miles o'brien will join us to discuss the history and future of u.s. space explanation. we will take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. ♪ host: good morning. the questions continue today from members of congress. response from the white house and the international community following the downing of the malaysian airliner. all 298 people on board were killed in what officials say was a missile strike law along the russia-ukraine border. meanwhile, russian president vladimir putin said none of this would have happened if there had been peace in the territory. some scathing editorial this morning including the "new york times," and the white house is calling for a cease-fire. they nearly 10 mile area where

debris and bodies are still being recovered. it is friday morning, july 18, detailsill learn more about what happened, reaction, your calls, and comments. our phone lines are open, and if you are watching or listening outside the united states, the number is (202) 585-3883. otherwise for democrats, (202) 585-3880, and for republicans, (202) 585-3881. we also have a line for independents. you can join us on twitter or facebook, you can also send us an e-mail, journal@c-span.org. good friday morning to you on the "washington journal." let's begin with two international headlines. first from the "guardian" newspaper -- murder in the sky, missile destroys jet and kills2 295. now the death toll is 298. and from the "globe and mail" in canada -- shot down. a second black box has been

recovered. the "chicago tribune" writing workersrescue recovering a second recorder. ukraine agreed to provide assistance into the investigation into the boeing 777 airliner. the ukraine rebels say they will insure a safe access for international experts investigating the crash. kiev had complained the separatists had originally prevented officials from reaching the site in which all 298 people on board were killed. the separatists were later quoted as saying they had found one of the black box flight recorders. and again word this morning that a second black box has also been recovered. and this editorial from the "new putinimes" -- if vladimir can stop this war, growing casualties on the ground

host: that is this morning from the "new york times." shane harris is following the story for "foreign policy" magazine. he is joining us on the phone. thank you for being with us. guest: hi, steve. host: more questions than answers this morning. what have you found? guest: what is interesting to me is u.s. intelligence officials are now confirming that this was a missile strike. our intelligence indicates that clearly andl

they're focusing on a particular type of surface to air missile that the russians are believed to have provided to separatists in the region, and dismissal would've had the range to shoot airliner, and the separatists have been boasting in recent days of shooting down ukrainian aircraft, including cargo aircraft and fighter jets. the white house is very carefully avoiding pinning the blame directly on the separatists, but they issued a statement last night saying the incident highlights the urgency with which we continue russia to de-escalate the situation, and while we do not have the facts, we know this incident occurred in the context of the crisis in ukraine's fuel by russian support for separatists, including through arms, material, and training. so without really pinpointing this on the separatist, the white house is to be leaning heavily in that direction, which of course leads back to moscow. i think you will probably hear in coming days the administration calling on vladimir putin to do just what is being said in those

editorials, to take more steps to end this crisis now. host: interestingly enough, vladimir putin blaming the instability on the region but did not put any of the blame on his own government or those who are supplying these weapons to the separatist chechen rebels. guest: right, which i think it's unsurprising. he has been distancing himself to some degree from these rebel forces, which i think he has been propping up with material but also politically propping up more following the annexation of crimea. some of the separatists have been feeling that they do not get the support that they want from moscow. talked to sayve he has created a monster in a way and that it seems to be getting beyond his control. u.s. officials have stressed in recent weeks that if putin wanted to, forward and say to the rebels standdown, we have accomplished the mission, that they would probably follow his lead on that, so he is going to

bear i think a measure of the responsible before this incident once it is pretty definitively placed on the separatists who shot on this plan, which i think it will be. host: the other story getting a lot of attention, the headline from the "new york times" -- israeli ground troops now moving into gaza. where does this put the president, president clinton, the sanctions he announced on wednesday, now the escalation of the war in the middle east? guest: it is pretty extraordinary i think for any president to have this many foreign crises erupting as once. as we were covering the shootdown of the airliner to suddenly see the news of the ground incursion into gaza, but at the same time i think that ,as expected for a few days since the israelis have been sending signals on that. and i think probably u.s. attention is going to focus in the near-term more closely on this issue of the shootdown. the israelis have said already that the ground operation in gaza is going to be limited

strictly to trying to close these tunnels that hamas has been using to move people and supplies, and the united states has come out with a statement on that saying that they will hold the israelis to that and expected to be limited. so it is a lot of crises to manage at one time, obviously, but i think for now the russian shootdown in ukraine is probably going to consume more of the immediate attention. host: if you could try to put this in perspective because the president did announce the se sanctions against russian companies, tougher sanctions. he president was on the phone with president putin when the first word came of that downed jetliner, and of course information was sketchy at that point. much more information now. try to put the last 48 hours in perspective, what we are from the white house, these sanctions, the situation in ukraine, and now this malaysian airliner. the u.s.u're right, was already ramping up another round of stations on russia, and the white house administration has been getting a lot of push back from businesses, european

countries as well, to almost ordered go easy on the sanctions, so the administration was already facing a tension about how tough they should go on the sanctions, and of course this news broke. i think the immediate question that became -- are sanctions going to do any good at all? how would sanctions have stopped what appears to be rebel forces firing into the sky and shooting down civilian airliners? i think what is going to happen now is it is going to force the administration to sort of up its restaurant russia with more than sanctions and to come out with something in the way of demand, have putin step forward and put an end to this crisis. there may be some calls in congress to more heavily armed the ukrainian military as well, to get them to be able to take out some of these missile batteries. at this point, sanctions -- it already seems like something of not having that was a deterrent effect on putin, and i cannot imagine that increased

sanctions even called for would be seen as having much more of an effect now. host: if you are listening on c-span real, we are talking with shane harris of "foreign policy" magazine, and the senate intelligence committee did have a closed-door briefing yesterday. we heard from senator dianne feinstein. at that point, the information was not clear. there was a missile strike. now more information a this morning. what will congress be doing on any of this? guest: i think what congress can do at this point has put a lot of pressure again on moscow by coming out after getting these kinds of briefings. what they will do is come out with their own statements. they already had yesterday by pointing the finger at russia and create a chorus of opposition to putin. importantly, they will be hitting information from the intelligence agency, so everything they know will be coming from the demonstration effectively, but to the extent that they start coming out and calling on putin to take steps in calling on the administration to put up the pressure, that is going to kind of create a chorus of opposition against moscow mightill hopefully --

even create some consensus in washington, which would be a rare thing in these days. that is what we should be watching for. and then whether or not there will be calls to more fully provide support to the ukrainian military. of course the question then would become -- would the united states get more directly involved? there is no indication of that yet. you will see calls from congress to step this up politically on moscow. host: shane harris, who began the week with us on this week's "washington journal" this past sunday, it turned out to be a far busier week that even you had expected when you join us on sunday. thank you for being with us on this friday morning. we will get to your calls and, than just a moment on the investigation into that malaysian airliner crash. powerful minds are open. you can also join us on twitter @cspanwj. couple other headlines justices from the "arizona republic" -- blown out of the skies. and from the "denver post" -- flight shot down.

host: since putin appears almost immune to embarrassment and has himself authorized intal collateral form of loss innocent lives. this morning from the editorial page of the "denver oh peter is joining us from rockford, illinois. good morning to you. good morning. back in march, the fifth i believe, that is when israel missiles and rockets and fired into syr ia because it was said that syria was moving some kind of reference.

-- weapons. i think they broke some kind of law when they did a. about three days later, when he lay one down then, and then, and in breaking into the airway, they knocked what israel did off of the airwaves. they talkedso all about was the plane for about three months. and the same thing that happened here, israel shot those, was responsible for four kids dying, not to mention i think 300 other people. host: we go to john joining us from north carolina. good morning to you, john. caller: good morning to you, sir. can you hear me? host: we sure can. go ahead with your comment. find that the obama -- our country goes about things. we should be really cautious about this event because a lot of things happened there. us ifould be very bad for

we make a bad decision about a country who may have did something who didn't do it. it is a very powerful country. so it is smart for us to say hey, let's see what happens. we need to be careful of making wild ideas, a lot of wrapping up about somebody who may not be guilty. host: ok, thank you for the call. you are looking at pictures from overnight of the recovery continues. you can see a part of the wheel well from the plane that is strewn in ukraine, i get about 35 miles from the russian border. the plane that went down was en route from amsterdam to kuala lumpur. so far, no reports of any americans on board that plane. most are from europe. good morning. welcome to the program. you are on the air. caller: i would like to talk about what i heard on the news 1983 withincident in

the korean 2007 plane. the first time i heard yesterday was a politician saying that the russian people shot down the plane and then they denied it and later on they said yes. , oh, gosh, i cannot find the words. he had come out and said yes, they were spying, and they were wentaying that the 007 over the island, which was the new center of russian missiles and stuff. host: right. and ironically, yesterday was the 18th anniversary of that twa flight 800 that went down just over long island. of course, the indication, later investigation found there was an explosion on board the plane. the information right now is that this was a missile strike. our phone lines are open if you want to share your comments about the investigation into the malaysian airlines crash, and

u.s. sources confirming that a missile was involved. (202) 585-3880 our line for democrats. (202) 585-3881 for republicans. we also welcome our viewers and listeners outside the united states. this editorial from the heinouston post" -- a crime. those responsible for downing a passenger plane over you the ukraine must be held accountable. the editorial points out that the white house continues to avoid measures that could inflict crushing damage on

host: that is this morning from the "washington post." darrell is joining us from defiant, new jersey. caller: it kind of remind me of the iranian plane that we shut down with civilian passengers on board. but anyway, this is what we get when we spend $5 billion to destabilize ukraine. what did we think we were going to get? maybe the palestinians can get some of those missiles to use on that arehe f-16s slaughtering palestinian everyday, not a peep from the media and people like you. why don't you do is on israel and what they are doing in palestine? >> we have, caller, we split that up with -- host: we have, caller, we

brought that up with shane harris. if you want to watch that program, by the way, as all of our programs available on our website at c-span.org. we will get two more of your calls in just a moment, but i want to share with you. this is the description from the front page of the "new york times." the headlinesays s, jetlen bodie parts, and a child's pink book.

host: there were no houses in the immediate vicinity. the only visible structure was a poultry operation with long white coops in the distance. again, the front page, the description on the ground from the "new york times." kevin is joining us from wesley chapel, florida. good morning to you. caller: good morning. i think what we need to look at is how the system of notifications of pilots broke down. there is a notice to airmen. the notice to airmen should be a red flag to a pilot that you just do not go into this area. and we have war zones all across the world right now. malaysia airlines should be extremely security conscience

because they already lost a to the worldwide muslim conflicts that are going on. so i think it is a breakdown of the preflight nationalism -- of the professionalism of nato, a breakdown of the professionalism of the southeast treaty alliance . i think the lines of medication and demarcation with the airlines needs to be reinforced, but to me, the blame should look to the system and why the system is breaking down in these areas. host: kevin, thank you for the call. front page of the "financial times" -- airliner shot over ukraine, pro-russia militants accused of the attack. and this from "usa today." gary has us on our order page saying -- nothing to do with russia, it is a local problem,

should be addressed by our european allies. we have got our own incursion issue. and "russia today" has been posting a number of photographs. we can listen to ray from jacksonville, florida. good morning. caller: hi. point, ift to make a we're going to try to hold russia accountable for this accident, they also hold the united states accountable when we shut down that's iranian jetliner and killed 200 and some odd people. host: ok. thank you for the call. next is liam joining us from philadelphia. good morning. caller: good morning. this is awesome. season, you are awesome. in terms of the plan, i am not exactly sure how the united states foreign-policy was played into this. like, exactly what is -- can you hold someone responsible for something for somebody like this when a plane is flying over an active war zone? host: liam, thank you for the

call from philadelphia. the "l.a. times" with more on what was to be believed to be responsible for the strike am i -- for the strike, a powerful buk missile launcher. what brought down that jet, a single buk missile liner has a 60% to 90% chance of downing an aircraft. it requires a multiperson of a well-trained crew to operate, and the launcher can carry multiple missiles. joining us from portland, oregon. good morning. caller: good morning, sir. i enjoy c-span, and this is a great way to allow citizens throughout the united states to rest their feeling and get out , so i salutetion your efforts and it is a great show. my comment is really sure. i agree with the reference to sanctions by financing. i think that would be an excellent idea and needs to be

on the table. secondly, i think there needs to be a challenge to the u.n. be the. it supposed to world policy regulatory body that keeps everything accountable, yet they have been silent. it is almost as if they are what i call frozen chosens. they are for their own special interests, but not governing the world. thank you for the show and allowing me to have my comment. host: kelvin, thank you for the call. from inside the "new york times disastertory, the air stricken the moscow's competing strategy on ukrainian rebels. the piece points out that a quote from dmitry tennent, director of the carnegie moscow center, it is an extremely awkward moment for the kremlin, saying that everybody in the west is already pointing fingers at the kremlin. they are not waiting for an inquiry -- they're blaming russia today.

