his racist comments, the clippers had to play a pivotal playoff game. if the players had any doubts about what fans' reaction would be or even show up, doubt no more. here was the incredible scene as the clippers enter the court. the clippers went on to win game five against the golden state warriors, 113-103. they now lead the series three games to two with the potential clincher in oakland tomorrow night. chris paul described the scene after the game. >> after warmups, one of the most emotional things i think i've ever been a part of, you know, we have a tough locker room, all of us are tough but it almost brought tears to your eyes to feel the support from our fans. >> espn's senior writer chris

broussard is with us, as well as mike wise, sports columnist from "the washington post." you were there last night, chris. describe the mood among the players and the fans. >> the mood was similar among both. with the players, there was a heavy burden lifted off their shoulders as well as the nba commissioner, adam silver made his ruling. the players decided they were going to play but a lot of them had doubts heading into the game. you know, before adam's ruling. a lot of them have family members and friends telling them they shouldn't play. a lot of the players told me they looked on instagram and saw themselves being compared to slaves. they had a burden on their shoulders when they play a game four on sunday and before adam silver's announcement. once he made his declaration that donald sterling would be banned for life, that burden was lifted and the players felt that. and the fans felt it, too, because a lot of them were

questionable about whether or not they should go to the game, whether or not they should cheer for the clippers. once all that was taken away with donald sterling's ownership or at least in the future, the promise to take it away, all the fans and the players just felt this release and emotional release, you could sense it last night. >> yes, absolutely. mike, i certainly think commissioner silver made the right moral call and did the right thing. it's been widely praised. i'm wondering, one of the things we also saw, one of the dynamics here is after the racist comments came out, advertisers, responsers of the clippers started to drop out. so there was a financial pressure here as well. how much of the story is that financial pressure that was brought to bear as well? >> i think it was a huge impetus. i think any owners on the fence in the nba thinking, well, of course i don't agree with donald sterling's comments, and i think

it's abhorrent but if they can actually throw -- if they can throw him out of the league, what are they going to do to me if they find out i had subprime mortgage loans go bad in a small city which i made money. which dan gilbert did in cleveland. once those financial -- once those corporate entities got involved, that was pretty much it. i think if there were anything that put adam silver's decision to ban him for life over the top, i believe the corporations that bowed out in the relationship with the clippers did it. >> chris, great to have you on the show and great to see you away from the other things we usually see each other at. one of the things that made a big difference here was the players. one of the things that came to light after adam silver's presser was how close the players came to boycotting the game. not just the clippers/warriors game but it was close to being no basketball played yesterday. roger mason talked about that yesterday. listen to that.

>> yesterday we had a call that mayor johnson had for us as players with the executive committee members, player reps and players across the league. mayor johnson asked us what our views on the situation were. as you heard, we gave him three points. additionally, i reached out to other players around the league and made it clear that the players were ready to boycott the games if this type of action was not something that adam silver felt was necessary. >> he's talking about all the games that would have been played last night, steph curry from the warriors talked about how they would have done it, let the ball tipped up and they all would have walked off the court. what an incredible scene that would have been. that that didn't have to happen, is good. i'm proud of the players that they were willing to go that far

and to say, some things are bigger than the game. >> i said before the game, i'm not going to criticize the clippers players for playing in game four on sunday. i thought it would have been great if they had boycotted that game, not just the clippers but the warriors players as well. i think that would have taken care of this thing even faster. the nba, its tv corporations, its sponsors, corporate sponsors, they all would have gotten this thing done immediately and suspended donald sterling even as they were still investigating the situation. this showed me that the players were willing to go that far. showed me they understood their power. they had 450 of the greatest athletes in the world. no one else can do what they do at the level they do it and a lot of power comes with that. this showed me they want to be viewed as partners with the nba, not just the labor. they want to be partners with the ownership and the fact that they were willing to go that far was great. look, a lot of times the modern

day african-american athletes get criticized for not being as socially conscious as muhammad ali and bill russell and jim brown and guys like that. these guys haven't faced that time of overt racism that those guys faced. this was an example of where it was in your face racism and they showed they were willing to go the length and give up these games to make a point. >> yes. >> great point. great point. >> adam silver, huge day for him yesterday. is seen in many eyes as a hero. he responded to this. his predecessor david stern was known differently, more of a dictator, unapproachable and difficult to deal with. silver by taking this stance and using his role as a tool beyond just basketball to make change, has instantly gained the trust of his players and the entire clippers community. if you didn't know who he was before this, you certainly know him now. isn't this a monumental step for him moving forward in terms of

