veterans let's be honest defense cuts don't have to equal benefit cuts for the vets so how do we stop this myth and what areas should be on the chopping block instead and the supreme court citizens united decision has now turned two years old we're going to look at how it's changed our political system in that time and talk about the protests that took place on the steps of the supreme court this afternoon we'll have all that and more few tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so last night c.n.n. hosted yet a nother g.o.p. debate it was the second debate this week so we're really heading into the overkill zone here but last night it was down to the final four mitt romney newt gingrich rick santorum and ron paul and john king who moderated decided to start off this debate with a question to newt gingrich about his ex-wife saying that he asked for an open marriage and i guess let's just say that it backfired in typical new fashion he turned it into an attack on the media and the media well they basically took the

bait and then this morning only talked about this first minute of the debate and almost nothing else that was said. newt gingrich lashing out at the mainstream media last night during the republican debate attacking a moderator for starting the event with a personal question about his failed second marriage instead of focusing on issues that he says are important to america newt gingrich turned up the heat on the news media and last night's debate started when our john king asked about an accusation by gingrich's ex-wife that one candidate facing tough questions about his taxes accusations that another candidate wanted an open marriage who would have thought we'd be where we are today with newt gingrich and all of his righteous indignation possibly on the verge of winning south carolina are. gingrich's response because that's the same crap that they pulled on me and that's what's wrong with politics this is what's turning the american people off as for his ex-wife's claim that he

asked for an open marriage he says this story is false. i mean listen i've got my own thoughts of what happened last night i think it was stupid of john king to start out the debate with that as the top question i also think that had he wanted to he could have called out newt gingrich for his firm stance on family values and marriage and thrown that in his face and said that that's also why these questions matter because when you parade around telling other people how to live lower lives but refuse to hear about any critique of your own what just doesn't make any sense not to mention of course the utter hypocrisy of newt gingrich acting like it's absurd that anybody would focus on his infidelity rather than the issues that really matter when he was the man that led the charge against bill clinton back in the day but whatever i've said my piece on that and it took me all of thirty seconds and now let's move on to see what else happened it was a two hour debate after all so tonight specifically i'd like to focus on something that ron paul said because not only was it forgotten about the moment this debate was over but it's an issue that the mainstream media does

a really embarrassing and shameful job of addressing. where the veterans really deserve help both as a physician and the sick. congressman is the people who come back and aren't doing well elsewise they need more help we have an epidemic of suicide of our military coming back so they need a lot of medical help and i think they come up short changed it came up short changed after vietnam war persian gulf war even now they don't kid here. you see yesterday army officials held a press conference to talk about this growing and continuing problem within our military starting in two thousand and four suicide rates in the armed services began skyrocketing and hitting records eight years later after a decade of total war as well the problem has not subsided while the army reported that amongst active duty army national guard and reserves suicides are leveling off for active duty army specifically they reached a new record in two thousand and eleven so it's more as the army also reported

a sharp increase by nearly thirty percent in violent sex crimes that's also not forget the veterans face staggering unemployment numbers that p.t.s.d. is still a problem at the military is struggling to counter and to understand that's what happens after a country wages war for ten years wars where men and women go on monday multiple tours of duty and where it's hard to even describe what exactly it is that they're fighting for ron paul is right when he says that this is an epidemic that we need to do more to counter this problem and yet not a single other candidate up on that stage last night echoed his sentiments funny considering that those of the candidates of the most hawkish say that we need the strongest and biggest military imaginable that we can leave afghanistan and we should probably start a war with iran they want to wage war all over the world and yet they don't want to think of the consequences on their own people on those who they want to send to fight those wars and you know what the mainstream media is just as guilty because when it comes to iraq and afghanistan when it comes to the veterans of those two wars and what their lives are like afterwards they rarely ever cover it they go all

out on veterans day and think that that means that their job is done but the rest of the time they choose to. well yesterday we first reported to you that the f.b.i. had seized the file sharing website mega upload as well as arresting seven people connected to the site that includes kim shits a kim dot com the founder of make upload was a dutch citizen and lives in both hong kong and new zealand and the d.o.j. unsealed a federal indictment yesterday charging those arrested with racketeering money laundering and copyright infringement and the indictment alleges that mega upload and a shell company associated with it cause an estimated five hundred million dollars in copyright losses all of this of course happening just one day after the biggest online protest in history in opposition to sopa and protect ip so what does this entire episode tell us about how the feds plan to apply international criminal

