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Precious Blood; Autism's Voice

Aired May 20, 2005 - 13:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


BETTY NGUYEN, CNN ANCHOR: Stories now in the news. It is no longer a hurricane, but Tropical Storm Adrian is doing quite a storm on El Salvador. The storm barrelled ashore this morning, dumping heavy rain and forcing thousands of people to head inland. Forecasters say Adrian could dissipate later today.
The test could come Tuesday as senators head toward a potential showdown over President Bush's judicial nominees. Republicans are expected to announce today that the Senate will hold a test vote on Judge Priscilla Owen that will take place on Tuesday.

Now, if Democrats continue to stall, Majority Leader Senator Bill Frist has threatened a move to do away with the filibusters.

And parents will soon have a new tool to protect their children from sex offenders. The Justice Department is putting together a single Web site that will allow people to search for convicted sex offenders nationwide. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had this to say about this new registry. He made these comments just moments ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALBERTO GONZALES, ATTY. GEN.: Names like Jessica Lunsford and Megan Kanka highlight the importance of this new technology. Their smiles wiped away forever by sex offenders are a constant reminder that we must keep parents and communities informed and engaged.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NGUYEN: Participation by state will be voluntary. The site is planned to be up and running in July.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: In Iraq today, large, angry protests bringing up in three southern cities, mostly by followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada Al Sadr. They're apparently responding to the reported exclusion of members of Al Sadr's militia from local police forces, and a call from Al Sadr himself to act out against the U.S. and Israel.

In the largely Shiite cities of Kufa (ph) and Najjaf, demonstrators painted U.S. and Israeli flags on the ground and danced on them before and after midday prayers. And in central Baghdad today, a homemade bomb went off on a roadside as a U.S. Army convoy passed. A truck was destroyed. No word yet on casualties there.

NGUYEN: The near daily insurgent attacks in Iraq -- the guns, the bombs, the rockets -- are not only frustrating those trying to push the country forward, but taking a staggering toll on hospitals' ability to provide fundamental care.

Ryan Chilcote now with just how high the value is on the basic stuff of life.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): These men are lending a helping hand to a growing number of their fellow Iraqis. At the Baghdad blood bank, the ebb and flow of violence is measured in pints of blood. The explosion of car bombings is bleeding the banks' reserves dry. Violence accounts for 60 percent of demand.

Under Saddam, the bank got by on 125 donors a day.

(on camera): The blood bank now processes 500 donors a day. Still, the doctors say that's only half the number of donors they need. Blood in Iraq is in demand like never before.

(voice-over): Hospitals will provide you with a blood transfusion, but only if you have a life-threatening emergency, and that's if they have the blood at all. Short of that, you need to either provide your own blood or have someone, like a relative, provide it for you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is giving, because his uncle needed blood, because he infected by terrorists and he has a fracture in his leg, and his arm and his shoulder.

CHILCOTE: Baghdad's young and old crowd the lobby to meet the need or look for others who can. If you don't have a donor with the right blood type, the blood bank allows you to trade, but that means waiting. It's the luck of the draw here. Mohamed Khalifia is AB positive, one of the rarest blood types. He's getting anxious.

MOHAMED KHALIFIA, PATIENT (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): I came looking for a bottle of blood, and I haven't found anyone to donate. I was shot in the leg. Tomorrow I'm going to have an operation on it. I've got my container with me for when I find it. I prayed maybe somebody would help me.

CHILCOTE: He's not the only one with a cooler. People wait outside to help, but only for a price. These men will sell you half a pint of their blood from anywhere from $20 to $35, depending on the blood type. It's against the rules, yet tolerated.

But not everyone outside is as cold-blooded as the merchants. Haydar Jaffar is a taxi driver.

HAYDAR JAFFAR, TAXI DRIVER (through translator): I'm here to give blood today. One of my passengers came here to get blood for his daughter. I told him I'd do it for free. He just had to pay me the taxi fare. I told him, we're all wounded in today's Iraq.

CHILCOTE: Some of the hardest hit by the shortage of blood are those like 6-year-old Salam (ph), who suffers from leukemia. He and his father spend much of their time visiting the blood bank. But there is hope. They found a donor today.

