Poll Volatility

If you’ve been paying attention to presidential election polls recently, you know they’ve been rather confusing. Not only has there been a wide disparity in the findings of different polls, but there’s also been big fluctuations in the findings of the same polling organizations from week to week.
What accounts for these large swings in the polls? According to The Hotline editor Chuck Todd, it’s women:

WOODRUFF: So, you’ve looked at a lot of numbers, how do you see the women’s vote shaping up this year with Bush and Kerry?
TODD: Well, it’s interesting. When you see John Kerry’s numbers they move when he does well in national polls, it’s because he’s doing really well among women voters. When President Bush has taken the lead it’s because he’s improved his numbers among women. This new Pew poll that’s out today shows exactly the same movement where President Bush before his convention was only getting 42 percent of women. After his convention he got it up to 48 percent.
Now as John Kerry has made some improvements there, Bush’s number is back down to about 43 percent. It’s the number that fluctuates. The CNN/Gallup poll right after the convention had President Bush getting 48 percent of the women’s vote. There is no way John Kerry can win this election if George Bush is even getting 45 percent of the vote. We did a study in the states. And if you look at the states there’s not a single state that George Bush carried of the showdown states where he got less than 45 percent of the vote.

Let’s hope voting women wise up by November 2.

School Closings

I was surprised to see all these local schools closed today. I don’t recall ever getting a day off of school due to rain–only about three inches of it at that.
Back in the good old days we had to battle the elements armed only with this quaint contraption we called an umbrella. I wonder what ever happened to those things.

Republuicans Differ on Iraq

Via Andrew Sullivan comes this Ryan Lizza observation on the Bush campaign:

[F]or the most part, spending time on the trail with Bush is like being transported to a parallel universe. The only music is Christian rock and country tunes about plain-talking everymen. The only people who ask the president questions are his most feverish supporters, never the press. In this alternate universe, Iraq and Afghanistan are marching effortlessly toward democracy. The economy is, in the words of former Broncos quarterback John Elway, who introduces Bush in Greenwood Village, “the best in the world.” John Kerry, whose platform is to the right of Clinton’s in 1992, is calling for a massive expansion of government.

Is Bush out of touch with reality? Well, let’s compare and contrast. Here’s what Bush had to say yesterday on Iraq:

In Iraq, there’s ongoing acts of violence. This country is headed toward democracy. There’s a strong Prime Minister in place. They have a national council. And national elections are scheduled for January. It wasn’t all that long ago that Saddam Hussein was in power with his torture chambers and mass graves. And today, this country is headed towards elections.
Freedom is on the march.

A beautiful sight, isn’t it–freedom is blossoming in Baghdad.
But here’s the contrasting view Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) offered yesterday:

“We’ve gotta be honest with ourselves … the worst thing we can do is hold ourselves hostage to some grand illusion that we’re winning,” he told reporters on Thursday.
“Right now we’re not winning. Things are getting worse,” Hagel added. “Measure that by any measurement you want. More casualties, more deaths, more oil pipeline sabotage, I mean you pick the measurement standard and it’s worse than where it was six months ago or 12 months ago.”

Hmm, two vastly different assessments. Which one do you think is more attuned to reality?

General William Odom, (Ret.)

The former head of the National Security Agency weighs in on Iraq:

“Bush hasn’t found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it’s worse — he’s lost on that front. That he’s going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It’s lost.” He added: “Right now, the course we’re on, we’re achieving [Osama] bin Laden’s ends.”
. . .
“This is far graver than Vietnam,” said Gen. Odom. “There wasn’t as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with a war that was not constructive for U.S. aims. But now we’re in a region far more volatile and we’re in much worse shape with our allies.”
. . .
Gen. Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and senior military officers over Iraq is worse than any he has ever seen with any previous U.S. government, including during Vietnam. “I’ve never seen it so bad between the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the military. There’s a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic.”

Wow, that sounds grim, doesn’t it?
But don’t worry. Our leader assures us that “freedom is on the march.”

Hug Gone Bad

Today’s lesson in legal ethics:
Model Rules of Professional Conduct: Rule 1.8(j):

A lawyer shall not have sexual relations with a client unless a consensual sexual relationship existed between them when the client-lawyer relationship commenced.

What does this mean? It means not to do this:

Theresa Olson, the former King County public defender accused of having sex with her client in a jail meeting room two years ago, testified yesterday that she had an inappropriate relationship and had physical contact with her client, but maintained that it was simply “a hug gone bad.”
. . .
Olson is accused of having sex with her client, Sebastian Burns, who was later found guilty with friend Atif Rafay of the 1994 slayings of Rafay’s father, mother and sister in their Bellevue home.
. . .
Olson testified that she and Burns had developed romantic feelings for each other, and that when Burns gave her a hug during their August 2002 meeting, she did not pull away.
“I should have, but I did not,” she said, adding that the hug � which was more than platonic � had surprised her.
Bar lawyer Joanne Abelson pressed Olson, asking her whether she found the hug “flattering,” “exciting,” “stimulating” and “thrilling.” To each question, Olson replied, “yes.”

I guess the lesson here is to be careful with those hugs.