and main street found its might again. and main street found its fight again. and we, the locals, found delight again. that's the power of all of us. that's the power of all of us. that's the membership effect of american express. happy friday. it will be a good weekend, and this will be a really good show. we had a really good day in the tape archives today. in the 1970s, american express had an awesome award winning series of tv ads that sort of defined american express as a brand. it defined them as kind of the upscale credit card for celebrity types or at least for important people. the tagline from these old ads don't leave home without it. and that tagline survived for decades thereafter. but the gimmick from these brilliant ads that they did in the 1970s, the gimmick in these ads, for some reason, did not survive, even though it was

great. watch this. >> you know me. without my card a lot of people don't. this machine is one reason i need my card. i put my card in here, push my special number and get up to $5,000 in travelers checks at airports around the world. >> to apply for the card, call 800-528-8000. >> no way. that's benny goodman? the premise of the ad is i'm a famous person whose name you would know, but you don't recognize me looking at me. i am important, but the only way i can get treated with the importance that i deserve is by using this card, this card you too can have. this awesome benny good mown card. they did it with other notable people as well. >> do you know me? i'm one the astronauts who

walked on the moon. but when i walk in here to rent a car, this he don't always recognize me. i carry an american express card. >> do you know me? you think having won wimbledon, people would recognize me. without my racket they don't. so i carry the american express card. >> do you know me? i was treasurer of the united states, many people know my name, but not me. the card is welcome all over. it's superto have my signature on 60 billion, but for traveling and entertaining, a lot better to have my name right here. >> francine neff, turns the job of united states treasurer, to awesome corporate sponsorship deal and charles conrad jr. and virginia wade. these ads were so great and they also did one of these ads for a man named bill miller. that particular american express ad was referenced in a great piece in "the new york times"

about historical vice presidential picks. i would not have known this ad existed before i read about it in the "times" today. we looked all day in the archives for it. and just before air today, we found it, deep in the nbc archives. >> do you know me? i ran for vice president of the united states in '64, so i shouldn't have trouble charging a meal, should i? why, with this, they treat me as though i had won. >> william e. miller. they treat me as though i had won. william e. miller, republican presidential candidate. barry goldwater's choice for vice president in 1964. before they picked paul ryan, the last time the republican party picked somebody roift public i had can party to be vp was 1964, bill willer. perfect for the you don't recognize me american express ad because bill miller became vice

president. he and barry goldwater lost very badly. but it wasn't for the lack of awesome ads like this one. >> senator barry goldwater speaking with general eisenhower at gettysburg. >> we speak about war and peace and in this candacecy that we are engaged in, because we stress the need for a strong america, our opponents are referring to us as warmongers, and i'd like to know what your opinion of that would be. you've known me a long time and you've known miller a long time. >> barry, in my mind this is actual tommy rot. >> campaign ads were different then. despite the awesomeness of having ike on their side, calling their critics tommy rot, barry goldwater and bill miller, last republican ticket to have

somebody from the house of representatives as vp, miller and goldwater got clobbered. and i don't think it was because of the choice of miller for v.p. i think it was more of this. >> i asked to speak to you because i'm mad. i've known barry goldwater for a long time, and when i hear people say he's impulsive and such nonsense, i boil over. >> ronald reagan telling americans that he is boiled over with rage over allegations that barry goldwater might have the appropriate emotional temperament to be president. i'm mad! it probably didn't help. that is what the american people thought about barry goldwater, that he was a little [ whistle ] the goldwater loss was the worst loss in modern american politics and i'm defining modern loosely. the parallel between goldwater picking miller and romney picking ryan, are stunning.