his negotiating power. >> i think this was adam silver's moment. i think it is interesting, we play revisionist historians a lot when we talk about that david stern did have a brusque side. the league still has to answer for why nothing was done when there was public record of donald sterling's discriminatory tactics and his racism before this. but nonetheless, david stern was adam silver's mentor. and this is a guy who was more socially and progressively pro-active in regard to race and diversity than any other commissioner in the history of modern american sports. and adam silver took it one step further yesterday. he did not sound like a lawyer. he did not sound detached. he sounded like a person, a citizen of this world. not just a sports commissioner. and i think it really was his moment. having known him for 20 years,

it was a sight to behold. >> do we have a timetable for when the owners will actually have this vote? >> yes. they're going to have a conference call on thursday. they have an advisory and finance committee for the nba. that's when they're going to determine the timetable, when they'll do the vote and also if the vote will be made public. the players association is really keeping an eye on this because while they were satisfied with yesterday's happenings, they weren't content. that's where roger mason told me in person. he said, look, we want to know when the vote's happening. we want it to take place within a week, two weeks. they want to keep an eye on this and make sure this happens quickly and that everything the nba can do to get donald sterling out quickly, that everything to that case is -- to that point is done. >> mike, can you help me get inside don sterling's head here a little bit? jim gray is saying sterling tells him the team is not for

sale, even after adam silver's action. what value do you derive in continuing to own the clippers. why do you want to own a professional basketball team if you can't stand black people? >> getting inside his head -- >> it's a little scary. >> you could park cars in that head right now. so, you know, i don't know. it's a hard one to -- but look, this is not just about racism. i think this is about a billionaire. many billionaires in this country, not all, but many of them create their own alternate realities where people -- they don't have equitable relationships. everybody in their family and everybody that works around them works for them. they're dependent on them, therefore, they surround themselves with people that tell them what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. donald sterling needs sensitivity training before

anything. i don't care how long he lives. after that, stop being a stubborn old coot. >> sound advice from mike wise thanks to you. >> go ahead, chris. >> i'd like to add this. everyone i talked to who knows donald sterling in some way, they say he's going to fight this as much as he can. he's going to bring this to court. he's going to drag this thing out. and fight it. now as far as why he might want to own an nba team with black players, that's why a lot of people, including myself compared his mentality to that of a slave master. back in the antebellum south. he doesn't mind having sex with black people. he doesn't mind beingen fromly with black people but he views them as subhuman, as inferior, people he can make money off of but people he shouldn't treat with equality and justice. that's a problem and that's why the players were so upset. >> my last point was chris and i worked at "the new york times"

many years ago, covered nba. we happened to work with a colleague named william rhoden. he wrote a book called "$40 million slaves." today that book comes to prophecy. >> chris, mike, thank you so much. up next, the president makes yet another push to raise the minimum wage as the senate takes up the matter across town. we'll listen in and talk about the other big number besides 10.10 today, 0.1. as "the cycle" rolls on for april 30th. [ male announcer ] this is kevin.

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in his effort to up the federal minimum wage and began by calling out republicans for blocking a vote on legislation this morning. >> they told americans, like the ones that are here today, that you're on your own, without even looking them in the eye. we know these americans. we depend on them. the workers who benefit from a minimum wage increase often work full time, often in physically demanding jobs. they average 35 years of age. most low-paying jobs are held by women. but because republicans in congress said no, to even allowing a vote on the floor of the senate, these folks will have to wait for the raise they deserve. the good news is outside of washington, folks aren't waiting. while republicans have been deciding whether to even allow a

minimum wage bill to come up for a vote, you've seen ten states and the district of columbia go ahead and raise theirs. yesterday the hawaii legislature voted to raise their minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. maryland did the same thing earlier this month. i know we have maryland state legislators here today. thanks for the good work. so the aks that have been taken in just four states, maryland, connecticut, minnesota and hawaii, means that over a million workers will see a raise. what's more, we've seen big companies like the gap and small businesses from a pizza join in the st. louis to an ice cream parlor in florida increasingly choosing to raise wages for their employees because they

