Torture memos here, torture memos there, torture memos everywhere! On the left, they're screaming bloody-murder for public hangings of all people involved; on the right, they want Obama's head for letting out this confidential information. We're all embarrassed and horrified, but is that a reason for not talking about the fact that the United States DID torture? How do Lynndie England and her crimes at Abu Ghraib fit into this equation? Can you chastise one and not the other? And if letting out the memos is bad for morale, isn't torturing people bad for morale too? Maegan feels these the authors of these memos should be subjected to some sort of justice, and Teresa tries to remind us that if we want to do it right, we must be patient. Rome wasn't rebuilt in a day, after all.
Besides torture, wiretapping is all the talk in DC right now after CQPolitics.com broke the story about Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) being wiretapped and getting caught offering to lobby for AIPAC. How much of it is true? Could this be a tempest in a teapot? Is this just another story the media is trumpeting without much evidence? Ted admits this is a big part of the media environment now, with everybody being under a tremendous amount of pressure to break a story.
And the big news yesterday is Gavin Newsom announcing he's running for Governor of California, and did it via Twitter and Facebook! He might get new media, but he still has to get his message out there to, um, "regular folks" (aka non-twitterers). Will he make his stance on gay marriage a major part of his campaign? Of course, California is lining up a whole host of high-tech candidates for major office: Steve Westly, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, even Chris Kelly from Facebook. But to command the youth vote, you've got to do more than engage the new mediums - you've got to speak the language.
Finally, we've got a growing controversy, possibly, around Ron Howard's new film, Angels & Demons, with certain members from the Catholic Church calling it out. While this is surely going to fail in stopping the movie from becoming a massive box office success, a more interesting question is this: do boycotts even work anymore?
Listen to the show here, subscribe to the iTunes podcast, or use the Blog Talk Radio player:
Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (www.teresacentric.com), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry (www.maegancarberry.com). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com.