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joining me today "time magazine" deputy washington bureau chief michael crowley, chris hayes, host of msnbc's "up with chris hayes." former obama 2012 deputy campaign manager stephanie cutter, and buzz feed editor in chief ben smith. late yesterday the fifth most senior democrat in the senate announced he will not seek re-election. michigan's carl levin said he will step down in 2014, announcing he could best serve his country by "doing my job without the distraction of campaigning for re-election." right now democrats hold a 55-45 edge in the senate, including the two independents who caucused with democrats, but liven is already the fourth open seat democrats will need to defend later this month. south dakota's tim johnson is expected to announce that he, too, will retire. so far just two republican

senators, georgia's saxby chambliss and mike johanns have said they will not seek re-election. with democratic seats vacating, are senate republicans streamlining the message and laying the ground work for a unified front in the upper chamber? >> mr. paul wants to be taken seriously, then he needs to do more than pull political stunts and fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms. he needs to know what he is talking about. >> to my republican colleagues, i don't remember any of you coming down here suggesting that president bush was going to kill anybody with a drone. >> unity? not so much. this week senator rand paul's talky filibuster did much to expose a rift within the gop over one of its core concerns. while some elder statesmen, including john mccain and lindsey graham, mounted a strong defense of aggressive counterterrorism actions, paul's 12 hour and 52 minute extravaganza scored a significant victory with the party's right flank and beyond.

buzz feed reports "although wednesday's filibuster originally enjoyed only the support of conservatives, once it became clear that the conservative world was watching, and rooting for rand paul, a series of establishment figures rushed to his aid, including minority leader mitch mcconnell, and republican conference chair john thune. the old school, new school, old school split was evident on the twitter-verse. stand with rand began trending globally, and am they e-mail approximated supporters, defend your constitution, _#stand with rand. meanwhile, lindsey graham, intra-party scold got a _#of his own. primary graham. if there was any question about just how tense it might be in the upper chamber, the "new york times" ran this photo showing paul and mccain sharing an elevator ride after the elder senator accused the kentucky sion of disservice. hash tag, awkward.

stephanie, we have talked ad nauz yum at this point about the lower chamber and the raucus caucus and how difficult a job speaker john boehner has in his words getting the frogs in the wheelbarrow. but this week i think exposed some serious changes, if not a rift within the elder wing -- the elder sort of establishment wing of the republican party in the upper chamber. not just on sequester but with the rand paul talky filibuster. >> i was pleased see that picture because normally there's a democrat standing there getting a scowl. >> i've been on elevators like that myself. you know, i think that, you know, i appreciate what senator mccain and senator graham were trying to say. under no circumstances are americans at home in danger of getting shot by a drone from the u.s. government. however, they continue to be a little bit behind the curve of where a broad swath of the american people are. sure, you know, a large majority of the american people believe

that we should use drones to go after terrorists abroad, but they also want our constitution protected, and there's a way to do both. that's what the president has been trying to convey. that's ultimately what the attorney general put in his letter yesterday. >> is he fairly brazen. >> it doesn't make it right. just because they didn't go down -- they were in line as republicans back then, but it doesn't make it right. this is the senate. i worked in the senate for many years. we always tried to get filibusters going where senators would go down and hold their ground and get speeches. we could never do it because no senator wanted to go spend that much time on the senate floor. >> right. >> i was pleased to see that. that's what the senate is supposed to do. >> well, it's a testament to how broken the senate is. talky full buster. >> that somebody is playing by

the rules. >> put their mouth with their money is. chris, the change inside the republican party on national security and defense is pretty breathtaking. i mean, you now have a part of the -- you have rand paul and some establishment republicans that didn't think the sequester cuts were deep enough, were happy to take the defense cuts, and are now pursuing a, you know, a fairly not drastic, but very well articulated argument against a hawkish counterterrorism policy. >> i think there's -- i'm of two minds on that. one is i went back, and i read the other day four speeches from the 1990s by tom delay and republican members of the house about the nato bombing of serbia, and they sound like chomski. go read these house speeches. they are about america thinks it can do whatever it wants. we're bombing these buildings that have noncombatant civilians in them. huge opposition of bombing serbia, largely because it was a

