A compelling new website, which offers unique utility.

From MIT:

To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America.

To allow citizens to submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity. To allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process.

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Government Information Awareness

Via The Poorman:

“When we were putting the board [of directors] together, somebody [Fred Malek] came to me and said, look there is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. Needs a board position. Needs some board positions. Could you put him on the board? Pay him a salary and he'll be a good board member and be a loyal vote for the management and so forth.

I said well we're not usually in that business. But okay, let me meet the guy. I met the guy. I said I don't think he adds that much value. We'll put him on the board because - you know - we'll do a favor for this guy; he's done a favor for us.

We put him on the board and [he] spent three years. Came to all the meetings. Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years - you know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.

He said, well I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.

And I said, thanks - didn't think I'd ever see him again. His name is George W. Bush. He became President of the United States. So you know if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category. So you never know. Anyway, I haven't been invited to the White House for any things.”

-- David Rubenstein, The Carlyle Group

PragPro PPI - 7/3/03

This weeks PragPro Power Index features the addition of Q2 fundraising estimates, an updated google news count, no new polls, so the index remains unchanged. Dennis Kucinich has raised $1 million, so he joins the leader board. It’s safe to say Dean has the big ‘Mo’. The vast majority of his cash has been raised from the internet, at little or no cost to the campaign, including $800,000+ on the last day of the quarter.



1. Kerry – 58.31: $13.01 million, 3,100 News Stories, 14.3% Poll Average

2. Dean – 47.04 : $10.14 million, 3,160, 5.3%

3. Lieberman – 43.31 : $8.01 million, 1,600, 19.3%

4. Gephardt – 41.15 : $10.45 million, 1,700, 13.7%

5. Edwards – 40.62 : $12.42 million, 2,290, 5.3%

6. Graham – 31.42 : $3.62 million, 2,180, 6%

7. Kucinich – 17.1 : $1 million , 1,460, 1.5%

As always, for a discussion of methodology check,

PragPro PPI

Last Week:

1. John Kerry - 48.91 – (2,760 news, $7.01 million raised, 14.3% poll average)

2. Dick Gephardt – 40.85 – (2,120, $5.95, 13.7%)

3. Joe Lieberman – 37.61 – (1,530, $3.01, 19.3%)

4. John Edwards – 35.42 – (2,270, $7.42, 5.3%)

5. Howard Dean – 33.84 – (2,590), $2.64, 5.3%)

6. Bob Graham – 28.92 – (2,180), $1.12, 6%)

*Thanks to Interesting Times for Google News data.

The more I look at the fundamentals of the electoral map, just the way things are now demographically and ideologically spaced, the more I'm almost certain that we will see a 2000 redux of a split electoral and popular vote, regardless of the issues, regardless of the chops of the Democratic nominee. You'll always have 40% from each end of the political spectrum as an unswayable constant. Bush's 40% is much, much stronger...I don't believe that they would ever consider not going to the polls. The Democrat's 40% is mostly anti-Bush at this point, and not pro-anyone, that may change, but it's just as likely that a large portion of these folks will stay home and not vote.

If we look at job's lost, around 2.5 million, 2 million of these are blue-collar jobs. The city of Wichita, Kansas has a population of a few hundred thousand, 100,000 are now unemployed in Wichita. The question is will these unemployed blue collar voters, vote their religion, their firearm, their pro-Iraq position, or will they vote their jobs, their questioning of Bush's integrity, will they feel bamboozled? Most likely, they will not vote, sadly, 50% of those who can register are not registered, 50% of those actually vote, so we are talking about an electorate of 25%. This electorate has been effected by the economic downturn to a lesser extent, they are older so they do care about prescription drugs, they are more religious, and they are more supportive of the President's agenda as a whole.

Unless we see a rapid trend away from apathy, which is not likely as a nasty campaign and a feeling of hopelessness and party sameness is still likely to be felt by the 80% who don't vote, those who do vote will be split, with the Dem winning by larger margins in Vermont and Massachusetts, and Bush winning smaller margins in Ohio and Florida.

The central question for the Democrats is this: how to get their potential voters or simply non-voters energized as much as Bush's wealthier and evangelical Christian base is. The Democrats can’t even depend on the AFL-CIO anymore; the NRA has siphoned much of this support away. The gray panthers, let’s face it, get turned around with clever ads.

