austin globe which recently editorialized in support all name of savings of billions of dollars and millions of jobs from the dangers of piracy so we're going to break down some of the myths once and for all in terms of how much exactly is being lost due to piracy and whether sopa or protect ip even do anything to really counter it has julian sanchez is going to give us all the details we'll have all that and more for night including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so topic number one for the mainstream media these days has been the lead up to the caucus voters in iowa heading for the polls today and we're just ten hours away from i was presidential caucuses now heartland voters are definitely going to crush some dreams or they're going to fuel some others do you want to say everything's going to come in one two and three tonight i think it's a very close contest between santorum and mitt romney obviously ron paul has that

invisible army and that to me is is the key tonight not just how many people called but what do these republicans call i'm thinking thinking about picking up. now there are indeed important issues to discuss in terms of iowa which will be doing on the show tonight too but do you really have to spend twenty four hours seven days a week talking about iowa and only iowa and i guess what there are bigger things out there going on in the world in the news in this country specifically and so here i'd like to play just a little bit of catch up since we've been on break just in time the start of a brand new year president obama went ahead and signed the n.d.a. the national defense authorization act the same authorization act also includes a provision for indefinite military detention a civil liberties atrocity. but you see here is what obama did on the actual day that he signed it after backing off of the veto threat and he went forward and decided to insert into the signing a signing statement a promise a promise that isn't ministration won't allow this to apply to american citizens

without trial first so what happened out there in the media world well people just started rejoicing obama defender started blogging tweeting saying see obama does said that it doesn't apply to american citizens so it's all ok now i don't even know where to start in terms of what a foolish response that is all around but let's just make a few things very clear here no matter what obama does or doesn't do the a definite military military detention including of american citizens well that part is already enshrined into law he signed the damn bill so even if his administration chooses not to interpret it in that way well then guess what that doesn't stop any future presidents from using it in the exact language that was written it so thanks a lot obama you might promise to be the good guy in this scenario but you're still signed it which means it is now law which means that however someone chooses to use it in the future will be on your shoulders and it will be part of your legacy and is something that nobody in the mainstream media with the exception of rachel maddow who covered it last night has bothered to mention and she deserves credit there where the credit is due although i think till find her outrage not nearly to

be strong enough but enough about the other guys and how about more the future right let's also now instead talk about the past i find the notion that obama can make a promise and people still believe it to be completely laughable and you want to know why well let's take a little trip down memory lane and look at a few other promises that obama has made on the campaign trail since taking office promises were all broken with example number one. i've said repeatedly that i intend to close guantanamo and i will follow through on that i've said repeatedly that america doesn't torture and i'm going to make sure that we don't torture those are. those are part and parcel of an effort to regain america's moral stature in the world. yeah we all know the guantanamo bay has been closed if anything they're just pumping more money out of the prison complex to update it and also my out there would like to

say that at heart the president really wanted to close gitmo it was just congress that tied his hands let's face it all he wanted to do was transfer the detainees to illinois the whole part about righting the wrongs of the past letting certain detainees see a courtroom on no dice on that when he believes in a definite attention and he's deemed many of these to detainees simply on trial that's not the only promises broken so let's take a look at yet another example. transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency. ok so how's that transparency thing working out for us despite the fact the president actually receive the transparency award in private closed to the press mind you we only have to look at the administration's treatment bradley manning to their continuous fight against wiki leaks to see that they don't give a damn about transparency this president wants to keep government embarrassments secret don't forget he's also invoked the state secrets privilege many times in

court after criticizing president president bush for doing just that then how about the rule of law. well if you consider drone strikes and under clear shadow wars getting the us involved in a war in libya without ever asking for congressional approval but i'd say that promises broken long ago most notably though when this administration chose to kill an american citizen without any due process. really or this morning. a lucky leader of al qaeda in the arabian peninsula was killed in yemen. the day. thank the death of all aki is a major blow to our kind as most active operational affiliate the death of a walking marks another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al qaeda and its affiliates. now despite what the president would like to claim that was is our guest jeremy scahill said on the show that day a sad day for america

