today i want our people and our businesses and the rest of the world to know that the full faith and credit of the united states the f the senate republicans would have stood, that's how we would have won the fight. >> the white house is claiming victory but republicans refuse to admit defeat but the shutdown is over at least for the next 90 days and the debt ceiling is raised for the next four months and now after all of their hard work negotiating, the house is on recess. good job, guys. a much deserved break. and as nnbc's first read points out all pain and no gain. more on winners and losers to

come, butamong the winners federal workers back to job. they're probably sifting through 16 days of e-mails and phone calls they were forced to miss and vice president joe biden reopened offices but made no guarantees about the future. >> is there any guarantee? >> there's no guarantees of anything, but, loorks what you saw last night is democrats with a significant number of responsible republicans say enough. you know, there was no economic ration yale fale for in of this >> and ted cruz was meeting with veterans. let's not forget ted cruz is the one who caused the shutdown and voted last night to reopen it. he's calling it a remarkable vick toy to see the house engaged a profile, encouraging. luke russert is on the hill. first i want to say, tourie

said. >> that's a much longer conversation. how long have you lived in buffalo? >> since christmas day. it's a blood thing. it's the blood brother. >> sure. >> it's a blood brother kind of thing. >> this is already getting awkward. there are already some lawmakers that are talking about the next fight which is sadly just around the bend as republican congressman fleming put it to "the new york times." we're going to start this all over again but it does seem that congressional wisdom is lessons have been learned especially when it comes to speaker boehner. i wonder, you've been limbing this day in and day out is. that your sense? >> yes. i think if you saw the interview that came out from mitch mcconnell telling the hill newspaper, one of the local rags

on capitol hill, that he will no longer engage in shutting down the government on obama care, that's bad strategy, coupling that with the dwindling poll numbers, they won't pursue that strategy again, shutting down the government over the funding of the president's health care law. what is interesting is in this odd world in which we live in, john boehner, who has been just critiqued from the left, the right, for being a weak leader, has actually now been emboldened by the very conservative members who dragged him into this fight. michele bachmann saying the speaker showed a lot of resolve in the last three weeks and you have ted cruz saying the house republicans went into battle showing grit and gut. so it's an interesting dynamic at play. what i do think you'll see is a big-time battle over the january 159 deadline in regards to what -- will the government be fighting cleanly but it won't be

a shutdown. they'll figure something more all encompassing. the budget negotiations are going to be starting for the first time in a long while and the debt limit that occurred in february but they have the extraordinary meshes and that can be moved. i will say this. the president sort of trying to recalibrate this and saying, hey, let's do immigration reform, that face as very steep, steep, steep uphill batter with the house of representatives in 2014, which is a midterm year. so as far as them coming together, holding hands, singing kumbaya, that's not going to happen next year. when you have something as toxic and destructive as the last 16 days, they realize that's not the way to go either. >> one can only hope. good luck to those bills. let's turn now to michael sha sharer er. president obama now finds himself actually in a stronger place than a month ago. if you think about where he was a month ago, september, he was

reeling from democrats having denied him on his first choice to head the fed and of course the syria debate. i'm not one that likes to pick winners and losers but democrats are certainly more unified coming out of the shutdown than they've been in a while and that's always a good thing for the president, right? >> it is. the white house in this year and other years hasn't gotten a lot of gifts. generally world events tend to be against them and they're coping with them. and this was a gift handed to them with a bow by john boehner a few weeks ago. they see they succeeded in shutting down the government or threatening not to raise the debt ceiling less attractive in the future. and i think the president has reasserted himself in an ironic way because he stayed out of most of these negotiations as sort of the cooler head, which is always the position he like os to be in. >> michael, are those new

glasses? >> a couple weeks' old. >> they look good. we've had you on before without them. >> they're the new normal. >> i can take them off now if you want. >> no, no. save that for the end of the segment. >> what i want to ask you, though, is i understand this is an incremental breakthrough. this week is better than last week but it seems to me on this issue of the full faith and credit of the united states, this year is much worse than two years ago. the trend line on the big picture is bad. take a look here. in 2011 you had 26 republicans vote for default. yesterday 144 republicans voting for default even after everything. so while we can understand that we put out the fire for now, it seems the long-term trend is a lot more republicans on record for default. >> you know, you can argue that, but it's also true that a lot of those voting are symbolic votes.

