Right Wing Nut House

Stop the presses! Hold the phone! Can it be true? Are the Republicans poised to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat on election day?

A week ago, I would have laughed at any such nonsense. But as the Foley caper fades into the background and the so-called “marginal voters” start to concentrate on the choices they will have on election day, several trends that are favorable to the Republican cause begin to emerge.

I should emphasize that I still believe that the Democrats will take control of the House and will either have nominal control in the Senate or do no worse than tie the Republicans. But my reading of some individual polls in key House races shows that the bleeding from the Foley mess has essentially stopped and that given other factors, the GOP may be able to steal just enough seats to barely maintain control of the House while doing no worse than having a 1-2 seat majority in the Senate.

Providing that no more scandals give the Democrats any additional fodder for their smear campaign.

Indeed, that will be the overriding factor in any putative Republican comeback. The voters are more than ready to give Republicans the boot but are hesitating to do so simply because as they turn to the Democrats for leadership or any kind of organized message, all they hear are crickets chirping. The Dems are letting the GOP self-destruct - something the Republicans appear to be very good at doing. But instead of offering a positive alternative to the scandal-plagued conservatives, all they can do is point their fingers and accuse the GOP of malfeasance. Running on a platform that encompasses the brave message “We are not Republicans” is not inspiring anybody.

This points up the fact that the Democrats have essentially failed in their efforts to nationalize the election. While they would love to make George Bush and the Iraq War the overriding issues in the campaign, the fact is that the internals for most local and regional polls show voters are not buying into the Democratic view of things. Local issues are still trumping national ones by a large margin. And while many Democrats are running ads about the Iraq debacle, few are making it the centerpiece of their campaigns.

This is driving the netnuts wild. They are accusing Democratic candidates of playing it safe by not going on the warpath over Bush, Iraq, the GOP culture of scandal, and other issues that they have brought to the forefront. The Kos Kids and other lefties are railing against candidates who appear to be taking the advice of professional campaign consultants rather than the self appointed experts in the lefty blogosphere. These Democratic challengers have watered down their message and, in the view of the netnuts, squandered an opportunity to sharply delineate their positions on Iraq especially.

Actually, they may have a point. The problem, as the pros could tell the netnuts, is that the American people are ambivalent about what to do with regards to getting out of Iraq. By large majorities, they oppose the war. But at the same time, they realize the danger of simply running away without leaving behind some kind of stable regime that wouldn’t immediately fall under the control of terrorists or terrorist sympathizing elements. Hence, most Democrats are running ads about Iraq that point up the mistakes made and how they want things to get better.

Here in Illinois, even Iraq War vet Tammy Duckworth is finessing the issue, not even mentioning withdrawal in her TV ads against Republican Peter Roskam. In this primarily GOP district (an open seat due to Henry Hyde’s retirement), the race is a toss up at this point. And Roskam still has more than $1.5 million to spend on TV in the final three weeks while Duckworth has half that much.

This brings up another huge Republican advantage going into the final weeks of the election. Both individual GOP candidates and the National Republican Party will be able to bury their Democratic opponents in TV ads from now until November 7. And since many voters get most of their information from this kind of paid advertising (direct mail being another source for voter’s information), being able to outspend their Democratic challengers by 3 or 4 to 1 on TV could tip the scales in many of these close elections.

At the very least, what the GOP cash advantage does is reduce their potential losses. Three weeks ago, there was the very real possibility that the Democrats could take 50 seats or more away from the GOP. This now appears to be a fantasy and was never really possible. More likely, the Democrats will be held to gains under 30 seats (their best case scenario). This would still mean a GOP loss of control in the House but with the caveat that winning back the chamber in 2008 a real possibility.

But what about 2006? By my count, there are six Republican incumbents who have no chance on election day with another 15-17 in deep trouble. By that I mean that they trail their Democratic challengers by more than 8 points 3 weeks out. All the Democrats need to do is capture 9 or 10 of those 17 seats in order for Speaker Pelosi to bang the gavel next January to bring the new Congress to order. And since the Republicans do not lead in any Democratic open districts, the job for Democrats becomes that much easier.

On the other hand, all the GOP has to do is hang on to 7-8 of those 17 seats in order to deny the Democrats control. So in the end, the huge battle for power between the two parties will come down to a handful of races in the midwest and northeast. These are districts that are nominally Republican, went for George Bush in 2004, and where the GOP get out the vote operations may play the decisive role.

Personally, I don’t think it will be that close. I think it likely that the Republicans lose 21-23 seats with some second tier Republicans who are currently ahead losing in the end as marginal voters are attracted to many of this very good crop of candidates fielded by Democrats this time around. But that could change dramatically in the next 10 days or so as even marginal voters come back to the GOP fold following the coming ad blitz.

Hold on to your hats. It will be a rollercoaster ride between now and election day.

There is a great divide in American politics today. No - it’s not between those who support the Iraq War and those who oppose it. Nor is it between people who support gay marriage and those who believe marriage should be between a man and a woman - although there are some women (and men for that matter) who should be subject to a constitutional amendment outlawing their marriage of any kind under any circumstances to anyone, anywhere, anytime. We could call it the “My First Wife Amendment.” I predict swift passage and enthusiastic enforcement.

Actually, the largest chasm separating voters today is entirely between two rival subsets of Republicans. One group believes that the GOP is toast on election day and actually looks forward to the drubbing the party will take at the polls. The other group rejects the opinion polls entirely and believes that the GOP will somehow find a way to maintain control of both houses of Congress.

Given their particular eminence, I thought I would name the two groups after the most visible proponents of their respective worldviews; Glenn Reynolds “Pre Mortem” post on GOP chances on election day reads like a combination clinical diagnostician’s description of the epidemiology of a fatal illness and a New York Times obit:

As I’ve said before, the Republicans deserve to lose, though alas the Democrats don’t really deserve to win, either. I realize that you go to war with the political class you have, but even back in the 1990s it was obvious that we had a lousy political class. It hasn’t improved, but the challenges have gotten greater. Can the country continue to do well, with such bad political leadership? I hope so, because I see no sign of improvement, no matter who wins next month.

Hugh Hewitt’s infectious enthusiasm about Republican chances on election day reminds me of stories my father used to tell us about the attitudes of some people at Irish wakes. Even the most vile, wife beating old sot would optimistically be spoken of as if he were in heaven and having a nip of the “crature” with old St. Peter:

One of the few advantages of having been a lifelong Cleveland Indians and Browns fan is the awful knowledge that Democrats –and some Republicans– appear to lack that certain victory really isn’t so certain. (The Indians are only team to enter the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of the World Series with a lead and lose the series, and football fans far and wide know of The Drive and The Fumble. And I’m not even bringing up The Shot.)

October, 2002 wasn’t easy going for the GOP either, and after the tragic death of Paul Wellstone –but before the shameless exploitation of his memorial service– very few of the pros thought much of Republican chances to hold the Senate.

