well you know we know we are meaner and meaner than we are. so today i'm announcing my resignation from congress. yeah you can forget all that because in other real news president obama is getting sued over libya will break down the fight over checks and balances. it's a sign of the times welcome to bloomberg fill us all grow up protestors is setting up shop in new york city and they say they are not leaving until mayor bloomberg takes back his budget cuts. so just how bad did the u.s. want to get their hands on alleged russian arms dealer viktor booth well the answer

is just a wiki leaks cable away we'll have more on that case. out just a day in the life of a new york city bicyclist so what is with the happy find there anyway should the police be protecting citizens and not to mention bikers instead. good evening it's thursday june sixteenth eight pm here in washington d.c. i'm lauren lister in you're watching our t.v. well take a look at the big news coming from capitol hill today if you haven't already seen it let's roll that tape. maybe this is a theory is right now anthony weiner about to announce his resignation so today i'm announcing my resignation spoil lot of anger in that room totally for the warning

for almost exactly four minutes he has hit rock bottom or there are seeds of a potential if he were to come back in that maybe this was just the beginning of the healing but not the end of his political career for minutes it's been driving the twenty four hour news cycle and believe it or not we know his resignation may not be the most important news you need to know coming from the nation's capital as the united states continues its military intervention in libya the two branches of government are now battling it out as a result ten members of congress are suing president obama now in an attempt to end that u.s. involvement in libya for failing for him to get congressional approval now the white house claims that it's not actually in violation of the law because it says the u.s. is not actually at war but is just operating in a support role well first i want to throw up a few figures a little bit of a pictorial graphic so you can decide what you think the u.s. his involvement has been let's look at this so when you see it depicted in pictures

all of those forces and ships and planes represent the u.s. commitment to libya for the first couple months of it now let's look at you know compared to another let's take the u k. we're very have it why a difference when you look at the number of those little plane you see there and maybe you will that needed someone else was stepping up let's say france they're really pushing for this intervention yeah not quite the commitment of the united states over the course of this operation so you're going to fight what you make of those figures but earlier i spoke to david swanson about this he's author of this book you see here war is a lie and i asked him because he is one that believes that this war is the legal the white house of course saying quite the contrary i asked that he could prove the white house wrong here's his response well the white house doesn't make the arguments that many of its borders make the argument it made in its report to congress yesterday was that the war powers act does not apply much less the

constitution because this is neither a war nor still a ts this is something else this is a military operation that doesn't rise to the level of a still the speech is absolutely absurd the war powers act was written in one nine hundred seventy three very intentionally and clearly to encompass all military engagements to clearly imminent threats of us still of these and anything i'm only still east. and so there was a program yesterday in progress and then a speech signature it was this morning congressman dennis kucinich was to be a former lawyer from the reagan white house he was defending obama and he asked this guy twice never got an answer if there were two thousand missions over the united states by a foreign nation and many of them were dropping bombs would there be war would there be hostilities i would that raise that concern i want to ask you david it has even if you know you say that it doesn't even matter what the u.s. engagement is that this would be illegal but what about their argument that the

u.s. is in a support role and that they're not engaged in hostilities aren't drones striking libya still is that not hostilities. they are and the presidents report yesterday admitted that in sort of their unfettered whole remark but the war powers act i have more and more respect for this law it was written in one thousand nine hundred eighty three and it's a significantly says the a c. includes hostilities in military operations for the united states is a partner with other nations in acting in this sort of a role it's in their read that law to argue that it doesn't apply for reasons that the crafters of that law had the foresight to anticipate is just crazy one president obama didn't teach constitutional law what do you think you know he's really thinking here. can't well he's thinking that he's the president any wants to get away with what he can get away with he could have gotten congress to authorize war in libya it would've been quite easily done he could have done it in the sixty