know it's good business. they know that it means employees are more likely to stay on the job, less turnover. means that they're going to be more productive and customers see the difference. that's one of the reasons i issued an executive order requiring employees on new federal contracts to be paid a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour. so americans have been way out in front of congress on this issue. in fact, about three in four americans support raising the minimum wage. that's because we believe that in the wealthiest nation on earth, nobody who works full time should ever have to raise a family in poverty. that's a basic principle. [ applause ]

and at a time when those at the top are doing better than ever, while millions of americans are working harder and harder just to get by, that three out of four americans understands that america deserves a raise. >> as we mentioned, the senate effort to raise the minimum wage fell short this afternoon. democrats simply don't have the votes to overcome a republican filibuster. but here's why the president may be able to make his case, at least to the american people. extremely weak new gdp numbers show our economy grew only 0.1% last quarter, the slowest pace in more than a year and down drastically from the 2.5% we saw in the previous quarter. the president making the case we can't grow our economy without americans making a livable wage and spending that money on products and services. chuck todd is at the white house for us. chuck, the timing of this event seems pretty ironic, considering

the minimum wage that was taken today. and of course the new gdp numbers. >> well, it is but what's interesting is the white house, their own chief economist essentially blamed the weather, didn't connect it necessarily the way you just connected it to minimum wage. i think they certainly, look, they believe this minimum wage issue is a way to talk about the economy in a way that can help democrats, unite the party. this is a case where it doesn't matter if you're a blou state democrat or red state democrat. they're all on the same page when it comes to raising the minimum wage. it's a good tool for campaign democrats in a campaign year. it does seem, for instance, today was a political vote. they want to be able to show this as a good issue for them. but i've not heard the white house make the direct connection as much. like i said, on these gdp numbers they sent out six or seven different graphics talking

about weather as the chief reason why these gdp numbers were so low. >> yes. >> do you think that's something that can work, chuck? the weather, we've had a hard winter but we've had a hard winter in 2010 with snowmageddon. can the white house sell the case that this is an independent event they had nothing to do with? >> i think we'll find out the next quarter. if that's the case, they made a case that showed -- their other piece of evidence they say was weather related was on certain auto sales that showed that january and february were just disastrous but march as weather got better in more parts of the country, you saw an uptick. we'll know if they're right about this or not after the second quarter. you know, the other piece of evidence they use, they said this was the third worst winter, essentially for gdp quarter in the last 40 years. >> wow. >> that was -- you know, that was the evidence they were pointing to, saying, hey, this is an anomaly, particularly

giving the growth we saw in the fourth quarter of last year. >> being here in new york, we can attest to that. stick with us. speaking of numbers, there is mixed news for the white house. our latest nbc news/"wall street journal" poll, which you know a thing or two about, president obama's approval rating has jumped 3 points to its highest level in six months. but it's still in the low 40s. that's not helping democrats feel any better as the midterms creep closer and they fight to keep control of the senate. let's bring in a friend of the show. brian, what struck me is where the president's slight improvement is coming from. it's coming from women. how much of this shift is because of his push to raise the minimum wage? obviously an issue that has strong majority support among women. >> so i think these issues that the democrats are voting on, whether it's paycheck fairness for women or the minimum wage are designed to help bring the obama coalition back together to vote in the midterms and perhaps

to sort of discourage republican voters. i would sort of try to distinguish that from his day-to-day favorability ratings, which i think are much more tied to issues like the economy. they kind of gel together, right? if his approval rating is higher, that will boost turnout. if democratic voters are fired up, they will do better in the midterms. it's kind of hard. it's a causation correlation issue to say because he's focusing on these issues, that explains the uptick in his approval. >> brian, on the cover of the new republic, you have sasha eisenburg drilling down into things we felt for a long time that there are reflex voters who show up every two years like clock work and unreliable voters who show up usually every four, republicans have the lion's share of the reflex voters. democrats have the lion's share of the unreliable voters. eisenburg towards the end of the piece makes an interesting point, the new democratic progressive agenda is about

persuading some of the reflex voters, especially those working class white people who republicans haven't been able to take away via the culture wars. what do you think about that? >> i think you see democrats doing everything they can, whether it's through allocation of their electoral resources to give themselves the best possible chance of overcoming this trend where young people who are disproportionately democrat stay home during midterms and republicans come out and vote, so republicans do really well. what sasha found in his piece is that spending money on targeted campaigns to get voters to come out can be effective. one of the things democrats need to do in addition to using the power in washington to sort of leverage politics, if you will, they need their donors to write checks and for those checks to be used to actually reach voters through sort of regular shoe

