How Many Arizona Republicans Are Heroin Addicts?

Safford, Arizona, Graham County seat is northeast of Tucson and 81% white. In 2016, the county itself-- part of the sprawling first congressional district-- gave Trump a massive 67.2% to 27.6% win over Hillary and gave McCain a similarly lopsided win to John McCain over Ann Kirkpatrick. Two years later, Graham County gave the win to Martha McSally over Kyrsten Sinema (64.8% to 31.8%) in the Senate race and was Wendy Rogers (R) territory by a wide margin over Blue Dog Tom O'Halleran. It was the reddest county in the district-- by far.

Until yesterday when Safford City Councilman Chris Taylor withdraw from the congressional race, there were 5 Republicans vying for the nomination to take on O'Halleran or Eva Putzova (if she beats O'Halleran in the Democratic primary). Now there are 4-- John Moore, Nolan Reidhead, Doyel Shamley and Tiffany Shedd. Taylor, an opioid addict, pulled the plug on his campaign because he OD-ed on heroin. Taylor is just a typical right-wing Republican crackpot as you can see from the picture of his lunatic smacked-out program above.

He tries to use the excuse that he's a combat veteran but he was a junkie in high school and, remember, we're talking about street drugs here, not medical opioids. Taylor says he's seeking treatment for his addiction. His statement to the Arizona Republic:

Today, I have suspended my campaign for the US House of Representatives and am seeking treatment for substance abuse disorder. I will fully cooperate with local authorities on any matters arising from my recent relapse and overdose. Please respect the privacy of my wife and children as we deal with this situation.

I’m not going to hide from this. I’m not ashamed of what happened. I wish to sincerely apologize to the amazing people who have supported me. I don’t know what went wrong. I recently relapsed after having so many solid years in sobriety. I have to figure out where I went wrong. Thankfully I have every resource available to me through the Veterans Affairs Administration and I have the strongest support system one could dream of. My family stands behind me 100% and I feel the love and prayers of our amazing Gila Valley Community. I haven’t been able to respond to each of you yet but I have been overwhelmed by the amount of people who have reached out to me in love and understanding.

The only thing I can do is face this head on in complete humility and put one foot in front of the other so that I can get the help needed to be the father and husband that my family deserves. I’m human and I have never pretended to be anything but. I know that through the Grace of my loving savior Jesus Christ I will be restored to full health and bounce back from this and be stronger than ever.

This morning I had a long talk with Eva Putzova about this situation. She was far more sympathetic with Taylor's plight than I am. "I wish Councilmember Taylor tons of strength while dealing with heroin addiction and related health struggles," she said, sincerely. "I’m sure this is very difficult for him personally and others around him who are also affected by this illness. I hope that he will succeed in getting healthy again and then use his experience to question his very own party’s positions that deny treatment to people who have no resources or societal support. I hope he will question the endless wars of choice that traumatized him and thousands of his combat colleagues--the wars that left them so broken that the only escape they could find was in using opioids. I hope he will rethink his position toward government and taxes, because it is our taxes that are now funding (as they should) his treatment and it is the government that is saving his life. I hope he will come through this episode and realize that criminalizing drug use is not only ineffective but also cruel and immoral and people caught in the web of drug abuse didn’t fail themselves, but rather our society failed to take care of them. People don’t abuse drugs and alcohol unless they deal with trauma, poverty, and despair or lack a sense of community, meaning in life, and human connection. The Republican Party led the efforts to put people like Chris in jail or on the streets. It’s time to reform that party’s positions or find ways to be politically active outside of GOP."

Time For A Velvet Revolution In Arizona?

Earlier today, in the post about expanding The Squad, Flagstaff progressive Eva Putzova noted that "the future of this planet depends on this country getting a bigger squad." That was about the boldest comment any candidate I asked ventured. But boldness comes naturally to Eva, more so than most other congressional candidates. After all, she's been working on the front lines for a very long time-- and for real.

