Sarah Palin Calls for Uprising Against Letterman for Joke About Her Daughter

ABC News' David Chalian reports: Gov. Sarah Palin called on the public to rise up in opposition to David Letterman's distasteful jokes about her daughter this week. In a morning television interview on NBC's “Today” show, Gov. Palin described her controversy with the late night comedian as a “sad commentary on where we are as a culture, as a society, to chuckle and laugh through comments such as he had made the other night, I think is quite unfortunate.”

READ MORE: Palin Slams Letterman Joke as 'Sexually Perverted'
WATCH:Palin Vs. Letterman

Mr. Letterman's explanation that he was referring to her 18 year old daughter, Bristol, instead of her 14 year old daughter, Willow, who accompanied her recently to New York was met with derision by Gov. Palin. She called it a “very convenient excuse” that took him a couple of days to present.

“It was a degrading comment about a young woman. I would hope that people really start rising up and deciding it's not acceptable. No wonder young girls especially have such low self esteem in America when we think it's funny for a so-called comedian to get away with being able to make such a remark as he did and to think that that's acceptable,” Palin said.

Gov. Palin was apparently pleased to see women organizations speaking out against the comments and then proceeded to read from her BlackBerry an email she received from someone she described as not a typical feminist. “Every male organization. . . should rise up and shout in defense of their daughters, their sisters, their mothers,” Palin read to NBC's Matt Lauer.

When Lauer pressed Palin on her spokeswoman's response stating “it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman,” Palin said that was not in bad taste.

“I connect the dots to a degrading statement made about young women and that does contribute to some acceptance of abuse of young women,” Palin said in defense of that statement before going on to explain that it can be interpreted in many ways.

“Take it however you want to take it. It is a comment that came from the heart that Willow, no doubt, would want to stay away after he made such a comment,” she said.

Gov. Palin also decried what she sees as a double standard being applied to her and her family both politically and in a broader social sense.

“First, remember in the campaign, Barack Obama said, 'Family's off limits. You don't talk about my family.'”

“And the candidate who must be obeyed, everybody adhered to that and they did leave his family alone. They haven't done that on the other side of the ticket and it has continued to this day so that's a political double standard.”

Gov. Palin went on to describe a second double standard as the “acceptance of a celebrity being able to get away with a disparaging comment that does erode a young girl's self esteem and does contribute to some of the problems we have in society.”

Asked if Letterman owes her an apology, Gov. Palin said no.

“He doesn't have to apologize to me. I would like to see him apologize to young women across the country for contributing to that thread that is throughout our culture that makes it sound like it's ok to talk about young girls that way.”

Geithner calls for comprehensive regulatory reform

ABC News’ Matt Jaffe & Rick Klein report:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner Tuesday will ask for new regulatory powers for the federal government to address financial institutions whose failure could threaten the stability of the nation’s financial system.

“This is an extraordinary time and the government has been forced to take extraordinary measures,” Geithner says in an excerpt of his prepared testimony for this morning’s House Financial Services Committee hearing. “We will do what is necessary to stabilize the financial system and, with the help of Congress, develop the tools that we need to make our economy more resilient and our system more just…”

“We must ensure that our country never faces this situation again. To achieve that goal, the Administration and Congress have to work together to enact comprehensive regulatory reform and eliminate gaps in supervision,” he is expected to state. “All institutions and markets that could pose systemic risk will be subject to strong oversight, including appropriate constraints on risk-taking. Regulators must apply standards, not just to protect the soundness of individual institutions, but to protect the stability of the system as a whole.”

Today’s hearing will focus on AIG, the embattled insurance giant that has received over $170 billion in government bailout funds. A “resolution authority”, the administration believes, would have enabled the government to intervene with AIG to prevent the current predicament.

The new resolution authority would give the government the ability to sell or transfer assets and components of a company. The government would have the power to renegotiate or dissolve executive compensation deals, as well as deal with risky derivatives portfolios. The goal is to make sure the country never has to confront a situation like AIG in the future.

Geithner has been vocal in recent weeks about the need for more tools to protect the nation’s economy.

“It’s a terrible, tragic thing that this country came into this crisis with such limited tools for trying to protect the economy itself from the kind of distress that’d come as the system came back down to Earth,” Geithner said Monday night at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Finance Initiative in Washington.

“Our system basically failed its most fundamental test,” he stated. “It was too fragile. It was too vulnerable to shocks. It did not adequately put in place a set of checks and balances on risk-taking that had systemic consequences. You had failures in consumer protection at the basic level cause grave systemic consequences for the system as a whole. And we have a great obligation to get this right.”

“I mean, the world is watching us,” he noted. “They’re looking at what happened in our markets. And we have got to figure out — we have got to get ourselves to the point where we put in place a stronger, more stable system that provides a better balance between efficiency and stability. We just have not gotten that balance right. And we have a great obligation as a country to move to try to restore that.”

Geithner said Monday that the government has the opportunity to turn the nation’s frustrations with the current crisis into implementing an improved regulatory framework.