he is the same kind of pick with the same kind of rationale. miller was seen as being superrepublican. they didn't think they could get nosh state with him, but they liked his partisanship. he never passed anything of significance in the house, neither has paul ryan. but he had a leadership role. mr. miller had been republican party chairman, and was seen as an aggressive partisan. he was popular as an activist. seen as a hard core guy. they thought he was such a partisan republican hero, that he could really energize their side, and it would drive the democrats nuts. specifically, they thought that bill miller would drive the democratic president they were running against, lbj, they thought it would drive him nuts. this is the front page of "the milwaukee sentinal" in 1964. the last time the republicans picked somebody to be vice

president in 1964, it was for the same reason that republicans and mitt romney picking paul ryan now. right now, it's looking like the same kind of results. it's too early to say. we're one week in, and i don't think it's unfair to say that this is one of the all-time least unsuccessful rollouts of a vice presidential selection in modern history. maybe it will get better. but it's been bad. it became public knowledge 12:01 a.m. on friday night/saturday morning, followed up by an early saturday morning event. the romney campaign made a big deal about how the announcement of the vice presidential choice would be carefully timed to reward their greatest supporters. the only people who would know who the pick was were those who downloaded the cell phone app. instead, midnight on a friday night, there is chuck todd and it's on msnbc at midnight.

i don't know. and then the actual announcement itself. >> join me in welcoming the next president of the united states, paul ryan. every now and then i'm known to make a mistake. i did not make a mistake with this guy. but i can tell you this, he will be the next vice president of the united states. >> handled charmingly, not a great beginning. luckily for the romney campaign, president obama had made a similar, though not quite as bad mistake when he announced joe biden as his running mate back in 2008. still, not an auspicious start. and then there was the subcommittee of the staging. why were they rubbing on a battle ship? the official line, they were touring on the battle ship. they went on a tour and then they ran down the gangplank of

the battleship. neither of these two have served, using a did he come missioned battleship maybe to imply that they have military service they do not have? all was all over 10:30 saturday morning and america woke up, wondered what happened? what did i miss? followed by the first solo campaign for the newly minted vice presidential nominee, here is what that looked like. >> are you going to cut medicare? >> i think -- >> usa, usa, usa! >> answer the question. are you going to cut medicare? >> i think we need to be respectful of one another, peaceful for one another. >> will you cut medicare?

>> paul ryan is saying there, she must not be from iowa. it turns out the woman who was yelling at him was from iowa, despite what paul ryan was saying, she later wrote about it on the huffington post. what she was screaming at him about, what the hecklers were screaming about, was paul ryan's machine to kill medicare. paul ryan's plan to medicare is killing local headlines in florida newspapers, the official swing state response to who mitt romney picked as his running mate. if the romney folks could have seen anything coming about paul ryan, they should have seen having the answer for the medicare thing coming. the romney campaign apparently did not plan for that. they did not come up with what they would say about paul ryan's kill medicare plan. when paul ryan was asked about the plan, right after that weekend on sunday, he said i have my budget plan, my budget plan is different, and that's the man we're going to run on

and on monday, he said my plan for medicare is similar to his plan. and then on tuesday he said they were different, and on wednesday, he said that they were close to identical. the most important thing to pick this thing to be on the ticket and the biggest explanation is clear as mud. we didn't think this up. where the republican position on the paul ryan kill medicare plan is being made crystal clear, however, is daily ballot from these guys. republicans across the country and all sorts of states have started running advertisements and saying they are against paul ryan and his plans for medicare. and those among those candidates lucky enough to be able to vote against it have been touted as loudly as they can, they voted no on paul ryan. from denny reyhberg, linda mcmahon, heather wilson, scott brown, all saying they are against paul ryan on the

medicare issue. this is just the first week of his rollout. this is the honeymoon. and then he himself started talking to the press, and he handled it roughly as well as he handled those hecklers at his first solo speech in iowa. he tried to insist he never requested stimulus money. he said "i never asked for stimulus." yeah. yeah, you did. after he got called out for lying about that the new vice presidential nominee had to backtrack saying he actually hadn't recalled, and it was a mistake when he took the stimulus money and then took the courageous step of blaming his staff. and then "the boston globe" called him out again on another program. he tried to get away with blaming president obama foreclosing an auto plant in his

district, even though it closed before president obama ever became president. you want to join president bush for that one. this is week one. no honeymoon whatsoever. you can tell that mitt romney is answering questions about his tax returns. the rollout of the vice presidential candidate dent even get people distracted from that. you can see it in the numbers. nate silver of "the new york times," the average vice presidential announcement produces a four-point bounce in the polls. in the case of paul ryan, it was more like a one-point bounce. democrats are gleefully sending around those numbers, noting that paul ryan's rollout is least successful on record, on par with the rollout of sarah palin and dan quayle. the sarah palin dig, that hurts. the dan quayle dig, democrats may be gleeful, but when republicans rolled out dan