democratic president. that kind of foreign policy impulse towards not using the military as a weapon disappeared as soon as a democrat was not in office, right? so part of this is totally circumstantial. >> distance between the neo cons and the actual base of the republican party, and the gap between the two has been growing and growing and growing, and, yet, the absolute control of the think tanks and the money men and mccain and graham over the foreign policy republican party has remained until remarkably unchallenged, and what you are seeing now is that that's untenable over a turn amount of time. you can't get that far away from your base. >> michael, they're willing to forfeit. i mean, they're willing to forfeit part of that base. look, virginia is a state that the republicans have had historically that obama won in the last two elections. it is up for grabs.

they are not trying to make a play for those defense dollars and court favor in the old dominion. >> that's right. >> i think, however, on drones there's a little less here than meets the eye. i think that fundamentally the republican party still supports really aggressive counter terror policies, using drones overseas. the rand paul filibuster focused on this almost kind of freakish -- interesting and important slice of the question, but a little bit of a freaky scenario that i think is blown out of proportion to the much more salient question of the large numbers of suspected terrorists we're killing in pakistan, yemen, afghanistan, questions of due process and intelligence gathering there. i think that that still -- i think the overwhelming majority of the republican party is still on board with that, but i do think you actually slipped in almost as an aside the really key point, which is that on the sequester, the national security hawks have lost out to the small government. i think that -- and also on the question of afghanistan, people

are basically in the republican party okay with us getting out at obama's pace. you have some bill chrystal types that are complaining, but i think this rand paul is a red herring in a way. >> there's a history here. rand paul caused a lot of problems in a lot of republican primaries and told the party i want to say to the left because it was on the issue of the iraq war and the afghanistan war. there's a history here of the pauls moving the party in a certain direction, and they're going to cause problems. >> they have a coherent world view where republicans are split between small government and big government. if you look at the federal budget and you want to cut money, there's grover norquist, you look at defense and you look at incarceration, and there's increasingly conservatives saying, you know what, maybe this kind of tough on crime thing and this tough foreign policy where if we recalibrate that, we can save a lot of money. >> let's not forget that if you are talking about sort of

coalition building and i remember this from the last campaign, rabd paul had hippies, conservatives. he is idealogical consistent across a number of things that have appeal to a number of -- >> it's almost apolitical. you know, if somebody didn't want to join a party and they were apolitical, they went to ron paul. >> it is also fringe. it was called the crazy town -- jump on the crazy town black helicopter bandwagon, and that is some of that too. i think paul is also playing people who actually they think might get hit by a drone tomorrow zoosh can i make one more important factual interjection. there are people in cafes actually dwegt killed. they live in waziristan and pakistan, and there are civilian who's are in cafes. abu al alaki this boy who our drones killed was actually it appears in a restaurant. i agree that jane fonda getting nailed in -- by a hell fire

missile is an outlandish scenario. it's not that outlandish globally. >> not at all. i think republicans are basically okay with it. >> with that i agree. >> i think we also have the drone piece of this is obfuscated the argument. it's the notion that the american government may in certain cases -- you don't know which cases and by which logic assassinate american combatants on american soil, regardless of how that happens. that is something i think people -- we still have not figured out in terms of where we stand. i think this is -- it was transparency or obama is not saying what he means. we're not getting a straight answer. why can't we get this letter? it was almost like a process thing to deal with the administration responding to congress and talking straight and not being wiesely? i think that's where -- i think there was a cathartic component.

republicans haven't had that much fun since the elections. they said we're going to have a party. this is great. he is out there. >> it's doing well for owes the -- this is like enthusiasm and some wind in republican sails and stephanie, i want to go back to this idea. fundamentally, this has been the week of a little bit of movement, however incremental, and there's been a lot of talk about the president's dinner with republicans, what that was, the strategy behind that. we have talked in the last five minutes about the techtonic movements inside the party. that would be an opportunity for the president, the white house, and democrats to sort of exploit a break or at least sort of the change that may be happening on the other side of the aisle, and use that to come to the table with a grand bargain, and we've talked a lot about the fact that mitch mcconnell was not at the dinner, that he -- the president didn't inform him of the dinner, and that he chose and said to meet with rank and file members of the republican party and that this may be the new strategy. if leadership won't move, if leadership is getting primaried and terrified of a charge from the right flank, maybe it's all about the guys in the middle.

