e power of all of us. that's the membership effect of american express. good morning from new york, i'm chris hayes, secretary of state hillary clinton condemned yesterday's shelling by syria that killed a reported 92 people, more than a third of them children under ten according to the united nations. yesterday, also saw the deaths of four nato servicemembers in sem roadside bombings in afghanistan. as well as the death ofale eight people in one family killed by a nato airstrike. we begin with my story of the week. memorial day, for the overwhelming majority of americans is that memorial day is the beginning of the summer. that's true in times of peace, but it's been true, oddly even

during this long decade of war. we fought more war with a smaller and smaller percentage of the population taking part. there's no draft and military service is increasingly rare in elite circles in a 2010 speech at duke, secretary of defense spoke about this divide. >> whatever their found sentiments for men and women in uniform, for most americans, the wars remain an abstraction. a distant and unpleasant series of news items that do not affect them personally. >> so while the fallen exist as people we think about in the abstract, most of us don't have them in our own families. on october 10th, 2001, master sergeant evander andrews, a member of the 366 civil squadron died in a heavy equipment accident, while constructing an air strip in qatar. he was the first american casualty of operation enduring

freedom. the first doorknock at the home. the first flag-trapped coffin in this long era of war. he left behind a wife and four children, when i reached his mother, mary, she wanted to make sure i was pronouncing his name right. evander, her oldest child, enlisted right out of high school and always had a heart for others. i asked her if the war and the deaths of those who fought him seemed like an afterthought in american life. she said, i think people want to go on and not think about wars and losing people and death. she was critical of the president, telling me she felt he quote lacked the feeling for the military he should have. and the cause for which her son died was just. she won't be doing anything formal to mark the memorial day because she's volunteering a a women's homeless shelter. she said i think our grief is too hard for public ceremonies and such. it's very hard for us. 11 days after he died in qatar,

u.s. war planes bombed a remote village in afghanistan. targeting a taliban military base about a kilometer outside of the town. the bombing killed 23 civilians, the first confirmed civilian casualties of operation enduring freedom. a 25-year-old man told human rights watch he was outside the village when the bombs started falling. he rushed back to his home to rescue his family. he arrived at his family compound to find his wife and three of his children dead, the youngest just eight months old. it's natural to grieve for those we don't. those of us fortunate to not have lost anyone in this decade of war can go america merrily, about our barbeques but if the grief of our fellow citizens and loved ones is fallen in war is increasingly remote to a tiny

fraction who serve in the military, the grief of those halfway around the world is worse. the member kblal day tradition emerged at the one moment in america's long war history couldn't be divided. the first act happened on may 1st, 1865, when the recently freed slaves of charleston, south carolina, gathered on the city's race track that had been converted into an outdoor prison and they reburied over 200 union p.o.w.s who had been dumped in an unmarked grave. decoration day became a way of celebrating the martyrs to the cause of ending slavery. ultimately the day would become a national holiday, we now know as memorial day, as the civil war faded from memory,

supplanted by subsequent wars and subsequent war dead, we came as a nation to observe it together. to mourn our dead collectively. but in those days when the stench of death hung over a union that had barely survived, it was that hours that was contested, that was claimed by each side. as walt whitman said of them, the dead, the dead, the dead, our dead, or north, or south, ours all. today it can seem at times is if we barely inhabit the same union as ar own soldiers and we're not in union with a peasant in a remote afghan village who is remote enough to have a family scratching out its meager living where one of our bombs falls. but maybe memorial day can be a moment to reflect and to will ourselves to grieve for evander andrews and to consider how broadly those sacrifices eman e emanate. how many are sacrificed against their will in places unpronounceable, when a man comes home to find his 8-month-old daughter killed from

above. the dead, the dead, the dead, ours all. joining me with their own thoughts we have liliana sigoura, michael doherty, politics editor. new york "daily news" columnist john mcworther and a professor of linguistics study and news woo wooek. >> this who is a skog ar of the civil war. i was surprised to find the origin of memorial day. because it seems like something modern. >> i can't believe i didn't know that until just now. >> i couldn't believe i didn't know it david blight has essentially was the first person to unearth this fact in a dispatch written by a reporter from the new york tribune who

happened to be in south carolina during the first memorial day. a few things remarkable about that day. one is, there were no white people in the city they had all fled. the entire city was occupied by slaves who had just been freed. the interesting thing for my own pacifist sympathies was to go back and think about memorial day in the context in which memorialization of the war dead was also a statement about the justness and rightness of the cause. those two things were obviously intimately connected, right? they were saying, we, these are martyrs to our freedom. there's a sort of direct effect. and i think the difficult thing for americans as a whole as we think about afghanistan, a war that's profoundly unpopular, is how to think about the sacrifices made in the context of a war that the public says we should wind to a close, i don't know what it's about. why are we doing it. >> part of the problem is we

don't have a draft. if we had a draft as we used to, there would have been much more of a public outcry against something that continues for so long with an increasingly vague mission. another problem is the civil war was a war we had here and we have photographs of corpses. this is going to seem trivial. but it isn't. they're in black and height and they tend to be a little bit blurry. after that in terms of when we see corpses in colors, it's the wars that we fought somewhere else. if there had been a war here in say 1959, and we could actually see what all of this death is like, i think they would have a lot more impact than anything like that we see in afghanistan does. on how we feel about war and how we memorialize it. and whether or not we do. which obviously on this day, most americans are not doing at all. >> or you can compare it to how we memorialize the victims of september 11th. where there's this constant every year, incredibly solemn ceremony and we constantly talk about them and the reading of

their names. >> and the reason i think is because of their, their proximity to us and us i'm now speaking as this you know, liberal caricature of someone who doesn't have someone serving in these wars. the us there are the civilians, the people that go to work every morning and are not part of this nation that is our military forces that are so separate and socially distant from the other nation. so that's why i think we have that morning. because the thought of waking up one morning and going somewhere and being killed out of the blue is so horrifying. >> ecan't imagine that. >> there's a serious problem with the way we insist on imposing the moral frame on wars that are clearly immoral. the discussion about throwing a parade for veterans of iraq you know to kind of commemorate their sacrifice in iraq. to me is mind-boggling,ed image of a parade sort of