Ryan Chilcote, CNN, Baghdad.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

NGUYEN: Uncle Sam wants you, just not today. U.S. Army recruiters, all 7,500 of them, are not seeking young recruits today. They're instead taking a day of training, heavy emphasis on ethics procedures and the challenge of making the profession of soldiering attractive in a time of war. The military recruiting field is nursing a black eye after some recent reports showing recruiters bending rules just to meet quotas. Pentagon officials are speaking to the media about this right now. You can see a live picture of it. We will bring you any news from that briefing if it arises.

O'BRIEN: There's a documentary running this weekend on CNN that you won't want to miss. It's a look at autism, an often misunderstood and mislabeled disorder. It is a profoundly personal story, not an hour filled with doctors and clinical analysis. It is simply a look at the world through the eyes of one woman with autism.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: My name is Sue Rubin. I'm 26 years old. I've written these thoughts about my life because I don't really talk. This is not my voice, but these are my words.

Good girl. That's good.

I have autism, and until the age of 13, everyone assumed I was also retarded. Now I live on my own with assistance from others.

All right.

All right.

OK.

Thank you.

I decided to make this film...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Autism.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... to bring people into my world of autism.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Autism is a world.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Every year she got older, and her mental age stayed the same, which was at about two and a half. And so by the time she was 13, she still had a mental age of about two and a half. So, that's what we thought, we believed that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I certainly understand why I was assumed to be retarded. All of my very awkward movements and all my nonsense sounds made me appear retarded. Perhaps I was. Voices floated over me. I heard sounds, but not words. It wasn't until I had a communication system that I was able to make sense out of the sounds.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: Wow. I'm going to watch that one. "AUTISM IS A WORLD nominated for an Academy Award, by the way. You can see it this Sunday, right here on CNN, 8:00 p.m. Eastern, 5:00 Pacific.

NGUYEN: Well, the controversy over President Bush giving a commencement address at a Christian college. Coming up, why some students are so against the president, and what the Iraq war has to do with the battle.

And later, a little league pitcher's amazing perfect game.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

NGUYEN: President Bush on what you might think would be a friendly territory tomorrow, speaking to grads of a Christian school in Michigan. But it won't be all smiles and open arms at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A sizable groups of students and faculty is taking the president to task for what they call his unjust approach to many issues of the day.

So let's get right to it with Pam Haralakova and Matt Ackerman, both seniors at Calvin College, both graduating tomorrow and both with a message for their school's guest of honor. Pam and Matt, we want to welcome you to the show. Thanks for being with us today.

PAM HARALAKOVA, CALVIN COLLEGE SENIOR: Thank you.

MATT ACKERMAN, CALVIN COLLEGE SENIOR: Thank you.

NGUYEN: Matt, let me start with you. How do you feel about the president coming to speak at the college tomorrow?

ACKERMAN: Well, it's a great honor to have the president come to Calvin, but it's also a great opportunity for us as a Calvin community to be able to express what we feel about national and international issues. We rarely have an opportunity to speak with the most powerful people in the world, and we need to take this opportunity to express what we think.

NGUYEN: So are you more concerned about what you can convey to the president or what he could convey politically to the students there?

ACKERMAN: Well, we would hope that this commencement ceremony remains focused on the graduates and the celebratory event. We wouldn't want it to become a political event. Yet, we would like to be able to have some dialogue with the president, to be able to discuss some of these issues that we are deeply concerned about. Calvin is a place where we're taught to engage with issues with our Christian perspective, from a wide variety of perspectives, politically and economically. So we'd like to be able to have a dialogue with the president about those issues.

NGUYEN: What do you want to talk about in that dialogue, Pam?

HARALAKOVA: Well, I believe that the president is a world class leader. I respect him and I support him and I'm very excited to have him as part of our commencement ceremony.

NGUYEN: So you have quite a story. Your family basically sold everything they had in Bulgaria to move to the U.S. for the right to religious freedom. So the fact that this president is coming to your school is something you are in support of?

HARALAKOVA: Definitely.

NGUYEN: All right, Matt, but you kind of have a problem with that and I want to talk more about those issues, because you say you want to have a dialogue with the president. What is it that you want to tell him?

ACKERMAN: One of the big messages that we would like to send as a Calvin community -- and this reaches across the political perspective at Calvin -- is that people of Christian faith can have disagreements on political issues, that both conservatives and liberals can come from a Christian perspective and come to different conclusions about where they land politically and still be members of the Christian faith and still be brothers and sisters in Christ.

