Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Blunderbuss Express

by digby

St. John wants to escalate the Iraq war and shut down the internet, too. What a guy.

Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law.

The legislation, drafted by Sen. John McCain and obtained by CNET News.com, would also require Web sites that offer user profiles to delete pages posted by sex offenders.

In a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday, the Arizona Republican and former presidential candidate warned that “technology has contributed to the greater distribution and availability, and, some believe, desire for child pornography.” McCain scored 31 of 100 points on a News.com 2006 election guide scoring technology-related votes.

[…]

Internet service providers already must follow those reporting requirements. But McCain’s proposal is liable to be controversial because it levies the same regulatory scheme–and even stiffer penalties–on even individual bloggers who offer discussion areas on their Web sites.

“I am concerned that there is a slippery slope here,” said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “Once you start creating categories of industries that must report suspicious or criminal behavior, when does that stop?”

According to the proposed legislation, these types of individuals or businesses would be required to file reports: any Web site with a message board; any chat room; any social-networking site; any e-mail service; any instant-messaging service; any Internet content hosting service; any domain name registration service; any Internet search service; any electronic communication service; and any image or video-sharing service.

[…]

But the reporting rules could prove problematic for individuals and smaller Web sites because the definitions of child pornography have become relatively broad.

The U.S. Justice Department, for instance, indicted an Alabama man named Jeff Pierson last week on child pornography charges because he took modeling photographs of clothed minors with their parents’ consent. The images were overly “provocative,” a prosecutor claimed.

Right. Leave the definition of “child pron” in the eye of the wingnut and you’ve got the makings of a full-on witchhunt.

But what is most irritating about this latest absurd solution to a difficult problem is the fact that once again, you have idiots making policy about things of which they don’t even have a basic understanding:

The other section of McCain’s legislation targets convicted sex offenders. It would create a federal registry of “any e-mail address, instant-message address, or other similar Internet identifier” they use, and punish sex offenders with up to 10 years in prison if they don’t supply it.

[..]

“This constitutionally dubious proposal is being made apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts,” said EFF’s Bankston. Studies by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show the online sexual solicitation of minors has dropped in the past five years, despite the growth of social-networking services, he said.

A McCain aide, who did not want to be identified by name, said on Friday that the measure was targeted at any Web site that “you’d have to join up or become a member of to use.” No payment would be necessary to qualify, the aide added.

Yes. We’re all issued an e-mail address at birth so a registry of such addresses will definitely make it impossible for sexual predators to operate on the internet. Maybe we could have a permanent web-cam embedded in their foreheads so that we could watch them while they type, too. And it’s a good thing they’re targeting the sites where you have to “sign up” because that will certainly put a stop to it.

In this political climate, members of Congress may not worry much about precise definitions. Another bill also vaguely targeting social-networking sites was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives in a 410-15 vote.

No word on whether McCain and his fellow lawmakers are going to pass legislation making it illegal for politicians to pander to people’s fears with stupid, useless legislation while their own brethren are hitting on 16 year old pages.

Next year, Gonzales and the FBI are expected to resume their push for mandatory data retention, which will force Internet service providers to keep records on what their customers are doing online. An aide to Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, said Friday that she’s planning to introduce such legislation when the new Congress convenes.

Cathy Milhoan, an FBI spokeswoman, said on Friday that the FBI “continues to support data retention. We see it as crucial in advancing our cyber investigations to include online sexual exploitation of children.”

Who can argue with that? Maintaining information about what every American is reading and writing on the internet is necessary to keep children safe.

Other data,though, not so much. Remember this?

March 8, 2005

Dozens of terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year, according to a Congressional investigation that points up major vulnerabilities in federal gun laws.

People suspected of being members of a terrorist group are not automatically barred from legally buying a gun, and the investigation, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, indicated that people with clear links to terrorist groups had regularly taken advantage of this gap.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials and gun control groups have voiced increasing concern about the prospect of a terrorist walking into a gun shop, legally buying an assault rifle or other type of weapon and using it in an attack.

The G.A.O. study offers the first full-scale examination of the possible dangers posed by gaps in the law, Congressional officials said, and it concludes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation ”could better manage” its gun-buying records in matching them against lists of suspected terrorists.

F.B.I. officials maintain that they are hamstrung by laws and policies restricting the use of gun-buying records because of concerns over the privacy rights of gun owners.

Priorities, you know.

