tv The Rachel Maddow Show MSNBC July 26, 2012 6:00pm-7:00pm PDT
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schultz. "the rachel maddow show" starts right now. ezra klein is filling in for rachel tonight. always good to see you, ezra. >> good to see you too, michael. thank you very much. thank you for you at home sticking around for the next hour. rachel has the night off tonight. let's be honest here, july 26, 2012 was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day to be mitt romney. even if you consider yourself the staunchest mitt romney supporter out there, i think you have to admit today didn't go exactly according to plan. the kickoff of romney's overseas trip has been a disaster. here's a lead paragraph tonight, "mitt romney is perhaps the only politician who could start a trip that was supposed to be a charm offensive by being utterly devoid of charm and mildly offensive." it's been a bad day for mitt romney, a bad day that all began with this seemingly innocuous comment he made to our own brian
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williams last night. >> in the short time you've been here in london, do they look ready to your experienced eye? >> it's hard to know how well it will turn out. there were a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the private security firm not having enough people, the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials. that, obviously, is not something which is encouraging. >> wrong answer. i mean, not wrong exactly, i think he's probably right in the substance, legitimate concerns raised about security, organization, all of that, but wrong answer when the purpose of your trip is to make the people holding the olympics like you. that comment from mitt romney on his maiden voyage overseas set off a bet of a feeding frenzy in the uk, and leading the charge was a man that mr. romney was there to charm in the first place, british prime minister david cameron. >> we are holding an olympic games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. of course, it's easier if you
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hold an olympic games in the middle of nowhere. >> in the middle of nowhere. i think the term you're looking for there is oh, snap. mitt romney's comments stirred up such anger in london, he was forced to publicly walk back his remarks in a press conference later in the day, but the damage was done. earlier tonight in front of a crowd of 60,000 people in london's hyde park, here's how london mayor boris johnson addressed the crowd. >> there are some people coming here from around the world who don't get known about all the preparations we've done to get london ready in the last seven years. i hear there's a guy called mitt romney who wants to know whether we're ready. he wants to know whether we're ready. are we ready? are we ready? yes, we are! >> i hear there's a guy called mitt romney. it wasn't just mitt romney's comments about the preparedness of the city of london that got him into trouble today.
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it was a series of gaffes he committed overseas. after meeting with prime minister david cameron, romney then met privately with england's opposition david miliband. the only part that's bad, the whole part of it. "during a meeting with mr. mili band at westminster, he made another gaffe as he didn't know who the labor party chief was and instead addressed him as mr. leader." so that was strike two. a little earlier in the day as romney was addressing the british press corps, romney let out this little doozy. >> i appreciate the insights and perspectives of the leaders of the government here and opposition here as well as the head of mi6. >> mi6, you say? mi6 is like britain's cia, more so, what james bond belongs to the in the books and the thing about mi6, you don't talk about
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mi6. here's how that was reported. "for american readership, this is not like bragging, the british take on the national secret intelligence service comes with an extra-heavy doll op on the whole secret thing. the existence of the mi6 wasn't officially acknowledged until 1994. so yeah, whoops. there was an entire mean created on twitter today under the hash tag "romney shambles." here's how it was summed up from white hall, "serious dismay in whitehall at romney debut. worse than sarah palin. total car crash. two of the kinder verdicts." so this was not a good day to be mitt romney. but you know, as bad as a reaction was to mr. romney's comments about the olympics during that interview with nbc last night, i think there's one
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answer he gave that's been lost in all the coverage, in the long run in this election is going to matter much, much more. did he happen to see this part? >> let's talk about domestic -- the economy, before we wrap things up. the major planks of your job plan, lower taxes, both corporate and marginal rates, and reduce regulation. explain how that would be different from what george w. bush tried to push through. >> let me describe, actually, five things necessary to get this economy going. one, take advantage of our energy resources. particularly, natural gas, but also coal, oil, nuclear, renewables. that's number one. number two, trade. i want to dramatically increase trade and particularly with latin america. number three, take action to get america on track to have a balanced budget. now, those three things, by the way, are things which we have not been doing over the last three years, which are essential to getting this economy going again.
