Mid-Day Update: Bush Will Take The GOP Down With Him This Year
by Steve
Graphic courtesy of PollingReport.com
Along the lines of the story I ran this morning on the latest Gallup poll showing Bush down to 36% and problems for the GOP congress, check out this Page One in today’s Post by Charles Babington, wherein he reports that it is the GOP and not Democrats who are worried about turnout this November. Why? Because anger at Bush will drive Democrats to the polls, the GOP readily admits. Moreover, pollsters are finding that even GOP voters may vote for Democrats this year. Want more proof? For the first time ever, Rasmussen has Bush below 40% approval, with more than twice as many strongly disapproving of his performance (44%) than strongly approving (19%). (Hat tip to Blue in Texas) All the GOP can do to avoid this would be to dust off the playbook from two years ago and demonize gays and immigrants. Business Week and Zogby report that Bush is losing the support of the investing class as well.
Remember all those arguments from Steve Forbes and the rest of the flat-tax crowd about how such a tax scheme would benefit all of us? Bullsh*t. The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that thanks to Bush’s upper-income tax cuts, we in essence have a flat tax scheme now, with upper income earners paying only a little more as a percentage of their income than middle-class taxpayers. And what do we have to show for it? More and more rich people, a growing chasm between rich and poor in our country, a declining standard of living for the middle class and a decline in real wages these last five years, and no sign of the millions of good jobs that were supposed to come from Bush’s tax cuts. And if you don’t think tax fairness is a good issue for Democrats to run on this year, think again. Take a look at the results from last week’s Gallup poll on whether or not the public feels that the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share of taxes.
This is the Iraq we have delivered to the Iraqi people: a phantom security force of over 140,000 men roams the country not to bring law and order to the streets, but to serve as private, unaccountable armies for the various ministers to officially protect critical facilities and to unofficially settle sectarian scores. You’re doing a heckuva job Rummy.
We have now lost 48 soldiers just in the first half of this month.
The Huffington Post claims that the Poodle cancelled a trip to the US so that he could avoid being photographed with Bush.
If the Democrats are looking for an energy platform that would sell this November, how about a crash biofuels program that could lead to domestic production by 2015 of three times the oil we import now from the Persian Gulf, and a total detachment from gasoline by 2050? Oh, and it would generate millions of good jobs here at home and positively impact global warming too. This comes as oil hit $70 a barrel today for the first time since last August and the Katrina disruption.