Pew Poll: terror scare not helping Bush

They've been wishing and hoping over at the White House that their scare tactics would start the bounce. The media's been expecting it. But, it ain't happening according to yet another poll we found via Political Wire:

"The strong focus on news from abroad is having little impact on the public's political opinions. President Bush's job approval rating stands at 37%, virtually unchanged from July. His personal image continues to be far less positive than it was about a year ago ­ about half the public says he is not a strong leader, not trustworthy, and unable to get things done. Moreover, the renewed emphasis on terrorism has done little to boost the president's standing on that issue."

Not a strong leader, not trustworthy and unable to get things done. Throw in screws up everything he does try to get done and we've got an accurate picture of our President.

And, according to Pew's poll, things are looking too good for the Republicans on the Hill, either:

Voters continue to say they favor the Democratic candidate in their district, currently by a 50% to 41% margin. This reflects overwhelming loyalty among both Democrats and Republicans, combined with the fact that independent voters currently favor the Democratic candidate in their district by a 48% to 34% margin.

Anti-incumbent sentiment remains remarkably high. Three-in-ten say they do not want the representative in their district to be reelected, largely unchanged from surveys earlier this year and significantly more than expressed this view in the 2002 or 1998 midterms. In recent years, only polling on the eve of the 1994 midterm election registered this level of anti-incumbent voting.

All that tough GOP talk about staying the course is having an impact -- a negative impact:

Fully 46% of Americans say they are very concerned that if Republicans keep control of the Congress this fall they will get the country involved in too many military missions. By comparison, just over a third (35%) say they are very concerned that if Democrats take control of the Congress this fall they will weaken the country's efforts to combat terrorism.

Keep staying the course, GOP. Keep staying the course. Read More......

"Full-scale sectarian violence" in Iraq, so "Stay the Course"

Doesn't "full-scale sectarian violence" really mean civil war? Why won't everybody just call it what it is?

Bush and Cheney keep talking about winning. Take a look at a day in the life of the Iraq Bush and Cheney have created -- and remember, when the Republicans say "stay the course," this is what they mean:

A car bombing in the Sadr City district of Baghdad killed at least seven people and wounded more than 20 on Thursday morning, the authorities said....

South of Baghdad, an American soldier was killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol, the United States military said in a statement.

West of Baghdad, in an area rife with Sunni Arab insurgents, the police said a man had been killed and two of his sons wounded when gunmen fired at him as he waited in line at a gas station. In a similar incident, gunmen killed one man and wounded two others near a gas station in Yarmuk.

A suicide bomber in the upscale Baghdad neighborhood of Mansur blew up his vehicle as a police patrol passed, wounding five people, including three policemen, an Interior Ministry official said. At a supermarket nearby, an unidentified body was found handcuffed and showing signs of torture.

About 25 miles south, the authorities found six bodies with multiple gunshot wounds in the Tigris River. The dead men had been blindfolded, with their hands bound.

Six more people were killed in shootings in and near Baquba, north of the capital, news agencies reported. Three of the dead — shot at busy market — were brothers who owned an agricultural equipment shop. Another victim died after gunmen stole his car.

The United States military announced that a soldier had died from “enemy action” on Wednesday in Anbar Province, where American troops regularly fight fierce battles with Sunni insurgents.

In a rural area of Babil Province, south of Baghdad, Iraqi Army soldiers discovered three kidnapped police officers in the trunk of a car after clashing with gunmen at a checkpoint, according to an American military statement. The freed officers said two other officers had been abducted and taken away in vehicles.

American soldiers -- and a lot of Iraqis -- are dying because of the full-scale sectarian violence. They're dying because Bush and the GOP say we must "stay the course." Whatever happened to the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq"? Read More......

Want a different course? Vote Democratic.

A new video from the DSCC. Read More......

Is the NYT getting ready to run a hit piece on Ned Lamont and the Netroots?

Editor & Publish says "yes." Read More......

New Poll: Virginians know about GOP Senator George Allen's racist eruption, and they're not happy about it

From the DSCC:

Virginians Are Offended By Allen’s “Macaca” Comments. A majority of Virginians have heard about Allen’s “macaca” comments and two-thirds thought Allen’s comments were inappropriate. In addition, half feel Allen’s apology to Webb’s volunteer was insufficient and 46% think it will hurt Allen’s re-election bid. Allen’s approval rating is now under 50%.