So, yeah, you can't just give the people something to vote against. If everything was the same and Gore was President, I think just by virtue of the current electoral demographics, Gore would be in a world of shit. In other words, this is a GOP game board. If the Democrats win it will be due to a virtuoso performance, a major turnout spike or near depression. I for one think another 9/11 helps Bush, the rally around the leader effect is so strong. Oh, plus Nader will be back, you can count on it. It’s a helluva roe to ho. The crazy part is, with this economy it shouldn’t be. If the Democrats can’t win this one, they can’t win anyone. I’m talking about the death of the party, the opposition is all fractured, and under funded, ‘liberal’ is a cuss word. Welcome to your uni-party. I can’t say we didn’t help let it happen, thanks DLC.

A Few Words on Polling

Polling Report is a good resource to view ALL the polls. An index of polls is your best bet to get at the truth of opinion for a moment in time. Remember, a poll is only a snap-shot of a single moment in time, and therefore polls have a very limited utility. The media would make you think that polls have a maximum utility, they just don't.

As polls go, most suck, but Ipsos/Reid/Cook Political Report and anything from The Field Company is above standard, Zogby is usually pretty good, and Quinnipiac or the other regional University based institutions believe strongly in the science of polling and do a good job. The smaller the aspirations of a poll, the better. It's tough to take a sample of 3,000 people and say this is what the the whole country feels, without some very serious grains of salt added.

An indicator of a quality science is when they show their MoE, (Margin of Error), to the tenth, as in +/- 3.1. To really know if a sample is valid, and the pollster are serious about the science involved. When judging a poll not only do you need to know the questions, size of the sample, but where the sample was taken from, and how. Phone? In-person?

The right track/wrong track is still the best measure of the current national 'snap-shot', really the only poll I believe in, (from Ipsos-Cook.) The right/wrong track works because it is elegant in it’s simplicity and has a long track record of being a great indicator of the nations disposition for change. The best non-open ended, (when I say open-ended I mean polls where respondents fill in the answers instead of checking prefabricated answers…very bad), polls for opinion on individuals use a 'Temperature' scale developed by Mervyn Field in the 1960s, (the bomb-shizzle of polling.)

The place where good polls go bad, if it’s not the diversity and quality of the sample, it’s providing the question AND the answer. The question and answer shade one another, giving you a false reading. If you can’t conduct a poll where the respondents fill in their own answers in their own words, (ideal), then you have to make the provided answers clear, unbiased, and simple: 1-10, 1-being coldest, 10-being warmest, how do you feel about George W. Bush? Real simple, real elegant, devoid of words that may skew.

Gallup and Fox Dynamic often fail because of the language they use can distort results, and there have been charges that Fox Dynamic doesn't really try very hard to get a random sample, (let's call folks in Alabama, and Virginia Suburbs and call that America!) Most polling companies disregard the need for regional diversity. Also the people that answer polls aren't always what we would call 'prime indicators', for example the test to see if you are talking to a 'likely voter', is too often, asking, 'are you a likely voter'? Or the other lazy trick that polling companies use to declare ‘likely voters’ is asking if the respondent has an individual retirement account. There are a series of questions you can ask, that in combination give a good indication of ‘likely voter’, not two or three, I could tell you what these are, but then I would have to kill you, and I just don’t have the time to get you all.

Anyway good polls have open-ended questions in clear unbiased language, don’t provide the answers but instead allow the respondent to provide the answers, feature long interviews, and a real diverse sample. It's tough to pull off. These companies get paid to put out a poll; they rarely care about the science.

Do yourself a favor:

I’m With Busey

Tuesdays, 10 PM, Comedy Central, it’s absolutely hilarious.

From Charlie Cook:

Here's a prediction for 2004: If the prescription drug benefit is a factor in next year's election, it will be as an albatross around the necks of Republicans and the Bush administration. While the White House and GOP strategists have long said passing a drug benefit for Medicare recipients was a key element in the president's re-election strategy, the implication was that they needed to pass something called a drug benefit, with the contents and details less important than having done it. That may well turn out to be true, but maybe not.

Not too long ago I served on a panel discussion at Washington & Lee University with Dick Morris, the politically androgynous strategist who has worked for a variety of leading figures in each party in a career that has spanned more than three decades. While Morris is not necessarily one of my favorite people (and I disagree with perhaps 80 percent of what he has to say), there is clearly a mad genius in the man that generates some very provocative ideas amid a clutter of goofball thoughts and theories.