a truly scary day for america when a former constitutional law professor chose to end an american life with a drone strike again without any due process and just in case you haven't seen enough yet let me just remind you of one more promise obama made that never came to fruition. when i'm in the white house i'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. with us presently those states ahead. those workers deserve to know the others thirty three. yeah to this day nobody seen obama wearing those comfortable sneakers and walking along the picket lines with the workers didn't happen in wisconsin when collective bargaining rights were stripped hasn't happened in any other state for the past similar legislation the bottom line is it's not going to happen so this one really goes out to a lot of people out there it's not just the mainstream media who blatantly doesn't care about civil liberties or about the constitution or war this whole war on where this whole war on terror is taking us it's them but it's also the gullible pundits

the bloggers the twitters the apologists out there that are so blind that they still choose to buy any promises at this president gives us president obama signing this n.d.a. was a dangerous scary move and there's no ifs ands or buts about it there's no right way for him to make a statement about it it's now law for others to use as they please whether you promise not to detain american citizens without trial or not mr president but hell you've already begun killing citizens so why do we believe you on that it's pavement front but that's a far too many people out there including first and foremost the mainstream media that's supposed to inform the public be the government watchdog believe that's what they've chosen to miss. all right so today is the day in iowa a day when only about twenty percent of the state's population that's likely to

vote republican will come out maybe and cast a ballot that may or may not determine who the g.o.p. nominee for the presidency might someday be and all in all it's hard to say how much i were really matters in the long term but that has not stopped super pacs and the like from throwing insane amounts of money at more than twelve million dollars have already been spent on television ads the most recent estimate says that by tonight republican candidates will have spent two hundred dollars a vote to influence the roughly one hundred ten one hundred ten thousand iowans and then the media well every cable news channel website media organization in the country all they've all seem to use up all of their resources to send a mass of teams to capture every single second of the action but who exactly even has that kind of money right now and what should we make of this entire i was shell join me to discuss it is david sirota talk radio host and author of the book back to our future and james pullos host of the bottom line and reform school on page eighty the gentlemen i thank you both for joining me tonight and david want to start with you because you brought up this point in your latest article or your

latest column i guess you could say about the media and the massive resources they're spending on sending every single person to iowa how can they afford it. it's a fair question i mean this is the same media industry that argues that it doesn't have the resources to do the basic coverage of state legislatures city councils economics wars this is the same national media that says it's strapped for cash that is sent now according to one report fifteen hundred people to cover the iowa caucus and the iowa caucus is not it's not a news and it's certainly good news that because fifteen hundred people just in the media covering this event seem to suggest that it's not the mean. it doesn't have the resources to cover real news genuine news the news that affects us all every day it's there deciding not to cover the news in the end choosing to basically cover a presidential spectacle that i would argue doesn't have nearly as much to do with our daily lives as the regular news that's being ignored now james what you say is

all of this a lot of it just a spectacle because we have pundits that are talking about polls that change within the hour and it's basically news that once are done with it you throw it away. well it's it is an echo chamber and there's a spectacle quality to it so you can like that's if you don't. love sport and prestige politics to be more so why is the iowa caucus if you're big deal well you can create two makers with barack obama that sent him on his way except mike huckabee at this point are you going to mitt romney from securing the nomination when asked him around that big deal you everyone's getting to see which one of these candidates the republican field is going to drop out as a result of iowa they still get water and that's why i'm sure it's in there well let's talk about the sharks let's talk about where the people are lining up in terms of the candidates right now you let's look at romney santorum and ron paul do you see it as very much so the docs here in order and there's a very clear delineation between who is behind which candidate i guess you could

