culture is that so much about him and the huge musician has a part time status of friends is it all about libya now with understanding the ongoing changes often violent in the arab middle east what makes yemen and syria different from what's going on in. but can they loan a show or you'll get the real headlines with none of them are saying now i can live in washington d.c. and i will take a look at the chances for this great recession to turn into another great depression and i will tell you how eight hundred he is buying up advocacy groups to support its gigantic merger with t. mobile usa but first let's take a look at what the mainstream media has been covering on missing all the real stories.

down i guide you gingrich used to be speaker of the house he caused a government shutdown back in the ninety's he cheated on a couple wives and then blamed his love for the country for his and develop he has also launched a new presidential bid which has been doomed to fail since day one i mean let's face it he doesn't have a shot nobody likes news and he's probably beaten every flip flop record in the book when it comes to saying stupid things than having a lot from back just hours later and now the majority of the staff has quit and the mainstream media is acting like this is a freaking shocker. plans to relaunch here we go it's a real launch whatever is left of his campaign in your senate joyous on sunday this guy gets on fox whatever he wants to he's got ample political experience was the speaker of the house he was the leader of a movement that of course so wanted to turn america around and he's got all this political experience how could the guy have such

a horrible campaign go away it seems as if the campaign imploded before it even really got started and not unlike when it launched it is really the duty which is seriously considering dropping out of the race so you. credited rumors form. or what you said yesterday about a new great gingrich why why do you think this is happening why is his campaign in some form of disarray right now a new game bridge to a candidate without a campaign staff but still in the race for the white house which made an appearance this morning outside his home assuring reporters this latest setback is not the end of his bid. now listen presidential politics is important because it has to do with who bite be the next president of the country that's a big deal well let's talk about people that actually have a chance the people who might actually affect the country for better or for worse not the ones that are just trying to get their name in the spotlight so they can sell more books you know i'm just dying to know who out there really cares about all the beltway politics aside from those who live inside of the beltway

considering the extent with which the mainstream media covers this stuff and like i've said before you wonder why americans are so far removed from our wars that's because the media makes you that far removed they don't cover it because they live in a tiny little global where everybody just strokes each other's egos and that's the kind of stuff that real america couldn't care about either but as long as the rich and the powerful people are watching but i guess corporations have no problem throwing money at the media machine kind of exhausting to think about why don't we move on to something that actually matters you know secretary of defense robert gates who won't hold that position for too much longer he's stepping down on june thirtieth is doing a farewell tour of sorts and he's turned into a bit of a downer to be quite honest but more importantly was just a downer he's turned from being a champion of defense cuts into somebody who's desperately grabbing with every last breath for america's military power to continue growing for the war in afghanistan continuing on as well as troops needing to stay in iraq and you just cannot believe that every other country around the world doesn't want to beef up its defense

capabilities despite the fact that they're all broke just like the us now while giving a speech to nato this morning gave the lamented the quote deal if not dismal future of the military alliance because everyone else isn't paying their fair share because america. might not be able to for long either the reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the united states congress and the american body politic writ large to expand increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are currently on willing to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense. you know i saw every channel this morning to vote maybe thirty seconds amid it taught us what gates had to say but overall it came across as more of a boo ya sort of coverage you know like washout europe gates is calling you out but you know what would it kill you guys to actually analyze what he had to say maybe

ask why nato even exists anymore considering that there is no single common thread that holds the glue together there is no soviet union that's why there is no consensus when it comes to fighting wars abroad that don't affect us all like the ones in iraq that live in afghanistan is terrorism a common threat yes is everyone else realize the holding over one hundred thousand ground troops and a country with fewer than one hundred al qaeda members is not the way to fight terrorism yes but are you really surprised secretary gates that not everyone is interested in devoting their resources to intervene in the war in libya a civil war that has nothing to do with them and you know i think gates is right in a sense when he says that europe takes the back road they get to leave back relax knowing that america is going to take the lead and that's because we've taken that position who would be under the impression the impression excuse me that america was handle wall when we've installed a base in almost every single country and honestly the fact that european nations aren't willing to drive their countries into bankruptcy by spending more than all

