Judy Woodruff just announced that she’ll be leaving the anchor desk at CNN’s “Inside Politics” sometime next month. She didn’t give a reason for her departure but I read elsewhere that she was in Atlanta for contract negotiations. She was vauge about her future plans but, hey, I hear CBS is looking.
A new poll shows Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s approval rating is down to 40 percent. The Governor has responded by “retiring” education secretary Richard Riordan, the second most popular Republican in the state (which ain’t saying much, believe me).
It has been a rocky few years for Dick Riordan, the liberal Republican former mayor of Los Angeles. After being term-limited out as mayor, he made two attempts to run for governor. He threw his hat in the ring in the race against Democrat Gray Davis, but Davis took political advice from former President Bill Clinton and went after Riordan with an ad blitz during the Republican primaries, thus fatally wounding the only GOP candidate who had a snowball’s chance of winning the general election. (This was the last politically astute thing Davis ever did.)
In the run up to the Recall of Gov. Davis, Riordan signalled his intention to make another run but was preempted and completely upstaged when his friend Arnold Schwarzenegger went on Jay Leno to announce that he was running. Seems Arnold hadn’t bothered to give Dick a heads up before the announcement.
After Schwarzenegger’s election, he tapped Riordan to be Education Secretary, but the only news Dick has made during his tenure was when he told a young girl that her name – Isis – meant “dirty, stupid girl.” He later tried to explain this by saying it was a joke. Republican humor must be oblique to the rest of us.
After promising not to cut funding for education in the state, Schwarzenegger immediately”borrowed” $2 billion from the education budget which he now says he has no intention of repaying. Teachers have pummeled him in a $5 million ad blitz, protesters are dogging the Governor’s personal appearances and his poll numbers down – so, obviously, Riordan had to go.
“The protesters or poll numbers have absolutely no impact on what I do because I am very focused, and I shoot for what needs to be done,” Schwarzenegger said, once again confusing lying with acting.
A member of the delegation of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who met with President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on April 25, was denied entry to the United States after the delegation member’s name appeared on a national watch list for alleged terrorists, according to reports by The Dallas Morning News and the Agence France-Presse (AFP) wire service. But the issue has received virtually no attention in print and television news coverage since AFP first reported it, and no reporters asked about it during Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s press briefing in Crawford or White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s press gaggle on Air Force One following the meeting.
This may be largely attributable to the fact that current ratings are being compared with ratings during the elections last fall but there has been a drop in the ratings for talk radio across the board in the nation’s capital:
WMAL-AM (630), home of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other mighty righty talkers, was one of the big losers in the latest survey. WMAL lost nearly 30 percent of its core audience (adults ages 25-54) from the preceding three months, when the election was the dominant story. What had been an up-and-coming station a few months ago (WMAL ranked 11th among all stations during the fall) is now a middle-of-the-pack afterthought (it tied for 16th in the latest survey)…
WMAL was at least able to record some ratings. Two of its AM talk competitors, WTNT (570) and WRC (1260), barely registered. WTNT — which features conservatives Laura Ingraham and Joe Scarborough — captured an average of just 0.5 percent of the Washington area’s 2.3 million adult (25-54) listeners; it finished in a tie for 26th. WRC, which turned to a liberal talk format in January by adding Al Franken and some of his “Air America” crew, was nowhere to be found. It captured less than 0.1 percent of the audience, too low to be counted…
[One theory for why this is happening]: Conservative talk, the most popular kind on the radio, has long been driven by a passionate “us vs. them” underdog mentality. In case you missed the last election results, conservatives now dominate national and state politics. With fewer “thems” to bash, right-wing ranters may be finding it harder to maintain their traditional put-upon posture.
We’ve heard some crazy from Marjorie Taylor Greene,
But her latest conspiracy is the craziest we’ve yet seen.
Nuttier than Jewish space lasers,
She now says Dems control the weather,
And to hurt red states, they created Hurricane Helene.