>> well, it became pretty clear that the rank-and-file guys in the middle didn't know what the conversation that was happening between the president and the leadership. many of them didn't even know that the president had a deficit reduction plan. if the leadership is not going to be able to provide leadership and move the caucus along go to the rank-and-file. people have indicated that they're open to reforms. you know, lindsey graham, kelly ayotte, they know this has to be a balanced plan to reduce the deficit. it can't come all out of spending cuts. there's not enough spending cuts to be had to reduce the deficit. >> i'm impressed you just used the commonsense caucus is now what we are calling -- look, i applaud -- >> i only read what comes out. >> yeah, but this would be now bandied about because they shared a meal effectively, right, but we have yet to see

whether this translates. >> you know, look, this is the way government is supposed to work. the president believes, you know, that we need to try, and it's pretty clear that john boehner cannot lead as caucus. we've tried several times, and every time he walks away, and the american people pay. now the president is pursuing a new strategy, and, you know, i think that you'll see this continue. hopefully we can get some real results in terms of balanced deficit reduction. that's where the american people are. you know, i think in the house it might be a little more difficult because they're running district races basically. >> right. >> so few of them are running in districts that obama won in the 2012 election. i think only like 16 of them are in obama districts, but that doesn't mean the american people regardless of your party affiliation, regardless of where you win don't want progress. they want progress. >> i think they like seeing people sit down.

there's some sort of -- the sense that paul ryan would go and have lunch with the president. ben, what do you think of the strategy? are you bullish or bearish? >> it's something that obama has a very -- suggested he could do, and he has proven a strong leader and has been good pulling that caucus together. it would be a big change if they splintered on, this and i think, in fact, all the pressure right now is from their right. >> i don't see any of the incentives having shifted. let's be clear. the strategy -- the fascinating thing about republican strategy of obstruction is that it's been politically disastrous for the republican party and for members of the -- the members and for poor mitch mcconnell on who lost two shots at having a senate majority that were killed. it's been remarkably damaging politically, and remarkably effective substantively. we've already got $1.5 trillion in budget reduction. that's locked in the budget control act. now we have another $85 billion to $1.2 trillion over ten years. that's coming from sequester. now who will put together the best mix of austerity? >> the austerity cocktail.

>> the austerity cocktail. they won substantively. they have won substantively, and they've continued to win substantively because the conversation is rooted not in job creation. the conversation is rooted in deficit reduction, and so if you are a true believer on this front, right, the strategy from the republican perspective has really been working, and i don't see any incentives to change it. >> as matt miller said in the washington post yesterday, this is a party in disarray. whoa, what happens when they get it together. the whoa was my addition. they don't do that in "the post." we have to take a break. when we come back, if the acronym for know your personnel is kyp, then republicans may want to kyc, as in know your constituency. we'll look at new data that shows just how out of touch conservative lawmakers are with conservative voters next on "now." [ male announcer ] this single scoop of gain gives more freshness

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there is no shortage of evidence that the democratic process has serious flaw on a macrolevel, but a new study by political scientists at berkeley and the university of michigan sheds light on a breakdown at the very microlevel between legislators and their constituents. the survey of 2,000 state legislators from across america, both democrats and republicans, show that politicians are extremely out of touch with who they're supposed to be representing. lawmakers from both parties consistently thought their constituents were far more conservatives than -- far more conservative than they actually are. the report found that it was worse for conservatives. "conservative politicians systemly believe their constituents are more

