Despite Nation's Sadness, Voters Approve of Democrats 33% To GOP's 24%

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   With no clear narrative from Tuesday's primary elections, today the political media will churn the numbers of this newWall Street Journal/NBC poll in hopes of figuring outsomethingabout Americans beyond "hoo boy they are so poor and sad." Obama is somehow not overwhelmingly popular, but he's still got a 47% approval rating and 46% feeling "positive" about him, as a dude -- and his polices are actually more popular than he is. Democrats and Congress are "in trouble," yet voters prefer Democrats by a double-digit margin over Republicans: 33% to 24%. Now that the BP oil disaster is "better," Obama's got a 50% approval rating for his handling of the spill, up from 42% when it's all we heard about two months ago.Just 32% say the country is "headed in the right direction," which is evidence of some pretty incredible resilience, considering the Known Fact that the country is actually headed 100% off a cliff into a Lake of Fire. Hurry up and parse the rest of this data so you can feel smart before Sarah Palin twitters another "Muslins smell teh funniez" and just makes you weep again. [ NBC/WSJ Survey PDF ]

• Speaking of unpopular things that just bum the hell out of everybody, Iraq's "top army officer" says the U.S. military needs to stay put for a little while ... another decade sounds good, right? "I would say to politicians: The U.S. army must stay until the Iraqi army is fully ready in 2020." Uhh. [ BBC World Service ]

• Long-time Democratic congressman from Illinois and convicted felon Dan Rostenkowski died yesterday, at age 82. Like his cohort-in-death Ted Stevens, Rostenkowski was a congressional lifer and very effective at shoveling money to his constituents and himself. He was a crook and a jailbird, and now he's dead. What does it say about America when every political obituary is a rap sheet? [ Sun Times / Christian Science Monitor ]