incarceration next are americans finally getting over their prudishness political sex scandals they're not quite having the same effect as they used to in fact they don't seem to matter much at all anymore so we finally realize that politicians are human just like us and where are all the funny conservatives the left has tina fey they've got jon stewart they've got bill maher all the rights got dennis miller i think we all know he's not all that funny so we're going to speak to a christian conservative comedian brad stein to tell us why the right has a hard time being funny but now it's move on to tonight's top story. how do you fix a democracy when it's right with legal corruption that might sound like an odd term but it's exactly the case when we look at insider trading done by members of congress and their staffers those who are free to invest in companies which they themselves oversee wall street can't do it so why can washington are to correspondent guy in a church again has the story. the annual salary of members of the united states

congress one hundred seventy four thousand dollars the profit they can make by trading on inside information priceless. a number of u.s. lawmakers and dozens of congress staffers have reportedly traded thousands of dollars worth of stocks of companies they or their crosses wrote last for under the u.s. law there is no conflict of interest here they're just plain cheating and it's not fair what they're doing currently all u.s. lawmakers and their highest paid staffers have to do is to disclose information once a year on their finances by the analysis of the wall street journal u.s. public servants have been phenomenally successful trading stock at the peak of the wall street crisis senator spencer backus made tens of thousands of dollars betting against the market that he's committee helps oversee and he's the ranking member on the house committee on financial services. chris miller

a top energy policy adviser to the senate majority leader harry reid nearly doubled his bat when his boss helped pass legislation that won't up benefiting the fir after his staff or his name was mentioned in a list of capitol hill stock traders mr reid reprimanded his aide. poconos because christmas. my attempts to talk to some of those involved were time consuming and unsuccessful. we talk a lot about exporting democracy one of the bedrocks of a successful democracy i believe is freedom from credit corruption the sense that elected officials are elected to serve the public not to and hence their own wallets or that of their friends or cronies or family congressman brian baird offered a bill that would ban insider trading on capitol hill years ago but the act received

the support of phone the nine out of four hundred thirty five members in the house of representatives and none in the senate and in this case you've got the possibility of making great amounts of money. in ways that are illegal in ways that are hard to detect congressman baird says annual disclosure reports are not enough to my knowledge there is no human being employed by the congress of the united states who has looked at our financial reports with a with a towards possible conflict of interest now there is no initiative to change the rules what for the rest of america is cheating it's perfectly legal for the country's lawmakers why would they want to change it as it is now a public servants stock market activities are hard to track there are no investigators here on the hill doing that and some believe those senators and staffers who have recently been caught in the spotlight are just the tip of the

iceberg vanished on our washington d.c. . so why do any bills to reform washington's practices usually fail well maybe it's because the exact same people keep working there that's right year after treacherous election year the revolving door never seems to stop let me tell you what i mean by that see there could be a lot of new faces coming to town after the midterm elections with anti washington sentiment and tea party activism running high but these outsiders well they're just going to have to work with insider staffers house republican leaders have already put together a list of experienced washington hands to help fill top staff positions for the surge of newly elected leaders potential chiefs of staff many of whom are current and former capitol hill staffers ama lobbyists the people that know the ropes in the beltway and it happens every single election democrats do it too so does this mean that the system is just too strong to be changed do new faces really have any

power to bring new ideas to the table when joining me to discuss it is jay brewer open government strategist and advocate jay thanks so much for being here every well so let's get into this right here this happens every single year assuming there's a midterm election and the leaders start preparing a list of the people they think are experienced. but but this midterm election right of all others there's this feeling of how we want fresh blood new blood anti washington senator kerry just this make kind of a mockery of that i think it does i mean what's interesting is that this is essentially the third street change election that we've had in two thousand and six we had a sweeping change of congress democrats took the house and took the senate back in two thousand and eight democrats took back the white house of course and then there was even more additions made to the house and the senate and now we're going have another change election and it's going to be the republicans coming in almost certainly and yet nothing in washington really seems to change and so there's got to be a reason behind that and it really does come back to the fact that a lot of these lobbyist a lot of these people with long experience people that actually know the system on