While many talk about Morris' triangulation strategy that he developed for former President Bill Clinton back in 1995, which contributed to the first elected Democratic president to be re-elected since Franklin Roosevelt, it was his broader view of strategy I found most interesting.

According to Morris, certain issues "belong" to Democrats while others "belong" to Republicans. Historically each party has certain issues on which it is perceived as very strong, while on others there is little credibility. Morris points out that these lists remain fairly static; one rarely sees issues on one party's list transfer to the other. Morris argues that the goal of a candidate is to maximize his party's strength on the issues that his party is strong, then embrace one or two issues that "belong" to the other party, allowing virtually no distance between themselves and the other party on that issue. The point is to demonstrate to swing voters that you are not a lock-step party type, but rather demonstrably moderate and pragmatic.

In 1995 and 1996, by emphasizing his efforts to balance the federal budget and his signing a welfare reform bill into law, Clinton managed to avoid the liberal tag and, though incurring the wrath of many in his own party, went on to win re-election by a fairly comfortable eight-point margin.

In 2000, Gov. George W. Bush picked the education issue and was pictured almost daily visiting a school, reading with some cute little kid and more closely identifying himself with education than any Democratic presidential candidate in history. Very clearly, the Bush campaign sees a prescription drug benefit as its Democratic issue of choice for next year.

But it may not be that simple. I have noticed two things about senior citizens. First, they tend to have a great deal of time on their hands. Second, they don't mind telling anyone what they think about things. Even the most cursory look at polling data and reports from focus groups indicates that senior citizens have very specific ideas of what they expect in a prescription drug benefit. What they have in mind is something resembling what a Fortune 500 company provides (or used to provide) employees: A modest premium, minimal co-pay, no gaps, no restrictions on what drugs physicians can prescribe and unlimited coverage. Typical is a July 2001 report on eight focus groups conducted by the Democratic firm of Peter D. Hart Research Associates and the Republican firm of Public Opinion Strategies for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Reading this and similar reports, looking at polling data and conducting interviews show that seniors are quite adamant about their wants, and Medicare is the vehicle of choice. In short, the proposals passed last week by the House and Senate bear very little, if any, resemblance to the benefit they have in mind.

The idea of a plan being passed that doesn't begin to meet their expectations and won't kick in until after the next presidential election could well trigger the same kind of reaction that resulted in seniors picketing members of Congress in the late 1980s after passage of the catastrophic coverage plan. That example of political disconnect came the famous scene of old-timers climbing on the hood of House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski's car, hurling obscenities at the Illinois Democrat.

The problem, of course, is that seniors are looking for a prescription drug benefit that would probably cost at least $800 billion (twice the cost of the plans that the House and Senate just passed), and very likely much more than that. Many would at this juncture say, "we simply can't afford an $800 billion to $1.2 trillion Medicare drug benefit, given the size of the deficit, the tax cut and the war with Iraq." While that's absolutely true, try to convince seniors that the tax cut is more justified than the drug benefit. Go ahead, I'll watch.

Republicans decided that they wanted to pass a drug benefit and they had about $400 billion to spend. Between the two plans, they seem to have done a reasonable job of coming up with the best benefit they could, but it just isn't in the ballpark of what seniors are expecting.

So for all this talk about prescription drugs being a breakthrough issue for the GOP, I think it just as easily could become a liability that they really don't need given everything else that is going on. Had they trimmed the tax cut a bit to leave room for the kind of benefit these seniors are demanding, they might have gotten the political pop that they were seeking.

More: National Journal.com

COMMENTARY

Charlie’s right about the issue of prescription drugs having the potential to be an albatross. What I'm concerned about is the continuing disengagement of the electorate from the issues and a greater identification with candidate character/personality image.