say that you know romney has the establishment types that santorum has well like to call their the really crazy right wingers the religious zealots out there and ron paul has the people that just want something different. well it's interesting you know i wouldn't say santorum has the real crazy side so he has people who don't want to share it and want to party like it's two thousand and six rick santorum is the guy who says that you he doesn't need to reconsider fundamentally anything that is done we don't need to argue about tarp we don't need to think about whether subsidizing the middle class is a dead end road rick santorum is that guy he's he's less than sort of the crazy guy i think he's the guy who wants to go back in time to two thousand and six not something. i read a recent report to that said that if obama is an unelected or as excuse me as reelected he's going to run the country in an american fashion and i thought that we were kind of done with with this un-american you're not american back well i don't think that issue is going to go anytime soon we've seen the same kind of rhetoric from of romney from gingrich especially from perry you know the

republicans certainly the conservative base think that obama is steadfast in pulling the united states away from his traditional traditional trajectory of political agree then you know i think there's evidence here that if you do if you prefer equality or if you prefer some other things and then maybe the liberty aspect doesn't matter that much to you whether it's on civil liberties or other issues david what do you think carolina do you think there's any other candidate out there aside from perhaps maybe ron paul that doesn't want to go back to the bush era and he thousand and six. i mean they all seem like bush clones in some ways except for ron paul ron paul is the one candidate who i think on many issues represents something fundamentally different i don't agree with everything that he is different about but i do think he does represent something fundamentally different certainly something fundamentally different when it comes to war when it comes to foreign policy when it comes to the drug war and when it comes to civil liberties what i fear is that what comes out of this process is a nominee who is not ron paul who is somebody who is basically

a clone of barack obama i mean mitt romney is essentially on many major issues a clone of barack obama pro bail out wall street pro invasion and the civil liberties this this would be an election if it ends up being mitt romney election where it really is the old south park adage a turd sandwich versus a giant douche. well you know that's interesting you bring that up too i've read a number of commentaries out there a lot of people are looking at ron paul right now and also this i wouldn't call it an obsession but the fact that there are a lot of liberals out there that happen to like ron paul because when it comes to his foreign policy he represents everything that you wish the democratic party would represent and so in that sense do you think that he is forced you know democrats to also step outside of the box force them to have a little introspection look at who their president is at the moment and realize all the wrong that he's doing so ron paul isn't verisign mayor in the face of liberals in the sense that liberals have held dear this idea of opposing wars protecting

civil liberties ending the racist drug war the drug war that's frankly failed ron paul the fact that he represents this in a much more b.m. and aggressive on its way than any democrat frankly in the united states congress or really any democratic lawmaker at a national level and the fact that he's nonetheless been basically ignored by the antiwar movement nord by the liberal civil liberties crowd in many cases i feel like what ron paul has done as held up a mirror to a part of the democratic party's base saying that you would in fact are hypocrites why are james i want to know what do you think do you think that's a sense that's the correct reaction from people on the left or in a way are they choosing to prioritize where they want to tilt right forget about other policies of ron paul's forget about the fact that he wants to take us back to the gold standard you can say that our entire economy would be destroyed that he wants to dismantle so many government agencies well if for starters you've got to

get into the standard look at how well that's done for us but you know look i think much of what david said is true i think that's. really at a crossroads here with his presidency where you can choose between going to bombs offering interest really cool she does super super wealthy the wealthiest wealthy and the super super poor that's not the kind of track is this going to get them where they want to go on a lot of their key issues in. frankly when you see mitt romney doing what he's doing sort of being a loner shadowing barack obama at a lot of issues i think he's simply doing that so that he can stay in his his is his traction to people who traditionally democratic increasingly takes something remarkable if similarly from the democratic party barack obama's base is rolling even though his few months younger is decreasing and so i think that's why you're seeing similar romney's moves to to present himself as the least possible controversy to release contrition is it possible i want to get back to the money so it looks like a lot of money is already being spent here like i said about two hundred dollars

