Earlier today, I cross-posted at my blog and Daily Kos a quick write-up of an interaction I had this morning during a fundraising phone call from the DCCC.

It boiled down to this. I told the caller that my policy (which was true even before I was laid off last week) is to give only to targeted candidates. It's a policy I've more or less stuck to, although I did give some money to Sen. Feingold's Progressive Patriots Fund and the DNC. I expressed some unhappiness with the passage of the funding bill, thinking that would end the call, and not really wanting to get into an argument about politics with someone who was in all likelihood a full-time phone bank caller.

That was when she asked me if I wanted the troops to be cut off from their supplies.

It escalated pretty quickly, with her claiming the President hade the veto, with me saying that no funding bill would have meant no veto, and her claiming that the troops would starve in Iraq without the funding bill. Literally, that was what she said: "starve".

The Iraq supplemental appropriation passed in the House today on a vote of 280-142, with only two Republicans joining the 140 Democrats who don't believe George W. Bush should be given carte blanche for four more months.

That's only nine more "nay" votes (and only 14 more Democrats) than voted against the initial decision to give the President the authority to go into Iraq in October 2002, back when the Republicans still had the majority.

In five years, the percentage of Democrats voting against the Iraq war in the House has gone all the way from 60.8% to 61.9%.

I've written up a lengthy post for my own blog about PBS host Jim Lehrer's false claim to an Australian media reporter that 85% of Congress supported the Iraq war.

But I wanted to share one item I ran across in my research for that post here. The Pew Research Center did a poll after the presentations to the UN Security Council by UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and US Secretary of State Colin Powell that went to the heart of the media coverage of the arguments for war and claims by people like Jim Lehrer that they informed the public to the best of their ability. Even though only 26% of the respondents opposed the war under all circumstances at that point (another 23% felt more international support was needed), 42% of the respondents said that they had heard too little from war opponents.

I wonder why that was?