It's important to note that the character/personality is much easier to 'spin', distort, 'Hollywood-up', then the facts of the issues, though great attempts are made at each. The difference is that with the issues you can go to other sources of information, but for character perception your only source of information is the campaign media and/or the pop media A growing trend in electoral politics is voters voting on the often wholly manufactured image of a candidate as a TV character that they identify with, with a marginilizing of the issues. An even more dastardly practice is the manufacture by the opposition of the politician as villainous TV character; this is designed to suppress voter turnout. It's easier to vote on image or become ‘turned-off’, (oddly not based on any real facts but solely on manufactured perceptions), then research the facts of the issues. The modern media market is becoming more and more partisan and ideological, foregoing breaking the issues down to manageable bits of unpartisan truth, the market instead chooses the distortion of issues to meet their ideological perceptions of what their core viewers want to see, in order to appease their commercial constituents. Something to watch for in 2004 is the continuing deterioration of issues in exchange for personality perceptions in elections.

Why It May Be Impossible For The Democrats To Ever Win Another National Election:

How ChoicePoint Rigged the Playing Field of Electoral Politics

The work of a company called ChoicePoint has changed the electoral map playing field for decades to come.

Overcoming the work of ChoicePoint is job number one for the Democrats if they hope to win the 2004 Presidential Election.

The management of the playing field in the midterm elections of 2002 is part of the reason for the GOP control of Congress.

Learn about ChoicePoint, and how they changed electoral politics to benefit the GOP, maybe for the rest of our lives.

The playing field has been changed. Most have no idea how much.

Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program

The Wrong Way To Fix the Vote

Have Americans lost forever their right to vote a president into office?

Challenges to overcome to put the U.S. back on course to peace, democracy and well-being for all.

Jim Crow in Cyberspace

A collection of articles on ChoicePoint

What would a democratic election look like?

Mexico claims ChoicePoint stepped across the line

Firm in Florida Election Fiasco Earns Millions from Files on Foreigners

Ashcroft & ChoicePoint: Need I say more?

Winning the Election – The Republican Way

From Working For Change:

Today, there is a new and real threat to voters, this time coming from touchscreen voting machines with no paper trails and the computerized purges of voter rolls.

I just joined Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King III and investigative reporter Greg Palast in signing a petition protesting the Florida-tion of the 2004 election.

It only took me a few seconds to sign it and I'm hoping you'll sign it, too. Click here to sign the petition:

More: Sign Petition

UPDATE: The Long Arm of ChoicePoint

Choicepoint Lobbying Figures

From The Virtual Chase:

Lawyers may also unearth tax liens, bankruptcies, judgments, pending and past litigation, misdemeanors, assets, professional licenses, significant share holdings, UCC liens, marriage, divorce, voting and death records, campaign contributions, exclusions from federal contracts or participation in Medicaid and Medicare programs, defaulted Health Education Assistance Loans, NASD disciplinary actions, SEC sanctions, and more.

While LexisNexis and Westlaw provide access to some of this data, it behooves frequent researchers to subscribe either to ChoicePoint Online or AutoTrackXP (both owned by ChoicePoint). These services offer a cost-effective means of gathering information about individuals. Moreover, certain features assist researchers by suggesting possible relationships. ChoicePoint Online's Discovery Plus, for example, surveys billions of public records to find business affiliations, bankruptcies, liens, judgments, assets, and more. The more identifying information (e.g., full name, date of birth, SSN) you provide about an individual, the greater the accuracy of these search results.

More: Virtualchase.com

All your personal information, is available for sale, from Choicepoint.

Putting it all together

The following is an excellent, well footnoted report on the special relationship between ChoicePoint and The Bush Administration.

From watchingdubya.com:

The largest agency contract with ChoicePoint is the Department of Justice's 4-year $67 million agreement, most of which is spent on looking up crime histories and credit reports of US citizens. The FBI's Investigative Services unit, which supports agents involved in criminal investigations, makes heavy use of ChoicePoint data. Agents have access to the web site cpfbi.com, on which both the FBI and ChoicePoint logos are displayed. FBI spokesman John Collingwood told the Wall Street Journal, "The FBI has located nearly 1,300 subjects of criminal cases using these kinds of searches," adding that using

ChoicePoint "saves countless hours of manual records checks, a process the FBI has relied on for decades." While the FBI would not discuss how much it pays ChoicePoint currently, the contract for fiscal year 2000 was worth $8 million.

More: The Privatization of Big Brother

From Time Magazine:

Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession:

Where are the weapons of mass destruction?

Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked,

"Are you in charge of finding WMD?"

Bremer said no, he was not.

Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either.

A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD?

After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause.

"Who?" Bush asked.

