Sometimes, a number is so stunning that all you can do is stare.

24%

Look at it.

Think about it.

Less than one-fourth.

The most unpopular president ever.

According to Reuters:

Bush’s job approval rating fell to 24 percent from last month’s record low for a Zogby poll of 29 percent.

Down five percent. In one month.

Down five percent, in one month, from the previous record low!

The mind reels. The mind stumbles. The mind falls down.

The national telephone survey of 991 likely voters, conducted October 10 through October 14, found barely one-quarter of Americans, or 26 percent, believe the country is headed in the right direction.

The poll found declining confidence in U.S. economic and foreign policy. About 18 percent gave positive marks to foreign policy, down from 24 percent, and 26 percent rated economic policy positively, down from 30 percent.

You know what’s worse than being a president with a record low 24% approval rating? Being an opposition party that is incapable of opposing a president with a record low 24% approval rating.

It’s embarrassing.

It’s humiliating.

Considering the real life consequences, it’s also disastrous.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spent part of yesterday running from her Democratic colleague, Rep. Pete Stark. Stark said bad things about Bush.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spent part of last week running from his colleague, Sen. Chris Dodd. Dodd tried to stop a bad Bush policy.

Pelosi and Reid did not spend much time running from Bush.

They did not resolve to stop his war.

They did not resolve to stop him from torturing people.

They did not resolve to stop him from indiscriminately spying on the American people.

They did not resolve to force him to comply with subpoenas.

They did not resolve to force him to comply with laws, national and international.

The elected leaders of the Democratic Party are afraid to stand up to a president with a 24% approval rating.

The elected leaders of the Democratic Party are afraid of being criticized for standing up to a president with a 24% approval rating.

Perhaps that’s why Reuters also reported this Zogby poll result:

A paltry 11 percent gave Congress a positive grade, tying last month’s record low.

Paltry. That’s a good word for it: paltry.

Congress always polls poorly. But this is a record. A record of paltriness.

11 percent!

They’re less popular than Bush.

They’re less than half as popular as Bush!

It’s clearly not from opposing him, because they clearly haven’t.

Maybe it’s time they tried something different.

Maybe it’s time they tried opposing him.

For real.

Because if you can’t stand up to a president with a 24% approval rating, what can you stand up to? What can you stand for?

The story, out of England, is pretty straight-forward, but the implications are stunning; or, they would be stunning, if the repeated crimes and inhumanity of the Bush Administration had not fried whatever synapses allow us to feel stunned.

The Guardian reports:

Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called “black site” prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.

As Seymour Hersh has reported, the Bush Administration has made a deliberate calculation to change the rationale for its warmongering against Iran. They realized that the lie about Iran’s nascent nuclear weapons program wasn’t selling, so they decided to recalibrate and relaunch with a new marketing campaign claiming Iran is a major cause of the violence in Iraq. Of course, there wouldn’t be much violence in Iraq, had Bush not launched an invason, but we’re talking about catapulting propaganda, not reality.

So, the first Iran War rollout wasn’t working, and the Administration decided on another one; because it’s not the facts that matter, it’s the selling of war. So, Iran suddenly became a dangerous influence in Iraq. And some-time general, and full-time political hack, David Petraeus was recently in England, trying to sell the same story– although the Brits aren’t buying it. Apparently, neither are the people who would actually know something about it: the Iraqis.

The New York Times is reporting:

Iraq has agreed to award $1.1 billion in contracts to Iranian and Chinese companies to build a pair of enormous power plants, the Iraqi electricity minister said Tuesday. Word of the project prompted serious concerns among American military officials, who fear that Iranian commercial investments can mask military activities at a time of heightened tension with Iran.

Or maybe those American officials are actually worried that it’s going to be hard to sell a war based on Iranian meddling in Iraq when Iraq itself is inviting Iranian businesses into Iraq to build power plants.

The Iraqi electricity minister, Karim Wahid, said that the Iranian project would be built in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad that is controlled by followers of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He added that Iran had also agreed to provide cheap electricity from its own grid to southern Iraq, and to build a large power plant essentially free of charge in an area between the two southern Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

So, Iran’s going to actually help solve Iraq’s electricity problem. Something at which we’ve not been doing such a good job.

The Chinese will be paid about $940,000,000 for their plant, and the Iranians about $150,000,000 for theirs. Don’t ask where the money’s coming from. The article doesn’t say whether it’s out of the funds we’re giving Iraq, but it would be interesting to trace it. Because we are giving them a lot. And these are expensive projects. So, it does actually seem plausible that our tax dollars will be going to Iran, to help them rebuild Iraq.