per voter fawley about one hundred ten thousand iowans to show up but at the same time if you look at or a lot of the reports that i've read i have also said that voter turnout is rather low that a lot of these campaign events you see a lot more press in the room totally overtaking the room than you do actual constituents an actual likely voter so is it really worth it you know i mean what's the point of spending all this money there. oh you know why is the money there a lot of people are raising the issue now is of let's take money out of politics was the money there it follows the tower and follow the money follow the power if you want to get money out of politics of the way to do that is not by sort of removing the one intermediary between big government and the people of if you want to shrink the money in politics shrink our the fun washington david what about you what do you say i mean if the voters aren't even turning out then what's all the money being spent on well and it's kind of like this this weird orwellian bubble or maybe brave new world is better is a better metaphor because iowa is

a media spectacle because the media has determined that it is a spectacle the money goes into iowa for the candidates who are hoping to use that media spectacle as a jumping off point even though again in some kind of a manufactured event i mean there are more delegates republican delegates from idaho for instance in the nominating process than in iowa and yet iowa gets all the attention because essentially the media has decided it is the place for all the attention will be the money goes in in order for the candidates to maximize that attention it's an investment by these candidates and and i think as james said exactly right it's really frankly an investment by big money power behind those campaigns i had so lastly we don't have the results yet but since we're here with you guys care to make a prediction on who's going to win tonight. you know as you voted in romney is going to walk away with it but i'm starting to think that all of my nightmares are going to continue and rick santorum is going to net number one some people suggest

he's going to have a hard time moving that momentum for in his campaign but you know with people like rupert murdoch's telling i was to take a nice long look at rick santorum he could have some real it's. dave i don't want to i don't want to try to make a prediction all i would say is that i hope for the cause of ending wars and for civil liberties that ron paul wins the iowa caucus and wins the nomination if only that it will force a bigger and wider debate about those important issues of the american empire. i thank you both for joining us tonight thank you. well while the battle for iowa rages amongst republican candidates the democrats already have their man iraq obama all for one he has no democratic challengers but he also has plenty of advantages over the g.o.p. hopefuls he is currently out raising all the candidates combined and one can't ignore the power of the bully pulpit campaigning from the white house but is artie's marina part nine points out even with the power of the presidency

a lot of obama's former supporters just don't find him as charismatic or as compelling as they did four years ago. three years ago one historic campaign turned us politics into a pop culture phenomenon engaged by the promise of hope and change tens of millions of americans gave their money time and resources to the prospect of having barack obama as president and. for the democratic candidate achieved unprecedented support international fame and a record breaking six hundred fifty million dollars in donations in this election this is the by the moment changes come to america of the. thousands of new yorkers celebrated the victory clutching an enormous american flag

hand sewn by obama supporters but the winds have changed and the very same democratic symbol waved in honor of the president elect in a way each straight from a straight has been donated to the movement that became a phenomenon in two thousand and eleven there are about twenty people holding our david mckenzie organize the flag project after being inspired by obama rhetoric a dream shattered by the subsequent years of politics as usual curly what's inspiring me as up as over to us like that that's the thing that's inspiring you know like that's why i brought the fight so ws and the thing that inspired me about it is the fact that it's a grassroots movement that that had a like a very clear and transparent process artist shepard fairey seems similarly disenchanted releasing an updated version of his iconic hope poster replacing obama with his now clear support for occupy wall street with an economy still in crisis wall street largely unregulated social programs slashed and over forty five million

citizens on food stamps and. all starts with you making a decision to get involved obama's familiar prose may not be enough to win back his familiar fan base he didn't produce what people wanted him to produce you know a more like i said a more liberal take on government i think people wanted him to get to really fight against this this kind of money. power structure that the republicans are part of and i think there's a general opinion that obama's really kind of has won a down in two thousand and eight professor and author dr cornel west was one of obama's biggest supporters i think he's good because you've got the newness he's got the freshness taking part and more than one hundred campaign events but last april the prominent intellectual told r.t. that obama has failed he's too friendly face of the american empire abroad he's in the process actually of becoming very sadly upon big finance