host: next is robert joining us from arizona. good morning. caller: good morning. i think our president should work with mr. putin and investigate some of the circumstances leading up to this and also work with the u.n. thank you. host: thank you for the call. another story we are following as congress has another week or two of legislative business before the august recess. this is the headline from the "washington times" -- no bill on the border served before the

august recess. host: here's what speaker boehner said yesterday during his regular thursday news conference. [video clip] >> there seem to be a huge gulp right now on how to handle the crisis. do you have confidence that the two sides can come to some sort of agreement by the end of the month? >> i certainly hope so, but i do not have as much optimism as i would like to have. but again, we are working with our border group, we are working with the chairman of the appropriations committee, trying to find some way to deal with what is a humanitarian crisis at our border, and it needs to be dealt with. host: that from speaker boehner yesterday during his thursday news conference. i'd a way, we will focus on immigration issues and a supplemental with congressman bob wardell.

gertrude from florida as the investigation continues into that malaysian airlines crash, all 298 people on board killed. good morning to you. why are we giving israel $3 billion a year? we have and giving it to them for years and years for their military. why are we doing that? host: dean from london, kentucky. good morning. caller: thank you for taking my call. the malaysian airline -- why with this aircraft in a war zone, and when was the last time one flew across that area? does it happen each day were more than one time a day? i keep hearing the issue with israel. thank.net yahoo! had the courage to go in and take out hamas. maybe he will wipe them off the face of the map this one time.

praise god for that. to mobile,e go alabama. you are on the air. thatr: i find it strange there have been no americans found on the plan, first of all, and the fact that america went in ukraine and set up its own proxy government, and i just find it very strange that when this happened yesterday, i was watching cable news, and cnn, the moment that this plane went down, it was saying this is what y'all are saying from a paper, that the plane was shot down by russia. they just came out and said the plane was shot down by russia. and this looks very bad when you cannot believe they are american media anymore at all. i mean, the american media is basically useless. there was a lady on msnbc

yesterday, one of the reporters, and she said we have a person the the ukraine who saw missile hit the plane, and they put the guy on the air who was supposed to be a sergeant -- host: it was a prank caller. caller: yes, but what i am trying to get to is they did not even vet the caller. they did not even try to see if he was a legitimate caller. defend or not here to explain what the other networks did. clearly when there is breaking news and things happen so quickly, misinformation often gets on the air, and again, you're absolutely right, there was a prank caller from msnbc, which is made its way on social media, but i think generally speaking, this network included, when stories happen, early information, you want to be very careful and cautious of putting that on the air. we certainly try to do that here at c-span. thank you very much for the call . we go to build joining us from chicago. good morning. are you with us? caller: hello?

host: yes, good morning. caller: oh, yeah. now the plan, i think we still it,t know that much about it being shut down. at any rate, it looks like whoever shot that down, it was a mistake, a terrible, horrible mistake. it looks like if they knew what they were doing, they would not have shot that plane down. from chicago. darling makes this point on our facebook page -- what the heck happened to compassion and empathy for the people who lost their lives. there are loved ones grieving now. the right wing nut job say it is obama's fault, then they complain about god being removed from our country. you are absolutely correct. god has been removed from our lives.

our is this morning from facebook page. if you're just tuning in or if you're listening on c-span radio, we are getting your calls and comment it's about the downing of that malaysian airlines crash, a plane that went down just along the russia-ukraine border, and the u.s. security council is hosting a special meeting. live coverage at 10:00 eastern time here on c-span. we want to turn our attention quickly to another story from inside the "new york times" -- far from worries among, chris christie tells iowa "i would back a lot." he was in davenport, iowa last night as the head of the rga, the republican governors association. he was there to help terry branstad and his own election and iowa, setting the stage for a potential 2016 presidential bid. your is more with governor christie earlier in the day and marion, iowa. [video clip] >> oh, who knows, kelly? of questions kind are the kind of questions that you guys are fascinated with. what i think happens is that

people get to know you and make a judgment on you. they do not try to put your in any kind of box. the box they put you in ultimately is yes or no, and all the rest of the box is a really are meaningless in the context of yes or no. everery election i have run in, i present myself as who i am, and that people make a judgment. and sometimes i have one and sometimes i have lost. so if i decide to run for anything else again in my life, i will just come out, i will present myself, a gentleman there asked me a direct question before, i give him a direct answer. i do not know whether he liked or did not like it, but that is not the reason i am answering or why i answer it the way i do. and then everyone else will get to decide. they do not go in there and say are you conservative enough, are you liberal enough, are you moderate enough -- that is all people say. they say you i trust him, can i count on him to tell me the truth, is he somebody who can actually be a competent steward of our country's future. that is the way people judge, i think, who they are going to

vote for for president, for governor, or for any other job, so if i ever run for anything again, i will be happy to be judged the same way a have been judged twice in new jersey. and if i get the same results, i would be pretty happy, so those questions do not bother me or matter to me at all. host: governor chris christie on the campaign trail for terry branstad and his be from davenport, iowa, available on our website. all of our programming at c-span.org. this is the headline this morning from the "washington post." in ukraine. down surface to air missile hits malaysian airlines jet, all 298 a border debt. aboard are kileld. led. caller: i have two comments in less than two minutes. the first is the tragedy in the malaysian flight. my question would be to those especially here in this country. what exactly was the united states' involvement in that?

my second is to a caller, who spoke about israel and gaza, you do not cut him off, so do not cut me off. the president in 1952, they do not want peace in israel. he said how did the israelis leave here black and they came back white? that is something for everyone to ponder on. thank you and have a nice day. host: bobby from virginia. this headline from the "washington times," as vladimir putin moves quickly to from thehe information crash. and president putin loomed over the catastrophe of the downed malaysian airliner jet as russian news agencies reported he was the first to inform president obama of the crash, and he quickly placed the blame on his adversaries in the ukrainian government. putin moving quickly to carve out a role for himself and his country, russia, as for its investigators to be granted access to the crash site.

and related, a gallup poll now showing vladimir putin has a high polis popularity rating among the russian people. joining us on the phone is heather conley, she is with the center for strategic and international studies, an expert in this region. thank you for being with us. guest: thank you. good morning full stop host. host: where does this put putin as the discussion gets underway in earnest today? guest: clearly right now russian media is trying to ensure that blame is focused elsewhere, putin has already put out statements saying that this whole condition was created because ukrainian military, sorry, ukrainian government had invoked violence on these pro-russian separatists in eastern ukraine. we really have to wait to see how this investigation pulled out.

the first order of business is trying to get professional investigators to the scene of the plane crash. we know the debris field stretches over miles and is in rebel held territory. when of the site has been somewhat compromise full stop we are not sure who has the black boxes, etc. right now, the organization for security and corporation in europe has been granted access to try to get to that site. we know other international investigators are going forward, but it is unclear yet when they will get to the site, and of course the integrity of the material and the investigation. so this is going to be a blame game over the next several days. ukrainian authorities are providing what they are saying our intelligence intercepts of cell phone communications between the pro-russian thatatists acknowledging they brought a jet down. i think there is some confusion -- would these separatists have the type of antiaircraft missiles to do this kind of

thing? lots of confusion, lots of deniability, but this is an unspeakable tragedy, and speaks when a conflict starts spiraling out-of-control, as this one has over the last few days and weeks. these types of consequences tragically happen, so hopefully all sides to this conflict will immediately de-escalate and begin to reduce not only the armed conflict but get back to the negotiating table. host: heather conley, as you mentioned, a cop located negotiation. how, teddy kennedy to figure out who filed a missile? -- how complicated can it be to figure out who fired a missile? these buk, it seems to me that they could pretty easily pinpoint who fired the shots. guest: i think again what we are localg, these are eyewitness accounts. no one is giving their names. again understanding the region inre the plane has fallen is

rebel hands. everyone is frightened. no one wants to give information. both sides are motivated politically. this is why it is so vital to get a transparent international it investigation to get those facts on the ground. it is unclear, again, but we are seeing where the separatists had bragged just over three weeks ago that they had overtaken a ukrainian military installation, which had these missiles, which thes believed to be antiaircraft missile that brought the aircraft down. so there is evidence again at this is a conflict area where we are not completely sure. in early days, it is pointing to the separatists that have taken over this ukrainian military installation. eyewitnesses again are telling us they saw sort of a rocket go up in the area, and then this extraordinary explosion in air,

but both sides are going to be furiously saying "we do not do it," and it will provide enough confusion to point to not concrete evidence that the separatists were the cause of the accident. host: heather conley who is the program director for the csis. i want to show you one of the tweets from british prime minister david cameron, who not only send out his condolences, but said whitehall, the british government, will be a part of this investigation. how will that receipt? how will you get an international investigation that deals with all the facts and try to resolve exactly how this happened? guest: right now they do not even have access. the early teams have been given permission to go in are still in government-controlled areas. they have not been given access to the actual site. had sent monitors into the conflict many weeks ago. they were taken hostage by rebels, so again, this is an

unsecured location right now where they are going. they do not know if they will encounter hostile forces, rebel forces. we have to make sure the investigators can safely go in and do their work. again, we already know, we are many, many hours into the crash investigation. we are seeing pictures of the rebel forces going and walking through the debris field. we do not even know how much information has already been compromised, so it is already a very difficult situation, but the more transparent and internationally-based we can make this, i think we can try to get to the truth here. our hearts go out to the families of the victims of this flight. we understand that in the netherlands today, flags are flying half-mast. over half of -- it is believed -- the folks on the aircraft were from the netherlands, so this is a massive, massive tragedy. it will be a wake-up call for our european colleagues, again,

taking another very strong stance against potentially moscow and trying to de-escalate the conflict, which i think hopefully will help us get to a resolution more quickly. host: very quickly, i want to get your comments from a european perspective and former british prime minister tony notr, a middle east envoy dealing with the situation in gaza and the "washington post" reporting that more than 200 palestinians so far have been killed as now is really troops move into the region. from the u.s. and the european standpoint, what can we do to end what is happening in the middle east? guest: yes, it was a nice ordinary day yesterday where we had simultaneously two extraordinary stories. up prior tos come the israeli incursion into gaza, had trip and trying to work toward getting the party back to table, to establish a cease-fire, which the israelis had agreed to. unfortunately, the cease-fire

was not respected by the palestinians. what we will be seeing his enormous amount of diplomatic activity to try to get the cease-fire. we know the egyptians are trying to play a role in brokering an immediate cease-fire. of course we have really seen an increase in european government sanctioning on products and things coming from israeli settlements. there is certainly a strong mood across european public opinion that is certainly supportive of the palestinians' rights and want to try to get this resolved. tony blair has been the key negotiator for the international group that has been trying to do this, but quite frankly have seen very little results. you will see the europeans having a helpful effort. he public mood obviously between the ukraine crisis and now this has darkened considerably, and it is unclear what role the

europeans will play, but they will support try to get a cease-fire back on the table. host: heather conley, who is the europe program director for csis, which is the center for strategic and international studies, thank you very much for adding your perspective this morning. guest: you are welcome. thank you. host: a related headline in the "washington post" -- u.s. urging restraint by israel in the region. senator john mccain on the situation in ukraine and russia have this tweet saying -- we still won't provide the ukrainian government with lethal weapons. ukraine says russia shut down a fighter jet. that from senator john mccain, who is part of a senate intelligence committee briefing yesterday on capitol hill. from georgia, donnie is on the phone. good morning. caller: good morning. i have a couple of quick comments. first of all, i want to say that i feel sorry for the victims of , and iaysian airline

will be praying for those families. i have family right now in turkey, and i do not feel safe to fly out and visit them. i just do not feel safe taking an international flight right now. i have really been nervous about it ever since 9/11, really. so i would like to visit my sister and her family, but i just don't feel safe to fly out to turkey, and that is my comment. host: reagan from lexington, south carolina, good morning. caller: good morning, and thank you for taking my call. i would like to pray for the people who have family members on the plane, and just making a quick comment on the whole thing with investigation of the plane crash. if russia truly was not involved with this here, why was there forces not put on alert immediately after a missile was fired so close to their border? i mean, we have technology right now when there is a missile that is fired, the flash goes off and the technology tells you exactly where it is. i mean, the investigation as far as i'm concerned is done. now it is a matter of covering

it up. ando not want to look weak, have the administration right now to tell us the truth, you know, what they find because they will say well, if we find something, then we are expected to do something, and since we really can't do anything, we are just going to say we do not know who did it. host: ok, thank you for the call. the "london telegraph" has a story -- air operators around the world last night imposing a no-fly zone over ukraine as questions grew over why passenger jets were still flying over the war zone three months after pilots were warned to avoid it. flights were urgently rerouted around the region, potentially putting hours on to be scheduled journey and causing some delays. however, aviation safety theorities in europe and u.s. warning pilots back in april by the potential risk of flying in or near the ukrainian airspace. in "the telegraph" quotes norman shane saying -- malaysian

airlines, like a number of other carriers, have been continuing to use this route because it is a shorter route, which means less fuel, and therefore less money. back to your calls. charles from ann arbor, michigan. good morning. caller: good morning. i would like to make a comment about israel. we all see that israel has a right to defend itself and of course it does, but i would like to pose a hypothetical -- how would we in the u.s. feel if i'm , for example, the canadians begin to build a settlement in minnesota, and suppose the u.s. was too weak to defend itself, and the settlements kept growing and growing and growing? how would we feel? what would we do? just ask yourself if that situation occurred, how would you as a minnesotan or american react to it? host: another call.

