Take this for what it’s worth, but at least some small factions within the lamestream media seem to be – to put it mildly – criticizing President Obama.

Katie Couric may be best known for her unflattering interview with Sarah Palin. But her nightly news broadcast this past Monday night may be an indicator that the big liberal media are now turning their guns on Obama.

Couric said on “CBS Evening News” that Americans are growing “disenchanted” with Obama and are openly questioning his credibility.

“Is the honeymoon over?” anchor Couric said at the beginning of her correspondent’s report. She further added:

“Although President Obama has been in office less than a year, many Americans are growing disenchanted with his handling of the enormous problems he and the country are facing, from healthcare to unemployment to Afghanistan.

“His poll numbers are sliding, and at least one poll shows his job approval rating has fallen, for the first time, below 50 percent.”

Correspondent Chris Reid chimed in:

“The president is getting battered on everything from the economy to foreign policy. Some polls show Americans are increasingly questioning his credibility.”

The report asserted that while Obama talks about dealing with unemployment, which is over 10 percent and expected to rise, he has developed “no new ideas” for dealing with the problem.

CBS also cited a poll showing that only 14 percent of Americans believe Obama’s claim that healthcare reform won’t add to the budget deficit, and only 7 percent believe that the stimulus has created any jobs at all.

The report also criticized the president for being “indecisive” on Afghanistan, and for returning from his recent Asian trip “with little to show for it.”

An expert was quoted as describing his trip as the “amateur hour,” as he did not line up agreements with foreign countries before venturing abroad.

Is this the beginning of a “snowball effect”? Only time will tell, but this development can only be nothing but bad news for Obama at this point. And to think that it wasn’t that long ago when the President could do no wrong with the liberal media. Stay tuned to The Republican Temple as further developments become available.

Officials with the European Union Naval Forces are confirming Somali pirates have hijacked a tanker carrying crude oil from Saudi Arabia to the United States.

Military leaders believe that Afghanistan’s Logar Province, which is south of Kabul, is a critical region in the country.

The 57th annual Christmas parade outside of Boston, Massachusetts had a military theme this year as the town of Quincy said goodbye to troops heading overseas.

Jim sent this in:

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) — known within law enforcement and intelligence circles as “Leaky Leahy” — is sharply critical of President Barack Obama’s decision, announced last week by the US State Department, to decline joining the international treaty to ban anti-personnel landmines.

To illustrate how bad the national economy is, New York’s cash reserve is dwindling quickly, and the state faces a crisis if it doesn’t address its budget woes soon.

If the government can’t reach a budget agreement by Dec. 31, the state’s cash reserve will total only $36 million, and that’s only if the state dips to the bottom of its emergency reserve; New York’s budget deficit totals $3.2 billion.

Democratic Gov. David Paterson has urged the legislature to deal with the gap. But with public support for him virtually non-existent, his words carry little, if any weight.

On the bright side, New York’s legislature is famous for waiting until the last minute to address budget problems. So many legislators and outside experts predict the government will act before it’s too late. In addition, Wall Street bonuses are paid in January, and the state will receive withholding tax revenue from those payments.

But given the lack of progress in negotiations so far, state officials are readying for a cash crisis. Some government services may have to shut down if no action is taken.

“Unless we act, New York will run out of money, even after we delay payments to schools and local governments,” Patterson said in a web cast Tuesday. “This is an unprecedented fiscal emergency.”

Credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service wrote in a report last week, “The next three months will be critical to the state’s credit rating.” Moody’s analyst Emily Raimes told The New York Times:

 “If they solve them [the budget deficits] with one-time measures, that’s going to increase the gaps in future years, and at some point they get so large it becomes difficult to solve them.”

California is in even worse shape than New York. The Golden State’s budget deficit will soar to $20.7 billion over the next 18 months, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

That’s nearly triple the estimate of just four months ago, and the office says $20 billion deficits will likely be the norm for years.

You haven’t heard it from America’s mainstream media yet – heck, even Fox News hasn’t covered it – but the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. John P. Holdren, is a key player in the Climategate e-mails flap, which is shaping up as the biggest scandal in the history of modern science.

Holdren is an intractable global warming activist with no time for climate change skepticism. In a New York Times article, he contended that such questioning “has delayed – and continues to delay – the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge.”

He has also become something of a celebrity, rubbing shoulders with the Hollywood luminaries at President Obama’s state dinner Tuesday night honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and repeatedly appearing as a guest on the David Letterman show.

But the Canada Free Press this week revealed that the former Harvard professor and Al Gore global warming adviser features prominently in the thousands of e-mails and other files made public after the hacking last week of a computer server used by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit.

The most embarrassing item for the Obama Administration may be a 2003 exchange between Holdren and TCSDaily.com editor-in-chief Nick Schulz. Schulz challenged Holdren on whether downplaying the significance of the Medieval Warm Period required “what lawyers call the burden of proof.”

Holdren’s retort contained a remarkable assertion coming from a scientist: “In practice, burden of proof is an evolving thing – it evolves as the amount of evidence relevant to a particular proposition grows.”

Canada Free Press columnist and Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball says of the correspondence with Schulz that Holdren’s “entire defense and position devolves to a political position.”

The CRU documents also find Holdren disparaging solar physicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, contrarians regarding surface temperatures over the past millennium, who were colleagues of Holdren at Harvard, and Ball wonders if Holdren may have intimidated the two scientists before they “suddenly and politely withdrew from the fray,” as Ball describes it.

As has been previously reported, Dr. Holdren has a history of alarmingly extremist views. He co-authored a 1977 book, “Ecoscience: Population Resources, Environment,” advocating compulsory abortion for purposes of population control, mass sterilization, government-dictated family size like China’s one-child policy, and a “planetary regime” to be policed by the United Nations.

Not long before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion-on-demand throughout America, Holdren co-authored “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions,” which seems to argue that even years after birth a baby is not yet a human being.

“The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth,” claims the book’s “Population Limitation” section, “and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being.”

Holdren’s “Human Ecology” warns of large-scale disaster that might require “involuntary fertility control” to stop population growth. “Compulsory control of family size is an unpalatable idea, but the alternatives may be much more horrifying,” the Holdren book suggests.

As a member of President Bill Clinton’s Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology, Holdren chaired a study providing the groundwork for U.S.-Russian cooperation on securing nuclear materials in the aftermath of post-Cold War disarmament.

We look at the strides DOD is taking in the social and emotional care of military children. Plus, servicemembers deployed during Thanksgiving enjoy a taste of home.

U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday.