Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist put a "poll" on his Senate Web site yesterday, intended to drum up support for the GOP's ridiculous assertion that the minority party is required to let them approve the most odious, law-hating ideologues the President can find for judicial appointments. The 30-hour marathon session tactic isn't going very well for the majority, because all the news reports have so far provided that pesky context: the Senate has approved 98% of Bush's nominees in two years, and that's 50% more judges than the GOP-controlled Senate allowed through Bill Clinton's final two years. Orrin Hatch, surely destined to go down in Senate history as hypocrite of the century, wants the world to protest the Democrats using the same tactics he used against President Clinton's nominees.

All this context makes it hard to talk about how unfair it is, since, of course, it's not unfair at all.. So Frist put up a poll, originally asking if the Senate should be required to give a simple up-or-down vote on the President's nominees, "as specified in the Constitution," which is itself a false statement.

To Frist's chagrin, the "No" side won, 60-40. So Frist decided to start the poll over, annoyed by this inconvenient expression of democracy. The "no" side continued to win.

Imagine that - the voting public disagrees with Frist's position. So what did the Majority Leader's staff do next? They changed the sense of the question, so that a "no" vote meant you support the GOP's position, without resetting the votes. Then they edited it so badly that it no longer made sense. Finally, they changed it again, to read "Should the Senate minority block the body's Constitutional duty to provide the President's judicial nominees with an up or down vote?" If you voted against Frist's position a few hours ago, the change in the question means your vote is now recorded as a vote for Frist's position.

When these shenanigans hit the blogosphere, Frist changed the question to one that doesn't require your opinion at all: "Which highly qualified nominees to the federal bench are being filibustered by Senate Democrats? Janice Rogers Brown, Carolyn Kuhl, Priscilla Owens, or All of the Above?" That's not an opinion question, and it's false on its face - none of them are qualified for the federal bench due to repeated rulings showing hostility to the constitution and individual rights.

Next time someone tells you the GOP tries to keep people from voting, or that it cherry-picked Iraq intelligence to accept what it wanted and refuse results that were inconvenient, think of this poll. These people are so corrupt they can't even resist rigging an unscientific internet poll when it goes against them. If the facts are against them, the facts have to be changed.

The Senate Majority Leader, for pete's sake. Physician, heal thyself.