day gap after he started the war he chose not to there's an intention here to enlarge presidential powers to strip away congressional powers and that's even now in writing in an amendment that sitting in the senate in the or in a section of the defense authorization act of two thousand and twelve it's sitting in the senate like a like dozens of taking time bombs of future wars waiting to become law presidents want and this president is no exception the power to make wars on their own then for them why not more than ten members of congress that are really calling him on that's a dramatic way. well that's an excellent question i think there should be the full body but you know you told their efforts in recent weeks castillo limits to ninety one particular bills denying u.s. ground troops expressing their concerns and so forth there has been a huge numbers majority in the house of representatives but i think it would be plausible for the court to reply in this case congress to cut off the funding if it

chooses congress can impeach if it chooses that's not happening and that's an interesting point i want to talk about the money because the white house had met that it is then inquired about that this has cost the pentagon more than seven hundred million dollars and is expected to cost one point one billion dollars by september but this is existing money from the d o d budget can congress block that i'm just curious it sounds like you're saying they are and ok even if the white house is making this argument that they're not violating war powers act because the u.s. isn't really out war whatever you think of that does the white house need to go to congress on its spending this kind of money when the government spending is such a huge issue right now. one would think so one would hope so that the court case is dramatically strengthened by the fact that congress is not appropriate in a dime for war making in libya that helps tremendously because the court could easily argue that have been appropriated funding congress has thereby approved of

a war where congress may do with the senate goes along with the house is passed bills denying the use of any money from from those particular bill simply in the defense budget bills for the coming year for a war in libya the fact is the president is blowing around that and taking the money from the incredible slush fund in the pentagon and the cia and the secret budgets and bush is innovation allowing the presidents to transfer money secretly to secret budgets he says out of control what congress could do in response would be a pass a bill through both houses deny him permission to use any money from any source in a war in libya and who do that it could do that tomorrow and that's not on the agenda it should be and the real political well may be more broadly than even when clinton violated the war powers act in kosovo he went to congress to at least get funding approved which is then seen as every is going to congress at sixteen game mark i thought of the interesting touching there's a little bit that i was reading

a one your latest writings when you mention that a college student when you were speaking asked if you were being extreme to call this war illegal and a point you made was that you know illegal isn't some you know ideological statement you're talking about the law here i'm curious what you think that says about the way the public now sees us war as the u.s. of course being in a constant state of war now for ten years. yeah it's somehow impolite or radical to talk about war says illegal when that ought to be and we're clear cut question then whether a war is moral or sorrowful of course we have a majority opposing our current wars in this country with no response out of congress that's appropriate but these wars are blatantly illegal and the war in libya is the most glaringly illegal war we've ever seen outgoes by far you know clinton at least had the money clinton didn't violate the sixty day limit and so forth this is intentionally going around congress and avoiding any appearance

whatsoever of getting authorization from congress ok real quickly a group of twenty five u.s. senators almost all democrats had a cup of tea party republicans and they sent a letter to a bomb that hurricane and they have a sizable reduction of u.s. troops part as in july in afghanistan do you see this as significant and you think it carries any weight. i know i certainly hope so and so i don't want to talk it down but it's not an action it's it's it's an appeal to a higher authority from our first branch of government to its executive it's an inversion of our government to operate you know kids can write letters to the president senators can begin and end wars and that's what they ought to be doing right but yet we see this kind of these token those i'm curious yes or no if you see these as more token moves or actually affected instruments well it's certainly cannot hurt for senators and congress members to be talking about their opposition

to the war in afghanistan but there has been heard a concerted effort by the leadership of both parties in both sides of congress to avoid taking any action on afghanistan and back is a problem that cannot be addressed by elections when this promised a rose since the election and will be broken prior to an election we need a withdrawal next month in trying to seize not forcing it to happen that was david swanson author of war is a lie now you solve what you missed on capitol hill or just focused on the winner news and similarly in new york our cameras were camped out in queens today pointed at anthony weiner apartment or that worth taking him out at his press conference and brooklyn those actually may not have been the most important places in new york for news cameras to be pointed as our cameras found out our kids and. shows you what is getting overlooked in this summer of scandal. actually this summer the us media is buzzing with these burning hot stories that you do with your eyes seem to