led leather politics. >> which is something the obama campaign did well. chuck, former minnesota governor tim pawlenty had a surprising take on the minimum waj. >> i think by the way, the republicans should support a reasonable increase in the minimum wage. if we have a minimum wage, it should be reasonably adjusted from time to time. for all the republicans who come on and talk about we're for the blue collar worker, the working person, there's basic things we should be for. one of them is the reasonable increases from time to time in the minimum wage. >> i know before 2014 republicans have no interest in giving the president a win on the minimum wage. as we start to look towards 2016 and republicans remain concerned of their image of being the party of the 1%, are we going to

see more republicans moving in the direction of t. paw. >> i am surprised that republicans didn't offer a counter minimum wage increase of say $9. that's what the president asked for in the 2013 state of the union. i could see them making the argument saying, okay, we know some areas want to raise it to 10. we'll do -- we'll offer up 9 and sort of call the president's bluff. they didn't. and take the issue away. take it off the table. so i've actually been surprised they didn't do that. six months ago i thought this is where we were headed. the president threw out their 10.10, maybe somewhat as a rallying cry for the party to rally around. at the same time, perhaps it was the start of negotiation. the blue collar, in some of these red states, republican strength, the reason they're winning, they have won the old blue collar voter that used to be the democratic voter.

they become more reliable republican voters. pawlenty is right, they risk alienating these folks if they look too close to wall street. you say they don't want to give the president a win. i'm surprised they didn't call his bluff, do it and do it this spring to take the issue out of the fall. but that's thinking too strategically and frankly, i also think that republican leaders are worried that if they did that, they'd have primary problems. it will look like they're working too closely -- i can see them tieing themselves in knots to justify why they didn't do it. i think it would have been smarter strategic policies. >> rick santorum was on "morning joe" yesterday. glad to have you back. i hope you enjoyed the sushi. >> i feel bad. i'm not as big of a sushi fans aothers.

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comcast business built for business. we just can't seem to escape the vicious storm cycle this week. the tornado threat has turned into a flood threat for a wide area up and down the east coast. we are getting pounded here in the northeast by buckets and buckets of rain. the deep south is where the big action has been. check out this scene from what used to be a scenic highway in pensacola, florida. more than a foot of rain has fallen in the panhandle. nbc's gabe gutierrez is there in the middle of the mess. >> reporter: this is a residential neighborhood near the kbroun town area. as you can see, plenty of flooding. we are seeing this over and over again throughout pensacola. florida's governor declared a state of emergency for 26 counties. >> and in alabama, people traded in their cars for boats.

this is the town of summerdale that you're looking at where rising water called for drastic measures. and in mobile, dramatic rescues played out as first responders put their own lives on the line to save residents who in some cases were literally hanging on there for dear life. >> since yesterday morning when all this initially started we made well over 200 responses. those are including fires, medical calls and other type of emergencies. i do not have a count right now on the water of swift water rescued we've made tonight. >> too many. >> the severe threat is not over just yet. more heavy rains and strong storms are in the forecast, at least through tonight. we will keep you posted. turning now to the story that has a lot of people talking today. just last hour, oklahoma governor mary fallon talked about the botched execution in her state. >> after consulting further with the department of corrections director robert patton, we agree that an independent review of

the department of corrections procedures would be effective and also appropriate. >> fallon stayed for two weeks the execute of an inmate slated to be put to death last night after another execution was botched leading to a gruesome scene. 38-year-old clayton lockette, convicted of a 1999 rape, kidnapping and murder was brought into the death chamber, had drugs administered but they did not kill him quick lip. here's the "today" show on how it happened. >> reporter: lockette was set to be executed using a new experimental cocktail of three drugs. the execution began at 6:23 p.m. when officials administered the first drug, a sedative to lockette. >> at that time we began pushing the second and third drugs in the protocol. there was some concern at that time that the drugs were not having the effect. >> reporter: prison officials declared lockette unconscious at

