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Bad timing: taking office right as the national economy slides into recession.
Worse: signing onto a resolution honoring a political cause célèbre a few months before he gets busted for trying to wire tap a U.S. senator.

As for the bad: Public Policy Polling says U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan’s approval rating is somewhere around 29 percent. Keep in mind, Hagan won an election less than two years ago, beating Elizabeth Dole who was herself viewed as a popular and hard-to-beat incumbent.

Inside the PPP numbers, it looks like health care is really what’s damaging Hagan’s numbers. If you don’t like health care reform, you don’t like the senate democratic leadership and anyone who has been enabling them to push the health care bill forward.

As for the worse: Rep. Howard Coble has taken the House floor to denounce ACORN, the community organizing group, for their allegedly illegal activities. So you might expect that he would sign on to a resolution honoring the guy who shot a video that damaged the group's credibility. In particular, the video seemed to show ACORN workers giving advice on how a pimp and a prostitute could file their federal taxes.

Except that same videographer, James O’Keefe (who posed as the pimp in question) got busted this week for trying to tap Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans. (Yes, there are a whole mess of federal felonies involved in doing something like that.)

Coble was one of 31 Congressmen to co-sponsor Rep. Pete Olson’s resolution “Honoring the fact-finding reporting done by Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe III.” It's worth noting that resolution was filed in October, months before this latest escapade.

You can read the resolution here. Broader reactions from Republicans can be found here.

Update: I just spoke with Coble.

“When I signed on initially, I was very comfortable doing that because these two people exposed an outfit” that was doing illegal things and using taxpayer money,” Coble said.

“I’m not comfortable with what they did in Louisiana,” Coble said. Nobody, he said, should take his endorsement of the resolution as an endorsement of O’Keefe’s actions in Louisiana.

So will he drop off the resolution?

“Let me chew on that,” Coble said. There may be little point in doing so, he said, since the resolution is likely to go nowhere in the a Congress controlled by Democrats.