American Morning
Stimulating the stimulus
Start spending! That's expected to be the message today when President Obama brings his cabinet together. After all that talk of "shovel ready" projects, the Congressional Budget Office says only about 3% of the $787 billion recovery plan has been spent so far. CNN's Jim Acosta reports.
S.C. governor's anti-stimulus stance
[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/08/sanford.mark.cnn.art.jpg caption="Gov. Mark Sanford talks to CNN's Kiran Chetry about his resistance to federal stimulus money."]
South Carolina stands to collect $2.8 billion in federal stimulus money, but the state's governor doesn't want all of it. In fact, Mark Sanford rejected $700 million. A lot of it was earmarked to go towards education and public works projects. Later today he will reluctantly sign the request for that money.
His state’s supreme court ruled Thursday he has to take the federal money. Governor Sanford spoke to Kiran Chetry on CNN’s “American Morning” Monday.
Kiran Chetry: Your state has an unemployment rate right now of 11.5%, the third-highest in the country. Also, according to some of the statistics, you have 15% of the people in South Carolina living in poverty, which is the 12th highest rate in the country. Doesn't your state desperately need all the money it can get?
Mark Sanford: Yes, but the question is in what form. I think when you look at the money that was going to come, in this case from the federal government, it came with very serious strings attached. In this case, it would have put us about a billion dollars in the hole 24 months from now. It would have prevented us making changes to the way our state government operates so we would have been on a firmer financial ground going forward. And it wouldn't have allowed us to shore up our finances in what could be a prolonged financial storm. So it came with very serious strings attached.
Chetry: You wanted to use some of that money to pay down the debt and they were not allowing you to do that?
Sanford: Yeah. We said, look, we're fourth in the nation on a per capita basis in our indebtedness. It seemed to us with this kind of windfall, and this money represents the lottery of all lottery wins for the state governments across the country, that it would be prudent to set some money aside. If a family won the lottery they wouldn't just go out and spend it all, they’d put some money aside for a rainy day, for paying down the credit card balance or paying off the mortgage and I don't know why state governments should be exempt from that same principle.
Was Air France jet flying the wrong speed?
[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/08/cox.john.cnn.art.jpg caption="CNN talks with an Airbus expert about what might have caused last week's Air France crash."]
Sixteen bodies have now been recovered from the wreckage of Air France Flight 447, but the cause of last week's crash is still a mystery. New reports say at least a dozen other flights traveling in the same area at around the same time had no problems with weather conditions.
John Cox is president and CEO of Safety Operating Systems. He’s flown Airbus jetliners and is familiar with their controls and systems. He spoke to John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Monday.
John Roberts: What do you make of this idea that some 12 other planes flew through that area? Air France had four flights, a couple from Sao Paulo, and others went through that area of thunderstorms without any problems.
John Cox: Well I think it says the weather itself is probably not the single cause for the accident. This accident, just like all I've been associated with, will end up being a series of events. We'll end up learning that series one piece at a time to understand what happened.
Roberts: Air France sent out some literature over the weekend regarding one of the air speed indicator sensors, the Pitot tube, and there might be some problem with that. With your knowledge of Airbus…What do you know about problems with anomalous speed readings?
Cox: The fleet has shown a little bit of this issue to come up before. I'm aware of three or four previous cases in fleet history but it's typically been short duration. What we learned by the information that the airplane up-linked to the Air France maintenance facility, is they had a lot of very confusing signals that the pilots would have been confronted with. And exactly what caused that, it could possibly be Pitot tubes or air speed indications that would be causal in some way but why the crew was not able to satisfactorily determine which of the air speed indicators was bad, there's a procedure for it. Where that procedure either wasn't acted on properly or failed, that's going to be something the investigators are really going to have to look into carefully.
Advertising to 'Vampires'
[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/03/costello.trublood.getty.art.jpg caption=""]
From CNN's Carol Costello and Bob Ruff
There’s nothing new about Dracula.
