where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season's episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month — the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress — was also a mirage.
Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer — spittle, not spit, as it were. True, there is video evidence of the homophobic venom directed at Barney Frank — but, hey, Frank is white, so no racism there!
“It’s Not About Race” declared a headline on a typical column defending over-the-top “Obamacare” opponents from critics like me, who had the nerve to suggest a possible racial motive in the rage aimed at the likes of Lewis and Cleaver — neither of whom were major players in the Democrats’ health care campaign. It’s also mistaken, it seems, for anyone to posit that race might be animating anti-Obama hotheads like those who packed assault weapons at presidential town hall meetings on health care last summer. And surely it is outrageous for anyone to argue that conservative leaders are enabling such extremism by remaining silent or egging it on with cries of “Reload!” to pander to the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base. As Beck has said, it’s Obama who is the real racist.
I would be more than happy to stand corrected. But the story of race and the right did not, alas, end with the health care bill. Hardly had we been told that all that ugliness was a fantasy than we learned back in the material world that the new Republican governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, had issued a state proclamation celebrating April as Confederate History Month.
In doing so, he was resuscitating a dormant practice that had been initiated in 1997 by George Allen, the Virginia governor whose political career would implode in 2006 when he was caught on camera calling an Indian-American constituent “macaca.” McDonnell had been widely hailed by his party as a refreshing new “big tent” conservative star when he took office in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, in January. So perhaps his Dixiecrat proclamation, if not a dream, might have been a staff-driven gaffe rather than a deliberate act of racial provocation.
That hope evaporated once McDonnell was asked to explain why there was no mention of slavery in his declaration honoring “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens.” After acknowledging that slavery was among “any number of aspects to that conflict between the states,” the governor went on to say that he had focused on the issues “I thought were most significant for Virginia.” Only when some of his own black supporters joined editorialists in observing that slavery was significant to some Virginians too — a fifth of the state’s population is black — did he beat a retreat and apologize.
But his original point had been successfully volleyed, and it was not an innocent mistake. McDonnell’s words have a well-worn provenance. In “Race and Reunion,” the definitive study of Civil War revisionism, the historian David W. Blight documents the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war’s history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states’ rights against an oppressive federal government. In its very first editorial upon resuming publication in postwar 1865, The Richmond Dispatch characterized the Civil War as a struggle for the South’s “sense of rights under the Constitution.” The editorial contained not “a single mention of slavery or black freedom,” Blight writes. That evasion would be a critical fixture of the myth-making to follow ever since.
McDonnell isn’t a native Virginian but he received his master’s and law degrees at Pat Robertson’s university in Virginia Beach during the 1980s, when Robertson was still a rare public defender of South Africa’s apartheid regime. As a major donor to McDonnell’s campaign and an invited guest to his Inaugural breakfast, Robertson is closer politically to his protégé than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ever was to Barack Obama. McDonnell chose his language knowingly when initially trying to justify his vision of Confederate History Month. His sanitized spin on the Civil War could not have been better framed to appeal to an unreconstructed white cohort that, while much diminished in the 21st century, popped back out of the closet during the Obama ascendancy.
But once again you’d have to look hard to find any conservative leader who criticized McDonnell for playing with racial fire. Instead, another Southern governor — who, as it happened, had issued a Confederate Heritage Month proclamation of his own — took up his defense. The whole incident didn’t “amount to diddly,” said Haley Barbour, of Mississippi, when asked about it by Candy Crowley of CNN last weekend.
Barbour, a potential presidential aspirant, was speaking from New Orleans, where the Southern Republican Leadership Conference was in full cry. Howard Fineman of Newsweek reported that he couldn’t find any African-American, Hispanic or Asian-American attendees except for the usual G.O.P. tokens trotted out as speakers — J. C. Watts, Bobby Jindal and Michael Steele, only one of them (Jindal) holding public office.
New Orleans had last attracted G.O.P. attention in 2008, when John McCain visited there as part of a “forgotten places” campaign tour to deliver the message that his party cared about black Americans and that “never again” would the city’s tragedy be ignored. “Never” proved to have a shelf life of less than two years. None of the opening-night speakers at last weekend’s conference (Newt Gingrich, Liz Cheney, Mary Matalin et al.) so much as mentioned Hurricane Katrina, according to Ben Smith of Politico. When Barbour did refer to it later on, it was to praise the Bush administration’s recovery efforts and chastise the Democrats’ “man-made disaster” in Washington.
