today on r t you putting so-called national security measures back on the backburner a new york city judge is blocking key parts of the national defense authorization act it's a big boost to activists who oppose the law and we'll talk to one of the lawyers who is helping sue president obama. plus the obama administration is cracking down on hydraulic fracturing but it still isn't drilling into the heart of the issue so what's with the blade and oversight we'll explore. and down but not out ron paul is shifting his strategy for the two thousand and twelve g.o.p. presidential race focusing on delegates instead of dollars will give you a few good reasons why you shouldn't count this candidate out just yet.

it's thursday may seventeenth five pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl and you're watching our t.v. well a victory for opponents of the and a federal judge has ruled that provisions and the controversial law may violate our constitutional rights president obama signed the national defense authorization act back in december the move has outraged activists that say the law is so vague it allows u.s. citizens to be indefinitely detained by the military without due process but a group of activists sued president obama and yesterday the federal judge took their side here as part of a court order issued by judge katherine forest it reads quote this court is acutely aware that preliminarily and joining an act of congress must be done with great caution however it is the responsibility of our judicial system to protect the public from acts of congress which infringe upon constitutional rights. so the law

has been blocked at least for now to talk more about the case and the implications of it david c. ben journalist and house of the d.l. show joins us now hi they have ed so i know that you are a very big critic of the n.b.a. is so a huge victory for you your reaction to the judge's ruling well there are a lot of people who have been watching this and case of the past few months and they're basically saying that her decision is amazing it's extraordinary it's a huge victory and while those things are true she's just doing her job this is something that any federal judge in her position should have decided it's not as if she's doing something that's out of the usual it's just that we haven't seen the system work in so long that i think people are surprised to see you know checks and balances actually work this is actually being checked it's actually being stopped and there's still work to be done there's an amendment in congress being discussed

today but this is definitely good news and it gives great legitimacy to those people out there who said that the n.b.a. is a major threat to american citizens a basic civil rights that's right i know that their ad there were a lot of skeptics that this lawsuit had years versus president obama that this would actually go anywhere and are happy and surprised just as you are to see that that is this victory the court said provisions of the bill could be unconstitutional talk about what constitutional rights you say this law violates. well this is something that you don't need to be a federal judge to understand if you've been through seventh or eighth grade civics course you understand the basics of the bill of rights and potentially the indefinite detention provisions violate your first amendment and fifth amendment rights. with the first amendment the problem is there's a possible chilling effect are you going to write something saying you know the war in afghanistan is

a bad idea for you to write something supportive of anonymous or supportive of peaceful protesters like occupy wall street if that can be interpreted as a material support to an enemy of the united states and if you can be imprisoned without trial without charges potentially for years and with no proper court involvement if that's the case a lot of reporters are going to say hey i'm not going to cover this i'm just going to do my job and go home i don't want to in the prison i don't my family members and end up in prison and you see in oppressive regimes like north korea they use laws like this and the result is that nobody speaks out so obviously we were nowhere near that point but for several months for four and a half months in the u.s. we were living under and until yesterday it was a possibility that if you did something the government really didn't like or you said something that really harmed their interests even if it's not violent and not actually a threat to anybody's physical safety but they could imprison you without a trial and that's scary that's not what america is all about certainly it sounds

a horrifying and what makes the n.b.a. so controversial and how they get as it's begun as critics say open up all kinds of scary a possibility and then we did have a chance to speak to one of the plaintiffs in this case chris had jazz on the show not too long ago here's what he had to say about this. it removes due process for anybody who is deemed not much just a terrorist but to have contact with these associated forces that's not a term that's defined it's nebulous it's quite a frightening piece of legislation so plaintiffs and critics as you mentioned earlier fear that you've been reporting on terrorists could be considered grounds for being detained under this law and the judge did acknowledge the danger of some of the language in this bill and you talk about some of the dangers associated with the language being so vague. well we've seen time and time again that when you have legislation that is too vague it's abused and we saw that with the patriot act

that's still ongoing but the patriot act pictured act originally was only to be used for pursuing terrorists and instead it's been used on thousands of tax evasion cases and cases that have drug dealing cases things that have nothing to do with terrorism when you give government huge new powers they tend to take those powers i agree with chris hedges and specifically somebody in his position i mean he was a war correspondent and he's covering people who are straight up in these of the u.s. so just by contacting those people just by writing about them in a newspaper he's subjecting himself to indefinite detention and if you just look at those two words indefinite detention it makes no sense what's also so offensive about this is that it was snuck into our annual defense bill the end is passed every year it funds hundreds of billions of dollars of military expenses and keeps our troops paid and they snuck this in there if they wanted to pass something this trick pony and weird it should have been called the imprisonment without trial of

