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tv   The Rachel Maddow Show  MSNBC  November 26, 2013 9:00pm-10:01pm PST

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down the anti-american effort across the world. >> i think we're seeing a geopolitical shift in the middle east. certainly it makes people uneasy, but it is definitely worth pursuing. >> thank you, that is all in for this evening. the rachel maddow show starts right now. >> i'm already watching you and pal wolfowitz in my mind, and it's not stopping, chris, that was amazing. thanks to you at home for joining us. there's lots going on in the world, including huge whole swathes of america on whether a rather large and powerful storm is going to keep us all from getting home to where ever home is for the holidays this year. the god of supposedly random weather really does like to give us storms on the heaviest travel days before thanksgiving every
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year and this year it turns out is no exception. got more on that coming up. the iconic political video, yes we can from the 2008 campaigns, that is now translating to other countries politicians. and the obama administration makes a big move late in the day today to stop the sheldoned aalsons and foster freezes and coke brothers of the world from trying to buy the next presidential election as well. they made the change without congress today. they announced the first part of it today. and if you know any i'd logically motivated billionaires and today they seemed like they were in a really bad mood, this policy change might be why. there's a lot going on on this tuesday of this week. we start with the united states
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supreme court. and the court's decision to weigh in on the conservative war on birth control. it's hard to even say war on birth control, but as long as we as a country are going to use the word war on things that are endangered, the conservative war on birth control is a thing. and right now it is hilting the big time in republican politics. >> one of the things i will talk about, that the president has talked about before is that i think the dangers of contraception are -- and the whole sexual lib ber -- many in the chris christian faith have said contraception is okay. it's not okay, it's a license to do things of a sexual realm that is counter to what -- how thing
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are supposed to be. >> contraception is not okay. former pennsylvania senator rick santorum is now a guy who's christmas movie is about a -- rick santorum proved that a guy that had once been chased out of big-time politics because of his hard word social conservativism, the man on dog guy, a man who was famous only for his anti-gay beliefs and had lost hiss -- you only need to sit out a few years before the republican party would be ready to have you back after that sort of defeat. if that party was once again looking for a fire and brimstone type as it's potential savior, santorum came in second in the race for president last year, losing only to mitt romney. it seemed as more of an indication as it was also the sign of a broader embrace on the right, of rick santorum brand culture war conservativism, and that includes being against contraception.
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about five years ago, and anti-abortion group called the american life league started organizing protests around the theme of the pill kills, the pill as in the birth control pill. their theme was the birth control pill kills babies, in 2009, the birth control pill kills women. the birth control pill kills the environment. that was an interesting take on it. in 2011, they decided that the birth control pill kills marriage. so it's an annual thing. every year they say the birth control pill is responsible for killing some other thing and they always hold them in the first week of june and that is specific and on purpose. june 7 is the anniversary of a supreme court decision called griswald v connecticut. the party of anity abortion movement that is also anti contraception because they disagree with the griswald
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ruling and the griswald ruling said that states can't ban birth control. the states should be able to ban birth control and they should ban birth control, they think contraception should be illegal in america. like rick santorum said, contraception is not okay. but the big break through for the we're against birth control folks really came in 2012 when their annual early june protests about how birth control should be illegal, started to dove tail with something that was going on in republican politics. their anti-contraception movement started to get embraced by republicans and conservatives more broadly as part of the ways they wanted to be against obama care. they decided to become outraged that insurance regulations federally under obama care would specify that contraception is one of the things that had to be
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covered under people's insurance. vaccinations, cancer screenings, there's a whole list of things that have to be included in health care policies and contraception is one of them. everybody freak out. at the time that republicans and conservatives decided to freak out about that. 23 states already had that same man date in state law, which never bothered conservatives at all, not even in those states, but they all of a sudden decided that -- do you remember wheatton college in illinois. wheaton is an evangelical school. they said it would be horrendously religiously offense to them as a school to offer employees insurance coverage that paid for contraception. if obama care wanted them to do that, they would sue. it was so terribly offensive to them. when that school tried to sue, turns out they were already offering contraception to their employees in their policy before