procedures to internet policy and what happens to all those people that shared files on this site that weren't copyrighted or legal let's not forget megaupload gets about fifty million hits a day claims four percent of all internet traffic and has an estimated one hundred fifty million users who pay for that service so here to discuss with me is julian sanchez a research fellow at the cato institute thanks so much for being here tonight pleasure what do you think about this i mean this was a major operation it was the f.b.i. but working with authorities in new zealand working with authorities in canada in hong kong in the netherlands it really was an international operation all around you know from sort of the first thing to say i think is that if you know the facts lead out in the indictment here or are accurate the people behind this are in fact may get screwed i mean it does sound like they were not just hosting a platform of people committed copyright infringement but encouraging it you know with full knowledge as part of their business model if that's the case you know too

bad for them the question though is you know given that evidently we have perfectly you know ample cause. capability to find people overseas charge them in us court indict them and get them brought here when we need to. why is it necessary to have things like sopa and pipa to you know to carry that out we're also learning of course that even without soap and under the parts pro ip act of two thousand and eight the government thinks it already has the ability to seize before trial domains that are registered in the us dot com as dot org and so on and that's a little disturbing because even if it sounds like these people are guilty it is up to the trial to determine that the on the reasonable doubt and you would think that it's after that conviction that you would go to the you know go to the lengths of taking down an entire site which as we know again hosts yeah sure copyright infringement areal just like you tube does but also lots of legitimate stuff the journalist adam penenberg he's famous for breaking the stephen glass plagiarism you

know fabrication story tweeted this morning he actually used to use megaupload to get his stories to transcribers he would record an interview and then put it on megaupload for someone to transcribe well there are a lot of people out there i mean that's the whole thing right is that there are a lot of people that are users that make up that weren't necessarily using it for i guess you could say malicious purposes or to share copyrighted or pirated material out there so what happens to that now this site has been taken down although actually before we go there i mean some people are saying that there's a bit of a lack of thing going on where supporters of the site are trying to keep it alive now there are some servers in the netherlands that have popped up is there any way for megaupload to stay alive at this point well i mean i think the real obstacle at this point is that most of their executives are now in custody which makes it difficult for them to do anything also i mean you have to unlike the pirate bay for example which is a tracker that doesn't post all that content that's all you know hosted peer to

peer they just has to do the torrent tracking files we are talking about a case where they had a virginia based servers with something like twenty four petabytes. which is a million gigabyte. just ratcheted up there that's a lot so it's a lot a lot a lot of data and a lot of bandwidth it's hard to quickly shift that so it's clear that someone of the company now is trying to create new servers a different ip address different domain name and they've got to survive be addressed it's still working but there's nothing there it seems pretty clear that they'll be back up in a matter of days probably and in the meantime you know rapid share and hot file and orion and all these other lockers are just happy for the extra traffic i get a lot of traffic but then what happens to all these other people that decided to sign up for make a pledge that in paying you know whatever the fee is first of course i think somebody was saying yesterday that they just signed up it was three hundred dollars you know for this massive subscription what happens to their stuff they're the ones who are out of luck you know i mean if you want to find

a pirated copy of shrek two there are a lot of places other than meg upload on the internet where you can find that if you're using megaupload and you know video from your wedding to your cousins you couldn't make it we're screwed because that's probably the only place that was on the internet well that i mean i think that's you know unfortunate and i think that deserves some outrage from a lot of the users but you know how often do we really see something like this happen like let's say that the author already is in new zealand didn't want to comply if there was just a federal indictment granted from the court here within the u.s. to our authorities there are fed still think if they can go wherever they want all over the world to shut down these sites and arrest people well obviously you can't against the will of another country i mean who knows if it's asked but it makes you wonder you wonder how far they might go. you know i mean i guess you know they're willing to sort of parachute into countries like italy and seize people accused of terrorism i mean if you listen to the rhetoric coming out of the in the m.p.a. you know these guys are worse than terrorists so maybe we need delta squad to go in