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Film Noir

by digby

In Modo’s hit piece today she quotes Obama saying something that I had to go look up to believe.

He said:

“We have a certain script in our politics, and one of the scripts for black politicians is that for them to be authentically black they have to somehow offend white people,” Obama said in an interview. “And then if he puts a multiracial coalition together, he must somehow be compromising the efforts of the African-American community.

“To use a street term,” he added, “we flipped the script.”

I’ve never heard of this script. Is it true?

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Removing The Stinger

by digby

Maureen Dowd does a spectacular Queen Bee Kill today of both Clinton and Obama, basically calling her a sexless schlub and him a metrosexual cipher. With her usual original insight she notes that Clinton is a woman and Obama is black and then ends the piece with this darling little observation:

So there is a second question, perhaps one that will trump race and gender. It’s about whether he’s tough and she’s human.

Told yah. Democrats are a bunch of bitches and girly-men — the kewl kidz are sharpening their claws to do the GOP’s dirty work for them again.

Via TPM, I see that Jeff Greenfield has responded to the blogosphere’s exasperation athis story comparing Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mode of dress. Just as his fellow entertainer Rush Limbaugh always does, he claims he was joking and that bloggers are hotheads, trying to feed their blog beast with silly stuff like this.

I figured there was no way on planet Earth that anyone could possibly take such a presentation at face value. I was wrong.

Nobody that I know of was suggesting that he meant it at “face value” which I guess would be that Obama and Ahmandinejad’s similar mode of dress means that they have similar political views. What I criticized was the sub-text of such remarks and how these remarks are common right wing tools used to slander, demean and trivialize their opponents. The fact that Jeanne Moos also did a “funny” riff that day on Obama’s middle name “Hussein” (that was far more revealing of people’s bigotry than anything else) what you saw was this subtle theme emerging that implies both that Obama is superficial on the one hand (look at his GQ clothes!) and also somewhat exotic and foreign — not to be trusted. Enough “jokes” like this and over time people will develop an uncomfortable feeling about Obama’s “style” and his exotic name without even knowing that they have it or where it came from. That’s how these subtle themes work.

Greenfield even mentions the Daily Howler as one of the critical bloggers — the Daily Howler that wrote the book on the trivialization and character assasination of Al Gore with the very same shallow, schoolkid nonsense that Greenfield pulled on Obama, (which Greenfield implies are completely different things.) This thesis has been rigorously explored there and in the rest of the blogosphere and its conclusion is one of the reasons why the blogosphere has exploded. Far from being a little sideline we indulge in when we need some filler, it is one of the reasons we exist.

We have found, among many other things, that there is an obsession among the press corps with a very peculiar form of gender stereotypes which they affix to the political parties. This may be a function of what seems to be their terminal immaturity (and perhaps it has simply become reflex after all this time), but it is also part of a long term political strategy on the right to paint the Democrats as being odd, untrustworthy, hysterical, overly sensitive and soft — what neanderthals think of as traditionally negative female characteristics. Not only does this narrative feed into these negative sereotypes, which benefits traditonal power structures in general, it feeds into a positive male leadership archetype, which has been appropriated by the Republican Party. It is what allowed a halfwit, manchild to be elected as a “grown-up” while the real adult was derided as some sort of Blanche DuBois character who had lost his grip on reality. The kewl kidz laughed and laughed while the rest of stood there dumbfounded and paralyzed at this bizarre interpretation of reality. We aren’t paralyzed anymore.

Is it a sin, in and of itself, that Greenfield trivialized Barack Obama for his wardrobe and compared him to a holocaust denying psychopath? Not really. Is it a major goof for Jeanne Moos to simultaneously go out on the street and ask people if they think his “weird” middle name means that he can’t be elected? Probably not.

But you’ll have to excuse us hotheads for reacting strongly when we see these things because the last time the media decided to have “fun” and tell “jokes,” this way, enough people believed them that it ended up changing the world in the most dramatic and violent way possible. We are in this mess today at least partly because these people failed to do their duty and approached their jobs as if it were a seventh grade slumber party instead of the serious business of the most powerful nation on earth.

I don’t know what is wrong with them and their social construct that makes them so susceptible to this, or why they fail to see how this bias toward phony Republican machismo distorts political reporting, but it’s a big problem for this country. Whatever their psychological or political motivations, we cannot take the chance that these narratives will go unchallenged again. Bad things happen. Wars. Torture. Dead people.

