tv [untitled] August 23, 2011 11:01pm-11:31pm EDT
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studio to get some u.s. perspective on the dance shows next. for the. we've got. the biggest issues get voice face to face with the news makers. welcome to the alone a show where you get the real headlines with none of the mersey working live out of washington d.c. now tonight we're going to take another look at the situation in libya just how reliable is the information coming from the rebels from the international criminal court and where could could often be hiding then the school to prison pipeline as it's called is only getting worse with a look at the effects of criminalizing students for what should mostly be considered kids the kids and approval ratings for congress and president obama are
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at new lows so americans are obviously unhappy but we thought that you know what an angry comedian can probably say better than the rest of us felonious monk is going to be on the program tonight we're going to all of that and more including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. so on like one or two days ago today the libyan people who have been celebrating in the streets are back in their homes hiding the fighting continued in tripoli rebels stormed one market office compound where the colonel himself is still to be found. filled with black smoke that you see in the skies there over tripoli coming from moammar gadhafi compound the fierce battle that is taking place as rebels are trying to overtake the capital there tripoli the question is where is khadafi another question is what about gadhafi has weapons. so today of course we're back to the on the ground coverage where yesterday the mainstream media was already
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turning their vision back to d.c. and birthparent bickering about how this could politically be a win or a lose for president obama thanks in large part to nato forces and the united states libya will likely be free if a cruel dictator libya is celebrating one of the shocking collapse of these regime after four decades of cool quiet critics who say president obama is leading from behind does the congressional displeasure with the way this war has been run by the administration does that go away or is that still to be investigated. now as i explained yesterday the problem with all that coverage is that no matter what ends up happening in libya no matter how long it takes for gadhafi to fall or what kind of a government is formed in the aftermath this in change the one simple fact that the president got us into this war illegally that he never asked congress to unilaterally made the decision to devote our resources which at the moment according to the pentagon turns out it's cost us the taxpayers eight hundred ninety six million dollars to be involved in libya and he never even asked so let me harp
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on this one more time because as i mentioned yesterday it's not like this is something new something unheard of no quite the opposite when it comes to some of the worst examples of the executive abuse of power which unfortunately we've seen a number of times now with this administration they don't bother analyzing or talking about it or asking about it they just have collective amnesia they move on who cares about upholding certain principles of the rule of law and what dangerous precedents could be set in the future for this country so i'm going to take it upon myself to remind you of another example now we reported to you before on the show. about the global settlement agreement that's been in the works for almost a year after attorneys general ounce investigations into robo signing scandals of the banks and the hope was that this would lead to a much wider investigation that maybe they will look into how banks inflated the housing bubble but it turns out that the settlement that the o.j. was trying to push wouldn't be doing that now instead they would just make bank of america citigroup j.p.
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morgan chase and wells fargo pay twenty billion dollars and in exchange the attorneys general would have to agree to be barred from bringing any further litigation and there is one figure that really stood out here new york attorney general eric schneiderman who is refusing to sign on finally we saw somebody willing to stand up say the banks do not deserve to get off scot free here now of course twenty billion isn't exactly scot free but considering how many millions of americans found themselves underwater with home loans in their mortgages it's a pretty small number but this week we found out that the obama administration is in fact putting the new york attorney general under increasing pressure to drop his opposition to this settlement and they're not just pressuring him you know they're waging a campaign by contacting his allies including consumer groups and advocates for the borrowers. now does anybody else see something really really wrong with this picture the obama administration is using their muscle to pressure an attorney general to let the banks crimes be brushed under the rug and the sick thing is
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they're trying to make this about the people they're claiming that this settlement needs to go through to deliver much needed relief to hard pressed borrowers so that's it we should just rush it through never investigate the banks involved in the housing bubble because let's face it washington and wall street are way too close so then they're just going to try to make it about the people give me a break that's disgusting that is as eve smith of naked capitalism has been a guest on this show called it corruption plain and simple the obama administration is corrupt this president abuses his executive powers to involve us in wars to place americans on assassination lists to push courts to get rid of warrants and of course to not investigate the bush administration or wall street for all of their wrongdoing but you know that's another thing that the mainstream media would rather not look into that's another thing that they're more than happy to miss. so today became very clear the libya is still in complete disarray the images of
