welcome to the ilana show where we get the real headlines with none of the mersey going live in washington d.c. now tonight we're going to take a look at the announcement that afghanistan is going to cut its security forces i one third and that's after the nato mission ends in two thousand and fourteen but it's not the wrong time to be cutting in that case why did we spend all of that money and all the time training a larger force and it turns out of the treasury department is only used three percent of the funds in

a program created to help states with the hardest hit homeowners it's part of tart so we have to ask why the banks got bailed out but struggling homeowners aren't a priority when all of that and more feet are night including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. all the day has been a day of days for the mainstream media and by that i mean we have seen an all out media firestorm erupt over a cognate made by a democratic strategist named hillary rosen. the push and pull over women's issues is only getting sore the conservative blogs problem a comment made by democratic strategist d.n.c. adviser and our friend bill rosen. about romney's wife and we rose and told our anderson cooper last night that ann romney mitt romney's wife had never worked a day in her life and romney is the target and president obama's top advisers

aren't too happy about it democratic strategist criticizes ann romney for being out of touch as working women the obama campaign is and says itself immediately romney's wife has gotten pulled into a bit of a political skirmish and now she's speaking out she said i made a choice to stay home and raise five boys believe me it was hard work she said that ann romney quote never worked a day in her life so she can't advise her husband about issues that are facing women and the economy it's a mistake of attacking romney that romney is a is a very. admirable woman and has a lot of support she's the best thing that romney has going for him on the whole women's issues. all right i will give you a quick gist of this story in case you missed it but if you're watching the mainstream media all day any point would be close to impossible to have actually missed it but so we've seen mitt romney use his wife let's admit has a lot more charisma than he does so we've seen him try to use her as

a tool to bridge that gigantic gender gap he's basic and make claims that his wife is this guy to women's problems and romney's take is that women care about the economy so this democratic strategist named hilary rosen said and romney knows nothing about the economy because she has never worked and instead raised her kids so the romney campaign tried to claim that rosen was related to the obama campaign which she's not and ended up in a massive back and forth with even michelle obama getting in there and commenting hilary rosen apologizing and the twitter sphere but blogs out there the t.v. pundits have all tried their hardest to turn this into a left versus. right scenario the truth is that's not the case hillary rosen by no means speaks for all liberals and it's laughable that c.n.n. even considers her a liberal considering that she used to head the r.a.a. and now does p.r. for corporations but the truth is that this is an issue that all women should be able to support each other on raising children being a mom that is worth and it's not anyone's place to judge and call it less worthy

but even bigger truth here is that this is another mainstream media distraction technique if you the real issue is something iran himself said when he was trying to prove that he cares and knows so much more about women than the president does take a listen. i was disappointed in listening to the president as he's saying for trouble consider waging a war on women. the real war on women is being waged by the president still becoming ninety two point three percent of all the jobs lost during the obama years have been lost by women ninety two point three percent. but that seems like a crazy number right more than ninety two percent of jobs lost have been amongst women well the thing is the number is right in the sense when the recession really began well president bush was still president about three point three million men lost their jobs and that's how recessions typically work men are hit the hardest and they're hit first thanks to areas like construction or manufacturing going down

first and overall more wind than women have lost their jobs in the last couple of years hence of being called a man session but if you look at the last twenty six months u.s. payrolls shrank by seven hundred forty thousand jobs out of those six hundred eighty three thousand belong to women and all that is according to the bureau of labor statistics and so this trend is in large part thanks to a massive public sector job cuts in states across the u.s. about two thirds of the women laid off during those last twenty six months were all laid off from government jobs and we've also seen a lot of women laid off thanks to cousin education but what's so ironic about it was just plain misguided about this is that mitt romney is trying to call out president obama for women losing so many jobs well guess what mitt we have lost so many jobs because states that are facing budget shortfalls and now republican legislatures have chosen to cut those government jobs already point five percent of all state and local government losses have happened in states where republicans won

control in two thousand and ten thirty one percent vanished in texas alone and in my whole thing with small government i don't preach small government and then turn around and blame the president that you say likes big government for the loss of so many women's jobs. well that's just mitt romney being complete hypocrite which the mainstream media decided to gloss over because a war of words between women just makes for better t.v. right they love the drama but they choose to skate on the facts but the thing is and they've been doing this for a long time and we've mentioned it many times here on the show non's after a month the media reports on jobs numbers private sector hiring and they just couldn't figure out why the private sector was hiring but the unemployment rate wasn't seeing drastic shifts and that's because hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs are being shed and so that difference was not being made up but surprise surprise right all of this was once again what the mainstream media chose to miss and today's women centric t.v. debates.