It’s the Reyonoldistas vs. the Hewittonians and there doesn’t seem to be any middle ground. The pessimists scoff at what they consider the naivete of the Hewittonians while the optimists are livid at the Reyonoldistas for what they view as their defeatism.

Who’s right?

The latest election projection by Blogging Ceasar would seem to make liars out of the Hewittonians:

What didn’t happen last week has happened this week. For the first time since I began projecting the 2006 mid-term elections, the Democrats are projected to take back the House. Following a slew of district polls highly-favorable to the Democrats, 7 races have flipped to blue over the last week. In truth, these projections more closely reflect the prevailing winds of political punditry we are hearing across the country.

I do think that, barring another October Surprise, we have hit bottom from a Republican perspective. With 19 GOP seats now painted blue and 8 more within 2 points of going to the Democrats, that puts the bottom at 27. Right now, I see that as the maximum number of possible losses the GOP could sustain. (The number could grow by two or three if everything goes right for the Democrats.)

Of course, the Hewittonians fire back that the polls are wrong, that it isn’t that bad. In fact, Hugh Hewitt himself also believes the Democrats have hit their high water mark and the the chances for the GOP to hold onto control of the House are trending upwards:

It took 48 hours of loose nukes in the control of bad hair kooks to get the electorate refocused on the stakes in November’s elections. But even before North Korea reminded the electorate of the wonders of Clinton-Albright era diplomacy, even as “The Path to 9/11″ and The Looming Tower had done, the Foley effect had begun to dissipate as the reality of the choice before the country broke through even the MSM’s fascination with the destruction of the Republicans because of the notorious IMs.

Now Santorum in Pennsylvania, DeWine in Ohio, and Corker in Tennessee have showed strong momentum to match that of Allen’s in Virginia. Jim Talent will win in Missouri, and Democratic nominee McCaskill’s remarkable ability to churn out gaffes might make it a breakaway. Key Congressional candidates have the same momentum, as does Bob Beuprez in Colorado. Arnold out west and Charles Crist in Florida are crushing their Democratic opponents and with them, Democratic enthusiasm in those states.

As of today, the GOP has apparently thrown Mike DeWine to the wolves by withdrawing promises of money and support, in effect writing off the seat. DeWine has just recently broken 40% in the polls and it’s a long, hard, climb to victory from where he is now. If the national party is writing off a seat where their incumbent trails by 5 points 3 weeks to election day, you know there is something very bad bubbling beneath the surface of those polls that has them worried.

Realistically, the Republicans still have a chance of hanging on to their majorities in both House and Senate - as long as no more little bombshells are dropped by the Democrats. But for the GOP to win through to victory, several races must break their way on election day. The fact that the GOP get out the vote program is the strongest in the history of American politics could certainly tip some of those closer races back into the Republican colummn. Analyst Jay Cost at RCP blog:

Depending upon the ranker and the model, the probability of a GOP retention ranges between a little better than 33% and a little worse than 50%. This would mean that - following Rothenberg’s categories - the House itself falls somewhere between “Toss-Up” and “Toss-Up/Tilt Democratic.”

And note that these estimates are predicated upon the currently bleak environment for the Republicans staying constant. As things stand right now, the odds of a GOP retention, according to these arguments of these rankers, are somewhere between 1/2 and 1/1. If Cook, Rothenberg and CQ are your guide - you should not take the GOP at even money, but anything less than that is a bet worth taking.

Given the horrific spate of bad news for the GOP over the last month or so, that is actually a Hewittonian prediction. If someone had said to me last week that the GOP had a 50% chance of retaining control, I would have danced a jig for joy.

Indeed, in addition to the most expensive and sophisticated GOTV effort in American political history, the GOP will benefit - as they did in 2002 and 2004 - from their dominance at the state level. Their control of so many state legislatures and governorships during the redistricting process may have insulated just enough of their incumbents from the ravages of this election season.

And Michael Barone makes the case that the electorate is too divided to give the Dems too much of a victory even if they manage to wrest control of the House:

They’re more likely to prevail, if they do, by something like the narrow margins by which Republicans have prevailed in the five House elections from 1996 to 2004. By historical standards, there’s been strikingly little variation in those five elections. A Democratic victory of this magnitude would represent the kind of small oscillation that was commonplace in eras when one party or the other was dominant. The difference is that, with the electorate so evenly divided, a small shift can produce changes in party control.

Political realignments occur because of events that have deep demographic impact and when one party stands for new ideas that command majority support. The Iraq war (2,500 deaths) and our current economy (4.6 percent unemployment) are not events of the magnitude of the Civil War (600,000 dead) or the Great Depression (25 percent unemployment).

Moreover, voters’ complaints about George W. Bush and the Republican Congress are more about competence than ideology. Why is Bush’s second-term job approval so much lower than Bill Clinton’s even though the economy has been in similarly good shape during both periods? Iraq. Katrina.

Barone manages to plant one foot squarely in the Reynoldista and Hewittonian camps at the same time. But Barone actually hit the nail on the head last week when he wrote this:

I know that a lot of Americans long to return to the holiday from history that we enjoyed from the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But, alas, while we were on holiday, the forces of evil determined to destroy us were gathering strength.

Can you imagine if the Democrats had actually had the balls to run a positive, upbeat campaign that would have promised America a “return to normalcy” a la Warren G. Harding? Of course, the Democrats aren’t running any kind of an organized campaign at all - unless you want to call the orchestrated sleaze in the Foley caper a campaign. But instead of sitting by and watching as Republicans self destruct, suppose they had revealed their real feelings about Iraq and the War on Terror while promising a return to a 9/10 kind of America?

That may be a theme that resonates with the American people - if not in 2006 then almost certainly in 2008. The farther away from 9/11 we get, the harder it is to engage the public in the harsh realities of the world as it is - not as Democrats would wish it to be. Hence, their calls for the organized bribery sessions with Kim Jong Il of North Korea and Ahmadinejad of Iran that negotiations would turn into with those two thugs would, as Hewitt writes, bring us back to the Clintonian years of sleepwalking through history. Until we were once again rousted from our reveries by another terrorist attack.

I don’t know if the Republicans can pull out an electoral victory these last three weeks before the vote. But I think that the Hewittonians are probably right to be upbeat. In the end, hope and optimism are always better than bitterness and despair. That goes for politics as well as war.

Something we should keep in mind if the Democrats take over…

Regardless of whether the Democrats take over the House and Senate in November, it seems clear that our foreign policy elites have decided that the War in Iraq is a lost cause and the only viable strategy should be to get our troops out as fast as possible.

There is no other way to view the recommendations that will be forthcoming from the Iraq Study Group headed up by Bush family friend and foreign policy blue blood James Baker:

A commission formed to assess the Iraq war and recommend a new course has ruled out the prospect of victory for America, according to draft policy options shared with The New York Sun by commission officials.

