i have never moderated any republican debates at all and, also, newt, i was never in the beetles. i didn't host the oscars that one terrible year and i did not have an hour-long special on espn to announce i was leaving for miami. newt also thinks i was in a chilean wine gingrich. today's worst person in the world. that's countdown. i'm keith olbermann. now, to chris hayes, filling in for rachel maddow, because it is a rachel maddow vacation day. chris, good evening. good evening, chris. thank you so much for the toss and thank you at home for staying with us for the next hour. we begin with republicans sitting behind the wheel, their foot firmly tied to the gas pedal, racing towards a high, steep cliff. we begin with a political party. here's essentially how it works. actually, you know what, i'm on the tv. so instead of telling you how it

works, why don't i just show you? in the great movie "rebel without a cause" with james dean, there is this iconic scene where dean's character plays chicken with his nemesis in town. check this out. >> she signals. we head for the edge and the first man who jumps is a chicken. all right? >> darn leather jacket. as a general rule, you have to be sort of crazy to play

chicken. typically, it is the crazier person, the one who cares less about their own safety and security that wins, no matter the dire consequences of its winning. at its core, chicken is a game of principle and commitment and not backing down no matter what peril lies ahead. that's how you win a game of chicken. there is also apparently -- that's also apparently the single unifying political principle for the republican party right now. the republican party's approach to governing at this point is that they're in the car with their foot pressed to the gas, even with a giant cliff looming in the distance. the current game of chicken involves two vitally important, end the world as we know it issues right now. the first one is s.t.a.r.t., the nuclear arms treaty that president obama has already agreed to with russia and he just needs the u.s. senate to ratify. it is an agreement for both countries to reduce their nuclear arsenals and will allow inspectors to be on the ground in both countries to make sure that's actually happening. s.t.a.r.t. has stalled thanks to one man, republican senator jon

kyl of arizona. after republicans delayed a vote on s.t.a.r.t. twice this year after senator kyle was wooed by the white house for months, he now says a vote shouldn't happen until next year. this weekend, senator kyle's obstruction on this issue earned him and senate republicans the rebuke of leaders around the world. >> unprompted, i have received overwhelming support from our allies here that s.t.a.r.t., the new s.t.a.r.t. treaty is a critical component to u.s. and european security. and they have urged both privately and publicly that this gets done. nobody is going to score points in the 2012 election around this issue. but it is something that we should be doing because it helps keep america safe. >> despite that, jon kyl and senate republicans are now saying no to any vote on s.t.a.r.t. this year.

to be clear, what we are talking about is quite literally the most dangerous thing on the earth. the idea behind this treaty is to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to be able to monitor the whereabouts of loose nuclear material so it doesn't wind up in the hands of people we would rather not have loose nuclear material. that's about as important as it gets. it is something that used to be a bipartisan thing. yet, republicans staring at that cliff are apparently content to just say, no. to play chicken with american's national security. until whatever demands they have are met. republicans are playing chicken with america's economic security. at some point early next year, congress will have to decide whether or not to raise this country's debt ceiling. the debt ceiling is essentially the amount of money the united states can borrow in order to operate. the debt creeling is a very big deal. everyone understands that given the recession, the government is going to have to keep borrowing money to get us through the downturn.

in order to do that, congress has to raise the debt ceiling. it should be more or less a no-brainer. if you don't raise the debt ceiling, you are threatening to plunge the federal government into something that looks like bankruptcy. but earlier this year, democrats had to raise the debt ceiling and they did it with basically zero votes from republicans in the senate and precisely zero votes from republicans in the house. not only did republicans in congress vote against raising the debt ceiling but lots of republicans running for congress got elected by bashing democrats for exactly that vote. salazar's wreckless vote to increase the debt limit to a staggering $14 trillion. america may have to borrow billions more from china and the middle east to pay it off. >> republicans, especially those who just got voted in, are pledging to stand ons principle. raising this debt ceils is the wrong thing to do. an increasing number of republicans are promising to vote against raising the debt ceiling when it comes up for a vote next year. >> i am going to vote against raising the national debt