other nations combined on defense that's not something to lament the fact that countries like the u.k. are actually scaling down their defense budgets as something to admire and maybe we can take a cue from them rather than cry about the fact that they don't want a copy of the global policeman those are just a few thoughts on something that the mainstream media completely missed. all right let's talk about the economy or at least what's left of it to talk about you know i've been harping on the show lately about the fact that nobody really seems to be doing anything about the fact that all factors of pointing in the wrong direction unemployment went up in may the economy only added fifty four thousand jobs and many expect june's numbers to be even worse we were part of the may of the case shiller home price index saw home prices fall to the lowest point since march of two thousand and three and now robert shiller saying that another ten to twenty five percent slump in those home prices wouldn't surprise me at all but all street

seems to be on the verge of what many are calling another panic mode with layoffs scheduled pessimism pervading and threats of downgrades being thrown around a new c.n.n. poll shows that forty eight percent of americans believe that this is either very likely or somewhat likely that the united states will experience a depression within the next twelve months so is this next depression and habitable planets so he stopped here to discuss this with me is anthony the director of economic research for the reason foundation anthony thanks so much for coming on tonight sure what do you say i mean i don't know if you want to call it another great depression you want to call it the double dip in the great recession there are so many names but are we heading down that direction of the out of the well we've been heading that direction i think i was on your show i don't know how many times last year saying look we may or may not have a double dip recession but for lack of a better term one way or another the economy for the next several years is going to suck it's not going to be a depression at least not in a technical sense of a depression that's not possible the next year but i think that we are seeing all

these negative negative indicators and people are freaking out about them because they were for some reason expecting us to actually have a positive year in the economy like that we wouldn't be freaking out about these these numbers over the past couple months if in january economists had been mistaken in trying to predict the rosy rosy numbers we've been in a folk of three for the past couple years. this is that there's this i mean i've been i've been writing about this for some place listening to those and nine so others this is not a real recovery that we've been in which is why the economy continues to milly's just kind of shrug along ok well first of all the recession technical depression walk us through what the technical differences are right so americans can get it straight it will be so technically a recession is when we've had two quarters or six months of negative g.d.p. growth and so right now the economy's been growing at about one point eight percent so to that was for the first quarter this year so to have a recession we would have to have negative growth in this particular quarter and

then the following quarter so we wouldn't even really call it a technical recession until the end of this year and to have a depression it's a much longer time frame of negative g.d.p. i think we were told that we already got out of the recession right of the recession was over and it clearly doesn't want to be a lot of let's talk about the fact though and like i said this is something i've been harping about on the show lately which is that nobody has been doing anything about it because we have a congress that's just completely. obsessed with this debate over raising the debt ceiling over lowering the deficit over coming up a budget cuts but now we don't have any kind of stimulus we don't have to wonder if you need to there is nothing propping anything what do you think needs to happen i mean you and i have bashed quite a bit on the show too but do you think that we need a q e three or that we need another stimulus but i'm pretty sure you can say no i'm going to say no to another stimulus is if you just look at the what the last them listed didn't get us very far maybe if we had a little more it is what it was wonderful be what rosy out there so so the there's

this desire to want to do something right now congress is polarized it's not so much that they're bickering over the debt ceiling to they are but it's that there is a polarization in the republicans have one house of the senate has the other and there's not a lot of agreement of what we're going to do so that's going to freeze us no matter almost what's going on the reason that we bash q.e. two is because it doesn't really do that much. hope the economy needed q we knew the first quantitative easing and even burning said it was a big champion of all q e three is going to do is maybe have a marginal impact and what you could measure that is maybe a point five percent impact on the unemployment ratio at absolute best probably less but it's going to have a huge impact. inflation fears so that's going to be a big problem going down the road q e three isn't the answer another state really see rising gas it's actually. not the answer another stimulus isn't going to work because the last stimulus it wasn't just wasn't enough money as it was probably going to say oh it has been it has been saying in our going that we need to spend trillions and trillions more it's where that money spending is spent isn't going to

create a long term economic growth it's not going to spark a private sector to do anything because there's a whole bunch of other things that need to be dealt with in the economy like a possibly start the private sector to do something ok it's a question we're asking all the time it's not giving them more tax breaks they have plenty of tax breaks i mean that's where i sit on the money they sit on the cash and they don't hire people because they don't need the american worker anymore they just go overseas so i want you so i would say that i would say lower taxes but let's say we don't care so let's we'll go with your scenario we don't need to give wealthy americans more attacks against giving wealthy very good evidence that we're going to deal with our discolorations the delegates out there is either taken into odds over to me like he's going to say this will give you that one so now so now what do we do so it's not going to be cutting taxes the republicans like to do. what we need to do is fix the regulatory environment for companies now doesn't mean deregulate it doesn't give a lot get rid of a lot of regulations what it means is there's a whole bunch of incentives for companies to spend or not spend money to invest or

