alongside people ex exuding love for their enemies. we no longer speak of negroes and segregation, but we speak of blacks and their lives mattering. the force that makes it bend is that radical revolutionary love that powered the life of dr. king. have a great king day. alex wagner is up next. the president is commemorating the legacy of dr. martin luther king but not necessarily in the way you think. it's monday, january 19th, and this is "now." >> a bold effort by the president. >> battle lines are being drawn ahead of the president's state of the union address tomorrow. >> paid for by new taxes and

fees on some of the wealthiest americans. >> they are the .1%. >> this is being viewed as a confrontation by republicans. >> for president obama to propose this is probably good politics. >> how much does this tax proposal have to do with legacy? the >> it is much easier to integrate a public pall than it is a slum. we have moved to a struggle for genuine equality. >> today fresh off a private screening with the cast from "selma" the president and the first lady commemorated the day

with a visit to a boys and girls club. it was a tax plan. on saturday night, in advance of tomorrow's state of the union address, the white house announced a sweeping proposal offering a slew of tax credits for middle-class and low-income families. the plan would eliminate a loophole that allows america's richest to pass on untaxed wealth to their heirs. it would raise the capital gains tax and it would levy a small tax on the 100 biggest banks, so what does this have to do with dr. king? the full title of the 1963 march on washington was the march on washington for jobs and freedom. as the 60s wore on king new the

coming battles would revolve around economics along with desegregation desegregation. >> it is much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to get rid of poverty for negroes and all poor people. it is much easier to integrate a bus than to make a quality education a reality in our schools. it is easier to integrate a public park than it is to get rid of the slums. we are in a new phase of a struggle where we have moved from a struggle for decency to a struggle for genuine equality. >> i talked to the white house press secretary josh earnest about the new white house plan. >> thank ss for taking time to

talk to me today. let me first get the mood of the white house. to those of us on the outside, it seems very emboldened. >> you can say it is a holiday around here. it is state of the union eve. there is a lot of work and activity here at the white house in what is otherwise a federal holiday. there's a lot of excitement. there's bounce in the step of people who are working on a day they would otherwise have off because there are ideas in this speech. there's a palpable sense of momentum because our economy has demonstrated tremendous strength and resilience which we feel good about. there are polls, particularly the latest one -- the president's approval rating is up nine points over a month ago. and we also feel a sense of moe

momentum about the kinds of policy proposals we have talked about over the last few months everything from making climate change progress in china and trying to bring a solution to our broken immigration system and saving new home buyers money on their mortgage. the president is speaking before the country, the congress, before whatever supreme court justices who decide to show up to lay out his vision for the country. >> it is not at all shared by the other side of the aisle. brendan buck from paul ryan's office saying we lift families up and grow the economy with a simpler tax code not tax increases. my favorite says that tuesday

night's state of the union address could be the first one in history designed to start a pavlonian rage. >> i think what this is it is designed to demonstrate to the american people that there's a choice to be made. a couple years of free community college to hard working students who are getting good grades reforms to our housing programs some specific reforms to our workplace policies that would allow workers who are sick or have a child that's sick to not be at risk of losing their job if they spend a day taking care of their kid at home.

they are going to cost some money. we need to decide what's more important. a trust fund loophole that only benefits millionaires or ensure ensuring that middle-class students can go to college for free? >> i guess i wonder where that enthusiasm is based. >> well, the president is enthusiastic about laying out a vision for the country that he believes will move us forward. there is a lot of excitement about that. the chance to articulate where we want to take the country is a tremendous opportunity and not that many people have it. we released this video online today where the president talked about how he wants to make the most of his final fourth quarter in office. a lot of important things happen in the fourth quarter and the president is interested in making the most of that opportunity. the question will come before republicans in congress. they have spent the last six

years being foresquare against anything that the president proposed. are they going to assume responsibility for governing the country? >> does this have to do more with 2016 than 2015? >> no. we anticipate there are going to be some really important things that are going to happen. the president is looking forward to talking about those tomorrow night. >> has he talked to any republicans that are willing to lend any support to any of this? >> there are a couple of things in the tax proposal that are proposals taken from republicans. one of the things the president is going to propose is an extra fee on highly leveraged wall street firms.