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rebel storming off his compound have been on every t.v. screen as well as images of those who loot of the compound one man coming out would get off his hat and gold chain on but having gold chains aside let's continue to look at what we could see in the near future what's going to happen in the weapons and do some people have a clue as to where gadhafi might be hiding or to discuss this with me is retired lieutenant colonel anthony shaffer senior fellow for center for the center of advanced defense studies and packed america excuse me ok. messed up your job there for a second tony so of course if we compare what we've seen over the last couple days to what we're seeing going on now it's pretty clear that something wasn't adding up to me we heard the rebels claiming that that's a tripoli had been taken over that the gadhafi regime had fallen like a house of cards today we saw and you know i think we should bring in of course his sons into this hama it was so that said to have been arrested turns out he's escaped or it's safe was also reported to have been arrested the international
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criminal court was the first one to report this they said that they would be bringing him to the international criminal court he rolls up in a white limousine to prove to everybody that he's still alive and to send a message there so where is the breakdown well it's chaos and i think that's what we're seeing here no one is really in charge and i think that's what people should be most frightened of any time you look at a situation like this where you have a social structure completely gone and let's be totally honest some of these points are really really relating to what's out there there are weapons out there a lot of weapons and more frightening is that gadhafi for all of his giving things up never gave up all of his chemical weapons we're talking about i'm told mustard gas mustard gas and sarah two of two things which are huge bargaining chips so there's no surprise he's not been found i my sources told me that he's in africa somewhere but clearly not in tripoli now let's talk more about these weapons he had there some chemical weapons what else does he have of course he was he's not
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supposed to have any of these scud missiles supposedly there are a lot of people a lot of confusion about that what it turns out they just fired and that's the tip of the iceberg these are older soviet era weapons but they're very effective there's the u.s. a seven grail which is a surface to air missile there's tons of weapons relating to. just individuals having weapons and that could be a problem when you try to start settling people down one of the things i do believe is going to happen is you'll see a cold lessening of groups. and tribes into smaller groups this is going to be a lot more like afghanistan then than iraq when we start settling things because a lot of these groups have grievances the have and have nots and really what your guest earlier on the network was talking about the fact that most people up rose against gadhafi because they were very unhappy they had grievances not because they were you know all that freedom loving in the end well you know not something that we've seen too i think across the arab spring is you could say there's been a unity in so many of these countries because they are unhappy with mubarak right
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or ben ali but then once the revolution is over once you deposed this later then what happens then the people aren't exactly so united but so let's talk about this problem of weapons even more because what nato their mission for starters was only supposed to be protecting civilians right you could say that that already there's been a lot of mission creep into what's going on there so are they going to use this is some kind of leverage to have boots on the ground or whatever you want to call it to say that we need to protect these we need to see whose hands they get into why i really wonder how the people of misrata feel about how well they were protected since literally tens of thousands of individuals either displaced or killed in the process of that place being protected with that said there's a real possibility now because secretary of state hillary clinton said it that there will probably have to be some level of state department and defense folks go into quote unquote this armed individuals especially these these surface to air missiles which could be used very effectively as a terrorist weapon so inevitably you're talking about some level of people on the
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ground now i can say this from what my research as indicated i don't think the libyan people really want boots on the ground so you're talking about potentially another afghanistan situation let's not forget afghanistan for the first couple years wasn't that big a deal the afghan people supported the limited footprint there because we were doing revenge they get that but the idea of us coming in to help them in the case of afghanistan or now in libya i think they have become much more problematic and that we would become or nato would become not very well liked they're very well liked right now because. of what's happened that could change pretty quickly and why i think that i'll see if you can test whether they're very well liked because of course there are pockets there are still gadhafi royalists out there as you mentioned there are thousands of people that could have been killed so at the end of the day there's always going to be this this ten dry because there is violence occurring but what does that mean to disarm them of weapons that means the will come in and we'll take them for you and we'll hold them for safekeeping the military term for this is called peace support it's either peacemaking or
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peacekeeping any way you cut it it means troops on the ground and so this is this is something we talked about a few months ago this is much like we had to do in bosnia we were still in bosnia we were there still trying to help keep the sides apart and that's for this seems to be going because again the monarchy those who were loyal to the monarchy forty two years ago in the east are the ones who are the have nots are the ones who rose up and from benghazi moved west it is they who have been ruling this national tribe this national transitional council they just and this is another thing as i've been well reported they had a purge about a week ago because they had too many people from the tribes in the east so there's really no cohesiveness within the the m.t.c. at this point in time so this is the worst possible time to not have a coherent team ready to take charge we do not have a government in waiting and that's why the situation i believe is more you know potentially violent now than it was you know look he said i'm really surprised about that right i mean that's the entire that's what how does when you get