quayle, republicans can win that year. how can the republicans turn this into a dan quayle year and not a sarah palin year? would you assume that republican knew the medicare thing would always be hard. maybe you can forgive them for not knowing what to say about that, on or about saying no, no, no, let me run away. the other thing paul ryan brought, his willingness, reputation for being a details guy, being willing to defend controversial policy positions in detail. they've still got that, right? the newest leak from the romney campaign to effectively their campaign newsletter, politico.com, their overall strategy now they have paul ryan, nobody on the campaign is going to be allowed to discuss details. it is their view that "diving

into details into a general election race would be suicidal." what did you pick paul ryan for exactly? you made him abandon his own policies and run against his own plans. you won't let him talk about your policies that you are making him embrace. the thing most people knew about him if they didn't know him as kill medicare guy, they knew he was from the least least popular guy. and the guy who not only lost, but had to parlay the depths of the obscurity into which he fell into a credit card commercial deal a decade later, that's the history. what's the plan here? there has to be a plan here. are you supposedly careful planners. what's the plan? joining us now steve kornathy, he is a writer for salon.com and co-host of an afternoon show on msnbc. >> i loved the intro, the old

bill miller clips, dan quayle coming off the riverboat, that's -- >> the fact that -- the premise of the bill miller ad, have you no idea who i am looking at my face. oh, it's as if i won, i'm so happy with this credit card. that's not only a loss, but a huge loss, but i was so struck today, going back and looking at the contemporaneous press coverage to see the ration nail of picking him, they really needed somebody who seemed like a hard core partisan to keep their own side happy. it's essentially the ration aal for paul ryan. is this as dumb of a move as it was in 1964? >> in 1 964, there were so many factors against barry goldwater, he was against the civil rights bill, so he was going to lose who neither who he picked in the north. and you think of jack kemp.

he took kemp as the running mate, bob dole who had been a sort of eisenhower republican, never bought into the supply side stuff. reinvented himself in the middle of the summer and embraced supply-side economics, embraced jack kemp's economic philosophy. he believed he needed to do that to energize the republican base and give himself something "big" to fall on. i saw shades in romney's announcement. have you a same guy, similar guy, not trusted by the republican party base. you need something to define the campaign. what did he do? what did it look like he would do? he would embrace ryanism, the ryan budget, the ryan medicare plan and roll the dice and see if they could sell the press and public, saying they are courageous truth tellers. they are down the positively, summer not going the way they wanted it to go. this is the rifblg you take.

now it basically seems like a week into this thing, they want to run with paul ryan and strip ryan out of this. they have gone through the most elaborate possible means to get to a generic vice presidential candidate. that's what they are trying to turn paul ryan into. and if you wanted a generic candidate, you could have picked anybody in the republican party. he is the worst person you could have picked for a generic vice presidential candidate. >> imagine are you bob dole/jack kemp campaign to have been a better campaign. if we can imagine back to that sort of a choice. not even just a historical analogy, paul ryan said he learned economics from jack kemp. moran apostle than somebody learning from the writing, but is -- is it possible to make a good case to the country for supply-side voodoo economics, trickle down economics, for the ryanism supply side stuff, that ryan has made his name on defending? could you do that? >> i think what's interesting

there, what ryan represents is the next generation about what kemp and the kemp, bill roth, supply side crowd started. the thick about kemp, he cared deeply about tax cuts, about slashing rates for upper business. believing that would grow the economy. didn't have an appetite for cutting the social safety net. we have these huge deficits, we can grow our way out of it with tax cuts. paul ryan, largely he and the fellow republicans in congress, are responsible for the deficits of the last decade, but paul ryan's posture is to take supply side theory and apply the libertarian war on government to it. not just we want tax cuts, we want to dismantle the social safety net and that's politically problematic, and the romney campaign recognized right away. we got ryan on our ticket, apparently our candidate wanted this guy, we can't run on ryanism. this is not supply side economics. this is a new generation. >> they got ryan, anybody who

looks closely finds that out, but anybody who looks is hearing paul ryan being a liberal. that barack obama, cutting the safety net, getting rid of medicare. that is amazing. making him a liberal. i believe that if you look at the fundamentals this presidential election is republicans for the taking and i believe the romney campaign is fundamentally incompetent on the basic decisions they need to make in order to take something that out to be there's. steve kornacki, co-host of "the cycle" and a senior writer for salon. and a nice guy for being here late on a friday. the romney campaign has assigned someone to be the paul ryan person, the paul ryan guy. if they were thinking about the politics of this, again, i have no idea why they picked this particular particular guy.

