October 12th, 2008
Welcome to the new Sunday evening edition of the Timothy Jordan Show News. We’re really excited about this change, but it comes a little too late from the perspective of the News staff.
This is a new place in the news cycle for us, a place with all kinds of elbow room.
Over the last seven years we’ve gotten used to waiting until the last second before pushing our final copy out to the studio. Sometimes things happen at 5pm on a Friday afternoon.
Our favorite things always came out of the White House. Yes, we have looked forward to those end-of-the-workday announcements by the Bush Administration. You see, they never release any of the good stuff Tuesday morning.
Tuesday morning is the time for fluffy little press conferences to talk about the great job that they’re doing. But Friday afternoon? That’s when they do something that they hope will be overlooked. Things like embarrassing FBI Inspector General reports that they’d rather go uncovered by the East-coast based national media outlets.
Not uncovered by us. We looked forward to that Friday afternoon scramble, sorting through a hundred pages of bureaucratic drivel for that one buried gem, the little glimmering line that illuminated the real agenda. Hell, now we’ve got the whole weekend. This is luxury.
Which of course meant that nothing happened. One Presidential press conference early Friday morning to talk about how everything in the economy was really bad, everyone’s anxious, but Bush and his team have come up with a plan. That’s it.
And of course this failure of a President is nearly out office. The election is less than a month away. It’s not like he can screw anything up any worse than he has. Well, there’s one way. He could give an afternoon press conference next week to announce that the missiles are on the way. Sorry folks, it’s the end of the world.
Yeah, that would be worse than he’s leaving us, but not by all that much.
And on that cheerful note, it’s time for your Timothy Jordan Show News, now at our new time, Sunday evening on the 12th of October, Ought-Eight.
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It was a week full of surprises that shouldn’t have been surprises.
It turns out that Sarah Palin, a small-minded small town mayor suddenly elevated to the national stage, acted in her current job, Governor of Alaska, like a small-minded small town mayor.
The official investigation by Alaska’s Legislative Council was released Friday morning. The committee, Republican-lead, concluded that Governor Palin violated the state’s Executive Branch Ethics Act by trying to use the powers of her office to get her former brother in-law fired from his job as a state trooper.
The committee’s report lays out how Palin and her husband spent several years pursuing a vendetta against Mike Wooten, a state trooper formerly married to Governor Palin’s sister. They had been working to get him fired since his divorce from her sister in October of 2005.
According to the report, their efforts continued up until January of 2007, when an administrative investigation into Wooten’s conduct as an officer concluded that he’d done nothing to merit being fired. He was given a few days leave and sent back to work.
The Palins were incensed. Their efforts to get Mr. Wooten fired came to nothing, so she fired his boss, the Commissioner of the Department for Public Safety, Walter Monegan. While the report does conclude that she abused her power in pursuit of seeing Trooper Wooten fired, they didn’t support a wrongful termination claim by Mr. Monegan.
• Palin Conduct Report by the Alaskan Legislative Council PDF
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And in other news of surprises that shouldn’t have been surprises, the government has once again been caught secretly wiretapping American citizens.
Two former NSA analysts who contributed to a new book by NSA expert, James Bamford, have gone public with allegations that the private conversations of soldiers, doctors, and private aid workers are being recorded and transcribed by the National Security Agency.
This is being done without any legal oversight, authorized entirely by the White House. One of the whistleblowers, Adrienne Kinne, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now about four months ago that she knew of two cases where reports were passed directly from the NSA analysts to the White House. I’m not sure how we missed that revelation on this show, but we did.
Unfortunately this is just another example of the Bush Administration running fast and loose with the Constitution, and our Congress failing to do its job. We’ve had a Democratic leadership in Congress since the 2006 election, a Congress with the power to demand answers about wiretapping abuses by the Administration, a power that they have sadly failed to use.
• New eavesdropping allegations, via Glenn Greenwald at Salon
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We have a moment for excellence.
It came this week in the form of a response to Senator McCain.
During last week’s debate Senator McCain complained about an earmark made by Senator Obama, an earmark to provide an overhead projector for a planetarium in Chicago.
It was a little upsetting for the planetarium’s directors to hear themselves mentioned by the Senator as if it was a bad thing to spend money on their planetarium. What McCain described as an overhead projector turns out to be a replacement for the Planetarium’s 40 year-old main star projector.
And we can add a secondary error in fact-checking to the Republican candidate, because according to the Adler’s staff the earmark in question was never actually funded. They’re still looking for the money to buy a new projector.
• Response to Sen. McCain’s debate comments, Adler Planetarium PDF