mentionedll martin the phrase observable reality, and i think we can apply that. no reason tove shoot down the plane, so it had to be pro-russian missiles, and it will never admit to it even after the investigation is complete. they will say they are not responsible, so that is one reality. the other one is that innocent .eople in gaza are being killed children and the elderly, ok. so i do not know what benefit israel is getting out of killing innocent people. that is the observable reality. if we have a situation in the mall or somebody withholding 200 people hostage, do you want to kill the hostages and say they are being used as human shields? that is not how we apply that logic to the situation. it is appalling. host: rob from kansas, thank you for the call.

our phone lines are open. (202) 585-3880 and (202) 585-3881. we also have a line for those watching outside of the united states. we welcome your calls and comment on the investigation into the malaysian airline jet crash. this morning, the "new york times" has a look at the flight path as the plane took off from amsterdam and that was making its way to kuala lumpur and made its way across ukraine and then was struck down in eastern ukraine just about 35 miles from the russian border. it's morning, front page of the "wall street journal" says -- the u.s. says a missile downed that jeff was about one to about two comments from russian president vladimir putin. tragedy wouldthis not have happened if there had been peace in the territory, if the military actions had not been restarted in southern ukraine. the disaster comes of a new trauma for malaysian airlines. the carrier already at the center of a global mystery of

the disappearance back in march. and one of its flight, another boeing 777, that went missing en route from kuala lumpur to beijing." coming up at the top of the hour, we will turn our attention to the budget deficit and new reports from the cbo, the congressional budget office. later, 45 years ago this sunday, a historic moment as neil armstrong set his foot on the moon, and we will get the perspective from nasa. also, miles o'brien will be joining us to take your calls and reflect on where nasa was 45 years ago and what is next. first, lou is joining us, illinois, good morning. morning.ood my comment is that technology is getting way out of hand. the people and the corporations who develop technology, especially those that are used in warfare, have andse much more morality many more safeguards in order to safeguard the world.

i don't know where this is going, but if one person can bring down an airline from hiding behind the tree using sophisticated weapons, it seems to me the whole world could be in danger. host: ok, thank you for the call. joe has this point on our twitter page -- there is nothing wrong with its flight path. what authority cleared them to diverge to that area? robert from pennsylvania. good morning. caller: yes, sir. isn't it obvious that the russians know if their agents are causing a problem, shot down the airplane, and whether it was a mistake or not, they killed a lot of people, and they have caused a lot of pain. i just can't believe some of the callers, the comments about israel protecting itself and

where they get their information from. host: ok, thank you for the call. the "l.a. times" reporting on a prominent researcher, among those on that plane. he was en route to the 20th international aids conference scheduled to take place in melbourne, austria. again, no report so far of any americans onboard that plane. there had been some initial reports that as many as 23 americans were on the plane. they are still going through the flight manifest to get information on that. let's go to jane next from indiana. good morning. caller: good morning. i'm upset. my husband just died. 30 years military. we have cut the military back. what are we going to do to defend the united states? that is my comment. host: ok, we go to.gov a baton rouge, louisiana. good morning. caller: good morning.

the malaysian airline deal, what is happening in iraq, se yria -- i thought it was just this country going to hell in a handbasket, but it seems the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket. we need strong leadership from somewhere, not just russia. we need strong leadership in several different places, and real quick, a comment on the israeli situation. why is it that countries like jordan, saudi arabia, and all have many, many hundreds of thousands of acres. why don't they give their area to the palestinians? i will tell you why they want. and i like the palestinians, they don't trust them, and they are kind of like gypsies were a few years ago -- nobody wants them, not even their brothers,

so do not criticize israel. criticize the other arab countries. that is where the problem is. host: ok, thank you for the call. the "washington post" has another look at that buk surface-to-air missile. and slate has another story online at slate.com -- how hard is it to shoot down a passenger plane? more details on the technology that its use. you can see there are three or four missiles on board that buk carrier thatnsport is located along the border of andrussian-ukraine border, the story from slate.com. some other headlines from the "boston globe" -- the russian-made missile, this is the headline from the "richmond times dispatch," the u.s. downing that missile jet. and from the "houston chronicle," another scene from the russian border. another caller from kentucky.

welcome to the program. caller: i would like to make a comment about the plane being shot down. host: go ahead, please. caller: well, i want to tell you, we are weaker than we ever was in our life, and it is nobody's fault but obama and the democrats. and i am a democrat, but i will never vote on a democrat ticket again. o.e republicans are weak, to obama even made a deal when he first got in with putin on their missiles, destroying them, and i guess he feels big about doing that. , nowe are sitting here missile defense or nothing else. this country could not work cuba right now the way he is doing. is joining uste

from new jersey. he headline from the "new jersey star-ledger" -- who is to blame? good morning, bernadette. caller: good morning, steve. i'm just talking about how weak we look in the world and how weak president obama has made us. he was at another fundraiser last night when he should've been on tv talking to the american people about the two crises, malaysian airlines and also in israel. new york foring to one more fundraiser. thank you. host: actually two fundraisers in new york city for the headline from the "chicago tribune lowe's quote -- israel since forces into gaza. hamas tunnels are a target in a new phase of conflict that so far has killed more than 220. greg is joining us from illinois outside of chicago. good morning. good morning. how is everybody? host: good. caller: good. it is interesting to see who benefits from this and it is

interesting to see that the media starts blaming russia right away. i find it very interesting about who is really going to make the most political hay out of this. host: so who do you think is responsible? caller: my gut with all of the lying that has been going on in washington, we have our own state department that lies to us all the time, and i would not be surprised if we destabilized a democratically elected ukraine, that we did not have our hands and is in one way or the other. host: ok. we go to sheila next in new york, good morning. caller: good morning full stop i have been listening to the some of the i found comments about israel a little upsetting. commentsen't so many about us killing so many innocent people in iraq and afghanistan. not that we wanted to, but that

is what happens in war. and the israelis protect their .eople would these people feel better if more israelis were killed? and as far as proportionality, what was the proportionality about giving up so many palestinians, hamas people who were jailed for one israeli? that is kind of the proportionality. host: ok, from new york. again, the story this morning. i read an excerpt earlier in the hour, but the front page of the "new york times" and the headline -- fallen bodies, jet parts, and a child's pink book. a descriptive detail on what it is like in the ground in eastern

ukraine as the bodies and debris strewn over several miles and a first-hand account of what it looks like if you want to check out. it is available online at nytimes.com. and there is this headline from morning york times," over down malaysia plan, and questions over its root. mary is on the line. caller: good morning. much moneynow how i the president raise in new york city last night in the fundraisers because i know it is so important not to have that money and those democratic party coffers. have youbout coffers, noticed how sensitive our president is when people are tragically slain? he is as sensitive as dick cheney is old heart.

that is how cold he is. we should be able to come forth and give some words of the slayings,ut and believe you me, to the anti-semites -- the israelis will never take another train ride. they will go down fighting. the: mary, thank you for call from michigan. the president is back at the white house today. he did have very brief comments yesterday in wilmington, delaware and went on with his regular schedule for sake was speaking on transportation issues and attending to fundraisers in new york before arriving at the white house late last night. brian and sorting us from michigan. good morning. caller: good morning. i was kind of concerned about -- i thought the banner said we were going to have a discussion chechene israeli -- the separatists or the russian separatists -- host: and we are. caller: i hear people talking

about something else about israel. what i would like to say is i do not think the united states looks weak. widee in the middle of diplomatic changes in this world , and it is because of the situation economically. it has got a lot to do with that. if we get that settled, things will be better. host: ok, thank you for the call. you are looking at some of the photographs courtesy of the "new york daily news." they have posted 40 new pictures overnight, including the scene and kuala lumpur as family members mourned the loss of their loved ones. you can see the investigation into what happened in eastern ukraine. as the debris from malaysian airlines flight 17 now strewn over several miles and body parts also there as part of the investigation. it leaves is joining us from fredericksburg, pennsylvania. the morning.

welcome to the program. caller: hello. i think we should just wait and see because the way you stir things up and the way the media stirs income, and i also think most americans need to really study world war i. it is kind of interesting that this is 100 years later, the start of world war i, i have not seen anything on television about how that all began, how would all progressed, and i have not heard anything about the harsh penalties that were placed on germany because they were an economic powerhouse. all of these things lead up to world war i. host: louise from frederick three, virginia. the crash could alter the equation on stations in russia. the u.s. had just ratcheted up the pressure on russia with new sanctions not 24 hours before. the president facing a potentially volatile situation in ukraine with the downing of the malaysian jetliner.

officials wary of jumping to conclusions. our last call is from california. don, good morning. caller: good morning. thanks to c-span again. i do not know why you all are always reporting all of this old stuff, and then everybody gets to blaming obama for everything. this does not have anything to do with obama. i mean, this ain't got nothing to do with the bible and the last days. you all white folks done took whiteble and made supremacy out of a calling jesus christ a white man, and he is black, and you guys are just messing up everything. everything is coming into fruition. everybody seeing that you guys, you white you white folks ain't nothing but a bunch of white supremacist , obama, everybody hate

him, and he ain't even black. the richmond times dispatch with headlines on eastern ukraine. still no word whether we will hear from the president, but we do know that at 10:00 eastern time, u.s. security council holding an emergency meeting. we will have live coverage of the proceedings here on c-span. coming up in just a moment, maya .acguineas will be joining us she is with the committee for a responsible federal budget. and later, charles bolden will be joining us as we look back 40's years ago -- 45 years ago as we first set foot on the moon. we are back in a moment. ♪ >> july 20 marks the 40th

anniversary of the first lunar landing. veteran correspondent jay barberie on the life of the first man to walk on the moon, neil armstrong. saturday at 10 p.m. eastern on booktv. >> we are here at salisbury house in des moines, iowa. it is a home that was built by karl and needed tweaks in the 1920's. variedeks was a man of interests. one of the most notable of -- notable legacies of his interests are the collection that both he and edith amassed, in terms of sculptures, art of rare collection first edition works, medieval manuscripts. it's incredible. carl weeks collected the books he collected not only because they are important historical works, but also because he

believed that books themselves had aorks of art and worse beyond the words on the page. he collected almost every grass" byf "leaves of walt whitman. it changed over time and within added columns, but for carl, it he added:'s,f -- but for perl, and was the art of collecting. he also had the first edition of hemingway's work. this is "green hills of africa," in 1935.way, published it is interesting because it demonstrates the relationship between carl weeks and herman hemingway. in this inscription, "to carl weeks him instead of a drink of and yes, with very best wishes. sincerely, ernest hemingway." exploring life

in des moines, iowa. >> "washington journal" continues. host: we want to turn our attention to the growing budget deficit. joining us here is maya macguineas with the committee for the responsible federal budget will stop in regard to -- responsible federal budget. year,ard to the coming the cbo directed us this past week. guest: right, the congressional budget office came out with its long-term projections. these are important, because they show is not what to expect if we are just in this decade, which is how we look at the budget as far as 10 years numbers, but in a long term which is not good. it is not a surprise, but is a useful reminder that the deficit has been coming down in the short term. in some ways, that is good. in some ways, that is bad. the short-term improvements stand in the way of a stronger

economic recovery. you kind of worry about the fact that you don't want deficit reduction to come too fast. you want the economy to be able to regain its footing and get on top of the medium and longer-term projections. not doingnse, we are very badly. our debt is already at postwar historically high levels. and projected to grow at unsustainable levels. there are a lot of warnings in this report. host: let's put this in terms of numbers. from the cbo and your own organization, the overall debt is about 73% of the gdp and by 2025, 80% of the gdp, exceeding the size of the entire u.s. economy by the 20 30's, and doubling the entire gdp after 2080. see,: right, as you can the debt is growing faster than other parts of the budget, faster than the economy, growing as a share of the economy. and that is basically the definition of something that is unsustainable will stop it is growing faster than the whole economy.