and round these folks up i don't think you know we're near there yet but you do you do wonder. given the number of hundreds of sites we've already seen season into this authority you know when they've gotten what the industry calls the worst of the worst and it turns out that a surprise surprise that hasn't stopped piracy do they go to forums where people are posting links even if the form isn't just a copyright infringing forum do they go at these other file lockers that unlike mag upload doesn't it's not clear that they are deliberately planning to facilitate copyright infringement but just providing cloud storage all right so let's say that sopa and pipa which for now it looks like this massive online protest kind of work they've been shelved let's say that those actually were to become law than how much worse what a problem like this become what we see you know so many more instances like this you know i think there are a lot of sites that they may not be going after now because they understand you

know if you take down megaupload dot com they'll show up again at mega upload t.v. or some other non us registered site so you would imagine that they would be more aggressive in doing kind of simultaneous takedowns across the domain space if they knew that they could do it everywhere you also i just think we just have a lot more aggressive action against companies that not only are based overseas but unlike kim dotcom and company you know may not speak english or be familiar with us law so i think that imposes a much greater burden is one thing to say you know business is hosted in the us are expected to understand american copyright law and be able to defend themselves in court if you're talking about you know a small startup in billie's or something you know they may not have a lot of us lawyers and a deep understanding of the digital and the millennium copyright act for say for him dot com he doesn't really paint himself doesn't come out to be a character that entirely sympathetic when they are arrested him with his many lamborghinis and fancy because there is matching on matching or c.d.'s ben's with

license plates good and evil and i also have one. and one that said guilty. what she may come to regret ouch ok so just you know last question to you and you have been coming on the show for months we've been talking about protect ip and we've been talking about sopa and then we have this massive day of protest blackout day on wednesday do you think that was a success well i mean the bills are now so i think it's hard to call it anything but a success on the other hand you know industry lobby groups don't like to spend millions of dollars and you know just write it off as a waste so i wouldn't be surprised if we saw these coming back under a different acronym now i have a feeling that that might happen but i guess in the meantime we have a little bit of celebrating to do and so we're going to go into that in our next story but join thanks so much for joining us tonight and we'll see how this story unfolds too and sorry for people that might have lost some stuff on there.

now the government's efforts to continue with their war on piracy is obviously far from over but there was a noble victory against it today senate majority leader harry reid has changed his mind on voting on the protect i.p.x. after one hundred twelve congressman spoke out against the bill and a very successful online protest and mobilization earlier this week and it tweet earlier today reid said in light of recent events i've decided to postpone tuesday's vote on the protect ip act they are both listed now as delayed meaning that they could be brought back brought back or left to die but for now there are no plans in either house or the senate to vote or further debate on either bill so that's basically a tally in the will win column after all harry reid was just on meet the press last sunday extolling the virtues of pippa as a job creating bill and he's not the only one the thinking is we'll see senator chuck schumer a sponsor also took to twitter to tell opponents that congress is in fact paying attention to its constituents tweet it you've been hurt people has been polled so we can find

a better solution and we should note that pipa sisters bill sr bill sopa has also been tabled by congressman lamar smith all i can say is holy cow. congress has actually listened to its constituents for once after months of growing public outcry opposition from almost every tech company and embarrassing house judiciary committee hearing and the white house coming out against the harry reid was still dead set on voting on this bill so this is just proof of the protests by thousands of websites on january eighteenth successfully made their point the protect ip and sopa are not the answers to concerns about music and movie piracy but it's not just three that surprised us in fact last night in the debate all four of the republican presidential candidates also expressed opposition to the bill's. well our favor freedom. and i think that if you you know i think you would have more first we have copyright law very company finds that it is genuinely been infringed upon it has the right to sue for but the idea that we're going to preemptively have the

government start censoring the internet on behalf of giant corporations that are going to interest strikes me as exactly the wrong thing to do so the. truth of the matter is that the law as written is far too intrusive far too expansive far too threatening the freedom of speech and movement of information across the internet it would have a potentially depressing impact on one of the fastest growing industries in america he was the first republican to sign on with a host of democrats to oppose this law i mean i'm i'm for free but i'm not for people abusing the law and that's what's happening right now and i think something improper should be done i agree this goes too far. so it seems that everyone is finally in agreement that the way the sopa and pipa are written won't fix anything it would just place on warranted restrictions on the internet as we know it but today salon's glenn greenwald brought up a good point he took to twitter to ask is a lesson of so as defeat a that citizens can defeat an industry back to bill or b.

