can't take concentrated pepper spray in their face. if newt gingrich was president, instead of pardoning the turkey, he would pepper spray the turkey. >> lizz winstead, have a great holiday. that's "the ed show." i'll ed schultz. i'm thankful for those of you that watch this program. "the rachel maddow show" starts now. good evening. thanks for joining us for the next hour. i'm melissa harris perry. rachel has the night off. if you were watching the republican party's foreign policy debate in washington last night, you may have caught what happened at the very end of the evening. the last question of the night was, which national security issue do you wish we'd ask you about. what's the thing that worries you the most that hasn't been discussed tonight? the responses given by the candidates to that question were sort of weird. rick perry, for instance, reelly wanted to talk about the pressing issue of abortions in china. newt gingrich wanted to talk about the dangers of

electromagnetic pulse attacks. herman cain wanted to discuss his former career as a ballistics analyst. mitt romney and rick santorum both wanted to talk about the prospect of radical islamists invading latin america. we sort of found those answers a little puzzling, because if you asked us that question, there are all sorts of foreign policy issues that we here at the ma dough show would have had on the agenda that weren't touched during last night's debate, things like the current debt crisis in europe that threatens the underlying security. or how about the 100 u.s. combat troops that president obama just deployed to africa. instead of wanting to talk about those issues, this group of republican presidential candidates appeared to want to focus their night on things like radical islamists invading mexico and pressing issues like this one. >> the most significant threat

is iran become nuclear. >> our interest is to ensure iran does not go nuclear. >> iran has announced they plan to strike israel. >> when you talk about attacking iran, it is a very mountainous region. >> we need a strategy of defeating and replacing the current iranian regime. we could break the iranian regime within a year. >> the right course in america is to stand up to iran. >> last night it was all iran all the time for the republican presidential field. it was basically a battle among the republican candidates about who could sound tougher about the dangers of iran and who would be best at defeating iran. this singular fok cuss on taking out iran, on getting the united states involved in yet another conflict in the middle east was sort of a notable takeaway from last night's debate. it didn't really make much sense until you realized who was in the crowd they were speaking to. previous republican debates this year have featured crowds filled with likely republican voters and tea party activities and

conservative movement activists. last night tftsz a little different. last night it was guys like this who were asking the question. >> my name is wolfowitz a visiting scholar at the american enterprise institute. >> yes, that would be former george w. bush deputy defense secretary wolfowitz. one of the guys that brought us the war in iraq. wolfowitz before becoming a public debate questioner was a guy that said the united states could do iraq with a small force, we'd be greeted as liberators and the whole thing wouldn't cost us a time. last night he was grilling them on american foreign policy. wolfowitz wasn't alone. >> i'm david adding ton, vice president with the heritage foundation. >> if the name david addington sounds familiar to you, it's because his old job is legal

counsel to steef of chaf to dick cheney. he was a mysterious shadowy guy behind the scenes who was advocating things like torture were actually legal and the executive branch had the right to do anything it wanted in the name of national security. like wolfowitz, david addington picked by cnn to scrutinize the republican field on foreign policy since he is so distinguished himself in that field. also featured prom meantly during last night's debate was famed bush administration' rah neo conservative fred kagan one of the driving intellectual forces behind the u.s. war in iraq. following mr. kagan a little later was former bush administration speech writer mark thiessen. last night was like a reunion of george w. bush neo conservative foreign policy team members.

if those are the guys who are still setting the agenda in the republican party when it comes to foreign policy, you apparently end up with getting republican presidential candidates who sound like this. >> this is one thing we know about barack obama. he has essentially handed over our interrogation of terrorists to the aclu. >> senator santorum, under certain circumstances in the past you've supported profiling, is that correct? >> i have. obviously muslims would be someone you would look at. absolutely. >> we need a strategy of defeating and replacing the current iranian regime with minimum use of force. >> the right course in america is to stand up to iran. >> if we were serious we could break the iranian regime within a year. >> if we're serious about iran, we have to be serious about syria as well. >> this is the time for us to use not only sanctions but covert actions within syria to get regime change there. president obama apologizes for america.

it's time for us to be strong as a nation. >> i guess this is sort of like when you put republican candidates in front of guys like pat robertson and they start weeping about finding jesus. maybe this is how republicans react when you put them in front of wolfowitz and dick cheney's secret lawyer. joining us is lick magazine editor at large steve clemons, he also writes "the washington note," senior fellow at the new america foundation. this was a fascinating moment. for all the invocations of ronald reagan we've heard in these republican debates, we have really rarely heard the name george w. bush invoked. when you listen last night that those republican candidates, it sure sounded to me like george w. bush foreign policy strategy. of course, with the exception of ron paul. did you hear a return to a neo con vision last night?

