listen up. we want to know your take send us your comments by visiting the tom hartman facebook page by a twitter at tom underscore hartman or in the chat room on the message boards or through the blog at thom hartmann dot com you can also leave a message on our rant line at two two five three six fifty three zero six agree disagree sound off it's all welcome but remember that your comments may be used on the air. the good the bad of the very very melon aka mostly ugly their good credit municipal. the three hundred seventy five year old french bank has made a decision to cancel the debts of many of its of its poorest customers the bank announced that it would cancel the debts of individuals who are the equivalent of one hundred ninety dollars or less a low interest roth loans for inexpensive valuables like most of europe the french economy is struggling the bank's decision to forgive the small loans is quickly

help improve economic wellbeing of thousands of customers who now have more cash to spend and stimulate the economy imagine that a bank actually from giving the loans of its customers to be nice and they didn't even make the customers take a vow of silence take that bank of america the bad ricky don't google my name santorum one of santorum is go to policy proposals over the g.o.p. primary season as entire career for that matter has been to limit the payments victims of medical malpractise can seek through lawsuits santorum argues medical malpractise lawsuits help drive up the cost of health care even the cvo report found that tort reform what he's talking about as in limiting medical malpractise suits would only result in one tenth of one percent of savings on total health care spending even worse rick santorum is a hypocrite surprise in one nine hundred ninety nine santorum is wife filed

a bell. a practice lawsuit for five hundred thousand dollars claiming that a chiropractor had left her with permanent back injuries that would result in a lifetime of pain this lawsuit came just five years after after santorum had proposed legislation to limit the rewards of malpractise lawsuits so while larger wards are just fine for mrs santorum the root of all health care costs was for the rest of americans another example of the hypocrisy the conservatives practice so well and the very very ugly the wall street journal w.s.j. recently published an op ed piece written by sixteen prominent global warming deniers and various and minimal scientific backgrounds including the likes of oil company executives in the piece the sixteen argue that while manmade carbon dioxide has some effect sudden warming the planet effects are small and there's no they to panic about sixteen and ayers argued that all the other scientists who believe in global warming are just trying to scare the general public is other scientists who

are trying to scare us include a group of two hundred fifty five members of the united states' national academy of sciences who wrote a much more scientific and reality based op-ed piece that they submitted to the wall street journal however the wall street journal declined to publish this blatant form of bias on the part of the wall street journal shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone after all it is part of rupert murdoch's empire and a close cousin to g.o.p. t.v. united states is the only developed nation in the world with global warming is still up for debate and we can thank that journalist like those of the wall street journal or is just very. there's one industry just one industry that specifically mention the united states constitution and that's the press that's because the founders knew how important a free open and diligent press. is keeping

a two powerful government in check and for a population to be informed enough to make a reasonable democratic vote as thomas jefferson said we're left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government i should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter that's how crucial the press is to our form of government that's especially true during an election year when politicians will throw whatever the lie they can at the wall hoping that a few of the most stick to sway voters it's up to the press to make sure that none of those lies stick unfortunately today the press is dropping the ball for example on sunday state of the union morning show on c.n.n. republican senate minority leader rich mitch mcconnell told this whopper of a lie to candy crowley. they've been trying to pretend like the president just showed up yesterday just got sworn in and was starting for a fact it's been in office three years he got everything he wanted from a completely compliant congress for two of those three years were really

a completely compliant congress for two of those three years really then why is it the mitch mcconnell himself led his republican minority in the senate to shatter the record for the most filibusters in one session of congress a record that goes all the way back to the george washington administration obama didn't get everything you wanted from congress far from it. from the very beginning he had to negotiate down his stimulus package and make a full third of the tax cuts just to get three republican susan collins olympia snowe and arlen specter on board with it and when it came to health care did president obama really get everything you water from congress he didn't get a public option and he sure as heck didn't get the cornhusker kickback or did didn't want rather the cornhusker kickback that so-called democratic senator ben nelson demanded for the louisiana purchase the so-called democratic senator mary landrieu asked for in return for her support it that's exactly the congress gave me a cap and trade energy let reform legislation through the senate as he wanted