commemorating iraq and what that might look like to iraqis and the rest of the world. there were many military veterans commemorated on twitter and everywhere else. >> you come back from the war and the immorality of that war was not at all the responsibility of the people who fought it. who do kind of come home that at least a tiny part of the reason why some of them feel so adrift and why kind of suicide rates are so high and why there's such a crisis among veterans has to do with the kind of profound disconnect. it's not like in vietnam where people are kind of contemptuous of them. i understand they want, if not a celebration of the war they fought, a celebration of the sacrifices. >> i had the same instinct, because rachel maddow was someone who has been advocating for these sorts of parades and there's been some in st. louis and she and i have gone back and forth a little bit. i think i share that instinct,

how do you distinguish, it's such a fine line to say, we honor the people that have made the sacrifices that are part of our, that are bound together in our social contract and we have them do these things through our democratic process. at the same time without glorifying what we have done there. i don't know if can you do it. the one thing that changed my mind a little bit was when i saw there were parades in iraq when we left. i thought maybe we can have parades, too, like we're all glad this is over. you know what i mean? we were all glad this is over. >> think it's very difficult. i think that in previous wars when dissent was actually repressed by the federal government and the nation, there was a draft and anyone could be involved, everyone knew someone who died. there was one story that people could attach themselves to. you were part of lip rating europe. you were pat of stopping the hun. and that does not exist any

more. partly because we have so much public opinion to dissent from the war. dick cheney said if you want to support the troops, you have to support their mission and a lot of troops also feel that way, too. that's how they tell their story. >> evander's mother, mary, definitely feels that way. it's a hard discussion to have. and we're going to talk with someone who has spent a lot of time with families who have lost loved ones in the war after this. yoo-hoo. hello. it's water from the drinking fountain at the mall.

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vice president joe biden was speaking to taps, which is tragedy assistance program for survivors, an event in arlington on friday. i thought one of the most powerful addresses i've seen from a public figure and one of the most exposed and vulnerable and emotionally raw. obviously joe biden has this tremendous tragedy that happened

to him in his own life, which is right after being elected to be the senator from delaware. his family was in a car accident, his wife and daughter died, his sons were in the hospital. he was only 29 years old. moment in his life that should be, it was incredible the guy got to be elected as senator at 29. he got this phone call. he talked about that grief was like and how that grief was distancing and alienating. >> i was down in washington, hiring my staff and i got a phone call, saying that my family had been in an accident. and just like you guys know, by the tone of the phone call, you just knew, didn't you? you knew when they walked up the path, you knew when the call came, you knew, you just felt it in your bones. something bad happened. and i knew. i don't know how i knew. but the call said, my wife is

dead, my daughter was dead, and they weren't sure how my sons were going to make it. for the first time in my life, i could understand how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. by the way, the moms and dads, no parent should be predeceased by their son or daughter. i unfortunately have that experience, too. i remember looking up and saying, god, i was talking to god. myself. you can't be god, how can you be good. you probably handled it better than i did. but i was angry. >> that's joe biden talking about his own experience. i want to bring in u.s. marines lieutenant colonel steve beck, an associate professor of naval science at carnegie-mellon

university. his book "final salute" about his work informing military families of the death of a loved one. thanks for joining us this morning. i want to get a sense from you having done this work for several years, what did you learn? what lessens did you take away from the work? >> well i think a great many lessons, actually. and one of the most important is that memorial day is every day for me. we've been at war for ten years now and i think that when i, when i look at these families and i, i talk to these families, i still am engaged with many of these families. that i notify of their loved one's death. i see them all the time. i was just with many of them in colorado this month.

i'll be talking with many of them tomorrow. many of the lessons i've learned was that we cannot forget the sacrifices of these incredible heroes, we have to continue to tell their stories to the world. and as we tell their stories, they live on and their legacies of valor live on in our minds and the hearts of americans. but we've got to tell their stories. >> there was a moment in the rocky mountain news article, which was the beginning of what became this book. and it's a very effective moment. it was the mother of a soldier who has died says to you, looks to you and says, was it worth it? and your response is, i can't say that for you. and i'm curious, how often you heard that question and how you think about the answer to that question. >> that was miss betty wellky, joe wellky's mother up in rapid city, south dakota. i remember that moment like it was yesterday.ke's mother up in

city, south dakota. i remember that moment like it was yesterday. >> she asked me, was it worth it i told her, betty, i can't answer that question for you. that's a question you're going to have to work out for yourself. because that would me be telling her what the value of her son was. and i can't, i can't answer that for her. i can tell her what the value of her son was for me and for this nation. but for her, she wants her son back. for her, there is no price that she wants to pay. for her son's life. she wants him back. i only was asked that question one time and it was from her. and i think that it might, in many people's eyes be a question that's asked often. but i was asked one time, with as it worth it. many of the families -- many of the families believe that, their sons or daughters lives were lost and the price was worth it

the car was just in their minds. others feel differently. >> could you spell out what you would have told her or what you did tell her about what the value of his death was, to the country and to you, met forically? >> i mentioned it later in the conversation that i saw different days for iraq. i saw new days for iraq and that it might take over a decade to see those days come to fruition. and indeed, that's pretty much what it's taken. those new days in iraq have come. i still believe that there are better days ahead for iraq. >> lieutenant colonel, steve beck, thank you so much for your time this morning and your service to the country. it's your surprise party and we want this hair color to be party ready.

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thinking today and observing memorial day. that will be happening tomorrow. just talked with lieutenant colonel steve burke, an officer with the marines. had to tell people. i think it's interesting, because it is, i think very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen, without invoking valor, without invoking the words heroes. and why do i feel so comfortable about the world hero? i feel uncomfortable about the world hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. and i don't want to obviously desecrate or disrespect the memory of anyone that's fallen and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine tremendous heroism you know, in a hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. it seems to me we marshal this word in a way that's

problematic. maybe i'm wrong. >> words take on resonances, sometimes you need to revise, i would almost rather not say hero and come one a more neutral term which would take on partisan resonances as time went by. but that's true of the word sacrifice, that's true of the word hero. instantly you get a certain way of looking at things. it is manipulative. i don't think necessarily deliberately. we use language unconsciously. i share your discomfort with those words, because they are argumentational strategies in themselves often without wanting to be. >> they're a little bit empty there are people who are genuine heroes. but the kind of implication is that death is what makes you a hero. as opposed to any affirmative actor, any moral actor. >> the argument i think on the other side of that is, right, is we don't have a draft, right. this is voluntarily. this is someone making a decision to take on a certain risk of that and they're taking it on because they're bound to