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obama care went into effect. it had never bothed them before. now they would say they were outraged by it. the pill kills, birth control is abortion, they couldn't possibly cover birth control? we have been covering birth control all this time, seriously? so something that was never really controversial before except on the fringes of the anti-abortion movement became kind of a main stream republican conservative cause. and it wasn't just poor confused wheaton college in illinois, it was does sens of lawsuits, with dozens of plaintiffs, many of them filing from states that already required insurance plans to cover contraception, but that never really bothered anyone before. today the united states supreme court decided to take on a pair of those cases, to decide if
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your boss gets to decide, based on his religious beliefs whether or not you can get birth control covered by your health insurance. one of the plaintiffs is a chain called the hobby lobby which donates a portion of their profits to oral roberts university. the hobby lobby says the evangelical christian religious beliefs of the company's owners mean that they don't want their employees to have access to contraception in their health insurance. another case was a mennonite owned wood working business from pennsylvania. mennonites are sometimes confused with the amish, but -- not believing in health insurance itself all together. so if your boss is a mennonite or is an amish guy who thinks that health insurance itself is
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wrong, does that mean that you don't get health insurance at work even if otherwise the law would say you had to? that's what's so fascinating about this case. it is the rick santorum, the pill kills folks they're an outgrowth of the anti-abortion movement, they think contraception is the same thing as abortion and they're against them both. if you're against birth control these folks are your folks. these are the folks who put person hood on the ballot in mississippi and colorado and other places, in which case if those things pass, all abortion would be criminalized, all of it. but also the iud would be criminalized because they consider some forms of birth control to be just exactly the same as abortion. so if you have an iud, you would be what, a felon? but this case goes beyond just that part of social conservatism.
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it goes to what your boss's religion -- may not want you as an employee to -- what if your boss has an objection to cancer treatment or a vaccination for polio. in the 1970s in greenwich, connecticut a whole bunch of kids got polio, in the 1970s because they were from families who were christian science and didn't believe in vaccinations. their -- course of action as their son died and who sent a practitioner to the boy's bedside to pray while he died instead of giving him the insulin shot that would have saved his life. dozens of its members have been charged in connection with people's death from treatalable illnesses. deaths from measles, deaths from as ma, deaths from treatable tumors and can sir. if your boss is a christian scientist, should his legitimately held religious beliefs mean that your health insurance shouldn't cover things that he thinks should only be
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cured with prayer, things like measles, asthma, should he be able to if your boss is a joe hoef have's witness, should he be able to stop your health insurance from covering the cost of a blood transfusion. if your boss thinks that aids is the punishment who hates the people he gave it to and he gave it to him on purpose. and if you test positive, can't he decide that your health insurance will not cover the treatment? and why stop at health care. what if your boss session it's not just the laws about health care he doesn't want to follow because of his religious beliefs, it's the laws about all kinds of things. this is the campus of duquesne university. they were not going to recognize their employees decision to form a union because they are a
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catholic institution, and for some reason, that religious affiliation of the institution means their teachers can't be in a union. may might want to take that up with the new pope francis. does that mean we don't have to follow labor law here? and why should it stop there? presumably we're about a half step away from aing that their religious beliefs preclude paying people the minimum wage. the mean streaming in the conservative movement of anti-contraception politics. where they think that contraception is abortion and abortion is murder and you shouldn't have access to either. that's what it is in a smaller sense. the fight here in a larger sense
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is about whether you are still entitled to the rights and protections of federal law, even if your boss session that god told him otherwise. joining nice now is the senior editor and legal correspondent at slate. thanks for coming in. >> i feel like i have always been the crazy old aunt in your attic. >> you have always been the crazy aunt at your lovely studio in charlottesville. how do you think that the supreme court is going to approach this? do we know anything from the specific cases they chose to bring up about the way they set this up for themselves that tells us what it's going to be like? >> we don't know. what we know is, as you said in your intro is this is some kind of unholy alliance of citizens united and the idea of corporate person hood getting together with the war on woman and
