19 percent.  That's right-- one-nine percent.  That is George W. Bush's approval rating, according to the latest American Research Group poll.  Fully 77% of those polled are unhappy with his performance.  The breakdown by party affiliation:

Among Republicans (29% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 45% approve of the way Bush is handling his job and 50% disapprove. Among Democrats (43% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 1% approve and 99% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job. Among independents (28% of adults registered to vote in the survey), 17% approve and 75% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job as president.

Think about these numbers.  They're unprecedented-- never in the history of polling has a sitting President been rated so low.  Not Truman.  Not even Nixon.

Bush is finally number one at something: sucking. 

It really makes me wonder-- just who ARE those 19% of Americans that actually approve of the job that Bush is doing, and what reality are they living in?

UPDATE: I think I found one of them: 

Good luck in November Republicans.

In his victory speech tonight, John McCain immediately attacked Barack Obama on several fronts, including the old "empty calls for change", and the "he's too inexperienced" arguments that are fast becoming standards. 

But one criticism McCain used to illustrate Obama's supposed "inexperience" jumped out at me:

"he said he'd bomb our ally Pakistan". 

Now, of course McCain is purposefully misrepresenting Obama's remarks about Pakistan, which actually went something like: "if we have actionable intelligence on Bin Laden's location in Pakistan and the government of Pakistan will not attack him, I will take unilateral action."

I expect this sort of deceptive crap from the Republicans-- even John McCain.  But to make that accusation against Obama when the Washington Post is reporting that his pal President Bush days ago conducted exactly such a U.S. military strike into Pakistan is just baffling to me.

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone's operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.

The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA's dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda's core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan.

Having requested the Pakistani government's official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval. The government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was notified only as the operation was underway, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

So Obama has publicly voiced the willingness to take unilateral action to take out an Al Qaeda leader.  George W. Bush just proved his willingness to.  Are we to believe that a President McCain wouldn't have done the same?

John Chait of the LA Times and The New Republic thinks so:

So yesterday, John McCain attacked Barack Obama for lacking specifics. Also yesterday, McCain's economic advisor, Kevin "Dow 36,000" Hassett attacked Obama for allegedly pilfering Clinton's economic stimulus program. (The criticism, and Obama's denial of it, can be found here.)

I noted yesterday that it's odd McCain would be attacking Obama for lacking specifics, when McCain is far vaguer and more ill-informed than Obama. It's even odder that McCain's campaign is jumping into the question of which Democrat came out with which stimulus plan first. I expected MCain to go after Obama, I just thought it would be on grounds of being a liberal liberal liberal peacenik.

Could the answer be that... McCain's goal is not to hurt Obama in the general election but to hurt him in the primary? Every poll now shows Obama performing better than Clinton against McCain. On average, he does five and a half points better than her, which is a very significant margin.

So it's quite likely that the reason that McCain is amplifying Clinton's attacks on McCain, rather than make attacks that would fit his general election audience, is that they're targetted to the primary. If McCain attacks Obama for wanting to withdraw from Iraq, that helps Obama in the primary. If he attacks him for lacking domestic policy proposals, it helps Clinton. I suspect McCain is trying to pick his opponent here, the way Richard Nixon tried to sink Ed Muskie's primary campaign in 1972, but without the illegality. (I'm not suggesting there's anything immoral about the tactic -- if I were McCain I'd do the same thing.)

--Jonathan Chait

"He is the past. We're the future.

From the Pro-Bush, Pro-Torture, Pro-Iran War National Review:

Say a Prayer for Hillary
If you want a Republican in the White House, that is

RICHARD LOWRY & KATE O’BEIRNE

At a town-hall meeting in Derry, N.H., in January, Mitt Romney tried to stir the crowd in the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama’s upset victory in Iowa: “We cannot afford Barack Obama as the next president!” About two people applauded. The next day, in Nashua, he mentioned Obama, but added, “I can’t wait to meet Hillary Clinton face to face.” Sustained applause.

Taken together, those two very different reactions provide a reliable barometer of conservative sentiment toward the Democratic candidates. Conservatives have long experience loathing Hillary Clinton. It has become second nature. If they ever do come to feel the same way about Barack Obama — and they may not — it will take time. Hillary Clinton will long hold pride of place as an object of scorn and a source of motivation for conservatives.

Hillary is smart, articulate, and disciplined; she has not made major strategic mistakes in her primary campaign. But she is hampered by his-and-hers political baggage, a fact that is especially apparent when she is compared with the charismatic, seemingly post-partisan Obama.

And Hillary has accrued additional weaknesses as the campaign has progressed. She began with high negatives, a chilly persona, and a liberal voting record. As a Washington insider who personifies an era of bitter partisan politics, she was always going to have to struggle to present herself credibly as “an agent of change,” to use the phrase she favors.