>> to see david addington, his name didn't appear in the book because he never wanted to be known. until jane mayor's book, the dark side, america didn't know this guy. to walk out and see him in the cameras was amazing. these are the people who hatched and were the architects of the iraq war on the whole. i'd say jon huntsman is a bit different. the henry kissinger, richard lugar, the chuck kagel wing of the republican foreign policy establishment is basically an endangered species. you've seen the neocons failing in some of their policies but have done a brilliant job of taking over and it being very, very strong in the major think tank institutions in washington, d.c. that is the crowd that basically sets the terms, if you will, for foreign policy debates now. >> so you're framing this as a kind of lack within the current republican party of this particular sort of republican

statesman model that we've once seen. does this mean there's a real ideological commitment to the neo conservative foreign policy values on behalf of these republican candidates? or is this just kind of a fear tactic that's employed in the context of a campaign. in other words, should i be actually afraid or should i just be irritated by this? >> it's a little bit of both. the fact is that old style nixonian was about cost benefits. we're at an age where anger and sentiment and trying to do good and striking back are now the terms that drive foreign policy. so what you see is a little bit of fear mongering that we learned from dick cheney that works well in the political playbook, combined with what i think is something happening in both the democratic party and the republican party, a sense that you have to change the way that the inside workings of

other states operate if they are seen to be a threat to the united states. it's sort of like the boring in star trek, you either assimilate them or an nye late them. >> let me ask the question asked to the candidates at the end, let me ask it of you. what wasn't discussed last night as we talk about our foreign policy and national security that you think is of critical importance? is it the european debt crisis? is it the situation in yemen? what should we be talking about here? >> there should be an organized hierarchy. all these issues matter. the drought in africa matters. the debt crisis could be a blow and shrink america's ambitions in the world. the largest national security issue for the united states today is the profound doubt in america's abilities to achieve the things it says it's going to do. that perception by other countries translates into weakness, allies behave differently, foes behave differently. so you need a serious discussion about how you creatively

approach the world and opportunities and try to figure out a way to build momentum and reinvent american leadership and leverage in the world. we didn't hear that. we heard assertions of american power, and we heard mitt romney and others basically saying we need to kind of be bold. this is not a recipe for return to american leadership in the world. whether it's china, europe, africa, what's happening in the global economy, it needs to fit within a plan, an equation for america to reinvent its plays. >> steve clemons, the atlantic magazine's washington editor at large. i appreciate you taking us to this place of reminding us what a big foreign policy looks like. >> thank you. among other revelations from last night's debate was that historian newt gingrich takes a slightly more humane view of immigration than some segments of the republican base. what that means for his electoral chances and for the chance to have a real conversation about immigration is coming up.

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there are new store lease which are perfect. they're specific. something important happens. they're ironic and all those things help to explain something much bigger, broader, absolutely perfectly. did you hear the one about the her said decemb mercedes-benz executive who went to alabama? you will coming up next. i'm your gps. turn right up ahead. you never update me. so, now i just have to wing it. i meant turn left up ahead. recalculating. turn right now! [ horn honks, tires screech ] [ laughs ] [ crash! ] and your fifteen-minute insurance might not pay for all this. so get allstate. you could save money and be better protected from mayhem like me.

recalculating. [ dennis ] dollar for dollar nobody protects you from mayhem like allstate. ♪ but you tonight [ male announcer ] this is your moment. this is zales, the diamond store. take an extra 15 percent off storewide this friday until two p.m. the republican candidates may not think the whole european economy on the verge of catastrophe thing is worth mentioning when it comes to future threats to america. you know who takes europe and specifically germany very seriously when it comes to their economic future? alabama. the state has a very close

decades-long economic relationship with one big german company, mercedes-benz. mercedes chose tuscaloosa, alabama, for a new car plant back in the '90s. alabama almost didn't make it because mercedes was aware of the racial history. the confederate flag flew at top the stap capitol in montgomery until 1993. it was a point of such contention that in 1988 14 african-american state legislatures tried to break into the state capitol and physically remove the flag themselves. they got into trouble for that. but the flag was just too historically significant to remove from the capitol. according to the republican governor at the time guy hunt, enter mercedes. the germans weren't too keen on building an american base of operations in a state that so revered the confederate flag. the flag came down in 1993, the same year mercedes choose