Somebody in this culture has got to be the sober, factual, reality based journalists and it only stands to reason that those who are trained and paid to be sober, factual, reality based journalists would fill that role. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are very good at political humor. (Even Dennis Miller is funnier than Greenfield.) The late night comics do a great job at skewering politicians. Leave them to it.

Until the mainstream press recognizes the extent of their laziness and gullibility — or pay a price for their political bias — we will keep reminding them and their audiences of their transgressions even if that makes us thin-skinned hotheads who are trying to fill blogposts. We all have our jobs to do.

Update: Kevin Drum responds to Greenfield too.

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Collective Conscience

by poputonian

The founders of the United States dealt with negative societal forces in different ways. To control the power of government, they established three coequal branches: executive, judicial, and legislative. To ensure freedom of religion, they separated church and state. To reduce the power of the military, they placed it under civilian control. But the founders understandably missed one other major threat to society: the corporation. There is a reason why they didn’t foresee this threat. In their day, corporations were public charters that…

…could only exist for a limited time, could not make any political contributions, and could not own stock in other companies. Their owners were liable for criminal acts committed by the corporation and the doctrine of limited liability (shielding investors from responsibility for harm and loss caused by the corporation) did not yet exist. [Drutman essay: The History of the Corporation]

In short, if the corporation ever acted outside the public interest, the charter could be revoked, and many times it was. Interestingly, albeit unfortunately, the founders did not anticipate the need for a constitutional provision that would keep the public interest aspect of the corporation intact. Without such a constitutional provision to control the erosion of public interest, it was through the court system that the monied interests won the game. A google search will turn up the cases, one I believe was in Santa Clara, California in the 1860s, and at least one other in the state courts of New Jersey, where the courts gradually determined corporations weren’t people and thus shouldn’t be held responsible in the same way you might hold an individual responsible. [Ed. See in the comments iconoclast, justin, and rob for a superior explanation (and links) of how the corporation gained protections while limiting their liability.] The net effect was that anything close to a corporate conscience was stripped away and a runaway power was born, one that was incongruous with the founders’ intent to protect the public interest from private greed. From destruction of the planet to an inequitable distribution of wealth, we live every day with the residual negative impact of corporations that have no consciences.

What should we say about the political system? Does America have a collective conscience, or are we absolved, as individuals, of any responsibility as long as we can say we didn’t vote for George W. Bush? I’ll call the question one more time: If he as the head of our national entity committed crimes against the nation and humanity, and the crimes become known, is he allowed to ride out his term in office, or do we act to remove him? As the Nichols article I posted about below indicates, the founders put a safeguard in the Constitution to protect against elected “despots and tyrants”. The safeguard, mentioned six times, is the impeachment option.

As to the question of a collective national conscience, I received an email from a reader who I think eloquently expresses the importance of collective responsibility for Iraq, but who perhaps disagrees with me about the need to impeach. The email begins with a quote from my earlier post:

“In the eyes of justice and humanity, how do we — you and me — as part of a representative democracy, escape an equal share of responsibility for the carnage?”

This is exactly the key question.

My answer is a little different from yours. I think we have to push the country to accept things that you take as premises in your post. You’ve already accepted them, and so have I, but the nation as a whole hasn’t, and because of that, anything we do without accepting them is bound to be tainted.

We’re responsible for those deaths, and we’re living in a democracy. Everyone focuses on Bush’s refusal to accept responsibility for what he’s done, and that’s really important. But the same thing is necessary for the country as a whole.

This isn’t some abstract thing, or just a desire to see the nation do penance for its crimes. It affects the way we see the conflict now and our options.

This whole mess was caused by problems over here, in this country — our own inability to understand other culture, things that are broken in our political system, problems with our own press, the ease with which such an ugly war was sold to the public as a whole, etc.

But when we talk about what to do next, we take this patronizing attitude — the Iraqis have to learn this, or isn’t it unfortunate that they didn’t go through the enlightenment, or the Iraqi government has to learn that we can’t do it forever, they’ll have to step up and “take responsibility.” Like a suburban dad teaching a kid how to ride a bike, we’ll have to take off the training wheels.

As far as I’m concerned, we need to do two things. We need to internalize the reality of what’s happened — that our aggression caused these deaths, and that it caused the ongoing chaos.

And we need to take our obligation to our victims seriously. Right now, that means trying to structure policies so that as few Iraqis die every day as possible. The civilian death toll has to be the dominant metric.