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number four, we've got to show better training and education opportunities for our current workers and coming workers. and finally, what i call restoring economic freedom. that means keep our taxes as low as possible, have regulations modern and up-to-date. get health care costs down. these things will restore economic freedom. >> so how is it that different from what george w. bush tried to push through? it is not. it is not different from what george w. bush tried to push through. lower taxes, fewer regulations, more domestic energy production, promises of deficit reduction that are overwhelmed by increased defense spending and tax revenues and panting rhetoric about economic freedom pretty much defined the bush administration's economic policy. and how did that economic policy work out? it was a disaster. this graph is by david leeanheart of the new york times. the two periods that span the bush years, '01-'05 and '06 to
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2010, they come in dead last. the jobs picture wasn't any better. this compares job growth under bush's business cycle with job growth under the preceding cycles and gives bush a handicap. doesn't count '08 when the financial crisis and recession began, but even when the handicap, the bush years performed poorly. see that on the right, they are the small bars. note the graph again. it ends before the financial crisis. a financial crisis that is at least partially attributed to the let the banks do whatever they want. they would never crash the financial system, would they? attitude that dominated in the bush and, to be fair, in the clinton years. once you add that in, bush has the worst record since herbert hoover. poverty, uninsurance, new firm creation, participation in the
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labor force, every one goes in the wrong direction, and yet romney can't explain how his policies differ. one of my frustrations with campaign coverage is there's a tendency to look at real failings, substantiative efficiencies as problems. romney needs a better answer to the question of, how do you differ from george w. bush? it is not a messaging problem. romney doesn't need a better answer, he needs policies that are actually different, that actually take the lessons of the last decade into account. as new york magazine's jonathan chate writes, romney's answer indicates a larger problem, republicans have not internalized a degree which bush's policies truly failed to produce strong economic growth. conservative rhetoric almost uniformically failed to acknowledge that even pre-crash
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growth, even before the crash, growth under bush was absolutely miserable. it almost -- it also almost uniformly fails to acknowledge that we live in a world today completely reshaped by the 2008 financial crisis. these last few years have been extraordinary economic years. we have been through and in some ways are still trapped in a once in a many generation economic storm, and nothing in romney's agenda is responsive to that fact. that is what amazes me. there is no new thinking here, nothing a republican in 2007 or 2005 or 1999 or 1991 couldn't have proposed. romney's like a doctor looking at a patient with acute pneumonia and describing, as he always does during physicals, diet and exercise. might be good advice, probably is even, but we need more than that right now. the one exception here is romney's pledge to roll back the dodd-frank wall street reform law, which is to return policy
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to something more like what it was before the financial crisis. it's like the opposite of new thinking. in this case, the obama campaign is actually a telling contrast. think back to obama's 2008 campaign. what did he run on? well, getting out of iraq, that was a big part of it, but his big domestic ideas were long term, a health care plan, middle class tax cut, a plan to cap carbon emissions, immigration reform, and he promised all of it would be paid for because in an expansionary period, we had to get deficits down. but by the time he entered office, the economy had begun to collapse, and this is really the key part here. his policies changed. it's not that he didn't support the other stuff or that he didn't try to pass it. in fact, he did pass health care reform, but his first initiative was a massive deficit finance stimulus bill. by the way, before he got into office, he helped pass the bailout too. the biggest idea is the american
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jobs act, which combines big, but temporary, tax cuts for workers and small or expanding businesses with aid in an extension of unemployment benefits. whether you agree with these policies or hate them, think they are exactly the wrong thing for the economy, they are, if nothing else, clearly connected to the current state of the economy. they are ideas to get people back to work now. to get money in people's pockets now. to reward businesses for hiring new workers now. no democrat was running around the country talking up state and local aid or vastly expanding unemployment benefits in 2007 or 2004 or 1999. but the same simply cannot be said for mitt romney's plan. and that's because, to the great misfortune of the country right now, which needs a good economic debate, the republican party's economic policy thinking is, at the moment, in shambles. joining us now, eric bernstein,
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an msnbc contributor. jared, good to see you as always. >> great to see you and great to listen to you. >> tell me if i have it wrong. you're a smart guy. you know how to read this stuff. you know the obama administration's policies well. are -- and the bush administration's, for that matter. are there major differences between the bush agenda and philosophy and what mitt romney's proposed here? >> no, if anything, governor romney doubles down. you said one thing that's different is repealing dodd-frank. that's deregulation, right, that's the hair of the dog that bit you, and the amnesia that's setting in vis-a-vis financial plarkts, by the way, actually, all that stuff that he was partially responsible, it didn't work, so even some people in the banking sector, greenspan recognizes it, so this
