richmond's three. three. three. three born to go for your media project a free media are teton. blog some are going to washington d.c. welcome to the big picture here's what's coming up tonight it appears the hope to withdraw troops the middle east by the end of the year is lost so the bush administration had all teary motives in starting our wars in the middle east meanwhile our doctors are being used as agents for drug control only for a governor a multimillionaire rick scott believes so details later on why he's trying to silence pediatricians across his state and republican lawmakers nearly two dozen

states are pushing new legislation in older poorer and student voters off the voter rolls with the sneaky plan to weaken democratic leadership. you need to know this even though bin ladin is dead the wars in afghanistan and iraq continue on rather than a rapid down draw of troop drawdown of troops in afghanistan in july as many as hope or at hope for u.s. officials are now saying that the president will likely only put a lot about five to one hundred thousand soldiers there another five thousand troops may be sent home at the end of the year a small dent in our massive force so while our war in afghanistan is likely to continue on with no clear mission at least twenty four. teen we're going to war in

iraq a war with an equally unclear mission for bush left office he pushed through an agreement between the u.s. and iraq promising that all troops would be out of that country by december thirty first of this year so now the pentagon is sending we could be there a little longer secretary defense robert gates admitted that the united states military will stay in iraq past the deadline if the iraqi government requests more help fill the holes in their security forces pentagon spokesperson elizabeth robbins said we're willing to entertain are with us for continued assistance and system with our commitment to a long term partnership with iraq but the bail or the seat of the ball is in the iraqis court. so if the iraqis do it and it looks like neither of our wars in the middle east will be any anytime soon trying to kind of wonder if we went to war in the middle east to combat terror bin ladin is now dead and al qaida is now scattered across the world and why are we still at war in the middle east is there another reason why all this blood and treasure is mean spent it's not being told

the american people are offered their takes on this issue or lawrence wilkerson former chief of staff to united states secretary of state colin powell and now a professor of government public policy at the college of william and mary and also larry klayman attorney author former federal prosecutor in the reagan administration and founder of the organization's judicial watch and freedom washed out or christian larry i figured welcome to welcome both of you colonel you're on the record as saying that you believe that the war in iraq was in part at least driven by a desire to get oil to change famously said ten percent of the world's oil reserves are there it's cheap oil back in two thousand and one. can you elaborate on that what causes you to believe i'm not sure it was to get oil i'm not sure that's the way to put it think it was to ensure that one of the greatest reserves of oil known reserves of oil in the world was well protected and i would even say it was to get it into the hands. chevron royal dutch shell exxon mobil and other private

companies because they're a lot harder to deal with the national companies like the mexican but as well and saudi and so forth so it was to stabilize one of the greatest resources in the world in terms of nonrenewable thought something else incidentally the iraqi report last week came out saying one hundred billion barrels is the low estimate two hundred billion is the medium estimate and in their wildest dreams maybe three hundred billion barrels this nor saudi arabia not like he's own government will never reach it because of political reasons but has a seven year plan to be at thirteen point five million barrels per day productive productive compasses is chiefly produced by the way saudi arabia is that it's really heart of the contracts are being left right now to try and bill three refining facilities in iraq so that they don't have to have the middleman this is a very lucrative area well it was a larry klayman it was originally called operation iraqi liberation we've got some

tape right here someplace of the presidential press secretary saying that there was about a two hour hoops when they realized oh i think i changed that you were the guy who sued as a conservative activist with the with freedom works or the judicial watch or you're the guy who sued the cheney task force dick cheney had to task force he was in charge of the counterterrorism task force which didn't bother me until september of two thousand and eleven or two thousand one and the energy task force they were meeting in march and april what did you learn oh that's right tom we were very interested at the time to see how we were formulating energy policy because there cheney was stonewalling producing it producing any documents revealing what was going on behind closed doors with his energy task force and we filed document requests with the energy department and with various national security agencies and what pops up a document which showed that the american oil companies were meeting with the administration giving up the oil. fields in iraq they were again b.s.

but those oil fields were being controlled by european companies we wanted control of those companies and i've always believed that one of the primary reasons we invaded iraq was to get control of this oil wealth effect this. we have a full screen graphic i think we can show or maybe we should just show our viewers this graphic of iraq that is came out of your lawsuit that they literally were dividing that here it is right here they literally were dividing the country up and and these blocks down here in the lower end where the big oil chunks are and then a list of the that is titled the headline is foreign suitors for iraqi oil field contracts and this is five march two thousand what this is not is six months eight months whatever it is i can do that if asked in my head after a year before your life for two thousand and eleven i always believed that two thousand was a pretext to invade iraq and unfortunately what's happened is that we see we didn't even get control of the oil fields we even blew that by the bush administration standards we now have