ceiling. we simply can't continue to mortgage the future of our unborn children and grandchildren. it is not fair. it is a form of taxation without representation. >> i don't see this next congress raising the debt ceiling. it will be a challenge we have to deal with. there are a lot of things in play during this lame duck session. >> so you think that's something that you will probably vote against. >> absolutely. >> will you filibuster any attempt to raise the debt limit? >> i think what tactics are used should be discussed. i plan on working with others to see what the best strategy is. you need people with principle in washington who will stand up and say, enough is enough. >> in addition to rand paul and mike lee and incoming republican congressman, jeff denim, other incoming republican members of congress as well as current republican members of congress have also been making noise about opposing any increase in the debt ceiling. speaking for himself and his fellow tea partiers, bill

johnson of ohio said, most of us agreed that to increase the limit would be a betrayal of what we told voters we would do. these republicans actually follow through on their threat to raising the debt ceiling. the consequences could be catastrophic for the country. we are not just talking about a government shutdown, which would be bad enough. we also run a real risk of precipitating a general global financial panic. that's how this particular game of chicken ends. that's what the car flying off the cliff looks like. on these two major policy areas, one having to do with our national economy and one with foreign policy, republicans are behaving like adolescents willing to drive the station wagon off the cliff with negotiations with their parents not people interested in the well-being of this country. the approach seems to be turn the headlights on, slam on the gas and see what happens. joining us now, economist and co-director of the senator for economic and policy research,

dean baker. nice to see you. >> thanks for having me on. >> dean, first off, just to ground this conversation, the kind of embedded implicit assumption behind railing against the debt ceiling is that bet is bad. therefore, we should not have more of it. how accurate an argument is that? >> well, it's close to crazy. it is unfortunate that there have been very few people out there really making the obvious point that right now debt is keeping the economy going. the simple story was we had an economic collapse associated with the collapse of an $8 trillion housing bubble that led to the loss at about $1.2 trillion in annual demand. about half of that in construction and half of that in consumption. we lost $8 trillion in housing. people stopped spending because they lost the money. in order to upset that, we got the deficits. if we didn't have the deficits, we would have lower growth and more unemployment. the people were upset about deficit today, what they are saying is they want more americans out of work. they may not know that.

that's what, in effect, they are saying. >> let's game this out. if they vote against raising the debt ceiling, game out for me what happens? it is no the necessarily the car going off the cliff right away. how much road do we have left after they vote against the debt creeling? >> it's hard to say, exactly. there's some sort of shufflings that the president and treasury secretary will do. he will be the immediate one. secretary geithner will be doing the shuffling, doing different accounts and trying to extend things. then, the president will be deciding that there are some services that could be done without, nonessential services. they will be furloughing people. at some point, 20 days, 30 days, it is hard to say. at some point, you have bills, social security checks, medicare checks and, of course, interest on the debt or debt being rolled over, that you are not in a position to pay. the money is not in the bank. that's where you really talk about a financial crisis. the u.s. is in a situation it can't pay its bills. >> it seems to me watching this if you look at the way the global financial markets have reacted to problems with

sovereign debt and other countries increase, obviously in greece and now in rirld, tirela markets tend to be pretty panicky right now. it is worrisome to me to imagine this kind of inducing this precipitating a crisis like that given the fact that there is all this kind of poorly understood risk floating around international financial markets? >> it is not a really clever thing to do. it wouldn't be clever in the best of times. we're clearly not in the best of times. where that gets you, what sort of situation develops in financial markets, it is very hard to say. we are past the sort of panics of september, october of 2008. there is a lot of unease. your mentioning the problems in ireland and elsewhere in european. it doesn't seem like the sort of thing you would really want to do deliberately, sort of thwart a financial crisis. >> if we are talking about this game of chicken, allen simpson is saying he is looking forward

to the blood bath, his words, over this showdown over the debt ceiling limit. obviously, there is a political objective there. what is there? what do the republicans and folks like allen simpson hope comes out of a showdown over a debt ceiling limit. >> they want president obama to buckle, to give up over key programs, social security and health care. i should point out, at the end of the day, their boys, the wall street boys will have the most to lose. the economy will be sitting here. what may not be is goldman sachs, morgan stanley, and the other wall street banks. at the end of the day, those guys stand with the most to lose. if president obama just stands tough, i promise you, the wall street boyce will be screaming at the republicans. i have a feeling they are going to jump out of the car. >> dean baker, economist and co-director of the center for economic and policy centers.

