Central America and beyond: ruminations, speculations & provocations

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is Chicago-born (eerily, on Sept. 11, precisely thirty years before the 9/11), but spent the 1970s in El Salvador until 1980, when his family fled due to the civil war. One of his heroes is Archbishop Oscar Romero, along with Cesar Chávez and his late father.

He's the blogger responsible for Daily Kos (political analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation). But Zúniga is not just blogging for his friends--his site is consistently rated one of the top two or three political blogs, and shows up in the top 50 blogs to be found anywhere on the internet (well, okay, we all think the US is the center of the universe.)

Also of great importance, the guy has time to write his own music for piano. He has a couple of dozen songs posted in MP3 format here. I´ve listened to a couple, and they're quite good, in that meditative, New Agey genre (at least, what I've heard so far.) Hey, I used to sing in the Texas Boys Choir with Danny Wright, so my opinion should count for something!

I should have noted in that last post that this was a Zogby Interactive poll, and that I lifted the results from the Wall Street Journal.

John wrote to tell me that a prominent political blogger, Kos, has said that this poll is conducted on the internet and should be taken with a huge grain of salt. You can register yourself here. Further research turned up this note from MSNBC on the phenomenon of online polling, and I note that Harris also has an "interactive" (code for online) polling system as well.

Finally, I read the background on their method at the Zogby site, and found that this, the first in a series of polls on battleground states for the 2004 presidential elections, reflects a qualitative improvement over previously done online polling efforts (which they've been doing since 1998):

How about the issue of how representative internet polls are? First, let’s understand that what we are doing at Zogby Interactive is very different than simply posting a question of the day and asking people to vote. Instead, we have spent the past six years collecting tens of thousands of email addresses, complete with demographic, behavioral, geographic, and attitudinal data on each person who has registered to be part of our internet surveys. We send an email to a sampling of tens of thousands of these addresses and invite them to visit a secure website to complete a poll. Each individual receives a secure link. These emails have been updated, cleaned, and validated over and over through the years. We have been testing many of our interactive surveys against our telephone surveys and have found growing correspondence – actually, in most cases, within 1 percent – between the results. In addition, we have been using our telephone call center to validate a sampling of our interactive respondents to ensure that they are who they say they are.

There's more, but in short it sounds like something we should not automatically rule out.

Another interesting tidbit is that Zogby did a poll last year in Iraq, the results of which were twisted by (surprise, surprise) VP Dick Cheney. I found this op-ed in the Guardian from last year, written by another Zogby, the brother of polling founder John Zogby, James, who's president of the Arab American Institute, who took Cheney to task (no, the Iraqis are not really happy with the US presence, Dick...)

Both Lynndie England and Jessica Lynch are from small towns in West Virginia, and issues of class are gaining more attention. Philip Weiss of the New York Observer notes that “there is something condescending and unconvincing about the portrayals of the poor people who are fighting the war for the rest of us.” He also writes:

The poverty draft reflects the great divide in the new economy. The college-educated would regard it as a waste if their children were to join the military. No, they must be trained to the highest degree for participation in the global economy. Meanwhile, high risk can be outsourced, to the new immigrant from Guatemala or the ghetto kid who can’t find employment….

There’s got to be a better way to define citizenship. Representative Rangel served (and froze) in Korea, and while he didn’t see the mission that time either, he has never forgotten the democratic lessons the military taught him: "We had the ability then to bring people of different classes and races together, and force their asses to respect each other."

The Iraq war has replaced that sense of a democratic collective with disrespect for those who can’t participate in the new economy. And don’t think that the citizens of Arab oligarchies don’t see that. We like to think that we’re exporting democracy. So far we’re exporting ruthless capitalism.