all of us through the social contract. through this democratic process of self-governance in which we decide collectively that we're going to go to war and how we're going to go to war and why we're going to war. and they give up their own agency, for a liberal person like myself, seems difficult to comprehend. submitting so totally to what the electorate or people in power are going to decide about how to use your body. but they do that all full volition and, yeah, i don't -- if the word "hero" is not right, there's something about that that is i think noble, right? >> there's something about it that deserves honor and respect and admiration and commemoration. but it's more than that, if you want to argue that kind of joining, by joining the military you are heroic, i suppose that that would be a valid argument. but that's not really the way we're talking -- >> sacrifice. >> it's more just that it's a

way of i think enoibling sacrifices that have a lot of nobility for the individual. but to say that someone kind of died heroically suggests that they died worthy. or they died in the pursuit of a worthy endeavor. >> i think the word hero is clearly deliberate. i think it is meant to cast, drape these kind, wars in a sort of righteous way. and i think we have to be comfortable or allow ourselves to say out loud, like these wars, in iraq and afghanistan aren't in my opinion, i don't think they're righteous wars. that doesn't mean that we have to disrespect the people called upon to serve and who have chosen to devote their lives to this. there's valor in that. but we can't be afraid of criticizing a policy at the same time we recognize that. >> i mean the great poetry that came out of world wore war i and world war ii, like robinson jeffers, they didn't use these words like hero when everyone else was.

they were consciously fighting against this and talking about the human waste and meaninglessness of these sacrifices, precisely because they were trying to be critical of the political structure that was at the helm of it. so in some ways, we have less courage than they do. on the other side, i think a lot of times we use the word hero as a substitute for physical courage that we admire and we see so rarely in our own lives. that's why we use hero for every first responders at 9/11. because it was tremendous physical courage which we rarely get to show or see. >> it's interesting to think about the literature out of world war i and world war ii and specifically the iconic catch-22 which world war ii obviously is the shorthand for worthy just causes and that book is all about even embedded in what, defeating the nazis, is the absurdity of the undertaking. >> it's easier when it's something you're more implicated in. part of the reason that we

tiptoe around these things and use language like hero and sacrifice is because it's very difficult to criticize or to even seem to kind of criticize something that you're so far away from. whereas catch-22, this is someone who fought in the war, has firsthand experience, who feels like he can be a little bit -- irreverent about it. >> i take it for myself as a journalist. i've done reporting and talked to veterans and family members of folks who have died in the war. haven't walked a mile in their shoes and the distance does seem totally insurmountable. if you're reporting on extremely poor kids in terrible school or whatever it is. but there's something distinct, there's a difference in kind in that kind of distance that does make people tiptoe, tiptoe rightly in the sense that there's a certain amount of

respect and deference that you want to have. there's another type of casualty not traditionally honored on memorial day, the servicemen and women who have taken their own lives. rates of suicide among army personnel corresponding with rates in the general population of 2004-2008. the number of army suicides increased by 08%, ages 18-24. more than half were low-ranking soldiers, we'll talk to the mother of a son who took her life after this. since before jeans were this skinny. not since us three got a haircut. not since my first twenty-ninth birthday. [ female announcer ] head & shoulders. scalp and hair beyond compare.

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always laughing. trying to make other people laugh. he joined the army because he had a wife and a child. he was working at i-hop as a cook. so he came from the military family, so the army was the answer. >> and he, he deployed, he came back and how, you spent some dime with him obviously after his first deployment. what was your understanding of his mental state then? was it clear to you that he was struggling with some stuff? >> derek forced laughter. he was drinking a lot. he had a picket of an iraqi man

that he or his unit had killed. that he showed me and said that when they kill over there, that they have to lay the body down and put everything that they find in their pockets around them and take pictures. i told derek, i'm your mom, can't look at stuff like that. a different, a different person came back. >> he experienced some, he, i think he was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, he was sent back for another deployment and attempted suicide in-country, if i'm not mistaken, right? >> six months into his second deployment on february 10th, he had a shotgun to his mouth and one of his friends stopped him.

they ended up sending him to the hospital in germany. where he attempted to kill hisself again by trying to overdose on his medication. he came back to the united states there at madigan army hospital at fort lewis on march 15th. they had kept him overnight. he met with a psychiatrist the next morning. who deemed him to be low to moderate risk for suicide. had him sign papers saying that he will get counseling and go to alcohol and substance abuse classes. two days later he tried to kill hisself again. by cutting himself. drinking alcohol with his

medication. on his suicide letter he stated that he bandaged hisself up. went to formation on friday. that he walked around waiting for someone to notice him. that he felt invisible and transparent. and then friday night he hung himself in his which i learned later, that that was against army regulations fon >> do you feel that the army, i mean from the chain of events you've described in reading about the story, it's very difficult to conclude that this was handled properly. do you feel the army failed your son? >> yes. on the autopsy report and the autopsy photos, they said that

my son, who hadn't been eating or sleeping since january, that he was a well-nourished, 110 pounds. the autopsy photos, i could sit there and count his ribs. yes, i feel very strongly that the army is very responsible for my son's death. >> there's been an increase in, we've seen an increase in suicides among people returning from wars. the ray has now exceeded the civilian population. what do you want to see happen? is there -- if you know, and this may be a difficult question to answer. ha do you want to see happen to prevent the next young man or young woman who comes back from ending up in this situation?

>> i believe and it was just in the newspaper, i think the article was either friday or yesterday. when an own general says that the soldiers who commit suicides are selfish. that that shows the mentality of the leadership of our service members has to deal with on a daily basis. i have a witness, kevin baker, that was in derrick's unit. that was there the day my son walked into the break room and his first sergend and his lieutenant was calling my son a coward and a pussy, telling him he was faking. these are his leaders. it begins with leaders.

>> major general dana pitard was the major general who posted to a blog that i have now come to the conclusion, suicide is an absolutely selfish act. i'm personally fed up with soldiers choosing to take their own lives that others can clean up their mess, be an adult and act like an adult and deal with their problems like the rest of us. >> that was taken off the website. this is something that i think a lot of people hear about and it strikes me that you get it exactly the core point. which is they're being a cultural shift that needs to happen in terms of recognizing this as a threat to soldiers' lives as much as bullets might be. mary kirkland, thank you for joining us today and i'm terribly sorry about your son. ct may seem like the stuff of fairy tales. but if you take away the faces on the trees... take away the pixie dust.