In particular, there's some issues that are close to my heart that I'm passionate about, things like global warming. Things like sending more aid to Darfur. Things like the economic situation in the United States that I think favors the rich and oppresses the poor. However, each student has their own particular issues that they would like to bring to the forefront, of course.

NGUYEN: Well, in speaking of those issues, some 800 students, faculty and alums have taken out a full page ad in the "Grand Rapids Press," a page that will be there today, another one tomorrow. Let's read the one that appears today. It says, "Your deeds, Mr. President -- neglecting the needy to coddle the rich, desecrating the environment and misleading the country into war -- do not exemplify the faith we live by. We urge you not to use Calvin College as a platform to advance policies that violate the school's religious principles." Now are those some of the issues that you want to put out there? Is that the message you want sent to the president?

ACKERMAN: Yes. I think that what we'd like to say to the president is that we have issues that we feel are very important. As a Christian community, we would like to present them to the president as a Christian leader to take action on some of these issues.

NGUYEN: And, Pam, has this issue divided many on campus? Because it seems like there are quite a few there that aren't really in support of the president coming to speak tomorrow.

HARALAKOVA: You know, I don't think it has divided the students. I -- if anything, I think that it has encouraged some very positive discussions, which is something Calvin is very much in support of.

NGUYEN: But by the president being there, does it make the school in any way seem affiliated with the Christian right?

HARALAKOVA: Well...

ACKERMAN: I think that's one of the things that the Calvin community is afraid of, or members of the Calvin community. We want to be seen as a place where people from different political perspectives can feel welcome and we don't want to be seen as particularly affiliated to one side of the political spectrum just because we are a Christian college.

HARALAKOVA: And we're pretty sure that the president would address the student body and would be -- his commencement speech would be very much focused on the community, as well.

NGUYEN: All right. We'll be looking forward to that speech tomorrow. Matt Ackerman and Pam Haralakova, graduating on Saturday, congratulations to you both. Thanks for being with us today.

HARALAKOVA: Thank you.

ACKERMAN: Thank you very much.

NGUYEN: Miles?

O'BRIEN: They were a power couple on a mission from God. As part of CNN's anniversary series "Then and Now," we take a look back at Jim and Tammy Bakker and where they are today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): In the early 1980s, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker became pop icons as leaders of the hugely successful PTL Club TV ministries. The couple called their riches a blessing from God. People soon discovered their extravagant lifestyle was financed from the almighty contributions of the ministry's faithful.

Soon their tears of joy became tears of remorse. In 1987 Bakker 'fessed up to an adulterous relationship with church secretary Jessica Hahn and later spent four years in jail for fraud.

Tammy Faye divorced her husband while he was in jail and married his business partner, Roe Messner. In March of 2004 she announced on LARRY KING LIVE she had inoperable lung cancer.

TAMMY FAYE MESSNER, TELEVANGELIST: It was lung cancer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Eight months later she appeared again with an update on her condition.

MESSNER: Every bit of the cancer is gone.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jim Bakker also remarried and is now back on TV, this time preaching from Branson, Missouri. JIM BAKKER, TELEVANGELIST: It's so good to get together with God's people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jim and Lori Bakker are in the process of adopting five children between the ages of 9 and 15. They've had legal custody of them for four years. One big happy family, albeit a more modest one.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: All right. It's the talk of the sports world this week. Dodger baseball and a rarity, the perfect game. Every batter who faced this pitcher sat right down. She's only in sixth grade. Eleven-year-old Katie Brownell. She's the only girl in the Oakfield, Alabama New York Little League. Last Saturday she mowed down all 18 batters of the opposing Yankees. Good for her. A perfect game. This is Katie's third season in hardball. And if you think she's all arm, get this, she's hitting .714.

NGUYEN: Wow.

O'BRIEN: Truly in a league of her own.

NGUYEN: That's some girl power right there.

O'BRIEN: I should say so.

NGUYEN: The might want to change the rules for Major League Baseball.

O'BRIEN: Yes, sign her up.

(STOCK MARKET REPORT)

NGUYEN: Coming up in our second hour of LIVE FROM, first lady Laura Bush is in the Middle East. White House reporter Suzanne Malveaux talks one on one with Mrs. Bush about what she hopes to accomplish.

