As has been well reported by NewsBusters squad members here and here, the media in the past few weeks have been falling all over themselves to report President Bush’s apparently plummeting poll numbers.  However, few media outlets pay attention to the poll conducted on a daily basis by Rasmussen Reports.  Could it be that Rasmussen’s numbers don’t mirror the negativity of many of the other polling groups?

“Saturday September 17, 2005--Forty-seven percent (47%) of American adults now approve of the way George W. Bush is performing his role as President.”

Of particular note regarding Rasmussen’s numbers is that unlike most of the other polls making headlines, Bush’s approval rating has been virtually unchanged since Katrina hit.  In addition, despite the gloom and doom being espoused by other polls, Bush’s current rating of 47 percent is only one point lower than his low for all of 2004, and only seven points lower than his high this year.  As such, according to Rasmussen, there has been far less volatility in Bush's approval numbers than most other polling agencies have been reporting.

NBC is doing something that you just don't see on network TV these days - promoting a TV show with a Christian theme. The peacock network is making a full-court promotional effort for the show with churches and Christian radio stations (from Newsmax):

An upcoming TV series featuring Christian pop singer Amy Grant will make its debut next Friday, and NBC is pulling out all the stops to promote it.

In "Three Wishes," Amy Grant will visit a different town every week, where, in a gesture of Christian charity, she will seek to fulfill the wishes of needy families and community groups, according to the New York Times.

The show, which Amy Grant describes as "faith in action," is being heavily promoted by NBC, which, the Times reports, has sent more than 7,000 DVDs of the show's first episode to ministers and other clergy members, along with a recorded message to their congregants from Amy Grant.

NBC also has scheduled Grant, who recently released an album of hymns titled "Rock of Ages," for interviews on Christian radio and taken out advertising in small-town newspapers.

Peter King (R-NY) the new chairman of the House of Representatives' homeland security committee blasted the media's coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. King made his remarks on the radio program of Linda Chavez while being interviewed by substitute host Steve Malzberg. NewsMax.com picked up his remarks:

"The FEMA of ten years ago certainly did not do any better job under much less comparable circumstances than FEMA did this time. [...]

"Of everyone involved, certainly they were the least culpable," the House Homeland chief said. "I think the main fault was the state and city of New Orleans - they did a terrible job."

The New York Republican added: "Our response plans are based on the premise that the local first responders will handle the initial onslaught. We weren't expecting that the local government would do absolutely nothing."

According to this article, British PM Tony Blair and former U.S. president Bill Clinton feel the same way about the BBC's Katrina coverage.

CNN founder Ted Turner rued on Friday’s Late Show with David Letterman that “we paid $400 billion to find a nut in a fox hole” and declared that the Iraqi people “were better off without us.” He also charged that “we violated international law by going to war without a clear mandate from the security council.” Though the 9/11 terrorists were hardly poor, Turner contended: “You don't stop terrorism with tanks, you stop it with giving people hope so they won't want to blow themselves up.” To that end, he proposed giving the UN $62 billion a year to alleviate poverty. As for the UN’s oil-for-food scandal, “there was money siphoned off at Enron and a lot of American corporations during the last few years, but we didn’t close down American business as result of it.” But Enron is no longer around.

Excerpts of Turner’s comments follow.

With the all-but-corporate death of the UPI, the AP is the main American source for news in the United States. Associated Press articles are mindlessly quoted by newspapers across the nation. Many local radio and TV stations rip and read either directly from the AP, or indirectly from local newspapers which use the AP.

Therefore, it’s reprehensible that the AP, three weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, has not found out that there WAS an Evacuation Plan for New Orleans and southern Louisiana which was not followed. The Plan is on the Internet and available to anyone who can push a few buttons.

Yet here is the lede of an AP story today (17 September) by Rita Beamish:

“As far back as eight years ago, Congress ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to develop a plan for evacuating New Orleans during a massive hurricane, but the money instead went to studying the causeway bridge that spans the city's Lake Pontchartrain, officials say.”

As reported here yesterday by the Media Research Center’s Brent Baker, Dean Reynolds of ABC News had a hard time Thursday evening finding people who didn’t like President Bush’s address to the nation concerning Hurricane Katrina. Oddly, the Associated Press’s Angie Wagner didn’t have such difficulties. Of course, the AP went to seven different states to ensure they got the answers they were were looking for:

“‘He had no intention of coming to help us,’ said Samuel Lewis, 31, an evacuee who watched the speech in a Houston shelter. ‘He should have been there 24 hours after. He is telling me he is going to rebuild my city. Still, when I go back home, you are going to rebuild my city, but what about all the stuff I lost? What about jobs?’"

“‘A day late and a dollar short,’ said 18-year-old Wayne State University student Rachel Aviles in Detroit. ‘I think he's more responding to the negative media than responding to fix the problem.’"

Once upon a time, the British use to be renowned for their sense of propriety and decorum. Now it seems, however, they are letting it all hang out just like all the other nations of the decadent West.

Trafalgar Square is, to put it most simply, a square in central London commemorating the Battle of Trafalgar. Makes you wonder then why then they have decided to place a statue of a disabled, pregnant naked lady amidst this memorial to great military heroes.

One characteristic of all decaying nations is the rush to distance themselves from the values of their pasts. As such, the Mayor of London, terrorist sympathizer Ken Livingstone, has expressed a desire to have many of the statues of the historical greats taken down and replaced with those of personalities more relevant to the 21st century, this no doubt being a euphemism for the purposes of honoring perverts and deviants.

For yet another characteristic of declining cultures is an unseemly public obsession with the sexual and abnormal. The nude is being justified in part to serve as a balance to "triumphant male statuary" dominating the park, that classification providing a great deal of insight to the deviant creating the sculpture who at one time crafted a replica of his head made of 4.5 liters of his own frozen blood.

But if that was the only reason, why not make a statue of this lady with some cloths on? We are further told of the need of the statue by the model herself because, "There is so much prejudice around sexuality, disability, femininity and pregnancy..."

Maybe so, but shouldn't her naked beauty be something only for her husband to behold and relish? If anything, in light of so many pregnant women thrusting their bear bellies into plain view stretch marks and all (i.e. the Dove Soap hussies), a little more Victorian restraint might do us some good with more being left to the imagination once again.