underlying factors are also unlikely to change. a big piece of this is the aging population. there is no trick there. we are going to be getting older, and that is a good thing that people are living longer, but it has a negative effect on a lot of parts of our budget that we have not adapted to and made changes to to figure out how to deal with the aging population. another piece of this debt growth is interest payments. ourstest growing part of budget is interests. to me, that's huge waste. that is where you are throwing money away. it is not on investment or important priorities for the country. it is just paying interest because we have been unwilling to pay for our debts in the past. there is a clear warning that the long-term is unsustainable. changes will have to be made. the real question is, how do we get a political system that is intent on ignoring these problems to own up to them and start working on these issues? is noularly because there impending crisis. it is not as if something terrible will happen this year

if we do not make changes. that allows politicians to kind of sweep it under the carpet to try to avoid grappling with these issues. important, issues like social security, medicare, things that people depend on. it is important that you start making no stringent -- those changes sooner rather than later. people have enough understanding of what is going on. then you can protect people who depend on the program. but delaying those changes will do a lot of damage. a gallup poll came out recently that only six percent of the american people are worried about the debt. and the president continues to say we are bringing down year-to-year debt. it has been brought down and have since i took office in 2009, he says. guest: that is a lot of the reason people are not worried about the situation. in the past couple of years, it was on the forefront of the national agenda. people knew it was an issue.

we had government shutdowns. we all must have defaults. we were doing a lot of things in washington focused on the deficit and debt. not a lot of productive things and we did not make as much progress as we should have, but recently the president has been talking about how we have cut the deficit in half. what he is not talking about is that the deficit is still very high and projected to grow way over the long term in a way that will cause it to grow it in -- at an unsustainable rate. the president is talking about with the deficit having come down, i would argue that is not really what is important, and could be bad for the economy. you do not want to reduce the deficit too much in the short run. what he, and we, and the country should be focusing on is that if you look at the projections going forward, we have made promises in programs that we do not have a way to make good on. we have borrowed so much that are interest rates are -- interest payments are growing and our unsustainable. we do not have a plan. and i would say,

you do not even need to get to a balance. just get to where the debt is not growing faster than the economy. no question, we do not have a plan to do that. focusing on this year and saying we do not have a problem takes away from where attention should be, which is that we need to make changes, and hopefully gradual changes to get control of this out-of-control debt. host: our guest is maya macguineas, who is a member of the steering committee for the fix the debt campaign, and the presidential committee for a responsible budget. is testimony from wednesday, a warning about the growing debt. [video clip] debt held by the public would also start to rise again more rapidly than gdp. and because such debt is now larger relative to gdp than at any point in u.s. history, except for a brief time around world war ii, further increases

in the long-term could be especially harmful. 25 years from now and 2039, federal debt held by the public would exceed 100% of the gdp, we and the economy could not be sustained con -- in definitely. host: again, that warning is from the congressional budget office to rector. -- do we get there yet shall congressional budget office director. how do we get there? guest: i would say it's going to be a lot of hard choices and people would have to understand there are many hard choices. i would suggest people read the cbo report. they put out really good, impartial work. laying out the numbers is a real awakening of why it is important. the second is you cannot fix his problem on spending cuts alone for more tax cuts on the wealthy alone. none of those are going to fix

the overall problem. this is a situation where we have to put the entire budget on the table, all areas of the budget, and do a real scouring of what changes we can make. the fastest-growing programs, other than interest them are those that relate to the aging of the population and our health care programs. to begin settlement programs -- social security, medicare, and medicaid -- need to be addressed. in 2030, the social security trust fund and the medicare part a trust fund will be running out of deserves. -- out of reserves. we do not want to get close to that. we need to look at how we adjust them to do needs testing, which is reducing benefits for higher the retirementd age, raise the payroll contributions. i am in the camp that you have to do a little bit of everything to get to a sensible fix. that is true for the entitled -- entire budget. entitlementlook at programs. discretionary spending, which is where a lot of public

investments are, has been hit in recent years because we have have the sequester, the across-the-board spending cuts that have hit. many people would say we need to make more public investment. i think there is a strong case for that, but we need to find a way to pay for them. right now, you have tons of good ideas on how to make investments, but no real plan. do have to look at revenues. you cannot fix the budget on the spending side alone, either from a policy side or a political perspective. you have to republicans and democrat coming up with something they can agree to, but it needs it will be revenues and pending. but when you look at revenues, the important thing is to look at how to reform the tax code. it is a disaster. it is filled with tax breaks on both individual and corporate side. lots of things are inefficient, and and do not work. over another group as far as winners and losers. there is over a trillion dollars

in revenues in the tax code. if you get rid of those tax breaks, there is space to bring down those rate in a way that will grow the economy and raise revenues for the federal government. there are smart ways that you can inform entitlement spending. perhaps, through new public investment and get revenues from tax reform. you could get a great 10 year budget plan that would not make too many changes in the short run. again, we need to make space for the economy to recover, but we have to bring the debt down so it is not growing faster than the economy. and asked a white all matters, this is not to fix the debt for itself. -- and as to why it all matters, this is not to fix the debt for itself. this is to grow in a sustainable way so we have an economy that is once again making investments, creating jobs. this is part of an economic recovery package, growing the overall economy. we are doing better in this country. right now, wages have stagnated. there are not enough jobs.

a lot of people are hurting in the middle class and being squeezed in a terrible way. you need to make this debt plan part of that overall economic plan to address these big economic challenges that the country has right now. to ask about how congress gets all of that done in light of what they have or have not done. they cannot even work on the immigration supplemental. that is unlikely to happen before the august recess. calling from new york. welcome to the conversation. caller: good morning. i have not heard you say anything about the military spending in this country. -- do youow how much know how much to this date, and are there projected numbers of how much we will spend in iraq? do you think that has anything to do with the budget or the deficit or anything like that? i'm getting off the phone, thank you. for your question. absolutely. the cost of the two wars over the past decade exceed well over a trillion dollars. and if you at all the related costs, far more.

and in partly, we did not pay for them. this is the first time in this country's history we did -- we were in gauged in wars where we did not make any attempt to pay for the cost. that contributed significantly to the growth of the budget deficit over the past decade. the deficit, just to take a step , came from a number of things. the two wars that we did not pay for. the very large tax cuts that we had under president bush that we did not offset the cost for. new spending, such as things like the prescription drug program and growth under discretionary spending. and more importantly, we have a terrible economic crisis in 2008, the downturn affects the deficit dramatically because you are spending more and revenues are coming in lower. reengaged in a lot of stimulus to try to help offset the contraction in the economy. the two wars were a significant contributed there. plan is tord, the have a major drawdown in the

cost of those overseas engagement. it will not contribute, barring other activities. and i would say for anyone who watched the previous hour of the show, it is a very sobering time right now. we are reminded today of all of the terrible risks there are around the world, so one can never assume there will not be other overseas operations. but right now, with what we are engaged in, we are assuming there will be a drawdown. but -- so the current projections of debt do not estimate to be spending nearly as much as we have in the past. part of the reason you want to get a handle on your deficit and debt is because emergencies arise. ,nd whether they are military natural disasters, or economic, you need to have a budget that has room in it, so you can run deficits when you have to borrow for a national emergency or to help deal with a contracting economy otherwise. when we walked into the economic crisis in 2008, we had debt levels that were half what we have now. that allowed us to bar a lot.

and there is a lot of disagreement about whether borrowing was the right thing to do, but i would argue is critical from keeping the economy from getting worse, being able to have applicability. to have that fiscal flexibility. and when we come into the next recession, which is -- which we will, with our debt twice of what used to be, we do not have the same flexibly. we have used the tools and toolbox. than what youent said about the military, and you make a good point. that certainly contributed to the deficit where we were. going forward, we do not know what our military costs may or may not be. but we are not in a good position to handle additional costs as they come to us, those that are unexpected. host: our guest is maya macguineas, a graduate of harvard, and the president of the committee for a responsible budget. you can go to the u.s.

see where youto are. how many zeros? guest: [laughter] host: let's go to muriel in brookfield, oregon. caller: hello. i would like to know -- when i had alone, the bank would tell me, put it toward your loan, not the interest. putting it toward your loan brings down the interest. you keep paying the interest, it will never go down. -- and first of all, why are we giving other countries money and they are not giving us any money? thesey don't we put immigrants coming down in detroit and chicago. believe me, they will go running home because it's just as bad. i would like an answer to the loan problem, though, thank you. host: ok, foreign aid. guest: i will focus first on

your question about interest payments. if you are talking about -- i don't know if you have a mortgage, but my guess is that you do. payments on the loan rather than the interest helps people pay off the mortgage. but with the federal government, most people would say it has a lot of power to borrow. and most people would say that the thing that makes sense is for the u.s. government to borrow money when the economy is debt and to pay down that including some of the principal when the economy is strong. you run budget deficits when your economy is weak and budget surpluses when it is strong. that is why i do not think we need to balance the budget every year. it is a nice, elegant thing to be able to understand that we pay for everything that we spend every year. but for the federal government, it makes sense to even out over a business cycle, which is usually 10 years. most economists and policy experts on both sides of the

aisle would say that what the u.s. government should shoot for is a balance budget over the business cycle. the economy is weak, and in that surplus when you are taking in more, you pay down some of your principal and bring the debt down a little bit. is, the u.s. debt is going to be growing whenever we have deficits. and it is growing most of the time, but not necessarily troubling. what is troubling is when it is growing faster than the economy. this is not even a high standard here. it is not come i owe, you have to -- it is not, o, you have to pay more than you are spending every year. right now, the vast majority of our budget goes to consumption items, not investment items. but if it was the rivers and we were investing in infrastructure to my research, education, things that had high payoff, you could make an argument that we could be borrowing more. the problem is, we are borrowing

money for consumption programs. we are borrowing money that we have no ability or plan to pay back, and we are borrowing money in both good times and bad times. hy are we doing this? because nobody really wants to pay the bills. about existing programs or new priorities, politicians -- and this is both parties -- love to come up with things that we ought to do and do not want to pay for it. we, the voters, need to do a better job of holding them accountable. if you're going to cut my taxes, what spending will you cut to offset that? newou're going to create a spending program, how will he pay for that? -- how are we going to pay for breaks and tax subsidies. a comment from jodi on our twitter page. and from the congressional budget office, to go back to your earlier point about where spending is going, spending on

entitlement programs including social security, on track to rise 14% of the gdp, double the historical average of seven percent. medicare, medicaid, and other health-care programs are projected to pursue past -- to surpass social security expenses next year and equally percent of gdp in 2039, far above the current rate of just under five percent. brassica -- from omaha, nebraska, next with maya macguineas. caller: good morning. say that the federal government borrows money. it creates money. there is a modern monetary --ory, and worn most other war and most learned has a book called seven indemnity fraud. most money -- most people do not know how money is created. one thing is, you could simply

put a transaction tax on wall street. that would bring in $160 billion. currently, they pay nothing. when i buy a stick of gum, i pay a nickel tax on it. wall street pays nothing. one thing you could do also is stop offshore tax havens. allow the government to negotiate medical costs and drug tops -- and drug costs. host: this goes to your earlier thought about tax reform. colorsi appreciate the ideas. those are the exact things that we need to be talking about. there's a transaction tax that has gotten a lot of attention recently because of the financial crisis, and other european countries are looking at where you attacks a very small amount for every transaction that takes place. you could raise a tremendous amount of money. the downside is that it could slow down the liquidity of our financial markets.

