Senate '08: Merkley In, Bates Out

Oregon's Speaker of the House, Jeff Merkley (pictured right), will oppose the state's wishy-washy Republican Senator Gordon Smith in his 2008 reelection bid. A few days after Merkley's announcement, prospective candidate Alan Bates got out of the way.

Merkley will face some opposition in the primary from former Justice Department attorney Steven Novick. Both are polling poorly against Smith right now, but those numbers are likely to improve as they gain statewide name recognition.

Smith has been desperately backpedaling from his position on Iraq, saying that the war "may even be criminal." But voters in Oregon won't fooled. Smith voted for the war and publicly supported it until last December, and even though he thinks the war is literally a crime he says he won't vote to censure the President. Smith's glaring record of support for the Bush Administration and promotion of huge tax slashes for giant corporations will cost him his seat next election.

Visit the candidates:
Jeff Merkley
Steven Novick

Bay Buchanan: Americans are Stupid

Flipping through channels this evening I accidentally landed on the Fox News propaganda flagship Hannity and Colmes. Normally I hate to give the noise machine any credit, but sometimes it's good to know what the extreme right is talking about, so I tuned in for a moment.

Buchanan, who's just as vitriolic as her more famous brother Pat, was screeching about Hillary Clinton's supposed flip-flop on the Iraq debacle and accused her a Clinton strategist also on the program of dodging tough questions. Then Alan Colmes, in a rare moment of relevance, asked Buchanan why Republicans wouldn't answer tough questions by doing the YouTube debate.

In a response that perfectly illustrates the attitude of the White House and it's political allies' attitudes toward the American people, Buchanan all but rolled her eyes as she explained that "those weren't tough questions, those questions were stupid." I mean, come on! Those questions were submitted by actual voters! Average Americans! Why on earth should Republican candidates stand to be questioned by average Americans? Heck, some of them might be poor.

Feds Raid Home of Sen. Ted Stevens

The FBI and IRS raided the mansion of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens today in the course of a massive investigation of Stevens on bribery charges. Here's the story:

In 2000, out of nowhere, Stevens renovated his house and nearly doubled the size. Stevens says he paid for the renovation himself, but according to CNN one of the contractors on the project said he actually submitted his bill directly to an oil company called VECO before sending it to the Senator.

The allegation that Stevens, arguably the crankiest old man in the Senate, traded influence for money if far from surprising. As a stalwart power broker on Capitol Hill for the last 39 years Stevens is the king of pork, maybe most notable for the hugely expensive bridge to nowhere project. While siphoning millions of federal tax dollars away from much-needed programs and using it to build useless roads and bridges isn't illegal, it certainly suggests you might be cooperating with oil and construction companies.

But the real story here isn't a the grumpy old Alaska Senator; it's the glaringly obvious corruption that has riddled the Republican party to it's core raising it's ugly head again. The GOP has been rocked by scandal after scandal after scandal, to the point where voters aren't even surprised anymore. Even Anderson Cooper, breaking the story on CNN, didn't seem particularly enthusiastic. After all, it's just another Republican corruption story.

Is Impeachment on the Horizon?

President Bush's approval ratings are the second lowest of any President in US history. Only Richard Nixon sunk lower just four days before his resignation, but he was only a point lower than Bush. Meanwhile, US troops continue to flounder helplessly in the quagmire of Iraq and scandal after scandal, subpoena after subpoena, rock the White House. Is impeachment on the horizon?

Let's hope not. Of course Mr. Bush and his staff deserve nothing less than the boot, but an impeachment proceeding would be a huge strategic error for the Democrats. If the Clinton impeachment taught us anything it's that going after a sitting President with the biggest of all sticks is risky business. Clinton's popularity actually rose during his impeachment and trial.

Obviously, there are some major differences between Clinton and Bush. Clinton was persecuted for fornication, an act not altogether disliked by Americans, while Bush would likely be impeached for any number of serious crimes. The problem is that no matter how much Americans dislike the President, they dislike Congress almost as vehemently. Any impeachment proceeding will be perceived as Democrats wasting time and ignoring real issues. That perception wouldn't be entirely wrong, either.