A while back, I was thinking about whether or not bush lied to get us in to this war, or if he was just spinning very hard and went right up to the line. I think he lied, but I decided that it doesn’t really matter.

When 665,000+ people have been killed, what difference does a lie make, one way or another? To put it another way, if he didn’t lie, would things be better? The body count dwarfs conventional morality, and the ideas we have about right and wrong in our personal spheres don’t necessarily make much sense on the level where Bush is operating.

When this is over, Bush will probably have been responsible for more than a million deaths. Probably a lot more than a million. Does it matter if he lied, or if he’s censured or impeached? If he’s forced out of office six months early, and Cheney runs out the clock, will the dead come back? It would be a farce to say that justice had been done — what kind of justice can balance the books on a million deaths?

It doesn’t address the core problems — one of which is that people are still dying. The other core problem is that we are a paranoid, warlike country, and our public was willing to follow Bush down this path.

If you listen to the populist right on talk radio now, you’ll hear that they’re defiant, unbowed, totally delusional, and filled with hatred. And many millions of our fellow citizens listen every day, nod their heads, and say, “damn straight.” That’s what we have to try to fix, although I have to confess I have no idea of how to do it.

Listen to the debate about what to do now — there is absolutely no sense of shame in any of it. That’s what we have to fix. Our actions have lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and we are not ashamed.

I don’t want America to be as amoral as the modern corporation, and my belief is that if we don’t act within the provisions of the Constitution to impeach, that is exactly what we’ve become. If not through impeachment, where does the imprimatur come from that says the Iraq war was unjust and immoral? Will the national conscience be expressed through the “free” press? Ha! The “free” press is incorporated. On the other hand, as the above correspondent concludes, what real difference does impeachment make when compared to a million dead?UPDATE: See iconoclast, justin, and rob in the comments for a better explanation of the evolution of the corporation and the Santa Clara case in particular.UDPATE II: A mention also to Vast Left who provided a link to documentary of The Corporation … definitely one not to miss.

Freedom is Under Attack By Baby Huey

by digby

Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla finds a very forceful and persuasive plea in support of Net Neutrality:

“Freedom is under attack. Under attack by hysterical and well funded Christian psychotics, intellectually undernourished leaders who lie and manipulate information…”

It goes on. If you dare…

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It’s Getting Hot In Here

by digby

So, McCain has Silvestre Reyes and Joe Lieberman backing his “plan” to send in 20,000 more troops and now we hear the president is seriously considering it.

I will merely reprise my earlier post on this from last month:

I do not want to see anybody sent into that meat grinder and I’m not sure they can do it. But if they do, it will stab St. John right in the back. His rationale for winning in 2008 hinges on his calling for more troops and the Bush administration not listening. (Whoever wins the Republican nomination in 08 must run against both Bush and the Democrats.)

McCain made a tactical error when he asked for a specific number recently. If they give him what he wants and it fails, which it will, his rabid support for the war becomes a huge liability:

Mr. McCain contends that the war in Iraq is worth fighting and is worth winning. He has said consistently from the start of the conflict that the only way to prevail is to send enough soldiers to do the job. His current proposal is to send 20,000 additional troops in hopes of bringing Baghdad and the restive western provinces under control.

The alternative, he said, is humiliation for the United States and disaster for Iraq.

He’s going to be left with no option but to call for even more escalation going into ’08 if they do this. I can’t help but wonder about the political implications. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the number is the same and that Abizaid famously said recently that the extra 20,000 weren’t necessary. If the Bush administration now “gives” McCain exactly what he’s asked for they are effectively passing off the war to him. McCain is positioning himself to be Lyndon Johnson in this thing without even becoming president.

Sending in more troops is a crazy idea, but it’s the kind of crazy idea that Bush is looking for. And it is the kind of crazy idea that will make the country turn on John McCain. I seriously doubt he ever thought it anyone would do this — and I doubt he thought through the political ramifications of calling for 20,000.

He be in big trouble if Bush decides to do what he wants. By ’08, this war will be a dead albatross around his neck. But then, McCain has always been too cutesy by half on this — he deserves to be strangled by his own arrogant posturing. Who did he think he was, claiming that he could have “won” this thing if only the country had listened to him. It was always unwinnable and he’s a lying, opportunistic piece of garbage. If Bush sticks the shiv in St. John’s back one last time before he leaves office, it will be poetic justice.