I have a long story about how Bill Clinton once came to call me and mix up Lou Rawls and Lou Reed and why that led to my first state banquet. If you just want the photos: here. I've only been to one state banquet at the White House in my life. It was for Czech President Vaclav Havel and the only reason I was invited was because it was pre-Google and I was the only one in President Clinton's rolodex who knew the difference between Lou Rawls and Lou Reed. It was the first time I got to meet so many people I was writing about here at DWT so often: from arch-villains like Charles Koch, Henry Kissinger, Jane Harman, Erskine Bowles, and Tipper Gore to some passing political figures of the day like Pat Danner (D-MO), Vic Fazio (D-CA), Richard Lugar (R-IN), Norman Dicks (D-WA), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Samuel Gejdenson (D-CT) and William Roth, the Roth IRA guy (R-DE) to a handful of more interesting, if extraneous, figures like Kurt Vonnegut, Mia Farrow, Eric Holder, Stevie Wonder, chess grand master Lubomir Kavalek-- and my old friend Ric Ocasek who I hadn't seen in years and who had originally helped launch my career as a record mogul by producing one of my bands, Romeo Void, on a whim. The whole guest list was geared to President Havel. (I don't think he was a Cars fan but Ocasek was married to Czech model Paulina Porizkova.) Lou Reed was the entertainment that night and Havel had long credited Lou's band, the Velvet Underground, with being the inspiration for Havel's own fortitude in breaking free from the Soviet Union. That was what Havel dubbed the Velvet Revolution-- and what Eva wrote about this week for the Arizona Daily Star: Remembering, and learning, from the Velvet Revolution.

In 1989, nearly a million people in the former Czechoslovakia-- where I was born and raised-- took to the streets to peacefully overthrow the totalitarian dictatorship of the Communist Party.

That euphoric fall changed everything for me. I would not be here today, having served on the Flagstaff City Council for four years and now running for Congress in Arizona’s first district, if the young people had not believed in the power and righteousness of their demands for sweeping reform and freedom.

Everyone was on board with taking power away from what we called the old structures-- Individuals connected to the ruling party, which lacked the moral authority to govern after failing us and betraying us for 40 years.

I was 12 years old; just old enough for my observations to inform my permanent politics. Life before the Velvet Revolution was not unbearable, but it was grim. Our air and our rivers were polluted. Common areas were littered with trash. Everybody owned everything; therefore, nobody owned anything. Our environment was colorless, gray and uninspiring.

As a child, I didn’t know what we were missing under our state-run economy, where 99.9% of the population was equally disadvantaged. My parents were loving. They didn’t worry about losing their jobs, paying medical bills or rent, or how they’d pay for my college education. As a teacher, my mom never had to buy supplies for her students.

They didn’t have some of the concerns millions of Americans do, like paying for health care. But, under that state-run economy, my parents were part of a lost generation: an entire generation whose potential and dreams were never quite realized.

A very small portion of the population had it better. The Communist Party elites were the equivalent of today’s American billionaires-- living in extreme wealth made on the backs of the working class.

Growing up in a state-run economy, experiencing the transition to a political democracy and living my adult life in a developed country with a high per-capita GDP but also some of the most egregious incidents of inequality, I became a fierce fighter for progressive policies and against political oppression. I realized corruption can come from the left or the right. I realized having one party in control of all branches of government is oppressive, and that while a two-party system is better, it’s still not enough for a true democracy.

In his book Disturbing the Peace, Václav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s first democratically elected president, wrote something I subscribe to more and more: “Parties should not take direct part in elections, nor should they be allowed to give anyone, a priori, the crutches of power, since when they do they inevitably become bureaucratic, corrupt, and undemocratic. They should instead provide those who participate in power-- having been elected-- with an intellectual base, with opportunities to hone their own opinions.”

Today’s big corporations are not dissimilar to state-run economies. Their employees and small shareholders are not personally invested. They see little meaning in their work. Meanwhile, our dreams as humans are universal. Whether it’s 1989 in Eastern Europe or 2019 in the United States, we need more than just the consumption that drives our everyday lives-- we need meaning, peace, fairness and the ability to negotiate our differences without the interference of powerful interests that silence us.

In our current system, I regularly remind myself what we really wanted in 1989: freedom, equality, fairness, access to opportunities and an end to oppression. We wanted the beauty we’d been deprived of; not in a trivial sense, but in the sense defined by writer Sandra Lubarsky-- “sustaining and flourishing of life-in-relationship with life.”

As we head into 2020, I hope young people in this country will find the courage to demand transformation, and, like they did in 1989 Czechoslovakia, the older generations will allow them to lead. We must do the same thing here that we did there-- remove old structures from power-- in order to get out of the climate, health care and housing crises while re-envisioning a new democracy-- equal, inclusive, just and generous.