Bush's crimes are egregious, don't get me wrong, but there is NO chance the Senate could come up with 67 votes to actually remove the President from office. Impeachment proceedings would consume Congress's time like a MMOG, and the national media wouldn't shut up about it for anything less than a mass kidnapping of pretty, white, pregnant women. The public would become absolutely sick of the whole thing. Republican voters would rally behind their embattled President while Democrats would just tune out. An impeachment attempt might be the only way for the Democrats to lose the 2008 election.

So folks over on DailyKos...please be quiet.

Ward Churchill: A Look at the Issues

Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who became famous for calling the 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns" in his paper "Some People Push Back" was fired yesterday allegedly for academic misconduct and plagiarism. This has caused rejoicing in some circles (Fox News and Pals) and outrage by others (ACLU).

There are two specific issues that are worth hashing out. The first issue is the freedom of academic speech, and the limits that academic speech should have. The second issue is the danger of academic misconduct.

Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado first became famous when he wrote an article in which he celebrated the 9/11 hijackers as freedom fighters and criticized the idea that those who died in the World Trade Center Towers were innocent victims. His most well-known quote is his comparison of the 9/11 victims to Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who was in charge of logistics for Hitler's final solution.

The quote in its full context is as follows:

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Churchill explained his comment saying:

The Eichmann phrase was meant "to analogize a technocratic elite at the core of empire to be, not Eichmann per se, but 'little Eichmanns,' " he said Monday. "Eichmann himself in his own context symbolized those nameless bureaucratic functionaries who performed in an absolutely conscienceless and immoral fashion. In knowledge that their functions created carnage, they did their jobs. ..."

"That is what Hannah Arendt found that Eichmann manifested," Churchill added, referring to Arendt's book on Eichmann and her popularizing of the phrase "the banality of evil."

"That was his meaning," Churchill said, "not the horror of the man per se, not his monstrosity, because ultimately what she confronted when she confronted him was not the monstrous but the banal, the everyman dimension of the Nazi functionary who made the Holocaust work."

Before discussing the importance of these statements, and Mr. Churchill's right to say this allow me to echo Dahlia Lithwick when she said of Mr. Churchill that "One couldn't unearth a less attractive poster boy for free-speech rights in academia."As Ms. Lithwick explains, Mr. Churchill's writing often takes the form of polemic rants published in alternative, non-peer-reviewed forums. Luckily for American academics a professor's personality, or writing style does not make that professor any more or less deserving of freedom of speech.

As Mr. Churchill's explanation shows, his comment is not simply a rant lashing out against the victims of 9/11 or promoting the purposes of Al-Qaeda. Instead, Mr. Churchill is engaging in a debate about the actions of the U.S. Government and the consequences of those actions. Even in his style of writing he is channeling such academics as James Cone and Noam Chompsky. Academia must remain a land where one can say anything at anytime. There is plenty of room for criticism of Mr. Churchill, however that criticism should be in journals, the campus, and the classroom, not in the boardroom and the halls of government. Universities are places that ought to facilitate the marketplace of ideas, and allow diverse ideas to compete, adapt and grow.

Unfortunately, the discussion cannot end there. The official reason for Churchill's dismissal was deliberate misconduct and "shoddy research" according to a faculty panel that recommended his suspension for 1 year. The full report can be read here.

Academic responsibility is as important as academic freedom for many of the same reasons out lined above. Those who are lucky enough to receive tenure and the freedoms associated with that status of "professor" are also entrusted to do accurate, responsible, original, and well-researched work. There are 4,140 degree granting colleges and universities, and most of these schools are policed by faculty panels and committees. Too often, these committees go easy on their colleagues who are accused of academic misconduct. In order to safeguard the liberties that many academics now enjoy, they need to be willing to crackdown on those who abuse those rights.

After a careful analysis of the facts, and the above issues, it is clear that Ward Churchill's dismissal is an example of an administration censuring a professor. As Miss Lithwick points out, prior to Mr. Churchill hitting the front page in 2005:

Nobody at the University of Colorado seems to have much minded that Churchill's footnotes often took the form of creative exaggerations and omissions, or that his trite little analogies to all-things-Nazi is a rhetorical device most of us outgrew in the third grade.

