Just shy of a majority of registered voters, 49 percent, say they definitely plan to vote against Barack Obama in 2012, but just 36 percent say they definitely plan to vote for him, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

It is an article of faith among Republicans (and far too many Democrats) that all those pesky “regulations” are to blame for the lack of jobs today and the ongoing economic slowdown. Just the first of this month, McClatchy had an article where they had surveyed small business owners across the country and the consensus was that in fact regulations are not the problem for small business but lack of demand is.

At least one news organization is trying to be a “news” organization.

Eight unreliable detainees, several of whom are known to have been tortured, provided a great deal of the intelligence justifying the continuing detention of Gitmo detainees.

On Wednesday, I wrote a post with the (admittedly rhetorical) title “Is Cutting Jobs Programs to Create Jobs Like Cutting Taxes to Increase Revenues?”

Today, I’d like to offer up a few more examples of how the new governors’ of Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin are treating workers within their states as they “create” jobs.

There are two pieces of good news in McClatchy’s story reporting that Carol Rosenberg, one of four journalists banned from Gitmo because she published the previously reported name of Omar Khadr’s first interrogator, Joshua Claus, will be allowed to return next week rather than after August 5, as they had previously decided.

So, out of 10 names, and going all the way back to Marion Crackbarry in 1990 (Traficant, Ventura and Jefferson are not exactly current either), Rosen could only think of one non-South Carolina Republican with a scandal? Really? What about John Ensign’s affair with a staffer and subsequent attempt to pay off her husband? What about the Vice President’s Chief of Staff getting convicted of obstruction of justice? What about the baldfaced corruption of John Doolittle and Tom Delay?

For those of you who may be concerned that the Senators assigned to the conference committee to sort out the House and Senate financial reform bills may not be up to snuff, we have a McClatchy profile of Senator Judd Gregg (R. N.H.), one of the Republican members, to assure us.

General interest readers in America, apparently, can’t be expected to face the fact that our Congress is not only ruining our own country, it is ruining the globe.

Jonathan Landay is a good reporter and McClatchy is a reputable news organization (there are still a few), but this is a ridiculous story: As the Obama administration reconsiders its Afghanistan policy, White House officials are minimizing warnings from the intelligence community, the military and the State Department about the risks of adopting a limited [...]