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deregulatory, trickle down agenda, i thought it was germane to go through the outcomes, the poverty, it's doubling down, ezra. >> the thing i think is important, there's a false equivalence, oh, we need new economic thinking, and one thing that i think has impressed me about, particularly, the clinton area of vets around barack obama, is that in the '90s, what they did, and you were part of these debates, they wanted to balance the budget when a lot of progressives were saying you need to invest, and they were big on deregulation and they have executed, basically, a 180 flip. they are not saying you need to balance the budget eventually or cut the deficit eventually, but for now, you need to do more deficit finance stimulus in the short term. at least implement dodd-frank, because we live in a different economic moment. am i misreading that? >> it's exactly right. this whole kind of notion that's embedded in our thinking that somehow republicans are fiscally
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responsible and democrats aren't has been completely flipped on its head by the dynamic you just mentioned. when the economy is growing, the gdp is rising, unemployment's falling, you want your deficit to come down, as it did under clinton and as it did not decidely do under bush. there we have what are called structural budget deficits, the kind that grow when she should be shrinking when the economy is expanding. and at a time like this, you actually want your deficits to be large enough to support the economy, given the private sector ongoing weakness. when that private sector comes back online, that's when you want things to go back to normal. if you actually look at what mitt romney's proposing again, you're just looking at budget deficits as far as the eye can see. >> that is, to me, the single most annoying part about our economic debate right now. i think if you ask mitt romney what is different, and kind of said this to brian williams, he is going to cut the debt, he's going to cut the deficit, he's
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going to cut spending. i've looked at his plan and run the numbers on it or read the people that do run the numbers on it. i see trillions in tax cuts and about a trillion in new defense spending, at least. at least 4% of gdp, which is much higher than where we are now. and he has gestures towards spending cuts but nothing near the size of what he's promised to spend or stop taxing, so it doesn't balance the budget. if you believe austerity, it is not austerity. >> exactly. and that's the ruse. he's taking defense off the table, social security off the table, and i'm cutting taxes $5 trillion over bush over ten years. the only way you do that is if you cut government to a point that is theoretically impossible, so the arithmetic stands on its head. what sounds fiscally responsible is fiscally deeply irresponsible.
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>> jared bernstein, msnbc contributor. as always, thank you for being here tonight. >> thank you, ezra. what does it say about a candidate that's based his campaign about his opponent. plus, the ezra klein challenge number five, the hardest one of all. stick around. ok! who gets occasional constipation, diarrhea, gas or bloating? get ahead of it! one phillips' colon health probiotic cap a day helps defend against digestive issues with three strains of good bacteria. hit me! [ female announcer ] live the regular life. phillips'.
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do you have any idea where you're going ? wherever the wind takes me. this is so off course. nature can surprise you sometimes... next time, you drive. next time, signal your turn. ...that's why we got a subaru. love wherever the road takes you. president obama made a campaign fundraising tour through california early this week, and while he was there, he
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talked about how awesome his party's economic policies are and how crappy republican economies are, like you do. >> i'll cut out government spending that's not working that we can't afford, but i'm also going to ask, anybody making over $250,000 a year to go back to the tax rates they were paying under bill clinton, back when our economy created 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history, and everybody did well. just like we've tried their plan, we've tried our plan, and it worked. that's the difference. that's the choice in this election. that's why i'm running for a second term. >> that's what you say when you're a democrat running for president. you say, hey, remember when the economy was great under president clinton? that's what we want to get back to, and remember the george w. bush administration kind of
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flushed it down the toilet? those are the same policies mitt romney seems into. for those of you keeping track at home, it's standard barack obama for president stuff, it's what he always says, what he said about john mccain in '08, the bush administration was tanking the economy and what he's been asssaying about mitt romney. but the republicans have come up with a new counterattack. here's how it goes, their own version of president obama's remarks from monday night, and spoiler alert, the rnc version of the obama argument is missing some words. here's what the republicans posted and shopped around to the media. >> just like we've tried their plan, we've tried our plan, and it worked. that's the difference. that's the choice in this election. that's why i'm running for a second term. >> so the video is captioned "president obama tells a fundraiser in oakland, california, that his plan for the economy worked." so they left out the part of the
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speech that made it clear when he said our plan, he meant the clinton-era plan. so it sounds like the president is saying the economy is totally fixed and perfect now. it's not what he said. it wouldn't be true, either. there's an argument to be made the president's economic policies have been successful. we'd be in worse shape right now if not for t.a.r.p. and the stimulus, and we can have that argument another day. that's not, however, the argument he was making monday night. and that's important, because what happened there is the republican party just grabbed a tiny snippet of the speech and presented it in a way that completely changed the meaning of the words, which is kind of becoming a thing this election year. remember this great moment in creative editing for the mitt romney campaign? >> if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose. >> now, did obama really say he'd lose if he kept talking about the economy? no. no, he did not.