A Very Different Lou Reed From The Guy I Knew

A couple of days ago a book came in the mail. Before I retired from Warner Bros, books used to come in the mail all the time. They don't any longer. I opened it and it was The Life Of Lou Reed-- Notes From The Velvet Underground by Howard Sounes. Never heard of him. Never heard of the book. But before I put it aside I noticed there was a note. Oh, I had heard of him. It was a note scrawled on a memo sheet thanking me for the interview. Ah... yes, the British author who had done the biography of Charles Bukowski and then one I never read by had heard all about, Down the Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan. When Sounes called from London about coming to L.A. to interview me, I had just been diagnosed with cancer. I was still reeling and... well, more fatalistic than scared. I had misgivings but I had the (mistaken as it turns out) impression that Laurie was OK with Lou's friends doing interviews for the book. I said ok, but knew that the kind of stuff a muckraking author would want most was stuff I had promised myself I'd be taking to my grave. Sounes wanted to come talk to me anyway, since-- I gather-- few others, or actually no one, who had worked with Lou at Warner Brothers was willing to talk with him. I haven't read the book yet but I have it in a small "to be read" pile. My cancer treatments are over now but I still have a touch of "chemo-brain" and reading doesn't come as easily to me as it once did.

Then this morning someone sent me the Nico Hines piece, Monster, in the Daily Beast. That I read. Oy vey! It made me run to the little books to be read pile and grab it and look in the index for my name. It listed 10 pages where Sounes used quotes. What had I said? I sat down and read each page. Whew! Nothing bad and nothing that would piss off Lou's ghost road to what Hines called the accusations in the book of "racial slurs and abusing women." (His piece's sub-title is Lou Reed Described Bob Dylan as a 'Pretentious Kike'.)

I first met Lou in 1966. I was a college freshman. Six years older than me, he seemed much more worldly and experienced. He was 24 and I went to see his band play on St. Marks Place off Second Avenue in the East Village. I tried to go to every show they played. I had never seen anything like it. Andy Warhol was their "manager" and the Velvet Underground was part of his presentation. I originally went for Warhol, went back from the band. I didn't get to know him 'til 22 years later when Seymour Stein signed him to Sire Records, where I was working at the time. Maybe he had mellowed but I had never heard him express any of the sentiments Sounes' book attributes to him-- and I'd say I spent a great deal of time with him between 1988 and his death 25 years later. "Lou Reed, begins Hines after reading Sounes' book, "was a monster." That sure isn't how I remember him.

"I loved his music, but you have to go where the story goes," Sounes told the Daily Beast. "The obituaries were a bit too kind, he was really a very unpleasant man. A monster really; I think truly the word monster is applicable."

The genius behind one of the greatest albums of the 1960s, was unstable, egotistical, misogynistic, violent, and selfish, according to some of those who knew him best.

Reed was well-known for his outrageous public statements—he once told a journalist: “I don’t like n----rs like Donna Summer.” In private he was just as offensive, one old friend told Sounes that he jealously described Bob Dylan as a “pretentious kike.”

Nasty, racist slurs are far from the most shocking revelation in Notes From The Velvet Underground. Reed always claimed that his lyrics depicting violence against women were fictional, but the experience of his first wife would suggest otherwise.

Bettye Kronstad, who married Reed in 1973, described life on tour with the tempestuous rock star. “He would, like, pin you up against a wall,” she said. “Tussle you. Hit you… shake you… And then one time he actually gave me a black eye.”

Allan Hyman, an old school friend, said Reed had even been happy to strike a girlfriend while having dinner with him and his wife. “She would say something. He’d get pissed off at what she said and smash her around the back of the head. [My wife said,] ‘Lou, if you continue to hit her, you have to leave.’ And then he smacks her in the back of the head. So she said, ‘Get out!’”

Sounes said there was a clear pattern of this sort of behavior. “It’s quite clear that he was a misogynist and he did hit women. They weren’t all knocked about but he knocked his first wife about and he wrote repeatedly about violence towards women--he seemed absolutely obsessed with the subject.”

On his third solo album, for example, Reed sang: “Caroline says, as she gets up from the floor / ‘You can hit me all that you want to / But I don’t love you anymore.’”