Most Americans who don’t like Obama or the health care bill are not racists. It may be a closer call among Tea Partiers, of whom only 1 percent are black, according to last week’s much dissected Times/CBS News poll. That same survey found that 52 percent of Tea Party followers feel “too much” has been made of the problems facing black people — nearly twice the national average. And that’s just those who admit to it. Whatever their number, those who are threatened and enraged by the new Obama order are volatile. Conservative politicians are taking a walk on the wild side by coddling and encouraging them, whatever the short-term political gain.
The temperature is higher now than it was a month ago. It’s not happenstance that officials from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia and Mississippi have argued, as one said this month, that the Confederate Army had been “fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for.” Obama opposition increasingly comes wrapped in the racial code that McDonnell revived in endorsing Confederate History Month. The state attorneys general who are invoking states’ rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons.
“They tried it here in Arkansas in ’57, and it didn’t work,” said the Democratic governor of that state, Mike Beebe, likening the states’ health care suits to the failed effort of his predecessor Orval Faubus to block nine black students from attending the all-white Little Rock Central High School. That battle for states’ rights ended when President Eisenhower, a Republican who would be considered a traitor to his party in 2010, enforced federal law by sending in troops.
How our current spike in neo-Confederate rebellion will end is unknown. It’s unnerving that Tea Party leaders and conservatives in the Oklahoma Legislature now aim to create a new volunteer militia that, as The Associated Press described it, would use as yet mysterious means to “help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.” This is the same ideology that animated Timothy McVeigh, whose strike against the tyrannical federal government will reach its 15th anniversary on Monday in the same city where the Oklahoma Legislature meets.
What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.
At least we can take solace in the news that there’s no documentary evidence proving that Tea Party demonstrators hurled racist epithets at John Lewis. They were, it seems, only whistling "Dixie."
- Reaction score
- 33
- Points
- 560
Frank Rich is a hilarious example of how the Legacy media is blind to what is happening.
1. There is no documentary evidence of the various charges raised by the Left against members of the TEA party
2. There is plenty of documentary evidence against most of the charges Rich lays in his piece, for example the gentleman who brought an AR-15 to a rally as a demonstration of his Second Amendment rights was also a black American; on August 7, black conservative Kenneth Gladney was beaten down by SEIU thugs at a town hall meeting in Saint Louis, Missouri. The beating took place on video camera – and the SEIU thugs were wearing SEIU-emblazoned garb. Going through Instapundit reveals hundreds of photos (and links to more photos, video etc.) of TEA party demonstrations, where Americans of all ages, sexes and demographics are marching and speaking together.
3. Frank Rich and his kind will go to their graves denying, denying, denying the videos and photographs, since they do not support their "narrative".
4. Bloggers now write the first draft of history.
1. There is no documentary evidence of the various charges raised by the Left against members of the TEA party
2. There is plenty of documentary evidence against most of the charges Rich lays in his piece, for example the gentleman who brought an AR-15 to a rally as a demonstration of his Second Amendment rights was also a black American; on August 7, black conservative Kenneth Gladney was beaten down by SEIU thugs at a town hall meeting in Saint Louis, Missouri. The beating took place on video camera – and the SEIU thugs were wearing SEIU-emblazoned garb. Going through Instapundit reveals hundreds of photos (and links to more photos, video etc.) of TEA party demonstrations, where Americans of all ages, sexes and demographics are marching and speaking together.
3. Frank Rich and his kind will go to their graves denying, denying, denying the videos and photographs, since they do not support their "narrative".
4. Bloggers now write the first draft of history.
- Reaction score
- 63
- Points
- 530
If anyone remembers their anti-communist training disinformation and agitprop are mainstays of their program. Tell the the Big Lie often and enough and people will be believe. As an interesting aside someone looked at the Communist Party USA platform and there is similarities with whats going on with the democrats.
http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
- Reaction score
- 33
- Points
- 560
I'm not sure this will have a great effect in 2010, but by 2012, a lot of political organizations and even local and regional levels of government may have been taken over.
