America's Awakening

PRINCETON, NJ -- About three-quarters of registered voters (76%) say most members of Congress do not deserve re-election, the highest such percentage Gallup has measured in its 19-year history of asking this question. The 20% who say most members deserve to be re-elected is also a record low, by one percentage point.

This finding is from a Nov. 28-Dec. 1 Gallup poll, adding to the broad negativity toward Congress Americans have expressed this year. These include historically low congressional job approval ratings, low ratings of confidence in the legislative branch of government, and low ratings of confidence in Congress as an institution.

The 76% who say most members of Congress "do not deserve to be re-elected" is six points higher than the previous high of 70%, measured in August.

The trends on this measure have been progressively more negative since 2004. Voters were also more negative than positive in response to this measure through most of the early 1990s, but at least half of voters said most members deserved to be re-elected in Gallup polls conducted between 1998 and 2004.

A substantial majority of Republican (75%), independent (82%), and Democratic (68%) voters agree that most members of Congress do not deserve re-election -- a sign of rare consensus about the legislative body in which both parties currently hold a leadership stake.

Read more at link http://www.gallup.com/poll/151433/Record-High-Anti-Incumbent-Sentiment-Toward-Congress.aspx


Personal recommendation: Dump the lot of them each election. The founding fathers never meant for career politician to exist in the first place. And get rid of all of their benefits.

The most disgraceful episode in media-military relations since Vietnam

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/09/the-most-disgraceful-episode-in-media-military-relations-since-vietnam/#ixzz1g4ZSkVHt


Unless the bas-tards come after me again, this is my last column on a national disgrace.

So let me be absolutely clear about who the bastards are: The New York Times, Senator Carl Levin and their 40 Democratic allies in the House of Representatives. The disgrace in question: The Times’s April 2008 “exposé” alleging conflicts of interest and wrongdoing by the retired military analysts often featured on television newscasts before and during the Iraq War.

I was one of those analysts. In fact, I wrote a first-person history of the Pentagon briefing program in a 2006 book, Warheads. After the Times article was published, I repeatedly argued that the story was perversely unfair, misleading and badly slanted. Among other defects, it omitted the “small detail” that Warheads had even been published, immediately raising fundamental questions of inaccuracy, even plagiarism.

What was far worse: Solely on the basis of The Times’s article, Senator Levin and 40 House Democrats promptly demanded investigations: by the Pentagon inspector general, the Federal Communications Commission and the General Accounting Office. None found any of the wrongdoing alleged by The Times in the article for which it was subsequently awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

This ignominy finally came full circle last week in a Washington Times article by Rowan Scarborough, one of the only journalists courageous enough to follow this story through to its wildly improbable conclusion. Scarborough had watched in 2009 while Senator Levin leveraged his powerful position as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee to press the Pentagon IG for a re-investigation. Surely the IG must have overlooked wrongdoing by the previous administration, the chairman’s reasoning went, but with Barack Obama now in power, go back and look even harder!

Pentagon inspectors general follow orders but don’t compromise their integrity. In September 2011, Scarborough reported that, its two-year re-investigation complete, the DOD IG was about to report that Pentagon officials and retired military analysts had complied with all laws and regulations. Having provided lengthy sworn statements to each of those investigations, I kept asking DOD IG public affairs officers when the final report would be released, receiving increasingly evasive replies.

Scarborough eventually uncovered and reported the shocking truth: Senator Levin directly intervened in the investigation in order to influence the wording of the final IG report. This was the political equivalent of jury-tampering but, for a while, it seemed like Senator Levin’s misconduct would go un-noticed. But then, Congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, announced his intention to examine Senator Levin’s meddling. The DOD IG’s final report was issued last week, reported appropriately enough by Rowan Scarborough.



Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/09/the-most-disgraceful-episode-in-media-military-relations-since-vietnam/#ixzz1g4ZGbAlX