>> thanks for having me on it. independent senator, bernie sanders of vermont is joining us. senator sanders, thanks so much for joining us. >> good to be with you, chris. >> senator sanders, you have he can actually zero republicans in the senate that joined the democrats and yourself raising the debt ceiling back in january. we are going to see this vote come up again. what is your sense of what the sort of temperature of the caucus is on the other side of the aisle about this vote. are we going to see a showdown over this? >> whether it is a showdown over that or a showdown over something else, there is going to be a showdown. i think the democrats and the democratic leadership have to pick the place where that fight is going to occur. in my view, we should stand firm, not yield an inch in saying that when we have a growing gap between the very rich and everybody else and we have a $13 trillion national debt, we are not going to give one penny more in tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires. that's insane. we are going to use some of that money to invest in infrastructure. we are going to create jobs and use some of that money to lower the national debt. we can't surrender on that issue. it will be fatal in terms of the good of the country as well as

politically. the democrats, the president have got to hang tough. >> i want to talk about that, what that approach of hang tough means. we have just set up this chicken metaphor that republicans, democrats are racing at each other in the cars. it's sort of who swerves first. republicans have demonstrated this implaquable opposition. also, it seems a disregard for the consequences. how do you -- what is the strategy for dealing with that when if you feel like the other side credibly is sort of willing to blow things up, particularly around things like the s.t.a.r.t. treaty or the debt ceiling limit down the road? >> well, i think that the strategy has got to be -- is to go out to the american people and organize them and say, here you have a republican party that wants or is prepared to blow this country up in the sense of not extending the debt ceiling in order to protect the wealthiest people in this country. chris, this nation has enormous problems.

we have got to grow jobs and we have to lower the deficit. there are ways that you can do that in a fair and progressive way. our job to answer your question in terms of strategy is go out to ordinary people, ask them whether we want to cut social security by 20%, ask the young people of this country whether they want their indebtedness as they're going to college to get even higher. ask the veterans whether they should be paying more to get v.a. health care. ask the middle class whether we want to get rid of the mortgage home deduction or we want to raise other types of taxes that hurt the middle class? i think we have got to draw a line and rally the troops. if we do that, i think we can expo the republicans for what they are. that is a group of people representing the wealthiest folks in this country who could care less about the middle class or the most vulnerable people. >> i want to get you out here on this question, which is about the s.t.a.r.t. treaty. another place we are seeing a

similar approach from the republicans. you have a more difficult problem. the s.t.a.r.t. treaty is not front in mind for most folks struggling through this economy. how do you bring measure to bear on the republicans across the aisle to get this thing ratified? because if it doesn't happen now, it's not looking good in the next congress. >> well, i think then you have three former secretaries of state telling the republican party that it's imperative that we pass the s.t.a.r.t. treaty. now is the time when we don't want another cold war with russia. we want to work with russia. everybody should be very concerned about nuclear weapons and the need to cut back on nuclear weapons, the need to make sure there are not nuclear weapons out there falling into the hands of terrorists. it is imperative that the republicans come on board with this. >> independent senator, bernie sanders of vermont, thank you for your time. have a good holiday. >> thank you. you, too. republicans talk about

choices our governor makes now that will affect our kids and the future. what about our children and grandchildren. these conscientious people are unanimously agreed we shouldn't bother with the whole climate change thing, because while our children and grant children shouldn't be burdened by debt, it won't be so bad if they all melt. that story's next. a great opportunity for us to write at least an hour to two every single day. you can see this? of course i can see you. but, steve, i'm thinking-- it's like you're standing-- it's like you're standing right there. it's like i'm touching you. yeah. introducing cisco umi, together we are the human network. cisco. it's like i'm talking to you from the future. ♪