The notion of vampires was around even well before Bram Stoker’s now century-old novel about Count Dracula. But Stoker’s 1897 book gets credit for popularizing and stoking our fascination with things “vampire.”
So did Bela Lugosi, whose frightening 1931 portrayal of the Count marked Hollywood’s first take on the the now famous vampire from the Transylvania-Moldavia part of eastern Europe.
There have been countless vampire movies since Lugosi’s, including the star studded “Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles” headed by Tom Cruise.
But neither Dracula, Bela Lugosi, or even Tom Cruise could have imagined how HBO is promoting its hit new series on vampires, “True Blood.” (CNN and HBO share the parent company Time Warner)
So, what’s HBO up to?
They’re advertising for sale bottles of a synthetic blood called “Tru Blood”. Well, not exactly. The ads actually are fake. But if you go to their Web site it sure looks like you can order up a bottle or two. Most people get the joke—it’s all a way to get people to watch the series—but some bloggers wondered.
“Energyfiend” blogged that “...I looked all OVER the place. I thought it was like a juice or energy drink...”
And “Anemic Stitch" writes: “(It’s) very disappointing to learn that this was all just a sick joke....”
Ted Danson: Cheer for the world's oceans
Editor's note: Ted Danson is an Emmy Award-winning actor, a founding board member of Oceana, the world's largest international organization dedicated solely to ocean conservation, and narrator of a new film, "End of the Line." For more information about Oceana, read here.
[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/08/art.ted.danson.oceana.jpg caption= "Ted Danson says a 'closed' sign on a beach led him on a 20-year quest to save the world's oceans."]
By Ted Danson
Special to CNN
(CNN) - Today, Monday, June 8, we recognize the first U.N.-sanctioned World Oceans Day. The event comes after years of pressure from conservation groups and thousands of activists who clamored for everyone to know and understand what's happening in our oceans.
I became an ocean activist in 1987. It was the fifth year of "Cheers" and my family moved into a neighborhood that was on the water, in Santa Monica, California. One day I took my daughters to the beach to go swimming, but it was "closed" and I couldn't answer my daughter's question why.
That's really how it started. That and "Cheers" was paying me a lot of money and I felt I had better be responsible with it. So, I started to get involved.
It turned out in our new neighborhood there was a fight to keep Occidental Petroleum from drilling 60 oil wells on Will Rogers State Beach in Los Angeles. They wanted to slant drill into the Santa Monica Bay. The fight was led by a man named Robert Sulnick and we became great friends and found a way to beat them.
We enjoyed ourselves so much that we wanted to continue this work. So Robert Sulnick and I, full of passion and naiveté, started American Oceans Campaign, which ultimately became a part of Oceana. And, here I am, still at it, 20 years later - because our oceans are in trouble.
Watch: Ted Danson speaks to John Roberts on American Morning
What’s on Tap – Monday June, 8th, 2009
Here are the big stories on the agenda today:
- First breaking news... American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee convicted of quote "grave crimes" and sentenced to 12 years hard labor in North Korea. Washington is demanding North Korea release both women. The State Department says it is deeply concerned and is working right now to secure their release. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson knows a lot about negotiating the release of detained Americans in North Korea. He's done it before – and he may be called on to do it again. He’ll join us live to discuss how this situation needs to be handled moving forward.
- New developments in the crash of Air France Flight 447. The Brazilian Air Force says it's spotted more bodies floating in the ocean. Seventeen were recovered over the weekend. Investigators – now focusing on the jet's air speed sensors – as they try to find out what brought down the plane.
- Gas prices – you feelin’ it? They’re a hot topic on the AMFIX hotline. Will the pumps have to hit four bucks again before the government does something about them?
- “End of the Line.” Actor Ted Danson narrated the new documentary, which focuses on the over-fishing of the world's waters. Danson also testified before a congressional committee in February about offshore drilling. He’ll join us on this “World Oceans Day.”
About this Show
Welcome to the American Morning blog where you can get daily news updates from American Morning's reporters and producers. Join us for "the most news in the morning," weekdays from 6-9 a.m. ET, only on CNN.
On Twitter
