Hilarious, and very true, JibJab poke at Wal-Mart.

In the spirit of Halloween, a truly scary story. If this trend continues, the country is doomed.

I've always found Lawrence O'Donnell to be too much of a mild-mannered, overly cordial and polite liberal talking head. Well, I don't know what's happened to him of late but he appears to have gone through a transformation since writing for The Huffington Post.

His latest entry pulls no punches:

'The White House dodged a bullet' is the single stupidest bit of nonstop echo punditry we've heard this weekend. Karl Rove not getting indicted presents the White House with a worse problem than an indictment would have. The problem being -- Rove is going to go to work Monday morning at the White House with TV cameras following his every move and with 47% of the public believing he did something wrong, according to today's Washington Post poll.

What the White House desperately needed on Friday was Rove's resignation. As long as he keeps his White House pass, Rove is a cancer on the presidency.

The Washington Post poll shows that the best outcome for the Democrats would be Rove staying in the White House till Bush's last day. The Post reports, "Barely a third of Americans -- 34 percent -- think Bush is doing a good job ensuring high ethics in government, which is slightly lower than President Bill Clinton's standing on this issue when he left office." Keeping Rove on the job will keep that number where it is today.

The pundit world, having spent years in awe of Karl Rove, will never understand how bad he is at his White House job. His second term agenda destroyed this presidency long before Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference. Rove sent his president on a political death march on Social Security reform with the most hopeless legislative idea since the Clinton health care bill. That showed Congress how powerless the second-term Bush would be. Without the Social Security collapse-which I predicted on day one of the Social Security crusade -- Senate Republicans and the right wing would not have dared defy their president on a Rove-managed Supreme Court nomination. And Rove obviously had no feel for the politics of Katrina which pulled Bush poll numbers to record lows.

As long as Karl Rove stays in the White House doing the terrible job he is doing and bringing the stench of scandal with him every time he walks in the door, the Bush presidency will remain a powerless gang that couldn't shoot straight. And the 'dodge the bullet' chorus will never understand that.

From David Rosenberg at Merrill Lynch:

The President's approval rating was already at a lifetime low going into last week's trio of bad news - the 2,000 U.S. fatality in Iraq, the Harriet Miers withdrawal and "Scooter" Libby's indictment. It can no longer be taken for granted that the GOP will sweep the House and the Senate again come the November 7, 2006 midterm elections at this point, and what is interesting is that Mr. Bush's approval rating of 40% is exactly where Bill Clinton's was at this same stage in the fall of 1993 - and the Dems were booted out of both houses the next year.