are you ready to rumble joining our panel tonight and neil mckay editor of the guns and patriots column of human events online same sex provider progressive strategist and conservative commentator chris allman welcome back and so let's get started first of all just moments ago hours ago if you know republicans in the house kate are so it seems we still haven't seen the vote counting but here's what john boehner had to say just a little bit. it's not always easy to do the right thing. we believe. we came here to change the way this town does business and no more gimmicks no more short term a short term them starting to do solid policy and it's time to do it the right way thanks this is a classic case of trying to call a defeat a victory and i don't think anybody's by and. i'm wondering did the tea party overplay their hand here and in fact might they have jumped the shark might this be

the end of the dominance of the koch brothers i wish i had a dollar for every time you predicted the death of the tea party taught me to be a very wealthy guy. actually i'm disappointed that boehner did cave i thought he was right he was right for policy reasons and i think he was right for political reasons and would be on with that as well honors idea this was their cantor's idea though i mean we as a backbenchers i mean but basically you know it was not the right thing to do to have a two month extension they should have had a one year extension or they should have stopped playing games of social security just give everybody a real tax cut however they were doing it boehner was trying to do the right thing and he got it if you're not there and i don't know how it's the right thing to do considering that the majority of the american people one of the two month extension passed ninety percent of the senate one of the two month extension extension passed including most republicans the president wanted to pass the only people who didn't want to pass with the tea party so who are the real extremes in congress that. they

were blocking it how how how did they how were they doing the right thing on this. is it a lot of your christmas there are some of it is a problem is you're taking money away from social security at a time when social security is heading for bankruptcy and yet the republicans in the house are not able to articulate what is wrong with this plan and so they backed themselves into a corner because they didn't do the legwork that was necessary and it was really too bad that they ended up with this point but here is president obama who claims to be so concerned about seniors but yet he's willing to deprive the social security trust fund of millions and millions of dollars well i mean it is strange that you would want he's being put back. it was strange that you would do this with so security why not just give everybody a real tax cut why does it have to be laundered through so security tom well you know that's a very good question actually i personally i don't think that this is a good idea from the right from the get go i never thought it was a good idea to take out the senate it's not a real threat to social security if in the long term you do some more reform social

security such as raising the cap as long as you talk about your job and even that hundred times a day have no measurable hundred say having all these little mini bills for this year and we really think we're going to reform social security is the reason it's a bad idea is not so much for the seniors today but i have three little kids who are going to pay for this tax cut when they grow up because president obama wanted to to look good right now based on borrowed money is what i need do is based on borrowed money that's not true well we're in the hole how many how many how many trillion trillion a year military budget is based on borrowed money or the interest on all that money on all of this is where you're going to notice social security is no longer a trust fund of course it is now and always in the by you by playing games with the payroll tax as you alluded to you're basically saying it's basically an entitlement program it always was it's rt it's running a surplus right now security is running a surplus right now it will be running a little it will be solvent for the next few decades and to make it solvent for

much is definitely all you have to do is make one simple reform that if you aren't raise the cap or you're going to make everybody just in the moment because i have written myself ious and put them in there that's why it's solvent because it was the regular treasury only thing people who like when george bush was born with millions of dollars in treasuries in his trust fund that that wasn't real money but the government takes the surplus out of social security and his or her band is that on it we're fifteen trillion dollars in debt or now it's very much a different things now we're talking about our government not having enough money. to let me let me actually i'd like to shift the topic here if i may just a little bit. along with the same thing i discovered today yesterday actually that the lead lobbyist on the keystone pipeline is grover norquist could the guy who is like the guy who's like holding the gun to every republican who is the other hillary staffer apparently grover norquist as has ms edged him out on making this thing happen on the get on the keystone pipeline what they just built