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getting together with the aca cases, and pretty soon this baby, this ugly, ugly baby that has just threads hanging out of every kind of doctrine, this is about in a profound way the first amendment freedomings of religion, it also about their religious freedoms -- but it's also about whether religion -- a corporation, a for-profit corporation, right, we're not just talking about catholic universities and about catholic hospitals, we're talking about for profit corporations that just make cracks in this case, whether they can have a conscious a religious conscious. so in a deep way, there's so much going on and this is going to be a nightmare for the court. and based on the two cases that we saw them take, and based on the cases that they did not take today, i don't think they can avoid squarely answering this question of, are corporations people too, not just for speech purposes, right, in the campaign
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speech context, but are corporations people too when it comes to having religion and what do you do about the real religions of the real employees and are they trumped by that corporate person's imaginary religion? >> and that corporate person's imaginary religion is mind bending. you're the lawyer not me. but my understanding about the law around religious freedom, especially the supreme court precedent here is essentially that you can have your right to obviously practice your religion protected, but your ability to sort of exempt yourself from things that would otherwise apply to you on the basis of your religion, kind of stops at your own skin. you're not able to decide for other people. when you make that decision for a third party, in this case your employee, that's when things have gone too far, because then you're infringing on other
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people's beliefs. >> we have lots and lots of precedent that says once you make your decision to enter commerce, your religious person hood has to fall back from generally applicable laws. this precedent is clear, what's a little bit interesting is that you have different corporations in this case, even defining what they consider abortion causing drugs differently. so you've got the catholic plaintiffs in these cases saying all birth control is off the table. you've got others saying only the morning after pill. you've got others saying, as you said, the morning after pill plus iuds, so even among themselves they don't just disagree about religion, they disagree about science, they disagree about facts. do these things cause abortions? the fda says no, but that's not even the issue anymore. so you're not just probing the good faith religions of these to
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profit corporations you're also probing, do they really believe these ideas about science? >> and if we have to be value neutral in assessing them, why can't a christian science boss say no, the only treatment allowed for cancer under my employees health coverage will be prayer. if we're going to say we're agnostic under religious agnostic under religious beliefs, how can there every ever be a -- >> it really rises in some of the dissents in these cases where they just throw out these slippery slope cases, stem cell research, really? gay couples that you don't agree about? really? christian scientists there,'s no answer to this. you have to create a neutral rule. and i don't know how the court creates a neutral rule if the court doesn't want to micromanage religious beliefs and deeply held religious beliefs.
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>> it's amazing to see this spring in the anti-contraception movement. it is a real pleasure to have you here in person. stick around if you want, there will be livations at the end of the show. maybe. i don't want to promise. big news breaking this afternoon, from the obama administration that could potentially change things a lot logically motivated billionairs and also whether there's weather, there's weather and weather related hurley burly in the skies and on the roads and on the rails tonight. there's a ton still to come up this hour, stay with us. ...are the hands that do good things for the whole community: the environment, seniors, kids, and animals. that's why we created the share the love event. by the end of this year, the total donated by subaru could reach 35 million dollars. you get a great deal on a new subaru. we'll donate 250 dollars to a choice of charities
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[ male announcer ] this december, experience the gift of true artistry and some of the best offers of the year at the lexus december to remember sales event. this is the pursuit of perfection. after the monica lewinski scandal, kenneth scar released a report about that affair. it was called the starr report and it was filled by many lurid details. perhaps unnecessary lurid details. but it was all there in black and white and it was for sale. and we did buy it by gazillions. the starr report caused a huge spike in the book of poetry by walt whitman. president clinton had given his
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young mistress a copy of leaves of grass. and apparently after reading that in the starr report, everybody rushes out to check out the whit map. but the star report was that popular. and the weird thing, surprisingly, even government reports that are not about sex turn out to be best sellers more often than you might think. the 9/11 commission report about why we were not prepared for that attack. the 9/11 report, a nationwide best seller. just like with the starr report, you can go online and read the entire report for free, since it's a government document, but people wanted to buy it in paperback anyway because they wanted to have it on the shelf. so the starr report a huge smashing success. the 9/11 report, also a very big best seller. but you know what recent report was also a big and unexpected huge, huge hit? 576 pages long, amazon ran out of copies of it.
