OBAMA DISAPPROVAL ON HEALTH CARE UP TO 52%: “An Associated Press-GfK poll says that public disapproval of President Barack Obama’s handling of health care has jumped to 52 percent. The same survey shows that 49 percent now disapprove of his overall performance as president. In July, just 42 percent disapproved of how he was handling his job.” This has to have a bunch of people in Congress wondering if they want to hitch their wagon to a falling star.

IN THE MAIL: From Lars Brownworth, Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization.

MEGAN MCARDLE on what happened to the health care magic pony.

SARAH PALIN IN THE WSJ: Obama and the Bureaucratization of Health Care: The president’s proposals would give unelected officials life-and-death rationing powers.

So is this a step up from posting her thoughts on Facebook? Or a step down? The Facebook approach has been working pretty well . . . .

Plus, Moe Lane notes Marc Ambinder’s fury. And Mickey Kaus mocks his spinnability.

UPDATE: “What was he thinking?”

DAN RIEHL: “Why are there Tea Parties and large numbers of Americans feeling disconnected from media and politics? It’s because a large portion of America feels ignored by the culture. Trust me on this, the last time that happened it led to the Reagan Revolution when the usually quiet rubes decided that they wanted to be heard.”

And related thoughts from Ann Althouse, with an assist from Camille Paglia.

TRAPPED GIRLS call for help on Facebook.

WOMEN SKI JUMPERS UPDATE: FIS Petitions for Women’s Ski Jump in Winter Olympics. “Today, the International Ski Federation (FIS) announced its petition for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to approve the inclusion of the women’s ski jump in the 2014 Winter Olympics to be held in Sochi, Russia.” It’s a disgrace that they haven’t let women compete already. More on that here.

RON BAILEY: Is Government Action Worse than Global Warming? Why policy nihilism may be the only rational response to climate change.

THE HILL: Tide turns against public option on eve of President Obama’s address. “Political momentum appeared to swing sharply against the public health insurance option prized by liberals Tuesday, on the eve of President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate on Tuesday signaled they are increasingly willing to pass healthcare reform without a public insurance option, even while Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) again insisted it must be included in a House healthcare bill. . . . But Pelosi may have undercut liberals earlier this summer when she told reporters that there was little chance liberals would vote against a proposal that expanded health insurance to millions of Americans.”

MORE ON THE SUNSTEIN FIGHT. Sunstein’s no Van Jones. But what a lot of the worries really indicate is how little trust the Obama Administration inspires among its critics.

UPDATE: A better target.

BLUE DOG MIKE ROSS comes out against public option.

SO MANY INDIGENT BURIALS, “Body Farm” stops accepting new bodies.

A ROUNDUP OF NEW APPLE STUFF: Apple Releases New Video Shooting iPod Nano, Camera-less iPod Touch. Yeah, the promises of a camera-equipped iPod Touch, though beguiling, turn out to have been unfounded.

THAT’S A LOT OF CHALK: Group wants to chalk Capitol steps with entire healthcare bill. “A nonprofit group is seeking permission to write every word of the healthcare bill on the Capitol steps. The effort is intended to draw attention to the fact that lawmakers are moving legislation they haven’t actually read. And what better way to draw attention than with bright chalk more associated with games of hopscotch than legislation?”

But will The Capitol Steps go along with it?

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Health care reform has not survived the worst Republicans can throw at it. It’s survived–barely–the opening volley.”

MICKEY KAUS: “Obama doesn’t need to get ‘Republicans on board.’ He doesn’t need to get Blue Dog Democrats on board. He needs to get voters on board. They aren’t on board now –39-37 against, according to Gallup. (When Congress passed Medicare in 1965, by way of contrast, Gallup found a 63-28 majority in favor.) … If the Dems’ health care bill were actually popular, all the vote-bargaining problems they now face would be easily solved. If the bill remains relatively unpopular, with those opposed much more likely to base their vote on the issue, it could easily fail to pass even if versions of it get past the House and Senate and into a conference committee.”

Camille Paglia: “Too late for Obama to turn it around? . . . As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have — from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?) “

HMM: NSA-Intercepted E-Mails Helped Convict Would-Be Bombers.

he three men convicted in the United Kingdom on Monday of a plot to bomb several transcontinental flights were prosecuted in part using crucial e-mail correspondences intercepted by the U.S. National Security Agency, according to Britain’s Channel 4. . . . It’s unclear if the NSA intercepted the messages as they passed through internet nodes based in the U.S. or intercepted them overseas. If the former, it’s possible the interception was part of the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program — a surveillance program aimed at intercepting foreign correspondence as it passed through domestic internet switches. Such interception was previously illegal unless conducted with a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. After news stories revealed that the NSA was conducting such surveillance without a warrant, however, Congress legalized such collection activities last year in its passage of the FISA Amendments Act.

Via Orin Kerr, who doubts this story will get the attention it deserves.

BARACK OZYMANDIAS? “It’s been a dull summer on the messiah front.”

THE CAPTAIN’S JOURNAL on Afghanistan and the Rules Of Engagement. “I said it would happen, and only recently ‘officials’ have admitted that the new Afghanistan ROE have opened up new space for the insurgents.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: ‘If Marines can be prosecuted for violating rules of engagement, why can’t those who impose rules of engagement be prosecuted when those rules kill Marines?” I don’t think so, but at the very least this needs to be re-examined urgently.

MARK TAPSCOTT: Congress Has Already Exempted Itself From The Public Option.

MARKDOWNS ON fitness gear.

NASA’S MANNED SPACEFLIGHT FORECAST: BLEAK. Bottom line is the feds would rather do something else with the money. Hope and change!

But maybe it’s not so bad. A big roundup at NASAwatch.

MARTIN FELDSTEIN: ObamaCare’s Crippling Deficits. “The higher taxes, debt payments and interest rates needed to pay for health reform mean lower living standards.” But lower living standards for you are a small price to pay in exchange for more power for the political class — whose living standards won’t be going down at all . . . .

SKIP SCHOOL, to stay in school.

DAVE KOPEL on Cass Sunstein and the Second Amendment. Sunstein’s told me that he thinks that Heller was rightly decided, though I strongly suspect that he still would support gun regulations that I would not.

Meanwhile, he’s not very pro-Second Amendment in this video from 2007.

HEH: Unmentionable: Best-Selling Conservative Books and the Networks that Ignore Them. “Research reveals a glaring imbalance in network coverage of liberal best-sellers and comparable conservative titles.”

Yeah, I’ve noticed that books like Liberty and Tyranny, or Culture of Corruption — or even Liberal Fascism — don’t get the kind of boosting from the allegedly mainstream media that more, um, congenial works do.

That said, the Obama era has been good for a lot of right-leaning books.