The Democrats Gloat Thread

I must admit to a weakness to that kind of speculation, I even made a thread about it once -- you might find it interesting:

What would you vote if you lived in ...?

I geuss your right, I should have known that. I smoked alot of pot in high school.

Yes, the Green party. I forgot about them. I was invited to one of their meetings a long time ago. At this time we can't afford to split the vote. It's the Bush people Vs. the rest of us. The A.B.B.A. party, Anybody But Bush Again.

If you were Bush, what would you do tomorrow? (you don't have to answer. I'm just bull$hiting)

Two questions: Where is the heartland? And is the zip code e i e i o?

The one thing you have to remember when looking at polls and the people who conduct them is that the pollster doesn't care what the results will be, the pollster wants to get it right. (Obviously, there are push-polls wherein the questioner IS seeking a particular view, but to my mind those aren't really polls, those are false advertising.)

Having worked on creating a statewide political poll for a news organization (in the heartland of Oklahoma), I can assure you that we worked on getting the questions formed properly and the demographics spread as widely as possible.

What good would it be to conduct a poll that constantly got it wrong? It would be like selling compasses that only occasionally indicated North, fairly soon you would have no buyers.

(BTW: one result that surprised me was (this was in the late 70's) the more rural a district the more likely voters were to be in favor of better relations with the USSR. Folks in Oklahoma City and Tulsa were neutral or opposed. Hmmm, whys-dat? Mebee rural farmers sell big shiploads of wheat to bad bad commie people. Red wheat means big green for the boondocks so let's make nice. Yah neveh know.)

Joe(who are you? Who who?)Nation

Shoot myself...

Interesting policy, foreign and domestic all rapped into one. You know, it's so crazy, it just might work.

"Chicken-hawks" don't kill themselves.

Joe

Is that your original joke?

Blatham:

He stole it from Old MacDonald (Had a Farm)!

I think "stole" is a little harsh... LOL

God no, heard it forty years at Thee Coffe House, San Angelo, TX. I stole it right away. I worked up a little riff on it to use while re-tuning the twelve string to explain just where my house was.

"We live so far out in the country the zip code is e i e i o. The place is 50 miles west of Jesus!-where-are-we, Texas, but it's not in the middle of nowhere. No. The middle of nowhere is where we make the turn North towards the house.

But we don't live on the edge of nowhere, no, we don't. You can see the edge from the barntop, but it's still a ways down the road.

It's lonely out there, but we like it. The voices in my head and I really like it. There's a tree and a stream. The tree is about a thirty minute drive south and the stream shuts down in mid-April till about December but it has a nice oily sheen on it when it's wet. Brings a little color to the place.

I brought a girl out there and hoped we'd settle down together, but somehow the chain snapped . I tried to follow her tracks but along came the June-July-August dust storm and I had to give her up for lost.

So, it's just me and Buck, my faithful dog, sitting on the porch baying up at the moon and stars. Yeah. Though, I can't spend too much time looking up at the stars, the last time I did ol Buck bit the hell out of my leash hand and ran off toward East Jesus.

Now lemme play you a little "Dough-re-mi"..... "


Joe(Starts with a 'C-chord)Nation

Crap, that was supposed to be a PM to Blatham.. .

Sorry, back to gloating.



Joe( )

Joe(quick with the post finger)Nation. You can delete a post before somebody adds another post.

I enjoyed it tho!

LOL...all very funny indeed, joe. And yup, I'll now steal the joke too.

Actor Ed Begley Jr said that when he did standup, the places he played were so far out in the sticks that he was reviewed by Field & Stream.

July 23, 2006
In G.O.P. Fund-Raising, Dole's Star Power Dims
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and KATE ZERNIKE
WASHINGTON, July 22 ?- The tables were loaded with untouched platters of food as Senator Elizabeth Dole rose this week to introduce her party's Senate candidate from Nebraska. Sixty people were supposed to be at the fund-raiser, but Mrs. Dole, the host and leader of the Republican effort to hold the Senate this fall, found just 18 people scattered across an expanse of empty carpet.

Mrs. Dole has been a nearly unstoppable star for 25 years: the secretary of both transportation and labor, the head of the Red Cross and a popular senator from North Carolina, never mind the wife of Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader and Republican presidential candidate.

