Polls Show Bleak Outlook For McCain-Palin

I might be ecstatic if I didn't know about the voter roll scrubbing that's going on in battleground states. A huge turn-out will be necessary along with exit polls in order to make a stolen election obvious to a blind man.

People like Joe "the puke" Scarborough are already laying the groundwork. Double digit leads don't matter because of the "Bradley effect." No one knows what the numbers really are. So says Joe, this morning. He's not alone. Other far-right wingnuts are claiming the same.

Vote early, says Bobby Kennedy, Jr. Make sure you have a government issued I.D. Raise mortal hell if they turn you down because of your name being different on voter rolls than on your I.D.. for example Robert F. Kennedy on one and Robert Francis Kennedy on the other. This is total b.s. and we all know it. Let these Democracy thieves know that it isn't over until we. the people, say it is.

No taxation without representation!

By Steven Thomma and Marc Caputo | McClatchy Newspapers

INDIANAPOLIS — A series of new polls released Thursday found a bleak outlook for John McCain, even in traditionally Republican states, and a potential landslide victory for Democrat Barack Obama on Nov. 4.

The polls found McCain trailing Obama in the battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania and suggest that he's behind even in solidly red states such as Indiana, and they also suggest that his talk about "Joe the Plumber" has done little to help his cause.

"Senator Obama is no longer the candidate of the young, the well-educated and minorities. He is now virtually the candidate of the 'all,'" said Peter Brown, the assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, which conducted one of the polls. "He is winning among all age groups in all three states. He wins women by more than 20 points in Ohio and Pennsylvania and is competitive among men in all three states. Whether voters went to college or not, they are voting for him.

"If these numbers hold up, he could win the biggest Democratic landslide since Lyndon Johnson in 1964," Brown said.

A new CBS News/New York Times poll found that a number of groups that supported President Bush in 2004, including married women, suburban voters and white Roman Catholics, now prefer Obama to McCain. Even white men, long solidly Republican, favor Obama, according to the poll, which overall found Obama leading McCain by 51 percent to 38 percent.

In Florida, where a Mason-Dixon poll earlier this week suggested that talk of the economy had helped McCain, a new Miami Herald poll Thursday found the Arizona senator trailing Obama by 49 percent to 42 percent.

The Herald poll, done in conjunction with the St. Petersburg Times by Republican and Democratic polling companies, was one of four surveys out Thursday that found the election map becoming more unfavorable to McCain.

Perhaps the most alarming of all, from a Republican perspective, was one sponsored by universities in the eight states that make up the Big 10 Conference of college sports teams. That survey found Obama ahead in all eight Big 10 states, including Ohio, Indiana and Iowa, three states that Bush carried four years ago. That was a dramatic shift from September, when the Big Ten Battleground Poll found the race a dead heat in all the states except Illinois, Obama's home state.

Now Obama is leading by double digits in all eight states, including Indiana, long a GOP stronghold, where the new poll found Obama ahead by 10 points. The last Democrat to carry the Hoosier state was Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

"If the Republican is only winning Indiana by 1 or 2 points, he's in serious trouble," said Charles Franklin, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the director of the Big Ten Battleground Poll. "McCain still has a chance to get to 270 electoral-college votes, but it's a narrow one."

The Big 10 poll found Obama up by 11 points in Pennsylvania, 12 points in Ohio, 13 points in Wisconsin and Iowa, 19 points in Minnesota and 22 points in Michigan. In his home state of Illinois, according to the poll, Obama is up by 29 points.

The Quinnipiac survey of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania found similar results. That survey found that:

• In Ohio, Obama leads by 14, up from 12 at the beginning of the month.
• In Pennsylvania, Obama leads by 13, down slightly from 14 points.
• In Florida, where Obama led by 8 points at the beginning of October, he now leads by 5 points.

Obama's lead in the Quinnipiac and Miami Herald polls is too small to say with certainty that he leads McCain in Florida, but the Herald poll found some key indicators that McCain may be falling behind in that key battleground:

• McCain trails Obama in Southwest Florida, long a reliable Republican base, and he leads in only one region, conservative North Florida — by 7 percentage points.
• Obama has tied McCain among Florida voters over 65 years old. McCain had a 7-percentage point lead in the over-65 group a Herald poll taken last month, just as the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy precipitated the economic crisis.
• Only 35 percent of Floridians said that McCain has demonstrated more leadership during the crisis and has a better plan to fix it, while 45 percent said Obama has demonstrated better leadership and 49 percent said the Illinois Democrat has a better plan to fix the economy.