this was floated by the republican chairman of the house ways and means committee last year. so there are some clear ideas that have been strongly supported by republicans in the past and the president wants to use them to invest in the kinds of things that benefit middle class families. >> last question. the president's script writer speech writer you tweeted out a photo of them working hard into the night. have they gotten any sleep? >> the speech is all but done. it is not quite done. i don't think we're ready to etch it in stone just yet. it is very close to being completed. we are a little ahead of schedule than we have been in previous years. i don't know what year it was we had some trouble getting the

speech text out because edits were being made up to the last minute. that's not going to happen this year. >> thanks for your time. >> thanks, alex. >> joining me now is author of "losing our way." bob, i think a lot of people applaud these white house initiatives. at the same time people understand that there is almost zero chance they're going to get passed before 2016 and the circumstances around inequality are worse now than they are in dr. king's time. the richest 1% will own more than half of the world's wealth next year. >> you're absolutely right. this has no chance excuse me, in the republican dominated congress. but for people who care about

wealth and inequality there has to be some discussion about transfer of wealth. i think it is important for people who care about inequality to hear about this and push it so whether it passes while president obama is president or not becomes irrelevant. some of this stuff takes a long time. >> when you heard about the tax raises and the tax cuts announced this weekend, i think a lot of people said this is setting the table for 2016 and this is about the democratic party in the coming years. do you agree with that and do you think this is a template for someone like hillary clinton? >> yeah, i agree with all of that but i would probably go a little further. there are a couple of people in the political sphere that say they care about inequality.

one is named jeb bush and the other is named mitt romney. if you look at their rhetoric, they're talking about immobility, inequality, inequality of opportunity as a real problem. what i think the president has done here -- and i thought bob framed it up nicely -- is welcome to the world. welcome to the debate. he has a set of ideas that are quite concrete that come at this wealth inequality problem. what we typically hear from the other side is trickle down and trickle down won't do it. i do like the way this is shaping up. >> do you think this is what the administration would have looked like if the great recession had never happened? is this kind of like that scooby doo moment where the mask is pulled off and it is like the issue of income inequality and

income redistribution -- >> the president has been really aggressive lately. very bold. he's making his proposals. i'm not trying to make a deal with the republicans on these issues. this is what i real believe in. this is what i care about. that's leadership and i think the public responds to that. >> this plan feels like the first of the post-recession post-deficit panic era. do you agree with that? >> only to an extent. when you're president, you have to focus on growth because without growth there's not even a possibility for progressive distribution. once you achieve growth you can start thinking more broadly about these issues.

however, this economy has actually been growing for five years. bob has a point. if you look at where that growth has gone it has gone almost exclusively into corporate profitability. absolutely this is an agenda whose time has come. >> i guess i wonder when we talk about political representation when we're talking about income inequality, can we truly address that in the way we need to address it without addressing political inequality? certain segments of our society are much more dominant in the political discourse and policy making decisions. >> so there's a report out that talks about the overwhelming influence of money in politics and the most recent update on that report shows how that exacerbates inequality when it comes to people of color in this

country. their interests are not the same as those of working people and poor people. we have to do something about the overwhelming influence of big money in politics. >> yeah, they are twinned in the womb if you will. >> exactly. >> as always good to talk with you. after the break, tea party leaders are encouraging, quote, liberal republicans, including jeb bush, marco rubio, and chris christie to run for president. plus two days ago, fox news issued an apology for spreading terrorist hysteria. that's ahead on now. >>hump day! hummmp daaay! it's hump day! >>yeah! >>hey mike! mike mike mike mike mike! >>mike mike mike mike mike. hey! he knows! hey! guess what day

