Mortgage Rescue: New Plan for Homeowners; Potomac Primary: Dems Battle in Three States; GM Buyout: Posted Largest Loss; Living to 100: Possible Even With Chronic Disease
KIRAN CHETRY, CNN ANCHOR: And it brought us to our "Quick Vote" question of the morning. Would you want to live past 100? Right now, 61 percent of you say yes. Thirty-nine percent of you, including John Roberts, say no way, because you're afraid you're going to run out of money.</s>JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR: Exactly.</s>CHETRY: Cast your vote, CNN.com/am. We'll tally your votes throughout the morning. But, you're right. You plan for retirement, and now you got to keep throwing some more money because people are living longer across the board.</s>ROBERTS: Yes. Typically, people plan for about 15 to 20 years of retirement, not 35 to 40, though.</s>CHETRY: Exactly. The next hour of AMERICAN MORNING starts right now. Showdown in the shadow of the White House.</s>SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I'm going to keep working as hard as I can.</s>SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I may be skinny but I'm tough, too.</s>CHETRY: The Potomac Primaries are on, whether it's do or die for the Clinton camp. House call, a new plan to get struggling homeowners on their feet. Plus, the marijuana machine. Should scoring pot be as easy as getting a snack? On this AMERICAN MORNING. How about it?</s>ROBERTS: That's pretty interesting stuff.</s>CHETRY: The medical marijuana machine -- they are rating some of them. We're going to talk about that this morning. Meanwhile, it's Tuesday, February 12th. Thanks for joining us. I'm Kiran Chetry.</s>ROBERTS: And good morning to you. I'm John Roberts. "Financial Security Watch," a new plan to ease the foreclosure crisis is coming out today from the White House and mortgage lenders. Our Ali Velshi joining us now to break it all down for us. Operation Project Lifeline?</s>ALI VELSHI, CNN SENIOR BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Project Lifeline, they're calling this, and we're expecting it to be announced formally about 11:00 Eastern this morning by the treasury secretary and the Housing secretary. It's a plan to give homeowners who are in trouble paying their mortgage some time to work out a repayment plan with their bank. Now, here's what the details are. If you are 90 days overdue or more, and we don't know what other criteria you'd have to meet, this plan will suspend any foreclosure activity on your home for 30 days, thereby giving you time to talk to your bank and work out a plan. The banks involved in this plan right now were the same ones who were involved four months ago in the plan that was announced by the White House. Bank of America, Citigroup, Countrywide, JP Morgan Chase, Washington Mutual and Wells Fargo. Now, this is an opportunity for people but there seems to be some hesitancy on the part of people who are in trouble to say, let me go to the bank. Let me work something out. The banks are getting into trouble by foreclosing on homes, particularly in areas where there are heavy foreclosures, because you end up with a bunch of homes in a neighborhood where there have been foreclosures. We know the property values on those properties are not where they were. So the banks don't want to end up holding these homes, but there's been some real concern about -- you know, Kiran, asked earlier, is this a bail-out? There's some sense that well, why bother paying your mortgage or why bother making good choices if these bail-outs keep on getting more and more robust? So this will face some criticism but this is an effort to try and shore up some people who are overdue on their loans. It is not limited to subprime lenders. This is people who are overdue in their loans and can't manage their payments.</s>ROBERTS: When are we going to get further details on this?</s>VELSHI: The official announcement is expected sometime at 11:00 or 11:30 Eastern Time. We might get some more details before that, but that's when we'll know the whole story.</s>ROBERTS: Keep working the phones.</s>VELSHI: Yes.</s>ROBERTS: Ali, thanks very much. Kiran?</s>CHETRY: Well, it could be a defining day for both parties in the presidential race as voters head to the polls. Right now, they just opened, in fact, in Maryland and D.C. It opened in Virginia for an hour now. The Democrats will be splitting 168 delegates in the three states, and Barack Obama coming off of victories in four states this weekend, leaving some concerns within the Hillary Clinton campaign. Also, the Republicans will be divvying up 113 total delegates between the three. Republican John McCain under pressure from a surge by Mike Huckabee. And again, as we said, the polls have just opened in Maryland and the District of Columbia. Most of the attention this primary day is going to the tight race between the two Democrats. Barack Obama could be on the verge of a Potomac hat trick today, taking Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. on the heels of his weekend's sweep. Hillary Clinton has her sights set on Texas, something of a firewall to stop Obama and to revive her campaign. Suzanne Malveaux is following the Clinton campaign. She joins us live in El Paso, Texas, where Hillary Clinton will campaign there later today. Good morning, Suzanne.