conservative than they actually are by over 20 percentage points. this misperception is so large that nearly half of sitting conservative officeholders appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on the issues than the most conservative district in the entire country." salon's alex per even put it this way. republicans were pretty sure their constituents were basically all to the right of louie gomert. elected republicans are more conservative than their constituents, but they think their constituents are basically all psycho freepers. needless to say, the implication for democracy are not pretty. the electoral process is supposed to be the panacea. it is supposed to pop that bubble and force a connection between the representative and the represented because getting elected to office is now less about town meetings than about buying expensive television ads. even the campaign process as fails to familiarize politicians with rank-and-file voters. the result is an underrepresentative democracy

which raises the question, the one about republican democracy itself. can it truly exist under these conditions? chris, it's now time for america's favorite segment one we like to call "up." >> "now." >> this is a fascinating, fascinating -- >> we're going to go deep on this in the show tomorrow. we'll have one of the co-authors. i think it's a rose eta stone for american politics. one thing you see -- this is reflected in polling data a lot. when you poll people on, you know, high level things like do you want to balance the approach to the deficit or do you think they should cut spending, you drill down to the specifics, d and -- they're massively popular, social security and medicare, among tea party, republicans, tea party people don't want to see cuts to those programs, and, yet, the conversation in washington is about cutting those programs,

about cutting those programs a badge of seriousness and the president of the united states had something on his website right now saying a real cut in social security and dollar terms. i think you look at that, and i constantly see this gap between what people want and what representatives say, and this data bears out this sort of intuition i've had for a lock time. there are two -- >> you commissioned it, didn't you? >>. >> there are some people that confirm all my preexisting biases. there are two things. one thing is the two things they look at the paper. it's not peer review yet. gay marriage and universal health care. those are on either side of the social sort of economic issue, and i would think actually that there would be a difference between those two, but there's not actually. >> we have some full screens. maybe we can show america just how far off base politicians are in terms of those two issues.

keep talking, chris. >> it's across all districts, right? even people who are in relatively liberal districts or relatively conservative districts, those lines, as you move from the left to the right, those are the districts changing in their composition, and, yet, the line is essentially constant the whole way there, right? >> and that nobody is accurate. the green line is perfect accuracy, and conservatives are less accurate in terms of liberals are. >> everyone overestimates the conservatism of their constituents. liberals do it by less than conservatives. then it promotes all these theories. there's a few different ways. >> that's what i want to discuss. >> one of them is there's a difference between your voters and constituents in the midterm elections, right? you know, the people that show up to a polling place in 2010 in november are not all of the people that are in your district. a lot of the people on medicaid probably aren't at the polls. a lot of the people who are out

of work or are working minimum wage jobs are, we know statistically, not showing up at the same level as, say, people ma above median income and above -- 65. >> he talks about the political inequality. he writes, "for people at the top 10%, you can predict what the government would do based on their preferences, but when the preferences of people at lower income levels diverge from the affluent, that had no impact at all on the policies that were adopted. that was true not only for the poor, but for the middle class as well." effectively huge segments of the american population have no say in the direction in which government goes. >> also, don't forget that legislators are trying to get -- they get feedback from their constituents, and also for people that are coming up and lobbying them, the business interests who wine and dine them. their donors. you do have that very kind of elite class that has overwhelming influence, and if i'm not mistaken, the study was state legislators. i worked in the statehouse in massachusetts for a while, and i

can tell you something that you will intuitively know, which is that a lot of people are just not very tuned in to what's happening in statehouses, who their state rep is. i would be interested to see what the numbers are like for the u.s. congress because in statehouses in particular, i think everything is a little bit flooky and disconnected or potentially so because the turnout can be so low, and there can be so much apathy. i wouldn't be shock iffed it was also happening at the national level. >> there's also a difference between the way the parties organize themselves, which i think is the reason for the triumph of the conservative movement. if you are a republican dealing with the organized republican base, it's idealogical, it's about issues like gay marriage, about health care, about these idealogical issues. in democratic primaries, as like here in new york city, you're very much dealing with constituencies. you're dealing with labor. you are dealing with ethnic constituencies. it's not so idealogical. i think if you looked at issues -- there are issues where it is for particularly issues around teachers unions, where i