believe you me you do not want to see. what the relationship like between casey and her parents and how is it now that she's accusing her father of sexual abuse the masterminds of big t.v. networks are new deep in this historic news coverage who could believe that congressman weiner's pictures or not pictures could be the number one story on capitol hill sixty tweets of a congressman are being stretched to the likes of the lewinsky scandal i did not have sexual relations with that woman. he was looking right at me but he said that and every detail is getting sucked out of a child murder case she's a sweet looking. she looks quite well and frail with her hit back in a ponytail like a cheerleader. meanwhile new york city has seen a small town of its own a few blocks away from wall street in new york city the callous protesters on the

steps and on a collapse of always different is that. the people pushing camp out here are saying this is just the beginning people spend the night here so their message is heard. a loud no to goof balls budget cuts that will throw more jobs out there when bill. really. the banks are sitting on trillions of dollars of our money. we're going to stay here until we get it we want to share we're all prepared so here we actually have pillows this resistance is inspired by global alpha course to protests over the last year not only of the governments here in our country but the governments abroad don't seem to want anybody to have any kind of subsistence of living. citizen journalists are here. i mean stream media is not once you go outside the us

you go outside of her and you start covering the unions and workers or are fighting against can't bear to look for mayor and they want wall street to. your tax who's well those are likely your sponsors if you're a big commercial t.v. news operation as the media treads carefully around the issues that people's anger is growing. so how many will be camping out here for the media she can out of that self-imposed a blue to report what matters. now it's not just new york city where this is going on protesters have also put a tent cities in wisconsin it's known as walkerville they're protesting the governor's policies they are critics have been calling him a union buster ever since that whole public union kind of crackdown occurred a few months ago now also walkerville bloomberg bill these are all channeling the shantytowns during the great depression and then as hooverville to find out what

really this is all about and the similarities earlier i spoke to dean night he is one of the bloomberg bill campers and his spokes person for new yorkers against budget cuts and i asked him what is driving hand in many other campers now to camp out on the streets not just protest but camp here's what he had to say. well it's outrage and it's also. ratcheting up the protest bloomberg zille started on the heels of a very large protest of city workers and teachers twenty thousand and the very next day twenty five thousand construction workers marched from downtown brooklyn across the bridge to city hall we greeted him with signs of . what we are trying to do is. push harder

bloomberg is very insulated very isolated except for his little club of. and you know people are hurting and we need to. get this across and find a way to put affective pressure on bloomberg that's what i was when i was him. sorry go ahead and finish your sentence didn't mean to step on your tongue. we want to force bloomberg to do the right thing we know it's very difficult for him to do it he's making money hand over fist by taking money away from us. you know want to i want to get to what you believe would be doing the right thing but i want to touch on something that you mentioned about the big banks that you that you say that bloomberg is doing that he's starting their interest more new york has really seen you know at the center of country the country by many as very

cosmopolitan and very wealthy you know wall street is the capital of finance we've seen wall street bounce back from the economic crisis they've had quarter of record profits and do you think that characterizes new york or do you think the reality is very different from most people there. well i live in the bronx the bronx is. the poorest urban county in the country. it's followed very closely by kings county also known as brooklyn. is the super rich of wall street and the upper east side are surrounded by desperate poverty and deepening economic crisis but bloomberg. or the governor have turned completely deaf called ear to the needs of the vast majority of new yorkers whether it's the issue of rent subsidies or the basic right to an education

