In light of this weekend’s historic get-together between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin…

Now, for less than 24 hours starting Sunday afternoon, the U.S. president is hosting his Russian counterpart at the Bush family’s summer home on the craggy Maine coast. No other leader has received such a rarified invitation.

…Swopa passes along a classic anecdote.

One gem which the audience enjoyed was the retelling of Powell and President Bush’s first encounters with Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Powell recalled it after the meeting he and Bush were reviewing events and comparing notes and seemingly they disagreed. At one point Bush looked at his Secretary of State and said (with a suitable Texas twang) “Powell, I looked into Putin’s eyes and I saw his soul” to which Powell replied: “Mr. President, I looked into President Putin’s eyes and I saw the KGB“.

I’m generally suspicious of these kinds of national polls, particularly at this stage of a presidential race, but the latest results from Mason-Dixon have received quite a bit of attention.

More than half of Americans say they wouldn’t consider voting for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for president if she becomes the Democratic nominee, according to a new national poll made available to McClatchy Newspapers and NBC News.

The poll by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research found that 52 percent of Americans wouldn’t consider voting for Clinton, D-N.Y…. Clinton rang up high negatives across the board, with 60 percent of independents, 56 percent of men, 47 percent of women and 88 percent of Republicans saying they wouldn’t consider voting for her.

The concern among Democrats over a poll like this is perfectly understandable. Obviously, it’s tough for any candidate to win a general election if a majority of the country a) dislikes the candidate; and b) has already decided, more than a year in advance, not to vote for him or her.

But I think this Mason-Dixon data is getting a little too much play. A few days before these results were published, a national Newsweek poll showed Clinton (and other top-tier Dems) with healthy leads over all of the leading Republican presidential hopefuls. In each instance, her support topped 50%. (In a hypothetical match-up against Romney, she’s at 55%.) There are other recent polls showing similar results.

Obviously, something is askew. Either a majority of Americans have ruled out backing Clinton under any circumstances, or a majority of Americans are prepared to support her against a GOP rival. It can’t be both. And given that there are more polls for the latter than the prior, I’m not necessarily prepared to write her off as a viable general-election candidate quite yet.

Are concerns about Clinton’s “electability” legitimate? Of course; it’s probably her most important campaign hurdle to clear, and there are still quite a few Dems who still need convincing. But let’s not take one Mason-Dixon poll too seriously.

Even hours after the dramatic scenes at Glasgow’s airport, details are still a little sketchy.

A Jeep Cherokee trailing a cascade of flames rammed into Glasgow’s airport on Saturday, shattering glass doors just yards from passengers at the check-in counters. Police said they believed the attack was linked to two car bombs found in London the day before.

Britain raised its terror alert to “critical” — the highest possible level — and the Bush administration announced plans to increase security at airports and on mass transit.

One of the men in the car was in critical condition at a hospital with severe burns, while the other was in police custody, said Scottish Police Chief Constable Willie Rae. Five bystanders in Glasgow were wounded, although none seriously, police said.

Rae said a “suspect device” was found on the man at the hospital and it was taken to a safe location where it was being investigated. He would not say whether the device was a suicide belt, but British security officials said evidence pointed to the attack being a suicide mission. […]

“I can confirm that we believe the incident at Glasgow airport is linked to the events in London yesterday,” Rae said at a news conference. “There are clearly similarities and we can confirm that this is being treated as a terrorist incident.”

That’s not exactly an iron-clad connection between the events, but again, officials are still gathering information. And obviously, with the British terror alert now at “critical,” the highest level possible, an aggressive investigation is underway. The latest reports indicate that two people were arrested in Cheshire, England, in connection with terrorist incidents in England and Scotland, bringing the total number of people in custody to four.

The BBC has put together an excellent Q&A on the information currently available.

This afternoon Steven Benen flagged this comment by NBC’s Chip Reid in which Reid claimed the Democrats were the “big loser” in the demise of the immigration bill. Now there are a number of things to say about this — 1) that Reid is parroting Republican talking points on this issue and 2) that no one seems to be raising the fact that, by the definition that prevailed only a year ago, Republicans are filibustering basically everything the comes up in the senate.

Yes to both. Both very important.

But you have to be far more than ordinarily clueless to believe that the Republicans aren’t overwhelmingly the losers in this whole debacle. The whole episode is only a little short of a catastrophe for the GOP, indeed, twice over.