i think it will get a lot more attention in the future. and the specific idea of negotiating drug prices, that is something that comes up generally as part of medicare reform. there is potentially a good deal of cost savings to be gained there. there is trade-off with every policy. you need to look at what effect that has on the innovation of the pharmaceutical interest rate -- pharmaceutical industry here. very serious policy idea, which has been included in most of the health-care reforms to one extent or another. and yes, the overall transaction tax is another piece. is probably the most important thing that is going to move in the near term. i think the most important thing to think about to fix the fiscal problem is entitlement reform. the most important thing to help with that, and also helpful -- hopefully help to spur the important.at is right now, we have a global

economy and we are playing on a very different feel than we have in the past. our tax code is incredibly outdated. i look at the individual side and there's a tremendous amount of reform we could do there in terms of consolidating and reforming the tax breaks that exist. but on the corporate side, where there is actually some interest from both the white house and members of congress, that may be the first step to it. you should look at individual tax reform and corporate tax reform together. senatorntly, you had baucus, who is now the ambassador to china, but was the head of the senate finance committee, and chairman camp, come up with very serious tax proposals, which were taken very seriously on both sides of the aisle. the white house has also made some suggestions for corporate tax reform, not individual, but i think they should be done together, particularly because so many small businesses are affected on the individual side, not the corporate side. you would want to do this comprehensively. but there is also this idea of a

model of tax breaks and bringing down the rates. there are some differences on whether it should raise revenue or not, but there is a general belief that these changes would help grow the economy and generate some revenues no matter what, by the economic growth. i think we should go farther and raise a significant amount of revenues if we are doing it with a hole big budget deal, which we should. but then the caller is also talking about other taxes out there we could talk about. there is a transaction tax, a carbon tax, which is something this country should be considering. just looking at the gas tax consumption that is going on with the highway trust fund, what we would do with that. there are always questions about whether we should be moving our income tax system to more of a consumption tax system. there are so many things we should be doing on tax reform, frankly, because our current tax system is so bad. there are tons of loopholes, and as the person who e-mailed in 20 doubt, many of them are industry specific and the opposite of what we have -- want to have,

which is a level playing field and one that promotes competition. tax reform should be an area where we should be able to come together, say there is a problem that needs to be worker on, -- worked on, and work on some solutions. those tax break are very highly regarded by the companies that like them. there are lobbyists that can make quite a career protecting them. but if people can understand that specific tax breaks that are small and targeted cost a lot of money, and are willing to trade them for improvement in overall rate, we could do a lot of good for the economy and the budget by raising revenues. maybe -- will or the political climate be different in 2015 to tackle these issues? guest: i would like to be optimistic. maybe it's my optimistic answer. we can exaggerate how broken the clinical system

is right now. this is a system where, friendly, we looked at what we -- what was going to happen and was could we were not going to be able to do the a digital i was talking about, the 10 years -- we were not going to be able to do the budget deal i was talking about, the 10 years. we look at this and said, maybe this way we will do no harm, maybe we will not make the deficit worse. how wrong that has been. if you look at every idea that has come upon the hill right now , whether it was fixing medicare, tax extenders, creating new benefits, nobody wants to pay for this in a and honest way. even on the highway trust fund, we are talking about using a huge budget gimmick, called pensions moving, which allows companies to put less money into their pensions in the short term, which leaves them with higher tax bills. they collect more money for the government, but in the long-term, they have to put that money back into the pension systems, so that will take away money coming into the federal

government. but it also leaves the pension systems underfunded and at risk of having to come to the pgb see gbc, which would have to pay for them. this is the kind of thing that we see over and over again, because people do not want to pay for the policies they are talking about. there is such a lack of real will to make hard choices on the budget, and honest choices on the budget. symbolic, orust reflective of what is going on at large in congress. fiscal is just one of the problems. but the overall economy and throughout the country, members not trying toe solve these problems right now. polarization and partisanship have frozen the system. i'm very worried. i think a lot of your listeners are worried, to, that we are not in a space lyrically to address

these challenges -- in a space politically to address these challenges. host: another point from one of our viewers. revenue is not the problem. please get a clue. we have a bloated government. the growing gap between the money the government spends and , at the growth of aging population, rising health-care costs, and the expansion of federal subsidies for health insurance. these are all reasons why the nation's debt is increasing. another call from linda. caller: i want to walk -- talk about the food stamp program, obamacare, and social security. all of these programs are therefore the poor. will we be able to sustain these going forward? guest: that is a great question. we need to be able to put those programs so they are sustainable. we understand what promises we

are making and how they need to be cap. clearly, we have the capacity to, but they cost money. we have to be willing to pay for those programs and make good on the promises. i would say, on social security, there is no way we are going to be able to make good on all the promises we've made. there will have to be changes to the whole program, both by putting more money into the system, but also by probably scaling back benefits, i think, for the well-off. very wealthy the get money from social security, too. and there is some space to adjust those levels. obamacare, we will see how much the cost controls on health care are able to save money. we've made some progress there in the past years, and that is the good news. the question is whether that obese is things going forward. there are many questions about health care. and food stamps, there is certainly the money to pay for the program. the question is whether we're going to and whether we will fund that as one of our priorities.

if we go back to budgeting where we lay out our national priorities and a plan to pay for those programs, that gives a lot of security. i think the main cop -- the main question from the caller is to my fairy scary to be out there and not know what you can depend on, what promises -- from the collar is, it is very scary to be out there and on the web promises you can depend on. it is important for people to know what they can rip -- what they can depend on from social security and medicare when they retire. it is important to have sustainable programs so people can plan accordingly. if people want to follow you on twitter, how can they do so? guest: that is a great question. onm at -- @maya macguineas twitter. i have multiple twitter handles. and you can go to the

responsible -- the committee for responsible federal budget. host: thank you for joining us. we will is turn our attention to 45 years ago. you areemember, -- if alive, you are member where you were when we first stepped foot on the moon. we will talk to perl's, nasa weinistrator and veteran -- will talk to charles bolden, nasa administrator, and veteran milesadministrator o'brien. we will be back in a moment. was thequincy adams second adam's to be elected to the white house. he was the second northerner to be elected to the white house. he was only one of two

anti-slavery president to be elected to the white house. he was deeply feared by the .outh they worried that his vision of a unified country in which the federal government and the in as were partners relationship that enabled the federal government to play the leading role in binding the country together through infrastructure projects, through supporting manufacture and so on, he was deeply suspected by the southern states that thought he wanted to much power for the federal government. but fred kaplan on the life of our six president, john quincy at 8:00 p.m. night eastern and pacific on c-span's q&a. >> 40 years ago, the watergate scandal led to the only

resignation of an american president. throughout this month in august, american history tv revisits 1974 and the final weeks of the nixon administration post up this weekend, opening statements the house judiciary committee as members consider articles of impeachment against president nixon. >> selection of the president occupies a very unique position in the operation of our system. excepted, the occupant of that office stands as a symbol of our national unity and commitment. it is the judgment that if that , then is to be replaced it must be for substantial and not trivial offenses, supported by facts and not surmise. >> watergate, 40 years later, sunday night at 8:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span3.

>> "washington journal can tenuous -- "washington journal" continues. >> armstrong is on the move. neil armstrong. american history tv, that iconic moment 45 years ago. the actual anniversary is sunday. neil armstrong setting foot on the moon, july, 1969. joining us in washington, charles bolden, nasa administrator. thank you for being with us. guest: so good to be with you. host: as you look back on this iconic moment in american history, what is your reflection? guest: my reflection is one of pride. i did not think i would ever be associated with the space program as i watched it from the officers quarters at the meridian naval air station. but i was thrilled, i was excited, motivated, and

inspired. and i feel the same way today as the agency is turning toward moving beyond the steps on the moon to putting humans on mars. i feel really excited about that mission as an agency. host: that leads to my next question. how likely is that and when? guest: it is very likely. we need the national will, and we are working on trying to inspire that. we have a president who has told us to do that, so that is really good. on tax day, april 15, 2010. and we have a congress that is also in agreement with that horizon destination. the 20 30's seem like the time we will do it. we still have some challenges, but i think we will make it. host: do you have the support of congress and this administration to move ahead on these projects? guest: we actually do. the goal of putting humans on mars -- i will have to take people back. on april 15, 2010, at the kennedy space center, the

president made what i consider to be a major pays -- spacex polity -- space policy speech. wantsd by the 20 30's, he us to have humans on mars, with the intent of landing and staying there. the congress has adopted that same thing. it was reinforced in the appropriate -- the authorization act of 2010. we are following the joint will of the congress and the administration, the president. ont: i want you to reflect what john f. kennedy said in september, 1962 at rice university as he set forth the agenda that culminated in the landing on the moon in july, 1969. [video clip] say, the moon? why choose this as our goalie echo they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? why, 35 years ago, fly the atlantic? we choose to go to the moon.

[applause] we choose to go to the moon. [applause] we choose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one that we are unwilling to postpone, and one that we can win, and the others, too. bolden, 1962, i know you are familiar with that speech. guest: very familiar. host: from the mercury program to the space shuttle program, really specific goals put forward by the president. do we have that now, that sense of enthusiasm for the space program? guest: i think we do from the president and from the congress,

and a large portion of the merit in public. listening, i was envisioning john kennedy coming back to earth and delivering that speech from the lincoln memorial, or even the naval academy -- since i'm associated with the naval academy -- and give a similar speech today. people say that about the moon and i would say that about mars. thing,d say the same because it is hard, and because we know we can do it. were able to if we transport him here somehow, he would make a similar speech, but the destinations would be asteroids on the way to mars, with the ultimate verizon destination being mars. this week,ars ago the apollo 11 launch took place, july, 1960 nine, and of course, with the landing on the moon on july 20, and returning to earth on july 24.

the total mission lasted 195 hours 18 minutes. the total time on the lunar surface, 21 hours, 38 minutes. let me turn to miles o'brien with a question for charles bolden. guest: good to have you here on this important anniversary. we often talk about nasa, about we need to have these concrete goals and deadlines that were set by president kennedy. i often think in the context of the times, obviously the cold war and this was a proxy cold war effort, and frankly, in the context that you had a martyred all of thethat sequences lined up to make that link -- to make that move landing happened within the decade, as he predicted. that imperative does not exist, that kind of time imperative. how much does that hinder the effort to focus energies, as

kennedy said in that speech? guest: i would push back a little bit. i think the time imperative does exist. we are not in a cold war, but nations do not want to go to -- go back to the moon. they want to go to the moon, because no one else has ever done that except for the united states of america. our international partners are telling us they want to go to mars also, and they want to go with us. the time is now, or we will miss the opportunity to lead the nations of the world on a venture that is unprecedented, that is challenging, and very difficult to do, for which we are not fully prepared yet. that is what the president has told us to do, develop the technologies to go there, figure out how to make humans survive the eight-month trip to mars, and a three-year round-trip. significantly more than going to the moon. i think we could go to the moon today if we wanted to. that is not hard. that is not a challenge for us. this nation is a great nation, and we need to be off to do what

the president and congress have told us to do, which is get humans to mars in the 20 30's. you've been told to do is good. and those of us who love space, we want to be on mars yesterday. we know that. and i've seen you and some of your senior people lay out the plan, which i think makes a lot of good sense. because it's not just about us print and putting footprints down and flags, but about building an architecture. the thomas like building an interstate instant -- in space, if you will. -- it is almost like building an interstate in space, if you will. is arankly, what i see lack of driving with the ongoing budget commitments. the river has got to hit the road. i see what you're saying, but i am an internal optimist, and i look for little steps. if you look at the proposed appropriations in the congress

for 2015, which they were ready to pass, and then we reached an impasse in the senate and it did not come up for a vote. but at that time, it had reached the president -- reached and exceeded the president's request by almost a billion dollars. i tell our nasa employees we've got to be able to tell people what we are going to do, do it, and then go back in and tell people, ok, the next at this this. is what we are trying to do. we are trying to take incremental steps to mars, and we can do it. this is part of our real america program, the chance to watch a nasa documentary on the moon landing 45 years ago on american history tv. before we go, i want to show you a preview. [video clip] ex 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 -- >> 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, zero, all engines

