53 Senators voted to raid the Social Security trust fund. Last week, Senators Jim DeMint and Mike Crapo introduced an amendment to prevent the current Social Security surplus from continuing to be spent. 53 Senators voted against it. Yes, you're doing the math right. Eight of them were Republicans who ought to be particularly ashamed. Townhall.com names the list of offenders:

Akaka (D-HI)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Biden (D-DE)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Burns (R-MT)
Byrd (D-WV)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Carper (D-DE)
Chafee (R-RI)
Clinton (D-NY)
Collins (R-ME)
Conrad (D-ND)
Dayton (D-MN)
Dodd (D-CT)
Domenici (R-NM)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feingold (D-WI)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Harkin (D-IA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Jeffords (I-VT)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Leahy (D-VT)
Levin (D-MI)
Lieberman (D-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Lugar (R-IN)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murray (D-WA)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Obama (D-IL)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)
Sarbanes (D-MD)
Schumer (D-NY)
Smith (R-OR)
Snowe (R-ME)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Talent (R-MO)
Wyden (D-OR)

Two more women die after using RU-486 abortion pill. This is in addition to four other women who died recently from a bacterial infection that developed after the women took the abortion pill, although the causes of death in the two new cases are not yet known for certain. Here is the Reuters story:

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-03-17T193051Z_01_WAT005095_RTRUKOC_0_US-ABORTION-PILL.xml&rpc=22

Two Convicted, Face Life in School Killing. Two North Philly gang members were convicted of first-degree murder for the February 2004 shooting of 10-year-old Faheem Thomas-Childs. They have been sentenced to life in prison without parole. Here is the Philadelphia Inquirer story:

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/14117999.htm

Here are the ever-ugly Philadelphia murder statistics reported in the article:

While official and public anger continue to simmer, Philadelphia's homicide rate has stayed high: 328 the year Faheem was killed, 380 last year, and 62 as of yesterday, according to police, a rate that, if it continues, would see 302 murders in the city by year's end.

And the article lists the names of other children and teenagers who have been homicide victims in the two years since Faheem's death:

2004

Lamont Adams, 16
Uri Alston, 17
Tyrone Blue Jr., 16
Milton Brown, 16
Nicholas Busa, 17
Tykeem Cherry, 16
Faheem Thomas-Childs, 10
Josiah Cruz, 6 months
Kyree Cohen, 17
Adam Daniel Hammer, 17
Marquis Harris, 13
Tyrique Lovett, 15
Anthony Oliver, 14
Jalil Speaks, 16
Malik Upchurch, 15
Ramone Valentine, 16

2005

Kenneth Baptiste, 17
Audrey Bell, age unknown
Kenneth Best, 17
Jevon Chestnut, 13
Isiah Cobb, 16
Wander DeJesus, 9
Malik Edmonds, 16
Nashir Hinton, 11
Rashan Howard, 17
Terrell Johnson, 17
Richard Johnson, 17
Michael Jones, 17
Jamal Joyner, 16
Shane Pomfret, 15
Lamont Pough, 17
Troy Sampson, 17
Kareem Sephes, 16
Daniel Starling, 16

2006

Tariq Blue, 14
Agustus Favors, 15
Darnell Winn, 15

Lynn Swann Tied with Rendell in Poll. A recent poll of Pennsylvania voters shows Republican challenger Lynn Swann tied with incumbent Governor Ed Rendell. Details are here:

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/3/14/225831.shtml?s=et

Strategic Vision, LLC, an Atlanta-headquartered public relations and public affairs agency announced the results of a three-day poll of 1,200 likely voters in Pennsylvania on various political issues. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

In a match-up between Governor Rendell and Republican Lynn Swann, the results were Rendell 44 percent; Swann 44 percent; and 2 percent went to "other candidate," with 10 percent undecided.

Elsewhere in this article, it mentions that Rendell's approval rating among PA voters is 43 percent, though it should be pointed out that 23 percent were undecided. A lot can happen between now and November, but if Rendell does fail to get reelected, he will be the first incumbent PA governor to meet that fate in decades.

The PA poll numbers aren't good for President Bush, either. His approval rating among PA voters is 35% according to this poll, a number that seems to mirror the reported national consensus. On the face of it, this is not surprising, considering that PA is a blue state. But David E. Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Strategic Vision, LLC, says that Bush has lost ground among conservatives in the state. Johnson says:

"The President’s poll numbers have gone down since January in Pennsylvania. Part of this loss can be attributed to the spate of bad stories that the administration has received from the Cheney hunting incident to the aborted ports deal. More alarming for the administration must be the loss of conservative Republican support...President Bush, up until last year, retained strong Republican support and was viewed as the ideological heir to Ronald Reagan. Since last summer, that support has steadily eroded ... Indeed many Republicans appear to be looking beyond the Bush administration and do not identify themselves as Bush Republicans but rather as Reagan Republicans."