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if there is one thing everyone can agree on in washington, it is the importance of grandchildren. >> we don't want to be the first generation that leaves fewer opportunities for our children and grandchildren than we inherited from our parents. >> we are worried about our children and grandchildren and we can't keep on going like we are. >> we are concerned about passing that debt on to our kids and grandkids. >> we simply can't continue to mortgage the future of our unborn children and grandchildren. >> people don't want to have, put this huge debt on their children or grandchildren's shoulders. >> trillions of dollars or more debt loaded on our children and grandchildren. >> the debt burden on children and grandchildren. >> a mountain range of debt we are filing on our children and grandchildren. >> the as-yet unborn grandchildren of america are perhaps the best represented political group in this great nation of ours, at least

rhetorically. it is a little funny given our great concern about america's grandchildren and the world they will inherit when all this grandchildren rhetoric is buzzing around the capital on the republican side of the aisle that the entire house gop leadership team would have signed on to an americans for prosperity no climate tax pledge. according to the blog for the group, americans for prosperity. more than 525 elected officials have signed on to this pledge to oppose any sort of climate tax. what that means in practice is this -- we are not even going to try to stop the planet from warming. we don't care if we give our grandchildren a hotter planet, a planet with far more unpredictable and disastrous weather events and resource wars across the globe. all of these things, future grandchildren of america, we give to you. look, i've been sitting in washington watching this hysteria over long-run actuarial projections over the deficit

with my mouth agate. there is a problem down the road with the ballooning costs of health care in this country. we are going to have to deal with it. we already tried to a little bit with the health care reform bill. there is no question about. when you are talking about problems that involve moving money around and cutting taxes, increasing spending, those are difficult problems. but from one day to the next you can solve those problems, put money into an account. solve money problems. it's been done before. when social security was in crisis during the reagan years, the deal was to save it. these things have been done before. disaster has been averted. physics is another thing entirely. you can't just wake up one day, survey the u.s. and see we can no longer grow corn in iowa because the summers are too hot there and vacuum the carbon out of the air. if you want to talk about grandchildren, check it out. right now, the leaders of one party have completely abrogated the moral responsibility to future generations. at the same time, they are beating their chests with grand and martyred nobility about all

they're doing for their children and grandchildren. joining us, roxanne brown. roxy, thanks so much for joining me. >> thanks for having me, chris. >> first of all, i think you have an interesting perspective. your from the steel workers. why is it that they have been so supportive of climate legislation? cluing -- including a tax. it seems a bit antithetical. >> our union's concern around issues involving the environment really stems from our desire to have safer working conditions for our members. this is something that we have been concerned with since the '60s. something we have been working on for over 40 years. in 1990, we identified global warming as the most pressing challenge facing our future. the document actually entitled, "our children's world." a lot of the rhetoric that you talked about in the segment just before this is actually not rhetoric to us.

it is something that we are seriously trying to work to attain a cleaner, sustainable environment for our current members and workers and also their future children and grandchildren. >> even the grandchildren. >> absolutely. >> i know you have done a lot of work on the hill around the climate change legislation that was there. first of all, with this pledge that's been signed by the house leadership, is there any meaningful climate change without a tax on carbon, without a price on carbon? >> yes. i think the reality is that we are going to into a very different congress in the 112th congress that begins in january. will we see a comprehensive climate bill? chances are, no, we won't see that. but, i think we will see things or that we can see things that are seen as bites at the apple. so a strong renewable lectristy is something that would be real in terms of reducing our

greenhouse gas emissions and creating jobs. programs like building star and home star and policies that encourage industrial energy efficiency are all things that have strong bipartisan support in washington and can be done in this congress. >> the republican argument, the big argument they martial out, is that this is a jobs' killer, that it's going to be bad for business. policywise, i wonder how you answer that. something that puts steel workers out of business would be bad, right? you guys must have a perspective on this that doesn't see it that way. >> this is a very old argument for us in the steel workers. like i said, this is something we have been dealing with for over 40 years. we are very key players in the shaping of the clean air act and a series of toxic policies. this is something we have been hearing to are a long time from the business community, that all these policies are jobs killers. we've, in fact, seen the opposite. we strongly believe that clean

energy policy, that climate policy, can, in fact, drive investment and deployment of technology that spurs job creation and retention. the steel workers often talk about the fact that a lot of the jobs already exist right now. there are 8,000 component parts in a wind turbine. the steel plates, the cells, the gears. all of those parts are being made right now by some of our members around the country for different applications, like defense and automotive. so there is no reason that we can't do the same thing for those clean energy technologies we are hoping to see grow in the united states. >> roxy brown is the assistant legislative director for the united steel workers. thanks so much for joining me. >> thanks, chris. bye-bye. everyone who is completely freaked out about the new tsa body scanning and pat-down at the airport. i get it, the junk. i'm with you. the backlash against the tsa has in the last 72 hours gotten