Currently, the 10-member commission — headed by a secretary of state for President George H.W. Bush, James Baker — is considering two option papers, “Stability First” and “Redeploy and Contain,” both of which rule out any prospect of making Iraq a stable democracy in the near term.

More telling, however, is the ruling out of two options last month. One advocated minor fixes to the current war plan but kept intact the long-term vision of democracy in Iraq with regular elections. The second proposed that coalition forces focus their attacks only on Al Qaeda and not the wider insurgency.

Instead, the commission is headed toward presenting President Bush with two clear policy choices that contradict his rhetoric of establishing democracy in Iraq. The more palatable of the two choices for the White House, “Stability First,” argues that the military should focus on stabilizing Baghdad while the American Embassy should work toward political accommodation with insurgents. The goal of nurturing a democracy in Iraq is dropped.

As I wrote about here, this is hardly a “Study Group” at all. Their job? It isn’t what their legislative mandate says it is:

“The Iraq Study Group will conduct a forward-looking, independent assessment of the current and prospective situation on the ground in Iraq, its impact on the surrounding region, and consequences for U.S. interests.

Instead, the Baker Commission, as it is coming to be called, was set up for the sole and exclusive purpose of giving both Republican and Democratic politicians cover for our retreat from Iraq. The Washington Post sniffed this out almost immediately:

The group has attracted little attention beyond foreign policy elites since its formation this year. But it is widely viewed within that small world as perhaps the last hope for a midcourse correction in a venture they generally agree has been a disaster.

The reason, by and large, is the involvement of Baker, 76, the legendary troubleshooter who remains close to the first President Bush and cordial with the second. Many policy experts think that if anyone can forge bipartisan consensus on a plan for extricating the United States from Iraq —and then successfully pitch that plan to a president who has so far seemed impervious to outside pressure—it is the man who put together the first Gulf War coalition, which evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991.

Our worst fears regarding the Commission seems to have been confirmed by leaks to the New York Sun about the two plans under consideration. Both plans explicitly reject the idea of winning through to what the President has defined as “victory:” A stable, democratic Iraq capable of defending itself from the murderous terrorists who are seeking to bring down the current government with the help of outside powers.

In short, the “Baker Solution” is a recipe for defeat and retreat. No amount of spin will change the fact that once we leave Iraq, the entire world will see that our enemies in Iran and Syria as well as al-Qaeda were successful in inflicting enough pain on the American people to cause our precipitous withdrawal.

The first plan especially, is maddening. It grants what appears to be about 75% of what under any circumstances would be considered “victory” and then yanks the troops from Iraq before they can finish the job:

The president also said he was not averse to changing tactics. But he repeated that the strategic goal in Iraq is to build “a country which can defend itself, sustain itself, and govern itself.” He added, “The strategic goal is to help this young democracy succeed in a world in which extremists are trying to intimidate rational people in order to topple moderate governments and to extend the caliphate.”

But the president’s strategic goal is at odds with the opinion of Mr. Baker’s expert working groups, which dismiss the notion of victory in Iraq. The “Stability First” paper says, “The United States should aim for stability particularly in Baghdad and political accommodation in Iraq rather than victory.”

Stabilizing Baghdad, and bringing the bulk of insurgent groups into the political process is by any definition, “staying the course.” Prime Minister al-Maliki has already successfully negotiated with more than a dozen insurgent groups, including tribal militias who are now battling al-Qaeda terrorists instead of American soldiers. And American casualties have skyrocketed the last three months because we have transferred the bulk of our combat forces to Baghdad in order to try and bring a modicum of peace to the bloody chaos in that tragic city.

Leaving the rest undone - training the Iraqi army and assisting the new government with some of its thornier problems having to do with militias and death squads - is almost incomprehensible. The problem, as the elites see it, is that Iraq has stressed the army, complicated our relations with our friends in the Middle East, roiled domestic consensus at home to fight the War on Terror, and been a general distraction from what they believe should be our goal - getting to the “root causes” of terrorism and solving problems like the Israeli-Palestinian question as well as the insularity and poverty of Muslim states.

But why bother with the rest if you’re not planning on finishing the job? It has been my contention for many months - spelled out most recently here - that if we are not going to attempt victory then it is immoral to ask our men and women to place themselves in harm’s way for some face saving solution. That’s the Kissinger Viet Nam formulation. I thought it stupid, wasteful and immoral at the time and still feel that way today. The only business government has in asking young men to die is in the cause of victory. Anything less is state sponsored murder. In a free society and even with an all volunteer army, national leaders should not use the lives of its young men to make geopolitical statements or “save face,” or prove how much suffering we can endure (as the Nixon-Kissinger logic went after they decided we couldn’t win).

Once it is determined that we cannot win (or in this case, do not have the national will to win), we should admit defeat and withdraw the troops immediately. Whatever failed state Iraq becomes we will just have to deal with it in the context of the rest of the Global War on Terror. Yes it will complicate our efforts enormously. But we should have thought about that before wasting the selfless courage and spirit of our military in a war that we were not willing to see through to a victorious conclusion.

Will Bush go along with anything the Baker Commission recommends? The ISG will release its report in December, after the November elections. I have no doubt that the President will find himself under enormous pressure to accept withdrawal from Iraq based on the Commission’s criteria. Although Bush has proven himself to be one of the most stubborn Presidents in recent history I doubt that he, Rumsfeld, and Cheney can hold out against the entire foreign policy and defense establishments as well as majorities in both Houses of Congress. He will have to reluctantly agree to some kind of withdrawal plan short of victory.

And that’s when it will become very tricky indeed. The Administration will be forced to sit down with both Syria and Iran in order to get those two states to stop funding and supplying the insurgents - a task made extremely difficult by the fact that neither country wants to do us any favors. So withdrawal will go foreword leaving a weak Iraqi government that will, as some analysts believe, morph into a military dictatorship or worse that will have a mandate to bring order out of the spiralling violence. And the dream of Iraqi democracy will die an ignoble death.

In fact, the Baker Commission sees this as probably the best near term solution:

If we are able to promote representative, representative government, not necessarily democracy, in a number of nations in the Middle East and bring more freedom to the people of that part of the world, it will have been a success,” he said.

That distinction is crucial, according to one member of the expert working groups. “Baker wants to believe that Sunni dictators in Sunni majority states are representative,” the group member, who requested anonymity, said.

It has become clear in the last few months that our democracy experiment in Iraq was in more trouble from defeatists and political opponents at home than it was from either al-Qaeda or the insurgency. Even the British, seeing the ascendancy of the anti-war Democrats in November and suffering from their own disillusionment, appear ready to leave. All that appears to be left to do is determine how fast we get our troops out of danger and what kind of spin will be given to this massive failure of American will which will attempt to salve our consciences and soothe our feelings about losing a war that should have been won.