But only over the past several weeks has Hillary’s campaign given Republicans reason to wish devoutly for her success in the primary. She has earned the vocal disapproval of the liberal elite in a way the Clintons had never quite managed before, even through the fundraising scandals, the Lewinsky affair, and the payola pardons. If she wins the nomination, she will be forced to court the party’s angry-Left base at a time when she would be better served by reaching out to the center. She has used Bill as an obvious crutch, weakening her own image and saddling herself with him for the rest of the campaign, while her feminist allies have made it clear they will do all they can to define her candidacy as an exercise in vintage 1970s-style feminism.

Hillary has gone from “inevitable” to “potential general-election disaster.” Republican strategists are gleeful over the possibility that she’ll win the nomination. What haunts the Grand Old Party is the specter of an Obama primary victory, which would deny Republicans their best opportunity to squeak back into the White House in what otherwise should be a difficult 2008.  Republicans disdain Hillary, but feel that they need her — a twisted kind of political codependence.

The biggest shift over the last few weeks in Hillary’s standing has been the amazing wave of revulsion directed at the Clintons by the liberal opinion elite. Early in the campaign, Hillary’s coverage was positive — sometimes adoring. The media considered it odd that someone so “warm and witty” in person could be such a polarizing figure; only an irrational Hillary-hater, they argued, could see a committed liberal in this sensible moderate who has worked so diligently for bipartisan consensus. That Hillary is history. Now, the narrative is that she’s a down-and-dirty fighter who is polarizing her own party’s activists. The endearing chuckle has been replaced by a forced cackle.

In the 1990s, liberals felt obliged to defend the Clinton White House against a congressional assault; scare figures such as Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Starr could not be allowed to take down the Democrats’ champions. But now there is no Clinton White House, no Republican Congress, no Gingrich and no Starr on the scene. Liberals can consult their moral compass again — and it’s pointing toward Obama. If liberals who agree with the Clintons on most policy issues can’t stand them, wait until voters who don’t share that agenda make themselves heard in the fall.

Voting for Hilary is giving Republicans exactly what they want.  Don't do it Democrats.  I know some of you love Hillary, or maybe you just have fond memories for the relatively good and prosperous times of the Clinton 90s, or think they got a raw deal last time around, but i urge you to take a deep breath and think about the big picture.  Think about victory.

Can someone-- maybe a Republican-- please explain what happened in the Republican caucus in Washington state this past weekend?

It seems that the people running the election there decided to stop counting the votes with 13% of the votes uncounted, and the two top vote getters separated by less than 2% of the vote!

State party chair Luke Esser then sent out a press release declaring McCain the winner on the basis of the 87% of the results that were counted.

The question on everybody's mind is "why?"  Was it some hang up with the votes, or some mechanical issue? 

Nope.  Luke Esser said that he just thought it was the right thing to do.   According to Esser, sometime overnight he did some sort of back of the envelope statistical analysis of the the margin of McCain's lead (1.8%) and the number votes left uncounted (13%) and decided that Huckabee didn't have a chance and he'd shut the thing down and declare McCain the winner.

Here's Esser's rationale ...

“Maybe it would have been safer if I hadn't said anything. But it was an exciting and historic day for the state and I thought if I was confident about what the outcome would be I should share that with the people who had gone out to their caucuses.”

So it was just such an "exciting and historic day" that Esser figured he owed the participants a decision as long as he was confident what the outcome would be.

I'm really not sure I've ever heard anything that ridiculous.

Since then, the Seattle Times has quoted Esser as now saying that the state GOP is going to try to get as "close as we can to 100 percent" of the vote counted.

As "close as we can"!  Try your hardest Washington State GOP! 

Really-- what is it about counting all the votes that gets under Republicans' skin so?

It turns out that our friend Mr. Luke Esser has some, uh... interesting ideas about who should be able to vote, and how easily:

Like any sport worth its salt, in politics you have adversaries, opponents, enemies. Our enemies are loudmouth leftists and shiftless deadbeats. To win the election, we have to keep as many of these people away from the polls as possible.

Now your average leftist loudmouth is a committed individual and can almost never be persuaded to ignore his constitutional rights. The deadbeats, however, are a different matter entirely. Years of interminable welfare checks and free government services have made these modern-day sloths even more lazy. They will vote on election day, if it isn’t much of a bother. But even the slightest inconvenience can keep them from the polling place.

Many of the most successful anti-deadbeat voter techniques (poll taxes, sound beatings, etc.) that conservatives have used in the past have been outlawed by busybody judges.

The only means of persuasion left available to us are Acts of God, who we know is exclusively on our side. I’m talking about seriously inclement weather. I want Biblical floods and pestilence. I will settle for rain, sweet rain. The deadbeats won’t even go out in the rain for their welfare checks (they send one of their social workers to pick it up). There’s no way they’ll vote if it’s raining.

Nice one Luke.   If only we could still use poll taxes to weed out poor voters, and "sound beatings" to discourage other undesirables from the polls, we could finally get a government that works for the interests of real Americans-- the rich and ideologically pure.  

Oh wait...

... in this hilariously cringe-worthy internet ad:

Ugh.  Stick with the appeals to the over-65 set Hillary.  That's your base of support, and that base-- like your candidacy-- is all about the past.

Your campaign's attempts to prove otherwise, with what they consider to be "hip" and "edgy" web ads, have just been embarrassing.  Please stop them from doing this again.