The Herald poll also found that Obama's biggest boost in Florida came from independent voters, who now back him over McCain by a 57 percent to 22 percent margin. That's a 38-point shift toward the Democrat since the last poll in September, which was also conducted for the Herald, the St. Petersburg Times and Bay News 9 television by SEA Polling and Strategic Design and The Polling Co.

The fate of McCain's campaign in Florida and elsewhere was damaged by troubles that are out of his hands, said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican who owns The Polling Co.

She said the ''superseding events" of the financial crisis hurt McCain, who led by 2 percentage points last month. But, she said, McCain's campaign is also to blame for his troubles because it's focused too on attacking Obama for his alleged ties to a Vietnam-era radical terrorist.

''Trying to connect Barack Obama to Bill Ayers rather than trying to connect McCain to the average voter on the economy has also been dubious," Conway said.

The growing importance of the economy and Obama's success in talking about the issue appear to be deciding factors in winning independent votes, which comprise about a fifth of Florida's electorate. Independents have grown increasingly worried about the economy, making them more like Democrats than Republicans.

Compared with about half of all Republicans, just under two-thirds of independents and Democrats reported experiencing big financial troubles — from losing a job to missing a mortgage payment. Of those who've experienced economic duress, 55 percent back Obama and 34 percent support McCain.

Tom Eldon, a Democrat and pollster with SEA, said that Obama has used the economy to improve his standing with nearly all types of Florida voters. In the case of senior citizens, it was his ''pounding" of McCain in television ads about Social Security, Medicare and health care. Obama has outspent McCain on advertising in Florida by 3-1.

McCain's initial response — rapping Obama for his ties to Ayers and the vote-registration group ACORN — missed the mark, Eldon said, because the attacks were geared toward firming up the Republican base, but they alienated independent voters, to whom the self-described maverick once appealed.

"He served up red meat for his base but he starved independents," Eldon said. "McCain has run a base campaign and it's a race right now that is all about the independent voters."

The McCain campaign also took heavily Republican Southwest Florida for granted, Eldon said, by not doing enough to appeal to the region's elderly voters who've lost a lot in the stock market. Obama opened up field offices in the Republican area to keep the pressure on McCain, a tactic that the Republican Conway said was an example of Obama's nearly "flawless" campaign.

However, Conway cautions, "Florida's still in play" in a politically and financially volatile atmosphere. Indeed, though the Quinnipiac poll's findings resembled those of The Miami Herald survey, three statewide polls this week found Obama losing momentum in the face of McCain's renewed attacks over the Democrat's recent statement that he wants to "spread the wealth around" by raising taxes on families that earn more than $250,000 a year.

(Caputo reports for The Miami Herald.)

ON THE WEB

Poll: Independents boost Obama in Florida

Quinnipiac University poll

Big Ten Battleground Poll

CBS News/New York Times poll

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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Best and Worst of McCain's and Obama's Campaign Contributions

BuzzFlash Data Analysis:

Analysis

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Ah, if only we could survive on Ben & Jerry's ice cream alone. Alas, it's nearly impossible to avoid corn products from Archer Daniels Midland (or paying their corporate welfare with our tax money). But one website, BetterWorldShopper.com, can make it easier to parse the good companies from the bad. And when BuzzFlash decided to pair up their rankings with 2008 presidential campaign finance data, we got a glimpse of where employees of the best and worst companies in the world are dropping donations.

The site compiles 20 years of research and ranks global companies on performance in five key criteria: the environment, human rights, animal protection, community involvement and social justice. Companies are grouped into dozens of product rankings from airlines to bottled water. Also, the site created a ten best and ten worst list overall.

The web site (and a corresponding handbook, The Better World Shopping Guide) was created by Dr. Ellis Jones, a sociology professor at the University of California, Davis. He envisions shopping as a political statement.

"We don't vote for the CEOs or their policies (unless we are rich enough to be significant shareholders, informed enough to know what's going on, and compassionate enough to care about more than just personal profit), yet our destinies are increasingly in their hands," he writes on the site.

"As citizens, on average, we might vote once every 4 years, if at all. As consumers, we vote every single day with the purest form of power...money. The average American family spends around $18,000 each year on goods and services. Think of it as casting 18,000 votes every year for the kind of world you want to live in. Use this site to take back your power."