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welcome back. i'm chris hayes, rachel has the night off. search continued until early

this evening. they are con ducking an investigation into what they are calling and insider trader ring. "the wall street journal" reports that "the investigation if they bear fruit have the potential to expose a culture of pervasive insider training in u.s. financial markets including new ways nonpublic information is passed to traders to experts tied to specific industries or companies, federal authorities say. one of the firms being investigated is our old friend goldman sachs. and taibbi had this to say about them.

swaps and alphabet soup instruments. but today's fbi actions provide a good occasion to marvel at just how little there has been in the way of criminal law enforcement, in the wake of the largest financial crisis in 80 years. $8 trillion of wealth vanished, leaving an economy hammered hard by the worst recession years, working people bearing the brunt. and there's a ton of anecdotal evidence from lawsuit depositions to interviews i've conducted for a book i'm writing. yet, aside from bernie madoff, we've seen hardly a perp walk or conviction. what gives? part of the problem is that actually bringing katss -- financial front cases is very difficult. in 2009, the federal government tried but failed to convict two bear stearns hedge fund managers of security fraud. that's an exceedingly tall

order. part of it has to do with the mindset in which the governing and financial classes have come to view the crisis. the entire financial meltdown was a counted of of collective error in judgment. nothing untorrid about it, no bad faith. just fundamental mistakes. we thought the housing bubble would last forever, we thought the financial instruments were distributing and reducing risk, not exacerbating and multiplying it. it turns out we were wrong. mistakes happen. let's move on. there's another way of interpreting what happened which is to view the entire chain of housing bubble securitization as a giant ponzi scheme. fundamentally predatory in nature. and predicated on deception. you have to use the "f" word, fraud.

i was struck when i read michael lewis' masterful account of the crisis. about exactly this good faith/bad faith distinction. there were more morons than crooks. but the crooks were higher up. the crooks were higher up. it goes a long way towards explaining why we haven't seen more prosecution of the crooks. if we're going to avoid another crisis, that's going to have to change. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [ male announcer ] at&t covers 97% of all americans. rethink possible.

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seat bush tax cuts be extended in this lame duck? >> here's the way i describe it. if one is interested in job creation in the private sector, it is important to recognize that lower taxes enable the job creators, ie, small businesses to have more money in which to expand their work force. >> does the incentive model work if it pays more after tax to work, save, invest. >> of course it does and my record shows that.

we had over 40 consecutive months of tax cuts. >> it formed a very familiar george w. bush argument, not only do tax cuts create jobs, the evidence that they do is right there in the george bush presidential record for all to see. for nearly all of the two terms mr. bush serve as president, the bush tax cuts were in effect. the tax cuts he signed into law in 2001 were accelerated later, one that had the words job and growth in the title. they were designed to create jobs and president bush claimed his record shows there was job growth during his administration. and he's right. 1.1 million jobs, according to the u.s. department of labor, 1.1 million jobs over nearly eight years. so george w. bush isn't lying when he says his administration created jobs in an economy

featuring lower tax rates. what's not clear is the cause and effect relationship between the tax rates and the jobs. he lowered tax rates from the era of president clinton. lower taxes create more jobs serum. mr. bush's administration saw more job creation than did mr. clinton's? actually, no. by a factor of 20 or so. wrong by 2000%. the eight years of president bill clinton, the country netted 22.7 million jobs. the policy argument for the bush tax cuts is pretty weak tea, almost, i would say, nonexistent. it's far more illuminating to understand the bush tax cuts not as an attempt at job creation but as one among many examples of what political scientist, jeffrey winters calls, the income defense industry. the average american household income after taxes from 1979 to 2006. in those 27 years, the poorest 20% of american workers saw an 11% rise in average annual income. in comparison, what did the top

1% see? a 256% bump from somewhere below $400,000 to 1.2 million. the hallmark feature of the american economy over the past three decades is rising in equality and a larger and larger share of national income being captured by a smaller group of extremely wealthy people. in response to this, bush, the entire gop and some democrats propose extending tax policies that exacerbate rather than mitigate the problem. they want to pour fuel on the inequality fire. that's the agenda. given the recession, you can argue that middle class and low-income people need a tax break. at the top of the income scale, that argument falls apart. the zombie arguments for it never seem to die. joining us now is jacob hacker, political science professor at yale and co-author of an amazing new book called "winner-take-all politics." how washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class. i highly recommend it. jacob, it is great to see you.