more on that ahead. one more thing about bill miller, barry goldwater's pick for vice president in 1964. miller and goldwater got beaten really, really badly, the republican's worst presidential showing ever. johnson beat them by over 20 points and he was lost enough to obscurity that adecade later he did an american express do you know me ads? where the whole idea of the ad was, of course, you didn't know who this person was. one thing about bill miller, aside from being vice presidential candidate and on an american express ad. one thing that really does survive the years about bill miller, for which he still to this day is totally justifiably famous in a very positive way. and that is that he is stephanie miller's dad. stephanie miller, high priestess of talk radio. her dad is bill miller. and it is true proof of a life

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and for the blind spot monitoring that helps remind you that the highway might not be as desolate... ...as you thought. ♪ juicy brats grilled up on a thursday. the perfect use of the 7th inning stretch. get that great taste anytime with kingsford match light charcoal. this tyrant has amassed a large cache of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and is aggressively seeking nuclear weapons. he sees america as the only obstacle to his perverse ambitions. and that is what he shares with al qaeda, these terrorists against us.

this deep hatred for america. we must not let him share anything else with these terrorists, mr. speaker, and with that, mr. speaker, it's a painful vote, it's a painful subject, it's a painful issue, but this is a cause that we cannot go unanswered. i urge a yes vote and i urge passage of this resolution. >> that was wisconsin congressman paul ryan, not now presumptive vice presidential nominee paul ryan in october 2002, explaining his vote in favor of invading iraq because of the weapons of mass destruction saddam hussein had stockpiled and was ready to deliver to the terrorists. paul ryan will probably not be asked on the campaign trail about how long wrong he was about iraq when he voted to authorize a war for something that wasn't there. the iraq war is over, and nobody in american politics talks about it much anymore. that said, if they wanted to

draw attention to paul ryan's disastrous view on iraq, they couldn't have found a better adviser for him. they have elevated a man named dan seymour to be the top paul ryan staffer. he was the spokesman for the u.s.-led provisional government in iraq in the months after the invasion. he was trying to convince reporters that the invasion was going awesome, when, of course, it was a disaster. the "the new york times" described it as often delivering rosy accounts to reporters whose online view of the progress knew it was anything but. dan seymour told one reporter that "off the record paris is burning, but on the record, security and stability are returning to iraq." that's dan seymour. that's the paul ryan senior adviser. the bush administration flack who was charged with trying to sell america on the iraq war.

but the iraq war is over, so nobody is asking mitt romney why he wanted the off the record paris is burning guy on his campaign at all. and nobody is asking paul ryan about the weapons of mass destruction he said saddam was about to give to al qaeda when he was helping cheer lead the country into a second simultaneous war in the end of 2002. the other simultaneous war we were in at the time we still aren't out of, the war in afghanistan, the other bush/cheney war that has become the obama war, is still very much under way. five so-called green on blue attacks where uniformed afghan security forces fired on coalition troops who are training them or otherwise working with them. two of the attacks were today. at least seven americans have bing killed just in the last week by uniformed afghan service members we're supposedly working alongside. and this appears to be part of a trend in afghanistan right now. a bad trend. by the associated press's count, there were five coalition troops killed in 2009, five in 2010,

last year, it was up to laesk, and this year, which is not over, there have already been 34 coalition troop deaths in green on blue, or insider attacks in afghanistan. nbc news has learned today that in response to the attacks by afghan security forces on americans, all u.s. military personnel in afghanistan have been ordered to have a fully loaded magazine in their weapons at all times. no matter what else they're doing. the army has also ordered that at any gathering of u.s. military and armed afghan security forces, at least one u.s. soldier will be designated as a guardian angel to stand in a protected space with a loaded weapon ready to respond immediately if there is an attack. the taliban leader, mullah omar, is back enough to take credit for these attacks. that's what the taliban does, whether or not they deserve the