because he couldn't overcome a unanimous republican filibuster he couldn't get the disclose act require full disclosure of who's spending how much money in our elections post citizens united because it too couldn't break a unanimous fellow republican filibuster he couldn't get comprehensive immigration reform and legislation like the dream act passed again thanks to a unanimous mcconnell led republican filibuster in the sun and he couldn't get legislation through the senate and tax breaks for corporations that outsource american jobs a build named creating american jobs and ending offshore enact all of these bills i just mentioned passed the house had more than fifty percent of the vote in the senate but couldn't break mitch mcconnell's unanimous republican filibuster which set the bar at sixty percent rather than a simple majority and all of these bills would have yielded tremendous benefits for our nation they would have put jobless americans back to work they would have provided health insurance for fifty three million uninsured americans they put it would have put our nation on track toward clean energy they would have strengthen

our democracy and fix the broken immigration system so what the hell is mitch mcconnell talking about when he says that congress gave the president everything he wanted in those first two years he's lying it's a complete and utter lie and it's up to candy crowley to call him out on it. got everything he wanted from a completely compliant congress for two of those three years you don't hear him mention any of that so what he's been engaged in since the bus tours began. auction is try to convince the american people that somebody else is standing in his way but it doesn't seem to be working well doesn't seem to be working are you serious so after mcconnell just lied to her face crowley takes the bait accepts the lie and then asks of president obama's strategy to rewrite history as asserted by mcconnell is working that's not journalism it's. not challenging the assertion that congress gave president obama everything he wanted is like agreeing that president bush had

reliable intelligence the saddam hussein was making nukes and chemical weapons both couldn't be further from the truth yet both echoed across the airwaves in the mainstream news to the point that most republicans and a few independent democrats believe them to this day in defense of candy crowley this is nothing unique to her or her show meet the press face the nation every single show on fox news you name it and you'll find republicans and occasionally democrats flat out line to journalism school graduates who don't blink and don't call them on their lies and why don't they call it lies because they're afraid the big name politicians will refuse to come on their shows in the future and those shows are set up in such a way that if they don't get the big names the show goes down in flames it's called needing access and it's why networks pressure good journalists to let a few lies slide. this is why the mainstream media has such a bad reputation today they've given up their job the jefferson vision of

adversarial keep them honest journalism and handed the role of fact checking off the political talking heads waffen have no interest in the facts at all especially during an election year and since they dropped the ball others have had to pick it up like julian a song that wiki leak is not an outlaw as a journalist is doing the job that the mainstream media should be doing speaking truth to power and giving people the facts to make informed decisions and there are other independent media outlets doing the same thing like democracy no free speech t.v. current t.v. in a pen a websites a democratic underground truthout buzz flash op ed news common dreams we're all a story an alternate among others it's time to turn the mainstream t.v. off and turn on those who are reporting news in the same spirit thomas jefferson and vision our democratic republic will be the better as a result that's it for the big picture tonight for more information or to see any segment of our show check out our website tom arbonne dot com and don't forget democracy begins when you get out there and get active tag your suitable.

well. science technology innovation all the wisdom elements from around russia we've got the huge earth covered.

more news today violence is once again flared up. saying these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations are on the day .

welcome to the show get the real headlines with none of the mercy or live in washington d.c. tonight we're going to take a look at a new assessment by u.s. intelligence agencies they say that the number one threat to this country is no longer all qaeda and its affiliates but iran and the president finally publicly addresses the u.s. drone program but are his answers disingenuous christopher swift is going to join us to break it all down then while a recent new york times report concluded that corporations like apple are shipping jobs overseas because this country is failing to produce enough skilled workers