running. we have liftoff. light --e drifting to write a little. -- drifting to the right a little. ok, engine stopped. xd glad landed. >> we copy you on the ground. -- >> the eagle has landed. >> we copy you on the ground. >> [laughter] moon.ong is on the a 38-year-old american standing on the surface of the moon on this july 20, 1969. ,> it's one small step for man one giant leap for mankind. >> that looks beautiful. charles bolden, as you look back on that moment, where were you 45 years ago? guest: my wife and i had just come back from a weekend of

revelry in new orleans. i was a student at basic jet training in a radiant, mississippi, and we were gathered around a black-and-white tv with some other students and their spouses watching. listen to that recording, we have had another apollo 11 moment in this nation to august ago when curiosity landed on mars. people around the world were glued to tv. people in time square by the thousands watching on the big screen as we got the reports of curiosity landing on mars. that was a precursor to humans landing on the planet. to trivialize neil armstrong's a compliment, but i think neil would have been proud of us to see that we had taken another small step beyond what he did on the moon in putting a vehicle, a car sized vehicle, on the surface of mars in the way that we did so precisely and successfully. the next big thing for us is

another bar -- another mars rover in 2020, a precursor robotic missions that will lead to humans eventually stepping foot on mars. host: a veteran of the space shuttle program and a former marine corps lieutenant graduate , charles borden -- charles bolden. thank you for being with us. guest: thank you. host: and we continue with miles o'brien. why is this so important? guest: it is important because as i was watching a moment, i got misty. i was thinking about where i was, a 10-year-old boy in grosse pointe, michigan, watching in the basement of my house with a rabbit ear television. wondering why we could not get better reception, but amazed we could even see it. and remembering walter cronkite, kind of taking his glasses off and getting misty. i had the great fortune of working with walter cronkite years ago when i was covering

the shuttle. we talked about that moment. had workedu know, i so many years to cover it and really had not thought about what i had -- what i would say at that moment. and all that came out was "wow," but that is all i could do at the moment. there were no other words to match that moment. what i find fascinating is that it was built in the midst of the darkest days of the cold war. it was about rivalries. it was about beating the soviets. all of the negative things that we think about in the 60's. but in the end, that moment brought the world together. there is the irony. it was about rivalry, but in the end, humans went to the moon, not just americans. there was a little alchemy that occurred somewhere along the way there and do changed things forever. >> 45 years ago, the landing of neil armstrong and apollo 11 on the moon, where were you?

what do you remember? our phone lines are open. the nevers are on the screen. we also welcome the -- the numbers are on the screen. we also welcome your tweets and you can send us an e-mail. guest onin will be our sunday on c-span's washington journal. let's watch. [video clip] the moon.se to go to we choose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. july 20, the 45th anniversary of the apollo on the moon landing. it was a huge event. seeing him walk out of the capsule and walking on the moon, whoa. >> it was amazing. small -- one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. >> 45 years ago this year, and

american walked on them and and inspired not just our nation, but the world. >> for me, it has been an inspiration in my life. i still have the ritual newspaper. >> going into space is a big deal. the moon is literally walking on the moon. >> congratulations to the entire apollo 11 crew for your daring, historic, spent 45 years ago. -- accomplishment 45 years ago. host: buzz aldrin will be our guest on sundays "washington journal." did you have the opportunity to meet buzz aldrin? on many occasions. every time he was in front of a camera, he was extreme the skittish. he is a generally shy and introverted person and generally felt that the limelight that shined upon him was not shared in a way he was like with the people who got him to the moon. he is a true believer in the

team effort that got him there, which i understand. honoren to be given the to give him an honor at the air and space museum a few years ago, right around the time of one of the anniversaries. i was the mc and was giving him the award. i had the chance to give -- to have dinner, my wife and i with he and his wife. it was delightful. we talked about everything but the moon. kids, grandkids, everything you could think of in a conversation. i felt like neil armstrong was my friend after this. not long after that, i went to the very same location with a in tow to intel -- get him to talk about one of the anniversaries. him, heminute i saw literally ran away from him -- from me. it was a different experience. i finally got him when he was coming out of the white house later that same day. i buttonholed him and buzz and mike collins at the white house and was able to interview him.

but the truth is, neil armstrong was an engineers engineer, and a test pilot test pilot. -- an engineer's engineer, and a test pilot's test pilot. he was never comfortable accepting accolades that came to him. host: why was he selected? guest: maybe because of that. every says he was a civilian at the time with navy roots, which would appeal to the president, president kennedy. but the fact he was a civilian and not a member of the military at the time, maybe. but the truth is, when you look at how all of those missions stacked up, it was a crapshoot as to which one will be the first one to actually land on the moon. some of that was just purely. you have a sequence of event -- was just her luck. you have a sequence of events and missions got shuffled around and apollo eight went around the room -- around the moon instead of testing the module. this is the crew that got to be

the one. he was just shy about it. i think you could make the art event that it would have been nicer to have someone more comfortable sharing the story with the public. because that person, like it or not, and in some cases i think he did not like it, had a public world to share it. role to share it. i don't know that he was able, or comfortable, telling the story to future generations, as, let's say, jean stern and might have been if he had been the first. host: we are talking to miles o'brien, formally with cnn. he is in air and space reporter. our phone lines are open. from the state of georgia, thanks for waiting. good morning. thank you, c-span. miles, i have watched you for years. our rim has just been superb. justr space program has been superb. but what i'm wondering, is there some slack in a? are there any laws preventing

them from going out and mining asteroids? no.t: in a word, and there are businesses and enterprises thinking along those lines. it's still pretty tough to make a business case for launching a rocket to go to an asteroid and bring those resources back right now relative to the cost of finding a place to mine them here. we still have a problem with chemical rocketry and the cost of giving -- getting out of the gravity well of earth. until we solve the problem, until we come up with new propulsion systems or elevator concept, whatever you may choose to get us off the surface and into low earth herbal -- low earth orbit at least, the expense of getting there, it makes it very difficult to ontify the resources present an asteroid. having said that, as time goes on and you look at the commercial space sector and you look at what people like elon musk are doing to try to change

the equation, i think this will change it. i think the cost of getting into space will dropped radically. it needs to drop by an order of magnitude at least. resources on our planet will become more precious. over time, this will happen. is from laura. i would rather my tax dollars fund missions to mars rather than missions to iraq. as we look back, the 21 hours we were on the moon, 45 years ago this month. dave, good morning. caller: good morning. in july, 1969, my mom -- my father were to receive as an expatriate working for an american company. we were living in the philippines at the time. thathings i remember about , first of all, the time zone difference meant that we were events takingthe place during the day, which i believe on the east coast it was in the middle of the night. i rememberer thing

is that because the satellite feed was so expensive, there were stories that several of the tv stations locally had to band together to pay for the feed that was coming from the united for the transmission of what we saw on the tv. host: thank you. guest: that brings out an important point of what i was saying in the beginning, that this was truly a global thing. everybody in the world who could get to a tv was watching it, not just americans. lesson, whichs a in the current time with the international space station we are learning what again. the space station, taking aside any of the scientific or extortion endeavor, the space station. he is an opportunity for 16 plus theons to work together -- space station is an opportunity for 16 plus nations to work

together on a giant operation and a court made a task. that is unprecedented. space offers us an opportunity to bring us together as human beings. the space issue has proven that. the mission to mars will prove that. and the moon landing, despite the fact that it was about cold war rivalries, showed us in that time that it could be done. veteranknow you are a of the air and space museum. as we look at some of these iconic catchers from 45 years ago, it is so amazing. you look at that and say, they were in their? guest: i know. that lunar module, -- of course, if you ever get to one of the displays in houston or huntsville that shows the way those rockets were assembled is amazing. but that tiny little bug, that course,dule, which of is not designed to fly full

gravity, or for that matter in the atmosphere we live in, looked so frail. frankly, if they had pushed too hard with their feet, they could have kicked a hole right through the skin. and that frail little craft, that ugly little bug, if you will, which really is a beautiful thing, was an amazing interesting -- an amazing instrument. that it got think the crew back and fired up every time, it is really wonderful that we had six missions and not a hitch. host: bill in alabama, good morning to you, sir. caller: i would like to make a imment before i mention who am, or was. i agree with mr. o'brien that mr. boland is probably a little -- mr. bolden is probably a little too optimistic about going to mars by the 20 30's.

we have i have is that our priorities on social issues, as opposed to things of adventure. . am bill would i was in houston. assigned to the lunar surface operations of the time of apollo 11. as a matter of fact, i prepared the first apollo 11 lunar surface operations plans. to developpportunity the equipment and train the crew , train apollo 11, armstrong and aldrin, for what they did when they got on the moon. host: i'm glad you called in. we would love to have your firsthand account. let me ask you a question first. is there a sense of urgency like that today to explore the universe? caller: no, there is not. i know there are a few dedicated

people to it, but i do not believe that today. thank you. host: stay on the line. don't hang up. we will go to miles o'brien, first. guest: i do agree with bill. here's the thing. the sequence of events that gave , they are not going to happen again, and frankly we do not want that to happen again. of thet want the middle cold war and mutually assured instructions. -- mutually assured distraction. we do not want that. the idea that we would base a cold war rivalry that would get us to mars, date certain, i don't think we should wish for that. the way we did the mood landing in that context, which was a sprint to beat the russians and we did, there was never a good articulation of what is next. americans were like, why are we continuing to go?

why do we need to spend this money? vietnamt the end of the war, and inflation. have is a different approach to it now. which is what nasa is trying to talk about, a more incremental and sustainable approach. the problem with incremental and sustainable is you are less likely to get those huge point headlines in "the new york times." how do you keep people interested in something that is incremental? it is like keeping people on the edge of their seats for the construction of a highway system. we have to make people understand that we are not going to reinvent apollo. that is not going to happen again. we need a space program that matches the desire to be spacefaring on a permanent basis.

it is hard to come up with a bold type programs to match that kind of approach, and frankly the bold programs are kind of just the opposite of that. back towant to come you, bill. thank you very much. it is exciting to hear from people who were involved firsthand. i assume you are in houston at mission when neil armstrong set foot on the moon. what was your reaction? in an adjoining room off the main command area. i was stored of -- i was sort of standing by the government constructions. they were well trained. said inially just modicum what they were doing. host: your thoughts? what was going through your head? but it it was my job,

was only after that when i realized when the mission was completed that i was more or less elated in what had been a comp was. host: thank you very much caller: caller: for phoning in. my pleasure -- host: thank you very much for calling in. caller: my pleasure. host: joseph is joining us from california. good morning. caller: thank you for letting me talk. if we don't go to the moon and start developing bases on the moon, china will beat us in the race to mars. bet: "i thought we would living and working on mars by now for resources." caller: we all did.

docking atclippers this base station, supersonic transport, all the things we thought in this technological era of hubris that was the 60's came to a crashing halt in the 1970's. it has been a disappointment to those of us who saw that vision and saw what it meant to those of us on the planet. that is this expression all of the billions that were spent on apollo and gemini and mercury before it, the money was not stacked into bags and shipped into space, it was shipped here. an infrastructure of technology and acadre of engineers prowess in aerospace that we still hold in this country today. it is difficult. it is a subtle sell.

they think why don't we just spend the x here? we do. organizesmething that our efforts and crystallizes our thoughts and inspires young people. that is a very important point. we do not make a lot of engineers in this country before, and space has proven time and again to capture the imaginations of young people and bring people into the fold, into these technical fields that are difficult and important. host: strong and michael collins laced a few things on the moon, including an american flag, a 1 mission,the apollo messages from 71 world leaders, and a small gold pin shaped like an olive branch. caller: thank you for having me

on here. i was just married whenever we television, and we were happy to see our space program progressing so well. my wife and i had moved into our home that we had saved up to get. we were pleased that our technology had developed this far. but today we live in a different time period, and i see us spending our money in another direction. inneed to keep it here democracy countries and not spend it out in space. host: frank, thanks for the call. that is the point you made a moment ago. guest: there is no place to spend money in space. we are spending it on technology, on development, on sustaining and engineering and scientific enterprise. that is a worthy goal for any

nation. host: one of our tweets this morning -- nasa tot is time for step out of the way and let private business developed a business there. muskis why you see elon suborbital to get people interested in the notion. there are businesses that can develop it, but it is something that you can get money and investors for. coming up with a business plan to go to mars, that is not quite there yet. that is the promise of government. that is exactly where nasa should be right now, and that is the long-term goal of any space agency, to think about doing things that the private sector cannot. the answer is both. it depends on what goal you are talking about. host: hopefully this will be a

fun question because you have been passionate about space exploration. if you could go back in time and be part of any mission, which one would you want to be on? guest: that is a really good question. the first moon landing would have been wonderful. but for my money, the most audacious of the apollo missions was apollo 8. at that time, that was a late decision to go to the moon. the lunar module was too heavy, not ready to be tested. that was supposed to be a test mission for the lunar module, and instead that became apollo 9. late in the game they said why can't we just try going to the moon? no one had ever done that before, hit that translator -- button.ns-lunar that was a really gutsy mission, and i don't know that in today's context it would have happened.

