President Bush Handling the Job

And now some fresh pickings from the wartime grapevine:

Poll Results

A newly released poll shows that 67 percent of active members of the military approve of the way President Bush is handling his job. The poll was taken more than two weeks ago -- even before the capture of Saddam Hussein, which boosted Mr. Bush's job approval ratings among Americans in general.

But this poll -- conducted by the Military Times newspapers -- shows that 56 percent of active military members specifically approve of the way President Bush is handling the situation in Iraq. A poll of the general public at about the same time found 46 percent of all Americans agreed. In the military poll, 64 percent of active duty military also said the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over, compared with 59 percent of the public in civilian polls.

Frenchman Fired

A French journalist has been fired after condemning the way French newspapers covered the war in Iraq. The International Herald Tribune reports that Alain Hertoghe said the papers in France concentrated so much on the problems the U.S. encountered in the war ... "it was impossible to understand how the Americans won."

In a new book, whose title in English would be The excessive war: How the Press 'dis-informed' us on Iraq, Hertoghe says France's major newspapers routinely described President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair as violent, imperialist and unreasonable. And that there were 135 clearly negative headlines about them, but only 29 about Saddam.

Hertoghe says one paper in particular, Le Monde, became -- "Saddam's Gazette," saying that the fall of Baghdad was because -- "Saddam's Fedayeen had so much compassion for the population that they stopped fighting." Hertoghe's employer, the La Croix newspaper, says it fired him ... because his book damaged the paper's reputation and questioned the professional ethics of some of the paper's staff members.

Card Concerns

In an effort to include the African-American community, Bank of America (search) is offering pre-paid gift cards with images of Kwanzaa (search) -- the African holiday this time of year. But now the head of an African cultural center in Charlotte, North Carolina, isn't happy with the effort at inclusion ... and is calling for a boycott of Bank of America, saying the cards are -- "attempting to commercialize our spiritual holiday" by promoting overspending by African Americans.

Gerry Chisolm, of the Nubian Rootz Cultural Center, argues that Kwanzaa is supposed to provide a refuge from consumerism and financial pressures. According to the Charlotte Observer, she recently met with bank officials, and they are now evaluating her concerns

— FOX News' Michael Levine contributed to this report