LIVE FROM's hour of power begins after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com


Aired May 20, 2005 - 13:30   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BETTY NGUYEN, CNN ANCHOR: Stories now in the news. It is no longer a hurricane, but Tropical Storm Adrian is doing quite a storm on El Salvador. The storm barrelled ashore this morning, dumping heavy rain and forcing thousands of people to head inland. Forecasters say Adrian could dissipate later today.
The test could come Tuesday as senators head toward a potential showdown over President Bush's judicial nominees. Republicans are expected to announce today that the Senate will hold a test vote on Judge Priscilla Owen that will take place on Tuesday.

Now, if Democrats continue to stall, Majority Leader Senator Bill Frist has threatened a move to do away with the filibusters.

And parents will soon have a new tool to protect their children from sex offenders. The Justice Department is putting together a single Web site that will allow people to search for convicted sex offenders nationwide. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had this to say about this new registry. He made these comments just moments ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALBERTO GONZALES, ATTY. GEN.: Names like Jessica Lunsford and Megan Kanka highlight the importance of this new technology. Their smiles wiped away forever by sex offenders are a constant reminder that we must keep parents and communities informed and engaged.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NGUYEN: Participation by state will be voluntary. The site is planned to be up and running in July.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: In Iraq today, large, angry protests bringing up in three southern cities, mostly by followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada Al Sadr. They're apparently responding to the reported exclusion of members of Al Sadr's militia from local police forces, and a call from Al Sadr himself to act out against the U.S. and Israel.

In the largely Shiite cities of Kufa (ph) and Najjaf, demonstrators painted U.S. and Israeli flags on the ground and danced on them before and after midday prayers. And in central Baghdad today, a homemade bomb went off on a roadside as a U.S. Army convoy passed. A truck was destroyed. No word yet on casualties there.

NGUYEN: The near daily insurgent attacks in Iraq -- the guns, the bombs, the rockets -- are not only frustrating those trying to push the country forward, but taking a staggering toll on hospitals' ability to provide fundamental care.

Ryan Chilcote now with just how high the value is on the basic stuff of life.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): These men are lending a helping hand to a growing number of their fellow Iraqis. At the Baghdad blood bank, the ebb and flow of violence is measured in pints of blood. The explosion of car bombings is bleeding the banks' reserves dry. Violence accounts for 60 percent of demand.

Under Saddam, the bank got by on 125 donors a day.

(on camera): The blood bank now processes 500 donors a day. Still, the doctors say that's only half the number of donors they need. Blood in Iraq is in demand like never before.

(voice-over): Hospitals will provide you with a blood transfusion, but only if you have a life-threatening emergency, and that's if they have the blood at all. Short of that, you need to either provide your own blood or have someone, like a relative, provide it for you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is giving, because his uncle needed blood, because he infected by terrorists and he has a fracture in his leg, and his arm and his shoulder.

CHILCOTE: Baghdad's young and old crowd the lobby to meet the need or look for others who can. If you don't have a donor with the right blood type, the blood bank allows you to trade, but that means waiting. It's the luck of the draw here. Mohamed Khalifia is AB positive, one of the rarest blood types. He's getting anxious.

MOHAMED KHALIFIA, PATIENT (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): I came looking for a bottle of blood, and I haven't found anyone to donate. I was shot in the leg. Tomorrow I'm going to have an operation on it. I've got my container with me for when I find it. I prayed maybe somebody would help me.

CHILCOTE: He's not the only one with a cooler. People wait outside to help, but only for a price. These men will sell you half a pint of their blood from anywhere from $20 to $35, depending on the blood type. It's against the rules, yet tolerated.

But not everyone outside is as cold-blooded as the merchants. Haydar Jaffar is a taxi driver.

HAYDAR JAFFAR, TAXI DRIVER (through translator): I'm here to give blood today. One of my passengers came here to get blood for his daughter. I told him I'd do it for free. He just had to pay me the taxi fare. I told him, we're all wounded in today's Iraq.

CHILCOTE: Some of the hardest hit by the shortage of blood are those like 6-year-old Salam (ph), who suffers from leukemia. He and his father spend much of their time visiting the blood bank. But there is hope. They found a donor today.

