anonymous may have declared a new target for their digital activism and it's making the republicans very nervous. it a.j. know this is first inaugural address president abraham lincoln asked the nation to appeal to its better angels unfortunately for speaker of the house john boehner he never took lincoln's advice and over and over again while trying to keep his house republicans in line this year boehner instead appealed to the extremes within his party the tea party and now it's coming back to haunt him tonight led by tea partiers in the republican party the house of representatives is expected to vote down a two month extension of the payroll tax cut for one hundred sixty million americans it was an extension agreed on by both republican and democratic senators one that

was approved by the white house and one the boehner himself supported when it initially passed on saturday shortly after though is tea party republicans went into full revolt mode there are unhappy that the plan is only a two month extension they're on happy that a lot of a far right wing goodies had been stripped out of the bill and so tea party republicans are about to vote to screw over one hundred sixty million americans with a thousand dollar average tax hike that kicks in in two weeks and is only paid by people making less than one hundred six thousand dollars a year you can call it the tea party tax increase realizing the political implications of a looming no vote baner desperately tried to reach out to senate majority leader harry reid this afternoon begging reid to call the senate back for further negotiations on the bill to read rejected the request outright saying senator mcconnell and i negotiated a compromise of speaker boehner were quest i will not reopen the reading the

negotiations excuse me until the house follows through and passes this agreement that was negotiated by republican leaders and supported by ninety percent. meanwhile republican infighting began today as republican senators pleaded with their colleagues to pass the middle class tax cut senators dean heller scott brown and dick lugar all for immediate passage of the bill senator scott brown's strongly condemning house republicans saying the house republicans plan to scuttle a deal to help middle class families is irresponsible and wall yes yet none was that's exactly what's just about to happen so months of bowing to the tea party finally caught up with speaker john boehner is the republican party on the verge of breaking apart and how voters react to yet another no vote from republicans and and a tea party tax increase here to talk about all of these issues is richard asco

senior scholar with the campaign for america's future richard welcome back. good to be here thank you we've been flirting with this idea all year but has been or officially lost control of the republicans in the house of representatives his caucus now. well you know i think it's always been the game of good cop bad cop but you never know when the bad cop goes really bad and becomes the bad lieutenant so i think what we're seeing now is basically this old cop movie turning into something out of quentin tarantino there's there's blood all over the place and and we don't really know where this thing is headed except that boehner loses any semblance of appearing like a statesman the republicans look like they've been outgunned as far as electoral positioning is concerned and one hundred sixty million americans are likely to lose the tax cut so it's it's insane out there right now if we look back to the ninety's

when for example newt shut down the government. pretty much everybody knew that he had been dissed on air force one on that flight back from mother was from age and had to sit in the back and he was you know p.o.d. at bill clinton and that had some role to play you had that there was the new york post you know front page with a new dress like a baby with a diaper in a bottle you know throwing a tantrum right there was there was this kind of widespread knowledge of that level of pettiness and idiocy and then you know the government shutdown so he got blamed for it but right now do you think that the average american is paying enough attention to politics and understands who the players are and what's actually going on that whether this you know whether whether this tax hike happens or not whether this vote happens or not however this plays out will have any political consequences a year from now. you know i think it's all very diffuse in the public mind and i blame the democrats in a way for that because the payroll tax was never the best way to deliver

a stimulus tax cut to the middle class it benefits higher earners much more than lower earners even though it benefits millionaires to get the maximum cuts out of this it's complicated it's hard for them to understand but people aren't blaming boehner and the press they're blaming his people so once again we're seeing the end that a quit negotiating with the on worthy and then being undone by the insane and i think it's very hard for people to follow that in the public eye unless the democrats draw a clear lines in the sand between what they want to do and what republicans want to do they're getting better i like harry reid's firmness on this but it's over a nebulous way of delivering some benefit to the middle class so they answer your question no i think a lot of this is getting lost on the public i think they're getting the idea that the benefit that the republicans are being uncooperative and the democrats less so but i think there could have been a lot more effective ways to frame this and to deliver the policy itself do you

think that there's any possibility of that over the short term over the next couple of days as this kind of all shakes out plays out that the democrats will do that i mean harry reid came out made a fairly forceful statement today although it wasn't widely covered is there some kind of the actrix of that getting i mean is there any way that they can get this message out wake people up to what's really going on in the republican party basically doesn't give a rat's patootie about average working people and that they're doing everything they can about out of billionaires. well they're going to try but they're going to be hamstrung by the policy itself which has been being been pushed from the white house so i think if they could go out there and say hey we tried to give you a tax break that was simple clean and good for you we tried to keep the one you had we tried to pay for it with a tax on millionaires which by the way a majority of republican voters support and they stop i made us at every turn so we want you don't to know every time you get a paycheck you're going to lose a little money thanks to the intransigence and madness of this republican party and