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yoo-hoo. hello. it's water from the drinking fountain at the mall. [ male announcer ] great tasting tap water can come from any faucet anywhere. the brita bottle with the filter inside. i guess i just want to debrief that conversation. with mary kirkland, whose son

committed suicide after serving in iraq. we should note that i just want to be clear, that eric shinsecki, who is head of the va, has prioritized mental health and mental health services and there's a gao report about the wait time to get mental health services and there's been responsiveness to policy makers to this. this is not completely off the radar screen, this in fact it's increasing will i on the radar screen. the major-general himself, his policy record on the base that he runs has been fairly good and fairly enlightnd in terms of thinking guesting the soldiers' mental health. but the numbers right now are pretty disparispirited. >> what's so astonishing is

we've been talking about this rhetoric and whether or not it's hollow or respectful to talk about these soldiers in these abstract terms like heroism and valor and sacrifice. what i think is indisputably hollow is the way we talk about these people with such reference that's completely unmatched by any tangible policy support. i mean you're right that they're making progress. but the va is still underfunded. there's still these kind of preposterous wait times. and there's also, from what i've read, a real a resistance to acknowledge the fact that there's a connection between the combat trauma and -- it's amazing they don't want to acknowledge a connection between the violence people witness and commit in war and these mental health outcomes. >> there might be a little classism involved, too. i get the feeling if there were more people involved in the military -- not to imply that everybody in the military are of working class, but i imagine

there would be more urgency here rather than people who don't get to speak up as much. >> that's part of the broader issue. which is the fact that this is something i write about a bit, rachel does a very good job in draft writing. something i write a little bit about in my book. the complete alienation between the sort of, the institutions of meritocratiac achievement and elite selection. if you look at the numbers, how many people were enrolled in rotc in stanford in 1950 versus 2012. it falls off a cliff. stanford, rotc was kicked off the campus. so you have this real disengagement at very elite levels. >> have there any connection between the stress in battle and the psychological stress. the way we diagnose these things, post traumatic stress

syndrome. world ward i, it was called shell shock. world war ii, battle fatigue. you couldn't escape this was a consequence of war. the new diagnosis seems to locate the problem inside the person themselves. preexisting and somehow the war was just something that elicited it. rather than the actual cause of it to them. >> that's interesting. as we talk about how we think about these terms, valor and hero and observe memorial day. i want to talk a little bit about the broad sweep of public opinion. a new poll shows big swing in how americans view morality. that's up next. right in our own backyard. so we combined our citi thankyou points to make it happen. tom chipped in 10,000 points. karen kicked in 20,000. and by pooling more thankyou points from folks all over town, we were able to watch team usa... [ cheering ] in true london fashion. [ male announcer ] now citi thankyou visa card holders can combine the thankyou points

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this week we saw two seemingly contradictory shifts on opinions. the mastic historic sea change in support for same-sex marriage continues. a "washington post"/abc news poll released wednesday found a record 53% of americans now believe marriage should be legal for same-sex couples.

only 39% said they oppose same-sex marriage. compare it to two years ago in the same poll found opposition to same-sex marriage at 50%. the shift is especially striking among african-american voters. 59% now say they support same-sex marriage. up from 49% two months ago. something happened in between those two polls. which is the president declared his personal support for same-sex marriage. let's repeat it. in two months support for same-sex mri voters jumped a stunning 18%. on wednesday, former secretary of state colin powell added his name to the list, endorsing the president's decision in an interview with cnn. >> as i've thought about gay marriage, i know a lot of friends who are individually gay, but are in partnerships with loved ones. and they are stable a family as my family is. they raise children. and so i don't see any reason

not to say that they should be able to get married. >> for progressives, these are heartening developments, issues, reproductive rights. half of americans say they're now pro life. the pro choice number is the lowest in the poll's history, down from a high of 56% of american who is say they were pro choice in the mid 1990s. i find this sort of longitudinal polling on attitudes really fascinating. because the ability for a body politic to change opinion en masse is in some ways the most important aspect of modern democracy. the fact that we can all, that you can have a society that says it is sinful and it should be illegal for black and white people to get marry and come to the conclusion that that's a ridiculous and horrible notion. let's talk about the first part of this. is the amazing change in

attitudes on same-sex marriage. particularly african-american attitudes in same-sex marriage. here's jay-z. wath to play the sound because i love jay-z. i love his voice particularly. this is jay-z adding his support to marriage equality. >> i've always thought it as something that's still holding the country back. you know, what people do in their own homes is their business. and you choose to love whoever you love. that's their business. it's no different than discriminating against blacks. it's discrimination, plain and simple. >> note so self, wear black suit with white t-shirt next weekend. i like that look. here's just a one example of some of the way the polling has flipped. we talked about it broadly. look at the numbers in maryland, opinion on same-sex marriage among black voters in maryland. in march, 39% of voters

supported same-sex marriage, in may, the numbers were flipped. >> what do we make of this? >> can you look at that and think wow, something the president, it bears mentioning that he's black. the black president says something. one might think, wow, what kind of influence this man has, that's a nice thing. he's being a black president, in a way i don't think we thought about. it shows the opinion was low-hanging fruit. it shows that things -- people would have saidreflectixively. >> supporting gay marriage becomes a proxy for supporting the president. >> as a vatican i catholic, michael doherty, ha do you make of the sea change on gay marriage. >> i'm amazed how dramatic this is. less than a decade ago when

vermont passed civil unions. this was considered at the time extremely advanced. and that a state a few weeks ago would vote, nuclear nuclear against gay marriage, and also civil unions, was conceived as totally retro grade. we're talking about a decade shift that's unbelievably dramatic. this issue was barely on the radar in the '80s, it was unthinkable. gay marriage in 60 years, 100 years. well no, it's happening right now. the shift on attitudes is amazing. i don't actually even know what accounts for it, really. i mean there's, there's been very little organized opposition to it. i mean in a sense of -- there's plenty on the service, political opposition, national organization of marriage, karl rove and the vatican. people don't get broadcasts from the vatican into their living room. >> i'm curious, i want to

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roundup. no root. no weed. no problem. live from new york, i'm chris hayes, i have john mcworther of colombia, university, from "the new york daily news," and liliana certain everyone gura from the wonderful "the nation" magazine and michael doherty from "insider.com." right before we went to break we were talking about two interesting bits of polling from this week. one was on further evidence of the massive historic sea change and a public opinion on gay marriage. particularly among african-americans. but broadly. and michael, i asked you before we went to break, can you imagine a day in which the vatican favors gay marriage?