Another interesting update, according to an interview with the young man George Allen called "macaca," the man was wearing a baseball cap at the time of the verbal assault. That means George Allen would have lied when he said the reason he called the man "macaca" was because he was sporting a mohawk haircut, because he couldn't see it (not that it's a real clear connection between mohawk and macaca). Read More......

Would you buy a war from this man?

Big surprise. The man who single-handedly oversaw America's greatest foreign policy defeat since Vietnam, has nothing left to say so he's repeating himself.

President Bush said critics of his Iraq policies are advocating a "cut and run" strategy that would draw terrorists to American soil.

"Leaving before we complete our mission would create a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, a country with huge oil reserves that the terrorist network would be willing to use to extract economic pain from those of us who believe in freedom," Bush said Wednesday.

"If we leave before the mission is complete, if we withdraw, the enemy will follow us home," he said.

Unfortunately, George Bush is describing what very well may happen in Iraq because of his own incompetence.

Iraq is lost. It's over. Bush fought a war that was unnecessary and based on a lie and with no plan for victory and then he lost. So now he's going to have to withdraw, either sooner or later. It's only a question of when (Bush and the Republicans hope they can keep our troops there until the next president gets elected, so they won't get blamed - putting aside the fact that this war is costing us $100 billion a year and thousands of lives of US troops). And when he does withdraw from Iraq in shame Bush will have created the very terror state he's warning us about.

Bush has no policy to avoid cutting and running. And cutting and running is exactly what he will have to do because the Iraq war is over, Bush lost. Have you noticed how he constantly tells us how bad things are going to be if we lose, but he never actually tells us how he plans to win. Read More......

Iraq insurgency continues to grow

I'm not sure how any reasonable observer could still believe that the presence of 130,000 troops in Iraq is making things better for either Iraq or the U.S. Attacks are at historic highs, casualties (both American and Iraqi) are skyrocketing, and, worst of all, there's no public discussion of changing tactics.

Pundits often like to say that we're at a turning point. Constitutional referendum? Turning point. Elections? Turning point. Massive sectarian violence? Turning point. This is often the result of TV news and regular opinion articles (I'm looking at you, Mr. Six Months) that need to justify their existence and make events sound vitally important all the time, but the reality is simple: the situation is just getting inexorably, relentlessly worse. We're not at some imaginary Important Juncture; rather, we're presiding over a gradual (though increasing, at the moment) decline of security and increase in chaos and mayhem.

And it's voices like this that are suppressed or silenced:

“The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels,” said a senior Defense Department official who agreed to discuss the issue only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution. “The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time.”

While most of our original goals, save the overthrow of Saddam, are beyond saving, I'm not entirely hopeless about the future of Iraq. But right now, the U.S. is hurting the situation, not helping it, and that is the result of a massive, unforgivable failure of leadership.

On an unrelated note, if you read the entire article, you'll get a sense of the rapidly-growing importance of the DIA in the intelligence community. This is a direct result of Secretary Rumsfeld's consolidation of power, and it bears watching. Read More......

Bush signs law that helps gay couples - oops

Bet you he didn't plan on that one. Read More......

Federal judge rules Bush domestic spy program is unconstitutional, orders it stopped

READ THE COMPLETE RULING HERE.

Trouble in communist paradise.

She went on to say that "the president of the United States ... has undisputedly violated the Fourth in failing to procure judicial orders."

Why does Ned Lamont hate America?

Then we get the folllowing from the Republican in charge of the US Senate:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, said he backs the government's appeal of the ruling. "Terrorists are the real threat to our constitutional and democratic freedoms, not the law enforcement and intelligence tools used to keep America safe," Frist said in a statement.

No, actually, the Republicans are doing a pretty good job of trashing the constitution and our democratic freedoms without the help of Osama.

By the way, where is Osama? Read More......

Open thread

Gang, please do regularly check out our advertisers, all of them (in the left and right hand columns). Your interest in our ads, and our advertisers, helps keep AMERICAblog happy. And, the good thing, is that our advertising is intentionally targeted to (usually) reflect your (our) political interests. So please do remember to click through and check them out. Read More......