capitol hill know how to manipulate it know how to actually make anything happen if anything can actually happen on capitol hill sometimes that's even debatable but they're the ones continuing to fill the spots but if that's the case then all of these tea partiers i mean should they be angry isn't this exactly what they should be angry about fighting against are they being kind of gypped here by these by these tea party candidates arguably yes i mean i think arguably you have a situation in which whoever you elect is not really the problem the ability of the average american whoever that may be my mom is an example i always love to use my mom as a woman in tennessee who cares very much about her community and what she can actually do and it kind of in this in this case doesn't matter who is her representative if the republican a democrat not much is able to move and it's really about this system it's really about the people that are brought in to run the back end as it were about back and i mean if we talk about these staffers and these lobbyist they're the ones often bring all the information all of the reports to the table we're the ones that get to rifle through it all and choose what to present to their lawmaker who then is

going to use that information to form their opinion to write a vote on a bill that's right the back and i called the tragedy of advocacy right which is that a lot of these people are there twenty five year old staffers making twenty five thousand dollars a year they don't actually know all that much about how the system works but they're really the. one's presenting all the information and they rely on these other folks. to tell them what and what the expert advice is not an issue so your opinion as you said it was so you sign a petition and you try to weigh in meaningfully with you represent you get a phone call you sent a fax you do whatever you can do that the other day a thousand other people going to do the same thing just like you and the twenty five year old going to turn to a lobbyist and say how does this really work so fixing the system i think ultimately comes back to how can we build a platform some way that people can actually see in a verified measured way in public transparently exactly what the public is thinking in a district i don't know i think that that's a great question but i don't sense you know what we're saying here is it doesn't matter the candidate doesn't matter or so we say but i mean the candidates are the

ones who who are the public face of it all right so i want to bring up also right now obama's approval rating is again at an all time low i think it's about thirty seven percent which is pretty depressing right what he came in with but so do we say that this is because obama is failing or is this because he can't change the system and he can't change washington well again arguably you could say that obama has had more impact in a two year period than almost any president in the last several decades he's an active some of the largest most sweeping legislation in a long time and yet people aren't very happy with it so it's not about necessarily the laws he's changing it's really about the system that he's not changing so yes i agree it is really is i think people's frustration around the system more than it is the actual legislation now it's also been the case for just about every president after the first eighteen the two months or eighteen months to two years rather really since ronald reagan who is even unpopular as well so i think the verdict still out on that well i mean everybody is complaining are of course

comparing right now obama to reagan's numbers of the same time to create his numbers for the same time but my question is you know if you can never get any new blood into the system if you can't actually. through it all then what's the point. and therein lies the rub. that is happening i mean right i mean now everyone is so angry about experience and that's turned into a bad word and then he said that work is something that we've got to get over the citizenry so i'm really frustrated as i can't meaningfully weigh in and let my representatives know what i want i'm frustrated because it takes sixty votes to get anything to happen so fifty nine votes on any one thing is that going to move a piece of legislation that's frustrating you know it's it's extremely fresh in the two hundred seventy six lobbyists who used to work in government including eighteen formal former actual congressmen were involved in the law latest big piece of big legislation the telecom bill this summer and i don't know how to change that but i think i think ultimately it's going to take. i don't know what is going to take you

know what that's going to resonate i mean in essence you could say that this is just like any other industry there's this revolving door where the sad thing is that this is one they're really affects and toys where all of our lives take thanks much for being here thanks very much for having the show that i saw to come out tonight show live wire. the peer to peer file sharing services closed down so what does that mean for the war between file sharers and the recording industry i discuss that in a moment and a look at the incarceration rates here in the u.s. and why they're on the rise could democracy who to blame and speak with reason magazines radley balko interested in. the news today. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. charlie operations rule the day.