Sadly, however, it requires that 20,000 more Americans troops get stuck in the middle of hell on earth and I cannot hope for it, even as I know that all is lost anyway and all we have left is to put a non-crazy person in the White House in 2008. I still do not believe we will withdraw from Iraq until after January 20, 2009, no matter what Jimmah Baker or or anyone else says.

It’s a very unpalatable set of options these right wing failures have left us, isn’t it? Let’s hope they are taken out of the foreign policy loop for a good long time. If this mess doesn’t finally prove they are incapable in this area, nothing will.

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Fashion Police State

by digby

Kevin Drum discusses the media’s unnatural obsession with certain politicians’ sartorial choices, such as Jeff Greenfield’s bizarre notion that Barack Obama is apeing the style of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Really.)

He writes:

Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy “Armani Suit” Pelosi can all sympathize. (And yes, as near as I can tell, “Armani Suit” must be Pelosi’s middle name or something. Not a profile goes by that doesn’t mention her attachment to Armani.)

Question: Does this demonstrate the moral frivolousness of the modern press corps, as Bob believes? Or is this mostly a reflection of human culture, which has been obsessed with demeanor and appearance ever since clothing was invented? Did the Roman press mock the subtle ecru highlights in Cato’s robes?

Tha latter, surely, but 24-hour cable news has turned it into the former. When fashion description was confined to occasional sentences in news stories, there was only a limited amount of damage it could do. But when cable news took over, with its addiction to images and its voracious appetite for something — anything — to fill up its 1,440 minutes per day, pop fashion demagoguery suddenly became a big deal indeed. That’s how you end up with deeply weird stuff like Greenfield’s take on Obama.

Why is it, then, that we don’t see any similar stories about Republicans. Odd, don’t you think?

Kevin’s analysis is correct, except for one major thing he left out. These fashion “stories” are planted by snotty GOP operatives to trivialize (and feminize) Democrats. All these liberals are a bunch of flaming metrosexual fashionistas, don’t you know, thinking about their looks all the time, staring in the mirror, spending tons of money on their appearances. (Remember “Christophe” and the 300 dollar haircut? John Kerry and the botox?)

Democrats are nothing but a bunch of bitches and girlie-men, haven’t you heard? This is not an accident or a coincidence, I guarantee it.

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Truth And Consequences

by digby

Back when George W. Bush was riding high Bob Woodward asked him how history would judge the war. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” He was a man of action, then, confident that he was ordained by God to rid the world of evil and that everyone worshipped him. (That’s the same interview where he says he doesn’t ask his father for advice because he appeals to a “higher father.”)

My, how things have changed. Bush is now counting on history to redeem him, and being the shallow little nitwit he is, he will probably rest easy into his dotage believing that no matter how much his presidency may have screwed up the world, ultimately everything will work out. It’s a shame about all the dead bodies, but sometimes that’s the price others have to pay for the priviledge of getting the American way of life.

Bush is described by another recent visitor as still resolutely defiant, convinced history will ultimately vindicate him.

“I’ll be dead when they get it right,” he said during an Oval Office meeting last week.

This is becoming a new theme in ruling class circles these days. Events have proven these people to be asses so they are hiding behind the fiction that if humanity manages to survive and Iraq progresses to something better than it is today, then they will have been proven right. David Ignatius popularized this convenient theory with his seminal column entitled: “Iraq Can Survive This” from July of 2005, in which he posited that even if it devolved into a civil war that lasts thirty years, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the odds are that someday it will turn into a peaceful nation, right?

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn’t so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn’t be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn’t provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

What happens in Iraq will depend on Iraqi decisions. One of those is whether the Iraqi people continue to want U.S. help in rebuilding their country. For now, America’s job is to keep training an Iraqi army and keep supporting an Iraqi government — even when those institutions sometimes seem to be illusions. Iraq is in torment, but the Lebanon example suggests that with patient help, its institutions can survive this nightmare.

Only a pessimist could think that 15 yrears of bloody civil war is a bad thing. Why, in the end they had that awesome cedar revolution, with fine lookin’ babes and everything, the all-important institutions intact. No harm no foul. (Well, ok. Maybe they need a few more decades of bloodshed to fully appreciate how great it all is.)

By this logic, Hitler was history’s greatest European hero. Look at ’em today!

