| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Wedding of the Decade of the Century of the Millennium | ||||
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Every late summer, public officials and news makers disappear from public life and go on vacation, making it hard for the news media to find interesting stories to cover. So how does the respected cultural commentator Jon Stewart deal with the seasonal dearth of interesting news items? Mock the cable news media’s efforts to fill 24 hours of live coverage, especially when there is nothing to report. Like the recent wedding of Chelsea Clinton in Rhinebeck, NY, or as Stewart called it, the event that “set the record for most amount of media gaining the least amount of information.”Glad someone had to guts to say what many were probably thinking.
Perhaps the best illustration of the news media’s futile attempt to impart any real information (but stubborn effort to outlast the lack of info to report) was Fox News’ Courtney Friel. Stewart cut together a series of brief reports filed from outside the event, none of which held any real news, and when cut together, yeah they seemed funny.
After showing another montage illustrating various estimates on the cost of the wedding, Stewart summed up by saying “you can criticize the media for spending more time and attention on the Chelsea Clinton’s wedding than on the Wikileaks-Afghanistan story, the 9/11 responder insurance funding vote, and how the tax cuts effect the deficit combined, but when they do combine their forces their ability to get facts is awesome. Honestly where are the numbers coming from really?”
Imagine spending $250,000 on flowers. Or $20,000 on a cake. How does $15,000 to $20,000 for toilets sound?
Sounds like the first Wedding of the Century.
Wedding industry experts say that when Chelsea Clinton gets married Saturday at a private estate in upstate New York, the tab could hit $2 million, $3 million or more — a canape or two above the average $24,000 that most American newlyweds will shell out this year.
Most weddings host about 150 guests; the Clinton-Mezvinsky nuptials are expected to have 400 to 500.
Details have been notoriously scarce, but Sally Kilbridge, deputy editor of Brides, said industry insiders have gathered enough intelligence to sketch out roughly what sort of shindig the daughter of President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will put on when she marries her longtime boyfriend, investment banker Marc Mezvinsky.
Some estimates put the cost at close to $5 million, but Kilbridge said Chelsea Clinton won't let it get too extreme.
Hillary Clinton released her tax returns for the years 2000 to 2006 late Friday afternoon, ending weeks of speculation over her delay in making them public.“The Clintons have now made public thirty years of tax returns, a record matched by few people in public service,” spokesman Jay Carson said in a statement. “None of Hillary Clinton's presidential opponents have revealed anything close to this amount of personal financial information.”
The campaign said the records showed Bill and Hillary Clinton had paid more than $33.7 million in federal taxes on a joint income of $109 million and donated $10.2 million to charities over the past eight years.
The New York senator had initially said that she would not release them unless she was the Democratic nominee. But at a debate shortly before the March 4 primaries, she said she would consider releasing them "even earlier," though she did not name a precise date.
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