jelly's continued. curious trying to see a slight mythological as better place than the scenes of how to protect yourself we can truly check your receipt didn't anything one. thing. we've done in the future how hard. this saturday the world came one step closer to a massive nuclear accident and you probably didn't even hear about it well that's because until a former u.s. air force launch officer tweeted about it nobody and the public knew that this

saturday the logic control officers at the warn air force base in wyoming lost communication and monitoring capabilities for fifty intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles now before you go thinking hey the u.s. probably has weird technical glitches with this but still it has all the time let me just tell you that a glitch of this size losing control of enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire world with well that is absolutely unprecedented and you know what else is so weird about this whole thing i could have sort of the safety and the security of nuclear weapons was a priority for this administration. violations must be punished words must mean something the world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons we take concrete steps to a world without nuclear weapons and we genie secure in fact. as long as nuclear weapons are required to deter aggression and defend our country and our

allies we will maintain a safe secure and effective nuclear arsenal a nuclear weapon in the hands of a terrorist is a danger to people everywhere. now see the best part of all this is the air force is saying hey no big deal right that's exactly why obama himself was briefed on this incident you know just as this was happening though there was another very interesting of it taking place take a look at this. like . those a were us both flying over brooklyn coincidence i think not you remember back to late september a group of former air force officers gave a conference of the national press club where they claimed that nuclear weapons or routinely switched off by u.f.o.'s yeah now you guys know i can joke about this all

day the fact the u.f.o.'s turned off our nuclear stockpile but what it really comes down to it the fact that we lost communication and monitoring capabilities with fifty nukes well that's beyond terrifying certainly doesn't help me sleep at night and it's all the more reason to get rid of the things altogether. but launched ten years ago it appears that as of yesterday the peer to peer file sharing software called lime wire is dead now in a four year old case brought by the recording industry association of america a us judge ruled that lie wires users commit a substantial amount of copyright infringement that the company hasn't taken any meaningful steps to mitigate that infringement and the jam just to the music industry amount to over one dollars now we won't know how much line wire is going to have to pay until january but for users yesterday marked the day that the website officially of sports to shutter its file sharing service is now to make

clear just how large line wires retied extended over the years it's been estimated that its software was downloaded two hundred million times on the website now if visited offers a few thoughts from the c.e.o. entitled dark clouds and silver linings here feels his disappointment at the sadness but also the promise of their team of technologists are creating a new service for users to look forward to how can we really look at this is this proof the record labels are winning this war the file sharing as we know it is over or is this just a small battle a single victim in a world full of bit torrent sites that are going to keep adapting and changing faces we're here to discuss it with me as k.c. one hundred communications director and policy strategist for the future of music coalition casey thanks so much for being here thank you not tell me how you look at this because some people are just crying oh my god the end of live wire this is the death of file sharing do you see it that way well you have to remember that the technology that line wire was built on is kind of agnostic in terms of legal or

illegal the way it was used clearly was to you know buy song to buy many to you know collect on authorized music and share music that they didn't have the rights to. it's important though to understand that this case has been kind of winding its way through the courts for quite a while so what about for here exactly. he anticipating this you could say that it's not exactly not his biggest shocker but business something that i found funny right as i was reading a lot of articles about it today and i was reading some of the commentary i wanted to see what readers what users had to say and a lot of people are like live wire still exists i mean that just shows you how quickly these technologies adapt instantly there are a million articles pointing you to alternatives to lying where there's frost wire there's. you torrents aries song i mean there's a million of these things popping up so clearly how does this mean to you that the recording industry is losing the battle that they just can't keep up well it's very difficult to keep up i mean shutting down it's kind of like sending cops to bust

a high school party that was over ten years ago now it's just beer cans laying around the action is clearly moved elsewhere. a lot of rights holders are concerned about not necessarily the downloader torrent sites and services which are very very difficult to keep up with because they are so decentralized but they're going after things that they can hopefully keep better track of and those would be overseas sites that stream media oftentimes television and movies but music can exist there too and they make their money through advertising so well that's actually you know you bring up an interesting point here because there is some legislation that's trying to push through where they can actually go after sites that allow copyright infringement in other countries and that's what they're trying to do which brings up a lot of questions i mean is this america's place can they extend their reach that far just because someone in america always the content can you go after people internationally well the tension between you know copyright intellectual property and the internet you know has kind of existed since the birth of the internet and

