Bush’s pre-speech poll ratings fall to Nixon’s level

WASHINGTON — President George W. Bush’s approval ratings were the lowest for any president the day before a State of the Union speech since Richard Nixon in 1974, according to results of a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday.

Sixty-five percent of those surveyed said they disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president while 33 percent approve. The rating matches Bush’s career low, from a May 2006 poll.

Seventy-one percent of Americans said the country is on the wrong track, up from 46 percent in an April 2003 poll, the month after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. A majority of those polled this month don’t approve of how Bush is handling the Iraq war, terrorism or the economy.

Bush also received career-low approval ratings in a new CNN poll. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed said they disapprove of how Bush has handled his presidency and 34 percent said they approve. Sixty percent disapproved and 38 percent approved of Bush’s performance in a March 2006 CNN poll.

The president reached an all-time low 28 percent approval rating in a CBS poll released Monday. Sixty-six percent of those surveyed in the CBS poll said they opposed Bush’s sending 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, and 75 percent said the war there is going badly. Fifty percent said Congress shouldn’t provide money for the 20,000 additional troops.

The CBS poll surveyed 1,168 adults nationwide by telephone from Jan. 18 to 21. The poll has a sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Almost two-thirds of people in the U.S. don’t support a troop increase in Iraq if Congress passes a resolution opposing it, and don’t believe the war can succeed, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll of 1,007 adults.

(Bloomberg)

U.S., British workers seized in Nigeria

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria — Unidentified assailants seized two foreign oil workers Tuesday in the latest kidnapping in restive southern Nigeria, officials said.

An American and a Briton were taken in the oil center of Port Harcourt, Rivers State police spokeswoman Irejua Barasua said.

The pair worked for a Nigeria-registered oil services company, Pivot Engineering, a fellow oil-industry worker said. He said he called one of the hostage’s mobile phones and a man with a Nigerian accent immediately rang back from that number saying the two had been taken hostage.

One of the main militant groups, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, said it was not responsible for the attack.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has hit Nigeria’s oil industry with attacks that have trimmed nearly one quarter of the country’s normal 2.5 million barrel per day crude production.

Despite the vast energy stores lying beneath their lands, most of the region’s people are mired in poverty and hostage-takings for ransom have become common. There have been nearly 100 kidnappings over the past year in the southern Niger Delta region of Africa’s largest crude producer. At least 11 foreigners are believed to remain in captivity.

Hostages are generally released unharmed, although casualties sometimes occur during gunfights between the hostage-takers and the military forces that patrol the vast region of swamps and creeks.

Trial resumes in Mississippi reverse discrimination case

JACKSON, Miss. — The federal trial of a black Democratic Party official in Noxubee County entered its second week, with more testimony anticipated from whites who claim their right to participate in the election process has been violated.

Ike Brown, the chairman of the county’s Democratic Executive Committee, is accused of violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was written to protect racial minorities when Southern states strictly enforced segregation. It is the first use of the act to allege discrimination against whites.

Noxubee County is a rural area along the Alabama line with a majority black population.

Two white witnesses said last week that Brown had threatened to challenge their right to cast ballots in the party’s 2003 primary. In addition, an unsuccessful white candidate for Noxubee County supervisor told the federal judge he was unfairly treated by the defendant as to how absentee ballots were counted in a close race against the eventual black winner.

Federal prosecutors want U.S. District Judge Tom Lee to rule whites’ voting rights were violated by Brown and other black Democratic Party officials in the county and to order unlawful practices stopped.

Cheri Anne Eaves and Kari Hardy testified that Brown accused them of being disloyal Democrats and had threatened to try to deny their right to vote in the 2003 Democratic primary. Brown allegedly had put them on a list he circulated of 174 white voters he would challenge as ineligible to participate in Democratic Party election because they were closet Republicans.

“I was angry that anybody would have the right to say I couldn’t vote,” Eaves said.

Despite the threat of being challenged at the polls, she told Lee she did vote in the Democratic primary. Hardy said she did not vote.

Both women testified that they didn’t understand why Brown could question their right to vote. They said they hadn’t voted in Republican primaries before. Mississippi has open primaries for the two political parties to hold and doesn’t require voters to register as Democrat or Republican.

Brown claims the U.S. Justice Department is misconstruing as racial intimidation his attempts to keep Republicans from voting in Democratic primaries. However, the Justice Department alleges that the “relentless voting-related discrimination” is based on Noxubee County blacks trying to shut whites out of the process.

(Associated Press)

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