>> no. and for i'll lay that out on two levels. like on the religious level, the church can't teach something contrary to its own moral or doing mattic teaching previously it can change all sorts of little things. but the moral law and doctrine dogma doesn't change, to change its teaching on marriage would be to say that the church isn't the church any more. by definition. >> particularly because the doctrinal foundation for this is that marriage is fundamentally pro creative in its essence and sanctified as part of the pro creative endeavor. >> if people want to read this, just google theology of the body. and there's all sorts of interesting information, it's why we don't believe in gay marriage or invitro fertilization or lots of other things that separate sex from potential child-bearing. >> i gather there are aspects of catholic doctrine that have been

allowed to become fossilized, pass i haivel passively. >> the teaching on 0 usary has changed in the catholic church. i thought the theology of the body, my understanding initially of why marriage was sanctified, was not so much for pro creation, was for people who couldn't achieve the ideal of celibacy. if there's an acknowledgement at a point that the choices, for gay people the choices are between promiscuity or sex outside of marriage, or sex within marriage, just as choices for most head sex s heterosexua >> there's no way around what we

call the deposit of faith, the scriptures, the traditions. the prohibitions are so clear, attempts to read around them. the sin of sodom was inhospitality. or st. paul really isn't authoritative just don't work. and the generation of prelates within the catholic church that were trying to do this are dying, like today. the progressive movement, which i might call dissenting from church doctrine is losing all its steam. >> the younger generation is much more conservative traditionally. >> and i definitely have seen that in my own catholic upbringing in terms of my father's generation, my father was a jesuit seminary. his generation was a much more politically-you know, progressive i think terms i would use. >> and the failure of progressive catholicism, if we

can call it that, no idea really, it just falls by the side, they didn't inspire future generation to join the church. if you are denouncing celibacy as a rule. people are loathe to pick it up. >> that is the problem. liliana, how do you understand this broader shift on gay marriage? >> i can't claim to necessarily. you know, but i was thinking as you were talking about the onion headline from a few years back, pope changes mind on same-sex marriage after meeting like steve and dan or something. and it's great, it's hilarious, it speaks to a central truth. which is generational. which is all of these things. the more people, the more we know people personally, the more it's very easy to shift on this. and you know, having conversations with like kids today is really interesting. and yes, i'm in new york city, so maybe it's slightly different from other parts of the country. but there's this sort of no-brainer aspect to it and the

church and the vatican is disconnected from the day-to-day reality on the ground on many fronts, but that's how you explain the shift. even within ten years, that's significant. >> you point to something which is interesting, the accelerating nature of it. it's in the midst of a virtuous circle. from our perspective, i don't know from michael's. but that the increased experience with, with people that are of the same sex and are married, or in committed relationships, the increased support produces a policy environment. >> and it's also true that the gay rights movement i think is in a lot of ways the most successful civil liberties movement or certainly the most rapidly successful civil rights movement we've ever seen. in terms of the amount of progress it's achieved. part of it is that once you kind of -- there's a challenge embedded in gay marriage and gay relationships into the primacy

of head sexuality. gay marriage challenges very little about the underlying society. unlike tech nix which really does call on huge numbers of men to give up certain privileges and to kind of change the ordering of their lives, or similarly, civil rights, which is an economic challenge to kind of white power. the fact that two men can get married is actually fits really well within the same. >> i could say the same. >> i agree with this in large part. even though i don't find it agreeable. but as the state has moved in and filled marriage with new meaning, new ideology, that these are two partners that are legally equal. >> but that's not the state that's filled that in. that's kind of a social revolution. >> that's true as well. >> but the state has responded to the social revolution. >> and it's also been kind of a co-belligerent in our society. >> are you saying that you

disagree with two partners that are legally equal. >> the traditional marriage idea that catholic church has is not based on post enlightenment values. >> my question is don't think that that should be the view of the state that are two partners that are legally equal. is that a viable position for the state to take. >> i'm questioning if the state should be involved in marriage as it is. special entry we're telling the state constantly, you can't define marriage as a man and a woman. because you can't define how people love. while the state is very involved in it currently. in any case, churches and other private organizations are loathe to take up cases and divide property. but now, it's difficult to exclude gay people from law and the thing that people aspire to in marriage is something that most people think that gay

couples and lesbian couples can aspire to. so the circle that you're talking about. we're no longer talking about my friend, a gay man in san francisco, hates marriage equality. he's part of this older, radical critique, i don't want your boring straight life. >> one of the things that's happened internally to gay rights movement, that part of the movement has been diminished, there's been total primacy put on pront and center. >> and on joining the military. >> which are ways of assimilating gayness into the normal fabric of america. >> and it's stopped. when in the 1980s, many average people looking at the news could see their portrayal of gay people. like there was an episode of "different strokes" where a gay person was portrayed immediately as a predator. you're seeing this is a bath

house culture, it seems totally alien and it allows you to still call gay and lesbian people perverts. that is disappearing as gee people are aspiring towards white picket fences that you want for yourself. >> that is in "the new york times" wedding sections. that brings us to a place where i think it's easy to say, to fit the framework or marriage equality and gay rights into a nice, tidy narrative about moral progress and moral revolution. it's much harder to do that on abortion. given the new polling numbers. we should say if you dig into the numbers, right, you find that the policy views of the american public vth changed that much. in terms of the american people who say it should be illegal in all circumstances, that's still a minority view. and the majority of people think it should be legal in some circumstances and the some is the place -- >> the polling doesn't tell you,

that particular poll doesn't tell you which circumstances people think it should be legal in. >> the sum is the thing that's the contested territory in a lot of cases. why, what's to me what's most interesting about the polling over abortion is the degree of plateau. is how contested it is, how it remains contested and it doesn't seem to be moving in either direction it seems pitched at the same place it has been for a long time. it's interesting to me that we have other things where the see-saw tips and this one seems balanced on a kniven edge. this- mcallen, texas. in here, heavy rental equipment in the middle of nowhere, is always headed somewhere. to give it a sense of direction, at&t created a mobile asset solution to protect and track everything. so every piece of equipment knows where it is, how it's doing or where it goes next. ♪ this is the bell on the cat. [ male announcer ] it's a network of possibilities -- helping you do what you do... even better.