But going into the most fiercely competitive Congressional election in 12 years, some Republicans say Mrs. Dole is faltering in her latest job, as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which raises money, recruits candidates, plots strategy and shapes the party's message.

She has been lapped in fund-raising by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The latest filing, on Thursday, showed Democrats with $37.7 million on hand, compared with $19.9 million for Republicans. If Senate Republicans are unable to close the gap, it will force the Republican National Committee to step in with financial support in tight Senate races ?- it had $45 million on hand as of Thursday ?- creating tensions with House Republicans who want that money used to help them.

For all her star power, Mrs. Dole, who turns 70 next Saturday, has not had much of a public profile this year, leaving her party at a disadvantage in parrying attacks from her notoriously assertive Democratic counterpart, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York.

She failed to find strong candidates to run against vulnerable Senate Democrats in at least four states, a shortcoming that could also be partly attributed to the White House, which has often played a crucial role in candidate recruitment.

However the blame is apportioned, the party has been left without a high-profile candidate who can take advantage of the few opportunities open to Republicans this year, like Connecticut, where Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Democrat, has been distracted by a challenge from the left and said he would run as an independent if he lost the primary.

Mrs. Dole also could not head off a brutal primary battle in Rhode Island over the seat held by Lincoln Chafee, who is being challenged from the right, a fight that Republicans fear may alienate conservatives and hand the seat to the Democrats.

In interviews, Republican senators voiced support for Mrs. Dole but made it clear they were nervous about the months ahead.

"I'm going to say it's going well, because at this point in time, that's what you need to say," said Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, who earlier this year publicly criticized Mrs. Dole's recruiting efforts.

Senator John Thune of South Dakota, who has already made known that he wants to succeed Mrs. Dole when she finishes her term at the end of the year, said senators pressed Mrs. Dole about the committee's financial situation at a lunch she held for them on Tuesday.

Senator Norm Coleman, the Minnesota Republican whom she defeated by one vote for the job, said: "A lot of people had questions about cash on hand. We have to accelerate that."

Other Republicans had harsher views. "Look, we have a lot of Republicans who are on the ropes, this has not been a spectacular year of recruiting, we are way behind in fund-raising," said Pat Toomey, the president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee. "I don't see a lot to brag about."

For Democrats to take control of the Senate, they will have to win six seats, a tough task with only seven or eight in play. If the Republicans still have a majority after the election, much of the criticism of Mrs. Dole is likely to be forgotten.

In an interview in her meticulously ordered office in the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill, Mrs. Dole defended her fund-raising efforts. She said she was pleased with her success at recruiting candidates to challenge Democrats in what are generally viewed as longer-shot states for her party: Washington, Michigan, Maryland and New Jersey.

"You know it ain't going to be easy," said Mrs. Dole, a North Carolina native with a distinctive, soft Southern accent. "We are up against a headwind. But I cannot tell you how delighted I am with the sterling quality of the candidates."

With a laugh, Mrs. Dole brushed off comparisons with Mr. Schumer, suggesting he was more concerned with advancing his career, while her concern was about shepherding Republicans through a difficult period.

"I didn't take this job to prove anything," she said. "I've been around this town for 40 years.''

"This is not a P.R. campaign for me," she added. "This is not some kind of contest between Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Dole."

Mrs. Dole's friends and some senators said that she had the misfortune of having won the leadership of the campaign committee in a year when the climate had turned increasingly sour for Republicans.

"The problems the Republican Party faces are not of Ms. Dole's making," said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "They're political trends that have been a long time in the making. She's upheld her end of the bargain."

Mrs. Dole came into this role viewed by many Republicans as one of the party's better-known figures: personable, hard-working, relentlessly efficient. She won the campaign committee job after she and her supporters argued that she would be a better face for the party than Mr. Coleman and that the network of financial supporters that had backed the Doles over the years would save senators the time they might have had to spend making fund-raising calls.

"She went to members and said, ?'I want to contribute to the party, I can raise money, I have the celebrity factor, I can do this,' " said Stuart Rothenberg, an independent political analyst who tracks Senate races.

In many ways, her difficulties in this job should not have been a surprise. She folded her own campaign for president in 2000 after having trouble raising money and putting together a campaign staff. She has also not exhibited the street-fighter instinct that seems central to the character of the three other members of Congress heading similar campaign committees ?- or, for that matter, of her husband, a onetime head of the Republican National Committee.