Instead, the faculty panel that issued the report about Mr. Churchill did not begin investigating him until politicians and media talking heads called for his resignation in 2005. This report did indeed find that there was academic misconduct, however even they only suggested a year long suspension. It was the administrators of the university who pushed for the dismissal of Mr. Churchill, the same ones who have been looking to dismiss him since 2005.

Will Mr. Churchill win his case accusing the University of Colorado of denying him his 1st amendment rights? Probably not. However, our university system is in serious danger if this dismissal leads to greater censorship and a speech "chill" on campuses around the country.

Contributors Wanted

Earlier this summer MaryAnn and Pablo were kind enough to join me in this little project, and it's grown quite a bit. Since June we've been posting more regularly and traffic is up to better than 250 hits a month. I want it to keep growing, so I'd like to invite any readers out there interested in participating to start posting. If you'd like to contribute, send me an email at nrobinso at willamette dot edu. You can post as frequently or as infrequently as you want, and on any topic you want, under to proviso that you don't break any laws.

Security Theater

After two long years the FAA has decided to let airline passengers take lighters on airplanes. It turns out you can set off shoe bombs with little batteries, too, so taking away Bics didn't do a whole lot to keep us safer after all. Oops! The New York Times quotes TSA assistant secretary Kip Hawley as calling the confiscation of lighters "security theater" and saying it "trivializes the security process."

This comes just a couple weeks after Michael Chertoff warned the country to be extra scared of Al Qaeda because he had a "gut feeling." Click here to see Keith Olbermann talking trash about that.

The most interesting part of the story: TSA agents collected about 22,000 lighters a day, and disposed of them at a cost of four million dollars a year! Four million bucks! Do you have any idea how many kids could go to HeadStart for that kind of money? And all they actually needed to do was hand out the lighters in baggage claim to all the angry smokers trying to spark matches.

Prisoners of the Census

Most people reading this will be familiar with the term "felon disenfranchisement." In most states, if you get convicted of a felony you lose your right to vote, at least for a while. Since minorities are disproportionately convicted of felonies, the result is that those same minority groups are underrepresented at the polls. About 5.3 million Americans can't vote because of these policies, and included in that figure are 13% of all black men.

That's old news, but you may not know that the Census Bureau actually supercharges minority underrepresentation with fuzzy math. The census determines who lives where for the purposes of apportioning representation, so big cities are supposed to get more state and national representatives than rural areas. But the census counts people as living where they sleep, which means they count prisoners as living in prisons rather than in their homes.

The problem is that the vast majority of prisons are built in rural areas, while the vast majority of prisoners are from urban areas. In Illinois, for example, 60% of prisoners come from Chicago while 99% of the prison cells are outside of Chicago. In New York, NYC residents make up two thirds of prisoners, but 91% of them are held in upstate prisons. Dozens of other states exhibit similar numbers.

This practice creates major distortions, or "phantom populations," which skew democratic representation. Urban minorities are underrepresented while rural whites are overrepresented. In New York, phantom population have created at least seven severely underpopulated senate districts overpopulated. When state senators these districts vote on legislation like sentencing guidelines they have a tremendous incentive to keep prison populations high--if they don't, they could lose their jobs. The people who are supposed to represent prisoners actually work to keep them in prison. Worse still, since money for Federal programs is frequently distributed on the basis of population, urban districts get less money than they should.

Counting prisoners this way blatantly disenfranchises minorities who are already underrepresented by felon voting laws. The insidious catch-22 is that the people affected by this travisty can't do anything about it because they have no voice in the system. They've been stripped of their right to vote. To find out more, and to see what you can do to help, visit Prisoners of the Census.

Violence in Kurdistan

Iraqi Kurdistan, a chunk of territory in Northern Iraq, has long been the safest region of the country. The Kurds were essentially autonomous under Saddam Hussein, so the American invasion and occupation did little damage in the north. Lately, that reputation for security is being called into question.

First, there's the whole mess with Turkey. The history is long and complicated, but the short version is that the PKK, a Kurdish separatist movement, has been fighting a low-level civil war with Turkey since 1984. According to Turkey about 2,000 PKK separatists are holding out in its mountains, while as many as 3,000 more hiding in northern Iraq. This has prompted the Turks to mass 140,000 troops on the Iraq border, where they've been growling and snarling about invading. That's an idle threat since the US would never stand for it, but tensions are high and some kind of violence may be inevitable. This report claims Turkey and Iran have cooperatively shelled some Kurdish towns, but the source may be unreliable.

