truesee's Blog

(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama’s approval has hit an all-time low among the poorest Americans, according to the Gallup poll. Meanwhile, when compared to the other income brackets reported by Gallup, Obama's approval is highest among the richest Americans.

In the week of June 20-26--the most recent week published by Gallup--only 45 percent of Americans in the lowest income bracket reported by the polling company (those earning less than $2,000 per month) said they approved of the job Obama was doing as president.

Gallup publishes the president’s weekly approval numbers among Americans in four income brackets: those earning less than $2,000 per month, those earning between $2,000 and $4,999 per month, those earning between $5,000 and $7,499 and those earning more than $7,500.

In Gallup's most recent survey, Obama had majority approval in none of these income brackets.

However, of the four, his approval was highest--47 percent--in the richest bracket, those earning more than $7,500 per month.

His approval rating last was 42 percent among those earning $2,000 to $4,999 per month and 43 percent among those earning $5,000 to $7,499 per month.

Prior to last week, when it hit an all-time low of 45 percent, Obama’s approval rating among the poorest bracket reported by Gallup had never dropped below 47 percent. It had hit that level twice: first in the week of Nov. 8-14, 2010; then again in the week of April 25-May 1.

In addition to being at an all-time low among the poorest Americans, Obama’s approval rating is also nearly at an all-time low among the next poorest group of Americans reported by Gallup, those who earn between $2,000 and $4,999 per month. The only time his approval among this group was lower than the 42 percent it was last week was in the week of Aug. 23-29, 2010, when it dropped to 41 percent.

According to Gallup, Obama’s highest approval rating among the poorest Americans came in the week of March 16-22, 2009, just two months after he was inaugurated and one month after he signed his $787-billion economic stimulus law. That week, his approval was 68 percent among Americans earning less than $2,000 per month.

In March 2009, the unemployment rate in the United States was 8.6 percent.  This month, it is 9.1 percent.

5-year-old boy shoots 4-year-old boy in playground outside Washington, D.C.

 

Fox DC

Scene where a five-year-old Maryland boy shot his four-year-old neighbor

A 5-year-old boy shot his 4-year-old neighbor in the back at a Maryland playground Thursday afternoon, authorities said.

The bullet passed through the young boy's upper torso while the two were playing in Hillcrest Heights, suburb about 10 miles southeast of Washington D.C., officials said.

Officers were called to the scene shortly after the shooting and found the victim, who was taken to hospital where he is expected to survive.

The young shooter was scared by what happened and ran away and hid the handgun in his family home, but it was later recovered, police said.

It is not clear where the gun came from, but authorities are questioning his parents and adults who have access to the apartment.

"How did the 5-year-old obtain the handgun, and who does it belong to?" asked Prince George's County Police Officer Mike Rodriguez.

A man who described himself as the shooter's uncle told the Washington Post that witnesses believed the boy found the gun outside.

Dee Johnson, 29, said the child's mother lives in the apartment with her four children and does not keep guns.

"I know for a fact my sister don't keep no guns in the house," said Johnson, adding he was "praying" for the injured kid.

"It's just two little kids, two innocent kids," he added.

"We're just trying to figure out what's going on."

Jefferson was not, as his enemies in the election of 1800 claimed, an atheist. He believed in the Creator whom he invoked in the Declaration of Independence and whom he thought had brought the natural universe into being. By his own lights he thought himself a true Christian, an admirer of the moral teachings of the Nazarene. It had been, he argued, generations of the clergy who had perverted the simple humanity of Jesus the reformer, turned him into a messiah, and invented the myth that he had died to redeem mankind’s sins.

All of which would surely mean that, notwithstanding his passion for minimal government, the Sage of Monticello would have no chance at all beside True Believers like Michele Bachmann. But Jefferson’s rationalist deism is not the idle makeover of liberal wishful thinking. It is incontrovertible historical fact, as is his absolute determination never to admit religion into any institutions of the public realm.

So the philosopher-president whose aversion to overbearing government makes him a Tea Party patriarch was also a man who thought the Immaculate Conception a fable. But then real history is like that—full of knotty contradictions, its cast list of heroes, especially American heroes, majestic in their complicated imperfections.