not invest money in the economy and those can be. anything from if you're talking with the banks rules on how they can use their capital to if you're talking about just in the the the real economy occupational licensing standards these if you look going. down to the state level a whole wall of regulations that make it difficult for people to start companies to start small businesses to become a hairdresser even you have to go through this whole arduous process in arizona that's like a year and a half long if you just want to cut someone's cut so cut someone's hair on the state level there's things we can do a national level it's a massive regulatory environment this is nanny state where we think we're trying to help people we're not helping people that's so because i don't think the rules are all that bad we're going to have a few more rules and we're just talking about germany of the other day and everybody you think ought to be in their work share program which i doubt he'll be called socialism but if you actually give companies the incentive to keep people around and the government helps out then they'll keep those people around but let's

talk about something in terms of unemployment and what we're seeing right we've talked about this last generation there's a lot of people graduating from college graduated from high school right now and this is the worst possible employment environment that you would want to enter not only competing with the people that graduated the last few years the last two or three right that so i think it jobs but now we have older people but also aren't leaving their jobs as early because their four hundred one k. is it seems they have been just completely dismantled they've disappeared their ruined what do you do about that that's i mean that is a symptom of the larger problem of the economy not working so what we have right now is we have just as you said. i think something like seventeen percent of the people coming out of college right now can't get a job of the however the b.l.s. sort of defines sort of young americans with a twenty four twenty one or so so that's a really high unemployment number that's out there is not because they can't have

a hairdresser it's not. the the problem there is those individuals are seeking employment at companies that don't want to hire because it is not in their interest to invest in this economy because they are not sure what the future regulatory environments going to be for them they don't know what the tax environment is going to be for them they don't know if the federal reserve is going to go to q e three and jack. inflation they don't know if q.e. two has already created a massive inflation problem for them which is going to hurt their profits in areas down the road there's massive concern singer anything there's not there's any certainty in terms of the company and there's obviously a little uncertainty on wall street right now six weeks straight we would see the dow kind of jumping in plummeting and there's uncertainty for anybody who's out there looking for a job let's talk about i don't have to going to obviously what you think is the greater problem of this all is housing we just reported that housing prices now at the lowest point since march of two thousand and three and now shiller are saying hey might go ten twenty five percent lower and i would also not be surprised if it was ten to twenty five percent my projections are looking at the you know that

wasn't his he wasn't calling the forecasters are saying you would be surprised my forecast would be seven to thirteen percent is where we need housing prices to drop before we can see a recovery start and there's i i could remember all these things off the top of my head i knew so i created this list of five things that we need for housing to recover we need for home prices to actually fall to where they need to get to then start bouncing up we need to supply all these homes that are sitting out there they need to be sold we need for the shadow inventory which are all of the homes that have been hit the market yet that are being to late in the foreclosure process they need to come out so we can sell them we need for the mortgage servicing agreements which the regular leaders of the banks are going back and forth on how you actually manage mortgages once they've been made collecting payments and who can foreclose on what that needs to be sorted out because that stalling the whole foreclosure process and we need to fix penny and freddie mac. all in under a year and a half so that we can have a nice pretty economy by the time president gets elected to the us it was a tall order i didn't know what i doubt and argument and that's why the congress

isn't doing much because they're paralyzed with this daunting task of how do you approach and that's just housing that's a massive daunting task for us to expect congress keeps all of these things so it's yes there can be a lot of frustration at washington and how it's not work. the federal reserve and how they're not doing enough but they're facing a pretty tall order and we've put ourselves in this position my view we talked about this before we put ourselves in his vision position by not letting the economy sort itself out two thousand and nine that we tried to do things to prop itself up along the way and so now we're you dependent on the government to fix the problem or we just have to let it sort itself out which is going to take two to five years really sucky economy while some people say that you know it could be even more it could be it could be at least ten years before employment goes back to normal and who knows what the housing situation is going to be but that sucks you know i don't i think you always want to give something a suppressant if you think there's a really bad illness coming there are answers to these problems and that