Then there's Kirkuk, a whole new can of worms. Kirkuk was a largely Arab city pre-invasion, but since the Americans showed up Kurds have moved in aggressively on the oil rich area. Ethnic tensions between the groups boiled over today as three bombs rocked the city, one killing at least 75. The bombings come just months before a referendum on whether Kirkuk should join the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Obviously bombings are standard fare in Iraq, but this attack is remarkable. It's yet another reflection of the failure of the surge--insurgents are fleeing heavily-fortified Baghdad to hit easy targets in the North. It's also a potential indicator the the conflict is spreading to yet another ethnic group. So far the Kurds have stayed out of the fray, but they are now feeling pressure from all sides.

Meanwhile, Washingon remains hopelessly stuck in the mud.

The Senate in 2008

With all the hype surrounding the Presidential race it's easy to forget the US Senate is having a critically important election, too. With 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and two independents (Lieberman and Sanders both caucus with the Dems), Democratic control of the Senate is tenuous, but Republicans are on their heels. They have 22 seats up for grabs in 2008 versus the Democrats 12, and popular uprising against the war in Iraq is bringing several of those seats into play. Reflecting their weakening constituent support, seven Republicans broke ranks and voted for cloture on Jim Webb's proposal to lengthen troops time off in between tours, a move which would functionally decrease troop levels in Iraq. All but one of those Republicans is up for reelection in 2008.

At least three Republican seats--Maine, Minnesota, and Colorado--are already clearly competitive, but half a dozen more could move into the "toss-up" column in the next six months. Oregon's Gordon Smith, New Mexico's Pete Domenici, and New Hampshire's John Sununu are all vulnerable to the right candidate, and at least three more Republicans are considering retirement. John Warner (VA), Ted Stevens (AK), and James Inhofe (OK) are all safe if they decide to run, but if they retire each of those seats could go blue.

Meanwhile, Democrats will be able to avoid playing defense. The only really contestable Democratic seat is in Louisiana where Mary Landrieu looks vulnerable since most of the state's poor people are still refugees in Houston and Atlanta. Her chances are looking brighter, though, as Louisiana's Republican Senator John Vitter's sex scandal is making waves. If reconstruction efforts bring more blue voters back to New Orleans in the next couple years, she should be relatively safe. It also helps that she's already got $2.7 million in the bank (not her freezer) and Republicans can't seem to find a candidate.

So the forecast looks grim for Republicans. Even if they manage a miracle and Iraq becomes a non-issue, they still have to pour time and money into defending seats across the country. The Democrats will pick and choose where to attack, and will scarcely have to lift a finger to hold their own.

Worse than Iraq

Neoconservatism is not dead. The ideology of American imperialism and global conquest should have been decimated by failure upon devastating failure in Iraq, but the thready pulse is getting stronger. In the halls of power neocon elites, unshaken by the unmitigated disasters of their foreign policy, are setting their sights on a new target: Iran.

Last month Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Norman Podhoretz published a novella presenting massive airstrikes as the only option for dealing with Iran. US military and White House officials menacingly assert Iran's engagement in a proxy war against US forces, and President Bush continues threaten Iran, leaving "all options on the table." Meanwhile, Republican Presidential candidates fuel the fire. John McCain turned the theatrical performance of "Imminent Danger II" into a song and dance act; Fred Thompson, the unannounced front-runner, has called for a blockade.

Unilateral military action against Iran would be phenomenally stupid, and those who advocate it are willfully ignorant of the facts. The logic of the neocons own argument, that Ahmadinejad is a madman hellbent on the destruction of the US and Israel, guarantees an escalating military response from Iran. The results would be devastating.

First, Iran sits between Iraq, Afghanistan, and well over a hundred thousand US troops. If, as the US Generals assert, Iran is successfully killing our soldiers IED's in a covert proxy war, imagine the damage they could do in an all-out conflict. The Iranian Army is not a band of starving, poorly trained conscripts brandishing dilapidated weaponry. It is the strongest military force in the region (US and Israel notwithstanding) posing a "significant military threat" to the Persian Gulf and boasting "significant capabilities for asymmetric warfare." If we bomb Iran, US troops will die.