david sirota claims of that's just perpetuating an education crisis myth so he's going to join us to give us his take on the reddit community isn't stopping after stopping sopa and pipa there's a new suggestion to create a piece of legislation of their own called the free internet act so reddit co-founder alexis ohanian is going to give us all of the details are you have all that morphy tonight putting it does have happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so voting is taking place in the florida primary today and the mainstream media is just going crazy over the polls in the numbers and of course newt gingrich's upcoming demise. there have been three republican contests and three different winners and today the line is drawn in the florida sand voting is underway in florida as republicans compete in the biggest primary of the campaign so far it winner takes all in the biggest contest today and the nastiest battle in

this early primary season the last polls remain open nearly ten more hours state officials there predict it will be a big turnout more than two million voters expected to vote in florida today the stakes are huge fifty delegates are up for grabs the largest haul yet the winner takes all of them and seizes momentum as the clear front runner and it looks like mitt romney's new strategy worked hole after poll shows he's going to win today by what margin does mitt romney win florida. are now we all know that they live and breathe the political horse race and they are never going to get enough but i personally have a suggestion for the mainstream media today is if you're going to spend so much time looking at various numbers then why not take a look at the numbers that are actually shocking there's a new study out today from the wesley in media project that compares political campaigns spending thus far to the same point in the two thousand and eight

elections and while we all know that money makes the world and the political cycle go around what's staggering in this study is the impact that we can already see from the citizens united decision you see this study found that while spending on ads by candidates has decreased by about forty percent spending on political ads by outside groups is up sixteen hundred percent did you hear me there sixteen hundred percent and this is just for these early primaries who knows what these figures are going to look like by the time that we reach november and i give you a few more numbers there thus far in the campaigning for two thousand and twelve super pacs have spent forty four million dollars out of the two hundred seventy seven active super pacs the pro romney group restore our future has spent seventeen million dollars alone the pro gingrich group. winning our future i know these names are eerily similar aren't they well they have spent nine million dollars and of course there are always those super pacs out there that don't support a specific candidate so the two biggest conservative ones american crossroads and americans for prosperity they've spent eight point eight million on ads around the

country so far that a lot of money that's being thrown around you guys it just reminds you that even in times of recession the battle to get your interest represented is still going very strong problem of course with this kind of spending is that we don't always know where it's coming from and other cases where we do know we see the insane amount of influence that just one person can have let's not forget gingrich's super daddy sheldon adelson who single handedly has given two donations of five million dollars apiece and today we also found out who was for the most part bankrolling jon huntsman supporting super pac it was his daddy that's right his billionaire father donated one point nine million of our destiny that's the name of the super pac of the total two point six million that they spent so that seventy percent of the money and there were only ten other donors that is insane this is democracy no longer belonging to all of us to we the people but instead just a very few of the very rich people these are the numbers that we're going to see

increase and that really should be worrying us it's something that we should be discussing is something that we should be questioning and have the mainstream media and all with their obsession of the numbers in the polls they still choose to miss . well as you guys know the threat from al qaeda was old news testifying before congress or an annual overview of what our sixteen intelligence agencies think are the biggest threats to the united states director of intelligence and national intelligence james clapper referred to a report from his office that concluded that al qaeda has been decentralized and the number one top threat to the u.s. is now iran referring to the alleged plot last year to assassinate the saudi ambassador in washington d.c. clapper for the first time signal that they think this may have come from the top saying that it shows that some iranian officials probably including supreme leader ali common a have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct conduct an attack

in the united states in response to real or perceived u.s. actions that threaten the regime so i guess if anybody wanted to claim the war drums were beating between the u.s. and iran now or before there is no denying it now here to discuss this with me is christopher swift fellow at the university of virginia law school's center for national security law christopher thanks so much for joining us tonight great to be back. obviously we've heard a lot you and i have been discussing you know so much of what's been happening between the u.s. and iran between the heating up of the rhetoric that we've seen but to say that iran is now the number one terror threat to the united states what happened well the first thing is that al qaeda decentralized al qaeda has been massively degraded in pakistan and afghanistan the local insurgencies are still doing pretty well see the taliban and al qaeda is basically decided to shift from that theater to yemen to the horn of africa and to other places and at the same time the united states and iran have been engaged in sort of a cycle of mutual provocation with sanctions on the one side and with you know

