(CNN) – President Obama on Saturday linked the man accused in a botched Christmas Day airline bombing to an al Qaeda affiliate based in Yemen.

The president pledged that everyone involved in the attack would be held accountable. He also highlighted his administration’s attempts to crack down on extremist enclaves in Yemen, and reiterated his longstanding promise to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al Qaeda.

Obama has been criticized by some political opponents for not responding more aggressively to a botched December 25 attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet en route from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Detroit, Michigan.

Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab is accused of trying to ignite explosives smuggled aboard the plane in his underwear. Obama confirmed Saturday that AbdulMutallab, 23, recently traveled to Yemen and “it appears that he joined an affiliate of al Qaeda.”

Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said the attempted attack is a stark reminder of the threats the United States is still facing more than eight years after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“While this attempt ended in failure, we know with absolute certainty that [al Qaeda] and those who support its ideology continue to refine their methods to test our defenses and pursue an attack on the homeland,” Leiter said in a statement Saturday.

The group, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, apparently trained AbdulMutallab, “equipped him with … explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America,” Obama said.

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WASHINGTON — President Obama still insists that we can “spend our way out of this recession” to create jobs, and Democrats are pushing another spending stimulus in a vain attempt to do just that.

What is being called “son of stimulus” on Capitol Hill is essentially the same snake-oil remedies in the original nearly $800 billion stimulus: billions more for highway, bridge and other infrastructure projects, tax incentives to persuade people to make their homes more energy efficient, and limited tax breaks for small businesses that still keep the tax rates where they are as these businesses await the bigger Obama tax hikes to come.

With unemployment stuck at 10 percent — 16 percent if you count millions of jobless Americans who have given up looking for work — it is now clear that the first stimulus isn’t working. Remember, the definition of “crazy” is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Obama said earlier this year that his spending stimulus would bring the jobless rate down to 7.8 percent, but unemployment continued to rise and nearly 4 million more Americans are looking for work. Clearly, ever more borrowing and spending isn’t going to work, either.

“I think it’s a really bad idea if they do more of the same. The fact is, the administration is crowing about having created, say, 640,000 jobs, but if you look at how much money they’ve spent, that’s $1.2 million per job. If they had just taken the stimulus money and hired people at the average U.S. wage, they would have created 21 million jobs. And so, where is the multiplier? It’s gone,” economist Kevin Hassett told a House Republican jobs conference earlier this month.

A number of reports have come out lately that say we’re not going to see a significant improvement in the jobs picture anytime soon.

The American Institute for Economic Research, a leading economic-forecasting firm, said the economy remains weak and “the recovery may be unsustainable.”

“We have witnessed and chronicled many recessions. And in our studied opinion the economy today is not on the mend — it has instead registered what the medical community calls a ‘false positive,’” AIER said in its latest report.

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The latest survey puts the president’s approval at 49%-46%. But that’s not just low, it’s historically low. Here’s how other presidents have fared at this point in their presidencies:

George W. Bush 86%
John Kennedy 77%
George Bush 71%
Dwight Eisenhower 69%
Richard Nixon 59%
Jimmy Carter 57%
Bill Clinton 54%
Reagan 49%
Obama 49%

Although they both had 49% approval rating, that evil conservative Ronald Reagan rates higher than Obama because his negatives were lower (41% for Reagan vs 46% for Obama).

The poll of 1,025 adults, taken by landline and cellphone, has a margin of error of 4 percentage points, which means that Obama’s approval rating could be as low as 45%.

Give it another couple months and Obama will be recalling these as the good old days.

Source: USA Today