Morning News Roundup (23 Mar)

I'm running late and still in freelancer overdrive, so I'll try to make this a quickie (and hopefully will return with more substantial fare later in the day).

• If you download one large video file today, make it this segment from the Daily Show with John Stewart interviewing Russ Feingold (it's available over at Crooks and Liars in downloadable Windows Media and Quicktime formats; it's not available yet over at the Comedy Central site). With all the hand-wringing from the Left and the increasing attacks from the Right, it's amazing how common sensical Feingold's call to censure seems once you hear it straight from the man. Here's a bit on the segment from FireDogLake:
  

  He truly comes off as a man who has the confidence of knowing he did the right thing when everyone around him was doing the Bob Shrum shuffle into the center, standing up for what he believed in while others were too preoccupied with calculating their own political futures to bother.
  [...]
  The audience at the Daily Show was effusive; you could hear the the ardor he inspired. Feingold was funny without being glib and he came across as self-effacing, principled, and just awkward enough with the format to be thoroughly charming.

  I'll try to get some more transcript of it up later.
  
  
• It looks like Feingold might have a partial ally in Republican Senator Arlen Specter (maybe not for censure, but at least in continuing to probe BushCo's shady reasoning behind their illegal wiretapping program); via AP/Yahoo!:
  

  "[The Bush administration] want[s] to do just as they please, for as long as they can get away with it," Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I think what is going on now without congressional intervention or judicial intervention is just plain wrong."

• Salon's War Room points us to an interesting polling numbers discovery by Andrew Sullivan:
  

  Crunching the numbers on a recent Pew poll, Sullivan discovers that 57 percent of the people who describe themselves as "secular" say that torture is either never or rarely justified. Only 49 percent of white Protestants and only 42 percent of Roman Catholics are similarly torture-averse. "In other words," Sullivan says, "if you are an American Christian, you are more likely to support torture than if you are an atheist or agnostic."

• Carla J. Martin, a government lawyer whose misconduct threatened to derail the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, has been subpoenaed to testify at a court hearing about her conduct. Martin's actions halted testimony in Moussaoui's death penalty trial last week after she violated a court order by sharing testimony and contacting witnesses. [WaPo]
  
  
• Juan Cole has an update on the sectarian violence occurring in Iraq. The LATimes has the details on another large scale assault by insurgents against a police station.
  
  
• Some good news, though: In a lightning operation, US and British forces rescued three Western hostages held captive in Iraq for almost four months. The three aid workers from the Christian Peacemaker Teams -- Canadians Harmeet Sooden, 32, and Jim Loney, 41, and Briton Norman Kember, 74. [AFP] However, the BBC notes that at least about 43 foreigners are still being held in Iraq, and it is thought some 10 to 30 Iraqis are kidnapped every day - most of them for ransom.
  
  
• China does what the BushCo administration and its congressional minions won't: a sharp tax increase on big cars and a matching reduction for smaller models. [WaPo]
  

Alright -- off to the salt mine...