this was a different time, a different place, with the imperative of getting it done in a certain time periods that mission in many respects is what laid the groundwork for apollo 11. it was a pivotal mission. talking about nasa's 40th anniversary. and the 40th anniversary, president obama paying tribute to the crewmembers of apollo 11. >> very rarely do i have such an extraordinary privilege as i have today, to welcome three iconic figures, genuine american eroes -- strong, michael collins, and me. aldrin -- here with it is just wonderful. i think that all of us recall the moment in which mankind finally was untethered from this

planet and was able to explore the stars, the moment in which we had one of our own step on the moon and leave that imprint, that is there to this day. heroism,ause of the pressure,nder the grace with which these three gentlemen operated, also the entire nasa family that was able to, at great risk oftentimes and danger, was somehow not justift our sights around united states but around the world. host: that was the president five years ago at the 40th anniversary. do you think neil armstrong was happy to be there? guest: neil armstrong was always

uncomfortable in those settings. always. he was not a public person. i was telling you that story about the night i gave him the award. most of the apollo astronauts when they are in the public context, they give a boilerplate speech, 21 b kind of thing. he put together what amounted to a scholarly engineering white paper which he shared with the crowd. brilliant, insightful. he had spent a great deal of time about it. it was clear he did not want to be there talking about the moon. he wanted to talk about the future. i think he was always uncomfortable in public talking about what happened on the moon. he always wanted to talk about what is next for space. host: i want to share this one tweet -- "miles o'brien, you were right, it was a daring thing. a good morning.

caller: good morning. what a blast from the past. i was living on the naval station in iceland. my dad was in the air force. host: so it had to be the middle of the night when we landed, correct? tv.er: well, we got asrts we got to watch it during the day. it was a long time ago. host: i did not mean to interrupt. go ahead with your point. caller: i have heard rumors, but some people say, they question whether we actually made it to the moon. the only thing that ever gets me thinking about this is 45 years later, how come we don't have colonies and there are no starbucks on the moon? [laughter] host: that would be a good reason, just because of starbucks. the reason we don't have

starbucks is because there are not enough bucks for the stars. i don't want to spend a lot of time on this except to say, if it was done in a back lot of hollywood, i cannot imagine that secret being held this long. number two, why would we have gone back? we went back six more times. one was an aborted effort. but we landed five more times. why would we have done that? tore are a million reasons rebuke all this strange skepticism that has cropped up. if you do your homework and look at the claims point i point, it is sown from whole cloth. horseace shuttle was a designed by committee. what happened was nasa wanted to

go to mars. at that time, the thinking was an idea of aes of space station where you would assemble mars craft and a truck to go back and forth to the space station, a3-tiered approach. the nixonlo, administration went to nasa and said we are not going to mars. space station or space shuttle -- you pick it. ultimately, the space shuttle prevailed. part of why the space shuttle did not succeed as it should have is it was a partnership with the pentagon on the space shuttle to design a craft that could deliver spy satellites to , payloads. it was bigger than he needed to be, had a certain cross range capability that was required for the military. on it went. they piled on a lot of

specifications which were irrelevant to nasa's goal of exploration, so in the end it created a craft that had some fundamental flaws, including no escape system. it was a very dangerous craft that was limited in capability for nasa's goals, try to do a number of things for the pentagon and ultimately failed in that regard. i think we learned about technology, how you define a program, especially the specifications. it kept us in lower orbit much longer than nasa would have liked. host: let's go to ed joining us in greenbelt, maryland. caller: c-span, how are you doing? bowman -- i know he is not there right now. it was about five years ago.

i am an independent research , a phd in physical sciences and i have training in germany and i speak german also and spanish. what do you guys do with people like me, independent researchers? i also give lectures on traveling across the country, and you can look at my last name on youtube and see what i have done. host: how do we use outside experts? guest: we use them more. washave to remember, nasa doing contractors to do the work. on a militaryuilt procurement style contract, but the fact is the outside has always been a part of nasa. the civil servants preside over a contract.

what is changing is the way that context is arranged? -- shifting some of the responsibility to the contractors themselves. ,hat is what we are seeing moving into this realm of commercialization of space. nasa has always relied heavily on people outside the agency. they have to because of the way the agency has been structured. joining us from jacksonville, florida. caller: how are you doing today? i have a couple of different points about the mars exploration. one of the things that is a great idea would be to implement more realistic living environments for the astronauts. maybe a kind of dreamweaver them a that might give comfortable flight. we also have to remember to try to implement our military.

we use a device on the earth that we used to dictate a solar lens to the ionosphere. we could try to not only really control the planet but to make it safer for astronauts before researchers go down there. host: thanks for the call. guest: there are people who say the long-range goal for humanity terraform mars, to make it habitable for human beings. are running out of time here, billions of years from now. if humanity is to last beyond that, we have to think about getting off this planet. that is long-term, weighty stuff. the first place to go on that long endeavor would in fact be mars, and a lot of people say we could make mars a place where we breathe the air someday.

it sounds like science fiction, but a lot of what we are talking about today was science fiction a few generations ago. eight-week -- john, good morning. : i was a second lieutenant infantry officer when we landed on the moon. it was a full moon night. advisor on antry combat mission, and i got my counterpart over, who was a in the army and i said would you believe it if i told you there is a man walking on the moon right now. us lookedhow many of up at the moon right then to do that very thing? said there was no

way. they would die. and i had to explain spacesuits print he said, how did they get there? they had no plane. i explained the rocket system and stages and so forth. i could not convince him that we had done that. one other thing -- i have always heard -- i don't know if it is that when neil armstrong set foot on the moon, he said, "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." i always heard it was supposed to be one small step for humankind. guest: what he was supposed to say was, "one small step for a giant leap for mankind." he claims he spoke it and it did then get -- and he did not get

transmitted. there is no way to know. "one small came out, step for man, one giant leap for mankind." john from louisiana, good morning. caller: i remember quite well i was a first lieutenant in the united states air force, a pilot in vietnam. -- mark clark air place air force base in the philippines. i got to watch it on grainy, black-and-white tv. , on thehe day before other side of the international date line. host: you saw it before all of us, really. guest: it is so interesting hearing from a first lieutenant in the jungles of vietnam. happeningt, what was

with the strife on this planet versus what was happening with exploration. it is hard to overstate the tensions in our society over that. host: richard, good morning. caller: i have always wondered -- it is interesting -- the soyuz craft supplies the international space station. that was a rocket that was designed in the 1950's. it is reliable, dependable. i always wondered, why in the world did we ever get rid of the saturn? to my way of thinking, that design -- we had the basic design i put all the money into it. over the years the thing could have been refined. you would not have had to spend all the money for the shuttle to design that. now that turns out it was not a good design to begin with. i got depressed when we went to the shuttle design. i did not think it was an engineeringly acceptable design

from an efficiency stand point. saturnhave developed a rocket again? guest: we almost literally went in circles with the shuttle. many people would say that in some respects the space shuttle was a technological dead end. where did it get us technologically? that willwe learned inform our mission to mars? it gave us a lot of experience in space and taught us about spacewalks. it also taught us a little bit about how we should not design, frankly, a craft that will go deep into space. there is a reasonably good argument that the space shuttle to greatead us technological findings that will get us to mars. we learned a lot more by building the saturns. if you had taken a more

iterative approach and kept focused on exploration and not necessarily gone the route of a shuttle and utilitarian space truck, if you will, there is a good chance we would already have a starbucks on the moon by now. if you look at the federal budget, how big is the nasa budget? a penny.fraction of there are single programs at the pentagon that exceed that. it is much less than we spend collectively on coffee every year. we don't spend a lot of money on nasa, and the fact that we talk so much about it is a sign of the success of the expenditure of the money that we spend. we spend a little, we know a lot about it. we talk about it as if we cannot afford it, but we cannot afford not to do it. all, an inspiration to us and frankly, we have underfunded it for way too long.

it is about time we got serious about having a true space agency that can explore any meaningful way and it does not cost that much money in the grand scheme of things. even cost is not the right word. it truly is an investment in our economy the cousin of what it does for engineering science and technology here and all around the globe. host: why is this your passion? person, i spent time covering collectively set events. what i like about the space program is there are great events that ring is together that are uplifting -- that bring us together that are uplifting. i enjoy the idea of setting challenges, meeting those challenges, and those of us collectively experiencing something that is not necessarily about a war or a plane crash. your i want to go back to

conversations with walter cronkite. his excitement when neil armstrong set foot on the moon. sitting here are right now, he would not like the cheerleader term necessarily. reporter whorter's did his homework and believe like i believe that this is a worthy endeavor. he was -- it is kind of like the home team announcer for the baseball team i suppose in some respects. having said that, he was not afraid to ask the tough questions. he was always there for that. shareo was not afraid to in the collective joy over that moment. there is nothing wrong with that. i think we have a culture in reporting that whatever story you come to, you have to be a hermit skeptic. but the fact is people who cover politics -- a permanent skeptic. but the fact is people who cover politics love politics.

people who cover space, they can ask hard questions as well. host: heather from jacksonville, good morning. caller: good morning. launch abouten the three years ago now. i just want to point out that .8% sinceget is fiscal year 2010. i would love to see us go to the moon. but, mr. o'briant, what do you , what domr. o'brien you think about sos? does it seem outlandish? outlandish, but when you look at an incremental approach to expiration, it makes as much sense as anything. there is another goal that we should not overlook. one of these days an asteroid is

going to have a bull's-eye painted on our planet, headed in our direction. if you don't believe me, just ask a dinosaur. it is something that is going to happen. to the extent that we can learn how to redirect asteroids and manage them and deal with them, how to work in proximity with them, that technology may save the pregnant -- may save the planet one day. i am not overstating that. i know it sounds outlandish to blast through an asteroid, but if that asteroid were headed to washington, d.c., and was going to wipe out north america, we would want to deal with it. the mentioned, i do see agency is funded $3 billion per year short. congress and the american people need to express their interest in this. is it worth the next $3 billion per year to have the space

program we can be proud of? i think it is. i don't think in the grand scheme of costs in the government that is a huge number when you consider the payback. but these are tough fiscal times. ned is joining us from baltimore, maryland. part of the apollo program? caller: i was. i was with the martin company at the time, both with the proposal and as a simulator. the main reason i called was to enll -- i am sure mr. o'bri knows -- a true unsung hero was johnny hope all's -- johnny ho balt. rendezvouso-orbit was a failure, which is why the russians did not get there. john passed away a while ago. he and i were in la jolla when

it landed on a presidential commission. they sent air force one to bring him back. . just wanted to mention that i thought the people ought to know that some people that don't get named all the time are also responsible for our success. privilege you had to know him, and he was a pivotal character. one other name that does not come up, steve bales, a satomething-year-old wh in the trenches. the the coaching -- with lunar module touchdown, he was coaching the touchdown. it indicated the computer was saturated, and the crew was wondering whether to abort the landing at the very last minute. steve was 22 years old at the

time and insisted that they were go for landing. part of the reason they were is that prior to launch of apollo 11, they had run a simulation where the same alarm came up and the computer was saturated with information from the radar to ynce it sink -- to make it s and they abort of the landing. it turned out to be the wrong call. the entire landing hung on the decision of a 22-year-old engineer in the trenches who had learned everything about that alarm and understood the consequences and the fact that it was safe to land. the landing would not have occurred had they not done that simulation. it says a lot about how they trained and tested. that one individual could make that call -- think about the responsibility on his shoulders that evening. host: failure is not an option. .iles o'brien

thank you very much for being with us. i want to ask you quickly before we let you go, the downing of the malaysian airlines, 290 eight people died on board. by all accounts, and missile struck the plane. does this tell you about the safety of international flight? yourselfu have to ask why an airline would choose to fly into that region, especially when earlier this week two aircraft had been shot down by surface to air missiles. clear, andwas quite there were all kinds of notices to airmen, and the faa had completely prohibited u.s. flights in the area a little south of there. the airlines will tell you safety is the number one priority, but truthfully, savings is a big deal.