if you want it to stop you elect us now will they do that i don't know because it's not messaging they've tended to gravitate to but it's what a sensible person in their position would probably do very very briefly in just a minute or so we have left is a possible this could all fall apart over the next couple of weeks the democrats could be messaging like hey this is all the republicans fault and then right after the first of the year the republicans would pass the tax cut and it would be all for naught and the democrats would end up with their get their faces well sure i mean anything's possible and that's certainly one scenario and let's not forget the role of the media in all this and how they spin it in a couple in the next couple weeks and their desire to be unbiased is going to bias the whole reporting and perception of this brilliant yeah absolutely richard asco thanks thanks so much for being with us richard. you back thanks tom thanks the tea party republicans with less than two weeks to go until the tax cut expires there's the very real possibility that republicans will lead taxes go up by

a thousand dollars each for one hundred sixty million average working americans course the owners of tea party republicans billionaires like the koch brothers and multimillionaires like dick armey don't much care about the working americans and they're loving their control over the american political process. now turning our attention to the occupy wall street movement this weekend the movement celebrated its three month anniversary in new york city by asking for sanctuary ever since the movement was kicked out of its central command in zuccotti park more than a month ago demonstrators have been looking for a new place to set up operations to build a new encampment so on saturday demonstrators marched to a piece of land owned by trinity church one of the oldest churches in the city intent on setting up a new camp unfortunately their bid to reoccupy that area failed as trinity church refused to give the movement sanctuary on their property the n.y.p.d. arrived in arrested fifty demonstrators many of whom were trying to scale a fence around

a park like retired of fiscal bishop george packard seen here in the purple causing who was the first to climb the fence over into the property of trinity church for more on what happened over the weekend and why the movement might need a sanctuary to continue thriving i'm joined by nathan schneider editor at waging nonviolence dot org and a contributor to the nation magazine and the new york times nathan welcome to the program tonight thanks very much it's good to be here thank you what was the scene like on saturday outside trinity. well mostly it was a party i mean it started out with people milling around and playing music and talking with each other and catching up reconnecting since they can't do that every day anymore and making signs and then there was a march and in the field the decision was made to actually go forward with trying to and with effectively scaling the fence that was surrounding trinity's log off to

our today and that was when the police action happened that you just described after that it became a party again do i have this right that archbishop desmond tutu got involved well he wrote i believe a couple of letters the first letter indicated to called upon trinity to to consider opening the space to the movement citing the significance of this movement and the church's. possible role in it his second letter. told the protesters that they shouldn't be trespassing on the church land and so he kind of qualified his earlier statement how did the occupy wall street folks reach out to trinity church and or do or do we know what that communication was like how trinity responded to. what what demeanor is probably the wrong word but you know what i'm what i'm trying to capture here. what their attitude toward it was and

what their all response was of them just no. well it's been very complicated this discussion has been going on for months and actually you might remember that right after the eviction from zuccotti park in. the protesters when up to our taste square and tried to tried to take it then and were also expelled by by riot police so this goes back more than a month and and sense then there have been ongoing conversations spaces owned by trinity in lower manhattan smaller spaces and are spaces have been used by the movement and continue to be used by the movement and they were asking for more they were asking for this outdoor space trinity owns a tremendous amount of real estate it to this particular lot isn't being used and and so the call for being able to use the space continued now i was there

on thursday last thursday when a number of protesters went to trinity church itself and spoke out front with leaders from trinity and presented a little nativity scene. reminding the church about the story where where jesus his parents come and have no room to stay at the inn and have to stay with the animals and so they're trying to evoke some biblical themes in trying to persuade trinity to open their doors. it looking at the footage of the and trinity said no apparently looking at the footage is the is that space on the outside of those. graves that people are jumping up on or are those just sitting spaces. believe they're sitting spaces ok so this is not a graveyard or anything like that why why does the occupy wall street movement feel

that it's so essential that they have a physical outdoor presence of what they're referring to a sanctuary. well i think this is a very very crucial part of the movement i mean there's a sort of few phoria that people experience when they take part in the in the in person political conversation that's happening there and that's been a very special thing and over the course of months i've watched so many people have come in at different times have have been going to school really on the plaza on in zuccotti park which was renamed liberty plaza or liberty square and these kinds of in person experiences where they're confronted with other americans talking about not simply what people on the news or on the internet are saying should happen but what they really want from their society and from their lives that conversation is so transformative and so necessary to the life and spirit of the movement that not