</s>SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Kiran. Obviously, no mistake that she's already headed to Texas, looking for beyond today's primaries. What is really important here, this is not only a contest or race for the most delegates, but it's also about perception as well. She has to convince the nearly 800 superdelegates as well as the possible officials that will be supporting her or endorsing her, that she is the winning candidate. That despite a string of losses, a possible string of losses from today, that she is the one that is most electable. So what is she going to do? Well, here is her strategy. Here's how she explains it to our affiliate WJLA and "Politico" last night.</s>SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We're winning the states that we have to win, the big states that are really going to determine where the Democrats win. I have something in common with my husband. He never carried caucuses either. He lost all the ones that I've lost.</s>MALVEAUX: Kiran, you can already tell that she is downplaying the significance of caucuses. That is where Obama is very strong when it comes to grassroots, his organization. But it doesn't really carry all that much weight when you think about today. Today, there are three primaries -- Kiran.</s>CHETRY: Yes. And going through -- and at least all the polling showing Barack Obama heavily favored to win those and you talk about the Ohio and Texas being these so-called firewalls for the Clinton campaign. What are the chances of Barack Obama giving her a very strong run in those two states as well?</s>MALVEAUX: It's a pretty good chance that he will, obviously, be very competitive in those states. But she does go into these states having a certain advantage and she really needs to capitalize off of it. It's going to be very important for her to make sure that she does not lose some Latino support, the Hispanic support in Texas. It is nearly half of the Democratic voters that will be going to that contest, and that is going to be important, that that number does not change. We have seen, over time, Barack Obama, seems to be increasing support in that community. So she needs to make sure that it doesn't really change her numbers all that much. Ohio, very strong when it comes to the demographics there. You're talking an older group of voters. You're talking blue collar, older women. These are voters that tend to vote very heavily, very strongly for Senator Clinton. She needs to make sure that she maintains that support as well. And also, just in the next couple of weeks, Kiran, it's going to be very important for her to keep focus with her own message to change the topic off of today's election, if there were losses here, and say looking ahead, moving forward, these are the places where I can really collect the most delegates because it's going to be important influencing those superdelegates, as well as those people who possibly will endorse her in the weeks to come -- Kiran.</s>CHETRY: Suzanne Malveaux for us in El Paso, Texas, a big state campaigning going on there already. Of course, Suzanne, thank you. Well, Senators Obama and Clinton will also be facing off in a debate next week. It's hosted by CNN, Univision and the Texas Democratic Party. It is Thursday, February 21st. It's going to be at the LBJ auditorium at the University of Texas in Austin, and you can watch it live. It all gets under way 8:00 p.m. Eastern right here on</s>CNN. ROBERTS: Well, Senator John McCain is trying to prove that he can rally support from conservatives. His campaign announcing endorsements from former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and evangelical leader Gary Bauer. Bauer praised McCain for his anti-abortion stance. Meantime, McCain has turned down nearly $6 million in federal funds for his primary campaign. The Federal Election Commission says McCain requested the money last summer to keep his campaign alive but now that he's the front-runner, McCain has decided against the federal funds, allowing him to spend more if he makes it to the general election. But he's not going anywhere. Mike Huckabee says he's staying in the Republican race until he is mathematically eliminated. He told supporters that he won't leave, despite calls for him to drop out.