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Journal DaytonCIM's Journal: America: "You suck." 34

Journal by DaytonCIM

Poll: Bush approval at 39 percent
Saturday, September 10, 2005

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush's job approval has dipped below 40 percent for the first time in the AP-Ipsos poll, reflecting widespread doubts about his handling of gasoline prices and the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Nearly four years after Bush's job approval soared into the 80s after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Bush was at 39 percent job approval in an AP-Ipsos poll taken this week. That's the lowest since the the poll was started in December 2003.

The public's view of the nation's direction has grown increasingly negative as well, with nearly two-thirds now saying the country is heading down the wrong track.

"As a nation, we are pretty well stretched," said Barry Allen, a political independent from Reed City, Michigan. "I approve of some of the things the president has done and disapprove of others. Overall, I disapprove."

Allen said he liked some of Bush's economic steps during his first term but has been dissatisfied with the president's economic moves in his second term, his Iraq policy and his handling of gasoline prices.

Allen worries Hurricane Katrina has taken the wind out of an economy that was moving in the right direction.

With gasoline racing past $3 a gallon, Bush's standing on dealing with those prices may be one of his biggest problems -- seven in 10 said they disapprove.

And just over half in the poll, 52 percent, said they disapprove of the president's handling of the hurricane.

For Bill Kane of Kingsland, Georgia, the government's slow response to the hurricane "was terrifying to see in our own country. It made you mad, because it made you think where's our money going?"

More evidence of problems with the storm response surfaced Friday when the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced it would discontinue a 2-day-old program to issue debit cards worth to displaced families.

The administration also dumped FEMA Director Michael Brown, who had come to symbolize the stumbling early days of the hurricane response, as commander of Katrina relief efforts. (Full story)

Brown once served as the judges and stewards commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association.

"Bush puts people in jobs who don't know what they're doing," said Shirley Carignan, a retiree and a political independent from Weymouth, Massachusetts. "I think he's picking friends for these jobs. My girlfriend raises Arabians. You know horses, so what? Horses and people are different things."

The number of people who think the country is on the wrong track grew from 59 percent last month to 65 percent this month. Tumbling consumer confidence after Hurricane Katrina may be contributing to that sense of pessimism.

The RBC CASH Index, based on polling by Ipsos, showed that consumer confidence sank in September to the lowest level since early March 2003 before the start of the Iraq war.

Economic woes and a continuing war in Iraq have been complicated by the continuing hurricane recovery crisis.

"A lot of Americans don't pay attention to their leaders on a day-to-day basis," said Robert Blendon, a public opinion analyst at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "They measure presidents, governors and mayors on how they handle big events like a hurricane. This event is not over because the bodies are going to be discovered day by day."

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America: "You suck." More

America: "You suck."

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  • 1) Way less than 10,000 bodies found. Less than 2,000 dead. Sum of this, Hey I guess the Feds did OK.

    2) Economy surges behind 400,000+ jobs created and the rebuilding of a major city from the gound up.

    3) New New Orleans way better than Old New Orleans.

    4) Major cuts in the numbers of troops in Iraq. The boys are coming home.

    5) End game? Except for the 13% or so who hate Bush irrationally Bush ends up a 65-75% Positively Polled President at the end of his term. Sadly this paves the way for an inani
    • "The rod goes on to take huge hunks of our civil liberties but since we're all making money and seem to be paying less taxes no one really cares."

      In the South, the police call clubs like this an "Arkansas Lie Detector".

    • I have very rational reasons for not liking Bush, it's the people who DO like him who are irrational.

      *pfft* :-P
    • Ok seriously.

      1. I hope there's a blissfully low body count. But even that isn't going to stack up against split screen footage of people living in squalor at the superdome while the president says everything is fine, or the FEMA director basically admitting he knows less about the situation on the ground then people watching the news. Toss in callous remarks from various people(like Barbara Bush), and it's a political loss regardless.

      Hell, all you need to do to turn the president's endorsement into a nega
  • With the relentlessly, and dishonestly, negative reporting of all the news media the worst they could do was push Bush's ratings down to 40 percent.

    Mind you that this required completely ignoring the gross incompetence of the people actually responsible for handling Katrina. These stories are starting to slowly leak out and a final analysis will reveal the level of dishonesty that most of the media actually sunk to.

    But hey, as long as they feel good about it now who cares about the consequences?
    • ignoring the gross incompetence of the people actually responsible for handling Katrina.

      You mean like the FEMA folks? Or the mayor of NO for not using city buses to move people out? Or the LA Gov and what seems her general lack of intelligence?

      Mr. Bush is not solely responsible, but he is the leader and does rightfully recieve the mountain's share of criticism.

      But, I ask you, Mr. Bush claims that he "called the Gov of LA" to offer assistance, but she refused. Huh? Seems strange considering that he called,
      • I'd like the issue of who called whom to be addressed head on, and soon. Time is apparently reporting that she called him, and she had a hard time getting through to him, etc. If she's telling the truth, not him, bang, outright lie, on the order of Brown's claim that the families in the Superdome were getting fed by FEMA before FEMA even knew they were there.

        (Time's article is here [time.com], according to a DailyKos article, but I can't read it because I'm not a subscriber)
      • You realize that Bush couldn't order anyone in to help out with invoking the Insurrection Act and effectively removing the Governor of Lousiana from office? Yeah, THAT would have gone over well.

        The Governor of LA told the Red Cross that they couldn't bring supplies into the Superdome because she wanted the people to leave the caity. The Governor of LA said she needed 24 hours to decide if she wanted the federal government and military to assist. President Bush even offered to have a three star general be
        • It's posse comitatus, not possi comitatus. It can be suspended via executive order in an emergency.

          I think the real problem is that Bush was literally fiddling while NO drowned, not legal problems in getting a federal response going. But hey, I'm not a lawyer.
          • Bush was "fiddling" because he had already convinced NO to declare a mandatory evacuation and there were tons of supplies prepositioned to be rushed into the area the minute the storm cleared.

            The fact that the governor refused to let those supplies get into the city while the mayor refused to follow his own emergency preparedness plan to properly evacuate the city is what led to the fiasco at the Superdome. While Mayor Nagin was on the radio swearing about the lack of buses he had well over 500 city and sc
            • The final, most ironic part of all of this, is that this was actually the fastest and best response ever from FEMA to a major disaster.

              That's just scary.
            • Yes, everything was so well in hand, the pres decided to invoke a little Nero imagery. Except it wasn't, and that makes him look like a jackass.

              Nooo.. it means federalized troops can't function as law enforcement. If the governor of LA calls up her guard or follows(tariffs, treaties, WTF are interstate agreements called?) the procedures to get other state guard units(which is a lot of red-tape, and requires some collaboration with Washington) then the guard is not federal and does not fall under the Posse
              • The fact is that federal troops could not be utilized in a law enforcement role without either the governor ceding the authority or the federal government seizing it (the Insurrection Act).

                The federal government actually offerred to swear in an acting three-star general into the LA NG in order to allow the relief process to get started while LA tried to decide if they wanted to retain authority or not.

                The ONLY way the president could have deployed federal troops into LA was to essentially remove the governo
    • Clue, you'd realize that nobody but the radicals like Bush and his crowd anymore because they're radical, right-wing crackpots, warmongering cowards, and have their heads so deep in the asses of business interests that the guys they're poking could probably lick the tops of their heads.

      YOU, sir, are out of touch, not everyone else. America, despite what you losers on the right like to pretend, is actually still almost completely moderate and will not tolerate murdering fundamentalist radicals like BushCo. O

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