well by now it's no secret that immigration is an issue that most if not all americans hold a very strong opinion on and this monday when n.b.c. hosted a republican debate mitt romney had the following suggestion as a solution to this immigration problem well the answer is self deportation which is people decide that they could do better by going home because they can't find work here because they don't have legal documentation to allow them to work here and so we're not going to round people up. now last night's c.n.n. debate immigration talk continued with mitt slightly just slightly backing off that

plan meanwhile president obama who got the majority latino vote in two thousand and eight and yet hasn't delivered on his promise of comprehensive immigration reform reminded voters in his state of the union address this week that it is still part of the plan. payments of action of excuses we should be working on campaigns of immigration reform now. now another thing the president did that night was reach out to republicans and talk about how where students are involved he's been very tough and border crossings have decreased but it's not really something to brag about from a human perspective we've told you before about obama's record setting deportation record his administration sent three hundred ninety six thousand undocumented immigrants out of the u.s. and that was just in two thousand and eleven let's take a look at this from a different perspective a daily perspective to the huffington post is found through a freedom of information act requests that ice is responsible for holding thirty

two thousand people in immigration detention without any charges on a single day and that was october third of two thousand and eleven now amongst those who were arrested forty percent were convicted of any crime nor awaiting a trial the rest are there for low level offenses like duis or minor drug charges and only a few of them were actually accused of violent crimes to having imposed does make a good point here that being an undocumented immigrant is on its head a civil offense and not a criminal one meant immediately with the punishment of spending time behind bars so why are so many of these immigrants actually ending up in jail we see it all comes down to money private prisons that make a killing of undocumented immigrants because they can hold them in their prisons allowing the detention centers to meet their financial goals and a statement to the as you see the corrections corporation of america wrote immigration reform laws which are currently a focus for legislators and politicians at the federal state and local level also could it materially adverse impact us so for them a locking up immigrants and throwing away the key is simply

a business strategy the private prisons choose to overlook how this effects those behind bars who are too often forgotten they also forget how this affects american taxpayers it costs about two million dollars a day to keep immigrants detained while i sorted out their paperwork and decided what to do with the. people and what i said the obama administration are doing with undocumented immigrants is completely ridiculous they're clearly making a business out of rounding people up not consider the fact that these are humans they have families they have their own lives to live and i swear that they're trying to shift away from detaining innocent people with new policies but with figures like the ones that we've just shared with you seems like they say one thing and do another so hopefully this will get the american people to wake up and take note of our screwed up policies and encourage our lawmakers to try to make it right . while the two years since the citizens united ruling we've seen shifting attitudes not only as public discontent growing towards the influence of money in politics but so was the discontent from republican candidates both newt gingrich

and mitt romney of recently bemoaned the negative campaigning done by super pacs we see digging up the dirt on candidates as exist in our system for a long long time there's just more money and mortgages ations putting that kind of stuff out now and in fact if play such a vital role and is so ingrained that sometimes the candidates themselves forget what their own campaign's put out to attack their competitors take mitt romney at last night's debate for example. the rhetoric on immigration governor has been intense as you well know as all four of you know anyone who watches television you've had an ad running saying that speaker gingrich calls spanish quote the language of the ghetto what do you mean by that i haven't seen the ad so i'm sorry i don't get to see all the t.v. ads we did double check just now governor that ad that we talked about where i quoted you as saying that speaker gingrich called spanish the language of the ghetto we just double checked it was one of your ads it's running here in florida. on the radio and at the end you say i'm mitt romney and i approved this so it is

a bit of a serious question. so who are the people who work for various campaigns across the country to find the negative stories and dig up all of the dirt and how does it really affect the playing field joining me from our studio in new york to discuss this is somebody who has been uncovering the buried truth about political candidates for years alan huffman the author of the book we're with nobody to insiders reveal the dark side of american politics out i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight and first you know tell us how many years exactly did you spend you know how long you've been working on digging up dirt on people well thank you for having me and i should correct one thing my partner in research michael rigidity and he's also my co-author of the book we've been doing it for eighteen years and so all across the country and it's just sort of been a long very interesting road trip about not only politics but just about the country and the way the political system is evolving over time but so how have you seen it evolve in the last eighteen years that you've been doing this you know what

is it that you think that the average american probably has no idea is going on behind the scenes when when candidates are campaigning. i think when we started it was easier to shock voters you know eighteen years ago people were just they hadn't been exposed to is much the biggest change probably that we've seen is in the current cycle that after citizens united. you can't overstate the importance of what this is done the money that has been pumped into the campaigns in ways that are not precisely accountable to the candidates themselves and so that negative ads that you're seeing on t.v. are all based on opposition research that someone is doing out there that's changing the landscape completely and the internet of course has had a huge impact to our whole purpose is to document information the internet sometimes puts information out there that becomes true but repetition without