remember president obama back in the day voted for a default. at that point it was a very symbolic vote. he knew a lot of it was going to pass. a lot those votes fall into that category if a while. there's some share that believe we should default and it won't be that bad, et cetera. most of them do it. >> just for fun. just for the heck of it. >> and as a protest, i think -- i think coming out of this, you're not going to be -- i think the president was able to sort of move away from the 2011 narrative was every time we move away from it, it's a time to extract concessions. the president was able to move the ball on that. if we do get back to march of next year, whenever the extraordinary measuring run out and the republicans again are threatening to default on the debt. i think republicans are really in a position now where they're going to take again the brunt of the blame for that. it's not say they won't do it, but it's not as politically

attractive as it was in 2011. >> we'll see. michael, as abby mentioned earlier, albeit without suvn't outrage, ted "shutdown" cruz was out shaking veterans' hands as if he was not the one driving the whole shutdown. is he a performance artist doing a piece about modern conservative or is he perhaps a sleeper agent sent from the democratic party to help damage the republican party. >> stray, you're going to give it away, geez. >> we receive this trend for years with michele bachmann for others. they'll create a reality bubble around them to play to a particular audience that wants to hear a particular story. that's something they've always done. politicians often create stories and sells to voters. the problem is that elections end when voters go to decide and

usually that's a real reality check. >> you would think. >> this situation ended when the polls came out. we know the reality of the situation. we know that what ted cruz is saying is not true, but he has chosen to pretend as if those polls aren't real and we don't have to worry about what the american people say. he was saying yesterday the american people rose up and stood behind me and we're going to keep fighting this as if the american people were on his side. the american people are actually reality people checking not on his side but for him it doesn't matter because he's playing a different game. >> that's what happens when you live in a bubble with fake news and people who would believe that fake news that you're also hearing. >> let me point out that toure does not live in a bubble at all. >> the country is polarized. we have different information streams. we choose our own adventure. all these trends go on. i think he's taking it to a new place. it will be interesting as we get closer to 2014 as we go through

it because of gerrymandering, how much they call him on it. that's going to come back in a real way for the republican party. >> i have an alternate ted cruz origin theory which is frankenstein theory created by -- >> i like that. >> you've got great piece over at "time" right now on thewomen who really shined during that whole crisis. the tight sl appropriately women are the only adults left in washington you point out with the federal government at shutdown's door. they're setting new standards for civility. nancy pelosi was also remarkable repeatedly reaching out to boehner saying i'm here, i'm ready to help you out of this bind whenever you're ready. at the end she signaling every

single member of her party to n the caucus to default. can we look to the women of washington as sort of a hope to the future? >> i think we already do. if you look back, almost every piece of major legislation that's come out of the senate has come from a committee of women. what's distinguished the women from their male counterparts is they're still part of a society. part of a social network with each other across party lines. they meet regularly for dinners and the men have stopped doing that. so when it comes to crisis points like this, they're willing to reach across the aisle, willing to do the horse trading and they have the ability to do that. i think we're going to continue to see this shift in that direction. >> michael scherer, it's always great to have you. as mitt romney told us, he loves women as well. i do love the shades and i would say i think ari could use a pair as well. >> i don't know what that is. it sounds like a dis but it

makes no mistake. >> he took them off. he took them off. he looks good both ways. >> i like them. put them back on. he looks like clark kent. >> clark kent, i like that. >> up next, a teenager could have done it. what experts are saying that about as "the cycle" rolls on for a thursday, october 17th. ♪ ♪ [ male announcer ] eeny, meeny, miny, go. ♪ ♪ more adventures await in the new seven-passenger lexus gx. lease the 2014 gx 460 for $499 a month for 27 months. see your lexus dealer. for $499 a month for 27 months. for sein a whole new way.