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there was nothing about cigars or walt whitman. in the wake of the financial crisis -- and while there was a lot of disagreement between the democrats and the republicans about what exactly led to the financial crisis, there was one big, unanimous criticism that had no partisan bounds and it was this, the greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done. if we accept this notion, it will happen again. why did no one see it coming? why didn't more economists see it coming in 2008? the fact that economists are not
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better at predicting things has always been kind of a bad problem for economists. the very first president of the american economic association, he's famous for his lamentations in the 19th century that economists didn't offer anyone much help in figuring out the economy in fact. if economists cannot predict anything about the real world, then economics has a whole is essentially an elegant but mostly decorative form of math. it's pretty, useless, but also very pretty. what would be very helpful and reassuring is if economists did offer some accurate predictions and what the impact might be in relevant policy. the other big news in washington right now is that maybe there's someone who can do that. janet yellin is appointed to be
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the next chairman of the federal reserve. check this out, last year before she was nominated "the wall street journal" analyzed more than 700 predictions that were made over three years by policymaker at the fed. the current chair of the fed, he came in 10th, the number one spot, the most accurate predictor of all in the whole country was janet yellen. and who knows if janet yellen will still be as accurate about predictions about the economy when she gets the job. -- is an important criteria, she is apparently the best at it in the whole country among major economists and she is also on paper the single most qualified person ever nominated to be fed chair in the modern era. all of that means that it seems like smooth sailing for janet yellen's nomination thus far.
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being right about stuff tends to help you get the job. but neither of those things apparently help you with the modern republican party. the taj foundation, they have just announced that their political activist wing not only opposes janet yellen to be fed chair, they're also making the nomination a key vote. which means that any republican that dares to cast a vote for janet yellen will get a demerit. because of the move that senate democrats made last week to employ the so-called nuclear option. republicans do not have the votes to filibuster for nomination, but any republican who dares to vote in favor of who has been deemed the most
quote
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qualified fed chair in will republican senators care? will they heed jim demint on this and vote against her. i have no idea what republicans are going to do on this. republican politics right now are amazing. they would have to go amazing to try to gin up a republican revolt against somebody like janet yellen. but they are that amazing and they are not like the rest of politics here in this country or anywhere else in the world. my insurance rates are probably gonna double. but, dad, you've got... [ voice of dennis ] allstate. with accident forgiveness, they guarantee your rates won't go up just because of an accident. smart kid. [ voice of dennis ] indeed. are you in good hands? i have a big meeting when we land, but i am so stuffed up, i can't rest. [ male announcer ] nyquil cold and flu liquid gels don't unstuff your nose. they don't? alka seltzer plus night fights your worst cold symptoms,
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happy almost thanksgiving. without fail, this time of year, you can always count on an influx of news stories to alert you that people are, for example, camping outside your local big box store or there is a long list of ways that you are allowed to cook a turkey, or there's a war on christmas, and you are on one side of that war that you don't want to be. tonight we're having a particularly ripe experience of the problem and maybe part of the solution. just ahead. helicopthierhis hibuzzing, andk engine humming.