a course where we are there is about nation we have how we like to approach them there's lots of people in there you know going to their congressman this is how you fix the problem there are answers out there it's just a matter of can they be sorted through the whole big mess of ideas that the right wants come into place to do something about you know there is no one magic answer and i'm sure that no one will ever be able to agree on what the meantime the rest of us is up to sit around you know totaling our. thank you so much for joining us and i am absolutely. are we saw much more to come tonight as the obama administration given a free pass from the government leader bringing the latest on the court case on the straight and how do you keep activist groups from raising a fuss over a contentious merger just on the price i'll give you details on the latest a mega merger and why all the sudden some organizations are supporting this. internal me or me with the mechanisms to do the work to bring justice and accountability. i have every right to know what my government should do if you want

to know why i pay taxes. but i would characterize obama as the charismatic. of american exceptionalism. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then he glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok if you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right leg. i think

even one well. whatever government says here keep you safe get ready because of her freedom. for. the. first few.

while we consistently bring you updates on the war against whistleblowers like bradley manning we've also touched on another leader out there thomas drake a former senior n.s.a. officer was sharing information about his branch of intelligence and engaging in wasteful spending and he was sharing this information with a reporter from the baltimore sun now we should note that drake has continued to stand by the fact that all the information that he shared the sun paper was unclassified and he reiterated that in an interview with sixty minutes. ever communicate because of information should be on government. no one should ever want to ever there was one of the fundamental rules where there was oral communication was written electronic or later on even in hard copy it was all classified period. he's been charged with ten thousand is relating to whistle blowing after he leaked information about westphal spending fraud and abuse within the n.s.a. of the newspaper but we learned this week that instead of facing a possible thirty five years in jail a found convicted will agree to

a plea deal he says it is guilty for exceeding authorize use of a computer and that's considered a misdemeanor and all those felony charges will be dropped when we covered this story in past years we spoke with government accountability projects just on radek about how the drake case is a clear example of obama's extremely heavy handed approach to stopping anybody out there who may be a whistleblower no matter how significant the information was. leaks about contractor fraud are ok weeks like we can leaks or anything about you know endangering troop movements or telling nuclear secrets that kind of thing is not ok yet drake it's precisely because the person in the earlier category who was pulling the whistle on billions of dollars you know just one brings up a good point drake was simply trying to point out that the government's nine eleven approach was overblown that it won't cut any intelligence projects no matter how old they are while the fact that it was rightly alarmed by the massive amounts of

data that is being collected on american citizens regardless it's kind of strange how this whole case has completely fallen apart and so suddenly after all the government and the obama administration went after thomas drake with every weapon they have treating him like a hardened criminal but all of a sudden a plea deal comes forward from the prosecutors and the ten counts of felony are dismissed i think that begs the question what was all the hype about and at this point what is thomas ricks future sure is going to. i pass a new jail time by accepting the misdemeanor but a report from reuters says that a sentencing case is scheduled for june fifteenth although it's not really clear what so could it be that the obama administration realize they are being a little too aggressive in their war on leakers given media attention finally put them in their place saying goes the jury's still out on how much. of this march we found out they would be acquiring t. mobile usa for a cool thirty nine billion dollars it's a move that's received a lot of scrutiny especially if you consider the only three companies are going to

dominate the entire u.s. wireless market and the combined revenues for those two companies will add up to two hundred fifty two billion dollars now according to a twenty at a post on the company's public policy blog this deal is necessary in order to give the necessary network capacity to work within the quote broadband revolution and the claim is that the deal is going to allow them to expand their network so they can reach ninety seven percent of americans so it's a battle is brewing right here in washington with congress the justice department absi see all the good hard look but by recruits like the and p. and the lad getting involved that's right those liberal leaning public advocacy groups have each issued statements in support of the deal which is leaving a lot of people out there to believe that it might just be all about the cash let's just say the eighteenth is a very generous corporate donor so does this mean that even groups like the n.w.c. can be bought joining me to discuss this is our brodsky communications director of public knowledge our thanks so much for joining us tonight. first starters i know