a regime which is basically shiite controlled loyal to tehran we've accomplished little to nothing in iraq seems like we definitely gone back to biggest bidders right now or malaysia and china yeah china seems to be get a large chunk of it when i was in sudan year before last they were all over southern sudan. if you look at it from a wider perspective and i'm not saying that a trainee did but if one wants to argue on his behalf strategically then one wouldn't be concerned about who actually got control the oil as long as the or was they are the fungible in the world market and available to keep prices stable and my point about the chinese is they just you know they realize that there are any oil there they're looking for oil all around the world as we have done this without using it on three trillion dollars that they have a barge in the current accounts they forgot a lot of. it i had this theory that there are really three different. mode. beijing is going on in the white house at the same time from three different

people dick cheney was looking at the oil and he was just totally focused on that an oil oil executive george w. bush in one thousand nine hundred nine told his father for mickey herskowitz the guy who wrote ghost wrote a charge to keep his autobiography told him on the record on tape that if he became elected president first thing he was going to do is invade iraq because being a war president gives you political capital and he could use that political capital of privatizing social security he was on the record in ninety nine that was you know the tapes came out ninety in two thousand five of them remember saddam hussein one of the kills fathers so there was a personal he i he also and then and then you got don rumsfeld this is thomas frank just let me show a little clip from from a piece that i was for so here we are in crystal city. here where a stone's throw from the pentagon and this is sort of the heart of the military contractor world on this and you see k.b.r.

which stands for kellogg brown and root formerly a subsidiary of halliburton and now they're sort of famous or infamous depending on how you want to put it. for managing or i suppose mr managing the logistics of the occupation of iraq and over here you've got general dynamics one of the biggest defense contractors of them all making fighter planes that all that sort of thing and just down the road we have asked lockheed martin boeing another giant sci c. complex and many many more they're all right here right next to the pentagon so that everyone can conveniently get together and sign contracts and. you know the launch and have fun together the building that we're standing in front of so that was my my third theory was probably don rumsfeld was hanging out with these guys as he has much of his life i mean he'd been a businessman he was. surly been he's been he's at his fingers'

a lot of pots as possible if there really were three different agendas operating i don't think you're being too conservative when i teach this case study women marry on the george washington university my students usually arrive at least six and sometimes seven or eight most of it if i miss it you left out for example the goose fight card carrying member of the likud party who was interested only in the security of israel and what the removal of iraq and then later iran and syria would do for that security you had other people with as was intimated here maybe even the presidents who were looking at finishing what had started in the first war and motivated somewhat perhaps by the fact that saddam tried to kill his father and you had people who were looking at it from a very philosophical neo conservative perspective let's bring chaos because out of chaos will come change that change will manifest itself in democracy and freedom throw them all there they are so i mean there there are all kinds of motivations

pulled seeing this dishonor and i do think you know candidly my own view as well i do believe that they thought there was weapons of mass destruction there but i don't think that was the primary motivation and of course when it didn't turn out to be weapons of mass destruction then they wanted to create democracy nation building which is exactly what george w. bush said during his first campaigning but not too bright but he ended up very good i think the vice president my. observations were that the vice president convinced the president he was not interested in details about that but was interested in the connection that al qaeda and saddam hussein were connected we gave him the excuse to justify the war that back in ninety nine and city water and his brother had signed off on in ninety eight you know the peanut colonel wilkerson thank you very much for being here with us tonight since so many of our politicians seem to have been bought and paid for by big oil and we find ourselves in oil wars across the middle east if there is only a side effect of will corruption on capitol hill and when other nations that are

completely bought off by people corporations look at us i think we're crazy sample . for it i'm sorry i didn't hear that fracking since the one nine hundred ninety s. this is from the proceedings of the national academy of science and. the reason i bring up fracking fracking is a way of extracting gas and other fossil fuel out of the out of the year out of the ground out of the soil france today. so no more fracking we're not going to do this these are active fracking was fracking is where you inject enormous amounts of chemical soup toxic chemicals into the ground under high pressure it cracks up the soil these are active fracking wells these are inactive for old dead fracking world and this vertical axis these sort of the world this is the amount of methane in in the water in the wells nearby this blue area is the action level for hazard from

the us to part of interior so anything above this is like deadly dangerous deadly stuff so so what we have here is we're creating dangerous deadly stuff i mean if you've seen the movie gasland for example here's here's a clip from the movie gas land where they're talking about what happens when fracking comes to town. and that it gets really new uses called hydraulic fracturing or fracking it blasts a mix of water and chemicals eight thousand feet into the ground. the fracking itself is like a mini earthquake intense pressure breaks apart a rock freezer took us. six states of documented one thousand incidents of groundwater contamination bubbles that has this when it comes out. i wonder if they can drill whether we like it or not it's a free for all our water was good before they started. it what about it was bad obviously we have

