by Glynn Wilson

The CBS News magazine show “60 Minutes’ is not backing down from running an investigative story on the political prosecution of Don Siegelman based on the testimony of Alabama lawyer Jill Simpson, according to sources who are directly involved with the show’s scheduling, The Locust Fork Journal has learned.

An earlier report from a blog reporter who sometimes publishes on the liberal online news site Raw Story said the show’s producers are “killing” the story due to pressure from the White House, the Riley administration and Senator Jeff Sessions. That set off another round of speculation on the Web and on e-mail lists.

But four sources who are much closer to the process say that report is mere speculation and is not the case.

While there has been speculation and some verifiable information that pressure has been brought to bear on the network from Washington and Montgomery, there is no reason to assume that pressure will stop the airing of a show that has been in the works for months, according to sources who know how the national news cycle works.

The show was not aired this past week because of the Super Bowl and will not air this coming week, Feb. 10, because it is a big news time in the wake of Super Duper Tuesday.

Those involved in the show say it may be aired the next week or the next, or whenever other major national and international news developments are slow enough for the Siegelman segment to be the top, leading story.

“We could run it this week,” one source said. “But it would have to take the third slot. We don’t want that.”

Ms. Simpson herself says she does not know when the story will run and is for now sticking by her verbal agreement not to talk to other TV shows on the air until “60 Minutes” has a chance to run a full story first. It is the oldest and longest running investigative TV magazine show in U.S. broadcast news history, and should still have the expertise and resources to do a better story than anyone else in the business, even with the budget cutbacks that have spread industry-wide.

The producers have spent a lot of time and money putting a major investigative package together, so they are not going to lightly abandon the story.

It is true that CBS and other networks have been pressured not to run certain stories at times in the past, but it is too early to speculate that this story will end up in that category. So according to multiple sources, there is no reason for Siegelman’s advocates to start freaking out and calling the network complaining. The show has not been “killed.” At least not yet…

The United States Senate is back in session debating and voting on amendments to the new surveillance bill and telecom immunity, live on C-SPAN II.

Legislation to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act remained stalled in the Senate yesterday, held hostage by a partisan clash over procedures for consideration of an unrelated economic stimulus package, according to Congressional Quarterly.

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., complained that Republicans were blocking his efforts to schedule votes on proposed amendments and questioned Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s commitment to the legislation, saying Republicans have declined to allow FISA to move forward.

“The Orwellian Bush administration has now slopped over into the Senate, and now the Republican leader is now becoming Orwellian himself,” Reid said. “They want to stall the FISA legislation as long as they can, and they’ve done a pretty good job, because they want this legislation to be completed at the last minute, to give the House and the Senate conferees little time to work on this.”

Ad 1: Now it appears Senate votes on the amendments may come up Thursday.

“Hopefully, Senators Clinton and Obama will stay in DC for these critical votes,” opines the the liberal Democrat blog Daily Kos. “Obama was there to vote ‘yes’ on Cardin’s sunset amendment, and Clinton missed that vote, but did vote on the economic stimulus package.”

Another day; another blog vigil to save the world as we know it…

Hillary Clinton moved ahead of Barack Obama in the race for Democratic Party delegates in the 2008 presidential race on Super Tuesday, while John McCain surged to an overwhelming lead in the Republican Party’s delegate race over Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee.

No candidate in either party came out with enough of a lead to end the party presidential competition just yet, however. So much for the national TV pundits who predicted it would all be over and we would know the identity of the party nominees by today.

Clinton now controls 732 delegates and Obama holds 639, with 2,025 delegates required to claim the nomination at this summer’s convention in Denver.

McCain has now amassed 525 delegates, Romney controls 223 and Huckabee has 145, while It takes 1,191 to win the nomination at this summer’s convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

While the eyes of the nation and the press were focued on the Super Duper primaries Tuesday, President Bush threatened to veto any surveillance bill that did not include retroactive legal immunity for the telecom giants in an attempt to derail United State Senate plans to leave the phone and Internet service providers out of the dispute about the Bush administration’s domestic spying operation aimed at U.S. citizens and residents.

The warning, issued through a letter from Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, was aimed at legislative amendments to bar retroactive immunity to phone and Internet companies such as AT and T and Verizen that have given the government access to e-mails and phone calls linked to people in this country, not just abroad.

Without the retroactive protections, the letter claims, the company’s might be less willing to help the government track down alleged terror suspects in the future as they were asked to do in the days following the 2001 attacks.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seemed puzzled by the administration’s position, since the law is set to expire in a few days.

“I’m not sure why the Administration feels the need to issue a veto threat on the foreign surveillance bill when Senate Republicans will not even let it come to the floor for debate,” Reid said in a statement. “This veto threat is part of a White House strategy to jam the bill through Congress with procedural maneuvers and political gamesmanship. We call on Republicans to allow the legislative process to work so that the Senate can pass a strong bipartisan bill.

“Democrats remain committed to giving our intelligence professionals the tools they need while protecting the privacy of law abiding Americans,” he said. “Unfortunately, Republicans seem more interesting in scoring political points than crafting bipartisan solutions that make America more secure.”