And there’s this:

A terribly misreported diary is climbing the Recommended List at Daily Kos. The erroneous title:

Gore will not run – breaking news in UK (Updated)

And the text includes the following:

Because of the importance attached to it by so many, I am reporting breaking news on Sky News in the UK at the moment.

This is that Al Gore will not be throwing his hat in the ring and has formally annouced that he will not stand as a presidential candidate.

As has often been the case, however, Gore has made an ambiguous statement, and the media have misreported it. The diarist now has, too.

The actual quote, from Reuters:

“I don’t have plans to be a candidate again so I don’t really see it in that context at all,” Gore said when asked in an interview with Norway’s NRK public television aired on Wednesday about how the award would affect his political future.

In other words, it’s essentially the same thing he’s been saying all year: he has no plans to run. That doesn’t mean he won’t eventually have such plans.

Gore knows what he’s doing, and he’s deliberately leaving the door open, a crack. If he wanted to definitively rule out a run, he’d say something to the effect of: I am not running for president, and I will not run for president. It’s also absurd to think he would first make such a definitive statement to a Norwegian reporter.

In other words, this is nothing new. It’s not breaking, and it’s not Gore ruling out a run. It’s being badly reported, in Europe, and it’s being badly reported by a diarist on Daily Kos. Don’t buy it.

I will also say this: don’t buy all the diaries and essays suggesting Gore is running. We don’t know. We won’t know until he says something definitive. He hasn’t.

Amidst all the excitement about Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the questions and dreams about a possible presidential campaign, and the inevitable criticism from right wing cynics (demonstrating, once again, that they neither understand nor even like the concept of peace), let’s not lose focus on what really matters. It is not about the man, it is about his cause; and he is the man he is because he puts the cause above any personal considerations, and whether or not he runs will undoubtedly be determined by his best assessment of whether it will be the best way to serve the cause! We need also keep that priority straight! The coming weeks are critical, and we can help!

Largely because of Al Gore and the IPCC, global warming and climate change have now come to be frontline political issues. Bush no longer ignores it, and now tries to spin it (the best he will ever do on any political issue), and Congress is finally crafting legislation to address it. For now, this is where we need focus.

Mark Hertsgaard, the environmental correspondent for The Nation, puts it directly:

Now that Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, will the US Congress take the IPCC’s scientific advice on how to fight global warming? The IPCC holds that the world must reduce greenhouse gas emissions at least 80 percent by the year 2050. Few in Congress seem prepared to go that far, however. And judging from the discussion at a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill last week, even lawmakers who personally embrace the “gold standard” of 80 percent reductions are prepared to endorse a weaker measure in the name of getting some form of climate legislation moving in Congress.

If we take Al Gore seriously, and we take seriously his Nobel Prize, we need to immediately begin lobbying Congress to do the same. This is no time for the compromises that define the usual failures of our political system. With the issue in the headlines, we need let our Congressional representatives know that we are watching, and that we are expecting more than lip service.

The question is, what bill will reformers get behind? How ambitious will they be? Will they demand what the scientific community says is the minimum necessary to enable our civilization to (perhaps) avoid the worst future scenarios of global warming: deep cuts in emissions by 2020 on the way to 80-90 percent cuts by 2050? Or, in the name of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, will they favor a more modest and gradual approach?

The weak, ineffectual compromise approach is being championed by those champions of political weakness and ineffectual compromise, Senators John Warner (R-VA) and Joseph Lieberman (?-CT). Their bill would mandate emission reductions of 10 percent by 2020, and 70 percent by 2050. That they would, for some reason, decide on an approach that falls 10 percent short on such a critical goal says everything. It won’t solve the problem, but it will make nice window dressing. It’s not just embarrassing and absurd, it’s dangerous!

Not only do these provisions fall short of the scientific standard; there is even less here than meets the eye. The bill, as described in briefings and press accounts, contains a number of loopholes, including provisions that (1) will give rather than sell greenhouse-gas-emissions permits to polluters, thus violating the “polluter pays” principle of environmental accounting, and (2) count so-called carbon offsets–that is, paying someone else to reduce emissions while continuing to emit oneself–as genuine reductions.