what we really have is a revenue crisis the rich have seen their taxes for continuously to the low as they have been since before reagan was president reagan reagan institute a revolution today he would be considered an economic liberal the rich people are running roughshod over this country and bloomberg is one of them and what's necessary is first of all to make the rich pay a fair share of the taxes another thing to do would be to stop the wars and cut back the pentagon taxes from new yorkers to the pentagon are about sixty billion dollars which is somewhere between three and four times the combined shortfall in the budgets of new york state and new york city that was the night with different solutions for the budget crisis in new york he spoke for new yorkers

against budget now it is not just the thing these challenges believe and the nation eight. trillion dollars in debt or anything to struggle to pay their bills and their creditors residents are paying a price not just cut and jobless. this but cities and states have increased fines and fees to raise revenue in new york for example police are accused of going on a bicycle ticketing blitz to meet quota this next guy maybe one victim he got a ticket for not writing in the for writing in a bike lane or not riding in a bike lane sucker so confusing he put his quite on the line here some of it. you see here for human rights not when the boys were. little. or the food. and fuel for food were very fluid limits. and. your vices. from five dollars.

are yours to see or are you the pouring rain drops of your russians and you would rather you look like. now that all obviously resonate with people because it became an internet sensation it's gotten more than three million views online and earlier i spoke with that by crasher and filmmaker and by take it receiver case the night that i asked him why he thinks this video is such a hit. you know the you're not the first person to ask me that and i think i think for two reasons i think there are two aspects of the video that sort of trans social and language barriers and that's kind of the physical humor to it and then just the idea of kind of speaking out against something that is often hard to have

a voice so in my case it was the police department but any kind of bureaucracy that you kind of feel like the little guy and i think this video kind of kind of empowered me you know a lot of boys than i'll certainly say three million is quite a loud voice but it's interesting i read something you were quoted you said that you were not making this video as much to rise up to demand that it just be funny that you didn't see this is rising up to demand so do you not see this as political . you know i think that. regarding it being funny i think that was my intention in making that video you can't need as a filmmaker i can't sit down and say i make a video that's going to reach three and a half million people in a week i just want to make a funny video so my buddy oscar i went out and shot this in a day and put it online is a joke but now that i think it has kind of the eyeballs of such a large audience i do think that there's a little bit of a responsibility that comes with it so my intention wasn't for it to be political but i think as a result of its reach there's kind of

a responsibility you know my shoulders well it shows that people may you know really relate to kind of take it again to find it something that across the country as i said cities and states are increasing those lines as increasingly they're facing these huge debt burdens do you think that this is an example of that kind of this ridiculous getting a ticket for riding in a bike lanes you think that's an attempt of the city to kind of raise cash for the budget deficit that the new york faces. i don't think so for a number of reasons but kind of paramount is just rational logic like a fifty dollar ticket to the office or twenty minutes to write me just seems like completely ineffective and effective means of exploiting your public if they're your goal the delivery truck that i point out in the video that's blocking the bike lane carries a much loftier far and than my fifty dollar cycling fine so i think if the goal is increased revenue stream by taking the citizens of the city it's entirely misguided

if they're going after cyclists for fifty bucks a pop they're also going after other areas i mean i think that you're not allowed to smoke now in times square that's another fine i think they've raised fines do you think that's all unfair to bridge the budget gap. if it were to bridge the budget gap i think it's unfair but i'm a little bit more of an optimist than that i do think not allowing people to smoke makes the city a better place and i do think making the city a safer place for cyclists makes it a better place to live it might take its little bit misguided and i don't think it makes it a better place but i think overall the effort in the city to to you know make it safer for cyclists benefits everyone so so my question is that a revenue stream ok so my question you said earlier you feel like now that this has gone such exposure there's this responsibility on your shoulders what do you think that is what is the bigger statement here do you think it's kind of ridiculous laws that hurt the people or ridiculous police it sounds like you don't think it's about