a refinery in montana. of well they should build they should build refineries somewhere but i don't know i don't know if montana had to go to texas i mean what i'm understanding is that the only reason it's going to texas is because then you can take it through the oil through the panama canal and off to asia well if you want to go to asia you just bring it to a terminal and big coover and put it all to try to do good but the british columbia got a government said you can't do that you can't bring that i think i think the fact the matter is that the texas texas has an oil industry that's where people go to school for you know oil in this and that's where all the engineers are that's where all the companies are i mean if you want to meet you know if you want to meet people in the oil industry you go to texas and i think we know why the home of the green why is it over that neighborhood why why grover norquist gave house republicans a pass saying that if you want the tax cut expire doesn't count as a tax increase because you have competing interests and they're planning on holding the tax cut hostage until we can get a day that's a wild connection and if you know piers the lobbying on both part you know prove

that if you've just been actually speaking of the economy eight states are going to be raising their minimum wage to begin in the next year and san francisco has kicked it up to ten bucks which is three dollars above the federal minimum wage which by the way would be nine dollars and change if it was just if inflation adjusted to where it was right at sixty eight the economic policy institute this these eight states raising their minimum wage in san francisco is going to create one point four million is going to cause one point four million workers to get a pay raise and create at least three thousand jobs isn't isn't this the very best way to stimulate the economy to make sure the people at the bottom have money because they spend all of it rather than giving more tax breaks to the millionaires and billionaires who just are just going to other raises swiss accounts swiss bank we just passed a law saying we all make money shouldn't there be a yacht shouldn't it be a floor should no minimum wage absolutely not and that's and this is it's fantasy to say that you can jump somebodies wage these people who are making out and it was it was seven to ten days that we're saying well whatever the difference was you think prices in san francisco aren't going to go up to that level. though not as

much as the minimum wage as the history shows every time the minimum wage you know i think you don't think economically everybody goes up and prices don't track that and you think nobody's going to lose their job because of this and you don't think they're small businesses that will be hiring because of this thing is that all the way back to the 1930's when the minimum wage was introduced did they demonstrate that and i raise in an intimate way that says every cent increase in the minimum wage there's a six point five percent decrease in african-american young men who are employed so their employment falls six point five percent also the number of hours they work a week falls for every ten percent of increases and we only i really you know you're talking what thirteen to fourteen for yourself i think steve you know exactly you know if you've got a five percent i mean not your only options and when you think tanks found one little slice of one demographic i think you're going to that it's not going to ron who you know this is who's going to determine what pay people should receive if there is no minimum wage we're going to leave it up to corporations to figure how

much they should pay their employees mama grizzlies who are currently driving a race to the bottom all across the world trying to find the cheapest labor when they do that here too but when you hire someone to mow your grass and they say i want fifty dollars to mow your grass do you say no i'm going to go find someone who's going to do it for forty that's an extreme no it's exactly what i mean i would like to have employees and we used to have enough think in this country where we wanted our employees to be able to buy the products we're selling i mean that's what henry ford did we don't have a doubt that the minimum wage jobs are three percent of all the jobs in this country and there are steppingstone people get a minimum wage job they get experience they move on to higher paying job the same people who are on minimum wage today probably will not be on minimum wage in two or three years they will be moving up well you know michael you have people that you think they're not available where you know i i don't think there should be a minimum wage but i think the lowest paying jobs are there so that people can get experience so that they can go get higher paying jobs and the market will determine if you maybe just speaking of higher paying jobs the u.s.

auto industry which has hired. paint jobs although the entry level wages drop from twenty to thirty dollars down to fourteen dollars an hour which isn't minimum wage but it's still pretty rough is making a comeback car manufacturers are planning a hire an additional hundred sixty seven thousand u.s. workers of the next two years is projected for the first time in several years american made cars are outpacing foreign made cars over a million cars are its anticipate will be bought this year or will be sold this year by the end of this year i mean we're talking just over the next couple of months and we look back this is not projections this is what's happened back in two thousand and nine president obama rescued this industry over the objections of this guy mitt romney. my view with regards to the bailout was that whether it was by president bush or by president obama it was a wrong way to go i said from the very beginning they should go through a managed bankruptcy process a private bankruptcy process so now we know who's right who's wrong right we've got