credit. nobody expected this would be a foreign policy election. but we are at war. tens of thousands of americans are in harm's way right now and their families are hanging on every word from the war zone. what is politically incredible is not so much we can have an election without talking too much about the war, what is even more incredible than that is that the ryan/romney ticket is so confident in that result, so confident they will not be asked any hard questions about this war or the last one, that they have put the spokesman for the last disastrous war right at the top of their campaign. this is the plan for back to school. introducing share everything, only from verizon. a shareable pool of data to power up to 10 different devices. add multiple smartphones to your plan, so everyone in your family can enjoy unlimited talk and text. the first plan of its kind. share everything. get your student a samsung galaxy nexus for $99.99.

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the last time mitt romney told voters to trust him about what was in his unseen tax returns, it turned out he was not telling the truth about what was in them. why that is now coming roaring back. that's ahead. i was teaching a martial arts class and having a heart attack.

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we spent a lot of very good time in the way deep archives today looking for a tape we showed at the top of the show about the last time the republicans picked a member of the house for their vice presidential nominee. that was the barry goldwater nominee in 1964. who we were rooting around, we had a eureka moment when we got to the part of the archives about tax returns. i have never seen this before today, but i think it's amazing. 1974. richard nixon has just resigned. gerald ford has become president. and by the power vested in him. he gets to pick who the new vice president of the u.s. will be. because there is not an election that confirmed his pick, it's just someone being appointed by the guy just named president,

actually congress has to confirm the choice. congress has to confirm the guy gerald ford picks to be the new vice president. who does he pick? he picks michael bloomberg, the michael bloomberg of his time. a governor who is a giantly, giantly rich new yorker. but nelson rockefeller has to go before the senate to be confirmed as vp, and nelson rockefeller will not release his tax returns. at least he tries not to. watch him try not to with members of the press. the context here is that he is saying he will release his tax returns if the senate demands that he has to. but he's not going to give his tax returns to some pesky reporters. >> the role of the vice president depends on the president, if the president wants to use him, wonderful. if he doesn't, fine. >> do you believe that -- what would you do about your financial assets to meet the requirements of the vice presidency? >> i'll just conform to the law.

>> are you prepared to detail your personal finances for congress including your tax returns. >> i'm prepared to do whatever the congress asks me and to conform to the law in every respect. >> what is your net worth now, governor? >> you're not a member of the congress, excuse me. >> you seem to be a little less open with us. >> you're not the committee of congress. i haven't been confirmed and i haven't gone before the committee. my understanding is that protocol says that you don't discuss matters that are going to be taken up by a committee before you get to the hearings. >> do you doubt you will be confirmed? >> pardon me? >> do you doubt you would be confirmed? >> i would never take anything for granted. particularly action of this kind. thank you, gtlemen. it's been a pleasure. i may see you again. >> eventually, nelson rockefeller did get confirmed by the senate but not before coughing up seven years of tax returns.

precedent matters, right? politically, right now, the most important thing about mitt romney not releasing his tax returns is he hasn't been able to change the subject from people asking him to release his tax returns. there are two things that are underappreciated. one is precedent. the other, of course, is what light his tax returns would shed on his plans. how much money he would make under the policies he's proposing for the country. what his policies would do for his own tax burden and for the taxes paid by the middle class. on the issue of precedent, i think the national press, for some reason, is blind to looking back at mitt romney's public record. it seems like there's a willful resistance to looking back at what mitt romney has done in the past. when jim messina tried to make a deal about the tax returns, obama campaign narrowed the question. they asked for five years of returns. they asked mr. romney to release from 2007 to 2012, basically the years mr. romney has been running for president.