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we're happy to put governing

by crisis on the back burner for a few weeks. healthcare dove the place to sign up for those online exchanges has gotten off to a slow start because of widespread problems with the site. as the days and weeks have passed it's gotten even more brutal. some technology experts told "usa today" the entire site needs to be taken offline and completely overhauled because it's using technology from the 1990s. that's not good. tom costello is here with what he learned of the website's problems. tom? >> good afternoon. 15,000 people have visited the website. it insists the website is improving. some people are getting through and signing up but it won't say ho many people have managed to sign up so far. if the obama care website were a parent it would probably be in intensive care by now. more than two weeks after its rollout healthcare.gov is getting failing grades from supporters.

>> i hope they fire some people that were incharge of making sure this thing was supposed to work. >> and the white house itself. >> despite the glitches that we acknowledge and that absolutely must be fixed, people are getting on and enrolling. >> the "washington post" has called it a complete train wreck. the "milwaukee journal sentinel" says they need to fix the problems and fix them now. >> at healthcare.gov where alive can assistance is available now. >> not available now. >> 17 days later they still haven't been able to finish the process. >> as time went by and we realized thad this was taking longer than expected to sign up, you know, the excitement became more like a question mark, but we're not giving up. >> when you see this as a software programmer, what does it say to you? >> amateur hour. it looks like it was created by someone who has never delivered

software before. a user should never see this. this would -- this would barely make beta testing. all right? >> one potential problem, the website demands users input their personal information before they even begin to window shop for insurance, something retail websites like amazon.com don't do. programming experts say a lot of work needs to be done. >> if they don't change management, this project is doomed because we've already seen what the existing management considers ready for shipping, and it's not. >> you know, the allegations are that the administration waited too long to draw up the blue prints for the website. then had too many contractors involved. meanwhile many of the states that have built and run their own websites are getting high marks for how they're running. colorado and kentucky are getting cited as being good examples. >> tom, thanks for that reporting and we're going to turn to matt hoeny who's a

senior writer for "wired." thanks for being here. >> thanks for having me. >> absolutely. look. there's clearly a gap in the policy and execution. how is this thing actually being rolled out regardless of where you are on the policy? it seems from what we're learning there's a lot of concerns. put this in the context for us of other websites. you know, we hear about soft launches, beta testing, at times where some people try a sight before everyone tries it. should they have done more of that and how bad does this look given your background in reporting? >> clearly they have two problems and one is the system. the other as you alluded to is the scale. and it's really, really difficult to launch the scale. you know, they've gotten 15 million unique people that have gone there on the first two weeks. that makes it really difficult. when you see facebook roll out a new feature or google or

twitter, they'll roll it out to a small subset of people, make sure it's working before they get it in front of everybody's eyeballs. as the government is learn wheng you have a problem like that it makes it exponentially worse. >> at first i thought the problems of americans' expectations were too high as jon stewart pointed out. >> hi. let's get one thing straight about this country. we will camp out all night to be the first people to buy a phone or see a movie about shirtless were wolves, but you've got ten minutes to get me this health care. >> if it were an eye phone, we'd say 17 days is no big deal but when you dig into the numbers, they're saying 10 million unique visitor, tom costello saying 15. either way, we're looking at about 36,000 completed enrollments, only 1 million completed registrations. these are pathetic numbers.

look. the white house, the administration is working very hard. ryan lizza from "the new yorker" who is loving bashing it on twitter said, hairks he just went through health care.gov and it worked very well and smoothly for him. this is clearly a task that was beyond the folks who were tasked with building it, right? >> i think -- i think, you know, the people at least who were administering it, it seems to be beyond their capabilities to do. there were multiple contractors who all had to work together, maybe didn't know what the others were doing and you still have all this information that, you know, when people were putting in this information, it's going to a lot of different places. some of it needs go to dhs to verify that people are actually citizens. it's just got so many pieces that it was -- you know, it was a really, really hard job to launch this to the entire country, and it seems like they should have had someone with more experience who had done

something like this at a large scale than they actually put in place. >> without a doubt. we have some of the best computer engineers on globe in this country. why don't you just go to like apple or something, crystal and say, hey, you guys, help us out. we have this major project. you're going to be down with us. you're going to get a tax break. why not goinggo to some people like that and make this website really work i have a little confession to make which i'm a little embarrassed to admit at this exact moment. i used to work for the main contractor cgi federal. so i've seen this process up close and personal. what happened is i expect cgi had a contract already with hhs, understood the back end of the system already, they had a relationship with the client and there are all these private contracting firms around d.c. that specialize in government operations and specialize in how to get these contracts, so a lot of smaller private companies, a lot of the bigger private companies that you heard of aren't necessarily specialists