"She's been regarded as a very, very nice woman, but not someone who is overly political," Mr. Rothenberg said. "She's not known as someone who lives and dies with campaigns."

Mr. Dole, who did not return a telephone call requesting comment, lobbied friends in the Senate on behalf of Mrs. Dole when she was seeking the campaign job, aides said. Mrs. Dole said she and her husband rarely talked about her Senate work, describing their time away from work as "an oasis."

In arguing that she had done adequately raising money, Mrs. Dole said that she had raised 25 percent more than the committee raised in the last Congressional election. That comparison may be imprecise, several Republicans and Democrats said, because 2004 was also a presidential election year, when Congressional committees tend to take in less money because they are competing with presidential candidates.

She said that the reason she had less money on hand was because she had invested early in mailings to build a base of contributors for later fund-raising.

Mrs. Dole said her committee had done a strong job recruiting candidates for this fall. She asserted that Nebraska, Minnesota, Maryland and West Virginia were also ripe for Republican takeover, a decidedly bullish, though not outlandish, assessment.

Her recruiting effort in the Michigan Republican Senate primary has put her at cross-purposes with Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman. Mrs. Dole has actively pressed the candidacy of a white candidate, Michael Bouchard, who is in a primary against a black candidate, Keith Butler, to challenge Senator Debbie Stabenow.

"I think Ken might have choked a little bit on that one," Mrs. Dole said with a soft laugh of her Michigan maneuverings. She said she applauded Mr. Mehlman's overall effort to improve the party's appeal to blacks, but argued that it was essential for Republicans to field the strongest possible challenger to Ms. Stabenow, and that Mr. Butler was simply a weaker candidate.

Mrs. Dole said some of her recruiting failures had been out of her hands. Even before the cycle began she was counting on Mike Johanns, then the popular Nebraska governor, to challenge Senator Ben Nelson, a Democrat. She was surprised when President Bush nominated Mr. Johanns as secretary of agriculture.

"It was like a dagger to the heart," she said.

Mrs. Dole's involvement in Rhode Island has proved to be one of the bigger headaches this year. She concluded, as many party officials have, that Republicans would lose the seat if Mr. Chaffee, a moderate, lost the nomination to a conservative challenger. She invited the challenger, Stephen Laffey, to Washington, where, according to Mr. Laffey, she urged him to quit the race and run for lieutenant governor, saying that would be the best way to help the Republican Party. Mr. Laffey said he found the suggestion ludicrous.

"She's a nice lady ?- she was not convincing at all," he said. "It's a very weak argument to tell a citizen of the United States to run for a different office. Why wouldn't a sitting senator help grow the Republican Party? She didn't know anything about Rhode Island politics."

Breaking from NewsMax.com

Ann Coulter Censored Again By Newspaper

Editor & Publisher, a newspaper trade magazine, slammed Ann Coulter again.

The latest installments in the magazine's jihad against Coulter includes a story that Georgia's Augusta Chronicle has become the second newspaper to drop Coulter's nationally syndicated column. The magazine said Coulter's "stridency" has crossed the line.

Since Coulter's new book, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," shot to the top of the best-seller lists, liberal media outlets have been furious that Coulter criticized four of the 9/11 widows for their political activities.

I was heartened to note that Mr.Nimh, if he was able to vote in the US presidential election, might have voted for Nader. I am delighted that there are people with principles who would vote for someone like Nader.

I urged many people I knew to vote Nader in the last election(but only if I was fairly certain that they would have voted for Kerry).

I am hopeful that Nader( or a surrogate) will run on a "GREEN" platform in 2008. Keeping in mind the closeness of the races in 2000 and 2004, a Green Candidate may indeed get the votes that would have gone to Hillary Rodham Clinton in a close election.

GO-NADER-GO!!

I'm afraid you have misread me. What I wrote was, "Whenever the race between Dem and Rep would not seem extremely tight, one way or another, I would vote Green or the like (but not Nader)." (emphasis added).

I like the politics of the Green Party - but I don't like those of Nader, personally, not the ones he's developed since he continued his campaign in earnest in 2000. Some of my beef with Nader was summarised in this 2000 article: Ralph the Leninist.


Here I'd like to point out that Nader was actually denied the Green Party's nomination in the last elections. Instead, in 2004 the Green Party ran its own candidate, David Cobb, a sympathetic fellow.