bet you would find democratic legislators think that their constituents are left of where they are. a lot of this stuff is because the conservative movement is so idealogical, so well organized. >> i agree with that, and really good example on a national level is what happened to mitt romney during primaries. he got pulled so far to the right that he had too far to go to reposition in the general election. i'm not an expert, but those position that is he took i would guess hurt him with many people in the republican party, but also republican-leaning independents. it's a real -- it's a problem for the political process. >> at what point do they internalize this? they don't know what's going. >> part of what i think is interesting is, you know, there's -- rick has this theory that i think is very persuasive about the kind of defining trauma for an entire generation of democratic politicians was being caught unawares by right-wing backlash, and that, you know, evan bye saw it happen

to his father, and bill clinton got kicked out immediately from arkansas. this created this life-long trauma, this insecurity that they were employing to be too liberal. >> the silent majority under the bed. >> the silent majority. i think that's true. the question is at what point do conservatives start to internalize that same fear? how many national electrics do they have to lose before they get the same kind of -- this kind of traumatic, like, insecurity that just because the people in the red state common thread like their speech that, you know, everyone in their district it? >> i think they see it on the social stuff now. you see their skittishness around abortion and gay rights. >> on that note it is really worth noting today that bill clinton has penned an op ed in the washington post explaining sort of how doma came about and saying that it's time for doma to be overturned. he writes in 1996 i signed the defense of marriage act, although that was only 17 years ago. it was a very different time. no state in the union with same-sex marriage recognized much less available as a legal right. i believe that in 2013 doma and opposition to marriage equality

are vestages of just such an unfamiliar society. i mean, that's actually sort of -- it's interesting. i mean, he does explain sort of where he was at and how he thought doma was sort of neutralized. the issue of gay marriage from going to the courts and make it more incendiary. you do have to wonder, chris, was it, hmm, you just realize that you were on the wrong side of history here, or -- >> it's also a reminder, i think, when people talk about bill clinton dwikly and his legacy, and particularly when they talk about the clinton-gingrich relationship as a precedent or model for what president obama is dealing with. people forget how much awful legislation came out of that partnership. i mean, we got this -- the effective death penalty act, which is a disaster that any death penalty attorney will tell you is a disaster. we got doma out of that. we got welfare reform, which i think is a mixed bag, but actually largely as time goz, we'll work our way through the great recession, support all it was cracked up to be. >> it changes the way we measure welfare and welfare recipients.

>> there was a lot that came out of that, you know, out of washington working or of them coming to the table together that has haunted us for 17, 18 years after the fact. i think -- i think it should give people a little skepticism about just how worthwhile compromise where grand bargains as an ending of themselves. >> when we talk about president obama, his evolution on the issue, it is really dramatic when you look at the numbers. in 1996 27% supported gay marriage. 201153% support gay marriage. this is almost in the history books in terms of being a civil rights battle that is very nearly won, depending on what the supreme court does. >> it's a huge generational change. we've all been living it. i worked for president clinton when he signed doma, and nobody really understood the impact at that point. i mean, obviously it was devastating for so many couples across the country as a result, but look, this has been what senator kennedy used to call the slow march of progress, and we

have to keep on that march of progress, and we've come a long way even -- remember the 2004 election where state by state every state we went through we were dealing with anti-gay marriage battle initiatives. >> where one bill clinton allegedly told your then boss john kerry to support a federal marriage amendment, something that does not make it into his op etd ed. >> i was reading about the contemporaneous -- when the house passed the doma bill, a white house spokesperson whose name i didn't see in the story denounced it as gay-baiting. the president signed it anyway. that went to show his heart may have been in one place, and politically he was -- >> he was scared to be out of set with his constituents. >> thus he ties it up in a bow for us. we have to leave it there. thank you for joining us. as you teased at the top of the segment, you will be talking about this tomorrow. >> yep. >> so we are all tuning in tomorrow and every weekend right here on msnbc. 8:00 a.m. eastern. up with chris hayes, must see

