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The Hardball Briefing On MSNBC
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Has Iraq made the president hit rock bottom? A new poll released today by the
New York Times and CBS News shows President Bush's job approval rating at an
all-time low of 34 percent. As Congress grills administration officials about
the temporarily stalled Dubai Ports World takeover of six U.S. ports and polls
show the public doesn't support his position, the president's numbers on
handling the war in Iraq and national security are down. Tonight on Hardball,
correspondent David Shuster will report on the new numbers. Here's more
information on that in the meantime:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/politics/28bush.html.
Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services
Committee, will join Chris to talk about what he heard (and didn't hear) this
morning from John Negroponte, the national director of intelligence, about the
security concerns on the port deal.
For more on the polls and the ports, MSNBC political analysts Pat Buchanan and
Monica Crowley also will be here. Plus, Charlie Cook, an NBC News political
analyst and publisher of the Cook Political Report, will talk about what the
CBS/New York Times poll and his own publication's new poll say about the state
of this presidency. Here's more on the Cook poll:
http://www.cookpolitical.com/poll/default.php.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), will talk with Chris about what she and her
colleagues on the Senate Commerce Committee found out today at a hearing on the
ports. You can watch the hearing hear on C-SPAN:
http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/schedule.csp.
Retired U.S. Coast Guard Capt. John Holmes and Michael Mitre, port security
director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, will join Chris to
talk about port security operations.
And for more on how all of the politics of this are playing out, don't miss
Chris' conversation with Newsweek's Richard Wolffe and Bloomberg News' Margaret
Carlson.
Here are some things you might not have read yet today:
--AP has bad news from Wall Street http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3683270/
--AP reports on today's SCOTUS ruling against abortion clinics
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11604762/
--Hardblogger (!) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5445086/
--NBC's First Read http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3626796/
--Doonesbury http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5445086/
Brooke Brower compiled the "Hardball Briefing" in Washington, D.C.
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