Open Thread

Here are some polling numbers for this Green Saturday. Happy St. Patrick's Day to all.

A new Gallup Poll finds just 35% of Republicans say they would vote "enthusiastically" for either Mitt Romney if he wins the GOP nomination. Just 34% were enthusiastic about voting for Rick Santorum and only 28% were enthusiastic for Newt Gingrich.

"What should really give Republicans sleepless nights (if the numbers hold) is the demographic groups currently supporting Obama. In the Pew poll, Obama outperforms Romney by 20 points among all women, and by 31 points among women aged 19-49. He outperforms Romney by 28 points among young people 18-29 years old and ties him among people 65 and older. And he outperforms Romney in every region of the country and among every income group." -- Charles Blow Oh, and Mike Matthews is back.

Shockingly, there are no new primary or general election polls to parse today. To feed the polling addition, here some new Presidential approval polls, which tend to show the CBS poll was an outlier. Also check out this op-ed in the New York Times from an Executive from Goldman Sachs who is burning bridges while resigning.

“I’ve got a lot of good friends, the owner of the Miami Dolphins and the New York Jets, both owners are friends of mine,” he added. “But let’s keep him away from New England.” — Mitt Romney, stepping in it once again. He is almost a self parody at this point.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll indicates that 60 percent of Americans say the war in Afghanistan is not worth its costs, and Republicans are evenly divided on whether the war has been worth it. Indeed 54% say the United States should withdraw its forces from Afghanistan without completing its current effort to train Afghan forces to become self-sufficient. With the recent and disgusting murders by an American soldier, we need to hightail it out of there. And soon.

Remember, Daylight Saving Time begins tonight. So we "spring" forward, and lose an hour of sleep. Bastards. You know who else are bastards, Republicans. Why? Let Andrew Samwick explain the Republican spin on yesterday's good economic news:

[President Obama] is making inadequate progress getting us out of the hole we dug for you despite our opposition to every program you propose.

I know, I know, most of you are right now writhing on the floor going through withdrawal without the daily dose of polling goodness that usually accompanies our Open Thread. Let me explain what happened. As I was uploading some thumbnail pictures and editing some posts this morning, our server hosting company for some reason thought I was a hacker, and they blocked my IP address. Yes, I was banned from my own blog. The irony. At the time, I thought the whole site went down and we were suffering a server outage. It took most of the morning to track down what happened, and as a result I was not able to post the open thread. But I thank MJ for stepping up, and I thank our IT geek, LiberalGeek, for dealing with my hysterical demands. But now lets feed our addiction.

Well, we've been having server problems again, so we apologize if you've been unable to post comments on our brilliant posts from the past few hours. First off, we want to wish JP Connor Jr a speedy recovery. He tweeted last night that he had suffered a heart attack. While we disagree with him on his support of a certain elected official, we want him to get better fast. We miss his comments with that silly smiley face at the end of them. Hurry up and get well, JP.

On the Gingrich front, he is conceding Kansas to Santorum, and concentrating on Alabama and Mississippi. If Gingrich doesn't win those states, he is out.

So Mitt Romney won Ohio barely, and only at the last second. Not a compelling narrative for his candidacy. He also ended up winning Virginia (where only Ron Paul was his competition), Vermont (neighboring state to his home state), Massachusetts (where he was Governor), Idaho (where there are Mormons) and Alaska. Santorum won Oklahoma, North Dakota and Tennessee. Gingrich won Georgia. So what's next?

Does the Republican primary end today? If Romney wins Ohio and Tennessee, and Santorum only wins Oklahoma and Gingrich only wins Georgia, then I think yes, it is over. If Santorum wins Tennessee, the race will limp along with Romney again the frontrunner who has trouble down south. If Santorum wins Ohio and Tennessee, then Romney is back in trouble again.

We got polls. Lots of them. And the general election polls in Ohio and Virginia may cause Republicans to contemplate suicide as they are so horrible. Also... we have a surprising piece of information on gun ownership in America.