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>> after racking april million sxhilz traveling to 112 countries, last month hillary clinton bid the state department good-bye. >> i leave thinking of the nearly 70,000 people that i was honored to serve and lead as part of a huge extended family, and i hope that you will continue to make yourselves, make me, and make our country proud. thank you all, and god bless you. >> her tenure as the 67th secretary of state was marked by a relentless determination to rehabilitate america's image after eight years of cowboy diplomacy. countries were no longer with us or against us. instead, clinton employed a nuanced less confrontational approach to foreign policy craft agnew american image overseas. kim writes if her new book "the secretary" clinton was a

political powerhouse in her own right, and she was bigger than the job of secretary of state. the job would have to fit her, not the other way around." despite the inherent difficulties, clinton began her tenure by committing to a public brand of diplomacy. engaging with citizens and not just their leaders. putting aside the drama of the 2008 campaign, clinton became a loyal lieutenant to president obama, but as she writes, clinton was not a fan of obama's lofty addresses, and he, in turn, often didn't like her blunt saysness. she would never become part of obama's very tight inner circle. there was no chumminess. chumminess question aside, president obama made clear his respect for the departing secretary early this year. >> i think hillary will go down as one of the finest secretary of states we've had. i want the country to appreciate just what an extraordinary role she's played during the course of my administration and a lot of the successes we've had internationally have been because of her hard work.

her new book is "the secretary "a junior we with hillary clinton from beirut to the heart of american power. ". >> great to be here, alex. there is so much intrigue around any and all things clinton. i want to start, first, with the very hard work that secretary clinton did as part of her role as secretary of state, and you have a very interesting anecdote about her going to lahore and having a town hall in pakistan. this is early on in her secretaryship, if that's what you call, it and she was met with resistance. it was a raucus crowd, and you write in the book "the world had rarely leared of an american official apologize for past mistakes. this approach didn't go down well with republicans back in the u.s., but around the globe it went a long way to buy goodwill. by the end of the visit the tone of the pakistani media coverage had changed, and the newspaper headlines were less -- it wasn't a love fest, but hillary's charm offensive had made a dent in the wall of mistrust." tell us a little more about that.

>> you know, it was quite the sight, alex, being there in this auditorium with all these students who had all this pent-up anger and resentment about the united states. and u.s. policy. she had told her aides on this first trip of hers, she didn't want to just engage with leaders. she didn't want to give up on engaging with people, so she said, you know what, make me a punching bag. literally. they told her it's not going to be pretty. she said it doesn't matter. i want to do it, and she subjected herself to a battery of interviews and town hall meetings, with students and business leaders and journalists, and i was in the room when she was getting all those questions, and it was really quite hostile, but the fact that she was able to take those questions, answer them calmly, and show that that's people had someone in front of them who understood where they were coming from, was trying to understand their perspective, and was trying to answer them in

a respectful manner, it helped to diffuse the tension. now, the relationship between pakistan and the u.s. is certainly not perfect. it is still very complicated, but i even heard the pakistani foreign minimalster tell me in an interview that she appreciated how clinton approached the relationship and always tried to find a way to work together, and it's that approach to the exercise of american leadership that i detailed to some extent in the book. she will, of course, be criticized by republicans. also by democrats, and even by people outside of the u.s. who suddenly feel that the u.s. isn't doing enough. >> and essential, you know, it's hard to talk about the legacy. she just left a few months ago, but stephanie, you know, i remember when clinton was made secretary of state. a, it was a big deal because of the supposed animosity or the tension, but just the long battle that obama and clinton had sort of gone through leading up to the election. he announced he was going to

appoint richard holbrooke and richard mitchell in the middle east. there was a lot of belief that you just undercut the most important issues in terms of being secretary of state. hillary clinton won't be able to be engaged on those issues, and here we are telling stories about her role in pakistan, what she did there and a sense that she was, in fact, ultimately a very powerful secretary of state. >> i don't think anybody should underestimate her, and i wouldn't underestimate her because of richard holbrooke or george mitchell. they were two key allies of hers. remember when she was appointed swuf state there was very much a team of rivals discussion. now, you know, the president and secretary clinton, that partnership has really changed the way the world looks at america. it restored our power in the world. had history will play itself out, and she will have an enormous role in this country