and a puppet of big business and any politician here knows they are in trouble when the hollywood a listers start turning their backs are you happy with the way that obama has been running the country. you find no no no and i think i really think you misinterpreted his. his mandate i think i know i a friend of mine said to me the other day i thought it was a great line i no longer hope for audacity yet the approval ratings show voters are even more turned off with the alternatives leaving obama seemingly the lesser of two evils america's president clearly enters the twenty twelve race amid a growing band of disillusioned democrats most will still back barack obama over his republican rivals arguably with heavy hearts in two thousand and eight he was

the unassailable candidate of choice this time mr obama is likely to stay in my default arena artsy new york. just ahead tonight we'll have details on two arms deals were signed off while pretty rough the air after the break but discuss what these agreements mean for america's future relations in the middle east and our efforts to counter and surround iraq. with the was there to believe the reffing of. what a protest nobody seems to know. but never a pepper sprayed the face but part of the argument that they're being overly dramatic.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else you hear sees some other part of it and realize everything is ok. i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

mr. well as many of you out there are coming back to work catching up on your news cycle you might have missed two notable arms deals that were signed by president obama over the holidays one of these was the finalization of a part of a ten year sixty billion dollar arms deal with saudi arabia which included helicopters missiles bombs and delivery systems however this element of the agreement says the u.s.

is going to send eighty four new fighter jets to the country as well as upgrades for seventy more jets and other record reach as a tween the u.s. and its middle east ally the united arab emirates the three point four billion dollars agreement there includes ninety six missiles with supporting technology and training to accompany those weapons as well as a contract with lockheed martin to produce a terminal high altitude area defense weapon system for the u.a.e. so that would be the first foreign sale of the system to a foreign country however all this is part of america's efforts to build up missile defense of sims of its middle east allies over the past few years so u.s. is also sold one point seven billion dollars worth of patriot missiles to upgrade saudi arabia's defenses and another nine hundred million of missiles to kuwait to all these weapons deals by the u.s. or the part of a strategic move by our country to slowly build up defense against iran so even though the iraq war is over with appropriately placed quotation marks the u.s. wants to make sure that they are still involved in there is as involved in the region as ever before and in fact we told you

a few weeks ago the new york times reported on the expanding not diminishing american presence citing efforts to reposition new combat forces in kuwait and expanding and strengthening our relationships with other allies in the region secretary of state hillary clinton reaffirmed that mission saying we will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region which is proof of our ongoing commitment to iraq and to the future of that region which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy how funny they were saying free from outside interference right so is america are we really expanding our commitment to expand democracy here or is that just. from the people i clinton are using to strengthen our military ties it's a point that we brought up last november and we discussed the true american presence in the middle east with former cia agent jack rice during our interview here mind us that this was not the first time that the u.s. made moves like this. the first goal or with the americans did is they pulled back from iraq they stated kuwait in substantial numbers but they also moved into saudi

arabia so we see this point will be back in the eighty's but you know you saw harkens to the point that i was making earlier in your our conversation when the americans rolled into places like saudi arabia that's one of the things that drove this other interesting individual named osama bin ladin to actually reach out and fight the west again this question of bringing stability which results in instability. so this all just unfolds another bad taste of history repeating itself it's quite possible and frankly it's a sign that america has intentions other than the ones that we openly share with the world these arms deals could be the latest precursor to waging war with iran a country that if you think about it we now have surrounded. well coming out tonight show and tell and that as promised we're going to bring you all the latest when it comes to so after the break we're going to break down some of the myths about the legislation and a sister protect the bottom question is are the bottom line is do they even stop

piracy. into it only or military mechanisms to do the work to bring justice or accountability. i have every right to know what my government should do if you want to know why i pay taxes. i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.