Countdown Newsletter -- 03/28/06: White House Change-Up

[Patsy Stone]

------------------------------------------------------
Tonight on Countdown
------------------------------------------------------

White House chief of staff Andrew Card has resigned and will be replaced by budget director Joshua Bolten, President Bush announced Tuesday amid growing calls for a White House shake-up and Republican concern about Bush's tumbling poll ratings. Bush announced the changes in an nationally broadcast appearance in the Oval Office. Card came to Bush recently and suggested that he should step down from the job that he has held from the first day of Bush's presidency. Card's last day on the job will be April 14. Bush said he decided last weekend to accept Card's resignation. Bolten is widely experienced in Washington, both on Capitol Hill as well as at the White House, where he was deputy chief of staff before becoming director of the Office of Management and Budget. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12048598/

Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann broadcasts LIVE at 8 pm et, and the count is never complete without you. Join us.

We will air two large (and cocluding) segments of the Michael Schiavo interview today.

Drake University student Skyler Bartels spent part of his spring break living undercover at a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Windsor Heights. Bartels didn't last the entire week, but he did manage to stick it out for 41 consecutive hours. Shoppers and employees didn't pay much attention to him, he said, until the end of his stay. Bartels also said he is scheduled to appear tonight on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" on MSNBC. National Public Radio, Bartels added, has penciled in this afternoon for a spot on "All Things Considered," and a radio station from Ireland wants to arrange an interview. Bartels got the idea during a talk with his adviser, Carol Spaulding-Kruse, an associate professor of English. After seeing the discount chain's ads, Bartels wondered whether a person could actually live at a Wal-Mart store. http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060328/NEWS08/603280358/1001/NEWS

That's some of what we're planning for tonight's show.

Finally,
The singer who dressed as a policeman in the flamboyant late 1970s disco band Village People has been arrested after disappearing while drug and gun charges against him were pending, officials said Monday. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12043821/
"It's fun to sing it the J-A-I-L, it's fun to sing it the J-A-I-L... You can't set yourself free, you can't have a good meal, you can't do whatever you feel..."

-- Carey Fox

Countdown Home: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/

More:
Americans' optimism in the economy rebounded in March, sending a widely followed barometer of consumer sentiment to a near four-year high, a private research group said Tuesday. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12050193/

A lawyer for Osama bin Laden's former driver urged the Supreme Court on Tuesday to curb President Bush's use of wartime powers to prosecute terror suspects held at a U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12045388/

A British man accused of killing his wife and infant daughter was indicted by a grand jury Tuesday on first-degree murder charges. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12051353/

Mary Winkler, the woman charged with killing her minister husband, is "very confused and overwhelmed" by what's happening, her lawyer told NBC News on Tuesday. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12048445/

Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary under the Reagan administration and central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, has died at the age of 88. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12050783/

Israelis voted Tuesday in an election billed as a referendum on the future of the West Bank, with the leading candidate, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, promising to pull back from most of the territory and draw Israel's final borders by 2010. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12034819/

Three groups of gunmen kidnapped 24 Iraqis from businesses in Baghdad on Tuesday, while a car bomb exploded south of the capital as police exchanged fire with two suicide bombers at a police station, wounding a dozen people, officials said. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12033684/

An Afghan man who had faced the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity quickly vanished Tuesday after he was released from prison, apparently out of fear for his life with Muslim clerics still demanding his death. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12022144/

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor disappeared from his Nigerian haven, days after his hosts agreed to transfer him to a war crimes tribunal for the murder, rape and maiming of more than a half-million Africans, officials said Tuesday. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12048243/?from=ET

Hundreds of thousands of French transport workers, teachers and other employees staged a one-day national strike or marched through the streets on Tuesday to try to force the government to abandon a new youth job law. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12045529/

China's Health Ministry has explicitly banned sales of human organs in an apparent attempt to clean up the country's lucrative but laxly regulated transplant business. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12050522/