I don't really know where to start.

America has been led down the garden path by power hungry people riding moral high horses for years now - we're famous for it around the world.

They do it with God, fear and our own sense of being better than anyone else around...."American exceptionalism"

GOPers have done it for the past 30 years, railing against other people's totalitarianism and with the fear of the Bomb.

In the past decade, people who wanted to loot this country did it using a combination of fear and a spasm of nativism brought on by 9/11 to distract our attention and make us lose perspective.

Obedience to a Christian God and being holier than thou are underlying themes as well. They work well to foster GOP goals.

But we on the Left do it too....we lose perspective and equate things that are vastly unequal in importance, and get deluded as a consequence too..........

Bush was at 44% approval/ 54% disapproval 2 days ago in the (much maligned) Rasmussen tracking poll. His support has undergone the fastest drop ever recorded (for him) to todays reading of 35%/63% A/D.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/...

That's a net shift of 19 points in the A/D difference in 2 days.

It seems to be an anonymous source saying that since Rove screwed up real bad on the election, Harriet Meiers, Trent Lott and sundry others have it in for him, and Susan Ralston was forced to resign, KKKarl will retire "within weeks, not months".

I'll take vanilla on the rumor, which is not why I write this diary.

I am writing the diary because the Freepi seem to be taking this big, and it's been fun to watch

http://www.pollingreport.com/...

Bush is at 32% approval, 58% disapproval.

This represents a jump from an A/D spread of just 13 points before the election to 26 points a week afterward.

Even assuming that the pre election sample was skewed GOP, that's not bad.

That's the worst A and the worst D in Pew EVER - even lower than the May nadir

Here's a 48hour precipitation map for the period of next Monday through Tuesday night: http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/...

Before anyone flames me in disgust for suggesting that a weather forecast 8-9 days away is worth a damn, let me say this:

But that's the gist of what he has actually said.....and it amounts to that........Seriously.

Keith Olbermann really wasn't joking about his "See me in Gitmo"

From today's Froomkin:http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

First, Bushie LIKES this bill - he didn't even do a signing statement!

Here's another sign of how pleased the White House was with this legislation.

Signing statements -- in which the president quietly asserts his right to ignore legislative provisions that he believes conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution -- have become a controversial tradition at the Bush White House.

I am posting it as a diary here because I think that "Axis of Failure" is an inspired political slogan that perfectly captures the failures of Bushevik foreign policy and which deserves to be used generally in the course of the next month to counteract the attempts of Busheviks to:

1) change the subject from Masturgate

2) conflate failure in North Korea with the WOT and use both to inspire the Fear and Cowardice conditioned response from the American Voter that they evoked so masterfully in '02 and '04.

The GOPers like to pin ridiculously non-descriptive names on their legislation that usually suggest the opposite of the effects that said legislation will have on America:

The Patriot Act
No Child Left Behind
Clear Skies

etc. etc.

Lets beat them to it and add some truth to this one for a change..........before the GOPers can call it the American Motherhood for Truth Act, or some such garbage.

I like "The Disappearing Act" because it honors the people who "disappeared" without a trace in Argentina during the 70s-early 80s and those who disappeared from Stalin-era photos of Soviet bigwigs.

The Disappearing Act also says what may happen to YOU (yes, even you, ma'am) in what used to be the Land of the Free, but is now the Home of the Frightened.

Remember, if Bush says that you "support terrorism", you are an Enemy Combatant and can be tossed in the can forever.

Remember also that Bush thinks that anyone who "thinks" in a way different from him (i.e. who thinks at all) is supporting terrorists (see KO's recent commentary on the subject).

This looks worse even than the predictions of what bird flu might do if it acquired the ability to be transmitted human to human.

On a day when there are lots of discussions about fear-mongering using terrorists, here's something that is REALLY scary......it's right up there with the ecological collapse that will accompany climate change....and it is happening NOW.

World health officials last night put out an unprecedented warning that deadly new strains of tuberculosis, virtually untreatable using the drugs currently available, appear to be spreading across the globe.

The new strains are known as extreme drug-resistant TB, or XDR-TB. They have been identified and have killed people in several countries, including the United States and eastern Europe, and they have recently been found in Africa, where they could swiftly put an end to all hope of containing the Aids pandemic through treatment.