it takes another big industry silicon valley to do that you know he's right. not only did the right that the people stand up against legislation but several companies within silicon valley most notably the ones who blacked out their websites stood up against it too so perhaps that was the last piece falling into place forcing congress to change their stance on copyright protection after all silicon valley is one of the biggest industries driving our country today but this one defeat isn't going to stop the n.p.a. and the fight against protecting hollywood's precious content as mike masnick of tech points out this is just winning the first battle and what's going to be a very lengthy worldwide war like we just explained our last interview government is just sided take on anybody who might be links to pirated material without congress and hollywood lobbyist like chris dodd are still working to persuade congress to create a bill that would go after piracy and counterfeit materials or to revive sopa and pipa if they actually can let's just hope that future proposals won't be as extreme

as the ones the american people managed to kill this time. so to come tonight foreign policy might not have been on the agenda during yesterday's debate as veterans' benefits were a topic of discussion after the break we're going to find out how the government can still cut back on defense spending on make sure the soldiers get the benefits of a this are. people calling. for free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from the. as you can hear behind me loud explosions.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm john harvey welcome to the big picture.

last night's c.n.n. debate was essentially devoid of any foreign policy no iran no afghanistan no shadow wars but when the issue of veteran unemployment came up some of the candidates did take their time to criticize president obama for upcoming defense cuts and they said that he's doing it all on the backs of those who served. we have bros united states who said he is going to cut veterans' benefits cut our military at a time when these folks are four five six seven tours coming back in and out of jobs sacrificing everything for this country the president states can't cut one penny

out of the social welfare system and he wants to cut a trillion dollars out of our military and hit our veterans a dutch disgusting we've got an aging navy we've got an aging air force they're playing and cutting our number of active duty personnel they can't possibly keep up with the needs of our veterans it is absolutely wrong to balance our budget on the backs of our military we need a strong military so strong no one in the world would ever think of testing it. now just remember a few things the four hundred fifty billion dollars in cuts over the next ten years to defense was a deal reached by congress as was the condition that if the supercommittee failed six hundred billion and trigger cuts would also be coming that way now it's through the veterans benefits are one of the areas that will be hit with the chopping block and let's be honest it is not have to be that way so where else could these cuts come down and when republicans stop using better it's their advantage while pushing for continuous wars here discussing with me is just a large director of homeless veterans initiative at the community council for the

homeless at friendship place jeff thanks so much for joining us tonight so we just showed a few clips of you here rick santorum go off on this tirade and he says that it's absolutely disgusting that the president is trying to cut a trillion dollars from defense he's doing it on the backs of the veterans how does that make you feel as a veteran well that's let's keep in mind that president obama has probably been the best president in modern history for veterans he's increased the budget for the. by far over what the bush administration did he's been a lot better especially around homeless veterans we've seen a massive decrease in homelessness among veterans at a time where we're in the deepest recession we've been since the great depression homelessness in general went down one percent because of the stimulus package and the h. p.r.p. or homeless prevention rapid that's inside of that and especially for homeless veterans because of the vashti program which is a supportive housing voucher through the v.a. and through s.s. vs grant which is almost prevention raftery housing money we're seeing big cuts in

the number of veterans who are homeless so when i hear politicians like ron paul and other libertarians who want to go out there and say that well we can just cut and get rid of hud well if you get rid of hud guess how many thousands of veterans are going to end up homeless again because they're really being helped a lot by these programs and while i disagree with the president on some things the fact is is that when it comes to veterans he has been by far better than any administration we've seen in modern history but the thing is so these cuts that are going to be taking place the four hundred fifty billion dollars in cuts that very public can and they're talking about there are going to be cuts to veterans' benefits there is going to be some change to the system there but would you say that that is necessarily the president's fault or you know the pentagon right there are the ones that are looking at where they have to slow down there being good let's also have a different there's a difference between the veterans administration and the department defense ok so these two aren't the same thing and the cuts that are happening aren't going to be cuts to things or don't have to be things like health care or tri-care which is the

