my life to help improve those who survive cancer, to help fund a cure and see an end to cancer in our lifetime. as we started going into the 2008 race, i was really optimistic about the dialogue that was takinging place and after the president was elected the spirit of bipartisanship quickly faded away and everyone retreated to their corners. okay. what do you think when you watch this many years on when you watch republicans wanting to defund the law, wanting to get rid of a law that has given people coverage, that would actually take coverage away from people, would take coverage away from you? what do you think about that? it s gotten to the point where it s something that i cannot support and will not support anybody with that position. we re talking about something that affects my life and affects a lot of the people that i love and care about. and it s not right. it s not fair and it s pure blind partisanship that is drawing this rain of thought.
they seem very difficult 0 to fake. we ve also shown them to independent experts, chemical weapons experts, who thought they were consistent with a nonconventional weapons attack. so what does this mean? the president has talked about a red line and has been careful in discussing a red line to talk about mass casualty events, to talk about systemic deployment. if we are seeing something like this, if it is confirmed, it seems to me is the most systemic mass attack, deployment of chemical weapons. what does that mean for the red line the president has noted? reporter: this would be a totally different scale of events. in the past we ve talked about chemical weapons being use d to kill one, two, five people in numerous attacks. that always struck observers as a bit strange, more of a terror tactic than a tactic of war. using a limited amount of chemical weapon to scare your enemy instead of creating mass casualties. if this, in fact, is confirmed,
0 supreme court to strike down california s ban. also, secretary of state john kerry meets with lieders of the syrian opposition as new reports reveal that the u.s. has begun trading the rebels to fight against bashar al assad s forces. but will it be enough without american weapons? and speaking of foreign diplomacy, dennis rodman becomes the new bff to kim jong-un during a trip to north korea. yes, these are the real pictures. we ll explain later in the show. first, our top story this morning comes from our nation s capital. at times it felt like a slow-moving train wreck, but time is finally up for the white house and members of congress. today, $85 billion across the board spending cuts hit federal agencies and the pentagon. two competing plans to avert the sequester failed yesterday, as expected. president obama will meet with leaders from both parties today, even though many lawmakers have already left town for the weekend. that could harm his fellow s soldie soldiers. he sai
would win iowa. and what an extraordinary night here in des moines. welcome to abc news s special coverage of the iowa caucuses which basically ended in a dead heat. iowa gop chairman matt strong making the announcement that governor mitt romney, former governor romney, won the iowa caucuses by eight votes. but the tone was a bit more subdued by the time mitt romney officially clinched the gop nomination. he goes over the top with 1,144 plus delegates he needs to get the nomination in tampa. texas did it for him. this is not a surprise. once everybody else was effectively out of the race, and frankly before everybody else was out of the race, you could do the math pretty easily. now we re in the dog days of the campaign and coincidentally or not, cable news ratings are down. fox news down nearly 250,000 viewers in primetime since january, but from a much higher base of almost two million viewers. msnbc down 130,000 in primetime and cnn has been hardest hit down 45
but my sense is that one of them involves this long general election. is the public losing interest in the way we cover the presidential campaign? the justice department is investigating national security leaks to the new york times and critics blame the obama team for spilling some of the secrets that put the administration in a favorable light. a firestorm today as republicans claim the white house has been leaking national security secrets to the press, to make president obama look good. david sanger, the author of one of those stories, will be here. plus walter cronkite was the most trusted man in america. and that s the way it is, friday, march 6th, 1981. but sometimes he did things that were rather untrustworthy. would that have gotten him fired today? we ll ask his biographer, doug brinkley. i m howard kurtz, and this is reliable sources. remember when the republican primaries were going strong and we all bounced from bachmann to trump to perry to cain an