Poll: More Horrendous News for Bush – 61% Say He’s Bungled Iraq

Bush’s approval ratings have dropped to 42 percent; 51 percent of Americans say they disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job as president.

Newsweek:

As U.S. troops endured a deadly week in Iraq, 61 percent of Americans polled say they disapprove of the way President George W. Bush is handling the war in Iraq, according to a new NEWSWEEK poll. Thirty four percent say they approve. This is Bush’s lowest rating on Iraq and the first time it has dropped below 40 percent in the NEWSWEEK poll. And 50 percent of those polled say the United States is losing ground in its efforts to establish security and democracy in Iraq; just 40 percent say the U.S. is making progress there…

Meanwhile, Bush’s approval ratings have dropped to 42 percent; 51 percent of Americans say they disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job as president. Bush’s approval ratings reached a high of 88 percent in his first term, in the month after the September 11 attacks. Forty-two percent is his low.

Grieving Mother Leads Anti-War Protest at Bush’s Ranch

Associated Press:

The angry mother of a fallen U.S. soldier staged a protest near President Bush’s ranch on Saturday, demanding an accounting from the president of how he has conducted the war in Iraq.

Supported by more than 50 shouting demonstrators, Cindy Sheehan, 48, told reporters, “I want to ask George Bush: Why did my son die?”

Sheehan arrived in Crawford aboard a bus painted red, white and blue and emblazoned with the words, “Impeachment Tour.”

Her son, Casey, 24, was killed in Sadr City, Iraq, on April 4, 2004. He was an Army specialist, a Humvee mechanic…

[Sheehan] led a caravan of about 20 vehicles down a winding road toward Bush’s ranch. The group stopped along the way and sheriff’s deputies advised them that if they wanted to go farther toward the ranch, they would have to walk in a ditch along the road.

The marchers walked about half a mile until the deputies stopped them, saying that they had violated their instructions by walking on the road itself instead of staying in the adjacent ditch.

Sheehan protested, saying she had not walked on the road. The deputies refused to let her go farther.

The protesters then began chanting, “W killed her son.”

Novak Became Fair Game After He Broke His Silence on Plame

Jay Rosen at PressThink has a good analysis of the imbroglio that led to the on-air meltdown of rightwing propagandist Bob Novak earlier this week.

Rosen points out that in the two years since he published the name of CIA spy Valerie Plame, Novak had maintained a strict policy of not commenting on the case – until last Monday when Novak broke his silence – in his own column – to deny assertions by Bob Harlow, a former CIA official, who said he warned Novak not to publish Plame’s name in his July 2003 column. Novak complained in his column on Monday that the CIA official had not warned him enough. (He should have said, “Bob, Plame’s identity is extra-super-secret,” we suppose.)

Here’s Rosen’s reasoning:

Novak, in order to counter the suggestion that he had been properly warned but went ahead anyway — which he said would be “inexcusable for any journalist and particularly a veteran of 48 years in Washington” — decided to take up his pen. Ladies and gentlemen, he said, people have got to know whether their columnist is a crook. Or a jerk. Or a tool. Did I go ahead with the name of a CIA covert operative despite being warned? No, I did not.

Old Novak rules: sorry fellas, can’t talk. New rules: Novak chooses when. When to take the Fifth on advice of counsel, when to ignore counsel and respond to the news with his own explanations of what happened to reveal Plame’s name.

This, I believe, is the real cause of Thursday’s break down of professional discipline on air. The legitimacy of Novak’s exemption from questioning had collapsed earlier in the week. Ed Henry knew it and was ready with that news. Novak was not ready to receive it. So he invented an out.

Dr. Dean: GOP to Make Immigrants Scapegoats in ’06

Because it worked so well for Gov. Wilson and the California GOP (remember them?) when they successfully passed Proposition 187, the anti-immigrant measure, in 1994…

Associated Press:

The Democratic Party chairman, Howard Dean, argued on Friday that Republicans would try to make immigrants the “scapegoats” in the next election.

At a rally here a few miles from the Mexico border, Mr. Dean garnered the loudest applause when he said Republicans would make immigration a pivotal issue in coming elections, as they did same-sex marriage and affirmative action in previous elections.

“Do you know who the scapegoats are going to be? Immigrants,” he said. “In Colorado, the chairman of the Republican Party endorsed Tom Tancredo for re-election. That is morally reprehensible. The governor of California, a supposed moderate Republican, invited the Minutemen to visit California. We do not need vigilante justice.”

…Mr. Dean also criticized President Bush, contending that he rebuffed President Vicente Fox of Mexico because of divisions over the Iraq war.

Is Ann Coulter a Plaigraist, Too?

We know Ann Coulter is a hypocrite, a liar and a rightwing tool but is she also a plaigarist?

Of course she is. Check out this column in the Tucson Weekly for the full story but here are a few of the key facts:

As of this writing, the mainstream media still hasn’t picked up on the latest credibility controversy surrounding conservative columnist Ann Coulter–that several chunks of her June 29 column appear to be lifted from sources as much as 20 years old…

Coulter’s column, titled “Thou Shalt Not Commit Religion,” was her reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision banning displays of the Ten Commandments in courthouses. The column’s disputed text involves descriptions of federally funded art projects that conservative religious groups called “obscene art.” Those exhibits were the jumping-off point for the “Deo et Patria” crowd’s failed effort to convince Congress to yank all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

The sentences she allegedly lifted are vile – but were copied by Coulter word for word from a defunct web publication called “The Flummery Digest.”

We heard about the Tucson Weekly column via a Media Matters email, in which MM wryly noted that the charges of plaigarism are “hard to believe; if she’s getting ‘help’ with her columns, shouldn’t they make more sense than they do?”