an industry that's vibrant we've got people with jobs we've got you know americans i mean i'm not here to carry out of the romney crash was talk about political courage here's a guy who has huge political connections to michigan his father was the governor of michigan he has a lot of political support in michigan and yet he has the courage to say let's do this the right way i know you're going to direct quotation and so on but i mean it's like either you're in business or you're not running to michigan dropped a great deal it was it. so chris how you know well i think one of the things that there is the big three automakers but one of them didn't take any money so i don't think obama can take one hundred percent credit for this and you know what they are reading i stated with the unions as you said pay dropped i'm retiring benefits drop the health care things are kept intact a bankruptcy would wipe them all up not only would i want to and the reason why they wouldn't lost their pensions or maybe it would have been a designer making crummy cars of people the right one so you can pass laws and you give them billions of dollars and you can play all sorts of games in bankruptcy

court but if they don't make cars that people want they're not going to be in business and if you're also sitting on a huge amount of cash they could take that cash general motors this is not what happened what happened was we went into the bush great depression and for a couple of years nobody had the money to buy anything and that's what and when the large one of the largest industries the united states was in a crisis and the president stepped in and said you know we're going to we're going to get you through this crisis i agree i agree with you know partially and i think it's the problem with with the bailout whether was of the auto industry i'm glad the auto industry is doing well but with the wall street in the auto industries you should have had some strings attached there you could have you could have said are going to bail you guys out but we need to start making some more people who are going to lose we're going to lose billions on high. if we're going to bail out wall street we should we should have been no strings attached but i think it proves that when you when you bailout working people as you did with the auto industry versus bailing out banks there is on wall street it there was one of the auto well what we've seen though is that the big three are making cars that people want to buy and

the average age of cars on the road is ten years and so that's kind of cyclical but people are getting back into it and i mean to fire new car and you know what things to their benefit the companies are putting out better cars that people want to buy and that's a great thing and the stimulus must be working well maybe not you know it could be it could be that these got that these facilities of g.m. when if g.m. was zeroed out you know these factories would have been completely idle these workers would have found something i mean wouldn't just disappear or maybe if it's a you go away take it any crack up the door these are made of there are a lot of general motors should have gone the way of the boogie weapon somebody else would have come in i mean it could be wasted capital that you know general motors has made a profit a lot when it was have been destroyed well that's that's not our fault that's transition. so you know it was only speaking of transitions we have an election coming up ron paul seems to be the guy who's going to win iowa this is astounding to me here's a guy who is this is coming back to haunt him his newsletters published over his

name were saying that you know african-americans were conspiring of white people h. i v and and among other races and bigoted claims he's got the entire republican establishment aligned against him i mean just the entire republican establishment he's got the most extreme policy positions of any candidate for president outside of maybe i don't know maybe somebody running for the c.p.u.'s a bit you know and yet he might still win iowa what's what's so appealing about this guy what i what i miss and chris well i think it is that as a libertarian. there are lots of different kinds of libertarians and some people like him for one reason some people like him for another reason but he doesn't have people who like all his ideas and again i was one state he can win iowa as other people have and he can still go nowhere i mean it's he's kind of pulling at cocking a different people on different issues on their level but yet he doesn't really

have a base that agrees with him on the whole arc of what he stands for take that neal i described libertarians as republicans who want to smoke dope and get laid well if they want to they want to decriminalize pot and prostitution and and could it be that there actually is a larger pool republican contingent out there the likes the idea of government getting out of our lives oh he's so great on drugs and sex he wants to keep us out of our gun lives doesn't want any more he was very pro-life is an interventionist i mean there's a lot of appealing things about paul and you know i think last time he was picking up a lot of the anti-war movement those people he's are all positions that are true as you know what going up a lot of young people i think young people view the government they view the bailouts the view view everything and they say the government is the problem and they don't take the next step and see well it's corporate influence in the government that's the problem the government has worked and it's worked very well where it hasn't worked recently i mean you could say that from the one nine hundred forty s. all the way till the 1980's when we had the strong middle class we're the best