give me your take on this why would the end of the why would glad suddenly come out in support of an eighty n.t.t. mobile usa merger do they have anything to do with my kind of stuff not usually that sort of. organisations who usually telecommunications much of the telecommunications. usually have to take. well so you've got it might seem a little bit fishy then right i mean granted there are companies out there that are supporting. usa that didn't take any money from them when you have the kind of lazy people who receive i think a million dollar donation in two thousand and nine you've got to start asking some questions but i think that's right there and it's not just the police there are lots of groups out there a.t.t. spent sixty two million dollars from its foundation in two thousand and nine to

very sense on three groups and it's also worth noting that the head of the h.c.g. county actually which gives out all this money is not someone with a background in philanthropy it's the company's chief lobbyist now whether there's an explicit quid pro quo probably not but as alan miller from the sunlight foundation is supporters saying in one of the two stories about this it came out today there's something in the back of your mind of like two favorite benefactors or so i think you know very obviously in the back of people's minds because it's a little depressing i think for people that live here in washington d.c. either within the beltway you realize well that's politics that's just how it works but i don't think most americans when they think about some of these organizations that are supposed to be you know advocating for minorities for equal before the public good whatever you want to call it they don't normally think of it as as somebody who still needs money and who still can be bought from a corporation i want to get into what exactly this merger would mean i mean do you think that that is an incredibly dangerous idea that. might come together and how

will we have three options when it comes to our wireless carrier. that's exactly right it is a very dangerous idea i mean this is probably the most dangerous merger that she has been proposed at the same time it's probably the one that would be easiest for the government to block if they wanted to and that's because if you let you have board national carriers now you have horizon eighteen t. sprint and t. mobile and t. mobile it's been this sort of perkiest of the bunch of edges catherine zeta jones commercials that have those nice commercials of the guy hanging over the other guy as the a.t.t. network was a drag on on the proceedings there they had a nice little letting video with you know the royals they did it they have a really nice persona they had very innovative good plans and good coverage they'd be gone absorbed into jetstar bay t.n.t. and now we change the whole marketplace because then you'd have some eighty some percent of the whole revenue going to two companies say t. and t. and verizon and you wonder what's going to happen with sprint which is the third largest carrier much less all the smaller regional ones well so what we're getting

little people let's go ahead some of the effects that we're not assuming that obviously that means that they might be able to charge you a whole lot more if you only have really two or three options out there like you said depending on what really happens to sprint but in terms of your network capability is would this be better for the consumer the five seven percent of americans might be able to be covered in that you might have you know broadband in rural areas or it's all about not really true let's be clear that they are covering if you look at their commercials with one wilson all the red balls falling down on them they are covering most of the country anyway and they're not increasing their coverage that much with key mobile just by a couple million people now if a t.v. wanted to go invest in rural areas they're free to do that now they're free to do that it any time they're free to do that without spending thirty nine billion dollars to buy t. mobile that's what doesn't make sense about those promises and about this deal. yeah you know i makes me quite angry because i have eighteen and their services

sucks here in washington d.c. myself or never works so it's a little infuriating to hear about i want to quickly get into the entire four gene idea to write we hear about forty networks and how they are the fastest and agency a couple months ago i remember started touting their network as a four g. network but they actually do anything to change it technically to make about way not yet i mean four g. is one of those sort of mystical things sort of like a unicorn it made a bit of here might work maybe oh and a horse with no little horn attached to its head i mean there is technology to be to be serious for a minute it is going to be rolled out that will be faster and better on different parts of the spectrum but for most people it's not there yet and for a change you try to take a good while before it does all right so what's your prediction are we have like i said some of these organizations behind it we have facebook you know oracle coming out and supporting this merger do you think that this is he's going to go through all this really isn't it an f.c.c. play this is the justice department playing and looking at it strictly on any trust

granted this is what they call a horizontal merger when one company buys another company in the same line of business big think that the odds are about even maybe a little better than that there's deals going down are you have and want to look a lot let's make sure we're clear on just ok yes so that it's not happening is what we're trying to say not happening right i'm sorry he wishes to go back to the hey days when i was the largest corporation right over it broken up and they're trying as hard as they can are thanks so much for joining us my pleasure thank you for having me. all right still to come tonight you can catch all of the media frenzy today surrounding the release of e-mails from when sarah palin was the governor of alaska but we did and tonight some members of the media are earning our tools on award for their over the top coverage then god and g.o.p. politics some presidential hopefuls come out of office on their side to speak about religion and why some kind of think that god must be a republican activist or not.