In September, the New York Times reported that the White House front group Freedom’s Watch, led by former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, was considering a “national advertising campaign” to make the case for war with Iran, claiming that “Iran poses a direct threat” to U.S. security. Previously, Freedom’s Watch doled out $15 million to flack for the Iraq escalation.

While 63 percent of Americans oppose to military action in Iran, Freedom’s Watch apparently believes it can coax the public into another war. Laura Rozen reports that Freedom’s Watch is involved in test-marketing “language” to sell war with Iran. Laura Sonnemark, an attendee of the sessions, describes her experience:

After joining a half dozen other women in a conference room, she found, to her surprise, that she had been called in to help some of the country’s most prominent hawks test-market language that could be used to sell a war against Iran to the American public. [...]

“He was asking questions about [Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad going to speak at Columbia University, how terrible it was that he was able to go to Columbia and was invited,” Sonnemark says. “And he used lots of catch phrases, like ‘victory’ and ‘failure is not an option.’” [...]

“After two hours, [the leader] asked three final questions,” Sonnemark recalls: “How would you feel if Hillary [Clinton] bombed Iran? How would you feel if George Bush bombed Iran? And how would you feel if Israel bombed Iran?”

While the focus group was commissioned by another organization, Freedom’s Watch reportedly “shared information” produced by the session.

In the next step of their PR campaign, the Freedom’s Watch announced a redesigned website yesterday, complete with a new blog, “guest posts by prominent conservative figures,” and ways for visitors to be “heard directly by their members of Congress.” In an e-mail blast to supporters today, President Bradley Blakeman states, “our efforts have just begun.”

These attempts to sell war with Iran smack of the White House’s efforts to sell the Iraq war. In August 2002, Karl Rove chaired the White House Iraq Group, whose mission was to “develop a strategy for publicizing the White House’s assertion that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.” At the same time, Fleischer was propagating these false assertions to the public.

As a founding member of Freedom’s Watch, it is no surprise Fleischer is importing his White House propaganda tactics for war with Iran.

UPDATE: Phoenix Woman at FireDogLake has more.

Here’s National Election Survey data on voters’ view of the question of the role of women in society. Specifically, “Some people feel that women should have an equal role with men in running business, industry and government. Others feel that women’s place is in the home. Where would you place yourself on this scale or haven’t you thought much about this?” The question asks you to locate yourself on a seven-point scale, I’ve graphed just the two extreme values which show a sharp trend in favor of the egalitarian position.

This is one respect, at least, in which the United States has become a far less conservative country since the 1980s. What’s more, if you look at these demographic breakdowns you’ll see that while a lot of the shift is accounted for by cohort replacement, a lot of it represents within-cohort change of heart.

At a recent book party for former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) told the Washington Examiner that conservatives in Congress need “some backbone.” As an example of what he means by “backbone,” DeLay described what he would like to do to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman: “I’d like to bitch-slap him.”

Digg It!

Radar reports that, prior to securing a spot as a Newsweek columnist, Karl Rove approached Time magazine for a job. Time, however, rejected Rove as “essentially like an unindicted coconspirator in a whole host of felonies”:

Time’s editors apparently felt the cost/benefit analysis wouldn’t be in their favor if they embraced the man who has done more than anyone to keep the spirit of Joe McCarthy alive and well in American politics. … “They think Karl is essentially like an unindicted coconspirator in a whole string of felonies.”

I’ve been wondering for some time now how Mitt Romney would finesse the point that few theologically orthodox Christians consider Mormonism to be a species of Christianity. Byron York kinda sorta got an answer to the question:

Sometimes one forgets that Romney was trained as a lawyer, but not on that day. I tried one more time. “Well, okay, if you have been told that by other people, what is your reaction to the substance of what they are saying?” “You know, the term ‘Christian’ means different things to different people,” Romney told me. “Jews aren’t Christian. That doesn’t preclude a Jew from being able to run for office and become president. I believe that Jesus Christ is the savior of the world and is the son of God. Now, some people say, well, that doesn’t necessarily make you a Christian because Christian refers to a certain group of evangelical Christian faiths. That’s fine. That’s their view. Others say, no, anyone who believes in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the Savior should be called Christian. That’s fine, too. I’ll just describe what I believe and not try to distinguish my faith from others. That’s really something for my faith to do and for the churches amongst themselves to consider.”