documentation which is a little distressing to us having done this for so long was the mention of course that citizens united is change the playing field so i'm assuming that demand for people to do opposition research has gone up you know and what kind of an industry is this exactly how much money are we talking about and how much more can we seeing it skyrocket. well you know it goes through the whole every strata of politics so a presidential campaign could be hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes we might actually work on a very small campaign it depends on how how interested they are in winning that race and that may be just a few thousand dollars you know you have to be very flexible but we haven't really seen the full impact of citizens united yet because this is the first election that has come about since that ruling and with the super pacs able to invest unlimited funds in political campaigns some of which is not entirely transparent and which is

not necessarily linked to the campaign you just have a entirely new mechanism for exerting great influence over over the election well how much do you think that negative campaigning really works you mentioned that it's a little tougher to shock you know the voters these days so what is it exactly that you think might really make or break someone it seems like infidelity doesn't really matter either. yeah i think in the case of infidelity normally the problem would be how the candidate reacts to which is often the problem with opposition research is you know you throw something out there and maybe the voters don't really care but when you see how the man reacted which i think was the case with herman cain i think his response to the attacks were much of a problem as as the actual meat of the attack but the the whole what we're seeing with the opposition research going on right now is it's just it's more of

a pervasive picture of the candidate that's being brought in from a lot of different sources you don't have people that are just saying oh there's this one thing he had a dui or whatever you know there used to be you would just fund this one thing you would throw that out there and they would build a whole campaign around it and now there's more of a comprehensive look at a candidate and you look at what what we know about him then how that might indicate how he's going to lead in the future so it's a little more nuanced now than it was is there anything that is too racy or that goes too far have you ever found some kind of dirt on a candidate that even their competitors weren't willing to put out there to the public absolutely and people are always surprised to hear that that camp campaigns really don't especially congressional campaigns. statewide campaigns presidential campaigns or their own animal but but they don't really want to go deep negative if they don't have to because there's always the risk of blowback and so yeah we have

definitely brought things into them that they look at and everybody's like whoa you know i don't want to even be associated with that and any advantage sometime in that. well i can't name names because you know it was a confidentiality agreement with the campaign that we were actually working for but it was it was a case where there was some question of some criminal activity that and allegations of sexual abuse of children and because they really couldn't be proved and this was years ago so don't get excited i'm not you're not going to have to go find out who this was but it didn't come out because our candidate just said you know we're all going to look bad if this comes out we had mixed feelings about it because it did seem a little you know on toward and a little slimy but if it was true it needed to be known and as it turned out the candidate was elected and imploded a lot of other things happened that work sort of related to what had happened

before but that's and there were a few other cases where on at least. as well and time for one more question here you know the book is called we're with nobody how does that work where you work for anybody you don't care what their political background is you have no allegiance to a political party or their ideals. you know i'm a democrat and that those are my ideals they don't really come into play in the way that we do our work because we have to be objective we mostly work for democrats who work for republicans against republicans because we're going to research you and your opponent and we're going to look at you the same way and only way our ideology comes in the plays and who gets our awards. it's very interesting i think it's something that you know most americans have no idea what a huge industry this really is and how much it drives campaigns that thanks so much for joining us tonight thanks for having me. all right coming up next on the show people from the gingrich campaign are trying to pick

a fight with mitt romney we're going to have details of. and we'll introduce you to congressional candidate who wants to run based on the beliefs of the occupy movement is the first official occupy candidate but could we see more all that after the. same. people calling what you said for free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from the summer 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 you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry is a big issue. hi

guys it's time for tonight's tool time award and tonight it's going to newt gingrich and his campaign staff now even i will reluctantly admit that no it's pretty good at the debates has got that attacks on the moderators have earned him the love of the g.o.p. grout and he's even managed to knock the ever so slick mitt romney off his game he's so confident in his ability these actually campaigning as the man that can beat obama by debating him to death. i want you to know if you choose me and i am allowed to be your nominee. i would immediately challenge president obama to seven lincoln douglas style three hour debate.