</s>MIKE HUCKABEE (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: An interesting thing has been happening since last week. The National Media tried to say, well, the election is over, and the nomination is all secured. Someone forgot to tell me that, because I decided that until somebody gets 1,191 delegates, by the rules that have been designed by the very party bosses who now want to shut it down, they said that's what it took to win. Ladies and gentlemen, until somebody gets that, we are in this race for you and for every other conservative American who wants a choice.</s>ROBERTS: Now, despite some analyses that show that it's already mathematically impossible for him to win, Huckabee says he may stay in until McCain gets the needed delegates and that may not happen until the Pennsylvania primary on April the 22nd. We have full coverage of the Potomac Primary from the best political team on television. It's 7:30 Eastern. Analyst John Dickerson explains what's at stake today. It's 7:45, Clinton campaign spokesman Doug Hadaway. And at the top of the next hour, Mary Snow live on the GOP race. CNN is your home for politics live from the CNN Election Center. The best political team on television covers every race all day and night. Our nonstop political coverage carries on with today's edition of "Ballot Bowl." That's ahead at noon here on CNN -- Kiran.</s>CHETRY: Meanwhile, our weather another big story today. Snow and ice could stall another day across a major portion of the country and could make for an even dangerous ride to the polls in the mid- Atlantic region. In fact, they are digging out already from two feet of snow in upstate New York. Police outside of Rochester say that there was a car stuck on the side of the road every 30 feet. It's also freezing rain and sleet that left an inch-thick coat of ice all across Springfield, Missouri, one of the heaviest ice storms ever. There is a look at some of the roads. Police also say that it was a very slippery conditions for drivers out there. In fact, one fatality on the roadways because of that. Schools shut down. Government offices also shut down. They want to try to keep as many people as possible off of those slick roads. And exactly one week ago, people across the south were waking up to see destruction. Well, today, the first lady, Laura Bush, will get an aerial tour of tornado damage over Arkansas. Mrs. Bush is also going to be visiting a high school in Kentucky that was damaged in those severe storms that went through. Rob Marciano is at the weather update desk. He's tracking extreme weather for us today as well. And it looks like as we said, we can still expect some snow, some wintry weather in many parts of the country for yet another day.</s>ROB MARCIANO, CNN METEOROLOGIST: That's right. Ice on top of even some severe thunderstorms rolling through Texas right now. I want to show you the radar out of Dallas or just in the south of Dallas where this line of heavy thunderstorms just rolled through. Whenever you see it kind of bend like that, you know there are some pretty decent winds that are coming down from the mid and upper levels of the atmosphere. These severe thunderstorms had a history of producing 50 to 60 mile-an-hour winds and they're humming eastward at 50 miles an hour. So beware of that, maybe let's say in Tyler, Texas. Little Rock, Arkansas, you have a heavy line of thunderstorms rolled through the leading edge of which is about to head across the Mississippi River. Memphis, you'll get some heavy showers and thunderstorms also. And then, all of this heavy precipitation is heading into some very cold air right along the Ohio River, and that's where we're seeing the icing on top of the heavy snow that say Louisville got. They got four inches of snow, and now they're getting freezing rain and it's just piling up and coating the roadways. Winter storm warnings posted from say Paducah, Kentucky, up through Columbus, Ohio, for the threat of snow, freezing rain and sleet and miserable conditions, generally speaking. And this does extend into some cold air that's in place across the northeast. However, on the I-95 corridor, you'll start as snow and then likely turn over to freezing rain and then rainfall later on tonight. It's hard to think, John and Kiran, when you got a temperature right now of 17 degrees and you've got moisture heading your way, how could it possibly not be all snow for the next day? But it will start as snow, get a couple of inches and then by this time tomorrow, it will have turned over to rain. Back to you guys.</s>CHETRY: Rob, all right. Thanks so much. We're getting some breaking news right now, some new news not good news from the auto industry.</s>ROBERTS: Oh, terrible news for General Motors. Ali Velshi here with that. What's going on?