tuscaloosa. according to this 1993 associated press piece, mercedes officials said they never would have picked the state as an industrial base had the flag still flown at the capitol. the tuscaloosa plant has been vital to alabama's economy since it opened in 1997. one estimate suggests it's brought more than 41,000 jobs to the state. that's why it was a big, big deal last week when mercedes-benz executive driving his rental car in tuscaloosa was arrested for not having his passport. he left it back in the hotel. whoops. in alabama, that's now illegal. it's a violation of hb 56, alabama's new immigration law. remember hb 56, the law has sparked protest since it went into effect. it requires people to show proof of citizenship for every interaction with the state, things like getting heat and water. many kids stopped showing up for

school because of a provision mandating that schools must check their immigration status. anyone helping an illegal immigrant like a church, for example, would have been guilty of a crime. the law is subject of at least three separate lawsuits. the delegation of labor leaders an activists visited alabama to see how the law was affecting lives. one of those members was my friend james white who discovered things were much worse than imagined. he wrote the law is creating fear and suspicion. in one instance a shopper went to make a cash purchase at a walmart and wupz asked for identification. unless it's alcohol or tobacco, you don't need i.d. to pay for something in cash. in this climate many believe it's allowable to asking for documentati

documentation. white noted that farmers are losing fields of crops because so many immigrants have left the state. the broad climate of fear that will be familiar to those who live in alabama's first jim crow era, he wrote. at last night's republican debate, the candidates almost drew a distinction between good immigrants, people with graduate degrees and bad immigrants, the one we have to secure the border against, like people from mexico. what's happening in alabama is what happens when that kind of thinking becomes law. the arrest of the mercedes executive caused alabama lawmakers to stumble all over themselves to say, hey, that wasn't supposed to happen. republicans who supported the law keep calling the arrest an unintended consequence. quote, due the a number of unintended consequences including this incident, republican governor robert bentley, a strong supporter of the bill was considering

revisions. but that arrest is exactly what was supposed to happen, even though governor bentley may not have intended for it to happen to a german executive from mercedes, a company that has already shown discomfort with alabama's fraught racial history. the daily decatur summed up the arrest with a pretty awesome editorial. the people of our once hospitable state should send a thank you card for the executive arrested friday for violation of the immigration law. the german did more to show the id see of the law in one day than opponents have managed in months. we are guessing robert bentley has placed no urgent phone calls on behalf of hispanics split up by the law, but wasted no time calling the homeland security director after the arrest of the mercedes executive. we couldn't have said it better ourselves.

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thanksgiving is unique in it quite literally celebrates undocumented immigration. this is the image we're used to, the kindly, peaceful first thanksgiving. so nice of them. they let the women and children and most american natives sit by. then this depicting a more modern understanding of what we're celebrating on thanksgiving day, people crossing international borders by any means necessary trying to make a better life for themselves and their families.

we romanticize this practice in the past and criminalize it in the present. alabama is showing how draconian immigration laws produced by republican overreach might be bad for the state's economic development. but in last night's republican presidential debate after taking some criticism for not wanting to deport every undocumented immigrant everywhere, newt gingrich of all people made it about family. >> i do not believe that the people of the united states are going to take people who have been here a quarter century. separate them from their families and expel them. i do believe if you've been here recently and have no ties to the u.s., we should deport you. i do believe we should control the border. i do believe we should have very severe penalties for employers. i ask you for all to look at the

foundation plan. the farity that says it's the party of the family which will adopt a policy which destroys families that have been here for a quarter isn'try. i'll take the heat for saying let's be humane and enforce the law without giving them citizenship but by finding a way to create legality. compassion for undocumented immigrants coming from a republican has traditionally hurt that republican. george w. bush took a lot of heat for proposing amnesty and rick perry's precipitous fall from the follows began when he defended in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants. president obama has come under fire for his administration's continues versal secure communities program which enables federal authorities access to local law enforcement databases. would newt's policy be that much more humane?