the bandwidth you know became you know robust enough to carry larger files and yeah i mean the united states is going to try to protect its interests overseas just like it would with any other form of into you know intellectual property copyright is no different it's very very difficult because the internet knows no geographic. boundaries so you have to look for ways to arm you know the legal establishment and the justice establishment with the tools to take care of some of this and you know obviously some people will agree or disagree on the on the level nature and application of those tools well i think that's because perhaps you know the track record for the ways of looking for things to create new laws and so forth isn't exactly. the cleanest want to guess but you know the other question here we have to bring up is let's face it people don't want to have to pay for i mean you know especially with my generation your generation this is the normal thing before i tunes really popped up i mean i don't think you know anybody that didn't at some

point in their life download a song so shouldn't it be the recording industry then that. to that that has to just go along with it instead of continuing to fight the battle like you said always ten steps ten years behind its opponent it's a bit like whack a mole and it looks like whack a mole if you if you look at the history of you know infringing sites and take downs and shutdowns and so on and so forth you mentioned something that i think was key to this and that's i tunes with the appearance of i tunes you suddenly have the possibility of a legitimate digital music marketplace and to some degree technology is not the enemy. you know you need to be able to innovate on on a platform and you need to be able to come up with these kinds of services that can at the end of the day reward the creators because let's face it it's the people who make the music that we care about here and not the end of the exception here i mean if you look at napster who then tried to legitimize its form of business it didn't really become a success and here line wire was asking for the same thing on the court and actually allow them to you know to go in that direction so it's the model that one

where was using you know infringed now and go legit later just seem it seems like it's just over i don't think anyone could get the venture capital to build something like lime wire and have it take off in the marketplace and then go you know knock on the labels door and say ok we're ready to be legitimate now because everyone's using our service i think though they're beyond i tunes. there are all kinds of unique and completely legal and licensed ways to access music and we're going to see more of them because of you know the rise of mobile technology as well and eventually it could be possible that piracy for music anyway would become more of a thing of the past because the convenience and the price point would allow more people to participate i think that you know if it becomes cheaper more convenient that maybe they have a shot thanks so much for being here k.c. absolutely all right we've spoken at length on this show about america's disgustingly large incarceration system for you know what it's worth continuing to talk about it until it gets fixed let me just throw some statistics your way in one

thousand nine hundred seventy one in four hundred american adults are behind bars around for all as of two thousand and eight that number was one in one hundred states today spend one of every fifteen general fund dollars on maintaining their prisons and according to the king's college world prison population list the u.s. is home to five percent of the world's population but nearly one fourth of its prisoners now the incarceration system isn't only draining our government and our taxpayers of money but also damaging those who become a part of it in terms of mobility in terms of job opportunities and perhaps worst of all the effect on their children why has it gotten so bad well my guest radley balko says that could be democracy itself so joining me from nashville is reason magazine's radley balko thanks so much for being with us now i think that your statement is one that was pretty powerful first hearing that i think we all might get a little confused so explain to us more going to further detail as to why democracy

larger democracy could lead to a larger incarceration system. do we have bradley i think we may have lost their. yeah let radley you're with me now did you hear my question tell us why don't you tell us why you say that democracy larger democracy is the reason we have a larger incarceration system. i don't think that radley is is hearing me there so i think we're just going to have to wait one second to see if he if you can hear announcements you can hear me now yeah. ok perfect technology never perfect bradley i was just talking about your article you made a very strong statement saying that democracy could be to blame for a large incarceration system can you go further into detail on that. sure i think that it's the problem is that. the public has

a lot of misperceptions about crime and i think that in general. you know there are certain certain things that we don't put up to it right we can have the majority vote away the you know first amendment for redheads for example right and i think that one. very powerful. one set of powers that we give to the government that is that it's pretty awesome is the power to imprison people and i think that our criminal justice system is really too infused with democracy i think we have for example in california you have these ballot measures three strikes and you're out a lot of these other slogan base crime policies that really play on a public that really isn't all that well informed and that would probably strip constitutional rights from people suspected of crimes if if they could if it were put it were put to a vote. i think democracy is in large part responsible for