Second, Iran's small navy possesses incredible power due to its strategic location. The Straight of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman and channels 40% of the world's oil supply. Inconveniently, it also borders Iran. The Iranian Navy can't fight American warships, but it can scuttle warships and lay mines in the Straight. If Iran successfully closed Hormuz to oil traffic, the impact on global energy supplies could be catastrophic.

Third, Iran's paramilitary arm extends across the Middle East in the form of increasingly powerful militant groups like Hezbollah. These groups present a serious threat to US soldiers and local pro-American officials and advocates, but their threat to Israel is even greater. Last summer Hezbollah alone forced the exponentially more powerful Israeli forces into a stalemate and the moral victory generated massive public support. An American assault on a third Islamic would catapult public support for these groups.

Even if limited American airstrikes didn't provoke full scale retaliation from Iran it would still be disastrous. US aggression would almost certainly trigger popular uprisings across the Middle East. Pro-Western governments in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are already vulnerable, and massive destabilization in these countries would be the best case scenario. That danger is particularly severe in Pakistan, a nuclear power where popular support for Taliban forces is growing. Even the debate over whether to hit Iran with military force is percipitating conflict. Concerns over US actions are reverberating through the Middle East and Islamic Asia. An article published today in a Pakistani periodical frets that "it is hard to visualize the Americans [ending] their program of regime change in Iran."

It's tempting to blow off concerns over a potential attack on Iran as mere paranoia from an American left wing still shocked by the hubris of the invasion of Iraq, but that would be a grave mistake. The war with Iran may have already begun.

Spy Away

A divided U.S. appeals court ordered a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Bush's secret wiretapping program dismissed today on grounds that the plaintiffs had no right to bring the suit in the first place. The court said the group of lawyers, journalists and scholars lacked standing because they couldn't prove they were subject to the program.

If that seems remotely reasonable to you, consider this: the names of the people subject to the wiretapping program are secret. It's impossible for the plaintiffs to know definitively that their phones are tapped because the government won't tell them. Of course, that's the whole problem to begin with.

Furthermore, it's a joke to think the NSA might not be tapping the plaintiffs' phones. The suit was brought by the ACLU on behalf of a group of attorneys representing enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. If the NSA isn't listening to those conversations, just what the hell are they doing?

So, to formulate this deliciously devilish catch-22 formally, it's still illegal for the government to spy on you without a warrant, but the government doesn't have to tell you it's spying on you if it doesn't have a warrant. The only way to stop the spying is by suing, but you can't sue unless you can prove the government is spying on you...which they don't have to tell you.


Predictably, the two judges voting for this twisted logic were Republican appointees. The ACLU says they'll appeal the case to the Supreme Court. I wander which way Thomas, Scalia, Roberts and Alito will vote?

Henry Waxman

Congressman Henry Waxman knows a thing or two about overcoming adversity. Despite standing five foot five and strongly resembling a mole, the man has managed to represent Beverely Hills for 33 years. He's spent that time well. He was a driving force behind all kind of legislation, ranging from the Clean Air Act to Medicare catastrophic illness coverage. Remember that scene from The Insider where all the tobacco executives have to raise their right hand and lie about nicotine being addictive? That was Henry Waxman's doing.

But Waxman managed all that before he became the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, an almost magical title in Washington because the chair of that committee can issue subpoenas at will. That's very, very bad news Bush Administration and anyone else in Washington up to no good.

For the last six months Waxman has been playing hardball. Yesterday he subpoenaed a corporate pay expert to investigate corporate conflicts of interest. Today he announced his committee would examine the construction of the US Embassy in Baghdad--the company building the giant complex may be using forced labor.

Anyone who thinks Congress doesn't do anything hasn't been keeping up with the honorable representative from California.

The Transportation Department's Fuzzy Math

If you've ever flown on a commercial airliner, you've probably also spent some time (read: hours and hours and hours) trapped in a godawful airport a bazillion miles from home waiting for a delayed or cancelled flight. A couple weeks ago I got to spend about 14 hours in San Fransisco International trying to sleep on my laptop, so this story by the New York Times caught my interest.