An alternative has been proposed by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Bernard Sanders (I-VT), with a similar bill in the House being sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). Their bills mandate the 80 percent reductions, on real terms, rather than with carbon offsets, and they make the polluters pay. Hertsgaard links to the World Resource Institute’s comparison of these, and other, proposals.

Of course, only one of the bills is getting traction, on Congress.

According to sources speaking on background because of the confidential nature of the discussions, most Senate Democrats and many environmental and other public interest groups are preparing to support the Lieberman-Warner bill, despite misgivings about its shortcomings.

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While some in Congress apparently believe it is important to pass something, anything, environmental writer Bill McKibben disagrees. Since Bush is likely to veto even Warner-Lieberman, McKibben believes that even passing it will only serve to lower the bar, for the next Congress and the next president. It will make Warner-Lieberman appear to be the proper standard. Clearly, that would be unacceptable.

As McKibben explained to Hertsgaard, in a previous interview:

Since Bush is going to veto it anyway, there is no reason to make [a climate bill] less ambitious than what science requires. Climate change isn’t like other issues. It doesn’t do any good to split the difference to reach a deal everyone can live with. Climate change is about the laws of physics and chemistry, and they don’t give.

We’re all thrilled that Al Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s time for us to help them leverage that prestige, by pressuring Congress to do what is right. Call your senators and congresspeople. Tell them that Warner-Lieberman is unacceptable, and that the only valid options are Boxer-Sanders and Waxman. We now have the political momentum. Let’s not waste it!

Not much to say about this. Except that assholes will be assholes.

San Francisco Chronicle:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday carried out his promise to continue to veto gay marriage bills.

The Republican governor turned down a measure by Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, that would have lifted the state’s ban on same-sex marriages by defining marriage as a union between two persons, not just a man and a woman.

Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar Leno bill in 2005.

In the latest of a seemingly endless series of shocking revelations about the Bush Administration’s attempts to punish anyone who attempts to hold them accountable to the rule of law, it is being reported today that the CIA is investigating its own Inspector General for investigating the CIA for committing acts of torture.

From the New York Times:

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has ordered an unusual internal inquiry into the work of the agency’s inspector general, whose aggressive investigations of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation programs and other matters have created resentment among agency operatives.

Detention and interrogation programs? In other words, torture.

A small team working for General Hayden is looking into the conduct of the agency’s watchdog office, which is led by Inspector General John L. Helgerson. Current and former government officials said the review had caused anxiety and anger in Mr. Helgerson’s office and aroused concern on Capitol Hill that it posed a conflict of interest.

Concern? This warrants more than concern! This warrants an immediate and aggressive investigation by Congress into a clear case of attempting to suppress dedicated public servants because they may believe the United States should abide by international law and basic human morality.

Any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would be unusual, if not unprecedented, and would threaten to undermine the independence of the office, some current and former officials say.

To state the obvious: that’s stating the obvious.

The CIA, of course, officially says this investigation of the investigators is no big deal, completely appropriate, have a doughnut and some coffee and- hey, how’s the weather, today?

Meanwhile, back in reality:

Thanks to the Bush Administration, Iraq is officially hell. Not only have some 655,000 to 1,000,000 Iraqis been killed by Bush’s war, but millions more have been forced to flee their homes. Now, the majority of Iraq’s provinces have decided to cut off their means of escape.

As reported in today’s Guardian:

According to aid officials, 10 out of 18 of Iraq’s governorates are denying entry to civilians trying to escape the fighting or denying them aid once they have arrived, or both. An 11th, Babylon, also tried to shut out displaced families in recent months but was persuaded by the central government in Baghdad to relent for the time being.

Even in their own country, the desperate Iraqis are being told they are not wanted.

Meanwhile:

With the imposition of visa restrictions by Jordan and Syria, hitherto the main destination for Iraqi refugees, those seeking safety from Iraq’s ceaseless bloodshed have virtually run out of options.

“There are more and more makeshift camps in abysmal conditions, with terrible sanitation and water supply, very little or no healthcare, and no schools,” Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the UN high commissioner for refugees, said yesterday.

The article says about 4,500,000 Iraqis- a sixth of the population- have been forced to flee their homes, since Bush started the war. Last year, the British granted exactly 30 of 745 Iraqi asylum requests. Last year, we accepted an astonishing 535 Iraqi refugees. Yes, we’ve made their world hell, but don’t expect us to accept any responsibility for it. That would be to admit that something’s wrong, over there. Which Bush will never do.