http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/utah-tea-party-state/2010/04/20/id/356333
http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/utah-tea-party-state/2010/04/20/id/356333
- Reaction score
- 33
- Points
- 560
Another issue for the mid terms and the 2012 election. I think any attempt to sieze or devalue the various retirement savings of Americans (401(k), IRAs, Roth accounts etc) will energize a very large, organized and vocal opposition:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/05/are-democrats-plotting-to-steal-your-401-k/56605/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/05/are-democrats-plotting-to-steal-your-401-k/56605/
- Reaction score
- 4,457
- Points
- 1,160
I agree that talking, seriously, to Americans about fiscal prudence is good policy and could, indeed should be good politics, too. But I am not convinced that the Beck/Limbaugh/Palin faction, which appears to dominate the Republican Party now, is either smart enough or serious enough about leading America out of the current morass to seize the issue.
- Reaction score
- 63
- Points
- 530
Tax and spend liberals. No different than their European ilk who now face an EU meltdown. Europe today is where the US is headed.
On the bright side a recent poll indicates a voter shift to the Republicans.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704247904575240812672173820.html?mod=rss_Politics_And_Policy
Republicans have solidified support among voters who had drifted from the party in recent elections, putting the GOP in position for a strong comeback in November's mid-term campaign, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
The findings suggest that public opinion has hardened in advance of the 2010 elections, making it tougher for Democrats to translate their legislative successes, or a tentatively improving U.S. economy, into gains among voters.
Republicans have reassembled their coalition by reconnecting with independents, seniors, blue-collar voters, suburban women and small town and rural voters—all of whom had moved away from the party in the 2006 elections, in which Republicans lost control of the House. Those voter groups now favor GOP control of Congress.
"This data is what it looks like when Republicans assemble what for them is a winning coalition," said GOP pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts the survey with Democratic pollster Peter Hart.
He said the Republican alliance appeared to be "firmer and more substantial" than earlier in the year.
Mr. Hart noted that, to his own party's detriment, a series of major news events and legislative achievements—including passage of a sweeping health-care law, negotiating a nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia and making a quick arrest in the Times Square terrorism attempt—has not measurably increased support for Democrats. "A lot has happened," he said, "but the basic dynamic of the 2010 elections seems almost set in concrete."
A big shift is evident among independents, who at this point in the 2006 campaign favored Democratic control of Congress rather than Republican control, 40% to 24%. In this poll, independents favored the GOP, 38% to 30%.
Suburban women favored Democratic control four years ago by a 24-point margin. In the latest survey, they narrowly favored Republicans winning the House. A similar turnaround was seen among voters 65 and older.
"This is the inverse of where we were four years ago, and in a way that projects to substantial Democratic losses in November," Mr. McInturff said.
The new survey gives incumbents of either party little reason for comfort. Only about one in five respondents approved of the job Congress is doing.
People in the survey felt overwhelmingly negative toward both political parties.
Nearly one-third of respondents said they "almost never" trust the government in Washington to do what is right—about triple the number who felt that way when the question was asked in October.
Those feelings were evident in the past week, with the ouster of longtime incumbents from each party. After 18 years in office, Sen. Robert Bennett (R, Utah) was rejected for re-nomination at Saturday's Utah GOP convention.
On Tuesday, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D, W.Va.) lost his primary election by a surprisingly large 56% to 44% margin. He had served 14 terms in the House.
"It is a tough year for incumbents, no doubt about that," said Sen. Arlen Specter (D, Pa.).
Mr. Specter didn't express great confidence that he would prevail Tuesday in his own primary contest, in which polls show him neck-and-neck with Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak.
"I don't make predictions; I run for re-election," Mr. Specter said. "I've been in a lot of tough races, and I'm slugging it out."
While the survey results foreshadow a strong showing for Republicans, they also show that voters were far more motivated by their frustration with Democrats and government in general than by an affinity for the GOP.
Just 30% in the survey said they felt positively about the Republican Party—a smaller share than for the Democratic Party and the tea party movement.
Of those who want to see Republicans control the House, less than one-third said that was because they support the GOP and its candidates.
Rather, nearly two-thirds said they were motivated by opposition to Mr. Obama and Democratic policies.
"Republicans ran us under financially, and the Democrats are worse," said poll respondent William Lina, 80, of Alden, N.Y., who is a registered Democrat but plans to vote a straight Republican ticket in November.
He cited frustration with the Democrats' health-care overhaul and the economic stimulus program.