6:33 p.m. but over the next six minutes, eyewitnesses said lockette still appeared conscious and was struggling. >> one of the things he said was something's wrong. >> reporter: eyewitnesses said prison officials closed off their window into the chamber, putting lockette's execution on hold. prison officials say lockette suffered a massive heart attack and died at 7:06 p.m. >> a vein failure may have disrupted the flow of deadly chemicals into lockette, a doctor says. the story raises a lot of issues. let's take it to the table. this goes back to 2011 when death penalty activists got the only company that was the maker of the main chemical used in lethal injections to stop manufacturing that chemical. and that -- the amount they were making was a tiny thing for them. they didn't want the hassle, right? this is one case where activists were able to get business to say, let's get out of this for economic reasons and it works morally, too. that led to a huge problem for those who have to administer

death penalties. so you know, we have a situation where oklahoma knew they did not have the proper drugs, they went ahead and we have a situation that's gruesome. if executions look as gruesome who as some who are against them think they are, abby, it's hard to continue to do them. >> jay carney spoke about the story just this afternoon. let's take a look. >> i haven't discussed this particular report with the president. what i can tell you is that he has long said that while the evidence suggests that the death penalty does little to deter crime, he believes there are some crimes that are so heinous that the death penalty is merited. >> he was there speaking on behalf of president obama. i agree with him. i do think this man deserves to be killed when you read about what he actually did to this 19-year-old, murder, rape, buried alive. i mean, this is horrible stuff. i can't help but put myself in the shoes of her family and the friends that love her and imagine what they must be feeling. i'm sure they want the very

worst to happen to that man. that being said, we also can't have a broken system. regardless of how you feel or where you stand on the death penalty, i don't think anyone would agree with what just happened. i think to your point, this does give ammunition to folks who are against the death penalty to say if it's broken, why are we killing people at all? >> yes. i think it's a human response to look at someone like this man who committed the most unthinkable, heinous crimes that you can imagine and say you don't deserve a place on this planet. you don't deserve to die. you deserve to die. the difference comes in when you stop looking at the individual and the crimes, you start looking at the system. which is hard to do. what we've seen over the years is actually support for the death penalty declining as we have looked at a system where you have botched executions like this one. this is not the first instance. you also have people who are killed, who are wrongly executed, who are actually innocent.

when you separate yourself from the gruesome details of one case and you look at the system as a whole, i don't see how we can sustain a system where people are wrongfully killed and where you have botched executions like this one. >> there's another important thing happening over the last 20 years, crime rates and especially murder rates have fallen drastically. i think support for the death penalty is driven by fear, people are afraid of crime. they want to do everything they can to deter crime, they want to exact retribution on that instinct has falling away a little bit. we allow police to use deadly force, we engage in wars. the question is are we serving the interest of the public by having a death penalty? i think as you see these problems arise and as crime falls, it's much harder and harder to make the case that the death penalty is in the public's interest. >> complex issue. we'll be right back with jimy

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high stakes politics are back in effect this hour after a two-week spring break. president obama just wrapped up a speech pressuring congress to go ahead and raise the federal minimum wage. no coincidence, of course, these remarks came just hours after the senate stumbled in the dems' latest efforts to do just that. clearly, no love lost for either party in this divided congress that has been in session less than half of the days so far this year. without a whole lot to show for it either. let's bring in one of the hardest working guys in politics, jimy williams, executive editor of bluenationreview.com. bluenationreview.com. it's really cool.

congrats. >> i've been looking at it. everyone should check it out. >> you're our southern senior political kpon. you wear a lot of hats for us. we have a do the of dems obviously embattled in red states in the south. i was digging into some of these nbc news numbers. while favorability for the affordable care act is sort of, kind of inching up, in the south, man, it looks really ugly. 30% say it's a good idea. other polling is showing those numbers haven't budged, in some ways have gotten worse. is this going to be a problem for democrats in the south? what is going on different in the south than the rest of the country? >> the south is red. most of the south is red. at least the deep south certainly is, georgia, virginia, north carolina, they've begun to trend purple. obama won virginia tyce. the south is red. it's what it is.