the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. they happened to take that flight right over a war zone. other airlines were flying in, frankly, a lackadaisical manner that was dangerous. the families who lost loved ones in this need to get some answers because this is not safe. host: what is next for malaysian airlines? guest: i don't see how they survive, steve. it is a flag carrier supported by the government. there will be another that flies out of malaysia, but the unbelievable -- what are the odds of this kind of a coincidence? -- whatia airlines 777 are the odds? i could not do the numbers on that. it is such a horrible tragedy for the loved ones, such an unfortunate situation for the airline.

is, civilian air -- the airlines are not flying there now. have got to think about these things. host: miles, thank you for being with us. when we come back, we will turn to the situation of the malaysian airline plane. 202-585-3880 for democrats. 202-585-3881 for republicans. we are heard coast-to-coast on xm channel 120. back in a moment. >> now you can keep in touch with current events from the nation's capital using any phone any time with c-span radio on audio now. call 202-626-8888. recapweekday, listen to a

of the day's events at 5:00 p.m. eastern on "washington today." you can also hear audio sunday's public affairs programs. c-span radio on audio now. 202-626-8888. we are here at solitary house in des moines, iowa, and it was a home built by carl and edith weeks in the 1920's. carl weeks was a man of very interests. legaciese most notable of his interests are his amazing collections in terms of artwork, sculpture, the library collection. it is an amazing collection of rare, limited works. it is incredible. carl weeks collected the books that he collected not only because they are important

historical works, but also because he believed that books themselves were works of art and had a worth beyond the words on the page. so he collected almost every edition of "leaves of grass," by walt whitman. it changed over time, but for ofl it was the art collecting. carl also collected a variety of first editions of ernest hemingway's work. this is a great piece, "green hills of africa," because it illustrates the personal relationship that existed between carl weeks and ernest teng-hui -- and ernest hemingway. "to carl weeks, instead of the na's. at pe

booktv, sunday afternoon on american history tv on c-span3. journal]ngton continues. host: for the next 25 minutes or so we want to hear from you on the investigation into the malaysian airlines crash, and two have beens, recovered. the investigation focuses on a possible missile strike. this is the headline from "the boston globe." people on board were killed. you can see the wheel well, the area of debris that stretches for miles in eastern ukraine. 202-585-3880. 202-585-3881. you can send us a tweet or an

e-mail. we will get to your calls in a moment. this is one of the editorials this morning, "those responsible for downing a passenger plane over ukraine must be held accountable. in recent days there has been abundant evidence of sending supplies and heavy weapons to eastern ukraine, including advanced aircraft systems. down either by --" one other point from the editorial that says, "the white house continues to avoid measures that could inflict crushing damage on the russian financial system and force mr. putin and the elites around him to choose between aggression in ukraine and russia's economic future. wednesday's measures stop two banks from obtaining treasury.

the treasury has not excluded those banks from the financial system nor taken measures against the largest banks. even though its bank was sanctioned, the energy operations of gazprom remain untouched. it is criminal and him tolerable and should be -- and intolerable and should be treated accordingly. our phone lines are open. the numbers continue to be on the bottom of the screen. kathleen, chicago, good morning. just a couple of months ago -- and sometimes we can say things with our mouths that can cause tragedy -- caller: a couple of months ago on your had differentll people come on and saying how and me did theo

meted the andm peace. i think the united states has emboldened putin. you know, we need to stop this mess. host: kathleen from chicago. "the denver post." will russian president putin second thoughts about the incursion he has given? as it turns out, they shot down that malaysian plane thursday with all 298 people on board. perhaps not. he has himself authorized operations over the last couple of years. fromis patricia joining us pennsylvania. good morning. i just find it a little bit uncanny that president obama is on the phone with hooton, and

at the end of the conversation, theres, yeah, by the way, is an airplane down, just so you know, you know. i find that russia has been pushing and pushing and pushing obama. i am a democrat and i voted for obama. but i find that we have to stand up with all these overseas things and say we are america strong. my brother is in the military, in the army. he is a medic. i feel for him every day. but i god, we have got to stand up and say enough of this crap. usedese leaders, say you to fear us and you had better fear us now. host: headline from "the new york times," "some of the debris still on fire hours after the plane crashed in eastern ukraine." sandra, good morning. caller: hi. i'm calling because i have concern about the american letting president obama

taking us to a country like maybe moscow. we have people here who are starving and hungry, and he is just letting our americans go without. he has let everybody take over america, and it is nothing that we can do it seems like. he has taken our military from us to save us, to fight for us. day because myry father was in special forces. he fought for us. i don't understand why americans are letting president obama do this. host: thanks for the call from south carolina. i want to share this firsthand account of what it looks like on the ground in ukraine. the headline from "the new york times." parts and aes, jet child's pink book."

black sweater lay on her back, blood shimming from her face number her left arm raises is signaling someone. another victim, naked except for a black broad, leone field, one leg broken and her body torn. residents spoke of bodies falling from the sky." having trailed debris over several miles of artfully -- of sparsely populated ukraine informative. " said onerrible, witness. caller: from massachusetts. good morning. i am watching the situation as it unfolds and i hear a lot of people say, america, we need to do something. why do we need to do anything in

the ukraine? they are not a member of nato. we have no treaties to protect them. why would we escalate the situation and get american involved. foreign war where we let no business -- the ukrainians do it. why is america always called on? if we were directly threatened, we should think about getting involved. otherwise, i don't think so. host: from "the wall street journal," a photograph of the downed flight 17. in 1961 the u.s. secretary-general was killed in a crash in what is now zambia. 1983, korean air lines flight 007 is shot down by a soviet fighter in the sea of japan. of 1994, a jet carrying

the presidents of her wanda and burgundy is shot down. in november of 2003, at iraqi strikes -- missile strike. caller: i would like to make the americans, we need to wake up. we have been sold down the river. 23 precious americans murdered, just like we did before our consulate and stuff. nothing is being done about it. our president is campaigning. when we need to stand strong. i tell you, we have got to take america back. it is horrible. i pray about it, i grieve about it. , andw what we need to do they need to clean house in washington.

we need to go up there and clean the whole house there because we need to take our country, the united states of america, back. we are not going backward -- we are going backwards, not forwards. host: diana joining us from munro township, new jersey. good morning. caller: good morning. shall i start? host: yes, please. caller: my feeling, which has come up in the last few days, is that this congress that is so us look divided. when you divide, you conquer. that to me is the issue here. makes our united states, obama, look weak. when you are divided you conquer, and prudent and the rest of whoever -- and p

the and whoever else in world is saying now is our chance. it is like an open invitation. times" has aa. story on the missile that they believe was responsible for taking you down the jet. 90% chancet a 60% to of downing in her draft -- downing and aircraft. it has the possibility of carrying several missiles. good morning. caller: good morning. i called my state senator yesterday. i found it was unusual that we cruise in. diagnosing -- in benghazi. host: wake forest county, good

morning. caller: the u.s. cannot be the police of the world. we need to bring our boys back home. cut your neighbors yard before you cut yours. host: tony from detroit, michigan. good morning. say wasall i wanted to i listen to the callers calling in, and you can tell the people who listen to fox news and the difference between msnbc. we need to wake up, make our own sound judgment, and stop going by what we hear. the talking heads, what they say. it is sad what happened over there, but it is sad what is happening here because like the lady from new jersey said, it is divide and conquer. ith from switzer, west

virginia. good morning. caller: obama should be i -- obama and prudent is the worst president we ever had. i wish we had kennedy or reagan. i cannot believe how our country has gone down. it is the best country in the world. host: appreciate your comment. "vladimir putin can stop this war." on theg casualties ground, a major escalation of american sanctions against russia --"

host: coming up at the top of the hour, live coverage of a special session to talk about malaysian airlines flight 17. from connecticut, richard is on the phone. caller: correct me if i am wrong -- during the debate in the last residential election, didn't former governor romney say that russia was a threat of ours? host: you are absolutely right. he did say that. later, and two seconds

president obama looked at him and mocked him saying that the cold war is over. time -- ite at the seems as though governor romney was struck by something. that he would get involved with the ukraine situation. first of all, the countries alongside of russia -- poland belarusary, slovakia, -- they are quite concerned about this because if he has his hand in the ukraine, he may go on with the other countries. he it would get the soviet union back. that is my point. thank you very much. appreciate your participation. from "usa today" --

24 hours before, the obama administration faced a potentially volatile new development in ukraine on thursday with the downing of a malaysian jetliner. the president is in washington, and we expect to hear from him around 11:30 a.m. eastern time. john joins us from st. joseph, missouri. caller: good morning. beencrash could have avoided. i think our president is to blame, too. instead of taking the softline

approach with russia, he's .aking the hard line with them referendum elections in eastern u.k. where i could go either one way or the other. line, and weard are seeing the results. if i may, i would like to say one thing about israel. america would never stand for it if there were terrorists in the u.s. virgin islands. we would never stand for what the terrorists in gaza are doing. andpe israel goes in there obliterates them and never lets them back in. host: there are pictures on the of the ukraine. here are some of those photographs. jane joins us from south bend, indiana. -- james joins us from south

bend, indiana. i really like middle of the road rather than far right or far left. summed it upngton best, george washington, when he keep strong american borders and stay out of other countries, wars, and squabbles. these people that are mostly white that want to take their country back. i know exactly what they are saying. when we have a black president in these white ring washed -- white brainwashed fox people -- they say we have to take back our country and they are terrified of a black president. i am with the caller who said president obama is not the president of the ukraine. -- keepashington said strong borders and stay out of other countries, wars, and squabbles.

ingod, we have a military 139 countries, where $6 trillion in debt. for the call. speaking about another border thee, $3.7 billion before supplemental appropriations bill. senator boehner -- congressman weiner is pressing -- representative john boehner speaking from yesterday. seems to be a huge g between democrats and republicans on how to handle the crisis. do you have confidence that the two sides can come to an agreement by the end of the month? so, would certainly hope but i don't have as much optimism as i would like to create it again, we are working with our border group, working with the chairman of the appropriations committee, trying to find some way to deal with what is a humanitarian crisis at our border. it needs to be dealt with.

host: comments from speaker boehner yesterday. we are approaching the top of the hour. time, livestern coverage of the un security council meeting, i'd emergency session. then we will have coverage of president obama's comments. the u.s. saying a missile did down that jet." you can see officials on the ground sifting through debris. also from "the houston chronicle." "u.s.: plane shot down." from "the guardian," "murder in the sky: missile destroyers jet and kills 295." ashburn,er from virginia, outside washington,

d.c. caller: a thorough investigation of the incident should be done before hand. as americans, we should not point any fingers before we find out what really went down. i am surprised in this day and real-timenot have images of the events of what occurred because we know that it was shot down by a missile but we do not know by who or what. i think we need to take advantage, security measures, for things like that. it is not right to point fingers though it was a russian missile that supposedly hit the plane. next caller joining us from fayetteville, north carolina. caller: my question is for americans. is it rational to blame the

president of the united states for something that happened in ukraine? that does not make sense on any level for us to be blaming our president for something that happened in another country. that is crazy. people need to ask themselves that before they get on tv and talking crazy talk that does not make any sense. conquer and divide. that is all this is. host: thanks for the call. earlier this morning we focused on the 45th anniversary of the moon landing. 'sprogramming note, on c-span3 american history, you have the chance to watch a nasa documentary this sunday at 4:00 eastern time, 1:00 for those of you on the west coast. you can check out the schedule information online any time at c-span.org. c-span2.get booktv on

chris, san marcos, texas. good morning. caller: i wanted to make a comment on the situation. i agree with the president's made that he did not want to jump to a conclusion. people on the ground to try to figure out what happened. that is pretty much all i need to say. londonthe telegraph" in reports that air operators around the world last night imposing a no-fly zone over ukraine. the question grew over why passenger jets were still flying over the war zone three months after pilots were warned to avoid it. o'brien quoting a professor in england saying malaysia airlines, like a number of other carriers, have continued to use this route because it is shorter, meaning

less fuel and therefore less money. the joining us from trinity, florida. good morning. i am really some of us are leaving from malaysia, some of us have connecting flights in malaysia. we are just afraid to fly. what should we do? host: are you going to take the trip? caller: i don't know, we are scared to death. you are sharing the sentiments we hear from others. let's go to david in south carolina. president obama keeps blaming cute and for what is going on in the ukraine.