CBS Newsman Bob Schieffer At The Atlanta Press Club

Bob Schieffer was giddy as a school boy. His kind, interesting and weathered face lit up like a Christmas tree when he spoke at the September 29th Atlanta Press Club’s Newsmaker Luncheon.

In between hosting Face The Nation and moderating Presidential debates, Schieffer swung by the APC to promote his new book, Bob Schieffer’s America. If the book is half as engaging as Schieffer was for his guests at the APC luncheon, then get out there and buy it.

Schieffer first mentioned how he was talked into forgoing retirement by the suits at CBS News, ensuring that he and his fifty-plus-year career as a news reporter would be around long enough to cover the historically-rich 2008 Presidential election.

Schieffer’s raw enthusiasm for the the work he’s been doing for over fifty years straight was cold water in a desert to journos in Atlanta (or gas to a station right now I could say) – a town as beaten and bruised by changes to the journalism industry as any on the planet.

Karl Rove Does Multimedia His Way

Apparently Republicans are so offensive even to each other that they’re now having to run whining to the enemy/dreaded liberal media with their sorry tales of woe about… how the White House made ’em do it. Is anyone really all that surprised?

From CBS News, where the whole sorry story airs Sunday night February 24th  on 60 Minutes:

Rove’s attempt to smear Don Siegelman was part of a Republican campaign to ruin him that finally succeeded in imprisoning him, says the operative, Jill Simpson.

Simpson speaks to Scott Pelley in her first television interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, Feb. 24, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Simpson spoke to Pelley because, she says, Siegelman’s seven-year sentence for bribery bothers her. She recalls what Rove, then President Bush’s senior political adviser, asked her to do at a 2001 meeting in this exchange from Sunday’s report.

“Karl Rove asked you to take pictures of Siegelman?” asks Pelley.

“Yes,” replies Simpson.

“In a compromising, sexual position with one of his aides,” clarifies Pelley.

“Yes, if I could,” says Simpson.

Simpson says she found no evidence of infidelity despite months of observation.

Who knew Rove had such an interest in hanky-panky multimedia? Maybe he should have tried YouTube first, if of course that medium had been available way back in the dark ages of 2001, when most of this “surveillance” stuff allegedly took place. But no matter now, as bribery charges seem to have done the trick.

And if you wonder sometimes… could your friends, colleagues and neighbors be watching you in hopes of catching you in something compromising? Well, given this sordid tale, they sure are!