I periodically participate in a Zogby poll on-line.  I think they are of questionable value, but figure that if I don't take the 10 minutes to represent the middle of the political spectrum, the voice of the extremes gets amplified by my silence.

While I'm not a pollster, I have enough psych, stat, and testing background to recognize good and bad questions when I see them.  Zogby tends to be mediocre.

Today's poll had two political questions that seemed more intended to drive my opinion than solicit it.  

I have owed President Jimmy Carter an apology for 29 years.  It's about time I made it public.  He was right and I was wrong about his response to the Iranian hostage crisis.

When the Iranian hostage crisis went down, I didn't have a historical context for the middle east.  I didn't know that the CIA had helped to overthrow the democratically elected government to re-install the Shah after the Iranian oil fields had been nationalized.  I didn't know that the Shah was a brutal despot.  What I did know, was that our embassy had been attacked, and some of the guys on "our team" were being held against their will.  When you have been training for the "big game" for nearly three years, you think that is all you need to know.

Context and contrition below the fold...

Several recent diaries and comments suggest that the acrimony of the current primary process can't do any real harm because this is "The Dem Year" and whoever the candidate is and however they get there, a Dem will surely win the General election.  

This is a VERY dangerous assumption.

This isn't a candidate diary.  It's a strategy diary, and a cautionary tale.

People seem to have their knickers in a bunch because a preacher said "God Damn America" gasp.  Can we stop our breathless dithering for a minute and ask what that phrase means?

Two weeks ago, I changed my voter registration from Independent to Democrat to facilitate voting in the California Primary.  I voted this morning and I’ve been wishing someone would ask me about it all day.  A business meeting this afternoon had me walking by the California Secretary of State’s office  and there were six satellite news trucks already setting up so that pundits could breathlessly report the ponderous progress of counting California's votes later tonight... but no one with a microphone seemed evident and no one probably wanted to talk to me anyway.

I fantasized about my 60 seconds of fame if some carefully coiffed talking head from one of the networks had happened to ask me about the election and my comments were sufficiently interesting to get into the news cycle.  It would never happen, but I can dream...

I did it quietly Friday, on-line.  I wasn't going to tell anyone other than my wife, but I've been amused by the synchronicity of the talking heads and bloggers who have read me right.  It seemed only fair to begrudgingly give them credit for picking up on trends...

I changed my voter registration from "independent" to "Dem" so that I can vote in the California primary.  I fully expect to change it back at the first opportunity after the election... but as I thought about sharing the act with y'all in the first place, it occurred to me that my rationale might  interest those of you who wonder why anyone would be other than a "yellow dog dem".

Watching CNNI this morning at 1:20am PST there was a three minute segment on CNNI that followed an EOD team (Explosive Ordinate Disposal - the bomb squad) as the destroyed IEDs in IRAQ.

At the end of the piece, they manage to salvage ordinance they say was aimed at Americans.  As the camera pans over it, the voice of the EOD Sergeant is heard saying that he knows that the ordinance comes from IRAN because of its markings.  He says it is like football jerseys.

I found the clip on the web here

I am a vet and this appears to me to be United States Ordinance.  The markings are in English.  There is a lot number that should be traceable and the markings say it was made in 2005 (I don't think we have been selling weapons to Iran lately).

Rather than using the legislative branch’s tools (legislation, hearings, withholding funds, and impeaching an executive run amok), Democratic leadership seems to be playing a political game; acting powerless to check corruption and arrogance without a supermajority - perhaps hoping to establish their hegemony in 2008.

This is a grave miscalculation.  Democratic loyalists were not responsible for the 2006 power shift, it was centrists like me who distrust both right AND left extremes.  If they want our marriage of convenience to last, Dems must woo centrists with moderation, integrity, and commitment to the rule of law.  Instead they have re-authorized FISA, continued funding Iraq, confirmed an AG who isn’t sure whether water boarding is torture, and taken impeachment off the table; all while whining that their majority isn’t big enough.  The timing of this gamesmanship is terrifying.

The Dems’ continued passivity won’t scare the center further left.  Instead, it may encourage the center to splinter.  This might mean untimely support for a third party, support for the (rare) rational voices on the right, or complete withdrawal from the process.  Given the razor thin margin currently endorsing sanity, these outcomes would be catastrophic.