In fact, the Washington Post editorial makes that explicit argument today regarding Pinochet. After a few snide remarks about the “international left” who, it is implied, were misplaced in their outrage that Pinochet overthrew a democratically elected government and then went on to kill and torture thousands and thousands of people, assasinate his rivals and steal millions from the treasury, they point out that it was all to the good. After all, Chile’s economy is doing very well today:

Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle — and that not even Allende’s socialist successors have dared reverse. He also accepted a transition to democracy, stepping down peacefully in 1990 after losing a referendum.

Hey, you have to torture a few eggs to get a fluffy free market omelette 35 years later.

This is why accountability is so important. It is the epitome of injustice that allows war criminals and sociopaths like Pinochet to go unpunished for their deeds, allowing detestable apologists like Fred Hiatt to rationalize away the horrors he inflicted on his own people in the name of this abstract godhead “free-markets.”

Just as it is wrong to have allowed Pinochet to die a free old man, the leadership of this country should not be allowed to continue their comfortable lives without suffering any consequences in the here and now for their ongoing rationalization of American perfidy in Iraq. History will not redeem them any more than it has redeemed Pinochet and they should not be allowed to sit in the comfort of their riches and power like a bunch of decadent potentates and live as if it already has.

Where Destinies Cross and Hearts Intermingle

by poputonian

From a Salon article about Obama:

But few in Democratic politics still believe that Obama is just aimlessly window-shopping outside the White House. A major Democratic strategist, who is affiliated with another presidential candidate, ran into Obama on Capitol Hill last week and was told by him, “I hope that when your conflict-of-interest period is over, we can work together.” The easy translation: “After your candidate loses in the early primaries, I hope that you will sign on with me.”

So, who is the major Democratic strategist?

Not Quite Sure

by digby

Food for thought:

Multinational surveys have often reported that Americans are much more likely to believe in God than people in most other developed countries, particularly in Europe. However, a new Harris Poll finds that 42 percent of all U.S. adults say they are not “absolutely certain” there is a God, including 15 percent who are “somewhat certain,” 11 percent who think there is probably no God and 16 percent who are not sure.

These are the results of a Harris Poll conducted online by Harris Interactive® between October 4 and 10, 2006 with a nationwide sample of 2,010 U.S. adults.

Important difference between online surveys and surveys conducted by telephone interviewers

Over the last few years, several different surveys have found that more people admit to potentially embarrassing beliefs or behaviors when answering online surveys (without interviewers) than admit to these behaviors when talking to interviewers in telephone surveys. They are also three times more likely to say that their sexual orientation is gay, lesbian or bi-sexual. Researchers call this unwillingness to give honest answers to some questions in telephone surveys a “social desirability bias.”

It is therefore no surprise that in this online survey, more people say they are not absolutely certain there is a God than have given similar replies in other surveys conducted by telephone.

Differences between different religious groups

Not everyone who describes themselves as Christian or Jewish believes in God. Indeed, only 76 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics, and 30 percent of Jews say they are “absolutely certain” there is a God. However, most Christians who describe themselves as “Born Again” (93%) are absolutely certain there is a God.

Differences between different demographic groups

Demographic groups that are more likely to say they are absolutely certain that there is a God include:

* People in all age groups 40 and over (63% of those ages 40 to 49, 65% of those ages 50 to 64 and 65% of those ages 65 and over) compared to people in age groups under 40 (45% of those ages 18 to 24, 43% of those ages 25 to 29 and 54% of those ages 30 to 39);
* Women (62%) slightly more than men (54%);
* African Americans (71%) compared to Hispanics (61%) and Whites (57%);
* Republicans (73%) more than Democrats (54%) or Independents (51%);
* People with no college education (62%) or who have some college education (57%) compared to college graduates (50%) and those with post-graduate degrees (53%).

Frequency of attending religious services

Approximately one-third (35%) of all adults claim to attend a religious service once a month or more often, including 26 percent who say they attend every week or more often. Almost half of all adults (46%) say they attend services a few times a year or less often, while eighteen percent say the never attend religious services.

Those who attend religious services once a month or more often include 48 percent of Protestants, 46 percent of Catholics, and 12 percent of Jews. However, more than two-thirds (68%) of Born Again Christians attend Church once a month or more often.

Are believers declining?

Three years ago, in an identical survey, 79 percent of adults said they believed in God and 66 percent said they were absolutely certain that there is a God. In this new survey, those numbers have declined to 73 percent and 58 percent respectively.