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>> senator mccain's campaign actually said, and i quote "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." >> there's also this bit of creative reimagining on mitt romney's part last fall. >> sometimes i just don't think that president obama understands america. now, i say that because this week or was it last week he said that americans are lazy. i don't think that describes america. >> so did president obama really say the people he's hoping to vote for him are lazy? survey says, nope. >> we've been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades. we've taken for granted people are going to want to come here and we haven't been trying to attract new businesses into america. >> so he did say the word lazy, which in retrospect probably wishes he hadn't, but he wasn't talking about americans, he was
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talking about policy makers, essentially, about himself and the town he's in of the more or less the opposite of what mitt romney accused him of having said. the first time this happened you could imagine this was a fluke, second time, perhaps a coincidence, at this point, looks like creative editing is a strategy. steve benen who writes for the madd maddowblog, all-around terrific guy. thank you for being here. >> thank you, ezra, it's good to be here. >> look, politics ain't bean bag, like they say. but lately this seems to be the whole campaign. it's all misunderstanding of you didn't build that and our plan worked. that doesn't seem like the strategy you choose when you've actually got a good argument that's resinating with the american people. >> exactly. that's the thing about this that strikes me as the most interesting. in theory, that shouldn't be necessary. in theory, republicans and the
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romney campaign would simply take the president's comments, things that he actually said, things that he actually did, present it to the public, and the american mainstream would recoil in horror at this radical president, but the fact they are not doing that, they are taking these comments out of context over and over again suggests they are not particularly satisfied with the way facts are presented where they can use the facts to their advantage, so they feel this tactic is the only real avenue they have left for them. >> this is something that struck me about the campaign. it seems the obama campaign has been trying to get more and more specific. the most recent ad, president obama looking at a screen and saying mitt romney's tax plan works this way. it cuts taxes on the wealthy most of all, cuts taxes on everybody, no way to pay for it. well, the romney campaign has been trying to say -- they can't say barack obama wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, because that's popular, so they have to say he's animated by a radical economic theory in which he doesn't believe successful people deserve what they have.
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>> right, and that's -- >> isn't that the direction it's going in? >> i think that's right. i think ultimately when push comes to shove, there's ample polling data that shows what the president is proposing is popular. you mentioned taxes, there's overwhelming to pay more over $250,000 is actually pretty popular. romney can't and republican critics this general can't simply run against that, and so as a result they have to come up with some kind of fanciful notion of the president's radical ideology that doesn't really exist, but the facts don't cut their way, so they feel they have no choice but to go in that direction. >> i was trying to think about when i watch this stuff, who is it meant for, and i have a tough time finding effect after these gaffe or ad campaigns when you talk about these swing voters who in july of 2012 do not know who they support. seems you're dealing with people who are not folks you can easily
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convince through attack ads and gaffes and the things that make up the political menutia we deal with every day, because if they could, they'd already be convinced. >> come october or early november, the notion that this one quote or another that romney has taken out of context, will that be the main story of the day, probably not. it defines candidates early on and probably why the romney campaign has been so aggressive. but ultimately, i think the state of the economy, the state of world affairs come late fall will have a lot more of an impact how people will vote than daily nonsense that kind of drives the political discussion at this point. >> steve benen, writer for the maddowblog, show producer, and msnbc producer that doesn't believe in nonsense. thank you for joining us on tv tonight. >> thank you, ezra. some say there is a limit
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how wacky a person can be on primetime television. i say that's probably true. but still, the ezra klein challenge where we test that is next. teaching the perfect swing begins with back pain and a choice. take advil, and maybe have to take up to four in a day. or take aleve, which can relieve pain all day with just two pills. good eye. which can relieve pain all day with just two pills. put me at 5 timesd out my greater risk of a stroke, my first thoughts were about my wife, and my family. i have the most common type of atrial fibrillation, or afib. it's not caused by a heart valve problem. i was taking warfarin, but my doctor put me on pradaxa instead to reduce my risk of stroke. in a clinical trial, pradaxa® (dabigatran etexilate mesylate) reduced stroke risk 35% better than warfarin. and unlike warfarin, with pradaxa, there's no need for regular blood tests. that's really important to me. pradaxa can cause serious, sometimes fatal, bleeding. don't take pradaxa if you have abnormal bleeding and seek immediate medical care for unexpected signs of bleeding, like unusual bruising.