in doing that, they tried to address the romney campaign's main objection to releasing more tax returns. they keep saying they're worried if they reveal anything, the obama campaign will only demand they release more. today, the obama campaign manager acknowledged that concern. they said, quote, if the governor will release five years of returns, i commit in turn we will not criticize him for not releasing more. neither in ads nor in other public communications or commentary for the rest of the campaign. despite the question being narrowed and their objection being met, the romney campaign still said no, no deal. mr. romney said he had looked back over the last decade of his returns and found that he, quote, never paid less than 13%. and we all have to trust him on that. but back when he was running for governor in massachusetts in 2002, mr. romney set a precedent for what he is doing now, and it's a bat precedent. he was refusing to release his tax returns. he was incesting instead you

have to trust me. that year in 2002, he finished running the olympics in utah, he came back to massachusetts and announced he was making a bid in office. he told a utah reporter he declared himself a resident for tax purposes. so they wanted to see his tax returns. they wanted to know whether he was qualified to run for governor of massachusetts, whether he met the requirement that you have to be a resident of the state for seven years. mr. romney declined to release his tax returns citing a concern for privacy. now, because the question was not mr. romney's income at the time but his residency, the boston globe narrowed the question, just exactly the way the obama campaign did today. they offered the romney campaign in 2002 a deal. the globe said, release the tax returns to us with all of the financial information redacted. all of the numbers blacked out, with only your name and address still visible. they narrowed the question to

account for the supposed objections that mr. romney had raised to it. the issue is your residency. let us see the tax returns just to see your residency. still, they said no, no deal. he had been filing as a massachusetts resident, the campaign said. mr. romney's staffer eric fehrnstrom told the paper, you are going to have to take my word for it. it turns out that word was not good. facing a legal challenge by the democrats, mr. romney was forced to admit that actually maybe the reason he didn't want to release the returns is because what was in them was not what he said was in them. he had not been filing his taxes as a massachusetts resident as he publicly insisted he had. arve he announced the campaign for governor, he had to retroactively do his taxes. to match what he had been saying. what the romney campaign said been saying about his taxes was not true. they had been lying about what was in the tax returns. that's why they would not release them, even with all of the financial details blacked out. now they're assuring us they

never paid zero in taxes and even with the stated objection addressed in the new offer from the owe became ka pain, with the question narrowed, they still will not show the evidence. they're saying just trust us. the precedent for trusting them on this is not good. stay with us. more ahead. at shell, we believe the world needs a broader mix of energies. that's why we're supplying natural gas to generate cleaner electricity... that has around 50% fewer co2 emissions than coal. and it's also why, with our partner in brazil, shell is producing ethanol - a biofuel made from renewable sugarcane. >>a minute, mom! let's broaden the world's energy mix. let's go.

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let me also say categorically, i have paid taxes every year, and a lot of taxes. >> my view is i have paid all the taxes required by law. i don't pay more than are legally due. >> a spokesperson would only reiterate, mitt romney has paid his taexs in full compliance with u.s. law and he has paid 100% of what he has owed. >> i pay all full taxes. i'm honest in my dealings with people. people understand that. >> is there some secret? people know you're wealthy. >> i understand. >> there's nothing to hide. >> agree, nothing to hide.

>> i agree. mr. romney will not release his tax returns and he cannot seem to change the subject. today, the obama campaign pressed that political advantage, addressing the romney campaign's complaint no matter what they released, the campaign would ask for more. they asked him just to release the last five years of his taxes. they promised if they did that, they would not criticize him in public for not releasing more. the romney campaign still said no. joining us now is eugene robertson, thank you very much for being here. nice to have you here. >> great to be here, rachel. >> they cannot get this issue off the front pages. does this issue survive all the way to november, through the debates and everything? >> i think it probably does. it's a really easy to understand issue. you know, everybody pays taxes. so let's see them. his stated reason for not showing the taxes is that what's in there, whatever is in there, will be used as ammunition. he's saying, gee, there's something in there that doesn't look good. you know, that really makes people more curious as to what

it is rather than less curious. i never understood that like of defense. >> on this specific issue of his precedent. he has been dogged by his tax returns all the way back to '02 when he ran for governor of massachusetts. he said it back then, everybody had to trust him, he filed as a massachusetts resident, until he had to admit he hadn't. what he said been saying to trust him about was not the case. now, he says we should trust him that he never paid zero in taxes. how does he shake the precedent, and how could his time running for governor of massachusetts isn't more central to the way we understand how he behaves now? >> well, you know, it should be more relevant to how he behaves now. look, precedent for the voters was -- voters looking back, it's precedent for romney, too.