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yourself involved in a civil conflict where there are a lot of you know tribal differences here it's obviously not going to be black and white you can't possibly expect to start supporting or recognizing a rebel group called the trans national or excuse me the transitional national council and expected to represent all libyans i was on the air with a baster all huge load of the back to the master from libya on the nineteenth of march and i said then this is not going to be quick this is not going to kinetic so the question is if i knew that others knew that. why didn't the white house know that because president obama said the exact opposite so the question becomes days not weeks not weeks here we are six months later and i think we're now entering the most dangerous period of the conflict and to say that we're to declare victory now to me is a premature almost. silly recognition of victory won the victories not only secure you have the most potential for civilians to be killed because of retribution as you pointed out these pockets of gadhafi loyalists are still armed
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now do you really believe going to lay down their weapons and just kind of you know walk up and say i'm with you i don't think it's going to happen this is where we have to be much more real and what's going to happen next with the series of the series of events coming up to the conflict now at the same time of course you can say that well we've found out i think it was late march probably that there were already already cia operatives in libya of course the no boots on the ground game that we know that britain we know that france already sent in people to even call them special forces you can call them the trainers i bet that we have special forces there too somehow i don't know i just feel that all skeptical and i assume they were there let me ask you because i'm running out of time actually one last question of course you are saying that some your sources say it often might be somewhere else in africa that there is of course this hotel where journalists are being held and there have been some rumors floating around on the internet what better place for him to hide underneath this hotel where of course you know nato strike is going to hit no rebels are going to attack because you have international journalists sitting there it's always possible but i think he's much more fox like
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the man i think he's moved on i think he's got money here in the places we don't even know so i think this could become a problem to international community to track him down clearly you know one of the issues that led to this dragging on was not giving him an exit i think is create his own exit known over the next few days what paul effect it will be in your judgment the same time he did have kind of an exit for a while there were a lot of countries that were offering him asylum if you don't take it right all right tony i want to thank you so much for joining us obviously we will be covering this for a while and the pentagon noted today that we spent eight hundred nine. six million dollars so far i just wonder how that's going to keep taking up and up and up and up next. now still to come tonight should miranda rights be given to what non us citizens this is a decision was made on that if you're going to get in why not we're also students in trouble with the law the growing trend here and that's turning students into criminals grabbing valko senior writer an investigative reporter for the huffington post joined me in just a moment to discuss. in
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you in a court of law you have the right to speak to an attorney and to have an attorney present during any questioning if you cannot afford a lawyer one who provided for you and expense and whether you've been in trouble with the law before or if you watched cops law and order a million of other t.v. shows out there you're probably familiar with that statement better known as miranda rights and there are even elements of this you could say in the constitution the founding fathers wanted to ensure that all people in america were protected from the government's ability to assume anyone's guilt and after supreme court ruling in the sixty's it's mandatory for anyone placed under arrest to know these rights however a recent ruling by the board of immigration appeals decided that non-citizens arrested without a warrant do not need to be read their rights until after entering formal deportation proceedings now this ruling said that until an alien who is arrested without a warrant is placed in formal proceedings by the excuse me by the filing of a notice to appear the regulation does not require immigration officers to advise the alien that he or she has
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a right to counsel and any statements made during interrogation can subsequently be used against the alien in other words if you're an immigrant a non-citizen meaning that you're an undocumented or illegal permanent resident and you're detained by officers from ice or border patrol those officers are required to read your miranda rights however we should note law enforcement local law enforcement do still have to do this this like i said applies to border patrol and ice but despite the fact that most of the media has failed to cover this this ruling is a really big deal to arrest anyone despite their legal status without informing them of their ability to not incriminate themselves just because they're not citizens is absurd apparently you're only insured constitutional rights if you're a citizen no matter if you are here legally as a resident with documents that is ridiculous as somebody was a legal resident in this country beginning at the age of four and who didn't receive their citizenship until the age of to. anyone i find that very scary now by now the government made no bones about their bias towards who they consider real