threats inside the united states on the other with everyone using their proxies and other forms of influence in order to send messages that one another and there hasn't been a lot of shall we say. bilateral communication there hasn't been a lot of negotiation between the two sides and in that kind of environment with the shifting from one thing to the next with this cycle or antagonism and provocation in the absence of diplomacy it shouldn't surprise us that the iranians are pretty wound up and we're pretty wound up about their arrangements but do you think we should call them the number one threat that the u.s. faces i mean i feel like it's a little bit of a game of conveniences and here that's getting played right as a threat is touted when the administration or when the pentagon needs to especially when they need to you know push certain projects or there is or push why we need to have drone strikes in certain countries and special operations forces there well i mean you can you can make that argument and there's certainly no shortage of opportunism of that sort in the pundit talk or see i don't know if it exists in the government where they have sort of different activities on world simply they have

to answer to congress and sort of the public so i think their analysis tends to be slow as it is in this case with respect to al qaeda rather than fundamentally twisted or wrong in the case of iran however you know. the question as to whether their threat number run really depends on our time frame if we're looking at the next two weeks the next two months maybe the next six months then yeah i'd say iran is probably a major problem but if we look at a year two years three years ten years twenty years you change the time horizon and iran starts to become less and less important why because iran is facing an internal crisis political crisis because iran is facing an internal economic crisis and because iran is facing an internal demographic crisis and all of those things are going to restrain iran's ability to make life difficult for the united states specifically and for the west in general over the long term so in the short term probably threat number one but over the long term iran's internal collapse is probably going to put them out of business one of the things that i find particularly interesting too is that if you look at this report today if you look

at what james clapper said if they weren't focusing on the nuclear threat coming from iran in fact inside this report they basically said to us from everything we've seen the evidence shows they haven't decided yet. do they want to pursue a nuclear weapon or not and so they're focusing more on iran perhaps launching small scale attacks they use this alleged plot before to get the saudi ambassador here in washington d.c. or maybe something more dealing with cyber security so is that going to change some of the dialogue because you know you and i always talk about this plan to talk or see like you said which is that if iran gets a nuclear weapon the entire world is going to change for example former presidential candidate just said it last week well we're always hearing from presidential candidates how if you don't do what they say or believe what they believe how the entire world is going to change i was astonished that some form said something to the effect of if president obama wins reelection won't be in america as we know it and this kind of rhetoric is irresponsible and it actually gets us away from the kind of analysis that allows americans to decide whether

there is a threat and whether their government is managing it properly in the case of iran i think it is likely that we're going to see a move towards the pattern of assassinations in kidnappings that iran has used in the past when it wants to send a message to the outside world there's an interesting report that came out of west point the u.s. military academy a few years ago that contrasted the approach that shia groups and the iranian government used towards terrorism versus groups like al qaida and other sunni militant groups and the sunni groups tend to go for sort of large massive theatrical large scale events mass casualty the shia groups are very targeted they want to spend to use force and violence to send a very particular message and i think what we saw with the saudi ambassador here in the united states is part of that signaling that they're doing of course the real question is what's the state of commanding control inside the iranian government who's in charge of the mullahs in charge of the reds lover illusionary guard who are in charge is the government in the parliament in charge my guess is some of those folks are in charge of different things on different days of the week

depending on who they happen to be meeting with what do you think there is a report in foreign affairs today that essentially started looking back at some of the history claiming that you know since two thousand and one there are members of al qaeda that were. in iran they're being held there but now they kind of paint this picture as if it ron and al qaeda are working together and this is become the new safe haven and it just a bit because of some of the things that you mentioned just now between cities in between she is it just doesn't really seem to make a whole lot of sense let's distinguish what we know from what certain people think what we know is that there were in fact some al qaeda operatives including the what some of bin laden's family members that took shelter in iran and were allowed to shelter and built in iran after the u.s. operations in afghanistan in late two thousand and one early two thousand and two we also know that iran a lot cali and some other chaps to move from afghanistan through iranian territory into iraq so we know these things have been happening and it wouldn't surprise me if there are in fact a handful of al qaeda operatives or some affiliated act individuals currently in