a clue lies in the kreebl foundation, the idea he was promotion. >> the kreebl foundation is a good red card program that says you get to be legal but you don't get a path to citizenship, there's a way to end up with a country where there's no more ill legality but you haven't automatically given amnesty to anyone. >> so this red card solution would reform immigration all right. video for the program like matt kib bee of freedom works tells us so. the red card is literally that. a red card with a microchip embedded in it. but what happens if that worker loses his job or misplaces her card and is stopped by an immigration agent? where does the microchip go next? and where does she or he go next? joining us now to talk about these issues of immigration is president and executive director of the applied research center and the publisher of

colorlines.com. i'm so excited to have you here tonight. >> great to be here, thanks. >> you and i had an e-mail communication more than a month ago when you sent out the color lines report about immigration policy and particularly this administration's immigration policy. and then i heard, you know, newt gingrich talking about immigration policy on the gop side last night. i'm interested. take us from that level of how it hurts the economy. tell me about families. what difference does this make to human beings living on the ground under these policies? >> newt gingrich understands that immigration enforcement has a lot of collateral consequences. one of the worst collateral consequences is that families are split up. we came across a particularly egregious form of that kind of semgs when we started to look at the intersection of child welfare departments and immigration enforcement. so what we found is that when a parent is caught up in detention or deportation and their kids are in child welfare, the parent

is unable to carry out any of the tasks that the child welfare department wants you to do to get your kids back. when that goes on for long enough, ultimately family courts decide to do what's called terminating parental rights. they essentially say that family is not a family anymore. that parent is not the parent of those kids anymore. the kids stay in foster care or they are made eligible for adoption. >> what i remember from the report is you were looking at people's whose crime was parking tickets, very small sort of municipal level stuff, not the kinds of criminal immigrant language that we hear. so what does that look like if you're someone who is in an abusive domestic relationship or if you're a worker who had their wages stolen. what do these sorts of policies mean for those individuals? >> they mean you cannot have any recourse to protecting your own rights. if you're abused by anybody, by an employer, by a neighbor, by the police or by your husband,

then you can't do anything about it. we came across the case of a woman who was being beaten up by her partner. the neighbors called the police. the police arrived, arrested both of them, the woman and the man. kids went to child welfare. instead of them getting out of county jail and getting her kids, the woman was sent to immigrant detention from where she had no access to any of the things she needed to do to get her kids back. it's been more than a year. she hasn't seen them and that is why so many law enforcement agencies resist programs like secure communities because it prevents them from actually making the public safe. >> secure communities is something that color lines identified as a problem. obviously the alabama immigration reform, arizona immigration reform reproduced some of these inequalities. newt gingrich gives us last

night red card as a possibility. is this a possibility for some sane immigration reform that protects human rights and the borders at the same time? >> one thing that is true is that many people don't want to immigrate permanently. that's not in their plan. they'd like to be able to come work and still call home home. and yet we have a pretty terrible relationship to guest worker programs historically in this country. the real question is does the program, does that solution protect the worker as well as it protects the employer? that program is really designed to protect employers from being sanctioned and fined. no one has ever gone to jail for hiring undocumented immigrants, but from that, too. but from my perspective, any migrant, any immigrant has to be able to own their own visa. they have to be able to move from employer to employer. they have to be able to fight abuse by their employer, if they need to organize in their workplace or form a union, they've got to be able to do

that. those kinds of rights are not guaranteed in this led card plan. they really don't have any interest in protecting the rights of the immigrant really just in protecting employers. >> so the one possibility, the one possible good news here is maybe there will be a conversation about immigration reform that is more than just an ideological good guy/bad guy story. maybe gingrich, for whatever his failing are, has opened up the conversation for us. >> i think that's important. newt gingrich knows how to win an election. he's clearly entered the election. president obama, we were happy to see he responded to our report directly, acknowledged it was a problem, acknowledged it was happening. promised to put into place the changes to prevent it from happening. we need to see action on that. there are families being split up right this minute as we speak. the more that the election includes those issues, the more hopeful i am that they'll actually get addressed.

>> rinku sen from colorlines.com, thanks so much. >> thank you, melissa. the president of the united states today exonerated two turkeys, but the traditional thanksgiving pardon is rife with bunk which we will debunk and debunktion junction. ♪ ♪♪ ♪ ♪ [ male announcer ] everyone deserves the gift of a pain free holiday. this season, discover aleve.

