New from Gallup:

78% of Americans approve of the way Obama is handling his presidential transition, with only 13% disapproving. A majority of Democrats (94%), independents (79%), and Republicans (57%) say they approve.

That overall 78% approval rating compares favorably to the reaction Americans had to George W. Bush's transition, for which an average of 63% approved in January 2001, and Bill Clinton's transition, when an average of 66% approved from November 1992 through January 1993.

78% approval is huge. If Obama has that kind of approval rating in February, he'll be able to overcome GOP Senate opposition pretty easily.

But I'd love to see a regional breakout - does the South support Obama as strongly as the rest of the nation?

As Bush prepares to leave the White House, he and his advisors are hard at work rewriting history. Are we surprised? Of course not. But many pundits are.

It's official now. George Bush has entered not just the twilight of his presidency, but the Twilight Zone of history.

His interview with Charlie Gibson on ABC News is chock-full of Jabberwocky tangles of the mother tongue. Even on his way out the White House door, you still need a translator to decipher the President's meaning.

Actually, you don't need a translator at all. Here's a roadmap to Bush Revisionism:

While most coverage of the Chambliss-Martin runoff has focused on the fact that Democrats will not get a filibuster-proof majority, there's a deeper story here. On Election Day, Saxby Chambliss beat Jim Martin by only 3%. Just four weeks later, Chambliss won the runoff by 15%. What the heck happened to Georgia voters?

Obviously Obama wasn't on the ballot, and many Democrats who turned out on Election Day for Obama were not highly motivated to vote again for Martin, a decent but uncharismatic candidate.

John Kerry blogged this at HuffPo:

The progressive movement had what we want to believe was a seismic win on election day -- but it's really only seismic if it continues to reverberate.

We? When exactly did John Kerry join the progressive movement?

Sure, Kerry has always been a partisan Democrat with a liberal-ish voting record. But he actively supported the invasion of Iraq, thus failing a key test for progressivism. And he never led a single filibuster or other floor battle against Bush's horrible legislation or appointments.

Kerry's record was such a disappointment that Progressive Democrats of America supported a primary challenge against him this year.

By David Swanson

I know, I know, Bush liberated the Iraqis. But when will we liberate them from Bush's liberation? Well, ideally, the American people will rise up tomorrow and force Congress to cease funding the occupation and to vote an immediate and complete withdrawal with a veto-overriding supermajority, not to mention impeaching Bush and Cheney. I raise that possibility not so much because I've been drinking as because long-term movements for systemic reform require awareness of what we're missing. If we ever replace a Congress dominated by money, media, and parties with one loyal to us the people, it will be because we tragically realize what so very easily could have been.

Today's NY Times exposed more about Eric Holder's role in Bill Clinton's corrupt pardon of Marc Rich, and it's not pretty.

Mr. Holder had more than a half-dozen contacts with Mr. Rich’s lawyers over 15 months, including phone calls, e-mail and memorandums.

Holder was Deputy Attorney General at the time, so he was plenty busy. Why did he spend so much time on the Rich pardon? Glenn Greenwald has a theory:

The St. Petersburg Times says Sen. Mel Martinez is quitting the Senate:

Martinez won't seek re-election; Sink will

U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez plans a major announcement in Orlando shortly and a highly-placed Republican source says Martinez will announce that he's not seeking re-election and that he may leave his seat in advance of the end of his term in 2010. That would open the door for Gov. Charlie Crist to appoint a replacement in advance of a wide-open Senate race in '10.

By David Swanson

So, now we discover that Bush was warned in detail of the looming foreclosure crisis and told what would prevent it and what would make it worse. He chose to make it worse. Funny, he was also warned about Hurricane Katrina (we have the videotape), but he claimed he had no possible way of knowing what could happen. He was warned exactly how the Iraqis would react to an occupation of their country, but he said he had no idea. He got a memo describing the 9-11 attacks pretty clearly and was repeatedly briefed on the danger, and yet he said he just couldn't have possibly imagined such a thing. Of course, there's nothing we could discover that would cause Congress to impeach Bush. But we have learned this: Clinton could have avoided impeachment too if he'd only said "I had no way of imagining what might happen when that woman crawled under my desk." Psst: Obama, remember that as far as you know Afghanistan is a really fun place to occupy and almost nobody has ever had a bad experience with that!

Jack Cafferty at CNN wants you to tell him.

By David Swanson

The debate among progressive activists and commentators in recent weeks has tended to range from the leave-Obama-alone-and-he'll-fix-everything position to the stage-a-protest-at-Obama's-house-for-the-next-month position, including numerous stances in between those extremes. What all these positions share is acceptance of the incredible shift of power from Congress to the White House that we have seen in just the last eight years. It is in these concluding moments of the Bush-Cheney era that Congress's coffin is being constructed just outside our window, and I'm afraid that the peace and justice movement is picking flowers to bring to the funeral.

By Dave Lindorff

Before the odor of burned gunpowder has left the air of the Taj
Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, the US is lecturing India not to go off
half-cocked and attack Pakistan, simply because all of the attackers in
the terrorist assaults in that city arrived by boat, apparently from
neighboring Pakistan. US officials, including Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, are calling on India to engage in a “transparent” and
“thorough” investigation into the attacks to establish who was
responsible.

How different this is from the American government’s response to the 9-11 attacks in the US!

http://www.unionsforsinglepayerhr676.org

Self-described as "one of the Democratic Party's leading political strategists," Celinda Lake has claimed that single-payer reform lacks meaningful popular support. Lake's research, done for the Herndon Alliance, has consistently supported reform based upon private health insurance. She and the Herndon Alliance are largely responsible for the notion that a single payer Medicare-for-all healthcare system is ‘not politically feasible.’

Lake’s findings are in sharp contradiction to numerous polls showing that single payer is enormously popular.

* In a New York Times/CBS News poll in February 2007, 64% said that the federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.