I'll give you a hint.  From The Politico:

Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), a certified public accountant, had pushed for months for an internal audit of the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to GOP members, but the committee’s treasurer at the time was reluctant.

Finally, at a recent meeting, the now former NRCC treasurer, Christopher J. Ward, relented, giving Conaway what was supposed to be an official internal audit from 2006. That document was a fake, the GOP members said. Even the letterhead on which it was sent was a forgery.

Revelations about the falsified document touched off an unfolding scandal that has rocked the NRCC and spurred a criminal investigation by the FBI into the committee’s accounting procedures.

Fearing the fallout from the discovery, the NRCC informed its principle lender, Wachovia, of potential accounting problems.  Wachovia, which declined comment Thursday, had lent the committee $9 million in 2006, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Knowing the bank was required by law to notify federal investigators of any “suspicious activity,” the NRCC also alerted the FBI, Republican insiders confirmed.

At the same time, NRCC officials notified the FEC that the committee may have filed inaccurate disclosure statements.

Since the accounting irregularities were first uncovered in late January, NRCC Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) has retained an outside law firm, Covington & Burling, to advise the committee and hired the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to review the committee’s finances, the chairman told members during a closed-door briefing in the Cannon Caucus Room on Thursday.
...

Cole told his colleagues that he wasn’t sure if the committee had done a real audit since 2001, and that could open the door for a lengthy and expensive review of the committee’s financial records.

Cole spoke to members with notes detailing what he could — and could not — say, according to one member present. Conaway and Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), who chairs the committee’s management team, also spoke.

But none gave members any more details about the alleged transgressions.  And no one mentioned Ward’s name.

The former treasurer signed every FEC report the NRCC submitted from 1993 to 2003, and he was also affiliated with dozens of other Republican campaigns and leadership political action committees, some of which have already begun their own internal audits.

Ward has not responded to repeated attempts to seek comment.

In an effort to calm some of the most anxious Republicans, Cole said they could set up a private briefing with the committee’s general counsel, Don McGahn, to learn more, members said after the briefing. That way, lawmakers would be protected by attorney-client privilege.

But most members and aides have shown a distinct unwillingness to learn much more about the investigation for fear of getting ensnared in it.

The acknowledgment that the committee’s financial records might be inaccurate or falsified opens the possibility that the accounting problems could run much deeper than initially suggested in Cole’s original public statement on the matter.

Campaign committees are not required by law to perform an internal audit each year, a group of election lawyers said. But most corporations and large campaign committees do perform regular reviews to ensure their numbers match the reports they file with the FEC.

Cole, Conaway and Kline were careful not to suggest in the briefing that the committee had lost any money, members said. The NRCC, Conaway and Kline all refrained from public comment.

In the short term at least, House Republicans have rallied around Cole and his NRCC team, giving him a warm ovation during Thursday’s briefing.

Coincidentally, 2001 (which, according to the article, was the last time the NRCC apparently did an audit) was the same year that the accounting scandals first broke, and all of the devious and dishonest accounting methods came to light.  No wonder the Republicans in Congress showed such little interest in investigating these scandals when they first came to light in 2001 and 2002-- they were apparently taking instructional notes.

It kinda makes me think of this:

I learned it by watching you. 

Indeed.

TIME Poll: Clinton More Beatable than Obama

Though the real election is nine months away, Sen. Barack Obama would fare slightly better than Sen. Hillary Clinton in a head to head match-up with Sen. John McCain if the general election were held today, a new TIME poll reveals.

Obama captured 48% of the vote in the theoretical match-up against McCain's 41%, the TIME poll reported, while Clinton and McCain would deadlock at 46% of the vote each. Put another way, McCain looks at the moment to have a narrowly better chance of beating the New York Senator than he does the relative newcomer from Illinois.

The difference, says Mark Schulman, CEO of Abt SRBI, which conducted the poll for TIME, is that "independents tilt toward McCain when he is matched up against Clinton.  But they tilt toward Obama when he is matched up against the Illinois Senator." Independents, added Schulman, "are a key battleground."

For much of the year, Democrats have enjoyed a wide margin over any Republican rival in theoretical match-ups. Those margins have begun to shrink in recent weeks.

According to the new poll, Democratic voters favor Clinton over Obama for the Democratic nomination by a margin of 48% to 42%.

Seventy percent of the voters polled by TIME said Bill Clinton's recent performance on the campaign trail had "no influence" on whether they were more or less likely to vote for his wife. Nineteen percent of voters said Clinton's recent comments made them less likely to vote for her; nine percent of voters said it made them more likely to vote for her.

The poll also sampled all voters' views of several possible vice presidential choices — and their various impacts on a potential race. According to the survey results, 62% of likely voters want Hillary Clinton to name Obama as her running mate. By contrast, only 51% of the same voters want Obama to return the favor. The same voters, by a margin of 55% to 11%, believed that Obama would help rather than hurt Clinton's chances were he to become her running mate. If Obama tapped Clinton as his running mate, that margin shifted, with 38% saying it would help his chances and 31% saying it would hurt.