The more we know about 2004, the more we know how wrong the conventional wisdom was and has been:  No, Bush didn't win.  No, this wasn't a victory of right-wing so-called "values voters".  And no, marriage initiatives did not make a difference in the vote.

Kerry pollster Mark Mellman has found that [2004] anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives didn't boost voter turnout for either party. Moreover, political scientists at MIT found that Bush's share of the 2004 vote increased in most battleground states, but not the three that had gay marriage bans on the ballot. Stephen Ansolabehere, one of the study's authors, concludes that the gay marriage referenda may have given Kerry a bump. "That suggests there might even be some sort of backlash against this kind of politics," he notes.

Of course, we already knew that civil rights battles should not wait for the mythical time when no elections are on the horizon, and that pro-equality plaintiffs can't be expected to back out of their years-long case because the timing is inconvenient.   We already knew that Karl Rove, not people fighting for their civil rights, "pushed the issue" in 2004.  Now we know that it didn't even work.  This should put an end to any more "those darn impatient gays!" nonsense about 2004.

A graph that's worth a few thousand words:

http://www.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Approva l.htm

(shows Bush's approval ratings from Inauguration Day 2001 through May 2007 in Gallup, Zogby, AP/Ipsos, Quinnipiac, Time, Harris, Newsweek, NYT, Fox, NBC/WSJ, ABC/WP, and Pew, as well as a 14-day average)

Anyone seen any excellent posts in honor of Blog Against Sexism Day (aka International Women's Day)?    The point is for blogs that are not normally focused on feminist issues to spend one day attending to women, sexism, and gender issues.  Haven't seen anything yet on Kos and MyDD so here goes.

You know you're in trouble when even that concern troll Wolf Blitzer starts actually practicing journalism on you.  

Check out this little gem, in which Blitzer grills Patrick McHenry (R-NC), demanding evidence to back up his insinuations that the Democrats had something to do with the timing of the Foleygate scandal/coverup coverage:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/10/08 /blitzer-to-gop-rep-yes-_n_31229.html