Bury Me Broken

Morning Reading

• What Iraqis Really Think About The Occupation, The Nation [via Truthout] by Tom Hayden

A majority of Iraqis in polls favor US military withdrawal and an end of the
occupation. At the time of January's election, 69 percent of Shiites and 82
percent of Sunnis favored "near-term withdrawal." Surveys done for the Coalition Provisional Authority in June 2004 showed that a 55 percent majority "would feel safer if US troops left immediately."

• CIA Leak Scandal: Rove Defied Bush's Command?, The Nation, David Corn

The White House was signaling--rightly or wrongly--that it had no worries about its uber-strategist. And a year later, a White House aide who had just left his job at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue told me that the consensus view within the Bush gang at that point was that Rove was too smart for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and that there was no reason for Rove to explain--or admit--anything. (One prominent Washington defense attorney said--after I recently mentioned this conversation--"only a fool would think he or she could outsmart a prosecutor.")

• What's the Matter With 'What's the Matter With Kansas?', The Nation [via Truthout], Katrina Vanden Heuvel

Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? No. White voters in the bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more reliably Democratic in presidential elections over the past half-century, while middle and upper-income white voters have trended Republican. Low-income whites have become less Democratic in their partisan identifications, but at a slower rate than more affluent whites--and that trend is entirely confined to the South, where Democratic identification was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era--itself a holdover from the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

posted by niteskolar @ 7:50 AM