BuzzFlash decided to take Jones up on his offer. We analyzed campaign receipts from Jan. 1, 2006 to present for the two main candidates for president, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), searching for donations from employees of the ten best and ten worst companies in the world. Let's start with the good guys:

The ten best companies are, unsurprisingly, smaller than, say, Wal-Mart. Since they have fewer employees than the huge corporations that grace the ten worst list, their impact on financing presidential candidates is obviously less. Still, in crunching the numbers, an interesting, consistent pattern emerged. While Obama received little more than $17,000 over the reporting period, McCain got less from progressive companies. In fact, he got nothing at all.

Interesting patterns revealed themselves more subtly in analyzing receipts from the ten worst companies. Obama took in a total of $190,290 and McCain only got $117,478. However, one must take into consideration the sheer amount of money Obama was able to raise over the time period: almost twice as much as McCain. So while 0.11 percent of McCain's finances received between 2006 and now were from employees of the ten worst companies in the world, that figure was only 0.09 percent for Obama.

Macro observations played themselves out in individual comparisons. Obama's campaign consistently touts its grassroots support among small donors. In analyzing the data from one of the ten worst companies, Chevron-Texaco, this assertion proved accurate. McCain received $15,500 from employees of the oil company. Almost a third of that came from lobbyist and Chevron's Vice President of Governmental Affairs, Lisa Barry. Obama's receipts from Chevron employees, while over twice the amount of McCain's, came in smaller chunks, mostly from the likes of engineers and accountants.

Obviously, this is only a small piece of the campaign finance puzzle. And just because an engineer at a global corporation donates to a particular candidate does not mean that candidate is in a corporation's pockets. But employer data is required on Federal Elections Commission reports for a reason, and BetterWorldShopper.com ranked global companies for an equally important reason. In these days of shady 527s and political action committees, voters should take all the campaign finance data they can get.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

HR 3373: Egredious Attack On Privacy and Democracy

We are Sooo screwed!

Elliot D. Cohen: The Tele Gate Crisis: Stop Bush's Electronic Surveillance Before the Next Presidential Election is Stolen

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 11/26/2007 - 10:45am.
Guest Contribution A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen

About to be consummated by the Senate may be one of the most egregious, far-reaching, and dangerous attacks on constitutional rights in U.S. history. What is scheduled to take place this week on the Senate floor is a hearing about shielding telecommunication companies from both past and future criminal and civil liability for helping the Bush Administration to deploy and operate a massive computerized system of unlawful search and seizure with the potential to disrupt and destroy free elections, privacy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in America -- in a word, democracy.

The gravity of this attack on democracy in America cannot be overstated and is now by far the most serious crisis gripping this nation. Yet most Americans do not know about it. Nor is it on the evening news or being addressed by the mainstream pundits who instead speak at length about who won the last Democratic presidential debate. Sadly, it may not matter.

Since September 2001, and possibly earlier, AT&T, working cooperatively with the White House and the National Security Agency, has conducted monitoring of all e-mail and phone messages passing through the AT&T system, which also includes Qwest and Sprint. Making copies of all these messages and routing them for analysis to secret rooms hidden deep inside major AT&T hubs in the United States, this system has the potential to analyze message content according to predefined search criteria. Absent judicial oversight, as is now the case, these criteria could easily (and may presently be) set to find and read all messages sent by Democratic opponents of the GOP for purposes of gaining an unfair advantage in the upcoming presidential election in November 2008. Worse, this infrastructure supports interception, analysis, and reconfiguration of electronically cast votes when they are routed from individual voting precincts through the phone lines to a central headquarters for tallying. Unless this surveillance system is dismantled or placed immediately under careful, ongoing judicial watch, the outcome of voting in the next election -- and in subsequent elections -- may be as predictable as rolling loaded dice. Unfortunately, the FISA revisions currently before the Senate do not provide for the judicial oversight urgently needed to prevent the use of this system for such nefarious purposes.

HR 3373, the so-called Restore Act, which has recently been passed by the House of Representatives, has been scheduled for a Senate hearing this week along with the Senate's version of the bill, S. 2248, The FISA Amendments Act. Each of these bills attempts to revise the 1978 FISA law passed after the Nixon Administration to protect American citizens from being illegally spied on by government.

While HR 3373 does not provide for retroactive legal immunity to the telecom corporations, the Senate has so far not decided the issue. In an unanticipated recent move by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the issue was left undecided in committee and sent to the full Senate. Whether or not the Senate, in the end, grants retroactive immunity to the telecoms is profoundly important because such a grant of immunity would affectively wipe out the cause for action of at least 30 civil suits now pending against AT&T. This, in turn, would shield the Bush Administration's secret surveillance program from judicial inspection.