i think lbj said it best when he signed the civil rights act. he handed the south over to the republicans for decades to come. it was true until now. but, look, let's talk about these incumbents. ok kay hagan. she's running in north carolina. you have the tea party folks. mary landrieu is up big against bill cassidy. is she popular in the state? she's popular in new orleans. can she get white women to vote for her? we know what else she can get to vote for her, that is the base. those folks have to get a good turnout. they ought to own it, run on it and the other thing they ought to do is beat the living hell out of their governors for not expanding medicaid. nikki haley. many people could have been put on medicaid rolls. what did nikki haley do, she

said no way over my dead body. if i'm someone who's running against either a governor or a sitting senator, a republican senator, or i'm running in the south anywhere, i'm going to take obamacare and say this is the number of people that have been helped, this is the reason why we should expand medicaid. >> before you do that, i love your new article gop hypocrisy rises to new levels. any article with a headline like that, it's for me. you talk about how, once again, republicans are giving to corporate america and hurting policies -- against policies that would help middle class and working americans. you quote the late joe welch. have you no sense of decency, sir? that's a great moment in america. i have to show them that. >> look, this is a simple fact. oh, i'm sorry. >> you have no sense of decency. at long last, have you left no sense of decency.

>> joe welch ending the career of joe mccarthy. talk about that, sir. >> congress was away for two weeks. clearly the republicans ate a big old bowl of stupid or something. they came back and the first thing they did on the house side was marked up a bill that cost $310 billion and didn't pay for it. what's in the bill? a bunch of corporate welfare, r & d, a whole slew of stuff, tax write-offs for corporations. why? because maybe they need more campaign contributions. the bottom line is they didn't pay for it. meanwhi meanwhile, this is the same house that is sitting there, they're not going to vote on an unemployment extension because it's not paid for. these people are ridiculous. the senate voted down an increase in the minimum wage today. you just showed chuck todd talk about mr. pawlandty saying they should do it. what did they do while they were home? not talk to any of their constituents who were unemployed or get paid minimum wage? it's really dumb on their part. >> they seem to only care about the deficit when they're cutting

programs that benefit poor and working people. jimmy williams, blue nation review.com. thank you so much. you wouldn't trust a stranger to baby sit your kids, right? why do you trust them to baby sit your house? the cover story about how technology is rewiring how we interact with each other. that's next. now they're spending it to rig the system against you. pushing washington to cut american-made biofuels... bullying gas stations to use more of their oil... all so they get richer...and you pay more. truth is, biofuels are cleaner, better for your engine and less expensive. washington, don't let big oil rig the system any more. protect the renewable fuel standard. i was 80% nervous. but with 100% odor protection, i had nothing to worry about. [ female announcer ] only secret offers clinical strength antiperspirant in your 2 favorite forms,

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freely. so would you pick up a complete stranger on the street an drive them to the airport, let someone you never met in your extra bedroom or loan someone who's not your neighbor your power drill or dog? a host of sites allow you to do all of the above. people are logging in and sharing like never before. those questions are tackled in the new issue of "wired" when the new trust-me economy is being written aboutp this. technology is making is more reasonable for us to trust strangers with access to our lives. >> a lot of these service have a fundamental backbone of algorithms that makes us more comfortable trusting one another. airbnb, every transaction take

place within the airbnb system. they have a record of every other transaction you've ever made. they can use that to inform every rental. if they see a red flag that pops up based on your past and stop it from happening before something bad happens. >> this really about trust, jason, or about need in that we are at an economic state where people are doing whatever they can to get by? >> i think that's false dichotomy, to be honest with you. people do all sorts of things for money. a lot of great innovations happen because people needed the money. i wrote that article for money. so, you know, i don't think that -- i think that these trust infrastructures make this kind of behavior available, right? who knows what people would be doing if the systems weren't in place much the fact of the matter is we do have this trusting behavior now and it is put in place, for whatever reason people are doing it, it is made possible by these technological breaks through. >> the other side of the coin in this conversation is you can actually never be too trusting. you highlighted two stories in

your piece about air bnb, one couple here in new york city, went on vacation, came back to find out there was a sex party happening while they were away. i hate when that happens as well. another story of folks in san francisco that came back and found that their i.d. was stolen, pretty much all of their belongings were stolen. this is frightening stuff. >> well, yeah look, things are going to happen. things will happen in a hotel in a taxicab. what you need is a system that understands that those things are going to happen and does everything to prevent them from happening, when it does happen, you have insurance, you have guarantees to make up for any damage. for instance, the example in san francisco -- >> how do you make up for sex parties though? >> you pay them -- you pay people a lot of money and fumigate the house, i assume. >> jason, one of the things that you point out in the article is that we engage in commerce with total strangers every day, we hand out credit cards to shop clerks, get in the back seat of taxis driven by cabbies we never met, ingest food prepared this

