I generally have my morning post planned the night before. I find the story I want to write about, bookmark all the sources and citations I want to use, and I'm done. All that's left is to arrange it all into a cohesive and logical statement of some kind. Sometimes, while I'm doing this, the news landscape completely changes and what I was planning on writing about gets blown out of the water by new information. At other times, most of the information I've gathered still works, but the focus of the post changes. The news that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is going to retire is an example of the latter. In this case, I was going to write about how screwed Republicans are. Souter's retirement changed that slightly -- now I'm writing about how much more screwed they're going to be.First off, what I was originally planning to write about; internal polling shows the Republican party is losing every argument. Partial polling results leaked to the Associated Press shows that the GOP is "widely viewed by the public as less competent than Democrats to handle issue ranging from health care to education and energy." AP says the polling was "presented to top GOP officials in Congress." The poll also shows that Obama has been making significant gains among "self-described conservative, independent voters."
The Associated Press obtained partial results of the survey, which was conducted in late March by New Models, a firm with close ties to Republicans. GOP lawmakers in Congress have generally opposed Obama's early legislative agenda, voting with near unanimity against economic stimulus legislation and unanimously against a White House-backed budget that cleared Congress on Wednesday.
The survey found the public holds greater confidence in Democrats than in Republicans in handling most of the issues that are involved in Obama's legislative agenda.
Democrats were favored by a margin of 61 percent to 29 percent on education; 59 percent to 30 percent on health care and 59 percent to 31 percent on energy. Congress is expected to consider major legislation later this year in all three areas.
The only issue that Democrats didn't lead Republicans on was the "war on terror." And even there they weren't ahead, the poll put both parties at a tie on the issue. The Republican party has no advantages, only disadvantages... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