The fact that the episode has further revealed President Bush’s political impotence is relatively unimportant, given his extreme unpopularity. More important is that the whole run-through has further divided Republicans in the lead up to the 2008 election. But even that isn’t the really big deal.

The real fall-out is that this has dealt a massive and probably enduring blow to Republican efforts to at least compete for, if not win over, the growing hispanic electorate. The model here is then-Gov. Pete Wilson’s (R) 1994 reelection campaign in California — a set of events that played out somewhat more amorphously but to real effect across the country in the mid-1990s.

Briefly, Wilson successfully rode the anti-immigration issue to victory, in particular through his embrace of Prop. 187 — a successful ballot initiative to deny social services to illegal immigrants and get local cops into the business of policing people’s immigration status. It helped Wilson get reelected. But it also basically destroyed the California Republican party. Destroyed may be too strong a word. But it put the state’s rapidly growing hispanic population firmly into the Democratic camp and played a big part in making California into the solidly Democratic state it is today. (People forget, it didn’t used to be that way.)

The kicker here is that at least Pete Wilson won his election. Indeed, anti-immigrant politics, in California and elsewhere, helped fuel the Republican sweep in 1994. In this case, the Republicans didn’t even get it together and get a win in the short run. They managed to damage themselves in the short run and deal themselves a massive long term blow. That’s great work.

Now, some people might say that Democratic votes in addition to Republican votes helped to scuttle the bill in the senate. But this ignores the salient fact that Republican opposition to the immigration bill — not just in the senate but across the board — has been overwhelmingly nativist in character. Democratic opposition has tended to focus either on the guest worker provision or other details of the bill. It’s really as simple as that, indeed so simple it barely requires saying.

This whole episode has branded the Republicans as the anti-immigrant party. And that’s not good for a party that wants to compete for the votes of America’s largest bloc of new immigrant voters.

Call in the Coalition of the Leaving.

Radar magazine recently ran a feature about the coalition of countries who offered support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, noting that there are still about 12,000 foreign troops on the ground in Iraq, even after most countries that were part of the original “Coalition of the Willing” have since withdrawn.

Radar described Australia’s contribution to the war effort this way:

Australian troops were among the very first to invade Iraq, having been assigned with taking out Saddam’s scud missiles a day before the initial U.S. bombing campaign began in March 2003. And while Australian Prime Minster John Howard has suffered politically for his outspoken support of the mission, he recently reaffirmed Australia’s commitment to keeping troops there until the Iraqi government can defend itself.

Perhaps that reaffirmation was not as solid as the Bush administration would have liked.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard is secretly planning to begin withdrawing Australian troops from Iraq by February 2008, Australian media reported on Sunday.

The Sunday Telegraph, quoting an unnamed senior military source, described Howard’s withdrawal plan as “one of the most closely guarded secrets in top levels of the bureaucracy.”

The Sunday Telegraph said the drawdown of troops would focus on soldiers based in southern Iraq on security duty with Iraqi soldiers.

Ouch.

I’ve just started reading Lynne Olson’s new book Troublesome Young Men, which tells the story of the dissident Tory MPs who helped battled Stanley Baldwin’s and then Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policies and helped lay the ground for Winston Churchill’s crisis rise to the premiership in the summer of 1940.

Today Olson has a piece in the Outlook section of the Post arguing that for all his self-comparisons, President Bush much more resembles Neville Chamberlain than Churchill. She’s certainly on the mark in noting Chamberlain’s mix of inexperience in foreign affairs and certainty that he, and only he, was the one who could manage the crisis of Hitlerism.

The Chamberlain analogy only goes so far. But she’s quite good in noting the many ways that Bush is really nothing like Churchill.

Following up on Josh’s post from Friday night, Fred Thompson is not only failing to connect with GOP voters from the stump, he’s also inadvertently alienating an important Republican constituency. At a campaign stop this week in South Carolina, for example, Thompson equated immigrants from Cuba with potential terrorists.

Noting that the United States had apprehended 1,000 people from Cuba in 2005, Thompson said, “I don’t imagine they’re coming here to bring greetings from Castro. We’re living in the era of the suitcase bomb.” Fidel Castro is Cuba’s leader.

A video clip of Thompson’s remark immediately circulated on YouTube and has drawn considerable attention in Florida, a key early primary state home to many Republican-leaning Cuban Americans.