You got to hand it some some global warming advocates. When it comes to getting revenge on anyone who would dare question their precious suppositions on climate change, they’ve demonstrated the uncanny ability to channel the ghost of Torquemada while recreating the horror of the Salem Witch Trials:

A U.S. based environmental magazine that both former Vice President Al Gore and PBS newsman Bill Moyers, for his October 11th global warming edition of “Moyers on America” titled “Is God Green?” have deemed respectable enough to grant one-on-one interviews to promote their projects, is now advocating Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for skeptics of human caused catastrophic global warming.

Grist Magazine’s staff writer David Roberts called for the Nuremberg-style trials for the “bastards” who were members of what he termed the global warming “denial industry.”

Roberts wrote in the online publication on September 19, 2006, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.”

Gore and Moyers have not yet commented on Grist’s advocacy of prosecuting skeptics of global warming with a Nuremberg-style war crimes trial. Gore has used the phrase “global warming deniers” to describe scientists and others who don’t share his view of the Earth’s climate. It remains to be seen what Gore and Moyers will have to say about proposals to make skepticism a crime comparable to Holocaust atrocities.

If Gore and Moyers are smart, they’ll keep their mouths shut and pretend they’ve never heard of Mr. Roberts. This won’t be too difficult due to the fact that few serious people have heard of Grist Magazine whose internet tag line is “Doom and Gloom with a sense of Humor.”

Yeah. Pretty funny.

Roberts himself is something of a newt:

David was born and raised in the South. A revelatory summer working in Yellowstone National Park convinced him that it was not the world, but just the part where he lived, that sucked, so he moved out West. After way too many years in Montana pursuing graduate degrees in philosophy (no, really), he was lured out of the academy by the siren song of the heralded internet “boom” — about six months too late. He was sinking ever further into the Seattle swamp of tech work, having already hit Amazon.com, IMDb.com, and Microsoft, when the fine folks at Grist threw him a life preserver in December 2003. (Total profits from stock options: $57. Meaningful work: priceless.)

What we have hear ladies and gents is a gen-ew-wine, dyed in the wool, bona fide moonbat. In fact, the blurb about placing global warming skeptics on trial in some kind of international forum is given after Robert’s enthusiastic response to a book on global warming written by none other than George Monbiot.

That’s right. The namesake of the sobriquet “moonbat” inspired one of his disciples to prove just how truly moonbatty he really is by advocating putting on trial people who disagree with him.

I love it when life serves up little tidbits of irony like that. Almost makes one want to believe in the fates. Or at the very least, destiny.

Is this attitude widespread among the advocates for drastic action on climate change? Probably not so with scientists. But listening to Al Gore recently and his global warming “deniers” rhetoric, one gets the sense (well..one always gets the sense with Gore) that he’s about ready to fall of the deep end. Gore takes rejection of his pet theories the same way a schizophrenic takes someone challenging his visions of demons perched on the shoulders of people sitting next to him on the subway.

When someone tries to explain to the mentally ill that their delusions are nothing more than a manifestation of the symptoms of their sickness, they earnestly try and convince the skeptic that yes indeed, you have a little man with horns and a tail standing on your shoulder as we speak and he’s whispering into your ear right now. For Gore and many of his global warming warriors, this kind of crazed earnestness brooks no opposition and overcomes any latent intellectual curiosity they may have about the subject.

Indeed, this idea that global warming skeptics are no better than climate nazis is becoming more and more acceptable among the Luddites, the greenies, the greedy NGO’ers (who profit most handsomely by advocating governmental “solutions” to global warming), and that small subset of westerners who, bored to tears as the result of accumulated fame and wealth, seek out other avenues to relieve their ennui. The fact that people actually listen and take seriously drug addled actors, musicians, and the like on such an enormously complex subject like global warming tells you how far western civilization has fallen in the last decade or so.

In fact, among the more level headed advocates for global warming - scientists who might know a thing or two more than Al Gore about the subject - this political tactic is odious:

The use of Holocaust terminology has drawn the ire of Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. “The phrase ‘climate change denier’ is meant to be evocative of the phrase ‘holocaust denier,’” Pielke, Jr. wrote on October 9, 2006.

“Let’s be blunt. This allusion is an affront to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. This allusion has no place in the discourse on climate change. I say this as someone fully convinced of a significant human role in the behavior of the climate system,” Pielke, Jr. explained.

I too, over the last year or so, have become convinced that human behavior is responsible for at least some of the rise in temperature we’ve seen this century. But you can still color me a skeptic regarding catastrophic climate change. And it doesn’t help when people like Al Gore are either too ignorant to know any better or lie through their teeth about the state of the current debate over global warming. Roy Spencer:

As part of the current media frenzy over the “imminent demise” of Planet Earth from global warming, it has become fashionable to demonize global warming skeptics through a variety of tactics. This has recently been accomplished by comparing scientists who don’t believe in a global climate catastrophe to “flat-Earthers,” those who denied cigarettes cause cancer, or even those who deny the Holocaust.

It is interesting that it is not the scientists who are making the comparisons to Holocaust-deniers, but members of the media. For instance, Scott Pelley, who recently interviewed NASA’s James Hansen for CBS’s “60 Minutes,” has been quoted on the CBS News PublicEye blog saying:

“There is virtually no disagreement in the scientific community any longer about ‘global warming.’ … The science that has been done in the last three to five years has been conclusive.”

Pelley also posted this quote to the same blog:

“If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

In fact, as Spencer points out, there is enormous disagreement over many, many aspects of global warming across the scientific community. About the only issues there seems to be a consensus on are that it is getting warmer and that mankind plays a yet undetermined role in the process. Beyond that, there is an emerging consensus that the burning of fossil fuels may be the engine driving the climate spike. This position has been vigorously challenged by dozens of respected meteorologists, atmospheric physicists, and other scientists who wonder that if this is so, where the hell did all the CO2 go? It isn’t where it’s supposed to be (in the lower atmosphere) nor is it anywhere that it can be reliably measured. The models are all screwed up which have sent the physicists scrambling back to their drawing boards looking for a reason.

Ultimately, the biggest global warming skeptics are the scientists themselves. Even those who are part of the global warming consensus on climate change are constantly challenging their own assumptions, their own conclusions. This is what a good scientist does. Perhaps Roberts and Monbiot should start their show trials with them. If they are apostates in any way, doubting Thomases who question the dominant groupthink on catastrophic global warming, perhaps they can keep them in line by threatening them with star chamber proceedings.

Those of us who may not be scientists but who follow the debate with an open mind realize that bullies like Gore and the rest of the agenda driven left who seek to use the issue of global warming to initiate drastic economic and societal changes had to bring up Hitler sooner or later. It is their answer for everything and everyone who disagrees with them.

And it is getting very, very, old.