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pradaxa may increase your bleeding risk if you're 75 or older, have a bleeding condition like stomach ulcers, or take aspirin, nsaids, or blood thinners, or if you have kidney problems, especially if you take certain medicines. tell your doctor about all medicines you take, any planned medical or dental procedures, and don't stop taking pradaxa without your doctor's approval, as stopping may increase your stroke risk. other side effects include indigestion, stomach pain, upset, or burning. pradaxa is progress. having afib not caused by a heart valve problem increases your risk of stroke. ask your doctor if you can reduce your risk with pradaxa.
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every hedge fund and investment bank across the globe. draghi: yields disrupting policy transmission are in ecb remit. this is a sentence, one sentence, or fragment, that caused a huge stock market rally. it's a sentence that could mean the eurozone is going to survive, and it is a sentence that when i first saw it, i understood three words, draghi, are, and in. i understand it now, and in two minutes, you're going to understand it too. all right, do we have a clock? okay. go. let's begin at the beginning here. draghi is mario draghi, the guy who runs the european central bank, europe's ben bernanke, and as much as the crisis there is anybody's fault, it is his fault and that of his predecessors. they are the ones that control how much money is available. now, the simplest way to understand the euro crisis is greece, spain, portugal, italy, ireland, are having trouble
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borrowing money. if they can't borrow money, they collapse. if the eurozone goes down, the world economy goes down very badly. mario draghi and the central bank can solve the problem. you see, they can print much, as much as of it as they want and lend it to the struggling countries. spain needs money or we all go under, here, spain, here's money. but they've been saying this is against the rules for them, they can't lend money like that, and even if they could, they wouldn't because inflation is scary, but that crazy sentence there, that's them saying they might begin bending the rules, which is exactly what the market's been waiting for them to do. if you translate yields disrupting policy transmission are in ecb remit in normal english, it would say something like the eurozone collapsing to the point we can no longer do our jobs is something we have the power to intervene in, and it scares us even more than inflation does. the only catch here, we don't
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know how much draghi is willing to do. that is a very good sentence for the global economy, but a good sentence won't save the eurozone, only good policy from the european central bank will do that of the all right, did i? i did. 24 seconds left to go. this is new york state. we built the first railway, the first trade route to the west, the greatest empires. then, some said, we lost our edge. well today, there's a new new york state. one that's working to attract businesses and create jobs. a place where innovation meets determination... and businesses lead the world. the new new york works for business. find out how it can work for yours at thenewny.com.
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freecreditscore.com. you talk to anyone in washington and they will tell you the next two rush hour traffic on the beltway and snow, the thing everyone in d.c. fears most is the national rifle association, the nra, they are unrivalled in the power to shamelessly stick to its guns, sorry, sorry, and ultimately get what it wants, but it was not always this way. in 1969, then-president richard nixon, a republican, as you may remember, told the late journalist william sapphire that guns were "an abomb nation." he wanted to make handguns illegal. he later joined ronald reagan in support of the brady bill, which the nra opposed. george h.w. bush, republican, made it illegal to import assault weapons. there was a time in modern
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history where you could be a national political figure, a national republican, and be in favor of gun control. today, that is about as common as a unicorn riding a dodo bird with the transit of venus floating by in the background. today, even most democrats stay out of the nra's way. obama's mostly taken that advice, he hasn't picked that fight. in fact, if you calculate the number of new gun control policies he's advocated in his first term, you come up with one, and that is a negative one, by the way. under obama, there's been not one new piece of control legislation passed on the national level, but there has been an expansion of gun rights. as of 2010, your national parks are now armed. it is now legal to carry loaded weapons into yellowstone, yosemite, arcadia, and the grand tetons. the obama administration has overseen an expansion, not contraction of gun rights. even in the wake of the shooting in colorado that left 12 dead and dozens wounded, even then
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the president indicated no reassessment of gun laws was necessary. that is until yesterday. the president was in new orleans speaking to the national urban league that said something in a normal world would be so rational, so mundane, as to not warrant a mention, but in this not-normal world, it is shocking. >> hunting and shooting are part of a cherished national heritage, but i also believe a lot of gun owners agree that ak-47s should be in the hands of soel soldiers, not criminals. >> these are not shocking ideas, but they are part of a political pattern i've noticed lately, a pattern of the administration shirking its one-time ameliarist impulses. the obama administration's approach to hot-button issues was to back off.