having that for many people feels really debilitating on the other hand some people in the movement are kind of grateful to not have to be running the occupation all the time and this is unable to turn their attention toward other things so there's a bit of a. difference of opinion there though i think the majority of people would like and really value that in person on the ground outdoor open space ok thank you very much . appreciate your joining us thank you thank you nathan despite the movement's failed attempts to reoccupied it lives on in other ways after three months of people moving their banks from bigs big their money from big banks on wall street to local credit unions to helping families facing foreclosure to fighting against didn't loan debt the ninety nine percent of us are still being represented all across america let's keep it up occupy something. coming up anonymous may have set its sights on the iowa caucuses and the g.o.p.

is getting very very nervous. that drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it through to be made who can you trust no one who is you know in view with a global missionary see where we had a state controlled capitalism is called sasha's when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more. for.

good the next target for the activist group known as anonymous be the republican iowa caucuses into last month a video believed to be made by anonymous was uploaded on you tube warning of a potential cyber threat to the vote counting system used in the iowa caucuses. voting for these parties is unethical they have destroyed the american democracy. we are calling upon you to occupy the campaign offices of presidential headquarters in des moines iowa on december twenty seventh and peacefully shut down the first in the nation i want caucuses on january third. republican party officials in iowa are taking this threat seriously as the a.p.

reports republican party officials and i were taking new steps to secure their vote counting systems investigators aren't sure whether the video is authentic but party officials have instructed precinct caucuses to use paper ballots as a backup system and have taken other steps to protect the database and a website that displays caucus results so what does this threat whether it's real or not say about the security of our elections is our of all is our democracy vulnerable to hacking to answer that i'm joined by brad friedman editor brad blog dot com brad walcott. thanks tom great to be here my friend great to have you with us first the iowa caucuses don't have a particularly normal voting procedure so how could a activist group like an anonymous mess with their results yeah it's strange in the republican caucus is different from the democratic caucus but in the case of the republicans they actually vote on a secret ballot on paper in most cases i think where the problem can't make come in

is when they count the votes at each caucus site they then phone the man or send them by computer to a central republican headquarters and those votes are them thrown into a database and they're tabulated and announced by the g.o.p. to the media either correctly or incorrectly it's not a very transparent process so even if they vote on paper some of the caucuses actually use a show of hands and that's what the republicans are saying no don't do that use paper ballots even if they all do use paper ballots at this point unless they count those paper ballots publicly at the caucus and report the results locally before sending them into g.o.p. headquarters there's really no way of knowing whether the ballots will have been tabulated correctly or not raises a whole other question could this could this video been produced by republican operatives might republicans exploit this threat to sabotage ron paul who's now

winning in iowa or might they have even met and manufactured the entire threat so they can hack paul into losing when he actually wins and then blame the fact that he or if he does win and they just can't avoid it blame the wind on hackers. yeah well that's that's the issue look the republicans have not been concerned about all the warnings we put out in the past you know that iran china al-qaeda could access these systems and in fact iran and china did access a d.c. election system in two thousand and ten but this is not so much a matter of securing the system the g.o.p. has said they have plans to secure it they won't say what that is they're planning apparently security by obscurity it's not a matter of securing the system it's a matter of making it transparent so that even if it is secure we will all know that it has been secured so ron paul supporters will know that the vote has been

counted correctly and by the way ron paul supporters and all of the rest of the candidates but particularly paul has a reason to be concerned they watched as mitt romney supporters back in tampa in two thousand and eight in the tampa straw poll romney supporters were actually stuffing the electronic ballot box on videotape we've got video of that brad blog dot com so there's every reason to be concerned about the security here but more importantly the voters need to know that the count has been secure accurate and the only way to do that is if you count it transparently at the caucus sites and announce those numbers before sending them into the black box of the republican headquarters right on paper and probably just broadly speaking how vulnerable are or is are like who say are electronic voting machines but how is our entire national electronic voting system right now. the

entire system is a time bomb waiting to explode we the truth is we don't know how badly it's been exploited up till now all that we know is that it can be exploited it's easily exploited and in fact just last week a brad blogger ran a special report on vin angle county pennsylvania the election board there actually did a forensic study after a recent election where they had a lot of problems and they discovered that in fact their system had been remotely accessed multiple times before and after recent elections and the thanks they got for this forensic study was that the company s n s who makes these voting machines is threatening to sue them the county commissioners want to bury the entire report and a judge has now dismissed the entire election board for having the temerity to look into their own public election systems which have been privatized by these mega