It is an unseemly thing to be debating how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and occupation by US troops. I’m absolutely sure that most opponents of the war feel that way. They would, I’m sure, wish that we would all just sit back and accept the politically motivated study released today that purports to show 600,000 more Iraqis have died since 2003 than would have if we hadn’t invaded:

A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

First of all, the Times makes a common mistake by lumping civilians, insurgents, and Iraqi Police and Army units all together and simply referring to them as “civilians.” In fact, the study makes absolutely no effort to differentiate between civilians and insurgents, Police and army. All the researchers asked were the number of dead over the last 3 years.

But why is the study politically motivated?

This is the same crew whose 2004 study showing 100,000 Iraqi dead was thoroughly debunked by a wide variety of experts from both sides of the debate.

Fred Kaplan of Slate on the 2004 study:

“Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I’ll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)

This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board.

Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W. Bush will win somewhere between 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday’s election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling. The same is true of the Lancet article: It’s a useless study; something went terribly wrong with the sampling.”

As you can see from the above New York Times excerpt, these purveyors of wildly exaggerated mortality have tried the same technique this time around as well: they have “a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.”

What’s more, this excerpt from the original NY Times article of October 29, 2004 could have been pasted into their article today:

“Editors of The Lancet, the London-based medical publication, where an article describing the study is scheduled to appear, decided not to wait for the normal publication date next week, but to place the research online Friday, apparently so it could circulate before the election.”

Funny how these studies seem to show up around election day, eh? Color me suspicious, but if the study had come out 3 weeks after the election, I would be more sanguine about the author’s motives.

The Washington Post tries to put the best face on the study by quoting non-experts who seem satisfied with the results but curiously, all seem to be unanimously against the US occupation. But putting a ball gown on a sow still gives you a pig all dressed up with nowhere to go:

Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method “tried and true,” and added that “this is the best estimate of mortality we have.”

This viewed was echoed by Sarah Leah Whitson, an official of Human Rights Watch in New York, who said, “We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy” of the survey.

“I expect that people will be surprised by these figures,” she said. “I think it is very important that, rather than questioning them, people realize there is very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq.”

Ms. Whitson’s take is interesting. There is “no reason to question the findings” of a study using, despite what Mr. Waldman says, questionable methodology 3 weeks before an election. She actually wishes critics would just sit back and shut up because - and here she inadvertently debunks the study herself - “there is very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq.”

At least give the Times credit for including some cautionary voices in its article:

Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the best of what you can expect in a war zone.”

But he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed — 547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion — was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country.

Donald Berry, chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was even more troubled by the study, which he said had “a tone of accuracy that’s just inappropriate.”

In other words, the researchers were able to discover and confirm 547 dead in the post invasion period by interviewing a little more than 1800 families. And from that sample, they extrapolate 600,000 dead.

What’s wrong with that picture?

There are other sources for counting Iraqi dead. The well respected Iraq Body Count, run by academics opposed to the war, lists nearly 49,000 civilian dead since the invasion. Their methodology is sound and their numbers are based on actual reports from morgues, the media, and the military. Their number of confirmed dead is still less than half the number estimated in the 2004 Lancet study.

Someone is wildly off base here. Could it be the group that says that the US military has killed 180,000 Iraqis as a direct result of military actions?

Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

The fact that those three percentages totalled up equal 101% isn’t as ridiculous as 31% of deaths were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes. And here we get to the number one critique of this study and why it so totally useless:

Again, the study makes absolutely no effort to differentiate between innocent civilians and Iraqis trying to kill our troops. Nor does it differentiate between civilian deaths and the deaths in the Iraqi police and armed forces.

In addition, the study includes deaths that the researchers have arbitrarily determined were caused by the invasion but not caused by violence. If they are using the same criteria as the 2004 study, some of these causes of death include:

* Malnourishment due to bad economic conditions as a result of the invasion.

* Illness due to degraded health care infrastructure.

* Deaths due to domestic violence.

* Deaths due to criminal activity unrelated to the insurgency.

* And “… civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation.”

Of course, the political problem engendered by this pseudo-scientific hit piece is that the left will use this figure without any caveats and state flatly in their critiques of the war that 600,000 civilians have died as a result of our invasion. And by the time the study is once again debunked by those who know a helluva lot more about statistics and such than I, the lie will have taken hold and the myth will have been set in stone.

And the American people are treated to one more October surprise before casting their vote on November 7.

One can imagine the almost unrestrained glee being exhibited at the editorial meetings of the WaPo, the Times, and other more liberal newspapers as the various in-house organs for the Democratic party gear up for the final push that will guarantee victory for their clients in November.

The Republicans in the meantime, celebrating Christmas early by bearing gifts for their foes of scandal and stupidity, careen toward a disaster of mid-epic proportions:

Republican campaign officials said yesterday that they expect to lose at least seven House seats and as many as 30 in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, as a result of sustained violence in Iraq and the page scandal involving former GOP representative Mark Foley.

Democrats need to pick up 15 seats in the election to take back control of the House after more than a decade of GOP leadership. Two weeks of virtually nonstop controversy over President Bush’s war policy and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s handling of the page scandal have forced party leaders to recalculate their vulnerability and placed a growing number of Republican incumbents and open seats at much greater risk.

GOP officials are urging lawmakers to focus exclusively on local issues and leave it to party leaders to mitigate the Foley controversy by accusing Democrats of trying to politicize it. At the same time, the White House plans to amplify national security issues, especially the threat of terrorism, after North Korea’s reported nuclear test, in hopes of shifting the debate away from casualties and controversy during the final month of the campaign. These efforts are aimed largely at prodding disaffected conservatives to vote for GOP candidates despite their unease.

Even 30 seats wouldn’t be a cataclysmic loss. Give the GOP a chance to pick up one or two seats themselves and the Dems would settle for a majority in the House of a dozen or so. And most of those will be in GOP leaning districts making those freshmen congressmen ripe pickings for 2008.

The only problem is that if the worst case number is 30 seats today, what will it be in a month? I’ll go with political prognosticator Charlie Cook who said a while back that if second tier GOP targets are in play - Republicans who won with 57% of the vote or less in the last off year election - then the number of vulnerable congressmen could reach into the 70’s. Needless to say, a loss of 50-70 seats would pretty much indicate a complete repudiation of the Republican party and a probable decade long slog for the GOP back to the top.

But even a blowout like the one scenarioed above could be squandered by a Democratic leadership and, more importantly, a net community absolutely ravenous for Republican skin and scalp. And while I hope they do go after the corruption, the cronyism, the political favoritism, and the who venial mess on the Hill, the way they do it will determine whether or not the American people will turn on them in disgust and put a severely chastened Republican party back on top in 2008.

Blowback from the culture of investigation on Clinton the late 1990’s almost cost the GOP in ‘98 and 2000 the gains they made in 1994. And the Special Prosecutor binge that Republicans went on got to be expensive, tiresome, and an easy political mark for the Democrats to charge the GOP with frivolity.