>> thanks for having me on, chris. >> let's first talk about the post tax inequality. what role has tax policy in the bush years and the reagan years before that and throughout, what role that has played in the rising inequality that you and pearson document in the book? >> if you listen to some commentators, it doesn't play a big role. they are mostly looking at the middle of the income distribution for people making $50,000 or $100,000 a year, changes in taxes haven't made a big difference. when you start looking at families with 1 million or 5 million or $25 million in income, you are talking about huge cuts in the effective taxes that they are paying. cuts that are so large that recently, warren buffet complained he was paying a higher tax rate than his secretary. so for the very top of the income distribution, my co-author, paul pearson, and i say there have been economic smart bombs delivering payloads of cash to carefully selected wealthy recipients. that's been the story not just

of the last ten years but the last 25 and 30 years. >> one of them, since you talk about a smart bomb, one of the smart bombs i have been reported on since i got to washington is the hedge fund loopholes, a loophole for carried interests. hedge fund people can take home money and it gets taxed at a much lower rate than the wages you would make from income. why does that thing refuse to die? >> it really is perhaps the greatest illustration this is more than good arguments at work. everyone agrees that the carried interest provision is a huge boondoggle. it's essentially a loophole in the tax code that allows these hedge fund managers to pay only 15% on their $100 million, $200 million incomes. the reason it survives is that neither party has had the courage to take it on because it is so complex. most voters don't know anything about it. so four years after the democrats capture congress vowing that they are going to

take this on, it is still on the books. it sort of happens to die in the senate one time or in the house another time. conveniently, it never makes it to the point where it is seriously challenged. i think that's very revealing about what paul pearson and i call winner take all politics. >> i give you the difficult task of distilling the argument you make in the book with how government actions have affected pre-taxi quality, what people make, distilling that down to a tv friendly 30 seconds and i can get you out of here. >> that's a challenge. i think i can make it very simple. we tend to think that government just redistributes income. we all know that government has a huge effect on pre-tax incomes. if you want one illustration of that, i give you financial market deregulation. these folks brought our economy to the brink of ruin and made millions because government opened up all these opportunities for gambling with other people's money. so these titans of finance weren't superstars that were surfing some new kind of global technologically rich economy but

people enabled by government policy to make millions at our expense. >> yale professor, jacob hacker, doing an admiral job of that. co-author of "winner take all politics." which i cannot recommend highly enough. i appreciate you coming on the show. >> thanks for having me on. coming up on "the last word," hip hop russell simmons. you don't want to miss that. and next on this show, the simmons versus fox news. excellent. boss: and now i'll turn it over to the gecko.

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coming up, the tsa backlash backlash. everybody just deep, deep breaths, all right? oh, and please stand behind the screen. [ wind rushes ] whoa! whoa! whoa! whoa! we're cereal here! what? just cooling it down. enough said. gotcha. safety first. whoo-hoo! watch the whole grain! [ female announcer ] try kellogg's® frosted mini-wheats® hot. just add warm milk and you've got a hot way to keep your kids full and focused all morning. oops. dude your eight layers are showing. [ female announcer ] mini-wheats® hot. keeps 'em full, keeps 'em focused.

did you see "the simpsons" last night? >> we are unbalanced. it's not fair! >> now, "the simpsons" has repeatedly used fox news as a punch line. >> then i had this dream that my whole family was just cartoon characters and that our success led to some crazy propaganda network called fox news. >> why, here's fox news! ♪ we are the champions my friend ♪ >> i'm sorry, marge, but i won't live under the same roof as a member of the liberal media. >> you have to excuse him. he has been watching a lot of fox news. >> did you know that every day,

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the show does not normally cover holiday specific stories unless they include the words egg and nog in that order. but right now with congress waiting for the don't ask don't tell report to come out but with elections over, there's some downtime in the news business, which is not surprising this is the biggest story in the country. >> reporter: the new measures from the transportation security administration have set off a wave of criticism and frustration among passengers. >> you heard the backlash. passengers are calling some of these security measures humiliating, intrusive, others have likened it to sexual assault. these are some really harsh words. do you understand the outrage here?