In a notorious public spat, Reed also slapped David Bowie when the Thin White Duke suggested he cut down on the drink and drugs. In another confrontation with Bowie, the two men spilled out of a car wrestling and fighting each other. “Lou Reed obviously had a very ambivalent relationship with David Bowie, David Bowie really rescued his career, Transformer is what it is because of David Bowie,” explained Sounes. “He obviously resented the part that Bowie had played in his career. And that he was a much bigger star, and I think perhaps, Lou Reed fancying him a little bit at the start.”

...When Paul Morrissey, one of the Andy Warhol collaborators who knew Reed during the Velvet Underground years, was asked to take part in interviews for the book he suggested no one would want to learn more about Reed. “You need a good title like The Hateful Bitch [or] The Worst Person Who Ever Lived. Something that says this isn’t a biography of a great human being, because he was not… He was a stupid, disgusting, awful human being.”

Some of Reed’s erratic behavior may have been related to the major mental health issues he endured. After suffering a breakdown at college, he was treated with a barbaric course of electric shock therapy. When the Velvet Underground split, Reed suffered a second less well-known breakdown and was forced to return to his family home to live with his parents.

He was diagnosed as bipolar and certainly suffered manic depressive episodes.

“The way that he tried to protect himself as a vulnerable, sensitive person who, for instance, was very hurt by reviews when they were bad was to be aggressive and say: fuck you!” said Sounes.

The Velvet Underground didn’t receive the commercial success their song-writing deserved until decades after their demise but at least there had been some critical praise. As Reed’s solo-career continued that also fell away.

It didn’t help his mood.

Godfrey Diamond, Reed’s producer on Coney Island Baby, remembers an exchange late in his career. “Lou, all I want you to do is give me another ‘Sweet Jane.’ You’re the master of writing songs about people,” Diamond remembered. “He looks at me and goes, ‘Godfrey, I try to write ‘Sweet Jane’ every day,’ in this deep, awful, mean, aggravated, upset voice. Clearly, that wasn’t the thing to say.”

The foul behavior started long before the bad reviews, however. No matter what era Sounes turned to, he heard the same thing: “The word that kept coming up was prick,” he said. “Girlfriends called him a prick, people he was at school with called him a prick; people in his band called him a prick.”

It was a constant. “Lou was an easy person to despise,” said Ritchie Fliegler, who worked with Reed on Street Hassle. “He was the biggest prick I ever met, or ever worked for, but he sure wrote some great songs.”

I didn't know Lou when he was severely under the influence of drugs. He was completely sober by the time he came to Sire and the portrait Sounes and Hines paint is someone I sure didn't know, not the guy I stayed up all night with in the White House talking with Czech President Václav Havel, not the guy who several times over the years revealed his innermost fears and vulnerabilities, not the guy who contributed generously to non-profits fighting discrimination and the right-wing agenda he disagreed with so strongly... But one thing I learned over the years is that people form their own impressions and they're just as valid to them as mine are to me. Hopefully history will value value Laurie's more than... anyone else's.

Apparently Lou was an acquired taste and, like everything worth a second look, you had to make some effort to get the best of what he had to offer. Fortunately, what everyone seems to agree is that Lou wrote great songs and brought important music to the ears of tens of millions of people and influenced many of the most important musicians in the world-- not to mention the man who won freedom for his nation in what he called a "Velvet Revolution."

A Real Tear Jerker This One

Occupy Los Angeles - The Beginning Is Near from Marta Evry on Vimeo.

My friend Marta made this inspiring video at the OccupyLA encampment at City Hall here in Los Angeles. I like!

Everybody was talking about this Krugman post today-- I Am Not Your Mirror Image about Keynesianism. But I'm going to spare you the details beyond the link above and the groovy video below. Instead, let's look at the less complicated and wonky Krugman post that no one is talking about but my friend Harry, Hard Times On Wall Street. Get out your hankies:

An era of decline and disappointment for bankers may not end for years, according to interviews with more than two dozen executives and investors. Blaming government interference and persecution, they say there isn’t enough global stability, leverage or risk appetite to triumph in the current slump.
…
Options Group’s Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.

The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.

“This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”

Piss you off? Good. Get ready for OccupyTheBoardRoom this Saturday... details soon.