going forward. sfwlu use the phrase -- you said hillary said make me a pumplging bag, and in this country there's a sense of the clintons as a brand that is anything but a punching bag. these are dineassic politics. bill clinton is incredibly tenacious, but hillary actually in many ways has behaved counter to that perception. because she became secretary of state, and she was removed from the fray of domestic politics in the united states. she has emerged from being a politician to a states woman over those -- it required being able to being willing to engage people that are not always your best friends and who don't always see the world the way you do, who don't particularly like the united states a lot of

people in this country and overseas have a lot of questions about what is america's role as the super power in the 21st century, and what better central character to tell the story than hillary clinton, and all of that is from my own perspective as someone who grew up in pay route having questions about america and america's role and a child of war, and that's the perspective i bring to this discussion. >> certainly a perspective we need more of. we love fresh perspectives around here, kim. thank you for coming on. the book, again, is the secretary. on sale now. thanks for your time, kim. >> thank you. coming up, as the wars overseas recede from the american consciousness. so, too, may be the concerns about the threat here at home. we will talk security and the tsa's new rules just ahead. morning, brian! love your passat! um. listen, gary. i bought the last one. nice try. says right here you can get one for $199 a month. you can't believe the lame-stream media, gary.

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other potentially dangerous objects, but the policy is not xb winning over every, including america's flight attendants. >> we believe this is a slippery slope. what will be the next weapon that can come on board? we're there to protect and serve passengers, and also ourselves, and we don't want to see weapons unnecessarily introduced on board the aircraft. >> we'll discuss safety and security coming up next.

the tsa announced this week that passengers can carry small pocket knives. it will permit knives longer than two inches that do not lock into place, razor blades and pocket knives are still banned. an estimated 35 million americans carry pocket knives. the tsa argues security agents that focus their efforts on

screening for explosives as small knives can't open a cockpit door and can't bring down a plane. that has to be good news to you michael crowley. >> i can now bring my arsenal on to a plane. no, look, i trust the security professionals. >> i need the liquid rule to be relaxed yesterday. if they're going to start with the list, wouldn't that seem to be good place to start? they clearly think that it's still not safe enough. >> i'm with the flight attendants. if you can keep weapons off an airplane, it's probably a good thing. whatever size the jackknife is or whatever handle it has, i was reading the guidance, it's still dangerous. you know? if you are pointing your stuff through security or checking something, put it in a bag and check it. you know? it's like everything else. we have to do that with all of our beauty products. they should follow the same

rules. >> the jackknife lobby apparently more intense than -- more successful, powerful than we thought, ben. >> you sort of convinced me during the break that it's incredibly sexist. >> women are affected more by the liquid and gel rule. >> i have no problem checking my jab knife. >> crowley's gel. >> before we go, this all sort of leads me to question whether someone actually has their hand on the captain's wheel in terms of what is going on with rules and regulations. >> they're obviously operating totally out of irrationale fear, and a fear of having -- of making a mistake that causes a disaster. the whole cell phone incomprehensive ban on using cell phones that has zero grounding or any scientific reality. it has been a joke for years and years and years. still, causes constant real conflict and altercations and arrests on planes. >> the porous nature of the regulations. i'm not saying i do this, but the liquids have a certain -- you can't go over i think 3.2 fluid ounces, but you can bring, like, 64 bottles of 3.2 fluid ounces. therein lies the rub. i have never done that in my

life, and i can survive on just a jackknife, a bar of soap from home, so it's really easy for me, and i don't wear shoes. >> you're good now. >> traveling is a breeze. >> thank you to michael, stephanie, and ben. that is all for now. i'll see you back here on monday at noon, 9:00 pacific when i'm joined by wes moore, tommy veeter coming out from the cave, the new yorker's rick hertzberg, fortune's lee gallagher. until then, you can follow us on twitter@now with alex. andrea mitchell reports is next. carfirmation. only hertz gives you a carfirmation. hey, this is challenger. i'll be waiting for you in stall 5. it confirms your reservation and the location your car is in, the moment you land. it's just another way you'll be traveling at the speed of hertz. says

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