in that process of how to navigate the government contracting system. i mean, mat, how much of these errors do you think are coming from the government's end of things, providing this requirements too late, not providing enough money, and how much do you think is faulty work on the contractors a pz part and sort of endemic to this whole process of government con tracking? >> i think you're seeing both. i mean i think certainly some of the problems that are software problems are thinks where the contractors messed up or did something wrong. oracle, i think, has said their systems are working. everybody said, hey, our stuff works, including hhs. they've sort of tried to say it's not really our fault. it's the number of people who are visiting it. but they should have been doing more testing before this launched to the whole country to figure this stuff out and figure out where it's broken. the bottleneck that you alluded

to in your earlier seg meant where they have to sign up before they browse the plans, i believe you can now at least look at plans and get an estimate of what your costs are going to be in you're in a state that doesn't have an exchange. that should ease things up a little bit, but still the problem with actually getting information in the system and then there's also a problem with getting the information out of the system to insurers. it's not being reported accurately to indicate there's some sort of corruption in the database. >> wow. we're going to keep an eye on it. thanks for giving us a view from sul con valley. >> thank you for having me. >> absolutely. if you're watching all this and you're feeling a little blue, frustrated, concerned about the entire future of this nation, well, we will spin with some light on the horizon and some sun in the clouds. that's next. has it's ups and downs.

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with america's newest senator. newark mayor cory booker won the special election to replace frank lautenberg. >> and some serious news former vice president dick cheney was near death in 2010. that's fairly new revelation that he wrote in a book along with his cardiologist. according to "the new york times" he said good-bye to his family members and rekwefrt add burial at that time in wyoming. that was before he received his new heart. he describes america's health system as a national treasure that must be protected and the title of the new book is "heart." it's due out on tuesday. we're talking about manufacturing. predictions for activity over the next six months are at their

highest levels in over a decade. that is according to data from the philadelphia feds' monthly business outlook. more than six in ten firms expect increased productivity. here's hoping they're right. if this is wrong, i don't want to be right. introducing the butter finger butter finger cup. yes you are not dreaming. we're talking a creamy peanut butter center, chocolate coating with just a little bit of butter finger for crunch. unfortunate hi they won't be out in time for halloween. nestle says to expect them on the store shelves sometime in 2014. they look amazing, sound amazing. that's it for the news cycle. now to the latest in spin. i'm trying to read a serious script here. >> she's trying to make a serious turn. >> from something yummy to serious. >> we're going to shift gear,

talking about president obama who spoke today. if there's one thing that i have learned over the past three weeks is that bluetooth pretty today in the current dynamic, the current environmental, it's next to impossible for obama to get anything done. whether that be immigration, whether that be a big budget deal, whether that be a farm bill. as long as the tea party has a firm grip hold on the house, the future looks pretty dim for the president. i mean we've seen the senate. they passed a big comprehensive immigration bipartisan bill. it was passed down to the house. boehner was once again in a position to bring it to a vote. they did don't that. they still, the house, could come up with their own bill but the thought of it passing the senate is hard to mention. boehner, and you mentioned this in your rant today, krystal, the power is in his hands and if he's wanting this big moment to be remembered for i hope this is

a moment of reflection for the speaker to say, you know what? next time around i've got to pull the trigger much sooner than i did. i have to do the right thing for the country because if i follow with the folks on the far right, i'm going to hit a deadend. >> part of the problem is the democrats have been demagoguing it for three years. the admin strags has been demagoguing it for well over ten years. they can't back up. this is real stuff for them. this is a core of conservative tichl. sort of legalizing, welcomizing 11 million plus hispanic, latinos, that completely challenges their electoral strategy. that challenges their vision of america. this is going to be frightening stuff for them. it's going to reveal the same measures. hey, we need to make a change election torli. you can't continue to offend

