Things I’ve Seen

Andrew Sullivan quotes an email he has received:

“We’ve witnessed a shift in Republican politics. The Republican establishment used to pay lip service to religious conservative interests while openly courting independent voters with moderate policies because it knew it could get the religious conservative vote regardless (who were they going to vote for, Clinton!?). But now, it seems Bush is paying lip service to independent interests while openly promoting religious conservative policy. Who are we going to vote for, Kerry?

Well, yes.”

survey results I noticed something interesting:

Now, that’s not very suprising. But it seems to me that most people actually do have a gay friend, family member, or colleague - certainly more than the 60% who are aware of the fact, according to these figures. I wonder if one effect of the debate around this amendment will be to make more people aware that they have gay friends and neighbours… and so move the debate further towards the liberal side.

More from the Pew Research Center - read the whole thing here.

So far, the presidential primary campaign has been very good for the Democratic Party. Public interest in the race has been relatively high. Nearly half of Americans (45%) have a positive overall impression of the Democratic field, up from 31% just a month ago. And while a slim majority of the public continues to believe that President Bush will win the general election, there also has been a sharp rise in the percentage who feel a Democratic candidate will prevail in November from 21% in January to 36% in the current survey.

I hope - and believe - that President Bush’s decision to push for a constitutional ammendment to prevent gay marriage will be as politically wrong as it is ethically wrong. A majority of Americans are opposed to gay marriage, I trust (and there is some polling data supporting this) that this does not translate into support for a constitutional ammendment. Dislike of gay marriage may be in the majority; but the set of those who would see it outlawed is smaller than the set who think it is wrong, and the set who would see this written into the constitution is smaller still.

But more than this - I find it hard to imagine a person who will vote for Bush because he supports this ammendment, and would not vote for him otherwise. Fundamentalist Christians who were going to vote for the Democrats? That’s a big group, after all. And I can very easily imagine people who would go the other way: true conservatives, already on the edge because of Bush’s deficit spending; instinctive Republicans who are gay or have gay family, friends or colleagues; independants with a libertarian streak; moderates who voted for Bush as “a uniter not a divider”; the list goes on.

But there’s more. A party divided is a party in trouble, and this proposal will divide the Republicans, while uniting the Democrats. Even if a Democrat doesn’t feel safe supporting gay marriage, they can safely oppose changing the constitution (“Both Kerry and Edwards said they oppose gay marriages but would not support a constitutional amendment.”). But Republicans cannot be united:

“I will say that I’m not supportive of amending the Constitution on this issue,” said Dreier, a co-chairman of Bush’s campaign in California in 2000.

“The president needs to worry about fair-minded swing voters in America, not a Republican base that he has locked up,” said Patrick Guerriero, executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group.

There is no way that this is a winner for GWB. Counterspin Central agrees:

If Bush had any shred of human decency, humility, grace or leadership in his bones, this election wouldn’t even be a contest.

As such, he’s going to lose. And he’s going to lose big. And, hopefully, he’s going to take down the Republican party with him.

And for Andrew Sullivan, a consistent and eloquent supporter of Bush, this appears to be the last straw:

We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own. This struggle is hard but it is also easy. The president has made it easy. He’s a simple man and he divides the world into friends and foes. He has now made a whole group of Americans - and their families and their friends - his enemy. We have no alternative but to defend ourselves and our families from this attack. And we will.

Have a look at the latest survey of the Pew Global Attitudes Project, conducted over the past month in 20 countries and the Palestinian Authority.

It’s a 2003 report, but still very interesting reading.

Update - the executive summary is worth quoting here:

The speed of the war in Iraq and the prevailing belief that the Iraqi people are better off as a result have modestly improved the image of America. But in most countries, opinions of the U.S. are markedly lower than they were a year ago. The war has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans, further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the war on terrorism, and significantly weakened global public support for the pillars of the post-World War II era ? the U.N. and the North Atlantic alliance.

Why is it that organisations that do business with an international clientele, who can afford to put together beautifully designed, smooth-operating and really rather useful and interesting websites, cannot find the wherewithal to ensure grammatical language on the English version of their sites?

Try GMF AeroAsia for a case in point - a leading maintenance provider for aircraft in the Asian region. (If you want a real giggle, click the ‘in your finger’ button and watch the presentation).

Given all the cultivated, hightly educated and sophisticated Indonesians I’ve met, I find it hard to believe that a company with over 2,700 employees couldn’t find ONE person who could actually write in more fluent English! It’s “Time to End It All Up” [sic] to quote GMF.

I’m following Kevin’s lead

I know that the mainstream press has to cover the fact that Ralph Nader has decided to run for president. After all, it’s news.

But can the rest of us make a pact to just ignore him? He’s not even worth criticizing or mocking anymore, and we’ve all got more important things to do than giving him the attention he craves. Like unelecting our current president, for example.

No more to add.

A quote from TIME Magazine

Bush looks certain to go into the election with the distinction of being the first President since Herbert Hoover to see the total number of jobs shrink during his term in office.

Democrats point that out often, like whenever they move their lips.

If you plan to buy anything online, take a look at Shop to Drop Bush. It’s an affiliate shopfront which gets a small cut from the vendor (no cost to you) if you go through them, and will donate the money to “progressive/liberal groups such as moveon.org.

Adding a link for this…

You’ll need audio turned on to appreciate Mark Fiore’s The Gay Agenda

Burnt Orange Report has just experienced a massive explosion in hits, thanks to his reporting of this maybe-breaking scandal. It seems that getting linked by atrios is worth even more than Things I’ve Seen’s Babes against Bush and unelectable spikes.

BOR is a Texas leftie group blog, and looks like a good read - it’s now on my daily list, at least for a while.