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obama was already an african-american president with an unusual name and unusually international background and an ambitious policy agenda. better let at least some sleeping dogs lie. take gay marriage, for example. on gay marriage, there was a belief in the administration that if the president endorsed the idea that gay people should be allowed to marry, it would do much more harm than good, so keep the opposition calm and just let the underlying demographics turn in your favor. then this year something changed, and as you know, the president did come out in favor of gay marriage. on the immigration issue, this is what deportations looked like under the bush administration. for the most part, they kept going up. when obama came into office, there were many who hoped the trend would reverse. instead, the opposite happened. president obama became the deportation president. he deported more people than any other president ever. history was made, whether you like it or not, is up to you. the administration thought that by ramping up deportations, it would gain enough political capital to get what it really
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wanted, comprehensive immigration reform, or maybe just the dream act. the administration was wrong, it didn't get what it wanted. congress, including a whole lot of republicans who used to support it, voted down the dream act and never came anything close on anything bigger. this year obama has changed course. he announced the united states would no longer expel kids from the country who'd come here through no fault of their own, so that's three. that's a pattern. immigration, gay marriage, guns. my suspicion is that the obama administration found the old strategy wasn't working. they were hiding on these issues, but the people they were hoping to reassure hated in fear of them anyway. the nra, for instance, has a website called gun ban obama, where they say "obama could be the most anti-gun president in american history." how do they deal with the fact he hasn't proposed any actual anti-gun legislation? that's easy. they say "he refuses to speak honestly about where he stands. in fact, obama hides behind
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carefully chosen words and vague support for sportsmen and gun rights to sidestep and camouflage the truth. he pretends to be on our side." meanwhile, obama supporters were frustrated, so the obama administration found it wasn't making anyone very happy. folks on the right saw a liberty-crushing madman, folks on the left saw, well, it didn't quite look like change it could believe in. so the obama administration has changed course. better to stand with your friends than with no one at all. joining us now is the president of the president influential center for american progress. she also used to work in the obama administration as an adviser to the secretary of health and human services. nera, thank you so much for being here. first, you're a better political mind than me. do you see this trend, do you see sort of a change here in the way they are treating what many call cultural issues? >> throughout his history, the president has always believed in the politics of conviction, and
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he's believed that when you talk to his people honestly about issues, you gain political points. even when they are not totally popular, and now we're in a time where we're not trying to pass legislation particularly in the house, everything is literally ground to a halt, so he has the ability to actually talk honestly about these issues. and truthfully, after a situation after aurora, for him to not mention it at all, raised questions with people, and, you know, he took this from the perspective that it was very much common sense and cited gun owners themselves, which i think was a smart move. >> and when -- when you sort of step back, i kind of hate to do the cynical washington thing, it's all about changing turnout patterns and who will actually come to the polls, but you sort of say the politics convention, but three years we weren't here and one thing that's been striking about the issues he's chosen here and particularly true on immigration and gay marriage is that they poll much better among younger americans,
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so i do sort of wonder if they are looking at the polls who is excited to vote and who isn't. the thing we have to excite people with is conviction, showing them we are on their side. >> i do think the challenge here is congress, and it's truthfully been congress on both sides, democrats and republicans, and i do think in the beginning of the administration the president had a lot of legislation before congress and he made a conscious decision that passing health care was an important thing and other things would go to the side and that was, in my view, the right thing to do. that would be transformative legislation when fully implemented, so i don't think this should be seen as politics or trying to appease one, i don't think it's a political loser and political winner, it really is one or the other. and i think in this case the president was smart to say, look, this is a common sense issue, it might be a politically difficult thing to do, but a lot of these people are going to vote against me anyway and i'm going to tell it like it is,