them. steve king is going to say, no, no, we have to continue to stop this. we're going to see the same level of fight. >> i mean i think you're absolutely right about the immigration reform piece of this. what is animating the base, the tea partiers, the ones who have been shutting down the government and bringing us close to default is this group of people who are very afraid of where the country is heading. they feel like the world is moving too fast for them and they want to get off. so to obama care, they thought that the president was giving out goodies to laezy people who don't work. okay. the immigration piece is, you know, people have broken the law and part of this is very much animated by the way america looks is changing so immigration goes right to the start of this. >> it's given to people who don't deserve them. >> yeah. and so the republicans have been irspomtably feeding that fear as you're pointing out for years and it's very hard to make that turn, but i think if we're to look for a place of hope, there was some interesting reporting

from "mother jones" and david corn that at the beginning of this crisis democrats reached out to john boehner and said, hey, if you're actually worried about your speakership, if that's the holdup, we can keep you in your seat. don't see why john boehner can't find a little courage. i know there's precedent. immigration reform could pass very quickly. some sort of grand bargain that both sides could be happy with could pass very quickly. there is a bipartisan governing coalition in the house. it's all up to john boehner. >> you see it can be done. you see it can be done. >> everything you guys have said about those tectonic plates in the house make sense to me but i would go one step further. in listening to the president today i do think he had a missed opportunity. we know the republicans are culpable for this. when he defines the problem as the president did today in saying we have focus on the

bloggers and talkerings and professional tickty visits who profit from conflict, i'm sorry, mr. president, we need to focus on the debt bead republicans who don't want to do their jobs and get paid for not going to work which is what they've been doing the past couple of weeks and basically pushing out a lot of pain across the country. this is a deadbeat mentality and it is not about talk radio, okay? those guys don't have the job and the obligation and the constitutional set of requirements that these house republicans do. so i would like to see -- no, will it me be clear. having said many times on this show and elsewhere that the republicans are the problem here, the dead beat republican caucus, it is time -- >> but they're -- >> they're not deadbeat. they're obstructionists. they're working in their obstructi obstructionism. >> the thing here is, yes, the republicans deserve to have responsibility for their

actions, absolutely. but you can't ignore what is driving them and what is causing them to make this political calculus that taking our country to the bring is in their best interest. >> my concern -- i don't think we're that far apart. on slis the president is right and they've been wrong but on a day like today when the president puts it in a broader context and says there's all these issues in washington, sure, but we have to drive at the deadbeat republicans to make sure everyone knows why we're in this mess so they don't have the same freedom to feel like they could do this again in december and february. they're going to replay this tragedy, i think. >> we're not that far off on this topic and we'll also continue here on "the cycle" or in our office where it probably will continue. >> and if you have not noticed, a fashion trend on the show today. lots of purple. today is spirit day. comcast nbcuniversal is teaming up with gladd to take a stance against bullying.

there's a link right now on facebook. >> look at that family. >> make sure you share sniet look at that cycle family. >> we're so adorable. we have the best family at cycle. but up next, here's a startling thought. what if the republicans got exactly what they wanted. woman: everyone in the nicu -- all the nurses wanted to watch him

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more pills? seriously? seriously. [ groans ] all these stops to take more pills can be a pain. can i get my aleve back? ♪ for my pain, i want my aleve. [ male announcer ] look for the easy-open red arthritis cap. you are looking right now at the financial equivalent of a shrug. the s&p is at a high but the dow is down at the first full day of trading following the end of the shutdown deal in part because most investors kept the faith that congress would after every opportunity to miss behave come up with something to kick the can down the road purr usual, but it's not back to business as usual for the economy. the economy estimates the brinksmanship costs the economy as much as $24 billion. america's economic prestige is

being openly questioned and people are even more skeptical of congress. republicans in particular. hard to believe that this was john boehner's endgame when this all started so what was the goal here. new republic's calls it the final spasm of a fresh corpse. harsh but i like it. welcome. >> thanks for having me. >> from boehner's perspective, the country did not default. the government is reopened and all these tea partiers who he cares so deeply about are happy with him. he got what he wanted, right? >> yeah. i think boehner, if what his interest was was purely maximizing, optimizing his position, then it was fine and i think that's always why i thought a shutdown was rather inevitable because it was really the only way he was going to appease his right wing.