Special Prosecutors are one thing. John Conyers armed with every conspiracy theory this side of Area 51 is something totally different.

While there is little doubt that Democrats will seek to impeach the President, having the Congressman from Michigan (who claims to have already conducted his own “investigation” and found Bush guilty) trot out the “Bush lied, people died” battle cry may satisfy the rabid netsharks who seek the feeding frenzy a grand old Bush bashing party that would publicize most of their more outrageously ignorant and exaggerated charges. But it won’t sway any Republicans whatsoever. This would doom impeachment to the same kind of partisan show that the Clinton extravaganza ended up being.

A word of advice to my friends on the left; settle for the truth. In many investigations, that will probably be bad enough to shame the Administration but fall short of impeachable actions. To cheer on the Conyers wing of the party whose conspiratorial mind set will embarrass the Democrats could end up biting the Democrats in the behind in 2008.

I plan on watching the whole thing - the whole bloody mess - with one eye on history and another on 2008. And since there is little doubt that the netnuts will claim full credit for the Democratic victory and be the driving force behind the whole investigatory side show, I have little doubt that Democrats will give GOP and independent voters ample reason to kick the kooks out of office in 2008.

How much trouble are Republicans in with the voters?

At the moment, it appears that it may be more efficacious for some Republicans to change their party affiliation to “Independent Wiccan.” At least that way they could probably get the pagan vote. And they may even be able to siphon away some votes from the hedonists, although it’s a tough sell what with the Hollywood crowd overwhelmingly Democratic.

When Tom Reynolds, the Chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee trails in his own race for re-election by 15 points a month before election day, you can take that as a sign from heaven that there will probably be a lot of new faces sitting in the House on January 6, 2007 - the day the new Congress will convene for the first time.

And very few of those new faces will be Republican.

Political analyst and polling guru Stuart Rothenberg (a Democrat but a respected professional) believes the dam has already broken and a Democratic tidal wave on election day is almost a virtual certainty:

The national atmospherics don’t merely favor Democrats; they set the stage for a blowout of cosmic proportions next month.

No, that’s not a prediction, since Republicans still have a month to “localize” enough races to hold onto one or both chambers of Congress. But you don’t have to be Teddy White or V.O. Key to know that the GOP is now flirting with disaster.

Let’s forget all of the niceties and diplomatic language and cut to the obvious truth: From the White House to Capitol Hill, Republicans look inept. And that assertion is based on what Republicans are saying. Democratic rhetoric is much harsher and, therefore, easier to dismiss as partisan claptrap.

[snip]

You can be sure that the Foley mess will percolate for a while, as Democrats and journalists ask House Republicans what they knew and when they knew it. Instead of being able to focus on their accomplishments in office or their challengers’ warts, Republican House Members running for re-election will have to spend too much of their time answering questions about the scandal.

Indeed, this WaPo piece highlighting the problems of long time Congressman Clay Shaw from Florida seems to confirm Rothenberg’s analysis while pointing up the potential difficulties for even safe Republicans:

Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) was trying to talk about security Friday at bustling Port Everglades, but with planes roaring overhead and containers slamming onto trucks, nobody could hear him.

That’s a common problem for Shaw and Republican candidates around the country these days — trying urgently 30 days before Election Day to frame a winning message but finding their efforts drowned out by the furor over former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.).

“It’s sucking all the air out of the room,” Shaw said in an interview after his news conference at the port. “It’s a tough time; there’s just total saturation right now.”

Back in Washington, Republican strategists acknowledge privately that, even under their best-case scenario, Foley’s sexually charged messages and allegations that House leaders were too passive in responding to them will remain an all-consuming distraction for GOP.

The constant drip, drip, drip of revelations, charges, counter charges, and thundering denunciations from Democrats (who seem more interested in reading the private messages of a pervert than they do in listening to the phone calls of people who want to kill us) are political stilettos thrust into heart of the GOP, disgusting decent people everywhere from both parties not only for their content but for the cavalier attitude of Hastert, Reynolds, et al to Foley’s cyberstalking. With each new revelation, people are reminded that Foley could have - should have been stopped. Any kind of investigation would have revealed the raunchy IM’s and perhaps even Foley’s contact with pages after they left the program.

I predicted here that a page would come forward by Friday acknowledging that he had sex with the Congressman. I was off by less than 48 hours:

A former House page says he had sex with then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) after receiving explicit e-mails in which the congressman described assessing the sexual orientation and physical attributes of underage pages but waiting until later to make direct advances.

The former page, who agreed to discuss his relationship with Foley with the Los Angeles Times on the condition that he not be identified, said his electronic correspondence with Foley began after he finished the respected Capitol Hill page program for high school juniors. His sexual encounter was in the fall of 2000, he said. At the time, he was 21 and a graduate of a rural Northeastern college.

I don’t think there is any doubt that if proper procedures had been followed, Foley would have been discovered long ago as a member who was using the page program as a sexual bullpen, sizing up potential lovers (online or in person) while they were still teenagers and then soliciting sex after their graduation.

The question really isn’t whether his behavior was illegal in the strictest sense of the word. Despicable conduct knows no boundaries of legality when it is practiced against children of 17, 18, or 19 years old. And some conservative bloggers seem to think that it is possible since no law was broken, the entire scandal is a trumped up effort by Democrats to elicit outrage at Republicans for their actions in the matter.

I have no doubt that much of this scandal has been orchestrated by Democrats to gain maximum political advantage. I think one would have to be brain dead to think otherwise. But Foley and his enablers (consciously or unconsciously ignoring the signs of trouble and warning bells for years) don’t need Democrats to make themselves look negligent or worse, like a bunch of calculating, back room politicos more concerned with the electoral impact of Foley’s misdeeds than in protecting the children whose safety had been entrusted to them by their parents.

Foley was a bomb waiting to go off. Whether some Democratic operatives nudged the scandal along by feeding the media is really not the point, although I find it fascinating in a historical sense to trace the origins of the information to expose the creeps who apparently wish to out gay Republicans regardless of whether or not they wish to have their sexual orientation made public. These low lifes are the hypocrites not the gay Republicans. To browbeat the GOP for supporting a President whose anti-terrorist measures they believe violate American’s privacy while looking on with satisfaction and cheering as the most personal, private details of a person’s life are plastered all over some bottom feeder’s website is where the real hypocrisy in this whole scandal resides.

As it now seems likely that the GOP will be given the boot by voters on election day, America will turn toward the Democrats looking for leadership on budget issues, entitlements, the War on Terror, and other vital issues facing the country.

It says volumes that the American people will not find any new ideas or solutions from Democrats - only the promise that they will “drain the swamp.”

Given the Foley mess and the culpability of the GOP leadership in failing to act on it, that should be more than enough to keep the Democrats busy for a while.

