Well, I’ve had an interesting morning so far. The police knocked on my door at 2 AM to inform us that me and my husband’s cars had been vandalized with graffiti. Apparently some geniuses went through the neighborhood and spray painted a lot of cars and even some houses. My husband and I then spent an hour and half scrubbing the cars down to get the worst of the graffiti off. It’s not all gone (we’re making an insurance claim), but car no longer has a racial slur written on the side and my husband’s car no longer has a giant penis on it. So, I’m hoping your day is better than mine so far. Let’s start an open thread.
In a way, Amanpour, scheduled to leave CNN after 18 years of international coverage and take over the program in August, could be seen as the opposite of the perfect candidate. “This Week” deals mainly in domestic politics and inside-the-Beltway palaver, an area where Amanpour is widely considered to deficient. Consider: Whenever CNN has thrown one of its big election-night, convention, or presidential debate spectaculars, drafting nearly every living staff member to appear, Amanpour has had a conspicuously low profile.
And even though Amanpour has often been touted for her expertise on foreign affairs, she has vocal and passionate critics in that arena as well. Supporters of Israel have more than once charged Amanpour with bias against that country and its policies. A Web site devoted to criticism of Amanpour is titled, with less than a modicum of subtlety, “Christiane Amanpour’s Outright Bias Against Israel Must Stop,” available via Facebook.
Amanpour grew up in Great Britain and Iran. Her family fled Tehran in 1979 at the start of the Islamic revolution, when she was college age. She has steadfastly rejected claims about her objectivity, telling Leslie Stahl last year relative to her coverage of Iran: “I am not part of the current crop of opinion journalists or commentary journalists or feelings journalists. I strongly believe that I have to remain in the realm of fact.”
Shales then cites for evidence the conservative idiot site of Newsbusters. So what is Shales saying, exactly? Is he saying that because Amanpour is Iranian-American that she’s kind of suspicious? I think it’s an interesting choice myself. I think ABC may be trying an experiment to take the Sunday shows in a new direction, which is desperately needed, IMO.
Washington State’s idiot AG forgot to inform the governor that he was joining an anti-HCR lawsuit.
You can hear her here, on the Dave Ross Show from today. She is filing a brief against him. Open warfare in the State House in Olympia! I love it, except that I’d love more for McKenna to back off and stop doing this to Washington State. You can also watch Chris Gregoire’s response when she first heard about this:
I think the GOP is going to totally overreach on the HCR opposition. Right now Republicans are spending hours fighting the reconciliation bill, in effect defending the Cornhusker Kickback. Some Republicans have already started walking back the HCR repeal talk – I guess they can see the commercials about how Sen. X wants to ban you for pre-exisiting conditions.