This is from the September 10, 2003 program.
Rob Courddry On The CA Recall 9/10/03 (Small – 10 MB)
The Daily Show (The best news on television.)
Daily Show’s Rob Courddry On The CA Recall
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Senate Stands Up To Shrub Administration And Adopts Resolution To Roll Back New FCC Media Ownership Rules
Senate Defies Bush, Overturns FCC Ruling
In Reuters.
The Republican-led U.S. Senate on Tuesday defied Bush administration opposition and voted to rescind new regulations allowing large media companies to grow even bigger.
The Senate approved, 55-40, a resolution that would roll back the Federal Communications Commission rules allowing television networks to own more local stations and permitting conglomerates to own a newspaper, television stations and radio outlets in a single market.
The measure faces a tougher battle in the U.S. House of Representatives and a threat of a veto by President Bush if it reaches his desk.
The Republican-led FCC narrowly adopted the new rules in June, which would allow television networks to own local stations that collectively reach 45 percent of the national audience, up from 35 percent.
The new rules permit one company to own a newspaper, a television station and several radio stations in a single market, lifting a decades-old ban on cross-ownership. A company would also be permitted to own two local television stations in more local markets.
Daily Show On Reactions To The 9th District’s Recall On The Recall
This is from the September 16, 2003 program.
Daily Show’s Recall On The Recall (Small – 9 MB)
The Daily Show (The best news on television.)
Help Me Fix My Comments
Hey I’ve got some kind of weird bug going on when users get an error message before the comments sends anyway. Has anyone else seen this problem? Wanna shoot me an email and help me fix it? (Please 🙂
Okay I missed that the Daily Show had an incredible set of recall clips tuesday night — so i’ll be getting those up now.
Then there’s the rest of the week of the Daily Show, the rest of the Dick Cheney clips (yes! there’s more!) — Jesse Jackson’s speech from the protest Tuesday — and whatever else I’ve still got in the kitty from last week…
GAO Top Dog Warns Of The Consequences Of The Shrub’s Record Deficit (But Nobody’s Listening)
Federal Budget Disaster Seen, but Won’t Be Heard
By Janet Hook for the LA Times.
Even though the government is on track to run a record deficit in excess of $500 billion next year, neither President Bush nor congressional leaders have proposed doing anything to balance the budget anytime soon. Their strategy: to wait for a vigorous economy to do the job for them.
That makes David M. Walker, head of the General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm, a rare Cassandra. He is giving a speech today warning that the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook is seriously out of whack. And he challenges the assumption that economic recovery will solve the problem painlessly.
“We need a wake-up call,” Walker said in an interview. “We need to come to terms with reality: The gap is too great to grow our way out of the problem. Tough choices will be required.”
His is a lonely voice on Capitol Hill, where deficit-expanding initiatives are growing like crabgrass, unchecked amid new budget demands for the war on terrorism and the reconstruction of Iraq.
Bush and lawmakers from both parties continue to press for a $400-billion, 10-year expansion of Medicare to provide prescription drug benefits. House Republicans are pushing yet another round of tax cuts
Legal Analysis Of The 9th Circuit’s CA Recall Decision
One More Round For Bush v. Gore
By Charles Lane for the Washington Post.
Bush v. Gore held for the first time that the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which protects citizens from arbitrarily disparate treatment at the hands of state authorities, can be applied to the methods states use to tally votes. Previously, election methods had been thought to be mostly the province of state officials.
The court ruled that a statewide manual recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court to account for uncounted punch-card ballots, many of which were marred by “hanging chads” and the like, would be conducted according to wildly varying rules, making it impossible for the state to treat everyone equally within the short time available.
For the liberal interest groups and lawyers who have been fighting California’s recall, Bush v. Gore has mutated from reviled electoral coup to legitimate legal weapon.
If the case means anything, they argue, it means that the Constitution forbids states from arbitrarily counting different voters’ ballots differently. That includes setting up an election in which one technology, the punch-card machines, would subject a sizeable percentage of voters — among whom are a disproportionate number of minorities — to a greater risk of having their ballots discounted than other voters.
Indeed, yesterday’s ruling flowed from earlier litigation, since settled, in which groups used Bush v. Gore to win a promise from the state that all its punch-card machines would be replaced by March 2004, when the state will hold Republican and Democratic primaries.
The 9th Circuit noted that, according to experts, about 40,000 out of the several million expected to vote in the recall election would lose out because of the normal 2.23 percent error rate in the punch-card technology. Those voters would tend to come from six heavily minority counties containing 44 percent of the state’s voters, whereas 56 percent of the state’s voting population would get the benefit of machines with an error rate of no more than 0.89 percent.
Such discrepancies would probably not have risen to the level of a federal issue in the past, but 2000 changed all that, the 9th Circuit ruled.
“If we had brought the punch-card case to court before Bush v. Gore, you’d likely see the courts say, ‘No, states have to have some leeway,’ ” said Rick Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who aided the American Civil Liberties Union in the case. “But if it doesn’t apply here, it doesn’t apply anywhere.”
Experts Point Out (Yet Another) Cheney Fib Regarding Connection Between Iraq and 9-11
Cheney link of Iraq, 9/11 challenged
By Anne E. Kornblut and Bryan Bender for the Boston Globe.