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all right. polling on abortion, i just asked you why does it not move?

why are we sort of at this knife's edge, intense fraught pitch for a long period of time. >> part of the question is why doesn't it move along with progressive shifts on gay marriage. part of that is that gay marriage ends in something to celebrate, a wedding. once you kind of -- >> that's a good point. once you get under, over the kind of underlying bigotry, there's, you know there's kind of just it's just good. whereas an abortion isn't something to celebrate. right. it's much more morally fraught and so it's not just i think kind of bigotry against women or patriarchy that makes people uncomfortable with abortion. the reason, my suspicion for why the numbers are going down in terms of identification with being pro choice, especially since they're not going down on a policy level. it's not that more people want to criminalize abortion. we're so far away from illegal abortion in this country, you know, one reason i feel so strongly about this is i've spent a lot of time in countries where abortion is illegal and

i've spent a lot of time in hospitals that are full of victims of botch aid portions. for most people in this country, that's something lost to the mists of time. they hear the question, do you like abortion. not do you want abortion to be criminali criminalized. >> pro life has a resonance at this point that you acknowledge that there's something to be said about thinking that you would consider whether or not to be ending a life. even if you are in favor of all the policies. >> here's emily's list making that point. i was born two months after roev. wade was settled. so in a way, the battle was won. our grandmothers and mothers fought these battles with intensity. the intensity of pro life and pro choice voters. 51% of pro life voters under 30 say abortion is a very important issue. whereas only 26% of voters say abortion is very important. >> we don't see what the implications of a pro life regime might look like. i think there are other

attitudes and things at work. i think a lot of people, i think especially upwardly-mobile people, impossible to prove with polling, are so well-informed, so good at using contraception and other things that they're beginning to view, especially surgical abortion as kind of irresponsible thing and they want to express some kind of opposition to it. because someone who is responsible would have contraceptd or taken a morning-after pill. i think that's where the future of the debate is going. this elite view, maybe it's a classist view if you look at it from the left, will become more prominent, that surgical abortion is somehow irresponsible and morally, more problematic maybe an early-term chemical abortion. >> yeah. i mean a contraceptive fails, for those people who don't have access to it. we will always need, i don't think that's a good thing to sort of say that this is going

to be -- >> people in you know, classes where means, do have the means to take care of a child, if contraception does fail, too. >> there's also we should, what you're pointing to is something we've touched on the show and some interesting writers on the left and right wright about this. a kind of bifurcation in american family life and american sex life and american household ordering. which is that the upper middle class and above, have increasingly traditional family formations, they wait longer to have kids, et cetera and that's not the case lower down the social hierarchy, in which there's higher levels of single parents, et cetera. >> one thing that the polling, the polling i think can't quite get at this. i think you're right that people have this idea that there are women out there having abortions, kind of willy nilly or as a form of contraception as they want to express their disapproval of this there will be exceptions for those women. people who do abortions or work

in abortion clinics, will often say that everybody believes in three exceptions, rape, incest and me. you often see people in clinics saying i don't really believe in abortion but you have to understand my situation. >> i'm just not sure that i see people who read the "new yorker" and drink chardonnay calling them pro life because of michael, the things you're mentioning, which are i think very real. i don't feel it in that class of person. which i think i belong to. >> you actually, you have an open bottle of chord nay you stole under the table. >> andber brie in your pocket zblxgt i want to give liberal viewers a note of despair from me. even though these polls reflect some sentimental pro life view that's growing, i mean fundamentally, the shifts in

modern america are not going to be conducive to pro life laws or attitudes in real life. as you say, the exception is rape, inses and me. it's because people don't view child, you know, having a child as something that can be thrust on them or that is, you know, immediately their responsibility. because of actions they took. they view it as a choice that they make, volitionally with full awareness of every little step along the way. >> but it is certainly true that there are real-world implications to these kind of growing hostility to reproductive atonmy. there's a woman who just got out of prison after more than a year because she tried to kill herself when she was pregnant and it resulted in the death of this kind of, the death of the baby at full term. there are women who have been arrested and imprisoned all over the country for trying to end pregnancies illegally. so, but the fact is these are marginal people.

the people going to prison right now are you know, are kind of at the margins of society. i think as long as people really can't see anything like that happening to themselves, these rights are going to be chipped away at. >> there's been a huge spike in state anti-abortion laws in 2011. 93 laws restricting access to abortion in 2011. shattering the previous record of 34 in 2005. i think it actually is undetermined which way this ends up. i don't think i used to think that. we were doing research and talking about this editorially. women's christian temperance union was founded in 1875. they just kept at it it was a 50-year struggle. they won, they won briefly and eventually lost. but it doesn't seem, given the preference in intensity numbers and there's increasingly mobilization on one side and more diffuse mobilization on the other, i'm not sure how it ends

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try new crest pro-health clinical rinse. the center at wrongful conviction at northwestern university and university of michigan law school released a report that found that 2,000 people convicted of serious crimes were later exonerated. and it launched a online registry. in the report, michigan law professor samuel gross tries to put the problem in context saying no matter how tragic they are, even 2,000 exonerations over 23 years is a tiny number in a country with 2.3 million people in prisons and jails if that were the extent of the problem we would be encouraged by these numbers. but it's not, these cases point to larger number of tragedies we don't know about. obviously the stakes are even higher in death penalty cases. the report found 101 exonerated

people had been previously sentenced to death this month the colombia human rights law review laid out compelling evidence that a man named carlos de luna may have been innocent of murder when a texas judge put him to death. a judge had writ an document posthumous excusing another man because of overwhelming credible evidence. the third court of appeals prevented him from finishing the bench in 2010. in a gallup poll, 58% of americans say they morally accept the death penalty. while 34% called it morally wrong. the approval rate is long and the lowest in gallup's 12-year history of polling on this issue. joining us is barry shek, law professor at cardozo and

co-director of the innocence project. so maybe let's start there. you've been working on this issue and working on innocence and exoneration for a while. and we have five states in the last five years that have been the banned the death penalty. it's going to be on the momentum in california. do you feel momentum. or is it like we were talking with abortion just a second ago, one of these things that stays where it is in the public imagination. >> there's no question, you have to redefine the question. the question is not whether the death penalty is morally inappropriate for the most heinous of crimes, because if you go to europe now and you take a public opinion poll, you'll see that those numbers, that 60%, are the same. what's different in europe and increasingly true in the united states is that people do not trust the state to get it right. and with very good reason. and that is really the significance of the innocence movement and the significance of this registry.