in 2002, from his point of view, he did have to admit that there was this sort of discrepancy in residency, but it got cleared up in his favor. he cleared it up, and he ended up not releasing the actual taxes. and i think he figures he can get away with that again. >> today, the paul ryan side of the ticket released two years of tax returns. it showed him making less money than mitt romney but paying more in taxes. i wonder if that might sort of be a foreshadowing about the kinds of troublesome questions we would be asking if we did see more. >> i think so. there's an ad runing in battleground states now, i know, because it's running in virginia. that the obama campaign just put up about the 14% rate that romney paid last year and essentially saying, gee, the romney/ryan tax plan is he pays less, you pay more. i think we're going to hear that a lot. >> eugene robinson, pulitzer prize winning columnist, and a good sport for being here with us on a friday night. thanks a lot. >> great to be here. >> we have more ahead that will specifically challenge your

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degree but not my thesis. my idea is that i would live in undistracted bucolic bliss in order to finish the darn thing. it took me years but i did finish. to the extent that finishing the darn thing meant having to work in libraries, i did most of my work at the web dubois library u mass amherst. it is the tallest university library in the world, almost 30 stories. western massachusetts is not a skyscrapery kind of place. western massachusetts is more of a 19th century barn and a couple of cows kind of place. but the campus library is this big tall brick tower. you can see it from everywhere. and here's the weird thing. the whole time i was squeezing blood from that stone, the whole time i was writing my des sertation, there was this temporary looking chain link fence that went around the building. these are pictures of the fence from back in the day that the meant you couldn't just walk up to the building except through one tiny alley of space. it's a giant building visible from everywhere.

but when you got there, you had to enter through this tiny colored alley like cut through because of the building's unfortunate habit of dropping bricks off its facade. so the fence kept you far enough away from the building that they would not hit you on the head and the one little alley was covered up by a roof that would protect you if the bricks did fall. local legend had it the architects who designed the library in the late '60s made a lot of neat plans but did not plan for the weight of the books. and so the bricks popped off. you might have heard a similar architecture are rumor about a library near you. i say it's an urban legend because brick chips have been falling off that library at u mass amherst for decades but apparently the weight of the books accuse was a legend and never substantiated. maybe not true. not why that problem was

happening. to prove i'm an old person, these days that ugly chain link fence is gone but it's because it's been replaced by a prettier fence because they still have the same trouble. there is a place where the factoring in the weight of the building's content legend turns out to be a real thing. there's a new inspector general report out about this federal government regional office in north carolina. and in this new report, the inspectors describe what the building's contents were doing to the building's structure. the building's contents "created an unsafe work space for employees and appeared to have the potential to compromise the integrity of the building. the contents exceed the capacity of the floor by approximately 39 pounds per square feet. the excess weight can compromise the whole sixth floor of the facility. we noticed floors bowing under the excess weight." what could possibly be causing the floors to be buckling?

ta-dah. this turns out to be a veterans administration office. a va office. so naturally, what is so out of control that is potentially destroying the building are files. tens of thousands of pounds of claims files. an estimated 37,000 of them stacked on top of file cabinet in boxes, on the floor, causing the floors to bow, to the point that inspectors could see the cabinets were not level. after the inspection, the va decided to shift a lot of that paperwork out of the building and figure out how to make the building safe. but that doesn't solve the real problem. the sight of all of those files stacked up in those piles in just one regional va office is sort of a astounding confirmation of a statistic. the va is wading through 900,000 claims from america's veterans. that's close to a million veteran who's filed their paperwork for services they need

and still waiting to hear back whether or not they're going to get them. if you are a veteran waiting right now, if you haven't already been waiting for four months, you're not even counted yet in that backlog. in places where the va is doing really badly, like oakland, the wait for vets to hear back is more like ten months. in phoenix, arizona, the wait is more like a year. in central texas, it is more than a year. veterans are waiting that long to even hear back about whether or not they are getting what they are owed. we've seen multiple congressional hearings on this heard va promises to do better, claims that they are making progress. lots of talk from them about digitizing records to make them easier to be processed. this does not look like progress has progressed far enough. moving this stuff out of this one building to another building an might not fall down under the weight of the paper is a necessary first step. but i would hesitate to even call it a step forward. to the good people who work at the va, we are all counting on you. your job ial