closed kitchens, et cetera, et cetera. so, we are already in a position of needing to trust all the people around us that we deal with every day. so, is this really sort of fundamentally different? >> well, those all take place within a business context there is a regulatory and social framework that's been built up over decades to make you feel comfortable trusting the chef in the kitchen that hasn't existed on the individual level. you trusted somebody as a proxy for the business that you were interacting with, not somebody as an individual. this now applies that language and that context to fellow individuals that don't necessarily work for some corporation that back stops their behavior. >> jason tanz, thank you so much. up next, why you should not buy a house. >> what? >> seriously. don't do it.

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i want to tell you a story about why i love being a renter. i moved into a new apartment last weekend and i discovered yesterday none of the cable jacks work. that makes me sad, when i'm not here, i don't get to look at toure's face. because i'm a represent, i don't have to pay for or arrange any of that, it is the landlord's problem. being a rent means moving into the apartment didn't require me to put all the money i have in the world and put in a highly leveraged real estate investment. people routinely scrounge together everything they have to make a down payment of 10% or 5% or less if you did that with any other piece of real estate, people would think you are crazy, yet politician and civic leaders tell us homeownership is a key to the american dream. here is president obama just last year. >> we got a lot of young people here, yeah, who are thinking about college, they are gonna get a higher education, they are gonna find a job, they are going to find somebody they love, they

are gonna want to own a home. and the reason they will is because a home is the ultimate evidence that here in america, hard work pays off. that responsibility is rewarded. >> when our leaders keep equating homeownership with life success, no surprise people keep stretching to buy homes when they shount shunt and their views of the economy become distorted. we root for prices to group and implement public policies designed to push prices up. rising home prices are great for people who own homes, not good for people trying to move out of their parents' basements. right now, our economy stuck because people can't afford to do that 'cause homeowners with aen prices to soar, local community imposed laws --

incumbent homeowners laugh all the way to the bank. if more people saw themselves as consumers of housing rather than investors of it, if we had a culture of renting, with he can have policies they need to make housing cheaper rather than more expensive and we would all have money to spend on other stuff. when people bet their financial futures on home prices, housing crashes can crack the whole economy down. that's what we saw in 2008, yet six years later, the government is still insuring mortgages with as little as 3.5% down. we are still trying to use homeownership as a shortcut to middle class wealth. the temptation is obvious. if you want to get wealth into the hands of people as their incomes stagnate, high-level real estate investments will work as prices go up. since home prices sometimes fall, we should be sending a different message, buy a home if you want to own a home, can afford a big down payment and afford to absorb the hit if house prices fall f that doesn't describe you, you should probably be a renter, like me. okay. that does it for the cycle. now with alex wagner starts now. new e-mails from the white house on benghazi tell us

basically what we already knew. it is wednesday, april 30th and this is "now." whether it is ethenol or banana peels, more artificial fuel is revving up the benghazi engines this week and that means just a little more mileage for conspiracy theorist. yesterday, the conservative watchdog group, judicial watch, released a newly declassified e-mail from white house deputy national white house security adviser, ben roads, it was sent the day before u.n. ambassador susan rice was to appear on the sunday talk shows, which was five days after the september 11th attacks at the u.s. embassy in benghazi, where four americans were killed, including ambassador chris stevens. in the e-mail, roads outlines talking points in preparation for rice's appearances. while his guidance reflects much of what we already know and what the white house has already released, roads wrote that one goal of rice's appearances would be to "underscore that these

protests are rooted in an internet video and not a broader failure of policy." to be clear, this claim that the protests were a reaction to an internet video was a theory that came from the central intelligence agency, the cia, a theory that was relayed to the white house vet same day that rhodes sent his e-mail. with the exception of this previously unreleased message from rhodes and a few other documents, almost all of this stuff, the talking points shall eat mail exchanges, was released to the public about a year ago and while there are probably few questions to be asked about why we are only seeing this particular e-mail now, if you hear it from a benghazi truther, the smoking gun has been found. not only was a senior white house official apparently following cia guidance, he was also trying to manage political fallout before the 2012 elections. as dave weigle points out in slate this is a major departure from most crises when