Ryan Chilcote, CNN, Baghdad.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

NGUYEN: Uncle Sam wants you, just not today. U.S. Army recruiters, all 7,500 of them, are not seeking young recruits today. They're instead taking a day of training, heavy emphasis on ethics procedures and the challenge of making the profession of soldiering attractive in a time of war. The military recruiting field is nursing a black eye after some recent reports showing recruiters bending rules just to meet quotas. Pentagon officials are speaking to the media about this right now. You can see a live picture of it. We will bring you any news from that briefing if it arises.

O'BRIEN: There's a documentary running this weekend on CNN that you won't want to miss. It's a look at autism, an often misunderstood and mislabeled disorder. It is a profoundly personal story, not an hour filled with doctors and clinical analysis. It is simply a look at the world through the eyes of one woman with autism.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: My name is Sue Rubin. I'm 26 years old. I've written these thoughts about my life because I don't really talk. This is not my voice, but these are my words.

Good girl. That's good.

I have autism, and until the age of 13, everyone assumed I was also retarded. Now I live on my own with assistance from others.

All right.

All right.

OK.

Thank you.

I decided to make this film...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Autism.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... to bring people into my world of autism.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Autism is a world.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Every year she got older, and her mental age stayed the same, which was at about two and a half. And so by the time she was 13, she still had a mental age of about two and a half. So, that's what we thought, we believed that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I certainly understand why I was assumed to be retarded. All of my very awkward movements and all my nonsense sounds made me appear retarded. Perhaps I was. Voices floated over me. I heard sounds, but not words. It wasn't until I had a communication system that I was able to make sense out of the sounds.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: Wow. I'm going to watch that one. "AUTISM IS A WORLD nominated for an Academy Award, by the way. You can see it this Sunday, right here on CNN, 8:00 p.m. Eastern, 5:00 Pacific.

NGUYEN: Well, the controversy over President Bush giving a commencement address at a Christian college. Coming up, why some students are so against the president, and what the Iraq war has to do with the battle.

And later, a little league pitcher's amazing perfect game.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

NGUYEN: President Bush on what you might think would be a friendly territory tomorrow, speaking to grads of a Christian school in Michigan. But it won't be all smiles and open arms at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A sizable groups of students and faculty is taking the president to task for what they call his unjust approach to many issues of the day.

So let's get right to it with Pam Haralakova and Matt Ackerman, both seniors at Calvin College, both graduating tomorrow and both with a message for their school's guest of honor. Pam and Matt, we want to welcome you to the show. Thanks for being with us today.

PAM HARALAKOVA, CALVIN COLLEGE SENIOR: Thank you.

MATT ACKERMAN, CALVIN COLLEGE SENIOR: Thank you.

NGUYEN: Matt, let me start with you. How do you feel about the president coming to speak at the college tomorrow?

ACKERMAN: Well, it's a great honor to have the president come to Calvin, but it's also a great opportunity for us as a Calvin community to be able to express what we feel about national and international issues. We rarely have an opportunity to speak with the most powerful people in the world, and we need to take this opportunity to express what we think.

NGUYEN: So are you more concerned about what you can convey to the president or what he could convey politically to the students there?

ACKERMAN: Well, we would hope that this commencement ceremony remains focused on the graduates and the celebratory event. We wouldn't want it to become a political event. Yet, we would like to be able to have some dialogue with the president, to be able to discuss some of these issues that we are deeply concerned about. Calvin is a place where we're taught to engage with issues with our Christian perspective, from a wide variety of perspectives, politically and economically. So we'd like to be able to have a dialogue with the president about those issues.

NGUYEN: What do you want to talk about in that dialogue, Pam?

HARALAKOVA: Well, I believe that the president is a world class leader. I respect him and I support him and I'm very excited to have him as part of our commencement ceremony.

NGUYEN: So you have quite a story. Your family basically sold everything they had in Bulgaria to move to the U.S. for the right to religious freedom. So the fact that this president is coming to your school is something you are in support of?

HARALAKOVA: Definitely.

NGUYEN: All right, Matt, but you kind of have a problem with that and I want to talk more about those issues, because you say you want to have a dialogue with the president. What is it that you want to tell him?

ACKERMAN: One of the big messages that we would like to send as a Calvin community -- and this reaches across the political perspective at Calvin -- is that people of Christian faith can have disagreements on political issues, that both conservatives and liberals can come from a Christian perspective and come to different conclusions about where they land politically and still be members of the Christian faith and still be brothers and sisters in Christ.