now we all know that newt's got an ego on him that he claims to be the man who has grandiose thoughts and apparently it's rubbed off on his aides is he last night at the c.n.n. debate everybody pretty much agree that gingrich didn't do so hot and so what do you get his aides blame that went on they claim that mitt's people quote definitely packed the room i mean seriously newt sucked it up in your response was that mitt was cheating it wasn't a fair fight nice try i find all the words hating because it's complaint about the last debate held by n.b.c. is brian williams on monday night last night's debate because the audience was taken out of it and up until this point the audience has been your fam. you know i wish in retrospect i protested when brian williams took him out of it because it's wrong and i think he took away because the media is terrified that the audience is going to side with the candidates against the media which is what they've done in every debate and we're going to serve notice in future debates we will talk all of

which is not going to allow that to happen that's wrong as the media doesn't control free speech people ought to be allowed to applaud if they want to do. all right so let me get this straight on tuesday he's complaining about a media conspiracy to keep the audience from using their free speech in adoring him and then just four days later he has a new clapping related conspiracy to throw out it wasn't brian williams this time it was mitt romney now of course the spokesman of the for a republican party says that this is absurd that the party worked very hard to ensure the room was rank and file folks who represent the electorate of these guys are trying to speak to but no that is not enough not good enough for newt gingrich it could be that he had a poor performance is that somebody else wronged him so it's not the evil mainstream media it's got to be somebody else now my idea for newt is take take your humble pie and just eat it you had a bad night period so over pulling out the also classic victim routine we give new congress new gingrich and his staff tonight's tool time award. now just yesterday

twitter made a major announcement that they are expanding their operations worldwide they have yet to say which countries they'll be extending their business to but with the news of their expansion they also announced it will be using a new censorship policy is in order for twitter to exist in certain countries they have to agree to comply with that country's policies on the freedom of expression when it comes to censoring certain information so in a twitter blog post the company said starting today we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world we've also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld and why now many people are opposed to the censorship plant and tomorrow january twenty eighth users who want to protest are going to stop the site for the day they stop using the site for the day so basically any current tweets out there to spread the word of the protest have the hash tag twitter blackout now the having to post was reporting the word about the blackout is spreading in all different languages at

a rate of twelve tweets per minute and while the outcry over any type of censorship on twitter is understandable there is another side of this discussion in a blog post that we just shared twitter says they're giving themselves the ability to censor users but that's for users in one specific country they'll be leaving that same tweet available for users around the world so let's say that somebody in germany shares a tweet expressing support for the nazi party that is illegal in germany so even if twitter does censor that tweet in that country users in the rest of the world can still read the text as it was originally written so rather than tweet this rather than the tweet being censored everywhere now the social media company has also said that censoring any content would only happen reactively they're going to let the users know about the withheld content they also plan on publicly posting every single censored tweet on the website chilling effect or to show the company is attempting to be as transparent as possible now twitter was one of the major online sources for people to share word of protests like protests of sopa and pipa or

occupy wall street as as well. of course reading worried about movements during the arab spring in countries with oppressive governments twitter provides an outlet for people to share their thoughts without worrying about censorship so news of twittering gauging any type of censorship is rightfully causing concern how is twitter going to decide which laws they will abide by will iran's laws be treated with the same respect as germany's laws now somehow i doubt it would just brings up a whole host of questions so is this sort of selective censorship actually a good thing because it limits the impact of the censors or does a put too much power in the hands of the company to decide who's laws are valid and whose aren't going to let you decide but i think we'll find out what the people really think when they stop tweeting on saturday. well it's been more than four months since the occupy movement began and as encampments across the country have been a victim a lot of questions have been raised as to what comes next well this might be one path c. there is now officially the first occupy candidate running for congress nathan

kleinman is a twenty nine year old member of the occupy philadelphia movement will be running in pennsylvania's thirteenth district and i'll be running in the democratic primary so as being an occupy candidate really meat is the only way to break into the mold that enact change from the inside or is the tea party route considered a bit of a sellout joining me now is a think climate a declared candidate for congress in the two thousand and twelve election who's running on a platform based on the occupy movement nathan thanks so much for joining us tonight and first i guess tell us a little bit more about yourself when you say that you are an occupy candidate or that you're an active member by philadelphia what does i really mean. sure i do want to say i am not an official occupy candidate there really is no such thing as far as i know. we in fact in occupy philly we had a proposal last night at the general assembly that i was really happy to support that made it very clear that we do not endorse candidates we're a nonpartizan movement we're a nonpolitical movement and we need to have as open

a tent as possible i think that's really important for a movement like occupied to do so while i consider myself an active participant i'm really proud of my participation in occupy philly i am not an official candidate in any kind of way i'm an autonomous individual running for congress on my own platform i happen to share a lot of the ideals with the a lot of occupiers share i but do you call yourself an occupy candidate because you think that it makes you stand out from the rest of the democratic party or do you say you're an independent you say you're democrat what you know what's your own label yeah i call myself an occupy inspired candidate i am running in the democratic party i'm a lifelong democrat and i i believe for a lot of reasons but most of all because there would be really no way to win an election like this without running our two party system is so entrenched i think the democratic party has lost its way on lots and lots of issues and especially the