the budget issue. i don't i don't the economics has much to do with it i think it's for me the goal or at least my agenda has become with this louder voice has become to make the place make new york city and maybe everywhere a little bit better for cyclists and i think if anything my message has become you know make new york city better for cyclists by targeting people rather than the cyclists you know if you want to stick to the bike lanes and keep the bike lanes clean and keep to keep the streams out of the bike lanes ticket people from parking in the bike lanes and get the n.y.p.d. to stop parking in the basically and so there you go that's probably the biggest problem ok there you have it making the world safer for a bicyclist everywhere that would still make her case the united stats i was talking with people's rights a grand jury is investigating wiki leaks a key witness he's a friend of alleged wiki leaks informant bradley manning well he argues the goal is really to intimidate whistleblowers and to regulate journalism here is what he told

our t.v. yesterday after he testified and pled the fifth mind you before the grand jury in alexandria virginia. i think that over time they're going to try to influence public opinion by launching these tactics mr childer personal rights association the u.s. government is trying to finish the job it started four years ago with the pentagon papers destination it is trying to find a matter to regulate journalism in media though domestically and internationally and i feel that is trying to use investigating its we keep each to establish policies which will give the government broad censorship powers in determining how source information actually makes into the hands of media and this as the legacy of leaked wiki leaks documents continues to prove its journalistic value one example the case of victor boot he's a russian man that america accuses of being an international arms dealer well as his legal saga in the u.s. continues our team is marina porton i have found some revealing details of the u.s.

role in the case in some of those wiki leaks diplomatic cables here's what she found. he is the russian citizen america fought relentlessly to adopt it there but was secretly on swiftly extradited to the u.s. seven months ago and this may be where he stays indefinitely if found guilty on arms smuggling and terrorism related charges if you use and. he's looking at life there's no parole there's no early release in the federal system really the only way in the federal system to get a reduction in your sentence. a significant reduction is if you cooperate with the united states government some have argued distribute needs to be on captain america's team however captain on their record is being accused of playing dirty and illegally to remove the air cargo businessman from thailand according to documents released by wiki leaks all levels of washington top to bottom mounted

political pressure against bangkok to gain custody of boot in a us cable dated august thirteenth two thousand and nine us president barack obama was urged to call thailand's prime minister directly about boot the u.s. attorney general in the state department were encouraged to call the thai ambassador highlighting the massive drug enforcement administration commitment to thailand and the us ambassador in bangkok urged the thai government to issue a public statement of disappointment at the judge's ruling not to extradite boot america's the world's most powerful nation but it's not more powerful than the world unfortunately the way things stand right now they're willing to flaunt every international law to get what they want and that means doing all these illegal things in the case of the extradite him or should say kidnap and was arrested in bangkok in march two thousand and eight during a u.s. sting operation he was charged with conspiring to sell weapons to colombian fark

rebels on two occasions that high court rejected america's extradition request when an entourage of armed u.s. agents removed him from thailand following a decision of the thai government his extradition was still not legally approved the covert operation was kept secret from russia boots family and his attorney when . the transfer of victor boot to america was a violation of a very important thai american treaty signed in one thousand nine hundred which the political offenders cannot be extradited the case was not finalized and was moved to the us america used various means political. another's outside the boundaries of jus legal process to get the boot that means that richard is not getting a fair deal to this day high officials have not provided official documents explaining the legal grounds behind extradition this despite repeated inquiries made by the russian foreign ministry that. we know for sure let's all move into

sixteenth two thousand and turn at the moment one big debate was physically taken out of the time prison his case was being considered by the time i call to the peals that is why there are no legal grounds for him to face a u.s. court. meantime victor booker means in the u.s. prison held in solitary confinement his wife doubts her husband will receive a fair trial from the country she says violated international and bilateral laws to get him. that it's clear to everyone that the case has long been moved from the sphere of lots of politics i think or rather i would love to think that the american court is unbiased but i have strong outs about it because i think such pressure could be put on anyone including the jury in. the country accusing viktor bit of our feeling now why the hell are you with a political arm twisting come october and american jewry.