the problem is there's this notion that the congressional gop subscribes to and that vision even though the party lost tee sizively politically that vision is inching closer to becoming a reality. it makes, you know, the way the last two and a half weeks out, the upshot was more volatility, less security, less confidence that government can deliver on the services that people rely on it to deliver. and so even as the party lost politically in a kind of massacre, the vision, this anile lichl is-inching closer. >> the word that jumped out in your piece is final. if your thesis is correct does this mean it's the big final showdown. we won't see weeks of business held up in february and march on the debt ceiling again? >> look. i think the debt ceiling is done for this -- you know, this epoch, you know. we may have a future democratic

and even a crazier congress, god forbid but i think the debt ceiling is off the table. obama stared down the right on this. the next time we're going to go at it is probably april of next year. the memories of this past episode will still be pretty fresh. we'll be looking at a midterm election pretty soon. it will be difficult for your the gop to play the extortion game again. but when it comes to positioning, grand bargaining, expanding cuts to entatelement, we're still going to see a lot of funny business. that remains to be seen. you know, i don't see, you know, paul ryan being especially chasing but i don't see the people that the gop are sending to negotiate feeling especially chastened. i think they're going to push not over the brink but they're going to push this as hard as they feel they need to. >> i want to point out the chart

they put up is something rachel maddow had on the show is all the things the republicans got out of this and all the thing they did not get that they asked for. but the flip side is the democrats wanted all of this. you could make the argument that the president didn't win a whole lot either if you look at what he got in the end was just a short-term increase and this is what you wrote in the new republican. you say the reason the white house has been so firm in its no debt limit negotiation is it understands what is at stake. if republicans believe they can extract concessions from the president by threatening a debt default, there's no end to they will be able to demand. so really there aren't any winners here, right? that's the point you're trying to make. >> yeah. look. i think there are no winners, but it was really important for both this president and historically in the sweep of history and the rain and congress and the president to reassert this principle that extortion is not a legitimate mode of negotiation and think we established it was an important precedent to set.

i think he did reset that for the foreseeable. again, we could have an've loonier republican congress. at the rate we're going it's not that hard. >> anything's possible. hope you're right. thank you very much. up next, two boys go to the same elite school. one makes it. one does not. so what made the difference? we've got a preview of an eye opening documentary that you do not want to miss. to the gulf, bp had two big goals: help the gulf recover and learn from what happened so we could be a better, safer energy company. i can tell you - safety is at the heart of everything we do. we've added cutting-edge technology, like a new deepwater well cap and a state-of-the-art monitoring center, where experts watch over all drilling activity twenty-four-seven. and we're sharing what we've learned, so we can all produce energy more safely. our commitment has never been stronger.

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for many schools american diversity remains an important one even though it's challenge one because at black schools where there's few others like them the experience can be rewarding academic by but difficult emotionally. i grew up in a school where there were very few black guests just like our next guest michelle stevenson who documented her son's 13 years. >> in basketball games i sometimes get made fun of. they say, oh, you talk like a white boy and stuff. i've been lying to my parents and say, oh, i don't notice that i'm changing my voice because i don't want them to think that i'm a coward or something. >> american promise makes you part of two boys growing through the process. welcome, meichelle.

i look back. you get the education but you have those identity issues. looking back i bet you say it's all worth it but it's a nuanced equation. >> it's a nuanced equation. as parents and families we have to engage with teachers and really understand it's not just the academics. it's helping their social elements as well and help support them to become whole young men. >> we want one reason for the way things happen. with that in mind i don't know if you can answer the question. was there something particular that made the paths split in the story you're telling? >> something particular. i think we all make different choices as we -- as we navigated this world, and i think the support that the parents had, they made a decision where they felt they needed their son to be

in a space where the social and emotional were really priority to support the other boy. supporting us in our decision and really courting us to stay and go the whole nine yards, and we ended up staying with them. >> wow. >> when one of the broader trends that we see in america is black males do worse in school than almost any other demographic in terms of graduation rates. did you see anything over the course of the years with your son and with shaon that shined some light on to why that really is? >> for us, we entered into dalton with the idea that we would be shielded from the black male achievement gap that you were talking about but we realized that that was not the case. that education opportunity is only the first step and that there are specific issues that

