As we all watch Chris “cap­per” Lieben­thal slow decent into mad­ness and obses­sion con­tinue — prod­ded by who­ever at WisOpin­ion thinks his daily dia­tribes are worth pro­mot­ing — we wit­ness these really stu­pid ques­tions asked by an oth­er­wise rel­a­tively smart man.

Chris, Ahab by now would have called you ‘@#&%$* up.’

If Walker gets his way, and there is a fur­lough, and then there is a sur­plus at the end of the year, do the work­ers get a refund of their lost wages which were wrong­fully taken? Or does Walker get to keep the money and claim it as an in-kind con­tri­bu­tion on his cam­paign finan­cial statement?

Chris, why the long face for your poten­tial fur­lough?  I mean, Doyle’s about to sign a bud­get which puts entire state employ­ees on a fur­lough.  Where’s the crit­i­cism of that?

Oh that’s right, been in a pic­ture with “Big Jim,” wouldn’t be cool to speak ill of “Wisconsin’s Great­est Momma’s Boy” after that huh?

My finally point on the first ‘ques­tion;’ who the hell are you kid­ding?  It’s nearly July, it would take an act of God to turn this econ­omy around to even get a sur­plus at any level of government.

Sec­ondly, you know your pro­posed option in ques­tion two is like a fed­eral felony right?  The type of legal mael­strom that would drop down on any­one who does what you even sug­gest is going to be nasty.

Dude, thought we all knew lawyers on each side of the respec­tive Cheddarsphere.

Read­ing the Doyle Pro­tec­tion Ward’s Demo­c­ra­tic Party of Wisconsin’s reac­tion to the new PPP Poll made me think, “I’ve heard this excuse before.”

But state Demo­c­ra­tic Party spokesman Alec Lof­tus called the method­ol­ogy in the Pub­lic Pol­icy poll “noto­ri­ously unre­li­able” because all a respon­dent had to do was push but­tons on the tele­phone to participate.

That “essen­tially means that 5-year-olds could have voted” in the sur­vey, Lof­tus said.

The Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll is much more reli­able, Lof­tus said, because it was done with “legit­i­mate methodology.”

Yeah, I know where I heard (and for­give me Mark) whin­ing like this before…John Gard’s 2008 Con­gres­sional cam­paign in a poll from early Octo­ber. (H/T Brew City Brawler)

Gard con­sul­tant Mark Graul took issue with the poll, argu­ing that SurveyUSA’s use of auto­mated phone polling makes their sur­veys unreliable.

“A 10-year-old could be answer­ing the sur­vey and no one would know,” Graul said in an e-mail, adding that the Gard campaign’s most recent poll shows Kagen lead­ing by only one point.

So to para­phrase in the word’s of Milwaukee’s favorite anony­mous blog­ging lib­eral misog­y­nist…“Go ahead Mr. Lof­tus: Just admit Jim Doyle is going to lose and lose badly.”

Much of the port-side of the Ched­dar­sphere was all atwit­ter over last week’s “DailyKos/Research 2000″ poll.  In it, it showed Doyle — in fact every Demo­c­rat — beat­ing all com­ers except Tommy Thompson.

That’s fine dandy, of course, even Jay Bul­lock said to take that will a grain of salt.  DKos/Research 2000 polls have a hor­ri­ble track record and are known for over-sampling Democrats.

Today comes a PPP Poll, which appears to say the oppo­site.

Wis­con­sin Gov­er­nor Jim Doyle is suf­fer­ing from a poor approval rat­ing and trails two pos­si­ble 2010 oppo­nents, the newest sur­vey from Pub­lic Pol­icy Polling finds.

60% of vot­ers in the state say they dis­ap­prove of Doyle’s work in office, with just 34% approv­ing. While Doyle con­tin­ues to main­tain a decent 61% approval from Democ­rats, just 6% of Repub­li­cans think he’s doing a good job. He also meets with dis­ap­proval from 69% of inde­pen­dent voters.

In pos­si­ble 2010 con­tests, Mil­wau­kee County Exec­u­tive Scott Walker leads Doyle 48–40 and for­mer Con­gress­man Mark Neu­mann holds a 42–41 advan­tage. It’s safe to say the early lead for the Repub­li­cans has more to do with Doyle than it does with either of them
indi­vid­u­ally, as just 33% of vot­ers in the state have a favor­able opin­ion of Walker and 26% have one of Neumann.

Doyle’s unpop­u­lar­ity is pretty uni­ver­sal across the elec­torate, with every demo­graphic group PPP tracks by ide­ol­ogy, gen­der, race, and age dis­ap­prov­ing of his per­for­mance except for African Amer­i­cans and liberals.

“If he had to stand before the vot­ers today Jim Doyle would prob­a­bly not get reelected,” said Dean Deb­nam, Pres­i­dent of Pub­lic Pol­icy Polling. “Of course he doesn’t have to do so for another 17 months and has plenty of time to reha­bil­i­tate his image. Nev­er­the­less, it looks like Repub­li­cans have a good oppor­tu­nity here.”

PPP will release num­bers look­ing at Russ Fein­gold tomorrow.

I’m going to take a guess here and say Russ Fein­gold is doing just fine.  Really, he is.  I’m not being sar­cas­tic or anything.

PPP is a Demo­c­ra­tic Polling firm based out of North Car­olina.  They tra­di­tion­ally do their polls via touch-tone phone.

A fur­ther look at the inter­nals high­light the par­ti­san break­down of the sam­ple was Dem — 42%, GOP — 32%, and Ind — 26%

You can read the poll from PPP’s blog here.

Doyle’s suf­fer­ing from what is being seen nation­ally; Gov­er­nors of every polit­i­cal stripe are tak­ing the brunt of the polit­i­cal out­rage over the econ­omy.  Because of that, many are see­ing their approval num­bers tank as a ‘get the bums out’ men­tal­ity is hit­ting the var­i­ous governor’s races.  Doyle is no dif­fer­ent against that trend.

Inter­est­ing thing about the cross-tabs on Doyle’s unpop­u­lar­ity, he’s got over 50% unap­proval rat­ing (some­times over 60%) in every age group polled.  The 18–29 year old are his best group (54%), con­versely, they’re also his best group for re-election (iron­i­cally 54%).

I have a hard time believ­ing at this stage of the game, the Walker and Neu­mann favor­a­bil­ity num­bers aren’t based on any­thing more than sim­ply a lot of Wis­con­sinites not know­ing them.

But I do agree with one thing, Doyle’s best ass­est at this stage is Time.  He’s got 16 months to turn things, he’s got a machine which could slime an Eagle Scout (iron­i­cally Walker is one), and who knows, the econ­omy might actu­ally improve.

[I’m not so sure about the last one right now.]