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otherwise people think of me as a normal politician, and that hurts him more than anything else. >> you guys have an event coming up or recently happened on the nra and as whether or not they are as politically influential. so tell me, are they as politically influential as people think they are? >> no. we had an event -- we did a poll with frank luntz, republican pollster with mayors against gun violence, and he found in the poll -- he actually polled nra members, and nra members overwhelmingly believe we should have background checks, criminals shouldn't just be able to buy guns, people that have histories of mental health challenges shouldn't be able to purchase guns. what was really heartening is the president recognized that it's really gun members, people who have guns, nra members, believe in common sense measures, and i think that really helps show the extreme of the other side. >> neera tanden, thank you so
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last night on the show we showed you a pair of satellite images taken by nasa of greenland this month, four days a part. we mistakenly said the images showed the ice sheet melt that was almost gone. that was incorrect. the surface of the ice sheet melted, it's the surface of the ice sheet melt. what we got right is these pictures are very scary. and so is this picture. a padgett in washington, d.c. this month with the wheeling stuck in the overheated tarmac softened pach eed pavement. chocolate chip cookies are supposed to be gooey. airport tarmacs aren't supposed to be gooey. sidewalks are buckling. and remember last summer flooding threatened a nuclear power plant in nebraska that record hot year? this month a nuclear plant in illinois had to get special
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permission to keep running because the extreme heat outside had driven up temperatures in the cooling pond. last month, the freakout doratio storm took down trees and power lines from ohio to new jersey. tonight we have more severe weather. it looks like ghost busters outside. we have reports of tornadoes and power outages and general anxiety. stuck as we are in this record heat, we have no way of telling yet whether we're just looking at weird weather which is temporary or whether what we're seeing is genuine climate change happening around us. what we do know is we're seeing a preview of a climate change where weather will not only be hotter but more extreme weather and parts of our infrastructure is not working quite right anymore. new york times today considered
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the many examples of infrastructure failed this summer. along with sum efforts to improve infrastructure so we don't get as many busted highways and train tracks and headlines about nuclear power plants going down. those upgrades cost money. it cost billions of dollars. and this congress has been reluctant to spend on infrastructure, especially but not only republicans who keep calling for austerity. from a purely pragmatic standpoint, this drives me crazy. we have lots of people sitting out of work when they could be productive building things. amidst all the gloom, we have one huge advantage, one economy-changing opportunity and we have it because we are america. everyone wants to invest in us because we are the gold standard of gold standard investments. we can do a tip to tail overall of our roads and bridges and we can do it forless money than we will ever be able to do it for again and it will help the economy both now and in the
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if a corporation gets this deal, they would be jumping for joy. if bain capital could borrow at these rates, they would buy erg in the economy. but they can't. only america can. we can take that money and use us to help rebuild our infrastructure and help put people back to work now. people are paying for the privilege of loaning us money. the time to invest in our infrastructure is now, right now. doing anything less isn't just missing an opportunity. it is financial mismanagement on an epic scale. what's with you?
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>> hi, daddy. >> back in the spring, the first brigade kem be the team from the michigan national guard's 34th division returned home to minnesota from a year-long deployment to iran and kuwait. they helped escort the last troops and supplies out of iraq and now they are all back home in the u.s. and this weekend, they and other veterans of the wars in iraq and afghanistan will get a great big much deserved public thank you from people of minnesota. thanks to a fundraising organizing effort from a grassroots effort in indianapolis and st. paul. the twin cities hooer roe parade starting at 11:00 a.m., making minneapolis and st. paul the ever growing list of cities hosting welcome home parades. it began in st. louis in january. since then there have been welcome home parades in houston,
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tune, melbourne, florida, richmond, virginia, kansas city, missouri, austin, texas, and portsmouth, new hampshire. and now the twin cities in minnesota. this latest parade was originally supposed to happen in april. but you remember the red bulls? they weren't all home yet. and their friends and family and the military reached out to organizers to see if they could please wait. so they did. tomorrow vintage war planes will fly overahead as they marge downtown minneapolis. there will be face painting for kids, music and for the veteran themselves, a resources area, a whole bunch of organizations, gathered in one place to help hook veterans up with information and services like applying for tax credits. filing a claim with the v.a., or finding a job. so this weekend, minnesota, it is welcome home to iraq veterans and all post 9/11 veterans get
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