In particular, there's some issues that are close to my heart that I'm passionate about, things like global warming. Things like sending more aid to Darfur. Things like the economic situation in the United States that I think favors the rich and oppresses the poor. However, each student has their own particular issues that they would like to bring to the forefront, of course.

NGUYEN: Well, in speaking of those issues, some 800 students, faculty and alums have taken out a full page ad in the "Grand Rapids Press," a page that will be there today, another one tomorrow. Let's read the one that appears today. It says, "Your deeds, Mr. President -- neglecting the needy to coddle the rich, desecrating the environment and misleading the country into war -- do not exemplify the faith we live by. We urge you not to use Calvin College as a platform to advance policies that violate the school's religious principles." Now are those some of the issues that you want to put out there? Is that the message you want sent to the president?

ACKERMAN: Yes. I think that what we'd like to say to the president is that we have issues that we feel are very important. As a Christian community, we would like to present them to the president as a Christian leader to take action on some of these issues.

NGUYEN: And, Pam, has this issue divided many on campus? Because it seems like there are quite a few there that aren't really in support of the president coming to speak tomorrow.

HARALAKOVA: You know, I don't think it has divided the students. I -- if anything, I think that it has encouraged some very positive discussions, which is something Calvin is very much in support of.

NGUYEN: But by the president being there, does it make the school in any way seem affiliated with the Christian right?

HARALAKOVA: Well...

ACKERMAN: I think that's one of the things that the Calvin community is afraid of, or members of the Calvin community. We want to be seen as a place where people from different political perspectives can feel welcome and we don't want to be seen as particularly affiliated to one side of the political spectrum just because we are a Christian college.

HARALAKOVA: And we're pretty sure that the president would address the student body and would be -- his commencement speech would be very much focused on the community, as well.

NGUYEN: All right. We'll be looking forward to that speech tomorrow. Matt Ackerman and Pam Haralakova, graduating on Saturday, congratulations to you both. Thanks for being with us today.

HARALAKOVA: Thank you.

ACKERMAN: Thank you very much.

NGUYEN: Miles?

O'BRIEN: They were a power couple on a mission from God. As part of CNN's anniversary series "Then and Now," we take a look back at Jim and Tammy Bakker and where they are today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): In the early 1980s, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker became pop icons as leaders of the hugely successful PTL Club TV ministries. The couple called their riches a blessing from God. People soon discovered their extravagant lifestyle was financed from the almighty contributions of the ministry's faithful.

Soon their tears of joy became tears of remorse. In 1987 Bakker 'fessed up to an adulterous relationship with church secretary Jessica Hahn and later spent four years in jail for fraud.

Tammy Faye divorced her husband while he was in jail and married his business partner, Roe Messner. In March of 2004 she announced on LARRY KING LIVE she had inoperable lung cancer.

TAMMY FAYE MESSNER, TELEVANGELIST: It was lung cancer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Eight months later she appeared again with an update on her condition.

MESSNER: Every bit of the cancer is gone.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jim Bakker also remarried and is now back on TV, this time preaching from Branson, Missouri. JIM BAKKER, TELEVANGELIST: It's so good to get together with God's people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jim and Lori Bakker are in the process of adopting five children between the ages of 9 and 15. They've had legal custody of them for four years. One big happy family, albeit a more modest one.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: All right. It's the talk of the sports world this week. Dodger baseball and a rarity, the perfect game. Every batter who faced this pitcher sat right down. She's only in sixth grade. Eleven-year-old Katie Brownell. She's the only girl in the Oakfield, Alabama New York Little League. Last Saturday she mowed down all 18 batters of the opposing Yankees. Good for her. A perfect game. This is Katie's third season in hardball. And if you think she's all arm, get this, she's hitting .714.

NGUYEN: Wow.

O'BRIEN: Truly in a league of her own.

NGUYEN: That's some girl power right there.

O'BRIEN: I should say so.

NGUYEN: The might want to change the rules for Major League Baseball.

O'BRIEN: Yes, sign her up.

(STOCK MARKET REPORT)

NGUYEN: Coming up in our second hour of LIVE FROM, first lady Laura Bush is in the Middle East. White House reporter Suzanne Malveaux talks one on one with Mrs. Bush about what she hopes to accomplish.

LIVE FROM's hour of power begins after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com