economy in the world hands down and the government was working and then it was not as involved in our lives with regulation and telling us what to do it now we're not going be able to have cell phones in our car you believe that iran was far more involved in our lives back than there were there were regulations there were there was higher taxation on the rich there was yes but there was also more business growth and i mean yes young people want government out they also understand that they're going to have to pay the debts that we are incurring today and they're scared about that and so i think that's what they like about john tester rather than isn't this also a constancy to ron paul will. you agree or disagree he insists he's you know where he stands and he's not going to sort of cave you know eve basically is he's there and it's in i think they want to legalize heroin he's a racist has a racist past and i mean i'm really curious though even wars i'm familiar with the with the new republic and the other articles that have come out i was eight there his are his own over the words of his it was a newsletter he was associated with and i'm not sure house the ron paul newsletter

yeah but i'm not sure you know if i i would if i had my name on it i'd read it you know what i'm saying is that four years ago when these stories came out i thought that would be enough to end him as a presidential candidate so i'm curious myself what i don't know about this story because if you really was putting out this stuff and was actively doing it i don't know how i think this is our. party that doesn't care what minorities think it is or it's certainly expanded it was just is that while you really then why did ronald reagan make his first speech after after he was nominated president as it's in philadelphia mississippi the city where three civil rights workers were notoriously murdered and he talked about states' rights that was the that was the the core of his first speech why if he wasn't if the republican party isn't about dog whistle politics why i just don't think it's true i mean you can say that i'm going to get his first speech in philadelphia just yet but i'm not i'm not going to read into it the way you did you think he just picked

a little time to six thousand people in mississippi that nobody ever heard of. on the matter saying it's his first speech as president but this is his first speech as a candidate for president after he had been nominated by the republican party to be their official nominee for president that was his first speech was in philadelphia mississippi and. nixon called it the southern strategy you could say whatever you want i mean i've been involved in republican conservative politics not just in massachusetts but in other parts of the country and i haven't met these people you're describing and so you can say it and you can believe it but i've never seen it or heard it. i mean i think i would have bumped into these people by now all of all let's let's move along with our last question quickfire yesterday we learned who controls the c.-span cameras in the house of representatives it's not c.-span it's speaker john boehner we found out that when democratic machine minority whip standing hoyer tried to force a vote on the senate payroll tax cut extension bill any and we had the mikes turned and the cameras turned off on him while he was talking here is. pursuant to section

three b. of house resolution four ninety three the house stands adjourned until ten am on friday speaker and there's a speaker eleven mr speaker of the senate bill and like to i ask for unanimous consent that we bring up the bill to extend the tax cut pro hundred sixty million americans as you walk off the floor mr speaker you're walking out you're walking away so the question of what goes on in the republican controlled house when the cameras get turned off by the speaker could be a republicans hold their secret messianic rituals in honor of their overlord grover norquist or be john boehner and eric cantor brawl about to see who gets to be speaker boehner has won every time so far but the fights are getting closer and closer or see they play their favorite game pin the tail on the donkey except it's an actual donkey and it hurts but if it or some other option well tom i think it was colonel mustard with the candle stick in the drawing room that was. every time i turn on c.-span louie gohmert is talking so i don't know when the camera's not on

he's also you know. i don't know i heard the gavel bang down and then that's it it's over because because hoyer wants to stay in an empty room and talk to nobody i guess that's his prerogative disappears yeah it is you're ok my theory is that the tea party congressmen take off their human suits and frolic as lizard people. it's new to me ok you deal say i'm chris thank you all a merry christmas to marry because of you two years showing. coming up coming up in today's daily take a lesson the wall street used to work for. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it's already been made who can you trust no one who is human view with a global mission a receipt where we had

a state controlled capitalism is called sessions when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more.