we've got a lot of news coming out about the war in afghanistan this week spoke about the agreement on night raids but we have a lot of loopholes and now a new poll from a.b.c. in the washington post shows that for the first time a majority of republicans say that the war in afghanistan has not been worth fighting on top of that an all time low the only thirty percent of respondents said that they thought that this war was worth it but then it raises yet another question is the afghanistan's defense minister general abdul rahim wardak seventy agreement had been reached in principle with the international coalition the afghan security forces would undergo a significant reduction from a peak of three hundred fifty two thousand to two hundred and thirty thousand and that would happen after the nato mission ends in two thousand and fourteen now just to put this into perspective for you according to some estimates out there it's cost six billion dollars annually because the state and train the afghan national army and police post two thousand and fourteen the price tag would still be about

four billion but if the forces are going to be reduced after the nato mission ends after the troop withdrawal we have to ask if it was worth the money and the build up all along her discuss with me is michael o'brien already apartment of defense contractor and author of a million americans failure in iraq intervention too with raul one thousand nine hundred twenty. michael thanks for joining us tonight thanks for having us so what do you say right ten years of war here we've been spending a lot of money on building up the afghan security forces right the national army and the police and this was supposed to be kind of our exit strategy is that we can finally handed over to afghan control and everything will be ok in the country and now when we're supposed to be handing off the majority the responsibility to them then twenty fourteen they're going to be shrinking the force so was what with all choragus that's sixty four thousand dollar question. and frankly it was

it was a pipe dream. you know i you if you look back at our involvement in afghanistan after nine eleven i personally think it made sense for us to go over there that's where our qaida was holed out as the welcome guest of the taliban and you know it was ten eleven years ago with things were going well things were going very well we had special operators in that country really really kicking some some tale of the joker in the deck was the war in iraq and. all these forces were pulled out of afghanistan to support the war in iraq of course we don't have a draft so we're fighting two wars at the same time we don't have the draft we don't have enough troops to do it so we reduce the forces in our forces in afghanistan and it took just a couple years and it started going right down the drain and started going right back to where it was before we ever showed up and then we you know we surge these surges of thirty thirty three thousand soldiers that that's not

a lot thirty thirty three thousand troops and when you think about it what's the percentage of them that are actual combat troops carrying. you know carrying a rifle you know it's a fraction of them it's not all of them it's just it's just it's like probably one third or one one probably at most one third so it's not a lot of combat troops that are going over there and the war in afghanistan is not working out very well or afghanistan is a very very backward country if they're living you know by. based on our standards in the stone age. and the fact is that when we make if you clone point reducing your troops by a third there is a report in today's news that we usually the part of the head of the commander for special forces for storing the riyadh more mcphail i believe his name is. really making this a war of special operators navy seals or a new bill to force an army special forces which really is the way to fight this

war it's an unconventional war you need to fight in conventional but i'm curious about here and i mean i guess you could say that maybe thirty three thousand troops isn't all that large of a surge but still we have almost one hundred thousand troops where you know there was a peak on the ground in afghanistan that's still quite a massive force to be dedicating to something like this you know whether it whether you want to say that it's a lot or not but the problem is that the more troops we sent him there we didn't see things get better and quite the opposite you only saw the violence skyrocket you only saw more troop deaths and and so it shows you that numbers were not really really not part of the equation here they were not something that made the war effort more successful but what i want to ask you is that on one hand they want to make this more of a special ops smaller teams type of operation but what's happening right now is they're trying to agree on this strategic forces agreement right this is why we needed the agreement on night raids and they want to have this time before the nato meeting in may of this year what's going to be part of that agreement is that afghanistan wants a ten year long commitment from the u.s.

and that's not a combat troop level right that's in terms of reconstruction it's in terms of a lot of money it's still training advise and assisting but do you think that we're going to see more room for contractors if there is this kind of ten year commitment if there is still so much money being pumped into it well absolutely i mean fall of the money as the saying goes if karzai wants. troops out but he wants your money the state only need you know if we're going to school we have to be spent so you know in the military. industrial complex in the end will win the day. but i do have to say though that you know if you want to fight a war conventional you have to fight it with overwhelming force and one hundred thousand troops in a country the size of afghanistan is not overwhelming force and you have to you know you are going to quarter of a million troops if you want to win that war fighting it conventionally and you have to hear about how can you transfer vention a war but it's a war this must be based on what are insurgency and winning hearts and minds in the

other the other people are women and i don't want to serve and i was blowing you up when you don't want to have war or building schools you want war by killing the enemy counterinsurgency david david petraeus is p.v. is a flop and it doesn't work you don't you don't you know we don't war by building schools and here you know crayons so you are going to decide if you really want to become obvious now right and even if you look at the polling especially the last couple of months you really see public opinion start to shift and now it seems like the american public even republicans are done with it they're over it they don't think that this war was worth fighting so the question is going to happen are the question is what's going to happen once we leave right let's say that this twenty fourteen it with all goes as planned now you have president hamid karzai saying that he's toying with the idea of leaving office one year early because he doesn't want chaos to break out in two thousand and fourteen while withdrawal is going on and won election is happening at the same time you have their forces being reduced by a third as are going to senator kay also going to israel what it's asking for of course