Take another of the Founders routinely canonized in the current fairy-tale version of American origins that passes muster for history by those who don’t actually read very much of it: Alexander Hamilton. Outed by the Andrew Breitbart of his day, James Thomson Callender, for having had an “amorous connection” with the married Maria Reynolds, Hamilton responded by making an unapologetic preemptive confession—insisting that since on the truly serious issue of whether he had profited from the management of public finances he was innocent, the rest was nobody’s business but his own. Callender retorted that Hamilton had owned up to the sexual impropriety as a cover for the more serious financial one.

True history is the enemy of reverence. We do the authors of American independence no favors by embalming them in infallibility, by treating the Constitution like a quasi-biblical revelation instead of the product of contention and cobbled-together compromise that it actually was. Even the collective noun “Founding -Fathers” planes smooth the unreconciled divisiveness of their bitter and acrimonious disputes. History is a book of chastening wisdom to which we ought to be looking to deepen our understanding of the legitimate nature of American government—including its revenue-raising power, an issue that deeply captivated the antagonized minds of that first generation. But unfortunately, there is little evidence of citizens engaging in close, critical reading ofThe Federalist Papers,of the debates surrounding constitutional ratification, or of the dispute that pitted Hamilton and James Madison against Patrick Henry over what was at stake in Congress’s authority to make laws “necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the…Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States.”

Instead of knowledge, we have tricorn hats. Staring at a copy of the Constitution in the National Archives and making promotional pilgrimages to revolutionary New England didn’t prevent Sarah Palin from butchering the truth of Paul Revere’s ride, turning it into some sort of NRA advisory to the British to keep their gosh-darned hands off American firearms.

Facts, as John Adams insisted when defending British redcoats after the Boston Massacre, “are stubborn things.” He would be horrified by the regularity with which American history is mangled in the interests of confirming prejudices. It matters when Glenn Beck’s guest Andrew Napolitano pins the responsibility for the 17th Amendment, instituting direct election of senators, on a Wilsonian plot against American liberties, rather than the proposal of a Republican senator in 1911 that was approved by Congress before Wilson ever set foot in the White House. It matters when Bachmann mischaracterizes the Founding Fathers as working “tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” What made the Constitution acceptable throughout the Union was a Faustian bargain that counted slaves as three fifths of a citizen, thus artificially bloating the political representation of the slaveholding South.

With adult history buffs so deluded about the reality of the American past, it’s even more alarming that the National Assessment of Educational Progress recently rated history as the subject at which students are least proficient. This wouldn’t matter if history were just some recreational stroll down memory lane. But it isn’t. In the fiery debates of Americans long dead can be discerned the lineaments of the same core issues that divide us today. Right now, the education that might inform such a debate has turned into a schoolyard shouting match.

As the electioneering rises to a din, those who dare to read history for its chastening wisdom will be fatuously accused of “declinism.” But it is those who reduce history’s hard and honest reckonings to exceptionalist chest-thumping who will be the true agents of degeneration. As one of Jefferson’s favorite books, Gibbon’sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire,so luminously argued, there is no surer sign of a country’s cultural and political decay than an obtuse blindness to its unmistakable beginnings.

Schama, a professor of history at Columbia University, debuts as a NEWSWEEK/DAILY BEAST contributor in this issue.

Books: The Historical Founders

Revolutionaries:A New History of the Invention of Americaby Jack Rakove.
Compulsive and compulsory reading on the Revolution and forging of the Constitution.

Defiance of the Patriots:The Boston Tea Party & the Making of Americaby Benjamin L. Carp.
A wise and illuminating study of the original tea party.

American Scripture:Making the Declaration of Independence by Pauline Maier.
The definitive book, and a thrilling read, on the writing of the Declaration.

The Federalist Papers.The priceless document of two mighty intellects, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, united in common cause of creating an enduring American government.

'To Catch a Predator' host Chris Hansen caught on hidden camera cheating on his wife: report

Gabriela Resto-Montero
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Wednesday, June 29th 2011, 7:27 PM

WTAE.com

Police: Pa. Man Buys 'Fake' Pot With Fake $1M Bill

Police Said Joseph Lombardi Stole Herbs And Ran

The Sharon Herald reports the substance is sold as incense but mimics the effect of marijuana when smoked, which is why the ersatz pot is included in a bill outlawing such substances that Gov. Tom Corbett signed into law last week. The ban takes effect in August.

Police have charged Lombardi with theft by deception and retail theft because they say he took the herbs and ran after putting the bogus bill on the counter.Online court records don't list an attorney for Lombardi, who doesn't have a listed phone.