Joe Carter, a 53-year-old Republican from Kingsport, Tenn., who has voted for Democrats in the past, said he, too, would likely vote a straight Republican ticket.
"Both parties do things I disagree with," Mr. Carter said. "But just to stop what's going on now, I will vote Republican."
Overall, the survey found that voters were split over which party they preferred to control Congress after November, with 44% favoring each party.
But that finding masked the overwhelming Republican advantage among the voters most likely to cast ballots on Election Day.
The voters who said they were most interested in the November elections favor Republican control of Congress by a 20-point margin, with 56% backing the GOP and 36% backing Democrats—the highest gap all year on that question.
Mr. Obama's approval rating in the survey has remained stable, with 50% approving of his job performance, compared with 48% in March.
In the wake of the attempted Times Square terrorist attack, a plurality of respondents approve of his handling of terrorism.
But, despite White House predictions that passage of Mr. Obama's health-care bill would boost Democrats in November, the issue still appeared to be more of a drag on the president's party.
Some 44% called the health plan a bad idea, compared to 38% who saw it as a good idea.
The poll also showed sharp divisions among voters on the subject of illegal immigration.
Among all adults, support is high for the new Arizona law that makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally and requires law enforcement officers to question people if they have reasonable suspicions about their immigration status.
Some 64% said they strongly or somewhat supported the law, compared with 34% who strongly or somewhat opposed it.
Divisions were even sharper between whites and Hispanics. Among Hispanic respondents, 70% opposed the law, while 69% of whites in the survey supported it.
The survey oversampled Hispanics to increase accuracy.
Hispanics also held a different view of immigration generally than did white respondents.
In the survey, 58% of Hispanics said that immigration helped the U.S. more than it hurt, while 56% of white respondents said that immigration hurt more than it helped.
The survey found that, at the moment, Hispanics greatly favored Democrats over Republicans, particularly among Hispanics under age 40.
That stands as a danger sign for the GOP given the rapid growth of that voter bloc.
But Hispanics were far less interested in this year's elections than key Republican-leaning groups, meaning that the benefits of this trend might not accrue to the Democrats until at least the 2012 elections.
On the bright side a recent poll indicates a voter shift to the Republicans.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704247904575240812672173820.html?mod=rss_Politics_And_Policy
Republicans have solidified support among voters who had drifted from the party in recent elections, putting the GOP in position for a strong comeback in November's mid-term campaign, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
The findings suggest that public opinion has hardened in advance of the 2010 elections, making it tougher for Democrats to translate their legislative successes, or a tentatively improving U.S. economy, into gains among voters.
Republicans have reassembled their coalition by reconnecting with independents, seniors, blue-collar voters, suburban women and small town and rural voters—all of whom had moved away from the party in the 2006 elections, in which Republicans lost control of the House. Those voter groups now favor GOP control of Congress.
"This data is what it looks like when Republicans assemble what for them is a winning coalition," said GOP pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts the survey with Democratic pollster Peter Hart.
He said the Republican alliance appeared to be "firmer and more substantial" than earlier in the year.
Mr. Hart noted that, to his own party's detriment, a series of major news events and legislative achievements—including passage of a sweeping health-care law, negotiating a nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia and making a quick arrest in the Times Square terrorism attempt—has not measurably increased support for Democrats. "A lot has happened," he said, "but the basic dynamic of the 2010 elections seems almost set in concrete."
A big shift is evident among independents, who at this point in the 2006 campaign favored Democratic control of Congress rather than Republican control, 40% to 24%. In this poll, independents favored the GOP, 38% to 30%.
Suburban women favored Democratic control four years ago by a 24-point margin. In the latest survey, they narrowly favored Republicans winning the House. A similar turnaround was seen among voters 65 and older.
"This is the inverse of where we were four years ago, and in a way that projects to substantial Democratic losses in November," Mr. McInturff said.
The new survey gives incumbents of either party little reason for comfort. Only about one in five respondents approved of the job Congress is doing.
People in the survey felt overwhelmingly negative toward both political parties.
Nearly one-third of respondents said they "almost never" trust the government in Washington to do what is right—about triple the number who felt that way when the question was asked in October.
Those feelings were evident in the past week, with the ouster of longtime incumbents from each party. After 18 years in office, Sen. Robert Bennett (R, Utah) was rejected for re-nomination at Saturday's Utah GOP convention.
