THE TENSION: Thursday Morning Open Thread

The New York Times reports new laws and machines may spell voting woes. As dozens of states are enforcing new voter registration laws and switching to paperless electronic voting systems, officials across the country are bracing for an Election Day with long lines and heightened confusion, followed by an increase in the number of contested results.

Conservatives in the media warn that the usually liberal Times is setting up an election losing scenario for Democrats where candidates who lose in tight races will contest the outcome. It shows that the Democrats are not at all confident about winning the November election.

With congressional elections less than three weeks away, the Republican party's approval ratings are at an all-time low, with approval of the Republican-led Congress at its lowest point in 14 years, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Wednesday, reports Reuters.

The story didn't discuss the methodology and demographics for the polls. This information would shed some light on the results. However, the poll of 1,006 registered voters was taken from October 13-16.

NBC said the poll indicates people have been paying attention to the issues they are hearing about -- from Iraq and Bob Woodward's new book on the Bush administration's handling of the war to the unfolding scandal over former Florida Rep. Mark Foley's e-mail messages to teenage congressional aides. In truth it is unclear if Woodward's book has had any impact outside the beltway. The numbers may very well reflect a conservative frustration with Republicans that doesn't necessarily translate into votes for Democrats.

John Yoo, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says Congress recently sent a message to the courts: Get out of the war on terror. Yoo writes:

During the bitter controversy over the military commission bill, which President Bush signed into law on Tuesday, most of the press and the professional punditry missed the big story. In the struggle for power between the three branches of government, it is not the presidency that "won." Instead, it is the judiciary that lost.
The new law is, above all, a stinging rebuke to the Supreme Court. It strips the courts of jurisdiction to hear any habeas corpus claim filed by any alien enemy combatant anywhere in the world. It was passed in response to the effort by a five-justice majority in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld to take control over terrorism policy. That majority extended judicial review to Guantanamo Bay, threw the Bush military commissions into doubt, and tried to extend the protections of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, overturning the traditional understanding that Geneva does not cover terrorists, who are not signatories nor "combatants" in an internal civil war under Article 3.
Yoo concludes that the message went overlooked during the fight over the bill by the media, which focused on Sens. McCain, Graham and Warner's opposition to the administration's proposals for the use of classified evidence at terrorist trials and permissible interrogation methods. In its eagerness to magnify an intra-GOP squabble, the media mostly ignored the substance of the bill, which gave current and future administrations, whether Democrat or Republican, the powers needed to win this war.

Donald Lambro, writing in The Washington Times, reminds us that the Democrats' election-year agenda, which says what they will do if the voters put them back in charge of Congress, would seek to overturn or change just about everything President Bush and the Republicans have done since 2001.

Democratic leaders call their agenda "A New Direction for America," but much of its details are what Republican leaders call "boilerplate" Democratic dogma that the party has been proposing for years, such as raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25, rolling back the Bush tax cuts, expanding new stem-cell research, raising taxes on oil companies and boosting government spending for college-tuition loans and Pell Grants.
On the war in Iraq, the Democrats' agenda calls for "a tough, smart plan to transform failed Bush administration policies in Iraq" and for a "phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq."
To combat terrorism, it proposes to "double the size of Special Forces to destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorist networks like al Qaeda" and to "rebuild a state-of-the-art military capable of projecting power wherever necessary." Both provisions, national-security analysts say, have been at the heart of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's military reforms ever since the September 11 attacks in 2001.