This is from Al Hayat via an ABC investigative report from Brian Ross:

You'll have to use the link to read it, as I can't cut and paste even limited excerpts. The following points:

1) As far as I know, Al Hayat is well thought of  as a ME news source, but I'm no expert.

2) The "conversion to Islam" story is false - it was a cover for the so-called "real demands" of the terrorists (the "Holy Jihad Brigades"), and was put out to prevent people from learning that the US was actually negotiating terms with terrorists, something they have sworn on a 10 mile high stack of Bibles that they'd never do.

So this is the 4th poll since the Terrapturous unveiling of the UK airline liquid bombing plot.

Three of the 4 polls have shown Bush with no bounce at all (CBS, Gallup) or a negative shift (Zogby).

Only one of them gave him a modest bump (Newsweek).

The Mediots have been going insane with this one, repeating again and again how fearmongering would work against the Dems (we don't approve of it, dear, but those Dems are so incompetent that it'll work anyhow, and despite ourselves we HAVE to keep repeating that nasty but effective mantra....the Dems are soft on Terror!) .

Wanking brings people closer to Jesus

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Poll_Christians_addicted_to_pornography_0814.html

"The poll results indicate that 50% of all Christian men and 20% of all Christian women are addicted to pornography," said Clay Jones, founder and President of Second Glance Ministries.

Second Glance Ministries?

Another case of incestuous rulings by partisan officials in what should be non-partisan positions

So Bob Ney CAN be replaced by a hand-picked successor who is almost as corrupt in her associations as he is.

This is according to Jim Petro, the GOPer AG (consulted by OH Sec. of State Ken Blackwell - yes THAT Blackwell).

Apparently the "sore loser law in OH does not specifically cover a candidate who gets on the ballot via "declaration of candidacy"

Another milestone in the Zeitgeist Shift.

Rasmussen finally polls in a way that comes close to mirroring other polling on Bush, with 36% Approving and 63% disapproving.

The A-D spread is -27%, which is only a bit below par (-31%) for Bush polling these days.

Two points:

Rasmussen claimed to have rejiggered their weighting to reflect present Party ID reality two weeks ago, but this wasn't reflected in their polling......until now. Why?

I don't know if folks were disheartened by the latest Fox poll which had Bush back at 38%, but it doesn't seem to be an omen or anything.

Its just Fox being Fox.

The AP-Ipsos has overwhelmingly bad internals for the GOP this November, with a record 51% of those polled wanting the Dems to win Congress vs. 34% wanting GOPers.

This isn't  a very substantial diary, but I thought that folks should be heartened by these numbers. Pollwatchers like me are at least.

Dan does the play by play on the skit, the media's initial pretense that it didn't happen, the wave of Blograge and the contention that Colbert was just....tut.....NOT FUNNY, as well as being gauche in the extreme, don'cha know.

I submit this diary (yet ANOTHER Colbert Affair diary!) because it points up how nice it is to have a Froomkin out there, especially after the Dana Milbanks of the world piss me off.

Money quotes:

Yes, it turns out Colbert has brought the White House and its press corps together at long last, creating a sense of solidarity rooted in something they have in common: Neither of them like being criticized.

This is the second column in as many tries that I've seen him describe scenes from the Real World, and I'm starting to get worried about him. Is everything OK, Mr Cohen? Is your worldview feeling OK?

Because your columns are starting to suggest that the little dream world that you used to live in - in which Bush was our morally upright leader doing what had to be done for America - is starting to cave in as the result of a violent attack from the World of Facts.

Look at this:

Maybe we should leave Ground Zero as it is. .........This is their hole. It is, by dint of failure, George Bush's presidential library. His proper legacy is a void.

http://www.npr.org/...

New polls, same message for W: We REALLY dislike what you are doing as President.

While the overall Bush A/D is run of the mill (41/58 for Rasmussen - near the top for them, and 39/58 for NPR), both the Rasmussen (top link) and the NPR (bottom link) polls have STRONG DISAPPROVAL of Bush at or near record highs (42% for Ras, 45% for NPR).

Why is this worth a diary?