As a Miami native, perhaps I’m slightly more attuned to the concerns of Cuban-Americans, but one need not be a Dolphins fan to know that Thompson’s comments were surprisingly dumb. Immigrants from Cuba are fleeing Castro’s dictatorship, not plotting to kill Americans. What’s more, Cuban-Americans generally vote Republican and have always been considered a key GOP constituency by presidential candidates hoping to win Florida’s 27 electoral votes.

You’d think Thompson would know all of this.

Just like you’d think Thompson would have a better sense of foreign policy towards Iran.

Nifty Campaign Idea of the Month award: June’s winner is former senator and not-yet-candidate Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who advocated a blockade against Iran before taking military action to stop its nuclear plans.

“A blockade would be a possibility if we get the international cooperation,” Thompson said in a foreign policy speech in London, Bloomberg News reported. It was unclear whether this blockade — which some, especially the Iranians, might consider an act of war — would cover Iran’s lengthy land borders with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Azerbaijan.

The phrase “not ready for primetime” keeps coming to mind.

Hmm, what was the most disturbing part of Joe Lieberman’s appearance on ABC’s “This Week” this morning? It’s a surprisingly tough call.

Was it Lieberman’s reality-be-damned insistence that “the surge is working”? That was certainly disconcerting. Was it Lieberman’s assertion that leading Democrats are weak because they reject a neocon vision of foreign policy? That wasn’t much better.

But the real gem of the morning was Lieberman’s bizarre argument that terrorism in Britain should mean more warrantless domestic surveillance here. (ThinkProgress has a clip.)

“I hope that these terrorist acts in London and England wake us up here in America to stop some of the petty, partisan fighting that’s going on about…electronic surveillance, a lot of which could help stop terrorist attacks against the United States. Some of the fight is ideological. Some of it is just plan mistrust of the administration.

“I hope this week, based on what happened in the United Kingdom, President Bush, the bipartisan leadership of Congress will sit down and say, ‘Hey, let’s cut out the nonsense. We’re fiddling while our enemies are getting ready to attack us. Let’s figure out how to pass a law to modernize this electronic surveillance capacity which was critical.’ […]

“I’m talking about…the so-called FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was adopted in the ’70s. Technology has — both that used by the enemy, the terrorists, and that used by us has improved dramatically. And right now, we’re at a partisan gridlock over the question of whether the American government can listen into conversations or follow e-mail trails of non-American citizens.”

There are more than a handful of errors of fact and judgment here, but let’s stick to the two biggest.

First, Lieberman insists FISA is a generation too old. What he neglects to mention is that FISA has been updated many, many times. FISA may have been passed nearly three decades ago, but it’s been amended repeatedly to adapt to evolving threats and circumstances.

Second, Lieberman seems woefully confused about the nature of the debate. The Bush administration has engaged in electronic surveillance of Americans without warrants or oversight. Congress has requested information about how the program operates, which the administration has refused to provide. To hear Lieberman tell it, there’s a controversy about whether to spy on terrorist suspects. That’s demonstrably false, and the senator surely knows better.

Lieberman wants to “cut out the nonsense.” Good idea. The White House has apparently operated under the impression that FISA is inconvenient, and therefore irrelevant. As Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) noted way back in January 2006, “If [Bush] needs more authority, he just can’t unilaterally decide that that 1978 law is out of date and he will be the guardian of America and he will violate that law. He needs to come back, work with us, work with the courts if he has to, and we will do what we need to do to protect the civil liberties of this country and the national security of this country.”

When Lieberman tells a national television audience that the question is over “whether the American government can listen into conversations or follow e-mail trails of non-American citizens,” he’s either intentionally trying to deceive or he’s embarrassingly confused about the issue at hand.

Barack Obama appears to have broken the record for quarterly fundraising in a primary, pulling in a whopping $30 million over the last three months. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.

There’s a lengthy analysis of political independents in the Washington Post today, based on an extensive survey conducted by the Post in collaboration with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. The piece doesn’t exactly break a lot of new ground, but it’s interesting enough to check out. Matt Yglesias summarizes the piece’s conclusions quite well: “Many independents are actually partisans. Many others just have no idea what they’re talking about. A few really do pay attention and swing anyway.”

There was, however, one piece of information from the report that struck me as odd.

While these independents swung substantially to the Democratic side in 2006, 77 percent of them say they would seriously consider voting for an independent if one were running.

Is it me, or is 77% a little low? Nearly one-in-four self-described independents wouldn’t consider voting for an independent? Then why even consider yourself an independent?

Must be part of that no-idea-what-they’re-talking-about bloc.