it is also for a large part of the incarceration rate the fact that we elect district attorneys and that they're you know reelection and not their job performance usually you know in large part based on how many convictions they can win and even in states that elect judges i think this is even more of a problem but how do you blame for perhaps writing the misinformation right i mean you mentioning article saying that since the one nine hundred ninety s. crime rates have fallen dramatically yet polls l'affaire that americans think that crime is still on the rise when somebody has got to be benefiting right from playing this entire massive system going in and from keeping people scared. sure well i mean it's the politicians i mean it's very easy to run on a tough on crime platform it's very it's much more difficult to you know make a sort of nuanced position that you know we need to balance safety with individual rights. but you know i guess my point would be that if politicians are to blame for spreading this kind of engaging in this kind of fear mongering one of

the solutions may be to make the criminal justice system less political make it less susceptible to politics make it less susceptible to do wins elections and i mean it you know this has its own problems you know we've seen it for instance the you know the rubber rooms and with public schoolteachers where it's impossible to fire public servants in a lot of cases and you know there's i don't i don't know that there's any reason to think it would be any different if we made prosecutors public servants as opposed to elected officials but it would at least remove this problem of being able to kind of manipulate the public's fear and really having you know prosecutors justify their reelection based on you know how well they're able to fill the jails how do you think the public fare my concentrate more on the results right of our large incarceration system the fact that now we have a baby boomer generation who's going to have increased medical costs that we have so many women who are mothers or who are pregnant that are in jail the fact that

you know this is really crumbling the idea of the american dream and this mobility that we constantly talk about i mean how much money how many dreams i guess you can say are we going to lose because of this i mean this is this is what we see a lot often in criminal justice policy and we are actually starting to see some reforms a lot of states are moving to drug courts instead of criminal courts for consensual crimes which potential drug crimes california has released thousands of nonviolent offenders because they just don't have room in the prison system anymore you know but they're not doing it because the right thing to do they're doing it because. running out of money and you know this is all this with with alcohol prohibition right there in the common. it's commonly thought that we ended up all probation because it didn't work and because of what market violence actually we ended up all probation because the government needed money from protracting alcohol to help offset deficits caused by the the great depression so i mean you know the pendulum

is starting to swing back in the other direction of course only it's not for the right reasons suppose we should you know sort of take we can get but but as you said there are many many more fiscal problems are going to creep up to something we have an aging prison population that's the require increasing medical attention as it gets older it would have to make some decisions about what are we have as definitely a scary thing that we're not quite sure what the effects are going to be able to have to address a rally thanks so much for joining us jeff thanks i mean i get to come on tonight's show man when are you guys just going to start asking for directions your stubbornness is causing you money so stick around for that tool time award and politicians are caught with their pants down for years lawmakers are forced to leave office when they were caught in those extramarital affairs and for some reason that's not the case anymore going to look at surviving as sex scandal in just a moment. hello

again this is oh see the headline it's. mine down a boundary small supposed to consider a plant in the name of their lives is a military presence in the east european states which have joined says the collapse of the soviet union it comes ahead of the london russian nato summit in lisbon next month but the greats of a single missile defense system for the mines and other security will decide to stage. tempers remain high in kurdish controlled northern iraq with the is sick or in violence when the crops up to u.s. troops leave the region explosive and we can make starvation of secretiveness files

showing widespread torture and killing has also highlighted sectarian violence between arabs. israel's recent discovery of oil and gas reserves in the mediterranean and into tensions in the middle east side first in lebanon and turkey with whom israeli relations are already fragile so they taze to the rich failed but disputes of american borders cleared me in trouble ahead. and those the headlines let's now go back to the end of the show. it's time for tonight's jewel time to work and tonight i'm going to go ahead and give it to all of the bad in the entire world the reason is because you simply refuse to ask for directions to write a new british study says the average male drives an extra two hundred and seventy six miles every year as a result of.