Yesterday, I wrote a post on the potential political fallout from the Foley affair. I thought then that the scandal was being orchestrated by Democrats in order to target one group of voters; the conservative evangelical Christan “values voters” who have been such an important part of the Republican coalition for the last 15 years.

According to this Washington Post article, the most recent Pew Research poll on the attitudes of this vital GOP group indicates that this voting bloc may be undergoing a seismic shift as far as its allegiance to Republican candidates:

Even a small shift in the loyalty of conservative Christian voters such as Sunde could spell trouble for the GOP this fall. In 2004, white evangelical or born-again Christians made up a quarter of the electorate, and 78 percent of them voted Republican, according to exit polls. But some pollsters believe that evangelical support for the GOP peaked two years ago and that what has been called the “God gap” in politics is shrinking.

A nationwide poll of 1,500 registered voters released yesterday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of white evangelicals are inclined to vote for Republican congressional candidates in the midterm elections, a 21-point drop in support among this critical part of the GOP base.

Even before the Foley scandal, the portion of white evangelicals with a “favorable” impression of the Republican Party had fallen sharply this year, from 63 percent to 54 percent, according to Pew polls.

To say that these are catastrophic numbers for a Republican party fighting for its political dominance in Congress is an understatement. Since it is generally assumed that only the most committed voters from each party will turn out to vote this November, a smaller base of voters quite simply translates into fewer votes. Considering how tight some races are in the heartland where evangelicals (more accurately, “white Christian protestants”) can constitute as much as 40% of a Republican’s vote, the devastating effect of losing a fifth of that number either to the Democrats or, as the Pew study shows, to voter apathy, illuminates clearly how the GOP could be in big, big trouble.

Even those voters who might be considered mainstream protestants - people who attend church once a week - are falling away from the GOP:

Nationally, the Republicans’ once formidable hold on churchgoing voters has begun to slip. Among those who say they attend church more than once a week, the GOP still holds a commanding lead. The main shift is among weekly churchgoers, about a quarter of all voters. Two years ago, they favored the GOP by a double-digit margin. But in the new Pew survey, 44 percent leaned toward Republicans and 43 percent toward Democrats, a statistical dead heat.

The slippage is particularly striking among evangelicals. According to Pew data, the portion of white evangelical Protestants who identify themselves as Republicans rose steadily from 2000 to 2004 but leveled off this year at about half. The percentage who support keeping troops in Iraq has dropped to 55 percent, from 68 percent in early September.

The survey was taken the last 10 days of September and first 4 days of October - not entirely within the time frame of the Foley matter but close enough to give a flavor of how the once reliable Christian GOP voter is viewing it. And, not surprisingly, those voters appear to be very upset with the leadership in the House:

Lynn Sunde, an evangelical Christian, is considering what for her is a radical step. Come November, she may vote for a Democrat for Congress.

Sunde, 35, manages a coffee shop and attends a nondenominational Bible church. “You’re never going to agree with one party on everything, so for me the key has always been the religion issues — abortion, the marriage amendment” to ban same-sex unions, she said.

That means she consistently votes Republican. But, she said, she is starting to worry about the course of the Iraq war, and she finds the Internet messages from then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) to teenage boys “pretty sickening.” When she goes into the voting booth this time, she said, “I’m going to think twice. . . . I’m not going to vote party line as much as to vote issues.”

Does this mean that conservative Christan’s are about ready to abandon the Republican party and vote Democrat? Not hardly:

But before Democrats take credit for the shift, they might ponder one of the findings in a recent survey of 2,500 voters by the Center for American Values, a project of the left-leaning People for the American Way Foundation: Republicans have lost more support (14 percentage points) than Democrats have picked up (4 points) among frequent churchgoers.

That rings true to Michael Cromartie, an expert on evangelicals at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank. “Erosion for evangelicals doesn’t necessarily lead to Democratic voting. It leads to nonvoting,” he said.

This despite the well publicized effort by Dr. Dean and the DNC to “reach out” to the church going public in order to siphon support away from Republicans.

Apparently, Republicans are perfectly capable of driving voters away from the polls altogether without much help from Dean and Co.

Does all this necessarily lead to a certain Democratic victory in November?

Let’s not forget Karl Rove and what many observers believe is the most sophisticated get out the vote operation in political history. The Rove plan uses huge networks of ordinary citizens to contact voters, identify not only those who support Republicans but more importantly, those who are likely to vote on election day, and then assign something like a guardian angel to that voter to make sure that they go to the polls.

It proved wildly successful in 2004 as the Rovian machine marched 14 million new GOP voters to the polls and offset a determined Democratic effort, the most expensive in that party’s history.

Can he repeat that magic? Is there one more rabbit in the Rovian hat that he can pull out and save the GOP on election day by the sheer brute force contained in the millions of volunteers who will go the extra mile to get their friends and neighbors to the polls?

At this point, it just doesn’t seem probable. The discouragement and disgust felt by many of those volunteers may overcome any enthusiasm they may have felt at one time for Republicans and victory. And failing to enervate their spirits in the face of so many tight races across the country could very well mean that the Democrats will succeed and the GOP will go down to an embarrassing defeat.

Fox News says that internal polls show “massive losses” for GOP if Hastert stays:

House Republican candidates will suffer massive losses if House Speaker Dennis Hastert remains speaker until Election Day, according to internal polling data from a prominent GOP pollster, FOX News has learned.

“The data suggests Americans have bailed on the speaker,” a Republican source briefed on the polling data told FOX News. “And the difference could be between a 20-seat loss and 50-seat loss.”

Mark Coffey rightly views the polls with a grain of salt:

Remember, folks - the Republicans may very well lose, but this has been a possibility for months, well before most people ever heard of Mark Foley. People don’t vote for a generic Republican or a generic Democrat - they vote for specific candidates. Does the Foley scandal make a Democratic takeover more likely? Yes, marginally…but at the levels speculated on here, and with the resignation of Dennis Hastert as the ‘hinge’?

A word about the difference between “internal” polls and the polls that are conducted by media outlets in association with polling firms like Gallup.

The internal polls are much more detailed and nuanced. They ask the same question 3 or 4 times in different ways to make sure they get the true feelings of the voter. They generally focus on larger themes rather than specific issues or candidates - the favored themes giving scientific pollsters a good idea about the respondents position on issues.

They are best at identifying trends. And my guess is that some numbers dropped through the floorboards over the past week most probably questions relating to trust and right track/wrong track. As Democratic pollster Charlie Cook has pointed out, in a Democratic blowout, Republican incumbents who garnered as much as 57% of the vote in the last off year election could be vulnerable. Also sophomore and freshman members are extremely at risk.

If you take those factors into account, that puts the number of GOP seats in play in November at around 70 - making a 50 vote pick-up by the Dems certainly within reach.