it's one of the other you know in the taliban's on its way back would have you know al qaida is is around you know what other whatever conclusion can anybody come to and it's because we didn't you know we didn't wipe out a threat we slapped around a little bit but we didn't wipe out the threat and how do you wipe it out it takes a lot of force a lot of manpower and if you do it on conventionally which is what we were doing in the beginning before we went into iraq we. we're being pretty successful with the technology that we have we're fighting our wars now with rules ok with drones and special operators to call them in and into it from n.s.a. and cia we can really accomplish a lot and then bring in conventional forces to really do the job the reason why the american people are fed up with it is for the same reasons they were fed up with vietnam we waffled we went down the middle of that we went around and around but aren't europeans are because they don't really know what we're accomplishing

anymore i mean if the goal was to get rid of al qaeda then al qaeda is not in afghanistan anymore right that the saying these days is that maybe there's a couple thousand of them who will speak a word of the taliban to the taliban was al qaeda so still revere and we had gotten rid of them we want to get rid of the taliban regime we were that was what we were that's what we were doing when we first went over it now and they were going with the taliban exactly because i mean i can't if you believe you negotiate alexandro right mean this is that is a civil very complicated issue that's part of afghanistan's history itself it before we go to you know i just want to ask you terms of honey the cars i had saying that supposedly he might leave power i mean who he would take his place there any names the stand out for you barack obama. iraq obama are all right mike i want to rock hussein i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight you bit. hard time for our first break but when we get back to tell you how government

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all right it's time for show and tell on tonight's program earlier this week we spoke about political flip flops all the mainstream media was focusing on mitt romney we reminded you about the obama administration's flip flops specially when it comes to the war on terror so i want to know why you think of the president's team change their views on those tough issues once they got into the white house but a producer for treason assented to find out what you have to say. i'm the streets of d.c. to tell people the nation's capital what our viewers had to say on twitter facebook and you tube and see which comments which they keep orderly and. why do you think so many administration officials change your views once they get into power a mirror wrote in to say because politicians were corrupt before they had power we

need someone who is incorruptible if you want to keep it originally that they're all a little corrupt so of people if you want to keep it or delete it i'm afraid to leave i think everyone is corrupt but i definitely think that money will persuade people . because there are some honest people in the world i mean a lot of people get into politics just for themselves and their egos but there are some people that are in it for the country shine said they are smiling faces that life through their teeth corporate money is more important to them than the respect of people do you want to keep it or delete it and leave it. i don't know so if that's the case i feel that sometimes. the powers that be don't allow you to make the decision that you would make before you're in office all clued in on facebook so they tell the people what they want to hear to get elected and do what their largest campaign contributors tell them to do when they take office we the people are the votes but the corporations are the ones that hold politicians paychecks do

you want to keep it delete it all i absolutely agree with that was my thoughts exactly the question to me i think they did in trying to get into office is that first they need to get over and once there it does seem like their policies and things they talked about change keep it. i think a lot of them are being. a lot of people who wrote in a lot of people that we talked to out here can both agree that politicians will say whatever they need to say to get elected but we did run into a few people who will beg to differ. all right thanks for your responses and here's our next question for you so earlier in the show we spoke about the controversy surrounding hilary rosen's comments about stay at home moms so we wondered if you thought that stay at home moms are looked down upon today or if it's just the controversy was no even on facebook twitter and you tube and it was a response that just might make it harder. now did you know that tarp the troubled

asset relief program wasn't just about bailing out the big banks and in february of two thousand and ten the treasury department established an initiative called the hardest hit fund this was a seven point six billion dollars program aimed at helping families in states hit hardest by the housing market and where unemployment rates are the highest well turns out the only three per cent of that budget has been used in the last two years since the program's creation this is according to a new report by the special inspector general for the troubled asset relief program the report found that at the end of two thousand and eleven the hardest to find it spent only twenty one two hundred seventeen point four million dollars of the seven point six billion dollars budget provided and only thirty thousand six hundred forty homeowners have been helped so is this just another failure for yet another government program was aimed at helping homeowners hit by the financial crisis joining me from our studio in los angeles is david day and blogger at firedoglake david i want to thank you for joining us tonight and first of all i mean you write

about this all the time you and i have spoken about it and you know if you're if you pay attention and you read the news all the time that maybe the scenario is a little different but you think that for average americans when they think of tarp they only think of bailing out the big banks they don't think of any programs are actually meant to help americans themselves. i do think they only think about bailing out the big banks that's traditionally what is seen as tarp and a lot of defenders of the program the show the fact that a lot of these banks that have paid back their funds or there's less losses on the tarp than expected to prove to the postulate that tarp worked but in fact as christie were mero the special inspector general for tarp said today tarp was not just conceived as a program to reward or you know help fund banks through their tough troubles.