health care of service members it doesn't have to be on some of the things that really directly impact service members' lives what we can cut back pretty easily on our some of the d.o.d. expense expenditures on things like contractors we don't have to be giving these elaborate contractors to corporations like halliburton kellogg brown and root you don't have to cut this service to actually. service members you don't have to cut those benefits you don't have to even touch those and you can cut a lot more out of the. defense department's budget without avar really impacting any service members why me and maybe we can cut a few bases out there that we have that we have hundreds of them around the world maybe there's a few weapon systems that we could cut i mean if you just take a look at jet systems that we don't even use or nuclear submarines that we don't even use it's not like we have to make cuts in things that are actually impacting day to day life for service members impacting national defense we can just get rid

of systems that are irrelevant at this point in time mitt romney talked about an aging navy and an aging air force will why are we keeping those older planes where we keep those older submarines it's not like we're not producing new ones we just happen to be maintaining keeping planes and submarines and ships that are well outdated and so we can very much trim our military still keep it way beyond any other country every other country combined in the world we can still have a military much bigger than all of those and protect service members and cut the budget the thing is when somebody like mitt romney starts lamenting the fact that we have an aging navy he's lamenting it because he says that we need more that we need more defense spending and so i mean i don't know how does it make you feel do you feel like they're using veterans almost as a pawn when you hear rick santorum and mitt romney who don't want defense spending to be kind of all who are really preaching for us to stay in afghanistan that are really you know drumming. beating the drums for war with iran when they say how

dare you cut defense because it's only the veterans that are going to be hurt feel used in a certain sense well i mean i personally don't feel used i've been out of the military for years now but i can see where i can see where that rhetoric is use atory that's what it is that's their point in bringing it up. they can't possibly actually argue facts on these issues because they're completely wrong eva. ron paul was completely wrong as right as he was talking about the epidemic of suicide to talk about to think that after world war two that there were no programs put in place we don't remember going to be forgot about the g.i. bill and the housing programs how many housing programs were put in place post world war two there were tons of jobs programs put in place for world war two i mean he's just cutting history out i mean if his if he was a poor of a doctor is he as a historian i feel bad for the women that he served now as they are going to take but it's interesting though because ron paul does have a very large veteran following and he gets it when his home service members that

you're going to get them out of these countries and out of these wars that are incredibly unpopular of course he's going to get those kinds of donations i mean that's just that's just common sense because he's following certain policies that are very popular in the military we don't like to think about how unpopular the wars are inside the military but they are and so his foreign policy stances from that aspect are now if we start to expose some of the things that he talks about with closing down hard and how many thousands of veterans would become homeless like that if we closed down i think some of that support would probably wane i want to bring up one of the things that mitt romney was also talking about is that when he was asked this question as to whether or not there should be some extra help for veterans when they return to help them get jobs he basically said they should all be brought back to the states and let the states handle it all that's kind of a radical idea right since when did the states really have what are they in charge of military affairs in that sense what do you think of it i mean not only would it be a radical departure from anything we've ever done it just wouldn't be effective it

just plain and simply wouldn't be effective the states if they could be doing things like that they would be actually massachusetts where he was governor has been more successful than any other look at veterans' homelessness for example at a time where we saw the national veteran homelessness go down by twelve percent we saw veteran homelessness in massachusetts go down by about twenty percent because of how well their office of veterans affairs has made some of the. moves now i haven't done it of course while governor romney was governor it was years after he got done being governor there but the fact is there are things that states can do there are also things that the federal government can learn from what some of the states are doing but to think that we can just push it down to the states and that it's going to be effective it's just not smart policy and the problem here is that they're using talking points rather than smart policy smart policy it's the law it's going to be in depth it's going to be expensive they're not thirty second cheap little talking points that's not good policy that's part of the problem here too right that's why this needs to be discussed and addressed more often rather

than just thrown around as a talking point jeff thanks so much for joining us tonight not a problem thanks for. taking a break right now. people calling like you said for free and fair elections. and there's no reporting from the. if you can hear behind me. i got it.