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ng out of pipe. sfx: birds chirping. the news broke today in washington, but it began with this documentary in 2007. it's called hillary, the movie. basically a horror movie scandal sheet about all the -- produced by a conservative nonprofit
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called citizens united. they wanted to show hillary, the movie on tv and they wanted to run ads for the movie on other parts of tv. right before the democratic presidential primaries in 2008. the fec blocked citizens united from showing the movie on tv. it was basically an attack ad. citizens united appealed that ruling all the way up to the supreme court. in and in 2010, the supreme court ruled in their favor. and thus the legality of money in political campaigns changed profoundly and immediately. the ruling was in january 2010. by later that year in the 2010 elections, campaign spending from groups outside of the political parties on the candidates was in the vicinity of $500 million. by the next election cycle in 2012, spending by those outside groups just exploded. another $2 billion of outside
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money. billionaires like sheldon adelson and charles and david koch became very famous in the last election by pouring tens of millions of dollars in the into the campaign. some of their money was unreported because it was funneled through nonprofits. organizations nontaxed by the federal government. they don't have the same requires as traditional political organizations to disclose where they get their money. karl rove's nonprofit group is estimated to have spent almost $100 million dollars since 2010 on various financial campaigns. the group americans for prosperity, they have been spending millions as well. sheldon adelson has given tens
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of millions to many organizations. those groups which take the millions and millions and millions of dollars especially from big dollar donors and they use it for various campaigns, those groups remain untaxed under the guise of social welfare organizations. political operations funded by undisclosed donors at least for the moment are considered to work for the cause of social welfare and that's how you get a billion dollars where you don't know where it came from or what's to become of the organization who made it happen. today the obama administration proposed new rules to specify exactly how much and what kind of political activity these wealthy nonprofit groups could engage in and still qualify as tax exempt social welfare groups. these new rules would not just set clearer limits on spending, they would prevent these groups from funding political ads that appear two months before an election.
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that couldn't be considered social welfare activity anymore. if these new rules are adopted, could they represent the first effective counter force against the massive flood of spending that sprung out of the citizen's united decision? and if so, wouldn't bit neat that it all started hatching two days before thanksgiving. these proposed rules, i think it was unexpected that they were going to happen today, two days before thanksgiving, but we knew that something like this might come from the administration. were those the contours that you expected to see that were expected to be seen? >> it's actually a surprise. we have always known the irs was considering over the long-term, over years some kinds of new rules and restrictions. but the idea of coming out with them like this, is probably a reaction to the irs scandal with the two party groups a desire to have clearer rules for everybody. clearer enforcement for enforcers, clearer guidelines for the groups themselves. it is a wholesale change, it is
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the biggest change in probably 20 or 30 years. >> if these changes did go into effect as proposed today or as introduced today, how much of a change would they have on the kind of big dollar outside groups spending that we saw particularly in the 2012 election? >> i think what would happen is, what we'll see is some groups will say, you know what? we can't spend as much on political ads as last time. we got to spend our money on things that don't count under these new rules as political. some groups may say, you know what? we're basically a political group. we should probably go and register as a superpac and some groups will say no way, and they will try to hide their money, like organizing as a corporation and spending the money out of the corporation. >> in terms of registering as a superpac, the downside, donors to those groups, even if they can spend unlimited amounts
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donating to them, we all know they have to disclose. >> there are al of donors that don't want their names in the paper, they're afraid of boycotts, they're afraid of being called names. to steve forbes group has -- get money in politics, contributions in politics without being disclosed. superpacs, it's all on the table. >> what process it has to go through before these rules can be implemented, what do you see in terms of that? >> we'll see at least three months of public comment. i expect we will see thousands and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of comments on this rule to the effected groups from ordinary people. after that they have to go back and think about the comments. possibly tweak some of the rules a little bit. and sometime, probably in a
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year, or maybe even two years, the final proposed rules will go out. it takes a long time, it's the irs, but eventually it will have some clarity. >> in terms of the potential hurdles ahead, can congress stop this from happening? >> they can try and pass laws to stop it if they want. in fact some senators and congress people have called for laws that would do this so the irs is now doing it with rule making, but i see more of a fight in the rule making and in the courts. i imagine if someone thinks they have a really good case, that these rules are burdensome, that they violate the first amendment, i expect a challenge on those grounds. >> we're not in the supreme court right now, and nobody should ever speculate about what the supreme court might do, but the way these rules are crafted, today do they seem to be crafted in a rule that is designed to not rub the supreme court the wrong way? >> the rules don't say you can't spend money on that ad before election day.
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it just says that if you do too much of these particular things which we will identify, you don't qualify as a 501c4 group. you can still do these things, but you can't be a 501c at the same time. >> fascinating. it's really nice to have you here in person. thanks for coming in. coming up, a real life cranberry gets it on live tv. ♪ ♪ you get your coffee here. you get your hair cut here. you find that certain thing you were looking for here, but actually you get so much more. when you shop at these small local businesses, you support all the things that make your community great. the money you spend here, stays here. in this place you call your neighborhood.