because the national academy of science recently reviewed the literature. there is no deterrent effect to capital punishment. it costs a lot of money. what's on the ballot in california is extraordinary. just think about it. they have over 700 people on death row. it takes 25 years from the time of the death sentence to an execution. they are closing down civil courts, the budget crisis in california is extraordinary. it costs an extra $100,000 to keep somebody on death row as opposed to general population. it's calculated over the next five years the state will spend $1 billion more having capital punishment than not, including a one-time $400 million cost. these are conservative numbers that come out of blue ribbon panels. so there's no question that the death penalty is extremely costly. it doesn't deter and as a public policy matter, when you compare it to life without the

possibility of parole, that's why in connecticut this year, in new jersey, in new mexico, in illinois, and i predict in november in california, which will be extraordinary, because it is a referendum, it's going. >> to be clear, what's interesting here is you're saying look, people's moral commitments or moral intuitions about the appropriateness of this penalty in the abstract are fairly common across a bunch of different countries. the question is the attack on it, most effective attack isn't to try to overturn the moral intuitions, but to point out the practical problems of intuition. >> it's a public policy choice. it's terrible. i think perhaps the best book on this is frank zimmerman, the contradictions of american capital pishment. where he compares europe and the united states. it's disturbing to know that the states that execute the most, not have the most on death row, executes the most are the 11 states that did the most lynching historically in the united states. and that's not just a question

of race. that's a question of almost vigilante justice and it's disturbing. but the key moral issue i think that is really changed everything now. is innocence. and that's why this registry is of significance, because people now know and believe that there have been more, there are more innocent people convicted of every kind of crime and certainly capital punishment than anybody ever thought was true. >> liliana? >> within the anti-death penalty movement, of which i'm a part, in the wake of the troy davis execution, which was so shocking, there were many of us that couldn't believe he would be executed, given how many times he had faced execution and the last-minute stays and because the proof of his innocence seemed so compelling and the wake of that and the cameroned to willingham's revelations and the carlos de luna case. and what are the limits of the strategy and how do you go

beyond it. obviously it's shifted public opinion enormously. people who support the death penalty, there are those who would argue, well if we get one wrong every once in a while, it's still worth it. >> some say that, but as that argument begins to emerge as the argument for people get extremely uncomfortable on a moral level. and you see these coalitions emerging. with people of faith. you know, for good reason and the other side of the moral issue arises. but i think it's the, this is just terrible public policy. >> i want to ask you about the mechanics of the justice and why we are, our system gets it wrong after this. ♪ ♪ ♪ pop goes the world

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because i'm lazy. >> that's the late, great, patrice o'neill. articulating his fears of wrongful conviction of being, ending up on the wrong side of the justice system. here's my question. i read the report kpilted by the center for wrongful convictions, talking about the systematic analysis of the places where we know there's exonerations. it's just a shred of false convictions. do you think it is the case, any endeavor will produce any human endeavor will produce some amount of error and we just do so much of this that in raw numbers, we have a lot of people that are going to be falsely convicted? or is it the case that the system is broken in certain ways suches that the percentage of error is higher than it should be? >> well it's definitely the latter. we know that. the first thing to note is that the criminal justice system is an extremely inefficient one from the point of view of a

business model. because first of all, we don't keep the right data. that's the real message of this report. we kept track of the post-convection dna exoneration. innocence project.org, you see this 291. they're a bit different than these. because the post-conviction dna exonerations that we put up, they're innocent, 40% of the time we find the real perpetrator. here, we're looking at nondna exonerations, much broader, but what we know about it is that we're only scratching the surface. because we're finding out about these anecdotally. we weren't even including in these prior lists, the mass exonerations like ramparts and actualia, where people were just framed, the point is, what kind of system doesn't keep track of factual errors, total system failures. >> suppose we have a situation now which you're i'm plying is slightly better than before,

because of the nature of the dna. would it be possible for us to be a system efficient enough such where the death penalty might make sense, or is it such that the imperfections of human nature are such that it isn't possible? >> we know a lot about how to fix this system, the fact of the matter is that there are reforms about how one does eye witness identification procedures that dramatically reduce wrong indentifications, without reducing correct ones. right now the innocence project is in the midst of a huge campaign to do that. or you videotape interrogations, forensic science. a lot of it is just not validated scientifically. we know these are the causes, and so there's an enormous potential for reducing error in the system. we just don't keep track of the right data. >> let's talk about the eye witness identification, i sought that was fascinating. there's interesting experimentation that's being done in social psychology with

eye witness and -- >> for 30 years. >> for 30 years. >> this isn't just new on the scene. one of the things in the report, the factors for false accusations. 51% had, perjury or false accusations. and 43% had mistaken witness i.d., 42%, official miscot. bra moon, who was arrested in 1987 for a crime he didn't commit. let go, his photo remained on file and later misidentified in a rape case. he's explaining how it was he was tagged with a crime. >> my photo was shown to every victim of every crime on that part, in that part of town from that point on. which was only a couple of months. until someone said, well, you know, it might be him. it could be. i'd have to see him in person. and then we did a live line-up after the day i was arrested. and oh yeah i'm pretty sure that was him.

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from kitchen to table. this technology allows us to collaborate with our drivers to make a better experience for our customers. [ male announcer ] it's a network of possibilities -- helping you do what you do... even better. ♪ barry scheck, the innocence project. before break, i asked you one of the things that crops up a lot in exoneration in false convictions is unreliable eye witness testimony and you talked about reforms. why does eye witness testimony play a factor so much. >> brandon moon was my client, we should say on memorial day that brandon was four years in the united states air force before he went to school at the university of el paso and was wrongfully identified and wrongfully convicted. a few things about brandon's case that illustrates the problem. they used eye witness

identification techniques that were going to maximize the chances of error in that case and we now know and the new jersey supreme court has just decided a landmark decision on this, henderson, that recognizes this 30 years of social science, he no ways that if you administer eye witness identification methods, you dramatically reduce the number of errors without reducing correct identification. simple things like first of all, you might be shocked, but a key to science, the person who administers the photo array of the line-up should be blinded. should not know the identity of the suspect. we all know the observer bias effects that happen. you should give a warning to the witness, the real per traitor may not in photo array of the lineup. for 25 years we've known that dramatically reduces errors, without reducing the correct identification. >> you don't have to come up with an answer. >> because people will naturally guess. there are a number of other things we know about that and things you can say to juries

about the effects of cross-racial identification, which are profound. and. >> explain that. >> it's well known that certainly majorities, race, people, this country would be caucasian, are very bad at identifying people of another race, blacks and it works the opposite way in other countries where blacks are the majority. it works -- >> that's interesting. >> there's some, neuroscience can explain this, by the way. but that is a known and clear effect. and you see it reflected in the data. so eye witness identification is an area where if we implement reforms, which by the way, we just got in texas. we have in ohio and i hope the new york state legislature before it adjourns this year. we've had this bill now. that is recommended by the criminal justice council, that's the courts, judge lipman and everybody else, finally gets it. it's very hard to get this

legislation sometimes in new york as opposed to ohio and texas. why am i having these problems. >> you report a lot on this. do you great reporting on this. do you think there's an appetite for these kinds of reforms? >> i do. but i think a huge piece of this and what's so revealing about this exoneration database is also the role of misconduct. there's error and then there's the misconduct, whether it's police misconduct, prosecutial misconduct and the lack of incentive to go back and revisit errors and their implications. the fact this these are political positions, and people build their careers on these prosecutions has a huge role to play. >> there's a few things, we're talking about science, right? and error reduction. and a very simple thing. if you have an error that's a total system failure. what you should go back and do in any institution, in any business, is an audit. you would say, here's a cop -- tell the truth. you ask what went wrong, how can we fix it.

