In a new poll for Time magazine, only 21 percent of Americans said they approve of the job President Bush is doing in terms of handling the economy. Overall, 29 percent of Americans said they approve of Bush’s job as President, which is where his approval has hovered steadily for some time now.

Since last Friday, House Republicans have been engaged in a political stunt on Capitol Hill, staging fake sessions on gas prices while Congress adjourned for recess.

Over the weekend, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) urged Members to return to the Capitol, “although they themselves didn’t show up“:

“It’s not a request we make lightly. But the American people are suffering,” Boehner and Blunt said. “We’ve called on the Speaker to call Congress back into an emergency session this month and schedule a vote on the American Energy Act. We must continue to make a stand until the Speaker complies.”

Roll Call reports that Boehner is “perhaps arriving by the end of the week” but that didn’t stop him from issuing another stern warning yesterday to Congressional Democrats:

Congress doesn’t deserve a break — not while families and small businesses are struggling under the weight of sky-high fuel costs. It’s time for Barack Obama to put away the tire gauge and tell his Democratic leaders to return to Washington – today – to hold a vote on the American Energy Act.

But what has Boehner been doing while his comrades are fighting the good fight? Golfing. The Washington Post’s Ben Pershing reports:

Boehner also has found time to squeeze in a couple rounds of golf. Scores reported by Boehner himself to a United States Golf Association site show that he posted an 85 sometime this week at his home course, Wetherington Golf & Country Club in West Chester, Ohio.

Boehner was also spotted at another Ohio golf course this week raising money for his “Freedom Project” political action committee.

Perhaps Boehner’s absence on the Hill this week explains why his House colleagues have turned to former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) to lead the way. Regardless, when Boehner claims that “Congress doesn’t deserve a break” he apparently isn’t referring to himself.

Last month, author Andrew Klavan wrote that the new Batman film is a “paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.” CNN’s Glenn Beck agreed today, listing off controversial Bush policies he claims were vindicated by the film’s showcase of “conservative values on the war on terror”:

But Batman goes into another country and with a C-130 snatches a guy out, and then throws him back here into Gotham. So there’s rendition. At one point the Morgan Freeman character says to Batman, wait a minute, hang on, you’re eavesdropping on everyone in Gotham? And Batman says, yes, to stop this terrorist. Morgan Freeman says, I can’t be a part of it. And yet Morgan Freeman does become a part of it, and they find the Joker. One of the ways they find the Joker is through eavesdropping. I mean the parallels here of what’s going on is to me stunning.

Watch it:

Beck also said that Bush’s willingness to “die as the worst president ever because of the war on terror” is “exactly the message that Batman carries.”

Yesterday, Chinese authorities revoked the visa of former Olympic gold medalist Joey Cheek, just hours before “he was set to travel to Beijing to promote his effort urging China to help make peace in the war-torn Darfur section of Sudan.” Today on Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino told reporters that the administration is pushing the Chinese re-issue Cheek’s visa:

We were disturbed to learn that the Chinese had refused his visa. We are taking the matter very seriously. We have sent in our embassy in Beijing to démarche the Chinese. That is where we go in and we say we are concerned about this, and we want you to reconsider your actions. So we would hope that they would change their mind. And I’ll hopefully have more for you later, but we had to also wait for Washington to wake up to take any further action.

Cheek is the co-founder of Team Darfur, and in 2006, he donated his $25,000 gold medal award to help refugees in the region.

Interviewed on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this morning, Ron Suskind, author of a new book that reveals that the White House forged a letter concocting a fake link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, criticized the administration’s pre-war arrogance. For example, Donald Rumsfeld once claimed that the U.S. could easily “bend” Iraq to think like the West:

SUSKIND: One of the quotes in the book which is picking up steam is Don Rumsfeld saying to folks, in meetings…saying essentially “we will bend,” he says, “Iraq to our reality. They will succumb to our view of how things should be.” That doesn’t happen. So we get into all manner of messes as we go forward.

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Suskind added that Condoleezza Rice also selectively ignored the reality on the ground. In summer 2003, just the insurgency was taking root in Iraq, Rice reportedly said, “I don’t want to hear the I-word,” or insurgency, in any meetings.

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Today, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich promoted his “Drill Here, Drill Now,” dirty-energy-funded plan on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and Fox and Friends. On both shows, he touted the work of an intern at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, who Gingrich claimed “understands more more about economics than most of the politicians in this country.” His proof? The intern found a paper arguing that “the price of oil will drop almost immediately” if the U.S. expands domestic drilling.

The paper was rejected by the Energy Journal because the principle “is basically understood by every economist in the world,” Gingrich claimed. “Everybody who is a professional economist knows” that more drilling will make oil prices come down “immediately,” he declared. Watch a compilation of Gingrich’s appearances here:

Gingrich and his famed intern (who made his own appearance on Mike Gallagher’s radio show today) gleefully reported that the Energy Journal’s editor, James L. Smith, included a mocking shot at the Democratic Policy Committee in his rejection letter, claiming Democrats were the only ones who don’t understand the immediate benefits of drilling.

The cheap shot isn’t surprising, considering that Smith is a paid consultant for the world’s major oil companies, including ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Conoco Philips, Marathon Oil Company, and Saudi Aramco. Last year, he was quoted in the New York Times praising ExxonMobil for being “disciplined” in its investments and fawning over the “Exxon way to approach every business prospect.”

Gingrich’s claim to have “every professional economist” on his side was too much even for Fox News’s Gretchen Carlson, who replied, “I find it interesting that more economists are not on the record saying that.” In fact, it’s much easier to find economists who say on the record that Gingrich is lying: Read more

Today, Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed Brian Benczkowski to serve as his chief of staff. TPMMuckracker reminds readers that Benczkowski served as one of the Justice Department’s torture apologists, arguing that if torture is conducted to prevent an attack “rather than for the purpose of humiliation,” it doesn’t violate the Geneva Conventions’ ban on “outrages upon personal dignity” and thus is likely acceptable:

“The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,” said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public. [...]

In one letter written Sept. 27, 2007, Mr. Benczkowski argued that “to rise to the level of an outrage” and thus be prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, conduct “must be so deplorable that the reasonable observer would recognize it as something that should be universally condemned.”

Last month, Mukasey declared that people who perpetrated torture “cannot and should not be prosecuted” or even investigated.

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