</s>VELSHI: Well, we've got -- first of all, we've got General Motors posting the largest annual loss ever for an automobile company. Let me give you this so you can hear it from me. The largest loss ever for an automobile company in the United States, some $38.7 billion, but that's not all from operating. A lot of that is a tax credit that they couldn't use because they've had losses for that long. In fact, the fourth quarter results from GM are a little better than analysts had expected. So that's the mixed news on that front. The interesting part here is that General Motors is offering buyouts now to 74,000 UAW workers. This is a trend that we've seen. General Motors did this last year with some of its workers. Ford did it this year. Chrysler did it this year. The idea is to offer to buy out every last UAW, every last unionized worker at General Motors, on the assumption that some of them will say, this buyout package and a little bit of retraining and some ongoing benefits is a better deal than sticking around and risking being laid off by the company again. So, a certain percentage of these people are taking it. It allows General Motors and Ford and Chrysler to get some of these highly paid workers off their books without laying them off. In other words, it's putting some of the choice in the hands of the workers. They're expected that a number of them will take that. The terms of those will be available. Typically, what happens is there's a short window in which you can decide you are taking that buyout and you leave the company. The company gets its obligations to you off the books. Seventy-four thousand GM workers are eligible for this.</s>ROBERTS: How many do they expect will take it?</s>VELSHI: Well, I think we've seen better than 40 percent in the past. In the last year or so, that's been the average. But as we get closer to sort of the winding down of the big former, you know, the big three automakers in Detroit, as we know what the future is going to hold, I think more people will take it and say, let's move on and do something else. But I'll get those numbers for you precisely, but that's what we're looking at.</s>CHETRY: One of the things you also talked about is why it's so hard for the big three to stay competitive is because Toyota, Honda -- they don't have those "legacy" costs.</s>VELSHI: They don't have -- This is what this is.</s>CHETRY: Now, if they do the buyout, does that mean they don't have to pay retirement and health care for the rest of their lives?</s>VELSHI: There are plans. You can take a buyout and you can still get some benefits for it, but it's a fixed number. So General Motors will always know what your liability is as a worker and it doesn't have the sort of mystery, this building mystery that these legacy costs have. How long will people live? What will their health care costs be? So, it definitely allows the U.S. automakers, the Detroit-based automakers to have a cost structure that's more in line with Toyota and Honda and the other automakers who operate in the United States.</s>ROBERTS: So much for what Mitt Romney was saying about jobs in the auto industry coming back.</s>VELSHI: So, in other words, we're still shedding jobs. We're just not laying them off. We're letting them choose.</s>ROBERTS: Ali, thanks. More on that coming up, I'm sure.</s>VELSHI: Yes.</s>ROBERTS: A dramatic rescue down under. Why a yacht ran aground, and what happened next? And living to 100 years old may be easier than you think. You don't even need to be perfectly healthy. We're paging Dr. Gupta ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.</s>CHETRY: Welcome back to the "Most News in the Morning." A water rescue off the coast of northeastern Australia. It happened when a yacht ended up wedged on some jagged rocks overnight after a ride on rough waters. It took rescue crews about seven hours to airlift all 32 passengers and five crew members to safety. They were able to do that. Emergency workers say that no one was injured. There were some terrifying moments at a high school in Memphis, Tennessee. Police say that two students chased each other into the gym. One shot the other twice then handed the gun to the gym teacher and said, "It's over now." It happened in front of 75 students at Mitchell High School. A 19-year-old senior is in critical condition. The 17-year-old suspected shooter is charged with attempted first- degree murder. And it's one of the largest wholesale markets in the country. Now, it's up in flames. More than 100 New York firefighters coming to the Hunts Point Market. This is in the Bronx. It took a few hours to get that fire under control. Hazmat teams also on hand in case the markets huge refrigerators might have caught fire. There were concerned about that. Fortunately, though, they did not need the Hazmat crews -- John.