“You want to take that frustration and channel it to a credible reform agenda that people can look at and say, “That has the prospect of producing a more stable system,” that preserves capacity for innovation, still does what our markets do better anywhere in the world, which is we still have the system that does the best job in the world of taking the savings and investments of people around the world and channeling them to help finance putting an idea into a growing business. We are excellent at doing that.”

“Our judgment is that that the credible solution is going to have to have a bunch of elements,” he said, previewing the government’s plans. “We’re going to have to bring a stronger form of basic oversight with better designed constraints on leverage applied to those institutions whose stability is really critical to the functioning of the system. We’re going to have to bring a better oversight framework over the markets that are so critical to how the system works.”

The financial regulatory reform framework is the latest in a series of sweeping moves made by Geithner and the Treasury Department to address the current crisis and prevent future ones. On Monday, he unveiled the administration’s plan to rid banks of the toxic assets weighing down their balance sheets, a move that sent the markets soaring by almost 500 points, the fifth biggest gain in history.

– Matt Jaffe & Rick Klein

Schwarzenegger Welcomes Stimulus, Calls Program Job Creator

ABC News’ Tahman Bradley reports:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-Calif., said Saturday he’s willing to give the $787 billion federal stimulus program a shot because his state needs the money to get people working again.

In an interview with ABC News, Schwarzenegger seemed to reject the view that the aid won’t help improve the economy, a position at odds with a few of his fellow Republican governors, who’ve staked out positions opposing the rescue money.

“And of course some people did complain that they didn’t think it was the perfect thing. But what is perfect? And I think that you can ask a thousand different people what their ideal stimulus package is and you’d get a thousand different answers,” Schwarzenegger said.

Schwarzenegger stopped short of saying that he believes the stimulus will reverse California’s fiscal woes but he did praise some of the state aid in the recently signed legislation.

“I think that there’s some good things in there. Like it helps with improving the economy, creating jobs, our education system, health care, for general fund. I think it will put a lot more people to work,” he said. “I think that we are very happy in California that we got part of the stimulus package because for us it means $80 billion in benefits.”

Schwarzenegger was in Washington this weekend for National Governors Association meetings. He skipped the California Republican Party convention for the DC meetings.

Schwarzenegger has been feeling the heat back home and not just from Democrats. The California committeeman for the Republican National Committee, Shawn Steel, said of Schwarzenegger, “He’s not comfortable being a Republican, and Republicans aren’t comfortable with him being a Republican or being governor,” per the Golden State media.

Schwarzenegger ignored ABC’s question about Steel’s remarks.

The governor will take more questions tomorrow when he talks with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week”.

Leahy Calls for Bush ‘Truth Commission’

ABC News’ Rick Klein Reports: Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy is calling for a “truth commission” to investigate alleged legal violations by the Bush administration, becoming the latest prominent voice to call for further scrutiny of decisions made by key Bush aides.

Leahy, D-Vt., used a speech at Georgetown University Monday to outline his proposal for “a reconciliation process and truth commission” that he said could be given subpoena power and the ability to grant immunity to witnesses — though the goal, he said, would not be to bring criminal charges.

“We could develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair minded, and without axes to grind. Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth,” Leahy said. “People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts.”

“Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened,” he added. “Sometimes the best way to move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we can make sure it does not happen again.”

Leahy joins House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., in calling for a wider inquiry into instances of politics driving policies under the Bush administration.

Conyers has gone even further than Leahy, calling for an “independent criminal probe into whether any laws were broken in connection” with activities including warrantless wiretapping orders, intimidation of whistle-blowers, and the firings of US attorneys.

President Obama has not signaled an inclination to follow their recommendations. Asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last month whether he would support a 9/11-style commission to investigate alleged wrongdoing under President Bush, he responded:

“Well, we have not made any final decisions but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that, moving forward, we are doing the right thing. That doesn’t mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation’s going to be to move forward.”

Politics Live: GOP Senator Calls Stimulus a ‘Dog’ of a Bill

ABC News’ David Chalian Reports: It’s not often you will find Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, parroting the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, but he did so with glee on “Politics Live” on ABC News Now Thursday where he also took a shot at his Democratic colleagues for being afraid to pass the stimulus package without Republican support.

Sen. Hatch expressed no confidence in the current bill’s ability to jolt the economy back to health.

“This bill isn’t going to do it and the House bill is even worse,” Hatch said. “Now maybe in conference because once both houses pass bills we’ll go to conference, maybe we can improve it there. But it’s a dog right now. Even the San Francisco Chronicle calls it that and that’s a liberal newspaper.”

Sen. Hatch went on to say that he believed passage of the stimulus bill was assured from the beginning. Instead, Hatch argued, Democrats have been on the hunt for additional votes because they are afraid to own this stimulus bill all on their side of the aisle.

“The fact of the matter is they’ve always had the votes to pass this bill. They’ve been afraid to do it because they know it’s a dog,” said Hatch. “They know it’s gonna cost the taxpayers and arm and a leg. It’s gonna cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for each job created and guess who’s gonna pay for it? It’s gonna be our grandchildren and our great grandchildren and people down the line who really have nothing to do with it today.”