a problem here. it's the most amazing movie so here we have the united states and caged in wars overseas for oil in a war against our own environment for natural gas whereas france is saying ok no more fracking we're doing atomic power like crazy here japan just said we're going to scrub our nuclear goal they have thirty percent of the power comes from nuclear power plants it was their goal for twenty twenty was fifty percent they now say good bye bye twenty twenty they want to have fifty percent renewables and they're just you know they're ending their nuclear plants on the merkel in germany has said no we're going to close the last nuclear plant they're closing seventeen of them right now we're going to close the last nuclear plant by two thousand and twenty their plan is one nuclear plants by the way creates about eight hundred twenty megawatts of. gigawatt about a billion watts of power one nuclear plant in germany if you look at this graph

over here you see this is they put in place this program where the government would backstop the banks to give you a loan to put solar panels on your roof and the government power company would buy the electricity back from you at a premium they gave you enough money to pay off the loan on the on the solar panels on your house so people basically got free solar panels on their house in germany the government didn't pay for it people paid for the electric company paid for it and they have ended up now with with actually these numbers a reverse the red line is. it is germany and the green line is the u.s. and well what we're seeing here is germany is now producing eighteen thousand megawatts eighteen gigawatts that's the equivalent of twenty nuclear power plants worth of electricity in two thousand and ten whereas the u.s. this is from solar power the u.s. is only producing about two thousand but two nuclear power plants worth of electricity from solar plants so this is you know this is what's happening here what's happening is that these countries of the other countries are eating our

lunch and solar power and us is falling way behind be eating our lunch and solar power for example the world's largest solar plants the p.v. power stations they are it would be our names are about on the left hand side big countries canada italy germany italy spain germany germany spain these are the top ten countries for solar power in the in the world i thought we were like you know a big deal in this and we are following terribly badly behind this so it's you know pretty it seems pretty straightforward number one no more crazy wars for oil let's just let's just agree on that no more crazy wars for oil and in fact let's wrap up these wars and number two let's let's look at the lessons that some of these other countries are you are learning in like france say no more fracking halliburton runs that we don't want to do that anymore and let's go to solar power like germany is known and liked it and let japan is do it and let's do it now.

it's time for a daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question even with the death of bin ladin the war in afghanistan continues is a withdrawal in the near future your choices are yes the president has this small window to take a bold step and he's going to end our wars or no u.s. casualties in afghanistan are on the rise as the insurgents are ramping up their use of i e d's and other votes are split down the middle fifty fifty log on the target dot com let us know what you think the poll be open until tomorrow. coming up a debate on whether it's constitutional for pediatricians to ask parents if firearms are present in the home even it's to even if it is only to increase the safety of the child.

let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here and. i think. he'd be on well. we never got that that says we're going to keep you safe get ready because you get your freedom. you know sometimes you see

a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you don't. charge is a big issue. in florida republicans want the government silencing doctors the new bill is awaiting

governor rick scott signature that makes it illegal for doctors mostly pediatricians ask their patients who to kids if there's a gun in their house often doctors asked routine questions to see how safe a household is for a child by their swimming pool to ride a bike is there a gun in the home but the n.r.a. and their lobbying dollars have convince enough republican lawmakers to classify such a question by the doctor as an invasion of privacy you know violation of the second amendment violations of both the first and second amendment right a guy take my child to for a physical is invading my privacy only if he asks about my gun. so what's the point is legislation are doctors really conspiring to take people's guns away or offer his take on the issue guy smith writer songwriter and gun rights advocate his latest book is titled should live well guy welcome. good to meet you

sir great great to have you with us here's what i don't get why do the republicans want a big government stepping in between me and my kids and me and my kid and our doctor . well as a co-chairing libertarian i cannot comment on what the republicans do or don't do but i did have the benefit of reading the bill today before i came on your show this really boils down to three issues privacy choice and premiums now let's get a few things straight what instigated this whole mess was that a woman went to a doctor her pediatrician the pediatrician asked about guns not home and she merely declined to give him the information as is her right is a human being and as an american this doctor didn't want her to leave his office and eat a client to provide medical care for the child as is so little i just as as an american and as a doctor as well absolutely i would not argue that point in the slightest but guy

when you look at you know harvard did the study of fifty states from one thousand nine hundred ninety seven period during which sixty eight hundred sixty six thousand eight hundred seventeen children died from firearms accidental shootings and what they found was this was published in the journal trauma what they found was this study provides compelling evidence i'm quoting from dr trieste richmond the university of pennsylvania's firearm injury center says this study provides compelling evidence that states with high firearm availability or states of high childhood firearm death rates one of the most common questions or one of the most common things that sobbing parents i've had police officers tell me does that sobbing parents after their kid accidentally killed himself or his friend or the you know the guy's wife or whatever it one of the most common things they say is i had no idea that my kid knew that gun was in the in the in the drawer next to the bed i had no idea my kid you that gun was in the closet isn't it i mean you know