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i feel like one of the luckiest guys in the world. ♪ aflac... and major medical? major medical, boyyyy! [ beatboxing ] ♪ i help pay the doctor ♪ ain't that enough for you? ♪ there are things major medical doesn't do. aflac! pays cash so we don't have to fret. [ together ] ♪ something families should get ♪ ♪ like a safety net ♪ even helps pay deductibles, so cover your back, get... ♪ a-a-a-a-a-a-a-aflac! [ male announcer ] help protect your family at aflac.com. [ beatboxing ] selling fishcakes from the back of his truck, and in 1942, of course, they were sent away. after the war, as a japanese coming back from camp, he started a little store on main street in seattle. of course they needed some money, and bank of america was the only bank who would talk to my father. and we've stayed with bank of america. we have four stores now, three in the pacific northwest

and one in oregon. my parents would not believe how popular it is now. take a look at last month's unemployment numbers. people who did not graduate high school were unemployed at about 14%. having a high school degree helped a bit. about 10% of people with one of those were unemployed. having some college education you fared a little better. we see about an 8% unemployment rate. if you graduate college. if you actually have that bachelor's degree, the unemployment rate is half that. those are the data associated with the value of going to and finishing college. but how people feel about college and higher education and its value is something else entirely. with student debt at an all-time high, about $25,000 per

graduating senior, it's not difficult to understand why people would expect a lot in return. people do not seem to think they're getting a lot in return. one poll shows 5% of the general public thinks college is an excellent value. so what's going on here? are the other 95% not looking at the same numbers as the 5%? or is the disappointment in higher learning about more than economics. on the one hand, there's the platonic ideal of what a college is. fair warning that i as a college professor, i might tear up like speaker john boehner when talking about the bailout here is how a former dean at columbia university described college and what it's supposed to be. by design, great universities challenge institutions. they are meant to be unsettling. they require autonomy and trust

within the larger society, built as a hybrid of the english undergraduate college, the american system came to emphasize among other things mayor to beingity, academic freedom and free inquiry, skepticism to claims about fact and truth, the creation of knowledge, standards of excellence based on peer review and scholarship without borders. if this were twitter, i would retweet the heck out of that and add a plus one. that is what the college experience is supposed to be. recently, though, that ideal has collided head on with the news of institutional failure from campuses around the country resulting in questions about whether or not schools are keeping kids safe. most horrifically, of course, is the sex abuse and assault scandal that is allegedly taking place at penn state university and the inaction of penn state officials that followed. some may have even lied to investigators about what they knew in order to protect the

school and its football program. this is robert champion, a drum major at florida a&m university and on saturday night he was found dead on the band's bus. according to the sheriff, hazing may have contributed to the young man's death. just a few hours ago it was announced the band director was fired and state law enforcement might get involved at the behest of florida governor rick scott. this is the famous video from uc davis, campus police pepper spraying campus protesters will forever be associated with the occupy movement. the school's english department is calling on the school's chancellor to resign, the officers were placed on leave. students at four other campuses have been vigorously protesting another planned tuition hike after last year's 18% increase. the city university of new york system has also voted to increase tuition. a group calling itself students

united for free cuny organized a protest. 15 people were arrested. in chapel hill, north carolina, dozens protested a tuition hike there that would increase state tuition by 15%. joining us now to talk about this is chris hayes, my buddy and the host of "up with chris hayes" very early on saturday and sunday mornings. chris, i wanted to talk to you about this. i know you have been researching, writing and working on the declining trust in american institutions. as somebody associated with higher institutions of education, these set of stories have been hitting me particularly hard. is that unfair? should i be glumming all this higher education stuff with everything else? >> each sort of instance has its own contingent and distinction features. that's true for all different kinds of institutional failure from major league baseball to the catholic church to detroit big three automakers.

there are certain themes that resonate throughout. one is a lack of accountability. when you have hierarchy, hierarchies tend to consolidate power within their own. when they consolidate power within their own, they have a tendency to guard knowledge about what is happening with an institution. if the findings of fact by the grand jury at penn state are true, that's certainly what transpired there. there's also the bureaucratization that happened in any kind of large and complex institution. it's particularly true, as long as people check off the box, there is no kind of moral check on whether it's right. i've read interesting stuff about what happened with the pepper spray at uc davis. what you see there is it is procedure for campus police to ask people to leave. when they don't leave, it's procedure for them to pepper spray it's only in the context of the perspective of being outside the institution. what happens in cases where you have institutional failure and

