Terror Alertitus.

I followed a link from Salon, and wound up here.

From the Salon article:

The war on...falling approval rates?

A new chart making its way around the blogosphere is fueling fresh conspiracy theories about the Bush administration's terror warnings. The chart, which plots Bush's approval ratings vs. time and marks when the administration issued terror warnings, looks pretty accurate -- the bloggers who put it together did an exhaustive amount of research and generally used reliable polls.

The bloggers' conclusion:

"There are few things that are quite evident from the chart:

"-Whenever his ratings dip, there's a new terror alert.

"-Every terror alert is followed by a slight uptick of Bush approval ratings.

"-As we approach the 2004 elections, the number and frequency of terror alerts keeps growing, to the point that they collapse in the graphic. At the same time, Bush ratings are lower than ever."

Also check out the excellent timeline (which started on Table Talk on Salon) put together by bloggers Biltud and Julius Civitatus.

This isn't exactly news - I'd read elsewhere a series of articles (wish I could remember where), about the ever smaller bumps Shrub was getting from events like September 11, the invasion of Iraq, and then the capture of Saddam. The above article and chart include those events, but tellingly adds in all of the terror alerts.

Fascinating stuff. :)