issue of corporate power and money in politics and that's that's why i'm running to to do something about it i think we need to take a multi-pronged approach i still i'm involved in occupy and i plan to continue to be and i'm really excited about my involvement and a lot of the projects that are happening at occupy philly and at occupies around the country and around the world you know expand be telling your platforms like that. sure well i've my platform you can see i'm wearing a button here that says repeal the patriot act. that's that's a crucial issue i mean we have we have laws in this country like the patriot act that have classified legal interpretations so we don't even know what the government thinks that they can do with a law like that with the n.d.a. that allows for indefinite detention these things are dangerous and and i'm running to i'm running to stop them i'm also running because we've got we've got to help the working class we've got to help the middle class extending the bush tax cuts on

the rich have that the fact that people consider themselves progressives voted for that even as recently as last year is just to me is just appalling i now carry is to because you know part of the occupy movement a part of the goals and ideals there are to rid the system of the corruption of the influence that money has and that's why we see so many moves to overturn citizens united we've even seen some other candidates out there some republican candidates like buddy roemer put limits on how many on campaign contributions you know how are you going to go about that you have limits or you know where do you plan to get your money from. well i plan to get my money from individuals and i'm not planning to take any corporate money we really just got our just getting our fundraising up and running we fed exed our papers to the f.e.c. and i have volunteers working for me right now i don't have any staff but i will i will have staff i actually received my first donation today i'm allowed to

receive up to five thousand dollars before before the f.e.c. officially registers my candidacy we've got the bank we've got a bank account we can accept checks i haven't made a decision yet about a individual limit gotta look into what other candidates are doing and what seems appropriate but right now i'm running against a candidate who can raise millions of dollars with their hands tied behind her back and so the only way to compete in this election is going to be to raise money but i've already said publicly and i absolutely am committed to this that if i am elected to congress which i expect to be i will never spend a single minute of my time as a congressman raising money because it's a twenty four seven job and i really think that it's unconscionable that members of congress spend half their time or more on the phone raising money or going to fundraisers it's it's really inappropriate congress is a twenty four seven job so i am let me interrupt you nathan to just one final

question sound i'm curious what those at the you know what those that are part of the occupy philadelphia movement think about this move do they think that there should be my candidates and say if they occupy inspire or is that too much mimicking what the tea party to which now is just become an extension of the you know the republican party is there a lot of debate over this there isn't quite a lot of debate i think that it varies depending on the location and i'm sure it varies depending on the individual i've been involved at occupy philly since since october and i've been. incredibly involved in a number of different working groups so the people who are most involved there gotten to know me really well and they've been incredibly supportive i've been really gratified and happy with all of the support that i've gotten from from occupiers in occupy philly and my friends in the movement across the country it's been really really really quite amazing there is

a strong debate inside the movement about this question of reform versus revolution but i believe that movement like occupy is only going to succeed in changing the country if we take this multipronged approach and try and change the system from within and from without and i'm going to continue being active in occupy philly during this campaign and after i'm elected and i imagine after i retire as well because this is a long term process changing the country is not going to be quick it's not going to be easy and that's what the occupy movement is committed to that's what i'm committed to are nathan we'll see if you start the trend and we say more occupy inspired can't that's popping up thanks so much for joining us tonight thank you was a pleasure have a great day. so the company i fire side friday and unhappy at one point carolina politicians doesn't think of that penalty as harsh enough so he's proposed his plan and obama singing gives al green is record sales i puts.

you. i mean you can be in the midst. of people calling like you said for free and fair elections. and they're still reporting from the clinton as you can hear behind me loud explosions that lead. me to keep. i mean. i get it.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else hears you some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry is a big. welcome

to tonight's fireside fridays with your host jimmy cops. well this friday we have yet another episode of absurd government secrecy to discuss now in case any of you out there forgotten we've never actually seen any evidence or any photographs or videos to prove that osama bin laden really was killed the obama administration has instead claimed that these photographs exist but they've given various excuses for why they should be made public things like fearing that it might incite violence in the muslim world or worry that this could reveal classified operational methods used in these types of missions and that hasn't satisfied a number of media organizations and rightly so in my mind and in fact a government watchdog group called judicial watch is suing the government for the release of all photographs and or video recordings taken of the raid last may so their argument for why this should be made public makes a lot of sense see the obama administration has made it public to the entire world that they got.