doctors saying you know do you drive a bicycle do you wear a helmet is there a pulling your house do you know how to swim are there guns in your house you know if they're locked up to it has your father taught you or your mother taught you about gun safety why should those why are those not good rational reasonable and questions. well let's a tech couple different points here i look forward to seeing the harvard study because i went by the c.d.c. web site before coming on the show in the last year that they had records from billable for public review fifty one children total that entire year died from fire and maxton so how hubbard managed create several thousand sounds like pretty much your typical gun control. in that case you're right let me restate this here's here's the exact job to have in that period six thousand eight hundred seventeen children between five and fourteen died from firearms thirty four hundred forty seven from homicide seven hundred eighty two from accidental shootings and fifty

nine hundred eighty eight for suicide so a seventeen hundred it wasn't five thousand thank you for correcting me but the point is still seventeen thousand dead children and many of those dead children would be dead if a doctor had simply said you have a gun in the house and the kid said yes the doctor had said they had a mom do you realize that your kid knows that you've got a gun. that's strange conclusion to come to because when you look at the total number of children and we're talking about fifty one a year or just zero point zero zero zero two percent of the children in this country the number of interventions they're going to happen because a pediatrician ask a question about a gun is going to be almost on measurable it's going to be down the statistical noise look if it's if it's one or two children is that we're saving the lives of one or two children. to take away the privacy rights of all women and mothers in this country and these our cities are not to us in this information in our head the laws that prevent them from from telling anybody this information and that's part

of what that sort of legislation did is it said the doctors are not going to be allowed to require this information doctors can still our house but a woman is not going to be denied care of her or her child because they did ask they're not going to lose their doctor they're not going to have to move on to another man. so so you're willing to take this right in this this one piece why not you know i you know i get it you know the n.r.a. spends the n.r.a. represents billions of dollars worth of business you know the the n.r.a. is a trade association for the weapons business and it's actually there's a national maybe the designation of the scene in the united states. the n.r.a. i don't speak for the n.r.a. but the n.r.a. it's not the gun lobby that's the national shooting sports foundation. the n.r.a. does their firm lobby might my point was and i realize you don't speak for them that and that's what baffles me is why wouldn't you whether you know as a as

a gun rights advocate and and and frankly i think in many ways i'm a gun rights advocate i mean i think it should be up the state to figure out how they're going to do it but i don't understand why you would swear you would again want to have government the government of florida staking itself in the relationship between a doctor and a page. well you could call it sticking themselves into the relationship by the legislature and that everyone has and has to have the right to privacy they have to have the rights to the choice of the don't have the right to privacy when you go to the doctor absolutely a government has the right to say there are certain questions this doctor may not ask you because because we are infinite wisdom as legislator tours inside that you have a right to privacy in this area but not in this area but what if i actually was sexually transmitted diseases or what if they're asking about you know i mean there's a million things people talk to of their about their doctors that could be incredibly embarrassing that's true and that was the core of the way early people

it was decided on a woman's privacy rights with her doctor. i'm not sure i'm not sure how the two are connected but in any case guy smith. thanks for being with us tonight pleasure to be here sounds to me like another ginned up controversy by the n.r.a. but leave the floor republicans to take up the fight after all they need something to distract floridians from their plans to cut education funding unemployment benefits medicaid all the by the way to pay for tax cuts for oligarchy like rick scott and what better fear card than sane doctors are a part of a secret army to disarm americans of their god given right to own a gun it's tragic that florida is so close to buy into this. crazy alert doing the important work of the people of maine so what's

a more pressing issue for republican state lawmakers in maine health care for their citizens or whoopi pie it's sadly the whoopie s. when republicans in the state house consider just eight days of debate sufficient to pass a bill screwing come to customers of health insurance companies just eight days jam it through yet these same republicans wanted to spend fifty two days merely seven times longer debating and renewing legislation to make the whoopie pies means official state treat and of course that's not to be confused with the official state dessert which is a blueberry pie maybe there were a lot of moon pie lobbyists trying trying to urge legislate lawmakers to reconsider in those eight weeks next up on the maine state house agenda the official state cereal will be curios or frosted flakes they could be debating and eating for months and maybe they shouldn't screwed up those health care protections i see it epidemic of diabetes coming i mean. conservatives daniel you can sort of daniel helper from the weekly standard and jamie weinstein from the daily caller joined me

after the break barlow a liberal mid week problem. you know sometimes you see a story and the scene so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.