iran right now but the question of whether that's true or not is not so important the question is how much does it matter and at the end of the day if al qaeda is no longer the threat then ha well it is no longer that the other question is you know at the end of the day if this is in fact happening and you know to be honest with you with some some of what i've seen i think it's probably likely at the end of the day this is shamelessly opportunistic on the part of the iranian government and al qaeda let's not forget that the particular brand of sunni islam that al qaeda had here is itself to use militant lee anti shia and let's not forget that the last time the iranian government accommodated chaps with this particular elk they went to iraq and what did they do they started massacring the shia as quickly as they could including pilgrims including women and children including all the rest so if iran thinks of itself as defending the interests of shia muslims all around the world and they're sort of tacitly letting out a few of the guys running around in their territory that's a major problem for them not only domestically in terms of their own politics but

in terms of their legitimacy of the the worldwide she is a leader who supposedly leader of the worldwide shia community and the other problem is since september eleventh in the united states and europe and in other places that russia china everywhere. it's been this tendency to conflate groups that are not related to one another who may actually be competitors with one another because they look the same they sound the same and they chant death to america the fact of the matter is some of these groups hate each other more than they hate us or at least as much as they hate us and the divisions between them and the distinctions between them can often be just as important if not more important than the things that superficiality superficial similarities that they're going to buy into their mess something that often gets lost i think you can see in a lot of the discussions i want to switch gears really quickly just one last question is that the president hosted this google plus event yesterday where he was taking questions from viewers and he finally decided to address a question about u.s. drone use but there he said the don't worry about it the way that we use our drones

is an incredibly tight leash and he said that there are not as many civilian casualties as people claim that there are so here we have at least a public acknowledgement from the president talking more about drones when it's not necessarily about a specific drone strike that went right and may have killed the militant or not but i feel like that answer seems a little disingenuous it depends on how you look at the answer if you look at the i'm not a i'm not an air force pilot so i can't tell you about the use of drones and what the collateral damage is and all the rest but from a legal perspective the laws of the conventions and the laws of war require you to be as focused as possible and how you target and go after a potential adversary so the extent that drones allow you to take out an individual or two or three individuals as opposed to a building or a village or an entire region there's a legal argument there that drones are not only more moral not only more effective but also somewhat legal the political side of drones is what's not getting enough attention and that is whenever you get into a fight whenever you get make the decision to move from negotiation or from threats

and coercion to actual violence there's a whole bunch of a little processes that go on drones or a new weapon we haven't figured out how they factor into that but even you know from a legal perspective at least. way i see it too is that we just don't see a lot of information right when it comes to civilian casualties as far as the cia doesn't publicly want to acknowledge a strong program or that it even exists and then claim that there have been zero casualties and they tell us a little about it then we don't know if it's really so precise or if the casualties are you know over overrated or not overrated but you know if they try to overflow the result of that if the drones are under article town of three hundred the part of the u.s. law that allows covert operations cia activities you're not going to have that kind of oversight but if they're under article fifty if there are literate part in defense clearly then the laws of war attach the geneva conventions attach and suddenly there's more transparency yeah but at this point we just have to take their word for it right so that makes me a little bit skeptical always chris wragge got to wrap it up unfortunately i want to thank you for joining us tonight pleasure to see you thanks. are there still

much more to come tonight we're going to ask if the education system here in america is to blame for outsourcing after the break we're going to speak with david wrote about what he calls the education crisis myth and where we should be focusing our attention instead. of people calling what you said for free and fair elections. and we're still importing from the clinton if you can hear behind me loud explosions. i mean. i get it gave.

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