More: As the weapons hunt intensifies, so does the finger pointing. A preview of the coming battle

Howard Dean will hit $7 million Q2 fundraising Monday; he will be now be the front runner in the eyes of the media, if only for his novel Internet campaigning innovations and the manifestation of real grass-roots passion that is producing real growth in the first primary: dollars raised. The Internet is really starting to show some teeth with regard to raising dollars and support, 2004 will be an historically significant election: The year the Internet became a real factor. No one has played the free utility of the Internet like Dean, and to his credit, the participants came to him. From winning the MoveOn.org Primary, to putting meetup.com on the map, the Internet is the engine that is driving the Dean campaign.

An increase from around $3 million to $7 million from Q1 to Q2 is a sign of a healthy political organism. Dean’s underdog status and the law of lowered expectations will give Dean a little rocket ride in Q3. A lot of people are going to find out who Howard Dean is in the next few months, media space providing.

The media, the GOP, and the other Democrats will also paint a big ol' bulls-eye on Dean now, and if under this new lime light he pulls another Meet the Press type communications failure, it will hurt him. Dean can't have any more of this, (scroll up and read the entry above the comments), and expect to win the nomination let alone the Presidency. I for one think he needs to take a short break, this is a marathon and not a sprint. I've seen some signs of fatigue, and it worries me to some extent. In addition, Dean needs to show he has learned from the Meet the Press debacle, make sure he has an answer for EVERYTHING, he simply needs to prepare better. Everyone in the business knows Russert's tactics, Dean has been on the show before, no excuses for that performance. In short, Dean is going to be given a window of opportunity in Q3 to create some space, he needs to take the bull by the horns and be flawless.

This media environment holds Progressives to a higher standard then Conservatives with regard to campaign gaffes, he won't get a slide like W. did in many respects. Democrats have to recognize that there is a 24-hour GOP propaganda network called FOX, that will latch on to the Democratic front-runner like a psychotic remora as soon as he/she starts to show some muscle.

The delicate dance of Dean's applaudable off the cuff signature and the mandate of clear and efficient communication on every and any issue is central to extending the coming move. He needs to tighten his answers, especially with regard to national security. It’s the beginning of go time.

I don’t know who is assisting the Governor with communications, but at this point I give them a C+. To beat the other candidates and Bush it has to be an A. Frankly, the Internet has been doing their job for them. The policy should always come from the candidate, but the coms consultant must make sure that no matter how complex the policy option selection by the candidate, it is communicated clearly and efficiently. This is party wide problem, and part of the reason why voters are fuzzy on what Democrats stand for. Yes, we do take a more nuanced and frankly intelligent approach to policy option selection, but in politics you have to be able to communicate your selections regardless of the depth.

So on Monday look for Dean to make some news. This will be a good test to see how he handles the growing attention and moves from fringe to viable to front-runner.

News You May Have Missed

From The Guardian, (UK):

The Bush administration's top Medicare accountant has calculated how millions of senior citizens would be affected by bringing private managed care into the program, but the administration won't release the information.

An earlier analysis suggested that a Republican plan to inject market forces into Medicare could increase premiums for those who stay in traditional programs by as much as 25 percent. If that's still the case, it could help Democrats who argue that the GOP plan is risky for those who want to stay in traditional Medicare, where they can pick any doctor, rather than move to a managed care plan.
The administration's Medicare chief threatened to fire his top actuary, Rick Foster, if Foster released his calculations to Capitol Hill Democrats who requested the analysis, officials said.
Medicare chief Tom Scully said in an interview Wednesday that Democrats had no right to request the information from Foster in the first place.
`
`They don't have the right on the Hill to call up my actuary and demand things,'' said Scully, chief of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. ``These people work for the executive branch, period.''

Scully said he would release the analysis ``if I feel like it.''

More: White House Won't Release Medicare Memo

From CNN:

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday the parts needed to develop a bomb program that the CIA says were found in Baghdad are not "evidence of a smoking gun" proving Iraq had a current weapons of mass destruction program.

More: U.N. watchdog: Iraq had no nuclear weapons program after '91

From Yahoo News:

US State Department experts disputed CIA conclusions that tractor-trailers found in Iraq were mobile biological weapons labs, while the White House stuck by the claim.

More: State Department experts question CIA claim Iraqi trailers are weapons labs

Another update most likely today.