Fall On Your Sword

Except for the members of the Velvet Underground, the employees of the Dom on St Marks Place and Gerald Malanga, I doubt anyone saw Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable more frequently than I did. I'm pretty certain I went to every show, just bowled over by the music, particularly Heroin, and the way that Warhol projected his songs onto the band. I was just a teenager, a very stoned one, and 1966 is a kind of blur... except for those shows. Since then-- 45 years ago next month-- I've seen lots of bands use film and lights, pretty much all of them basing it on Warhol's vision. Until tonight.

My friend Steve, who I knew from when I worked at Sire and he was the star of a band we had called the Ocean Blue, called me the other day to say he was coming to L.A. with a band he's managing now... well, kind of a band. They're a studio outfit that doesn't make records or do concerts. They're called Fall On Your Sword and they make advertisements and soundtracks. And would I like to come see them play? My excuse for this kind of thing is that I go to sleep at 9 so it's always too late to see anything. It always works. But they played at 6. I guess I could have come up with some other excuse, but am I glad I didn't.

The integration between film and music I saw tonight was the inevitable post-Warhol quantum leap. I felt so lucky to have seen it. Other than half a dozen club shows in hometown NYC, these 2 English multi-media composers (+ a drummer) normally only do museum openings-- although Steve said they have a gig coming up at Madison Square Garden soon. And they win advertising awards-- loads of them, like a Clio for their work on the Nomis Damn Boots campaign and a Cannes Gold Lion Award.

They won me over right away with their zombie scenes from Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, chillingly reminiscent of delegates gathering for a Republican National Convention, and their cover of Bauhaus' spectacular "Bela Lugosi's Dead." But what had me flipping out was the live interaction on stage between the band and the short clip they made for "I'd Do Anything" (below), an achievement Warhol just never got to. I see filmmaker Jason Reitman, who caught them live at Sundance, had the same reaction I did.

"They were performing at the Another Earth party, a movie for which they wrote the original score. I was just about to leave for some much-needed sleep when live from the stage, I heard an (I-shit-you-not) electronic version of “I’d Do Anything” from the musical Oliver. It was accompanied by visuals of Battlestar Galactica robots seemingly singing the song with the band.  It was dark, strange, cool, moving, and absolutely hypnotic... Consider Yourself Awesome. Consider Me A Fan."

Yeah, me too.

What Are Republicans Doing Behind Closed Doors?

I don't watch much TV but I do watch a lot of YouTubes everyday. Although this Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell/Velvet Underground mashup was a close second, my favorite video today-- music included-- was this political thriller called Behind Closed Doors:

REPUBLICAN PARTY'S LATEST SPIN CYCLE-- THEY'RE AGENTS OF CHANGE

We've tried to cover the jaw-dropping spin coming from the various committees that make up the Republican Party's Inside the Beltway Establishment as they make excuse after excuse for their abysmal losing streak in the Special elections of late. We even did a little video clip, a special one. Today's Washington Post finds we're not the only ones who think the GOP should stop spinning and start a process of serious self-examination.

Most party insiders pray that they'll manage to scrape by in the GOP stronghold in northern Mississippi and can banish the unpleasant idea of any kind introspective analysis for a few more months. But even as conservative and Stepford-like a hack as Texas' Jeb Hensarling realizes a time for reckoning is upon them: "It's a time of sober reflection and, to some extent, resolve. I hope these special elections are a wake-up call."

After the party was devastated and demoralized by shocking defeats in overwhelmingly Republican districts in Illinois and Louisiana NRCC chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) blamed the low calibre of Republican candidates, although not as a way of looking in the mirror and examining how extreme the party has become or how out of sync their positions are from the aspirations and judgments of everyday Americans. He mentioned that the party is out of money and that if they had another big messy scandal in the headlines they'd be sunk.

As if on cue, within days, the tale of Staten Island's hypocritical congressman Vito Fossella starts unfolding like a soap opera on TV. "Just when Republicans thought they had seen everything, Rep. Vito Fossella (R-N.Y.) admitted Thursday that he has a 3-year-old daughter from a long-running extramarital affair with a retired Air Force officer. Fossella, who is married and has three young children at home in Staten Island, is also facing drunken-driving charges in Virginia. GOP strategists are debating whether he should resign or announce that he will not seek reelection in November. Fossella's resignation [expected this week] would mean another special election, this one in the nation's most expensive media market."