If PA conservatives are indeed down on Bush, it is hopefully not because their thoughts are being influenced by the liberal media. Surely, conservatives in every state ought to be aware of the mainstream media's anti-Bush bias.

Media negativity causes adult-level anxiety in children. Here is an unsurprising article in the Ottawa Sun:

http://www.ottawasun.com/Lifestyle/2006/03/02/1468946-sun.html

The article says:

"It's a very stressful time for kids to grow up." They feel threatened, vulnerable and more fearful of the future than ever before because of overexposure to pessimistic messages and images, says Mel Levine, pediatrics professor at the University of North Carolina Medical School and co-founder of All Kinds of Minds (Allkindsofminds.org).

"They're getting a warped view of the world. The media has developed a fascination with the downside of life" and it's dragging kids down too, says Levine. "There's no balanced view -- they're constantly taught to feel vulnerable instead of optimistic and excited about the future."

According to the Hospital for Sick Children psychiatrist Dr. Arlette Lefebvre, "We should let kids be kids and protect their innocence as long as possible."

I do believe this is true, and I think the constant negativity displayed by the liberal media in the last five years has had a similar effect on liberal adults in Philadelphia.

Bush Didn’t Lie About Levee Breaching. Not that it's a surprise, but the latest attempt by the media and the Democrats to create a Bush scandal is nothing but liberal spin. News reports have been claiming that a videotape of a briefing to the president by disaster officials showed that Bush was informed that the New Orleans levees could be breached by Hurricane Katrina. But the tape shows no such thing. In the tape, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield told the president that the levees might be "topped" -- which means that the storm surge could have pushed water over the top of the levees. Also, Mayfield told Bush that "the forecast now suggests that there will be minimal flooding in the City of New Orleans itself.” Here is the story:

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/3/3/120101.shtml?s=ic

As usual, the truth is quite different than what we are being told by the mainstream media.

Japan Finds Fuel Source in Cattle Dung. How about that! I wonder if this was one of the alternate sources of energy that President Bush was referring to in his State of the Union address.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/3/3/144314.shtml?s=ic

Peanut butter kiss didn't kill teen after all. Remember the news story from November about the 15-year-old Canadian girl who supposedly died after she kissed her boyfriend, because she had a peanut allergy and he had recently eaten a peanut butter sandwich? Well, a Quebec coroner now says that was not the cause of the girl's death. He has not said yet what the cause really was, but he felt he needed to inform a Canadian allergy association that the original story was incorrect. The story is here:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11659935/?GT1=7850

New partisan storm erupts over Katrina. Here we go again. A government video has been obtained and publicly released by the Associated Press, allegedly showing that President Bush was warned by federal disaster officials about the possibility of the New Orleans levees being breached by Hurricane Katrina. First of all, that's not true (see this post). But Democrats are naturally trying to spin this as proof that Bush did not care about the situation and that he did not make the proper preparations to respond to the coming disaster. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are predictably calling for a new investigation into the federal response, with Reid accusing the Bush administration of "hiding what really happened" and "systematically misleading the American people". And, of course, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Senator Mary Landrieu (D, La.) are trying to portray this video as proof that the federal, not city or state, government was responsible for all of the failures.

This, of course, is all nonsense. Since I hate to have to cover old ground, I will refer you to two blog posts I made on this subject in September:

Mandatory evacuation was ordered for New Orleans

The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed

CBS Slants Bush Poll in Favor of Democrats. The Rathergate network is busted -- again. You've probably been hearing about the CBS poll that puts the president's approval rating at 34%. But the Media Research Center points out that the poll was skewed to favor Democrats. Here is the website:

http://newsbusters.org/node/4211

It says:

On the bottom of the PDF version of the poll (page 18) it says how many Democrats versus Republicans were contacted.

"Total Republicans" contacted: 272 unweighted and 289 weighted.
"Total Democrats" contacted: 409 unweighted and 381 weighted.
"Total Independents" contacted: 337 unweighted and 348 weighted.

Brent Baker also noted how CBS failed to highlight a key portion of its poll on the Feb. 27 "CBS Evening News." 66 percent of respondents thought the media devoted "too much time" to Cheney's hunting accident.

UPDATE 12:31. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has a helpful table in this report (page 13) on what percentage of Americans consider themselves to be Republican or Democrat. It shows that in both 2004 and 2005, 30% said they were Republican compared to 33% who said they were Democrats. The new CBS poll (even after being weighted) had a population of only 28% Republicans to 37% Democrats.

This bias does not surprise me, of course. By contrast, Rasmussen Reports shows Bush job approval at 43%. This may not be a number to brag about, especially considering that it was 49% only ten days ago, but it is a big difference from the CBS number. Rasmussen polls have generally been reliable in the past, when it came to predicting election results.

Cocaine Brought To Class By Second-Grader, and passed around the classroom. Here is another unsettling story about small Philadelphia children possessing drugs:

http://www.nbc10.com/news/7550102/detail.html