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the iranian foreign minister is an interesting and eccentric seeming guy. he was the high level diplomat who broke the news of the nobody thought it was possible nuclear deal over twitter. he was the guy who was immobilized during the nuclear talks from back pain, the back pain he says he suffered by being misquoted in an iranian newspaper. i could not even walk or sit. the iranian foreign minister is
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a very interesting guy. right now in iran, he's a very popular guy. this is the greeting he got after arriving back home in iran after making the nuclear deal. those crowds if you can't tell are very happy. this is the scene at the airport, people cheering him, mobbing the motorcade, singing patriotic songs, holding up pictures of their president rowhani. they seemed psyched about the deal that iran struck in geneva. iranian journalists are describing the mood in tehran as hopeful. the only hope that the iranian people have had a in a long time. and in that hopeful atmosphere, the iranian president posted online a rather astonishing video. it is helpful to revisit an iconic memory from a recent american presidential election.
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remember this? ♪ ♪ it was a creed written into the founding doing couples that declared the destiny of a nation ♪ ♪ yes we can >> and now the iranian version. ♪ >> iran has a "yes, we can" video. and it seems a lot like the
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obama "yes, we can" video. this was first written about by the persian letters blog. it puts the iranian president's inaugural address to music, it's almost like the exact same yes we can video, right down to the solemn looking actresses. the president offer rang decided to copy this very american campaign video is noteworthy, but it's also noteworthy what he says.
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>> there are hard liners in iran who have come out against the nuclear deal. the overwhelming response from the iranian people and report think from the people is very positive. they see negotiating with the west not a sign of national weakness, but a sign of national hope. maybe a sign that the iranian government recognizes just how ready for change its own citizens are. today, our secretary of state john kerry also released a video, not nearly as fancy. secretary kerry said he wanted to clarify. he explained the u.s. offered modest sanctions relief in exchange for major concessions from iran including daily inspections at nuclear sites. he did not explicitly do it to congress.
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they are trying to scuttle the deal, to try to scrap it. working to impose new sanctions on iran though the white house asked them to wait to see if the nuclear deal works. though sanctions, new sanctions would kill the deal immediately. iran seems very happy about the nuclear deal. seems ready to take steps to change its relationship with the world. in a new poll, it is clear the american people favor the deal too, by a huge margin, by 2:1. right now most everyone is on one side. the side of at least trying to make it work. it is only the u.s. congress that's on the other side, the side of hoping that it doesn't work and trying to make sure it doesn't. [ toys chattering ] it's filled with new duracell quantum batteries.
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[ toy meows ] [ dog whines ] [ toy meows ] these red batteries are so powerful, that, this year they'll power all the hasbro toys donated to toys for tots. want to help power some smiles? duracell. trusted everywhere. ...are the hands that do good things for the whole community: the environment, seniors, kids, and animals. that's why we created the share the love event. by the end of this year, the total donated by subaru could reach 35 million dollars. you get a great deal on a new subaru. we'll donate 250 dollars to a choice of charities that benefit your community. it feels good to be a helping hand. okay, who helps you focus on your recovery? yo, yo, yo. aflac. wow. [ under his breath ] that was horrible. pays you cash when you're sick or hurt? [ japanese accent ] aflac.
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love it. [ under his breath ] hate it. helps you focus on getting back to normal? [ as a southern belle ] aflac. [ as a cowboy ] aflac. [ sassily ] aflac. uh huh. [ under his breath ] i am so fired. you're on in 5, duck. [ male announcer ] when you're sick or hurt, aflac pays you cash. find out more at aflac.com. to share with family. [ woman 2 ] to carry on traditions. [ woman 3 ] to come together even when we're apart. [ male announcer ] in stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and more, swanson makes holiday dishes delicious. we know we're not the center of your life, but we'll do our best to help you connect to what is.