White House using liquid explosive detector it refused to install at US airports to protect you and me

UPDATE: This is yet another Democratic opportunity, but will they take it? Don't just hold a press conference, demand that George Bush call the Congress back into session to deal with the threat to our nation's airlines immediately. He wants to talk terror and scare the hell out of people? Okay, let's scare the hell out of people - by talking, as Bill Clinton noted yesterday, about just how unsafe we really are because George Bush dropped the ball. The Republicans called Congress back into session for Terri Schiavo, let them do it for the safety of the entire flying public. And then let's have a frank and open and REALLY SCARY discussion about just how vulnerable George Bush, Dick Cheney and the Republicans have left us (by the way, is air cargo being checked YET?)

Uh oh.

Since the early 1990s, AS&E; has made SmartCheck, a $50,000 low-intensity X-ray scanner that can spot a bottle of organic compounds in a passenger's pocket.

But is the liquid an explosive, or a batch of baby formula? Ahura says its $30,000 handheld laser scanner, the First Defender, can answer the question. The device can ``see" through glass or plastic bottles and identify any of 2,500 different chemical compounds in about 15 seconds. The FBI and New York City police already use the Ahura system, which went on sale about a year ago.

Joe Reiss, AS&E;'s vice president of marketing, said his company's SmartCheck systems are used at the White House and the US Supreme Court. But they're not widely used in airport security. TSA agreed last year to conduct tests of the system. But Reiss said those tests had not yet begun.

And just let the White House tell us that these systems aren't really proven technology. Then why is the White House using them at all? Bush had the chance to save American lives and chose his own first:

But after this month's foiled terrorist plot to smuggle liquid explosives aboard jumbo jets, the government may not have the luxury to wait. Charles Slepian , founder of the Foreseeable Risk Analysis Center, a transportation security firm in New York, said that technology for detecting explosives in carry-on bags is well understood and readily available, but the US Department of Homeland Security is reluctant to spend the large sums needed to deploy it at hundreds of airports.

``Now they're embarrassed because they have to say that we have nothing in place," said Slepian. ``Shame on us. We've had the science for years."

Why? Because Bush and the Republicans who control Congress didn't give Homeland Security enough money.

The TSA has not outfitted airports with the devices, in part, because officials have to prioritize where they spend limited dollars, according to Frank Cilluffo, former special assistant to President Bush for homeland security...

We had money for tax cuts, lots of them. $300 billion for the Iraq war, and counting. But not enough to stop terrorists from blowing up US commercial airliners when we knew about this threat ten years ago. Read More......

Jon Stewart on Dick Cheney and Ned Lamont

"Al Qaeda was in tatters on the verge of surrender until news of millionaire Ned Lamont's 52%-48% primary victory reached them and rallied their spirits." Read More......

Why is the Department of Homeland Security involved in the JonBenet Ramsey case?

This is ridiculous. The agency meant to fight the terrorists has nothing better to do than work on the JonBenet Ramsey case?

John Mark Karr, 41, will be taken within the week to Colorado, where he will face charges of first degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault, Ann Hurst of the Department of Homeland Security told a news conference in Bangkok.

Had Osama killed a child beauty queen instead of 3,000 people maybe we could have gotten the Bush administration to actually devote a little effort to finding him too. Read More......

George Allen-palooza, Day 3

Lots of letters in today's Washington Post, and only one defends the bigot.

The NY Daily News is the first mainstream media outlet, that I've noticed, to point out the fact about Allen's mother being French-Tunisian and the slur being about dark-skinned people of North Africa. Read More......

Open thread

Good morning Read More......

Open Thread

Couple things before bed:

Zogby has Bush's approval dropping to 34%. Atrios points out the failure of the polls to meet the expectations of the pundits:

"Bush's poll numbers are perpetually going up, but somehow they never manage to rise.

Patricia Todd, who prevailed in her primary runoff for a state legislative seat in Alabama, asked her opponent to drop her challenge to the election results. Birmingham Blues is keeping track of the shenanigans.

Renowned homophobe Marilyn Musgrave is facing a very tough challenge this year from Angie Paccione according to the latest polls. It would be so sweet for Musgrave to lose.

Josh Marshall has a great post that may explain why Bush's numbers aren't rising in the wake of the recent terror scare:

Is there anyone in the country who can say honestly, in their heart of hearts, that when that moment of fear hit them after the recent reports out of London, they said to themselves, "God, I'm glad we're in Iraq"?

And, as predicted, the cable news channels are obsessing over the Jon Benet case. CNN, FOX and MSNBC are frenzied...so, anyone with real news, please share. Read More......