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americans and have been on the hunt for anybody who doesn't fit that profile but it keeps somebody in the dark to not inform them of those rights on evidently to people incriminating themselves the exact thing that our system seeks to protect you against so all obama's been working on immigration policies and deportation in recent weeks perhaps he should also question this latest ruling by the board of immigration appeals it's a dangerous president to create two tiers of justice for people in this country and it's time for the obama administration to stand up for the law and for what's right . now it seems like everything is being criminalized in today's society but perhaps one of the most dangerous trends we see is the criminalization of students think of a five year old in st petersburg florida who was arrested handcuffed and shackled to a police cruiser for throwing a temper tantrum a twelve year old in forest hills new york who is perp walked out of her school and taken to the police station then handcuffed to a pole for two hours after she doodled on her desk
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a twelve year old boy in louisiana with hyperactive disorder who was suspended for two days after telling kids in the lunch line i'm going to get you if they ate all the potatoes and he ended up being charged for making terroristic threats and then was jailed for two weeks while awaiting trial those are some of the most extreme examples but we see suspensions ticket citations being handed out for everything from truancy to senior pranks to non violent actions and i was talking about this before in the show this so-called school to prison pipeline but new studies show just how damaging the effects really are state of texas examined almost a million children and almost four thousand texas schools and they found that six in ten public school students were a suspect who were suspended or expelled at least once between seventh and twelfth great and those who had been suspended or expelled were nearly three times as likely to come in contact with the juvenile system the following year ahead of the start to begin with and what does that mean for young people in this country
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joining me to discuss this is radley balko senior writer and investigative reporter for the huffington post rather thanks so much for joining us tonight this is this one really has my blood boiling this story makes me so angry but maybe you can try to rationalize for a for us a little bit and go back through history tell us how it is that we came up with this system with the zero tolerance policies. well i'm not i'm probably not going to ask you any less angry. look i mean i think we are criminalizing everything in our society and we finally reach a point where we're criminalizing childhood look i mean kids need to be able to make mistakes and part of being a kid is making mistakes and they need to be able to make them in a way that doesn't affect them for the rest of their lives and you know the criminal justice system is a very long instrument for correcting mistakes and you know i think we saw it starting with these texting arse excuse me sexting prosecutions where you know teenagers have been showing their body parts to one each other to one another for
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for basically all of human history. and technology into the mix and all the sudden now we're protecting minors from being exploited or from exploding themselves i guess by charging them as child pornographers or forcing them to register register sex offenders for the rest of the lives i think it's it is kind of this march toward criminalizing everything you can't make mistakes the more the bad things can't just happen anymore somebody has to pay for them and i think we're seeing that now you know extended down to. you know mentor school and you know it's unfortunate i don't really. i mean i don't have anything to say to make you feel better about. i had some of these things you're right in the sense of they're criminalizing childhood because some of this isn't even a mistake it's throwing a temper tantrum as a five year old when you're in kindergarten i would really say that's a mistake i would say that that's just a normal part of growing up or you know the same way dealing on a desk sorry that's not i you know some criminal offense if you ask me but where do you think if we go into the schools where is it coming from is it because we have
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zero tolerance policies and sometimes teachers even though they think the kids shouldn't get in trouble just want to abide by those policies are because now you have campus police everywhere and maybe they're the ones that are deciding to be a little overzealous with giving out tickets or could it be both. yeah i mean i think it's all of those things i mean zero tolerance is certainly part of it but a lot of this i mean it comes down to discretion discretion on the part of school administrators to call the police in the first place i mean zero tolerance usually needs to suspension and doesn't lead to calling the cops and shackling five year olds to police cars that's the that's an abuse of discretion and abused by the school administrators who call the cops and be used by the cop and then when prosecutors charge these kids it's an abuse of their discretion as well as their story a couple years ago in chicago where there was a big food fight you know and these middle school kids were throwing food at each other and up to maybe a dozen them or so were arrested and charged with felonies i mean it's it's insanity i mean kids are going to make mistakes it's what they do and it's really it's a failure also i think of other community institutions to sort of step in and want
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to be outraged by this but also to you know step in and say this is you know desirable to correct kids mistakes and sort of guide their child but not the role of cops and prosecutors and prison cells well let's talk about trying to get the community involved here's an interesting story that i read coming out of texas today of course on the just recently released that study where they show how many kids of suspensions or or have been expelled and they actually are asking school or the schools are paying people attached to reports truancy to help out the cops there i want to think about that i feel like then they're encouraging people to criminalize these students why would they just call out a goodwill and now they're saying we'll give you a three. yeah i mean it used to be you would call the kids' parents right or you would ask the kid where he lives here you. can do that anymore because you'll be accused of being a hack a pedophile in waiting but but no i mean it used to be that there were there were community sort of family peer solutions these problems and i think again it's idea