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i have a big meeting when we land, but i am so stuffed up, i can't rest. [ male announcer ] nyquil cold and flu liquid gels don't unstuff your nose. they don't? alka seltzer plus night fights your worst cold symptoms, plus has a decongestant. [ inhales deeply ] oh. what a relief it is. i get times are tight. but it's hard to get any work done like this. then came this baby -- small but with windows and office. it runs my work stuff. ...and i can use apps like flipboard for news, or xbox video to watch the shows i'm never home to see... and i can still get work done at the same time. excuse me, do you mind if i... yep. ♪ honestly, i wanna see you be brave ♪ >> hey, travelers. weather. there are about 313 million people who live in the united states of america. more than 40 million of us are expected to be traveling some
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where within the united states for the thanksgiving holiday. and, hey, look weather. nearly half the country its getting some kind of significant rain or snow event right now. and into the holiday. which is making for scenes like this around the country. as people try to get home or to grandma's house or anywhere that doesn't have so many strangers in it trying to get some where, but are instead stuck with you somewhere on the way. weather caused 200 flights to be canceled. 5,000 flights have been delayed. this would be a drag if this was not the busiest travel of time in the year. because it is, this is a serious drag. you know what? it always is. always happens every single time. seriously. >> it was a miserable travel day for millions of americans on the move for thanksgiving. >> holiday travelers be warned. it could be a miserable commute to grandmother's house this year.
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>> if you are planning on traveling to day, give yourself some extra time. bad weather may be headed your way. >> pick a year, any year, except maybe 2008 which seems mostly okay. every year, every year. wild weather disrupts holiday travel plans. 2004. weather disrupts holiday travel. 2005. 2006, storms and floods hammer millions of americans making the thanksgiving trek. thanksgiving storm on the way. weather delays wreak havoc on thanksgiving travel. thanksgiving weather. massive airport delays. every year. every year. every year. thanksgiving travel and northern hemisphere winter are a terrible combination. it happens every year. and so -- stay in. stay in. stay in if you can. and if you want to stay in and plan your thanksgiving night cocktail for the family. or for just you and the cats, or whatever, this might help. my friend josie packard who works at the bar drink in boston invented the drink.
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i don't know if it is a thanksgiving drink, but it is my family's thanksgiving drink nonetheless. the northern spy, named after the apple variety. use a lemon to wet the rim of a glass. sugar, granulated sugar, cinnamon. since the glass rim is wet with the lemon juice, it will stick. and you will get a cinnamon sugar rim like that. set that aside. then you make the drink. applejack. it is the 100 proof kind, way better than the non-100 proof kind. if you can't find it. you might want to substitute for the bonded apple jack. per drink, 2 ounces of applejack. 2 ounces. then, the other liquor ingredient, some times hard to find. apricot brandy is best. if you can't find apricot brandy, apricot liqueur. half an ounce.
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if it's too sweet, dial back half an ounce. this its a pretty dry one. a half an ounce. then, the magic ingredient that makes it particularly seasonal is apple cider. if you can find nonpreservatives, nonpasturized cider, that's better. an ounce of apple cider. and then, to even out the whole thing and make it, muy delicioso. you want lemon juice. for this recipe, you want half an ounce of lemon juice. has to come from a lemon. not a plastic thing that lives in your fridge, spelled like lemon without the vowels. you want it to be a piece of fruit. there is the drink. shake it up with ice. pardon me for a moment. i have to take care of this. then you pour it into the glass that has already been -- rimmed with the cinnamon and sugar. if you forget to do the cinnamon
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and sugar rim until after you poured the glass. there is no going back. no hope. you can't add the rim once there is liquor in the glass. then to be particularly thanksgivingy, you have two choices -- one, add champagne. the other is not to add champagne. they're both wonderful. add fresh cranberries as your garnish. do not eat the garnish. cheers. now time for "the last word with lawrence o'donnell." bye, have a great night. >> remember when mitt romney said corporations are people. well, now the supreme court is going to decide if corporations are religious people. >> breaking news from the supreme court. >> very important question headed to the supreme court. >> does a corporation, does a company have religious freedom? >> asht to lawsuit from hobby lobby stores. >> health care law's requirement, that employers offer free birth control coverage.