The Transportation Department keeps tabs on how far behind schedule airlines are running, but their math is as fuzzy as the mold on the oranges in my dormitory refrigerator. That's because DoT only counts how long flights are delayed, not passengers. If your flight from OKC to DFW is delayed two hours, causing you to miss your connection to San Diego, your going to be hanging out in Dallas until you can book another flight. With jets jam-packed at record levels (85-90% of capacity) that might take hours or even days, but the DoT still only records your delay time as 2 hours. You could be trapped in a New York City terminal for longer than Viktor Navorski, but the DoT would still call it two hours.

In fact, a study by MIT showed that while DoT's average delay stat was a measly 15.4 minutes passengers who missed a connection or had cancelled flights suffered delays of more than five hours on average. The next time you see Anderson Cooper braving a snowstorm to talk, on location, about horrible delays in Frozen Wasteland City Airport that he's probably underestimating the real delay by about 66%.

Primary Strategy Shifts--All About the Benjamins

Scooter Libby can relax now that he's slipped out of the increasingly irrelevant grasp of the rule of law, but the leading Presidential candidates won't be getting a rest for quite a while. With the second quarter fundraising numbers trickling in, several campaigns are adjusting their campaign strategies.

John McCain is making the most visible shift, laying off staff like a Detroit automaker. McCain managed to raise a paltry $11 million last quarter. He's in such dire straights financially that he might actually consider accepting federal matching funds, a sure sign of a failing campaign. McCain might be better off kicking the national campaign to focus on winning big in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, but he's already elimated that move from consideration by dropping out of the Iowa straw poll. McCain's saving every penny he can by cutting salaries among his senior advisors, firing consultants, and trimming lower level staffers. He's still going to have to up the fundraising ante if he wants to compete in Super Duper Tuesday. TV time isn't cheap in California and New Jersey.

The Edwards campaign has already had to adapt to poor fundraising results. The former Senator is joining Mitt Romney in pouring time and resources almost exclusively into Iowa and New Hampshire. That move has prompted Hillary Clinton to increase her efforts in Iowa. Her strategy of "inevitability" took a hit this week when Barack Obama bested her in fundraising totals again, this time pulling in $31 million from a quarter of a million donors. The Clinton camp, which still holds a decisive lead in the polls, wants keep Ewards and Obama from getting a foot in the door with a winning performance in Iowa.

Poll numbers may not be moving around a lot, but cash-on-hand numbers are. It won't be too long before fundraising figures start to translate into polling figures.

Polling Update

Pollingreport.com has a slew of new data up today, and they show in dramatic fashion that nothing much is changing. Support for major candidates on both sides is virtually static.

Among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton is maintaining a solid lead with support ranging from the high thirties to low fourties, depending who you ask. A CBS poll shows her with 48%, but that survey excluded everyone but Hillary, Obama, and Edwards, so it's probably a blip on the radar. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is holding steady with support in the low twenties. He's behind but well within striking distance, especially with an extra $31 million in his war chest. John Edwards still needs a jump start; he's showing about 10% in the latest surveys and he managed to pull in only $9 million this quarter. That's five million less than the first quarter, suggesting the Edwards camp may be in real trouble.

The Republican numbers are shifting a bit with newcomer Fred Thompson shaking things up. He's scoring in the high teens or low twenties and can probably expect a modest bump when he formally announces his candidacy sometime soon. It looks like Thompson's support is coming from social conservatives bailing on Mitt Romney, who has sunk into single digits this week according to Fox, CNN, and CBS. Meanwhile, McCain and Guiliani are holding steady at around 20% and 30%, respectively.

Probably the most interesting stat in the polls this week comes from the CBS survey. They asked voters in each party how satisfied they were with the field of candidates. Nearly two thirds of Democrats said they were pleased as pie, but only one third of Republicans were satisfied. It's surprising that Republican satisfaction remains that low even after Fred Thompson's de facto entry into the race. Expect that number to move up, at least slightly, when the actor-turned-politician makes it official.

Finally, voters prefer the generic Democratic candidate to the Republican candidate by nearly two to one, but as always unnamed Democrats outperform named Democrats by a healthy margin.