Basically, Romney seems to be trying to indicate that he believes he’s a Christian (which is the Mormon view) without quite saying so, thus attempting to avoid getting into an argument with people who think that’s wrong. Daniel Larison says “this attempt to have it both ways is going to dissatisfy a lot of Christian and Mormon voters alike.” It certainly seems more like an argument that liberals would find appealing than one likely to persuade conservatives, but I have no idea how much this kind of thing bothers people. As a non-Christian myself, I’d kind of like to see Romney embrace the non-Christian label and try to break some barriers, but evidently he thinks trying to fudge the difference will work out better for him.

Last month, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani began running radio ads in which he used his experience as a survivor of prostate cancer to bash government provided universal health care plans. Using misleading statistics, Giuliani claimed that if he had gotten the disease in a country with government-based health care, “chances of surviving” would have been much slimmer:

I had prostate cancer, five, six years ago. My chance of surviving prostate cancer, and thank God I was cured of it, in the United States: 82 percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England: only 44 percent under socialized medicine.

Giuliani says he prefers a “free market” approach that uses tax incentives to encourage Americans to enroll in private health plans. But, as the Los Angeles Times reports today, Giuliani’s plan would be unlikely to cover cancer survivors such as himself:

But under the plans all three have put forward, cancer survivors such as themselves could not be sure of getting coverage — especially if they were not already covered by a government or job-related plan and had to seek insurance as individuals.

“Unless it’s in a state that has very strong consumer protections, they would likely be denied coverage,” said economist Paul Fronstin of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, who has reviewed the candidates’ proposals. “People with preexisting conditions would not be able to get coverage or would not be able to afford it.”

Along with Giuliani, the plans of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN), who also are both survivors of cancer, would likely exclude Americans such as themselves.

According to experts who spoke to the LA Times, it will take 5-10 years for insurance companies to consider providing coverage to cancer survivors. For example, a prostate cancer survivor like Giuliani “could be covered after five years of being cancer-free, at a 40% higher premium” — five years that is, if they had a “less severe form of the disease.”

Though each of the candidate’s campaigns say they are considering options for closing the gaps in their plans, tax credits and subsidies are unlikely to “cut it.” “If” someone has “a history of severe medical problems,” says Stuart Butler of the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Giving them $5,000 doesn’t really help them to afford insurance.”

Marcy Wheeler has more.

Writing about the whole race and realignment issue, Ross says the key thing to keep in mind is that “Publius is right: ‘Nixon’s law and order message was lost on no one.’ It was lost on no one because violent crime went up three hundred and sixty-seven percent between 1960 and 1980.” Silly Publius, silly liberals.

But wait, Nixon was elected in 1968, not 1980. Meanwhile, the population grew between 1960 and 1980. And the overall violent crime index is unreliable thanks to the vagaries of classification standards. But lets look at the homicide rate which works for comparisons over time. We see that the murder rate went up a good deal from 5.1 per 100,000 people in 1960 to 6.9 per 100,000 in 1968, at which point Nixon’s “law and order” message captured the hearts of America’s silent majority. But as you’ll see from the above chart, there’s no clear further correlation between either the absolute level of crime or the trend in crime and partisan or incumbent party success. Nixon wasn’t punished in 1972 for the fact that, despite his law and order platform, crime kept going up. Crime was way higher in 1984 than it was in 1968. And so on and so forth.

Along these lines, if a move to the right was really the consequence of rising crime rates, one would expect the most conservative groups in the electorate to be those most afflicted by violent crime — low-income African-Americans. But of course that’s not how it works at all. Thus while “crime” and “law and order” were obviously successful electoral themes for the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s there’s little indication that their utility as messages was tightly linked to the objective facts about crime. After all, if the appeal of “crime” messaging was really about crime, its effectiveness should have diminished in years (1972, 1988, and to some extent 1984) when GOP leadership failed to address the issue and/or its effectiveness should have been correlated with the audience’s risk of being victimized by crime, but neither is true.