On Tuesday, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D, W.Va.) lost his primary election by a surprisingly large 56% to 44% margin. He had served 14 terms in the House.
"It is a tough year for incumbents, no doubt about that," said Sen. Arlen Specter (D, Pa.).
Mr. Specter didn't express great confidence that he would prevail Tuesday in his own primary contest, in which polls show him neck-and-neck with Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak.
"I don't make predictions; I run for re-election," Mr. Specter said. "I've been in a lot of tough races, and I'm slugging it out."
While the survey results foreshadow a strong showing for Republicans, they also show that voters were far more motivated by their frustration with Democrats and government in general than by an affinity for the GOP.
Just 30% in the survey said they felt positively about the Republican Party—a smaller share than for the Democratic Party and the tea party movement.
Of those who want to see Republicans control the House, less than one-third said that was because they support the GOP and its candidates.
Rather, nearly two-thirds said they were motivated by opposition to Mr. Obama and Democratic policies.
"Republicans ran us under financially, and the Democrats are worse," said poll respondent William Lina, 80, of Alden, N.Y., who is a registered Democrat but plans to vote a straight Republican ticket in November.
He cited frustration with the Democrats' health-care overhaul and the economic stimulus program.
Joe Carter, a 53-year-old Republican from Kingsport, Tenn., who has voted for Democrats in the past, said he, too, would likely vote a straight Republican ticket.
"Both parties do things I disagree with," Mr. Carter said. "But just to stop what's going on now, I will vote Republican."
Overall, the survey found that voters were split over which party they preferred to control Congress after November, with 44% favoring each party.
But that finding masked the overwhelming Republican advantage among the voters most likely to cast ballots on Election Day.
The voters who said they were most interested in the November elections favor Republican control of Congress by a 20-point margin, with 56% backing the GOP and 36% backing Democrats—the highest gap all year on that question.
Mr. Obama's approval rating in the survey has remained stable, with 50% approving of his job performance, compared with 48% in March.
In the wake of the attempted Times Square terrorist attack, a plurality of respondents approve of his handling of terrorism.
But, despite White House predictions that passage of Mr. Obama's health-care bill would boost Democrats in November, the issue still appeared to be more of a drag on the president's party.
Some 44% called the health plan a bad idea, compared to 38% who saw it as a good idea.
The poll also showed sharp divisions among voters on the subject of illegal immigration.
Among all adults, support is high for the new Arizona law that makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally and requires law enforcement officers to question people if they have reasonable suspicions about their immigration status.
Some 64% said they strongly or somewhat supported the law, compared with 34% who strongly or somewhat opposed it.
Divisions were even sharper between whites and Hispanics. Among Hispanic respondents, 70% opposed the law, while 69% of whites in the survey supported it.
The survey oversampled Hispanics to increase accuracy.
Hispanics also held a different view of immigration generally than did white respondents.
In the survey, 58% of Hispanics said that immigration helped the U.S. more than it hurt, while 56% of white respondents said that immigration hurt more than it helped.
The survey found that, at the moment, Hispanics greatly favored Democrats over Republicans, particularly among Hispanics under age 40.
That stands as a danger sign for the GOP given the rapid growth of that voter bloc.
But Hispanics were far less interested in this year's elections than key Republican-leaning groups, meaning that the benefits of this trend might not accrue to the Democrats until at least the 2012 elections.
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tomahawk6 said:
I agree but, my impression is that many (most?) Americans do not. Even in pretty rock-ribbed Republican Texas when I asked some American acquaintances what they wanted their local, state and federal governments to stop doing I got, at best, a few nibbles around the edges of some tiny programmes and an admonition to make "them" stop "wasting" money.
Europe is about to face some wrenching choices; there will be riots, indeed blood on the streets of Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, London, Bordeaux, Lyon, Paris, Marseilles, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon and so on up and down the length and breadth of Europe.
Europe today, and in the bloody near future, is the USA is headed.
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P.S. Everyone who wants DND exempted from budget cuts must understand that Canada, too, must cut its budget deficits and run surpluses again, soon; and Canadians, themselves, must do the same or they will face the same grim futures as Americans and Europeans.
I would suggest that Canadians are going to see real sticker shock when interest rates start rising. An article the other day stated that per capita, we are the most personally indebted population in the world.
That has to come home to roost.
That has to come home to roost.
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