Friday, September 23, 2005

zogby might ask about impeachment

Not surprisingly, there is considerable interest in getting Zogby to ask the impeachment question again - so much so that the zogby's email system has apparently crashed.

I haven't heard back from them about how engage them, however, I've heard from someone (Donna) who apparently was able to get a hold of the marketing department and they have apparently agreed to move ahead with the poll - and they want to move forward next week.

Chad from the Zogby marketing department originally said that the questions would cost $1,000 - "it just rolled off his tongue like he a spiel he had said a thousand times." In a testament to capitalism, Chad called Donna back saying that he had made a mistake and "the price is $2000 for the first question and $1000 per question thereafter. "

Obviously, we need to centralise things, otherwise there will be dozens of groups asking the same question next week (and the fundraising will be all over the place) .

I havent heard back from John Byrne - ideally i'd prefer to get it centralised through RawStory - ideally we'd use their paypal account, and perhaps they can manage the choice of questions and all that.

The story got some play on Stephanie Miller's show (Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, D.C) on Thursday:
"Here's a poll that lots of people would want to see - but John Zogby will not do the impeachment polls" (she then reads from the RawStory article). Then she says "apparently it needs to be politically safe even to ask the question"
(You can download the program here - choose the 3rd hour - and it starts at about 24.30)

My story got a number of other mentions around the place.
A poll which shows that lots of people want to impeach the president would be important for a bunch of reasons:
1) it would hamstring the egadministration from doing much more damage
2) it might help give the media some more cover to write some more damaging stories
3) it would help push the crimes of the egaministration back to the fore - i'd love to see some editorials list all the different reasons that people might want to see Bush impeached.

Some people (including bill maher - vid here) are suggesting that a California-style recall would be better than impeachment - I agree with that wholeheartedly. Others are suggesting that impeachment would suck, because Cheney would become president. I agree that scenario would suck - however once the impeachment movement gets underway, then we can surely add cheney to the list. The only difficult part is that the list of potential impeachees is a pretty long list. If we take out Cheney and Bush, then I think Hastert is next in line. I'll leave it for others to judge whether Denny-as-pres is a scenario we can live with for the time being. Once the impeachment ball is rolling, we can probably also take out DeLay and Frist if they haven't been indicted yet.

In any case, a poll about impeachment isnt the same thing as impeachment - and in and of itself, a poll can potentially do quite a lot of damage - so if we can get the poll completed, we can worry about the other details later.

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