explicitly in side the language around tarp was that a good chunk of the money needed to go to help homeowners and whether you're talking about the hardest hit fund or you're talking about hamp or any of the other programs that came through tarp all of them have been generally a failure but let's talk about this specific find here the hardest hit fund when we find out only three percent of the entire budget more than seven billion dollars has been used in the last few years were to report attribute that you know by who do they blame it on what they blame it on. they largely blamed it on the treasury department and what they said is that treasury had if they did not provide the leadership or the planning to get these programs started and get the money out the door hardest hit fund was basically a kind of a partnership with the states that were affected and qualified for the program so

you know so i think some people at treasury would claim that it's the states. but he probably the best program of the bunch put out about sixteen percent of the money so far and that's in oregon so if your star pupil is getting a sixteen percent the problem is not the students it's a test at treasury had the ability to get the servicers and the government sponsored enterprises that fannie mae and freddie mac. to participate in the program certainly more of an ability to do that then the states would just have less bargaining power over these large banks and d.g.'s cs and treasury just didn't do it i mean they they allowed. states who are operating at a significant disadvantage to try to bargain with these banks and the g.s.t. zoo at their discretion could decide to participate or not participate in the program and without much of

a surprise they didn't have the treasury department fired back or trying to defend themselves and say that you know what you're only looking at the data from the very beginning of this program and if you look at the last couple of months we've seen a great increase and you know what do you think of their defense their. yes just phone with statistics i mean you're coming from such a low bottom the idea that it's ramped up forty percent from the previous quarter well forty percent from zero. over the life of the program you're talking two years you have three percent of the funds getting disbursed even in these boom years or this boom time it's still a lower percentage than what was promised with this program and really this mirrors many of the other programs that come out of tarp particularly ham i mean right around the same time as you know the two year period. which is the home affordable modification program was also putting out maybe two percent in terms of

the dispersement and the big problem here is that the money when you're talking about money that was your mark for the program the money goes in incentive payments to the banks to you know create these relief programs and forgive principal or or for bear or whatever it is for the homeowner the programs do not give money directly to the homeowner so they can help resolve their their struggles with their mortgage payments and ultimately that's a problem because it puts it completely at the discretion of the backs and so anytime you design a program like that the public interest is going to get subsumed by the interest to do sherry interest of these big banks and we've seen the consequences what kind of message is that's necessary to average americans to the taxpayers right i mean obviously you can tell that the mood is still blind if angry especially if you look

at wall street and a lot of taxpayers still feel the system is incredibly unfair that everything was bailed out on their backs but it looks like the treasury department made shared with mediately bail out the banks because we had to act fast because this was an emergency you know keep the economy from completely flying off a cliff and send us into another depression but the homeowners are just kind of last last in line. you always hear in these homeowner programs that it's just takes time to get ramped up and we're having trouble getting the money out the door to the people who need it what you never hear is that it takes time and it's just trouble getting money out that there were to the banks who need it you never hear anything like that coming out of these programs somehow the money they get your mark for banks has no problem getting to the target whereas these these kind of jerry rigged programs to help homeowners there's always that the way

in. difficulty design and things like that so i think i think the public should you know take a pretty clear message from. and you know i was talking about this many times before you know like you said the ham program is also a massive failure and just seems like every program a government tries to put forward doesn't get it right even this giant foreclosure fraud settlement doesn't get it right at the end of the day of the banks that why now and this is one of the key elements you know when it comes to why our economy isn't recovering when it comes to what the housing bubble really did you know the environment that it created after this crash but you write a lot about how you think that the media affects the way that you know that this is covered or paper or maybe why it's not being solved you know what i have to say about that. well i do think that you know in some sense we get the housing policy we deserve when we have members of the media who don't really know how to more home

mortgage works when they get reports like a recent one on a.b.c. excoriating fannie mae and freddie mac's firm rolling their lawns out in front of properties that they own which is the only way they will get sold and the only way you would prevent flight which is against the law in many municipalities i think there's a huge lack of understanding about what is going on in ministration housing city and that works to the detriment of homeowners alternately because it's easily demagogues you have an administration it's still afraid of rick's intelli and what he did very early on. which was seen to be the rise of the tea party to create the rise of the tea party which was about housing policy and not being a you know the administration should pay off their losers mortgages they've been spooked.