>> some passengers not just saying it's stupid but saying it amounts to sexual assault. some are also saying it's a violation of the fourth amendment to the constitution's ban on unreasonable search and seizure. >> new screening protocol at airported is the biggest story out there right now. in no small part because of images like this one. that's awkward, right? here's the thing. yes, there has been wall-to-wall coverage of the story, fox, cnn, msnbc. it seems to hit all the right outrage buttons, all the right outrage buttons like the story has a great tag line. >> you touch my junk, i'm going to have you arrested. >> if you touch my junk i'm going to is you arrested. that quote has been reduced to its very essence, very core with just four simple words, don't touch my junk. great catchphrase. a moment of supposed civil disobedience posted on youtube for all to admire, with a line,

which is the most twitter hash tag since don't tase me, bro. the second, a union boy forced by transportation security administration officials in salt lake city to take off his shirt as a routine part of the new patdown protocol. third, anti-muslim outrage according to certain right wing blogs and media outlets making exception to screening and patdown rules for women wearing hijabs, women wearing headscarves. >> they want an exemption for muslim women and janet napolitano is considering it. >> when it hits the outrage buttons, made for tv hero, the comments, kids caught in the cross fire, the muslims, you have to wonder about the efficacy of the tail being spun. first of all, the don't touch my junk guy didn't record that on a whim. he's referred to them as

groping. as far as the incident with the 6-year-old boy goes, we now know from the tsa the child set off the metal detector last week and it was his father who removed his shirt to speed up the security process. the muslim women getting the special hands-off treatment. >> they want an exemption for muslim women and janet napolitano is considering it. >> tsa said, no one is exempt, everyone is subject to the same screening, tsa is sensitive to religious needs but everyone is screened effectively. when a story hits all the right outrage buttons, it's not a bad idea to pause and take a breath. one, i'm not in a position to independently discuss whether protocols have risk. it seems on the tsa to make that case rather than say trust us. two, i'm more or less on team don't touch my junk. it feels invasive, a potent reminder of the security state after 9/11. why did i find myself agreeing with a friend of mine who tweeted this weekend that he was now part of the, quote, tsa

backlash backlash. part is the genuine is being marshalled by unsavory characters pushing awful ideas. part of it is that a disconcerting amount of animus seems directed at tsa employees themselves, the implementers of the policy rather than the geniuses behind it. joining me, staff writer at american prospect. adam, thanks for joiningmy. you wrote a very good piece about exactly this. i want to dive right in and say, what are the kind of ways in which this outrage is being marshalled on the right towards pretty onerous ideas? >> i just want to say i'm also more or less on team don't touch my junk. i will say this has dove tailed into a malicious conservative narrative against government workers. basically they have been after government workers. they say they get paid too much. they say they get too many benefits for a long time now.

now they are saying, look, who is the symbol of the public worker you want, the firemen, cop or the guy that puts his hand in your pants. that's what they are saying. >> walk me through the time line of the policy. there's a certain time line of obama menace aspect to the story as well, the footprint of big government as characterized by barack obama. where did this come from? >> according to the government accountability office the body scanners were in operational testing back in financial year 2007. what happened was after the christmas bombing, the obama administration accelerated deployment of the scanners because they were worried about the threat of nonmetallic objects and explosives like the one carried by the underwear bomber. >> so what do you think is driving ultimately -- i mean, how do you disaggregate the kind of useful frustration people feel about this growth of security state to scapegoating going on. where do you hope to see this move politically?

>> there are three groups, civil libertarian left that's really genuinely concerned about this. there are the people who aren't bothered by it at all. there's the small government right that's also genuinely concerned about it. then there are people that wouldn't care unless there was a democrat in office. i think how you can tell the difference is based on the good faith of the arguments whether they are being dishonest saying this is obama trying to put his hand in your pants, or we should adopt the racial profiling policy which wouldn't work because racial profiling is about as statistically accurate as random screening. you have to look at what people are proposing as an alternative and you can pretty much tell who has their heart in the right place and who is trying to turn this into a political scandal for their own benefit. >> very quickly. people are taking bets about when the tsa is going to walk back this policy. the winds do seem headed in that direction. what's your feeling of what we'll see in the next month or so. >> i think if the republic