corporations who don't want us to look at their machines as they count all of our votes in secret either accurately or inaccurately there's often very little way to know which one is the case it's amazing bret in the half a minute we have left what is red shift. well redshift is the difference between the exit poll results and the actual results that take place and we've seen this all across the country where democrats seem to be doing better in the exit polls but them for some reason once the actual results come out we see this huge red shift by several percentage points from the democrat to the republican we've seen this time and time again all across the country but you know as i say these three these issues are not a matter of right and left they're a matter of right and wrong republicans have every reason to be as concerned as democrats do about whether our election system is tabulating votes accurately

we have every reason to believe they are not and they will not and we need to do something about it before a worst case scenario happens again very well brad friedel thanks so much for being with us and my pleasure tom thanks between the insecurity of our voting machines and the right wing push for stricter voter id laws the right to vote and to have their vote be counted which is the beating heart of our democracy is in trouble that's why today it's more important than ever to listen to what thomas paine said about voting rights more than two hundred years ago payne hated that the idea that only property owners or the rich should have the right to vote in seventeen ninety five he said the true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights the rich have no more right to exclude the poor from the right of voting or of electing and being elected and the poor have to

exclude the rich but voting rights are under attack in several right wing states right now in the united states with new voter id laws the brennan center for justice for example estimates that five million americans eligible americans will not be able to vote the next election. thomas paine explained why that right is so important he said to take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case the proposal therefore to defeat disenfranchise any class of men is as criminal as the proposal to take away their property paine said the only time we should ever deny someone the right to vote was quote the only ground upon which exclusion from the right of voting is consistent with justice would be to inflict it as a punishment for a certain time upon those who should propose to take away the right from others and yet this thomas paine said the only time you you shouldn't let somebody vote is if they try to take the right of the vote away from others in other words thomas paine

said that what we should be doing right now is stopping republicans the koch brothers and scott walker and all those other folks who are trying to make it harder for young people old people people minorities poor people from voting. they're the ones that we should be taking the vote away from according to thomas paine now i'd rather just see everybody vote let's just make it very straightforward. and. it's time for our daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question or ron paul win the iowa primary your choices are yes we'll know by the use of good old fashioned paper ballots or no billionaires will spend enough money to make sure he doesn't win log on to tom arbonne dot com let us know what you think the poll will be open until tomorrow morning.

crazy alert now for a light bulb mill. brooklyn resident r.j. williams has his name in the record books now scarfing down a lightbulb in a record setting time record setter dot com was on hand to adjudicate the glass shout out last week the rules are simple williams had to eat the entire ball because up to the metal parts he could only use his teeth to break the ball and he could only use water to wash it down williams accomplish the feat in just under thirty four seconds for a new world record also reportedly in attendance speaker of the house john boehner has to make sure that the light bulb use did not comply with the new e.p.a. standards on energy efficiency. coming up mitt romney has gone on record to say that there's too much money in politics so why is except the millions of dollars in campaign contributions from billionaires nationwide. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to

break through it through to be made who can you trust no one who is in view with a global missionary see where we had a state controlled capitalism is called fascism when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more.

well go back to the big picture on tom hartman coming up in this half hour of money is the root of all the evil that our political system is doomed unless we act now and i guess tonight knows all too well how the corrupting influence of money can make or break you inside the beltway in this week's edition of everything you know is wrong wishing someone happy holidays couldn't possibly be offensive or could and is a nice daily take i'll tell you why newt gingrich is right no really i'm not kidding . in the midst of the rise the news perpetual second place republican presidential candidate mitt romney's things there's far too much money in politics ads and that it's a huge problem in our democracy at least he did back in one thousand nine hundred

for. these kinds of associations between money and politics in my view are wrong and for that reason i would like to have campaign spending limits and to say we're not going to spend more than this in certain campaigns to campaign for senator or a u.s. representative and so forth because otherwise i think you have money playing far too important a role i also would abolish tax you probably have what i don't like a. i don't like the influence of of money whether it's business labor or any other group i do not like that kind of influence lobbyist i want to register know who they are i want to make sure that gifts are limited i think we have to really become much more vigilant and seeing the impact on money and i don't care how it's organized on money and politics i think fast forward to today and money is playing an even larger role in politics in the last election thanks to the supreme court citizens united decision that corporations are people and money is speech nearly three hundred twenty billion dollars was thrown in the two thousand and ten midterm .