boys face, black boys in particular, around implicit bias, perception around who they are, expectations, demandingness -- >> stereotype threats. >> stereotype threat and how the anxiety that is involved with that that we as parents and teachers need to break out of and really engage in that discussion so we can really get to know who are these boys that are in front of us and how do we engage and keep them stimulated, both socially, emotionally and academically. >> so you're a filmmaker here and you're a mother in the film. i'm sure those two things clash because the filmmaker wants to show everything and the mom might be like can we have some privacy for my family. there's some moments when the camera is in the car, when idris is crying after he lost a basketball game. is that clashing, the filmmaker in you and the mother in you? >> oh, yeah. there were a lot of heated discussions and debates in the edit room. for us of course our priority as parents is to protect our son.

but as filmmakers and as we were shooting we allowed that the camera allowed us to go places we would not have gone as parents and we needed to go to to delve into these issues. we realized as we were sharing stories this is not just about our family, but families across the nation, african-american families going through the same thing. we hope that the film can provide a catalyst to talk about the achievement gap but also to engage in a very constructive way that brings everybody to the table. >> i'm sure my parents would watch it and say, yeah, we lived that same thing. it's a heart-warming film. your little boy and the other little boy go from 5-year-old pip squeaks to big boys taller than you with deep voices and girlfriends and go off to college. thanks so much for making this. best of the thumb. up next, abby huntsman takes us down a scary road. the new normal in american politics. lennounc ] ev millions of people

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welcome to the new normal, guys. >> is this the new normal? >> the new normal. >> this new normal. >> this is the new normal. i think this is the cliche alert. >> what do we all mean by this new normal? well, let me show you the only way that i know how. what you're looking at is a medder for for what has been and continues to be our inability to break a budget stalemate. we continue to shimmy back and forth in mickcrmicroinkments.

with the limited extension passed last night we'll be right in this very same position in just a matter of weeks. before we do this over again let's take a look at the inventory of what it has cost us. i'm a republican, after all, we like talking about costs. each day the government was closed, taxpayers lost $12.5 million an hour, $300 million a d day and $1.6 billion a week. and that's not even a hit to economic growth. as ezra klein points out, people don't much miss the 0.3 of a percentage worth of growth they didn't have in that quarter but compounded over time it's a disaster. a small blip on the radar today means huge dollars ten years from now. that's the dollars and cents. what's just as frightening about this new normal is that all of the political capital spent over the latest shutdown has come at the cost of the most important issues facing this country. when was the last time we had a serious conversation about tackling tax, immigration, education reform or breaking down barriers to facilitate a

manufacturing revolution? i guess the shutdown politicking is more important than having the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, millions left in the shadows as undocumented immigrants and an education system that puts our kids behind the nations we are fighting against in the world economic war. for those keeping score, our students are ranked 25th in the world in math. with bills to score political points, they flew fast and furious between chambers and so fong this congress has passed less than 40 actual public laws. the congress before them, which by the way was the least productive congress since we began keeping score, they at least passed 283 laws. lucky for them they will soon be the second least productive congress in history. don't get me wrong, the current house has voted on laws, 550 to be exact, they just don't go anywhere. this is the new normal. it's not only incredibly expensive economically and side tracking other important issues but it's also costing the gop. if it's even possible, the party

today is more leaderless, more divided and less popular than this time a year ago when it lost the presidency and vowed to change. you would think that a party so concerned about cost benefit analysis would be doing everything in its power to actually avert the situation. now is the time to be more productive. now is the time to have a more productive time prevail. now is the time to find a mechanism for pro growth rational problem-solving conservatives. we must actually win elections. a strong republican party is the only way out of this new normal. it's the only way we can revert back to the days when passing an annual budget was considered common place. and before the democrats pull a muscle while patting themselves on the back and talking about how they won, this country was built on a strong two-party system where people debate and then they compromise. one party stronger sounds a lot like russia did in the 20th century and no one wants that for us. that does it for "the cycle." no