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as the tea party faithful gather in south carolina conservatives may be hoping to turn the 2012 template on its head come 2016. the last gop presidential primary featured a cast of conservative candidates challenging the primacy of mitt romney. mitt may be back and he has a new platform to prove it. >> the only policies that will reach in the hearts of the american people and break the cycle of poverty are republican principles conservative principles. >> the new and improved mitt romney is likely to have company going after the moderate middle. how do tea partiers feel about

these centrist glut? we want rubio in. we want christie in. we want romney in. ted cruz warned against being lured by what he called the mushy middle. >> you know what electability is? nominate the candidate who is closest to the democrats. in their right mind would listen to someone who keeps getting whooped, giving us advice on how not to get whooped? >> joining me now is david corn and ryan grimm. two washington bureau chiefs on this big date. doesn't the mushy middle

doesn't that usually end up winning in terms of republican nomination processes? >> it depends who you're looking at, but george w. bush won. mccain won after people called him rino. reagan was an interesting case study in that he was a movement leader of the conservative movement but he won over the business establishment. ted cruz's theory of the case if you can even call it that was that mitt romney would have done better had he been more against abortion more against gay rights and had wanted to close down the government more than he might have wanted to do otherwise. i just don't see any, any, iota of empirical evidence saying

that more people who have voted for mitt romney if he was severe severely conserveativeconservative. >> we were overly focused on deficits and not about fairness. with the president's announced plans for the state of the union, even on issues of gay marriage, do you think republicans in the coming months and year are going to be drawn further to the center and maybe even, dare i say, the center left? >> i think you're going to see them talk a lot about economic mobility as their kind of entry point into the kind of populous energy that's out there right now. it was interesting to see jeb bush to use the phrase inequality. that's usually forbidden, even among centrist democratic

circles. that stuff is going to get pushed over to the sidelines in favor of things that will resonate more. and what will resonate more is attacking their opponent. let's say they're against common core. they'll attack jeb bush over that. these kind of races descend very quickly into knife fights. >> that sounds intriguing, doesn't it david? i was surprised to know that 57% of -- evangelicals make up a sizable portion of the republican party. 57% of the voters in the iowa caucus were evangelicals. can he sit out catering to the

evangelical christian right and still get the nomination? >> remember a guy named rudy giuliani? new hampshire they are more libertarian and not worry about south carolina and head to florida. we haven't seen too many people really able to pull that off. now this field we're going to have this time around, at least as it seems to be, is going to create a lot more mathmatical

policies. they are going to be a lot of different dynamics in this race. >> i wonder whose stock you think is trading higher. rand has distinctly been coloring in the lines of late. i wonder if you think they cancel each other out. who do you think whose stock is trading higher? where do you pit them at this stage? >> i think rand paul has the advantage because he has the organizing base out of his father. in iowa he was within a couple thousands votes, ron paul was, of winning iowa last election. he has dedicated supporters in new hampshire and throughout the country who are very good at organizing and getting their vote out. now obviously they'll all think that rand is a sell-out for all the different various ways he's breaking from his father but it is still rand paul.

rand paul has always been kind of a part of his father's operation, so i think they'll kind of feel like they're getting some of that. that's a base to start from. if he just tacks on another 5% then he becomes quite formidable in places like iowa. >> david, does mike huckabee stand -- where is he? he spent the weekend impugning the lyrical content of beyonce's songs. is he a contender? >> i don't know what he's going to do if it is nikki minaj. how many votes do you need to get to win iowa? 14% of the vote might win iowa. mike huckabee is well known. he did very well in iowa last time he ran.

amongst that high number of social conservatives that you just put up on the screen he has a natural claim to those people. so he hasn't had the discipline as a candidate in the past to sort of do what he has to do. he hasn't been great organizationally, but he can do well in iowa but then he could flame out afterwards. this is going to be a very unusual republican primary. >> david corn for the win the nikki minaj check. no word on who iggy azalea is going to be supporting. coming up, the american facilities to handle ebola patients in liberia are up and running, but we'll tell you why they're sitting empty.