If this dangerous program is to be defused in time to salvage a fair presidential election in 2008, the Senate must now vote against including retroactive immunity in a revised FISA bill. This is not business as usual. It is of the magnitude of a national emergency!

But the Senate will need to do more than this. Both HR3373 and S. 2248 explicitly immunize the telecoms against any cause of action connected with any future compliance with the terms of the bill. So the Senate debate should be over not only whether to give retroactive immunity, but also prospective immunity to the telecoms. Section 3(e)(3) of HR3373 provides,

(3) LIABILITY OF ORDER. -- Notwithstanding any other law, no cause of action shall lie in any court against any person for providing any information, facilities, or assistance in accordance with an order issued under this subsection.

Likewise, Section 703(h)(3) of S.2248 provides,

(3) RELEASE FROM LIABILITY- Notwithstanding any other law, no cause of action shall lie in any court against any electronic communication service provider for providing any information, facilities, or assistance in accordance with a directive issued pursuant to paragraph (1).

This grant of prospective immunity provided by both bills is exclusive, which means that it cannot be overridden by any other law -- criminal or civil. This would accordingly fully shield these companies against any future legal liability in assisting government in conducting surveillance under a directive pursuant to the law. This grant of immunity would not necessarily be a bad thing if compliance with directives issued under either of these bills reasonably ensured that the constitutional rights of American citizens would be protected. Unfortunately, both versions, in their current forms, open the floodgates for widespread abuse of privacy and voting rights.

In its present form, HR 3373 allows the Bush Administration to receive from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts (FISC) virtually blanket permission to conduct surveillance between a U.S. citizen inside the United States and a presumed non-Citizen outside the United States for up to one year when the "significant purpose" of the surveillance is to obtain information about a non-citizen situated outside the United States. And while the information obtained through the surveillance is supposed to be conducted with secret minimization standards aimed at minimizing the risk of American citizens getting caught in the dragnet, these standards appear to have little teeth in curbing abuses since they do not require destruction of the information obtained and are subjectively balanced by the government against its perceived need to obtain foreign information. Add to this that the government is not required to reveal the specific identities of persons, places, or communications under surveillance. Nor is there any provisions allowing a FISC to modify the orders or the minimization procedures if it finds a problem with either of these.

A loophole in the bill also permits the government to apply for emergency authorization from a FISC up to seven days after the fact whereby there is no provision for curtailing use of the information obtained should the FISC conclude that the conditions under which the surveillance was conducted did not truly constitute an emergency. This makes it possible for the government to bogusly cry "emergency" and then use the information it obtains anyway.

In the end, the judicial oversight requisite to protecting the Constitutional rights of American citizens against systematic and widespread government abuse, are not included in either of these bills. The government can simply rationalize the mainlining of all American communications through this system of "Total Information Awareness" as the necessary straining mechanism for accomplishing a "significant purpose" (not even the main purpose) of sifting out possible terrorists.

If this judicially toothless law is passed, any challenges to it are likely to be dismissed by the White House and its compliant Justice Department on this rationale coupled with an appeal to the changing tides of technology that, so it will claim, makes such an all-pervasive, surveillance dragnet necessary. In the end, we will have stolen from us our rights to freely communicate with one another and to elect our leaders.

Accordingly, the Bush Administration is now putting pressure on the Senate to pass a bill that provides both prospective and retroactive immunity to the telecoms, and which maximizes its freedom to conduct surveillance activities outside the radar of the courts. If the Senate helps the Bush Administration and its telecom accomplices get what they want, there may be little point to debating whether Clinton or Obama will receive the Democratic nomination.

So what can Americans do about the current crisis? They can help stop the Bush Administration from using Congress to immunize its dangerous surveillance activities from judicial oversight. The American Civil Liberties Union has a campaign underway to send letters to our Senators to convince them not to cave under pressure from the White House (or from the telecoms themselves), asking them not to grant retroactive immunity to the telecoms or give these companies permission to assist government in spying on us without any real checks. All Americans who care about the survival of democracy, including the right to have one's vote counted, have a moral obligation to join this campaign.

At the same time, members of the mainstream media have a professional obligation to resist pressures from the White House, and from the telecoms themselves with whom they partner, and to give due coverage to the story. So far these large corporate conglomerates, which are largely driven by their bottom lines, have betrayed their constitutional charge as the Fourth Estate. They must act now, immediately, before it is too late.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.