Vice President Dick Cheney, anxious to defend the White House foreign policy amid ongoing violence in Iraq, stunned intelligence analysts and even members of his own administration this week by failing to dismiss a widely discredited claim: that Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Evidence of a connection, if any exists, has never been made public. Details that Cheney cited to make the case that the Iraqi dictator had ties to Al Qaeda have been dismissed by the CIA as having no basis, according to analysts and officials. Even before the war in Iraq, most Bush officials did not explicitly state that Iraq had a part in the attack on the United States two years ago.
But Cheney left that possibility wide open in a nationally televised interview two days ago, claiming that the administration is learning “more and more” about connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the Sept. 11 attacks. The statement surprised some analysts and officials who have reviewed intelligence reports from Iraq…
Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said that Cheney’s “willingness to use speculation and conjecture as facts in public presentations is appalling. It’s astounding.”
In particular, current intelligence officials reiterated yesterday that a reported Prague visit in April 2001 between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent had been discounted by the CIA, which sent former agency Director James R. Woolsey to investigate the claim. Woolsey did not find any evidence to confirm the report, officials said, and President Bush did not include it in the case for war in his State of the Union address last January.
But Cheney, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” cited the report of the meeting as possible evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link and said it was neither confirmed nor discredited, saying: “We’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.”…
But there is no evidence proving the Iraqi regime knew about or took part in the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush officials said.
Former senator Max Cleland, who is a member of the national commission investigating the attacks, said yesterday that classified documents he has reviewed on the subject weaken, rather than strengthen, administration assertions that Hussein’s regime may have been allied with Al Qaeda.
“The vice president trying to justify some connection is ludicrous,” he said.
Nonetheless, Cheney, in the “Meet the Press” interview Sunday, insisted that the United States is learning more about the links between Al Qaeda and Hussein.
“We learn more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s,” Cheney said, “that it involved training, for example, on [biological and chemical weapons], that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems.”…
But intelligence specialists told the Globe last August that they have never confirmed that the training took place, or identified where it could have taken place. “The general public just doesn’t have any independent way of weighing what is said,” Cannistraro, the former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said. “If you repeat it enough times . . . then people become convinced it’s the truth.”
Had to take a break and go to school…
So I am in graduate school, and I finally had to do some reading and homework this week.
I’ve also upgraded my Movable Type so my RSS feeds should be in better shape.
Try to send a few comments, if you don’t mind, so I can check out the new install.
Check back tonight when things should be back to normal…
Thanks!
Dick Cheney Fib Challenged By Dems
Monday night, I posted a clip from Meet the Press where Dick Cheney stated that he no longer has any financial ties to Halliburton. Guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed that wasn’t exactly true.
Now Senators Daschle and Lautenberg are demanding hearings investigating the no-bid contracts. They also did me the favor of producing the exact numbers I asked for.
Oil services firm paid Cheney as VP
In Reuters.
“The vice president needs to explain how he reconciles the claim that he has ‘no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind’ with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred salary payments he receives from Halliburton,” Daschle said in a statement.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Cheney, who was Halliburton’s CEO from 1995 to 2000, said he had severed all ties with the Houston-based company.
“I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven’t had now for over three years,” he said.
Cathie Martin, a Cheney spokeswoman, confirmed that the vice president has been receiving the deferred compensation payments from Halliburton, but she disputed that his statements on “Meet the Press” had been misleading.
Cheney had already earned the salary that was now being paid, Martin said, adding that once he became a nominee for vice president, he purchased an insurance policy to guarantee that the deferred salary would be paid to him whether or not Halliburton survived as a company.
“So he has no financial interest in the company,” she said.
But Lautenberg said Cheney’s financial disclosure filings with the Office of Government Ethics listed $205,298 in deferred salary payments made to him by Halliburton in 2001, and another $162,393 in 2002. The filings indicated that he was scheduled to receive more payments this year and in 2004 and 2005.
“In 2001 and 2002, Vice President Cheney was paid almost as much in salary from Halliburton as he made as vice president,” Lautenberg said.
The vice president’s salary is $198,600 annually.
My Interview With Jesse Jackson On The 9th Circuit’s Recall Decision
I had a chance to speak briefly with Jesse Jackson after his speech today.
This took place in Sproul Plaza on Tuesday, September 16, 2003.
Jesse Jackson On Whether Or Not The 9th Circuit Decision On The Recall Will Hold (Small – 3 MB)
Jesse Jackson On Whether Or Not The 9th Circuit Decision On The Recall Will Hold (Hi-res – 35 MB)
Lisa Rein: “Do you think the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Decision about the Recall election is gonna hold?”
Jesse Jackson: “It’s difficult to say, only because this Supreme Court did an extrodinary thing in 2000. They stopped the vote determining the outcome of the presidency. So if they would do it for a President, they might do it for a Governor. You just don’t know. So we must be prepared.”
“I feel that momentum is building. People are finally beginning to see the danger of this act of disenfranchisement and destabilization. Whether it’s Prop 54 or the Recall. Both are of the same ideology. They seek to disenfranchise and to destablize and people must fight back. If we fight back, we’ll win.”