this does apply broadly i think is that things that are manifestly unjust or deviant or wrong get normalized within the institution. that's where scandal ensues. once you zoom out, the people outside the into tugs look inside and say, whoa, what is going on here? that applies to everything the way subprime loans were marketed on wall street to what allegedly happened in penn state. >> it feels like we had the enron scandal so we're feeling like we can't trust what's going on on wall street. and then congress is obviously down almost below the margin of error in terms of disapproval. now even where i'm sending my kid to college it feels like is an unsafe place. is the answer to this the kind of public scrutiny if what you need is to back up from institutions in order to be able to see everything that's wrong and sort of patently obvious when you're looking from the outside or is there something about institutional reform itself that can make a difference?

>> i think it's a combination of both. scrutiny and accountability go together. no one decides, wakes up one morning and goes, you know what? let's hold all of us accountable. accountability happens in moments of crisis and disruption. we saw that in terms of what happened to accountability in terms of the national security state in the wake of vietnam. we've seen it in all other sorts of instances in which, once there is public scandal, once there is an expression of what was really going on, then accountability follows. i think the other thing is the thing i've learned from doing this research for the book is that nothing is more powerful than norms. rules are less powerful than norms. but norms go fast ever. when norms inside an institution go, they can't be reconstituted. what you have to do is build rules. a perfect example of this is penn state. the reason that the sandusky case actually ended upcoming out is sandusky was working as a coach in a high school that had mandatory reporting

requirements. those are rules put in place that are paid attention to. and every teacher across this great land of ours is trained in mandatory reporting. if you see a child who you think is a victim of sexual or physical abuse, you must report. >> when i hear you say that i have a catch in my stomach. that sounds precisely like what conservatives talk about. what the real problem is isn't the laws, the rules or from seed yurs. it's our norms as a country have shifted. and in shifting we now have no reasonable place to stand. is that what you're saying or is there something slightly different? >> there is a core of this that does align with a basic conservatism about the potency and force of norms. that's norms i think are powerful. they're powerful inside institutions. in major league baseball you saw the norm go from being drug-free to being implicated in the drugs. once that norm shifts, it becomes much easier for them to justify to themselves the things they're doing. the place where i sort of depart is that i do think that you can create -- you can create institutional reforms that

produce a kind of self-fulfilling institutional framework that actually produces much better behavior that avoids the kind of worse sort of scandals that we've seen. >> the norm i appreciate you're changing is the norm of weekends on msnbc. i love what "up" is doing in the morning. it's incredibly exciting. we'll be tuning in in the morning. >> happy thanksgiving. >> chris hayes, host of "up with kriz haiz," thanks for here. a new poll shows mitt romney is a real drag on his own party. you're going to be really, really surprised to know who is all mormon up in here. trust me. stay tuned. priority mail flat rate boxes. if it fits, it ships for a low, flat rate. paid for postage online and arranged a free pickup. and i'm gonna track them online, too. nice.

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chosen as the -- he is generally poor and often very lousy. besides, he's a rank coward. the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird and with all a true original native of america. he is besides a bird of courage and would not hesitate to attack a again dear of the british guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on. that bird of courage and its place in our country's tradition is the subject of tonight's debunction junction coming up. es of your baby acting adorable. baby. on it. matt, ignore me and keep updating your fantasy team. huh? jeff, play a game. turbo-boosting now, sir. dennis, check in everywhere you go on foursquare. that's mayor dennis... of the water cooler. you're the best. liz, rock out to pandora. oh, no i'm an only child. and nick, you shouldn't even be here, you can do everything from the golf course. good? good. [ male announcer ] on at&t, blackberry® torch moves at the speed of 4g. ♪

in this election cycle on the republican side, just about everyone who is running a real campaign is getting a chance to be a front-runner for a while. no, not you, rick santorum, sorry. but even though newspaper columnists and politicos have been using inevitable to describe mitt romney for weeks now, he's not leading in the polls. given the cast of characters he's running against, mitt romney should be the far and away front-runner, he's not. certainly part of that is him being seen as boring or a flip-flopper or insufficiently credentialed as a moral conservative. that doesn't explain who is the front-runner right now. that's it. we're in the midst of the newt bump right now. nut gingrich is in the lead among republican voters. newt gingrich, a man whose moral conservatism has also been questioned and who is also famous on his flip-flops. remember when he called paul