If they lose Tuesday in Mississippi it will clearly be because they haven't learned anything at all from watching which way the wind is blowing. The NRCC and right-wing front groups are still pouring millions of dollars into the campaign to poison the atmosphere with irrelevant filth about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as though that is going to make up for Republican policies that have wrecked the economy and left us stranded in a no-win war in Iraq.

Independent analysts agree that a loss Tuesday would leave Republicans with no excuses. They blamed poor candidates in races in Louisiana and Illinois, where the GOP lost a special election for the seat long held by former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert.

"The Republicans would be ignoring reality if they try to explain away this race," said Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the Rothenberg Political Report.
Since 1994, Republican Roger Wicker has been reelected to his House seat with between 63 and 79 percent of the vote.

But with Wicker appointed to the Senate to fill the seat vacated by Trent Lott, who retired, Republicans are having difficulty unifying behind Greg Davis, the mayor of Southaven, a Memphis suburb in the northwest corner of the 1st District. Davis beat a Republican from the eastern portion of the district in the March primary. That win puts Davis on the ballot in November, whether he wins or loses this week's special election.

Democrat Travis Childers, a court officer in Prentiss County, came within a few hundred votes of outright victory in the first round of special-election balloting April 22, prompting national Republicans to send out an SOS for Tuesday's runoff. Davis, the NRCC and conservative allies have flooded the airwaves with a multimillion-dollar campaign that tries to negatively tie Childers to Pelosi and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

This is the second special election this month in which House Republicans have tried to turn the race into a referendum on a Democratic candidate's ties to Obama. The strategy was unsuccessful in Louisiana, but Republicans view the Mississippi district as more receptive because it is slightly more conservative and has fewer African American voters.

But while Tom Cole doubles down on the negative campaigning and puts the whole bankroll of Rev. Wright, less extremist minds within the party realize it's a strategy with little hope for success.

Tom Davis, who chaired the NRCC for four years, said he doubts the effectiveness of the anti-Obama strategy because of the contrast between the consistently unpopular Bush and the likely Democratic nominee.

"When Bush tries to articulate a vision," Davis said, pausing to choose his words carefully, "he will butcher the Gettysburg Address. Obama, he will make an A&P grocery list sing."
House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), in a private meeting with Republicans on Tuesday, admitted the limitations of the anti-Obama strategy and tried to sell his troops on an Obama-like message of "change" as their only hope for success.

"We can't win SOLELY by tying our opponents to Barack Obama and his liberal views. We also have to prove Republicans are agents of change," Boehner told his colleagues, according to talking points prepared by his staff and provided to the Post.

With the party's presidential nominee having rubber stamped every significant agenda item on the Bush-Cheney agenda, spinning the GOP into agents of change isn't likely to get much traction, not even in northern Mississippi. And the Republican congressional leadership will have a difficult time transforming the GOP image as the party of obstruction and rubber stamp docility for a hated and failed president into one that stands for any kind of acceptable change-- unless they can convince people that more war, more deregulation, more greed and avarice, more corruption and more divisiveness is the kind of change they're looking for. Sounds like a tough row to hoe. GOP professional propagandists share, at least to some extent, the myopia of the party's leaders. "The political environment isn't as bad as it was in 2006 when Republicans lost both houses of Congress and a lot more," writes the cloistered and clueless Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard. Still he has to admit that "more than 80 percent of Americans believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction. Democrats have steadily maintained the 10 percentage point lead in voter preference they gained two years ago. And President Bush's job performance rating is stuck in the low 30s, a level of unpopularity that weakens the Republican case for holding the White House in 2008." Maybe what they need to do is listen to a little Velvet Underground, something I suspect not many of them were doing back in the 60's and 70's.




UPDATE: IS ROY BLUNT TRYING TO SABOTAGE McCAIN? OR IS HE JUST STUPID?

Think Progress found a major discrepancy between two McCain surrogates, Mitt Romney and Roy Blunt. Both were in CNN's Late Edition this morning-- but with very different messages about what NcCain would be if-- God forbid-- he ever got to the White House. Romney claims McCain will be a big change from the failed and hated policies of the Bush Regime. Blunt, perhaps more honest than Willard would ever be, admits that McCain is just the same snake oil in another vial:

BLITZER: So it would be in effect a third Bush term when it came to pro-growth tax policies?

BLUNT: It would be. I think it would be. And I think that’s a good thing.