so doesn't just seem to you like the one percent just don't give a damn about anybody else but they lack basic empathy and compassion this week for example bank of america got hit with a three hundred thirty five million dollars settlement for preying on minority homebuyers their subsidiary countrywide systematically screwed over blacks and latinos people who just walked in looking to buy a home and walked out with the subprime exploding mortgage even though they

qualified for the non exploding normal mortgages that white people were getting banks to has looked at these prospective home buyers most of minorities not as customers not as fellow americans not as neighbors or friends but is instead as suckers people they could con into a crooked mortgage and walk away with extra fees where's the compassion for your fellow man meanwhile the house of representatives nearly half of whom are millionaires they've spent most of this week fighting an extension of the payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits for the jobless. they just don't care about what a thousand dollar tax increase on one hundred sixty million americans might mean to many of them like their allies the second richest man in congress it's just pocket change they don't understand what getting cut off from an unemployment check can do to a family so they sit on their hands or they call unemployed people lazy and they tell the uninsured take more responsibility for yourself what is the empathy in

a wall street bankers of the seven biggest banks in the country are about to rake in one hundred fifty six billion yes billion with a b. in pay and bonuses with little regard to the one point six million children who are homeless in america right now as we speak thanks to the fraud in large part of the fraud perpetrated by those very same banks were the humility and on the campaign trail you have millionaires like mitt romney and newt gingrich pledging to repeal obamacare and take away and sure it's for millions of americans these people just not understand what it's like to not have seven zero zero bank account why is that new research out of the university of california berkeley actually might provide us an answer to that question which is not a rhetorical question a new study suggests that wealthy people are far less empathetic and poor people

based on three experiments on hundreds of ethnically diverse young adults lower economic class individuals felt greater levels of compassion when watching emotionally charged videos and were better able to pick up distress signals during mock interviews than were rich people as jennifer stoller the lead author of the study noted about the wealthy people they studied they may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering as are poor people because they haven't had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives. i think that's because the wealthier someone gets the farther removed they are from the community they no longer live in the wee society with the rest of us in poor neighborhoods people depend on each other more when nearby families can't afford childcare they take turns looking after each other's kids food a share of people carpool and most of these transactions between neighbors are not done through money but through sharing favors that builds community

but the rich in america by and large don't live their life and they're not encouraged to either they're asked to give back to their community by paying their fair share in taxes there and asked to do what's best for their community by hiring local workers or by taking precautions about where they dump their waste or by even paying their employees a fair living wage heck they aren't even asked to not screw over their neighbors with bogus home mortgages they just keep making as much money as possible and with each additional dollar they make the farther and farther they get from the community and the less empathetic they become republicans that a call these people job creators and they say these people can regulate themselves that we don't need government regulations that really the case why on earth would we as a nation as a community trust the least empathetic among us to look out for all of our best

interests why would we trust the compassion oil barons to not dump toxins in our water or the compassion will c.e.o. to not ship our jobs overseas why we would trust the compassionless millionaire politician to help the unemployed we can't trust them because they've proven time and time again on wall street on the gulf coast and on capitol hill. this is why we need regulation this is why we need to democracy it's not bought and sold by the rich because the majority of us still live in the we society the society that's been highlighted by the ninety nine percent movement the society that encourages empathy and compassion you know before the reagan tax cuts america was a far more equal society and frankly a far more humane society the rich word is rich and the poor word is desperately

poor or as numerous but thirty years of reaganomics have brought us a coarser society and a thirteen trillion dollar national debt it's time to roll back the reagan tax cuts and repudiate the entire notion of reaganomics told front and pass it on. as the big picture for tonight for more information on the stories we covered visit our web sites of thom hartmann dot com free speech that org and r.t. dot com also check our two you tube channel is there a length of time how do i also time when i can even check out all the different ways you can send us to that i want to give special thanks to our producer mark with all her brilliant work and dedication over the last year from all of us in the big picture we'll miss you don't forget i miss you one and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there and get active tag your it says.

welcome to the lower show where we get the real headlines with none of the mercy me live out of washington d.c. and i am going to take a look at bankers trying to fight back against occupy wall street complaining that this is an attack on the one percent but this is an attack on the very productive but what exactly the bankers produce peter schiff is going to join us for that one then the media is in a frenzy over racist newsletters from the past coming from ron paul now he says he didn't write them or read them but the response has been.