ryan's kill medicare budget plan a right wing social engineering plan and said anyone whoever tries to use his own words against him is lying. so republican voters are saying questionably social conservative flip-flopper, whose campaign looks more like a book tour, than a presidential campaign over perhaps questionably socially conservative flip-flopper running a serious presidential campaign. now, that seems weird, right? it suggests that something else may be afoot in republican primary voters' reluctance to get behind mitt romney. here's a glimpse into one possibility of what might be dragging down mitt romney's campaign, from the pew research center. their latest survey out today shows that mitt romney's religion, his mormonism, is likely a factor in his candidacy in the republican primary. the survey found that among white evangelical republican voters, 15% say mr. romney's religion would make them less likely to support him. and among all americans, the survey asked people to give a

one-word impression of the mormon religion. and the results were about one in four gave assessments that are negative in tone. overall, cult is the most frequently used word. now, let's be clear. if you're a republican voter, there are plenty of reasons to want to reject mitt romney as your party's candidate. but his religion should not be one of them. if mitt romney is being rejected for his mormonism, then republican voters are demonstrating a troubling bias that has much broader implications. so let's pause for a moment. i do not want to engage in a theological debate about mormonism and whether mormonism is a good or bad religion, whether it has troubling doctrine, funny beliefs or strange practices. it is a religion, after all, and most world religions have what some people somewhere would consider funny practices, troubling beliefs, and histories that include abusive action against other groups. what's important here is that the very thing that conservative

evangelical republican voters seem to be expressing angst about, mitt romney's mormonism, is the thing that makes mitt romney part of a group whose american story is marked by experiences of oppression, rejection, and second-class citizenship. given the history of mormon exclusion in this country, one might expect romney the to show real empathy for mu muslims, wh religion is distorted. in 1838, missouri's governor ordered the mormon's expelled from the state or exterminated if necessary. it's almost time to celebrate thanksgiving. and as we gather, many of us will celebrate and reflect on the uniquely american stories of our own families. my family's immigration history is, in fact, tied up in the history of mormonism.

my maternal line are mormons. my grandfather's mother immigrated from sweden with her two siblings after her widowed mother was converted by mormon missionaries. my great-grandfather's father came to america as a 19-year-old from england. my immigrant ancestors pushed wagons across the west during the mormon expulsion. and i have a great-great-grandfather who was accused of polygamy. despite these laws, great-grandpa cooper refused to abandon his family and served time in prison as a result. my own mother, though he left the mormon church as an adult, was born a mormon and attended brigham young university. my american story is both the story of enslaved ancestors, sold on the street corner of richmond, virginia, on my

father's side, and of a persecuted religious minority in the american west on my mother's side. as we pause at thanksgiving to celebrate a nation that for all its shortcomings makes a story like mine possible, it is a moment to celebrate our diversity, not to cower in fear of difference. so, to gop primary voters, please, feel free to reject the candidacy of mitt romney, but don't do so because he is mormon. i'm happy to provide you with a whole list of much better reasons. ♪ ♪ let's go ♪ ♪ ♪ come with me, let's go ♪ ♪ come with me, let's go ♪ ♪ cruise like a norwegian

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turkey. >> president truman was the first president to pardon a turkey. is this true or false? false. there is no record of truman ever pardoning a turkey. so where did this thanksgiving tradition come from? >> this white house tradition dates back to abraham lincoln. >> false again. and president george w. bush should know better! because the tradition of actually pardoning a turkey for thanksgiving began with his father, george herbert walker bush, 22 years ago. next up, noted islamphobe pamela geller is warning against the islamization of thanksgiving through butterball turkeys. is that true or false? yes, that is true. but what else would you expect from the woman behind the campaign against the ground zero mosque, which was neither a mosque nor at ground zero. in an article published this week in the american thinker -- i'll let that sink in -- in an article published this week in

the "american thinker," geller asserts that all butterball whole turkeys are certified that lal. she bases this on a communication between one of her blog commenters and a butterball representative, which i think means somebody called the turkey talkline. so geller is now calling for a boycott of butterball. so we contacted butterball to ask them if their the turkeys are certified halal. and here's their statement in response. "our domestic products are not halal certified and thus, do not require any additional on-package labeling. as is common within the industry, when we started to export our products overseas, we applied for and met the necessary requirements of halal processing for a segment of our business. butterball whole turkeys are produced in a manner that meets those requirements if needed but only turkeys exports to specific