you do a root cause analysis. we do not do audits of cops who bring about, who lie, right? we do not look at district attorney who is do misconduct. we do not systematically audit defense lawyers who are completely incompetent and don't do the job. we don't take that kind of approach. we've been recommending that, we're looking at conviction integrity units, where we work with our colleagues and district attorneys offices to do that kind of auditing. but it's not done. we brought it to crime labs, brandon moon, not only bad eye witness procedures, but the serology in this case was completely screwed up. we demonstrated after brandon was exonerated with dna, we got a forensic science commission passed in texas. they have now conducted an examination of the brandon moon case and saw that the lab was analyzing the semen improperly and now going back and trying to audit old cases. so we've been doing this in jurisdictions across the

country. and this innocence movement is spreading. >> barry scheck, director of the innocence project, thanks so much for joining us today. what we should know for the week ahead after this. yoo-hoo. hello. it's water from the drinking fountain at the mall. [ male announcer ] great tasting tap water can come from any faucet anywhere. the brita bottle with the filter inside.

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what should you know for the week coming? memorial day was founded by recently-freed layoffs in charleston, south carolina who gathered to bury and commemorate those who had given their lives in a war that provided their liberation. you should snow that tomorrow marks the 11th straight memorial day our country will observe while waging war for longest such period in our history. you should know 122 u.s. soldiers have died in afghanistan this year alone. in a staggering 164 active-duty army national guard and reserve troops committed suicide in 2011. thanks to a change in policy, the family of soldiers who die of suicide receive a condolence

note from the president, but only if the suicide occurs in theater. you should know according to the census buehrle, oneoccurs i. 1/10 of nonelderly veterans don't have health insurance. there are 1.3 uninsured veterans and if the affordable care act survives the challenge before the supreme court it will move this system into exchanges which will provide access to insurance for all of the recent remarkable trend showing a transformation of public opinion on the issue of america marriage equality continues. 59% of african-americans support same-sex marriage and this should put to the rest the press' somewhat strange obsession with african-americans being uniquely opposed to gay rights. the neat, liberal narrative about moral progress and bending toward jult simply doesn't seem to apply to a host of other

deeply contentious moral issues such as abortion and the death penalty. despite nearly overwhelming evidence we have executed innocently people, people continue to favor the death penalty. moral revolutions take time and require a whole lot of unglamorous work. you should know egypti's elections are set to take place. a choice between the muslim brotherhood and a choice of a cronie of mubarak's seems like no choice at all. the election about happen on june 16-17, and the world will be watching to see if the revolutionary promise on true democracy in egypt is kept. the hardest part to revolutions are what come after they are won. i want to find out what my guests think we should know for the week ahead. let us begin with mr. john

mcwhorter. >> the death penalty, it makes me think of those who are exonerated and go back to community in broken men. i think particularly in new york and many cities, we'll continue the debate over stop and frisk which disproportionately affect the minority community and people who have a private sense and there are such people, that these excessive stop and frisks are something that an alienated young black man somehow deserbs because is he anti social, people should understand this stopping and frisking creates exactly the kind of alienated semi employable black man that many think deserve to be stopped and frisked. it goes in a sir compcircle and disgusting. >> since we have been talking about soldiers and veterans there, is one group that gets ignored. a stunning documentary called

"the invisible war" about the epidemic of rape of female soldiers in the military. i thought as a ball-busting feminist, i knew about this. but 20% of women in the military are sexually assaulted, which i find astonishing. this documentary is about these really, really brave veterans who have taken on this culture of impunity and have created real change, although change not coming fast enough. >> i have seen some of the people associated with the film, heard amazing things about the film. >> even if you think you know about this and won't be shocked, i think you'll be shocked. >> hill anna segura, what should people know? >> this really interesting sort of must-read discussion that the "texas monthly" published in the june issue a discussion between an austin police chief, houston d.a., a number of other people involved in the criminal justice system, and anthony graves who spent 18 years on death row in texas, and the discussion is so valuable, because there is this,

you know -- very revealing in the tension it reveals between anthony graves saying you guys tried to kill me, twice, and the discussions what reforms might work and what the politics might be and what efforts look like sr. a, and it paints a broad and detailed picture of the debate. >> it sounds like a good panel to have on the show. brainstorming here. do you feel like -- one of the things you talk about is the brokenness of people out of the system. someone, very quickly, who reports on this, do we do a good job of providing a soft landi for people who are exonerated? >> no, but also over years of meeting exx ining exonories, i y the strength of these people who come out and hit the ground running try to fight the injustices. >> michael brendan dougherty?

>> there was an interview that mitt romney did with "time" magazine, he was asked, if you want to cut government spending, why don't you do it in the first year? why do you have the long-term budge net four years out or ten years out? and he said, that cutting government spending will hurt the economy and he said, by definition it would hurt the economy is, and, in fact, the kind of government spending done right away would tip us to depression or recession. this is the first in a long series of moves that mitt romney will be making over the next several months in which the tea party is long forgotten, conservatives -- he will depend on barack obama to unite conservatives behind him and this interview is a sign of it. the other thing, when i was young and the rangers won the stanley cup, i just want to say this. i thought hockey was getting big again and then it faded out after a lockout. well, hell has frozen again and

you can root for the devils on ice, and go, devils. >> i want to thank my guests, john mcwhorter, michelle goldberg, "sex, power, and the future of the world, liliana segura and michael brendan dougherty, thank you, all. thank you for joining us. we'll be back next weekend, saturday, sunday, 8:00 eastern time, our guests will include thomas political gridlock in washington. stay up to date, check us out online at up.msnbc.com or go to twilightoftheelites.com on facebook. coming up next, the one and only melis melissa harris-perry. see you next week, here on "up." [ woman ] for the london olympic games, our town had a "brilliant" idea.

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