The Stuff I Didn't Get To -- 5/1/09

The Georgia Republican Party Steering Committee

-Headline of the day-
"Poll: One-Third Of Georgia Republicans Approve Of Secession."

A Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll found that about one-third of Georgia Republicans would be cool with seceding from the union. Seems to me they tried that once. It didn't work out well. There was this big war and Atlanta got all burned and it all got turned into a potboiler book that started the whole romance novel industry. Seriously, it was just a big mess.

Of course, the results all depended on how you asked the question. Asked, "Would you approve or disapprove of Georgia leaving the United States?" only 32% of Peach State GOPers approved.

But asked, "Do you think Georgia would be better off as an independent nation or as part of the United States of America?" 43% said that it'd be better of as an independent nation. So, barring secession, I guess that about 11% of Georgia Republicans hope we'll kick them out. Otherwise, the question is asking the same damned thing a different way. I question the effectiveness of Georgia schools.

Still, one thing we can take away from this is that Georgia Republicans join Texas Republicans in their blind hatred of America -- given the classic choice of "America; love it or leave it," a significant number choose "leave it." I'll bet they love them some terr'ists, too.

You know how the GOP grandstands on who is or isn't patriotic? They can just go ahead and knock that off now.

And I get to beat this "you hate America!" schtick into the ground now -- especially since it's clear that so many of you actually do. Payback's a bitch, ain't it Republicans? (Talking Points Memo)


-Cartoon time with Mike Fiore-
Hey kids, forget swine flu, catch Taliban Fever!


Click for animation

Scarier than your 401k! (MarkFiore.com)


-Speaking of secession-
You remember how Texas Gov. Rick Perry hates America so much that he, like half of Georgia Republicans, might just secede? Turns out that'd be a real bad deal for Texicans. According to the report, the state of Texas "has received federal disaster assistance more frequently than any other in the Union."

In terms of just FEMA money alone, Texas has received $3,449,142,397 since the beginning of Perry's first term in 2001. That's three-billion, 400-million dollars and change. If Texas had to scrape together all that on their own, they'd run out of Texican pesos or rubles or zlotys or whatever right quick and pronto. Then Perry would have to raise taxes on all the newly independent teabaggers by a stupid-huge amount.

Hell, they'd probably have to cut back to only three executions a week. (MoJo Blog)

Who Would Jesus Torture?

Maybe it's because the religion's all about a human sacrifice who was tortured to death, but it turns out that churchgoers are more likely to be cool with torture.

CNN:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

Is it any surprise that the people who are most likely to think that there were dinosaurs on Noah's ark are also those who think torture is OK?

Griper Blade: Hang on Tight, Things are Going to Get Stupid

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]