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the fight against ebola in west africa. the government of mali has declared the country ebola-free. the number of ebola cases has fallen so dramatically that the american built facilities in liberia are sitting empty. the response came too late to help the more than 8300 liberians that became infected. the epidemic remains a problem. in sierra leone, several hundred cases are being reported as of last week. just ahead, how far does america still have to go to achieve dr. king's dream? we'll discuss that next on "now."

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separation, particularly society as a whole, but particularly today between police and the community that exists in some places. >> that was vice president joe biden today honoring dr. martin luther king. this afternoon president obama marked the holiday by volunteering with his family at the boys and girls club and across the city in dozens of cities los angeles, new york city, thousands of people paid tribute to martin luther king by marching for justice. that list of places those are america's great cities. i feel like there is a renewed sense of engagement on basic civil rights issues. do you think ferguson is an inflection point like selma? >> i think it is an inflection point, but i don't think it is

like selma. selma was this tremendous effort on civil rights that had been made. one of the things that always strikes me was the amount of preparation that was put into it. you had tremendous leaders. the protesters and demonstrators actually went to schools where they learned the basics and the fundamentals of non-violent protests. they understood the issues thoroughly. i don't think we have the same levels of sophistication with the demonstrations we have now. >> there's also the question of the political system and how open it is to addressing institutional failure and systemic breakdown. 52% of african-americans in this country disagree that america is nation where people are not judged by the color of their skin. for black people in america, the since we are a post-racist

society is completely false. >> i know. remember how people were talking about it that way after barack obama was elected in 2008. just a couple years later, the numbers are going in the opposite direction. you compared selma to ferguson. selma, there was nothing am ambiguous about it. most of the country had the same sort of reaction to the police beatings. ferguson you start polling people about it. you find quite unfortunately a racial breakdown in how white americans and black americans are viewing these things. how they accept the findings of grand juries, what they think about the police and these sort of civil rights cases, and it is quite discouraging that there's

still this big gap. we saw it in the o.j. case. people are viewing race in america through very very different filters. >> when you look at -- we compare this to dr. king's time when segregation was legally justified. today it is not. yet some parts of our society are still dramatically segregated because that's the way it is. when you look at the economy, the wealth of white houses was 13 times that of black households. >> most of our society is segregated. this is a rigidly segregated society. i don't care what people want to say post-racial this that, and the other thing. if you went back to the 1960s, you would -- and you polled people then you would find a stark racial divide there too.

there was not a great deal of support for black protests or for black civil rights back in the 50s and 60s, even though there was a response to the televised violence and that sort of thing. we have always been a racially polarized society and we continue to be that. >> we talked with josh earnest at the beginning of this program. do you think we will hear more from him on the subject of race in the last two years of his presidency? >> to me the question will be whether he does anything proactively or whether he responds to what will no doubt with racially charged episodes and incidents that will happen. we have seen them coming now for several months over a year. what he'll do from his pulpit on his own accord i don't know. i give eric holder a lot of credit. his justice department has done

some of the most -- the highest number of police abuse cases throughout the country outside of ferguson and other places and have gotten a lot of good agreements and accords with local police forces that were used of racially motivated abuses. i don't know if he will in the next two years. >> and whether we will see confirmation of eric holder's replacement replacement. coming up, alleged no-go zones in europe. ones that function like little islamic caliphates that does not exist. that doesn't stop bobby jindal from discussing it. which means you need help from a whole team of advisors. from workforce strategies to tech solutions

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in britain, it's not just no-go zones. there are cities like birmingham that are totally muslim where non-muslims just simply don't go in. >> i've been to afghanistan, iraq kashmir and india, and it felt like these no-go zones. >> the hysteria was met with widespread ridicule both here and across the pond. paris is a city famous for its food, history, and culture and

caliphates, was the assessment by fox. david cameron minced no words and labeled steve emerson a complete idiot. and the french equivalent of "the daily show" ventured into the so-called no-go zones of paris. [ speaking in a foreign language ] [ speaking in a foreign language ] >> the no-go myth appears to have originated in a mistaken interpretation of 750 sensitive

neighborhoods for urban renewal. all of this prompted fox to issue a rare on air correction this saturday night. >> over the course of this last week, we have made some regrettable errors on air regarding the muslim population in europe. this applies to discussions of so-called no-go zones, areas where non-muslims are not allowed in and police supposedly won't go. to be clear, there is no formal designation of these zones in either country and no credible information to support the assertion there are specific areas in these countries that exclude individuals based solely on their religion. >> no credible information and yet almost two days later, louisiana governor and potential presidential candidate bobby jindal was in london warning of the dangers of wait for it no-go zones.

