RUSH: Let’s go to the audio sound bites first, the story that just won’t go away. Last night on ABC’s World News Tonight, reporter Neal Karlinsky reporting on the troubles of children going back to school.
KARLINSKY: Along historic Route 66 in Kingman, Arizona, we found a close-knit community strapped by high food and gas prices and struggling to get their kids ready to go back to school.
BACA: We’re definitely having to just buy the bare minimum this year.
KARLINSKY: Really, the bare minimum?
BACA: Yeah.
KARLINSKY: Tanya Baca’s back-to-school budget has dropped this year from $250 per child to just a hundred. Wendy Powell says tough times have left her with only $20 per child for her back-to-school supplies.
POWELL: They are using last year’s clothes, absolutely, but they’re also using last year’s crayons and different things that I had left over.
BACA: I’m buying them less, and they’re not getting to pick out much this year.
KARLINSKY: For her teenage son, that means no new shoes.
BACA KID: The shoes on me are getting tighter, and the shoe prices are going up, so she can’t afford new shoes.
KARLINSKY: Back to school on a shoestring budget, an unexpected math lesson for thousands of parents and their kids.
RUSH: Oh, it’s getting really bad now, used crayons, ladies and gentlemen! We are losing our souls, sending our kids back to school with last year’s crayons. My God, ladies and gentlemen, it’s unbelievable. I don’t know if they’ve got paste. That’s a good question. We haven’t seen any stories about paste, whether it’s new or last year’s paste or whether there is any paste. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the anatomy of how a story is created and gets legs in the Drive-By Media. This has been going on now for two weeks and it’s all part of the misery and doom and gloom that people in this country are experiencing. But, hey, there’s new polling data out there that suggests this may not be the case, and it comes from Reuters: ‘Americans remain deeply worried about a faltering economy and their own financial futures, but their outlook improved slightly this month, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday. The Reuters/Zogby Index, which measures the mood of the country, climbed to 91.9 from 88.7 in July as six of the 10 measures of public opinion used in the index rose. … The approval rating for Congress, however, dipped to 9 percent from last month’s all-time low of 11 percent as the legislative body headed off to an August vacation without progress on a host of issues including energy prices.’
So the American people’s mood is going up.