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that you know the only way to show to sufficiently show that we're serious about a problem is to make it criminal or to criminalize it in some way you see this all the time i mean there are those here and there ought to be a law phenomenon i mean it's not enough just that people show bad judgment and we can't show on them and say. it's not enough to say you know you're doing something bad or we have to we have to pass along any criminal we have to give them a criminal record we have to arrest them we're not happy until we see people in and out so i mean that's you know that's a larger kind of societal problem i think that that will take someone doing i you know these are things that you and i spoke about all the time and even when it doesn't come to kids we just talk about the prison system in this country in the fact that then you create this second class of citizens these people become disenfranchised then they can't get jobs so they end up filtering through the prison system over and over and over again and now studies have shown numerous studies including this recent on this came out last month at the exact same thing happens tickets that right here three times as likely to somehow be within the
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juvenile system the next year or that you're more likely to drop out of school if it doesn't work for adults why would they think that it works. yeah well you wouldn't and you know it affects them much earlier in life so the repercussions are should be rippling repercussions you know go on through for a longer period of time but you know i mean there are studies actually showing there's a harvard study done with pew a couple years ago showing in that i mean not only does it affect having a criminal record or expect the actual criminal in the person when they get out makes it harder to get a job and you know their income is reduced for the rest of their lives their checks their family and x. their peers it's actually sort of spreads out beyond the individuals incarcerated when we have entire communities and neighborhoods that that get affected from a single incarceration and you know in a country that's approaching now you know over one percent of its population or the behind bars your own. you know pretty scary prospect and of course you know we've seen in the same way that we saw mother yell at the cash for kids. there we saw
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everybody i think saw the video i know we played it on this show because our son ended up taking his life and she was basically blaming this judge for that state of mind i want to ask you too since you're so well versed with all the statistics here of this texas study basically showed in dallas that black kids make up thirty percent of the population yet sixty two percent of the citations do you think that the race is an issue only here in texas or is that something that was a nationwide. no i mean it's certainly i think it's a problem nationwide and you know you don't have to believe that every cop and every prosecutor is where he says to believe that all these laws have a disproportionate effect on on blacks and hispanics and i think lower income people in general tend to be disproportionately black hispanic you know the drug war doesn't you know you don't you don't see very many drug cops until trading you know perturb of these or or you know cater to states although there's plenty of drug use going on both places it's you know in new york city when they're doing the stop and frisks they're doing them in minority neighborhoods and low income
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neighborhoods so yeah this is i mean certainly it's going to disproportionately affect those communities makes it more difficult for those communities to. you know to migrate into higher income brackets and to. treat the cycle of poverty of things so they have all of the restoration is supposedly trying to respond to this we have a chorus eric holder we have arnie duncan secretary of education saying of their lodging a new initiative to go after this what are your thoughts in terms of how far they'll go whether it actually is anything. well i mean i'm not really sure what they can do i mean a best thing that they could do to address all this is to reform the drug laws and particularly to you know stop sending federal grants out to local police departments in exchange for greg arrest and to call off the federal drug work to be on marijuana which i think is really where a lot of this damage is being done but in terms of you know what even with the kids i mean they said that they're going to you know try to go after the zero tolerance policies to stop this school school to prison pipeline specifically yeah i mean i
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don't i mean i really don't know what the department of justice can do in terms of telling local law enforcement i mean law enforcement is traditionally a an issue that's supposed to be left up to the states and left up to to. you know more jurisdictions and i'm not really sure i mean they want to consider an example they can all conferences they can encourage local officials to show better judgment and i hope they do that be great but you know in terms of actual setting an actual policy i'm not sure there's a whole lot they can do all that maybe withholding federal funding maybe they can do that but i didn't really didn't consent or and i'm going out of their way to say sorry to cut you off or we have they had a break but we'll see if the policy actually goes anywhere rather thanks so much for joining us tonight. now still the calorie of our kids a titian of shelling tell that is that e.o. criticizing president obama and congress went viral within polonius month joins us in the studio to discuss politics.
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and broadcasting live direct from the center of moscow this is our team glad to have with us let's take a look at your latest headlines rebel forces have entered the compound of moammar gadhafi in tripoli the opposition claims to be in control of most of the capital however the whereabouts of the libyan leader remain unknown. meanwhile gadhafi has addressed to the nation via radio and says that leaving his compound was a tactical move. the u.n. steps up pressure on syria ordering an investigation into possible dwight's violations during the crackdown on anti-government protests. police arrest a man suspected of masterminding the murder of renowned russian journalist on a pollutant.
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