It sounded pretty bad in the newspaper, but it sounds even worse on tape. Majority Report Radio has a rare tape of GW Bush attempting to answer an unscripted question by a member of the Minority Journalists association, who I'd wager is not a member of the White House Poodle Press Corps.
Next week, GW Bush explains federalism as when you are federal?
American Progress Action Fund has a list of broken Bush promises. It is a long list, although I'm not sure how much longer it is than a comparable list might have been after, say, Clinton's first term. Or Reagan's.
The difference between this administration and Clinton's, of course, is that Clinton did a lot of other things right: he managed the economy well; he lowered the deficit rather than increasing it; the tried faithfully to make peace in the mid-east; and he faced a hostile congress dominated by Republicans. (I imagine some conservatives would say something similar about the first Reagan administration.)
In contrast, in addition to his well-known economic and foreign-policy failures, Bush has no substantial domestic policy successes to brag about (except tax cuts if you are wealthy), despite having a solidly Republican Congress.
Thanks to Beth Novak for pointing me to the NYCLU site on Protecting Protest:
Protecting Protest is a campaign of the New York Civil Liberties Union to ensure that protest can take place safely and legally during the Republican National Convention this August. We're defending civil liberties from a storefront near Madison Square Garden, in the courts by challenging NYPD demonstration control tactics, at City Hall, and on the streets.
The Republican national convention and the protests it inpires seem like a decent field test of the hypothesis that it's still a free country. I am mildly confident that thanks to the the work of the NYCLU and other groups like it, we will again fail to invalidate this hypothesis.
The Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 is a classy web based chart that maps the latest poll results onto an elecoral map. It even has an RSS feed.
And then there's the interesting commentary, e.g.,
The featured poll today is a special poll of New Mexico commissioned by Libertarian party candidate Michael Badnarik and conducted by Scott Rasmussen on Aug. 4. The result is Kerry 50%, Bush 43%, Badnarik 5%, a surprisingly strong showing by him. If pollsters regularly asked Kerry/Bush/Badnarik instead of Kerry/Bush/Nader, Badnarik might do better. That might actually affect the election since Nader sucks votes almost entirely from Kerry whereas Badnarik is much more of an equal-opportunity gadfly drawing from both sides. Could the questions asked by the pollsters actually change the election results? Time for a Ph.D. thesis on Heisenberg's principle (“observing the system changes the system”) as applied to politics. No change in the electoral college as New Mexico was already leaning to Kerry, only now the lead is a bit more solid.
According to this Bloomberg.com story, Kerry's Lead Over Bush Widens in New Hampshire, Florida Polls. (Spotted via First Draft, an interesting-looking new blog).
Update: Then again, Flablog points to this poll showing a tie. (The ARG poll was taken Aug 3-5; the Strategic Vision poll was taken Aug 2-4.)
United Press International: Florida's RNC delegation a secret:
Florida Republicans refused to release the names of the state's delegates to the national convention in New York later this month, citing privacy concerns.
“Some delegates are not comfortable speaking and don't want their information given out, and we've honored their requests. Our priority is putting the interests and welfare of our delegates first,” Florida party spokesman Joseph Agostini told the Miami Herald.
Reporters and editors were provided with contact information weeks in advance for Florida's delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Boston last month, including photos of some of the more high-profile delegates. Most other state Republican delegations are providing contact information as well.
I can't understand why the identity of the delegates — the result of a state-sponsored, public electoral process — is not a public record.
And it certainly makes visible the mockery of the idea that “delegates” are in some way representative of anyone but themselves.
Jotwell Blenderlaw