>> the sewo-called no-go zones, same laws same values the same rules simply don't apply. >> thank you for joining me on this martin luther king day when we have to talk about conservatives fomenting muslim hysteria. are you surprised it had not made its way to the biosphere that governor jindal is in? >> i'm not surprised. you have stephen emerson talking about muslim no-go zones. after the oklahoma city bombs, emerson was saying we should be looking for arab muslim men when

it was a white christian man timothy mcveigh who had done the bombing. i'm not surprised he has latched onto it stupidly. >> fox issued an apology. bobby jindal yesterday and then today was asked about no-go zones. i did say so-called no-go zones and i think the radical left wants to pretend this problem is not here. somehow this is all the fault of the radical left. >> i think governor jindal is protesting a bit too much. he might be trying to scrub some of the brown off his skin as he runs for a presidential bid.

i'm pretty sure that governor jindal will come to its senses in the next couple of days. >> we talk about people coming to their senses. the anti-islam is a very pronounced sentiment in the united states. america, it feels like radical islam is at war with the west and all of its principles. as a result some states all but 16, have considered passing anti-sharia law provisions. that's a dramatic number of states that have tried to pass this. seven states currently do ban sharia law. when you have a sort of tidal wave of governance that seizes

on these feelings of fear, how do you reverse that tide? >> it all comes down to money. the center for american progress a few years ago came out with a report called fear incorporated. the guy who basically was the master mind behind the anti-sharia legislation is behind the millions of dollars to get it passed. it is going to mean that we're going to see right wing neoconservatives neoconservatives. >> let me ask you about the president's comments at the end of last week when he was having a press conference with david cameron. warmup

one of the reasons that the u.s. was in less of a dangerous spot was because the americans had absorbed the u.s. muslim population better. that they were more integrated into american society. what did you think of that? did you agree with is that? >> that is empirically correct. europe always has much more relaxed laws which allowed for guest workers. we were basically the brain drain from the muslim world. we were the doctors, the engineers. 58% of american muslims have a graduate degree of some sort. amongst the western di as per of muslims, we are the most economically empowered. >> do you feel like this is reversible? what is becoming a deep seeded

cultural anxious object groups of people who belong to the muslim faith, is that reversible in the coming decade? >> i think the short answer is no alex. i think islamic muslims will be a political football in the year 2016. we had it during the entire presidency of barack obama. that was waretheir way of saying barack obama is black. taking pot shots at muslims is one accepted form of racism in the u.s. today. >> thank you for your time. >> my pleasure. coming up, just in time for mlk day, a major civil rights group is joining the fight to change the racist name of washington, d.c.'s pro-football team.

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a civil rights group is joining the call for washington, d.c.'s pro-football team to change its name. they are taking their call public on this mlk day after they came to a dead end trying to persuade the team owner to abandon their name. the group wrote, quote, as the nfl continues to move in the direction of respect and dignity, it cuts glaringly against the grain. quote, we believe they ignore the outstanding support we have received from native americans from across this country. a leader is pushing for team executives to hold a sit-down with those representing all sides of the issue. so far the team has refused. good evening americans, and welcome to "the ed show" live

from new york. let's get to work. >> if i could figure out a number of people i saved, that's something i would brag about. >> chris kyle saw a world divided by good and evil. >> i just want to get the bad guys. >> clint eastwood delving into the morality of war. >> raking in a whopping $90.2 million. >> i was just protecting my guys. they were trying to kill our soldiers. >> some in hollywood are taking aim at the navy seal. >> michael moo