</s>ROBERTS: Eighteen minutes after the hour now, Kiran. The secret to living to being 100 years old and beyond. A new study shows that many of the people who live that long do have some kind of disease like high blood pressure or diabetes. So how do they do it? How do they achieve such extraordinary longevity? CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta is at the medical update desk and joins us this morning. So what is the secret to long life Sanjay?</s>DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, John. You know, even people, I will say with heart disease or diabetes have a decent shot at hitting that century mark, as you said. It does not appear to be just good luck. It does not appear to be genetics, but rather lifestyle changes that you can even implement later in life, and that's sort of the key here. Take a look at the various risk factors here. As it stands now, 55,000 people have hit that century mark in this country, and the fastest growing population is 85 and older. But there are various risk factors that could sort of bring down your likelihood, if you will, of hitting that century mark. Overall, if you're healthy, if you've had clean living, if you exercise, you got about a 54 percent chance of hitting that century mark. If you start to add risk factors like you have a sedentary lifestyle, it goes down to about 44 percent. High blood pressure drops it to 36 percent. Obesity, smoking, you can see the list there. Add all the risk factors together, and your chance of hitting the century mark only about four percent, John. But again, it used to be this sort of this belief that if you had some sort of problem like high blood pressure or heart disease or diabetes, at some point in your life you were really not going to have a chance at all hitting that century mark. That just doesn't appear to be so anymore, John.</s>ROBERTS: Sanjay, you've done a lot of reporting on this. You even talked about it in your book, "Chasing Life," and you came up with an age calculator. What is your age expectancy?</s>GUPTA: Well, mine is actually 81, and this is based on a calculator that's actually on livingto100.com. It's a Web site you can go to. It takes about 10 minutes. You figure all these questions, answer all of them, and you know, 81, I was reasonably happy with that. I think some people would not be as happy. That's me, John. They actually sort of age progressed me from about now to about 100. Pretty attractive, huh? But that's what they think I'll look like at 100. They left me with all my teeth. I'm very grateful for that. But, look, you know -- again, it does not appear to be as much genetics as people thought it was. It does appear to be lifestyle and more specifically, aggressively treating things like high blood pressure and diabetes, if you do develop them as opposed to sort of thinking well, the person is older, they may not benefit as much, what they call them, ageist-sort of approach or even discrimination against older people. Actually, treating these diseases in older people seemed to make a big difference.</s>ROBERTS: You are a darned handsome-looking centenarian, Dr. Gupta. Let me tell you that.</s>GUPTA: Notice I kept talking after the pictures so you wouldn't have any chance to comment on that?</s>ROBERTS: You didn't think that was going to work, did you? Sanjay, thanks. We'll get you back here soon to talk about some other stuff this morning.</s>GUPTA: OK.</s>ROBERTS: And we've been asking you to weigh in. Would you want to live to be past 100? Right now, 54 percent of you say yes. That's fewer than half an hour ago. Forty-six percent say no way. Cast your vote at CNN.com/am. We'll tally your votes throughout the morning.</s>CHETRY: Maybe when they see how good Sanjay looks, they'll change their mind.</s>ROBERTS: Absolutely.</s>CHETRY: Not only did he keep his teeth, he kept all his hair, too.</s>ROBERTS: And literally, within seconds of him giving us that Web site, livingto100.com, we pulled it up. We're going to take the test this morning.</s>CHETRY: And we pulled it up. And actually, I think a lot of viewers did, too, because I can't even get to the calculator yet. But we'll try it out and you guys try it with us, and we'll see how long we'll live.</s>ROBERTS: If you have a question for Dr. Gupta, by the way, e- mail it to us. Go to CNN.com/am. Sanjay answers your questions every Thursday here on</s>AMERICAN MORNING. CHETRY: Well, reports of fires in a parked SUV has the safety investigators on the case. We're going to tell you which truck model they may be worried about. There are also some new changes in government requirements for getting a green card, and it's been stirring up some controversy. We're going to get a live report on that ahead when AMERICAN MORNING comes right back.