But the question as to whether it depends on Hastert staying or going is, as Mark points out, not very relevant to individual races. Much more important to the voter will be how Republicans own up to their mistakes and try and make amends.

This scandal will not change many minds about the GOP. What it will do - what it is being orchestrated to do - is to depress the turnout of the core GOP evangelical vote on election day. If the Christians stay home in sufficient numbers, it will be a wipeout.

The leaking of the poll to Fox News appears to be some kind of power play by a Hastert rival to gin up the panic and force the Speaker’s hand. Hastert has performed miserably this week, contributing in no small way to the impression that the GOP leadership should have done more with Foley. If this second level of vulnerable GOP candidates start to panic, they may put pressure on Hastert to resign. Look out then because there could be a full scale war that erupts between Hastert loyalists and upstarts like Boehner and Pence who wish for real reform of the Caucus.

My predictions over the past 3 weeks have been for a Democratic gain of 9-11 seats in the House and 3-4 seats in the Senate. We’ll have to wait until next week to see some real trends in the public polls (we need at least 4 or 5 polls on the same question to get a feel for where the electorate is) but my sense is that this scandal will have little effect in the northeast where there are several Republican seats in play but could have devastating consequences in the south and midwest. Indiana alone has 4 tight House races that could all tip to the Democrats if my sense of this thing is correct. And Illinois has 2 more toss up races where evangelicals will make or break the Republican candidate.

The way the news on this scandal is breaking, it’s hard to predict what Hastert will do. If he goes, it probably won’t be until the weekend.

While it may change the dynamic of the scandal, news that one of the young pages who was a recipient of raunchy instant messages from Congressman Foley set up the lawmaker as part of a prank doesn’t really change the facts of the matter.

Drudge:

According to two people close to former congressional page (name withheld), the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, (name withheld), a conservative Republican, goaded an unwitting Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats.

The primary source, an ally of (name withheld), adamantly proclaims that the former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a second associate of (name withheld). Both are fearful that their political careers will be affected if they are publicly brought into the investigation.

The prank scenario only applies to the (name withheld) IM sessions and does not necessarily apply to any other exchanges between the former congressman and others.

Those facts are simple; Foley sent at least 60 IM’s to former pages, many of them sexually explicit in nature; that the Republican leadership knew of Foley’s interest in male pages for at least a year possibly more and did nothing concrete to address the problem; and that Democrats have orchestrated the timing and pace of the scandal to maximize its political impact.

Only a fool now believes that this scandal exploded when it did as the result of fate. This story from The Hill about the original source of the emails being a longtime Republican raises some interesting questions, not the least of which could the identity of the “longtime Republican” be none other than former Foley Chief of Staff Kirk Fordham?

The source who in July gave news media Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-Fla.) suspect e-mails to a former House page says the documents came to him from a House GOP aide.

That aide has been a registered Republican since becoming eligible to vote, said the source, who showed The Hill public records supporting his claim.

The same source, who acted as an intermediary between the aide-turned-whistleblower and several news outlets, says the person who shared the documents is no longer employed in the House.

But the whistleblower was a paid GOP staffer when the documents were first given to the media.

The source bolstered the claim by sharing un-redacted e-mails in which the former page first alerted his congressional sponsor’s office of Foley’s attentions. The copies of these e-mails, now available to the public, have the names of senders and recipients blotted out.

These revelations mean that Republicans who are calling for probes to discover what Democratic leaders and staff knew about Foley’s improper exchanges with under-age pages will likely be unable to show that the opposition party orchestrated the scandal now roiling the GOP just a month away from the midterm elections.

First, as former Chief of Staff, Fordham would certainly be in a position to know Foley’s logon information and password. Secondly, as the article says, the GOP staffer is no longer working on the Hill. Third, as Chief of Staff for Tom Reynolds, Fordham would have had access to the other emails mentioned in the article - the ones sent by the young page calling Foley’s emails “sick.”

Finally, Fordham has been chummy with one of the prime suspects in this whole orchestrated affair; John Avarosis of Americablog.

Fordham was semi-outed two years ago by The Washington Blade where he told the gay newspaper that he was “out in the community but not in the press.” This was just after he had been named on “The List” by notorious gay activist Michael Rodgers who has made it his life’s work to out gay Republicans, even if it’s against their will. “The List” names GOP lawmakers and staffers who Rodgers claims are gay. Both Foley and Fordham are on The List.

Rogers frequent partner in outing Republicans has been Avarosis. The blogger claims in this article from 2004 that Fordham told him that Foley was indeed gay.

Foley responded to the reports by initiating a telephone press conference among non-gay Florida media and called discussion about his sexual orientation “revolting.” He declined at that time to answer questions about his sexual orientation and subsequently abandoned his bid for the Senate, citing concerns over his father’s health.

Aravosis said he obtained the latest information about the five-term congressman from Foley’s former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham.

Fordham, who is gay, headed up fund-raising efforts for Foley’s aborted Senate campaign and is now the finance director for one of the remaining GOP primary candidates in that race: Mel Martinez, George W. Bush’s former Housing & Urban Development secretary. Martinez has come out in favor of the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Fordham denied ever speaking with Aravosis and said, “I just don’t discuss Congressman Foley’s personal life with reporters, but I’m not sure what their motive is in outing him, other than to draw attention to themselves. Foley has a good track record with gay issues and opposes the FMA.”

Why would Fordham hand over the emails last July to Rodgers/Avarosis who are believed by many - based on past history and boasts made in public more recently - to be hip deep in the campaign to orchestrate this scandal? Perhaps Fordham, a moderate gay Republican, decided to bring down the anti-gay GOP. Or perhaps he genuinely was concerned both for Foley and the pages and wanted to stop the Congressman before he got into real trouble.

Whatever the reason, the FBI will interview Fordham to determine his role in this scandal. There is also word that the FBI is looking very closely at Messrs. Rogers and Avarosis as well and the Soros funded CREW.

Macsmind:

Besides Foley two names that have come into play are Rogers and John Aravosis of America’s Blog. Both are gay activists who on many occasions have threatened not only Foley and Fordham with outing, but others as well. These guys are what we call “Political Thugs”, the only thing they don’t use is guns, but they do nearly as much damage. Others call it by it’s real name - blackmail.

Again, the FBI - and I have this on good source - are aware of both individuals and looking into their involvement as well. As I said before we cops aren’t so stupid as to just look at an IM log or an email and say, “Oh look at that?, case closed!”

You have to prove that they originated on a specific computer, from a specific individual. If they weren’t they you have to find out who did create them. In any case are evidence, and as such if they were, as is apparent at this point, withheld from authorities for five months, one year or twenty five minutes, that’s breaking the law and such individuals could be charged for that.

I wonder how hard the MSM will be working to get leaks on the case from the FBI regarding the Democratic activists who have nursed this scandal baby for so long and now see the fruits of their labors plastered all over the newspapers of the world?