american citizens act if it was called that i do not think it would have gotten this far i do not think obama would have signed it into law i don't think they went with a title like that this the found a little bit less harmful i guess so but the judge has put a preliminary injunction and play is this is this is a measure that is only a temporary so how do you hope this plays out and are you confident that it will prevail. i'm not one hundred percent confident but at this point there is been major interest in congress to amend the indefinite detention provisions that's what they're working on today representative and several others are working on legislation that would fix this and even after it's fixed we do need to investigate this who was behind it where did the money come from where did the lobbying push come from why did we need this is there some threat that we don't know about and even so what threat could be so great that you can revoke the bill of rights that

you can revoke basic civil rights for american citizens must be a pretty big deal or it's just an illegal unconstitutional power grab either way we need to know what happened and what the motivation here was lastly they had at what point would you say that justice has been served do you want to see the end and da gone away with completely well you can't do with the end because it has a lot of legitimate and necessary provisions this is a bill that is hundreds of pages long and funds our military operations i want to see indefinite detention done away with i want to see an act passed that would prevent this from ever happening again just the simple act saying that no no bill in congress can ever infringe upon your bill of rights period no loopholes no nonsense you just can't do it and that's what i'd like to see and then i'd like to see those held accountable i mean if you're responsible for this you should be held accountable and that includes i believe carl levin the democrat and john mccain

a republican they were the ones who drafted this provision as far as i know and we should get answers from them why did they draft this why did they feel it's necessary david pleasure to have you on the show as always that was david seaman journalist and host of the show. well he is announce he's going to stop campaigning ron paul isn't out of the race just yet the presidential candidate says he simply doesn't have the cash to splurge on campaigning but he has a new strategy fighting and winning delegates after all his supporters say that's what counts anyways so just because many people have called this race ron paul and his supporters are here to stay so can the ron paul delegate strategy work we're going to ask shelley roche for some answers hi shelly so while romney has the cash to continue campaigning ron paul has been he has kind of this more behind the scenes strategy how does he plan to implement this delegate strategy and can it

work well. it's something that we haven't really seen before you know as of his announcement on monday where he said he was going to stop actively campaigning but still continue to focus on the states where he has already won delegates and where he has a chance to win more delegates so we're going to win the g.o.p. convention comes around he still has a significant presence at the convention. so and do you think that this strategy focusing on delegates giving up campaigning in terms of commercials and and ads and things like that that this can actually work. well i think what we've seen since two thousand and eight is that. the presence and the organization of the ron paul supporters not necessarily the campaign itself but

just supporters at the grassroots level the level of sophistication in organization has really skyrocketed and they have taken a number of seats at the county and state levels so they're really in a very strong position to get a large contingent of ron paul delegates to tampa you know regardless of whether the official campaign continues to spend money on ads and things like that so it's really about these these grassroots being so passionate and so engaged in the process that talked to many of his supporters supporters that are very passionate that say that this is not necessarily about winning it's about the message yeah exactly and you know right now the ron paul. movement is in a position where they can't really lose. you know that they've won so many delegates they're getting so much more media attention than they were in two thousand and eight and you know even if you look at the his share of the total vote

in the g.o.p. primary so far he's about twice double the number of votes that he was back in two thousand and eight so if you if you look at that the momentum is really increasing and so the message is getting spread people are really responding to it and they're getting involved for the first time in a really long time and tele to what extent do you think ron paul has transformed the public republican party another goal that i've seen of paul supporters are they talking about things that otherwise would have been over locked there for ron paul wasn't part of the race. oh absolutely and an obvious example is auditing the federal reserve this is something that has been one of ron paul's big issues for years and you know it's finally. starting to gain popularity you know within even within the establishment republican party so. the number of supporters and the sizable you know so-called libertarian fringe is starting to really get

involved and bring these issues forward and it's just going to be a matter of time the process of. introducing these ideas to the public and been dealt just naturally gain momentum after the republican national convention in august there will be just a couple of months before the election if mitt romney does become the nominee what will ron paul supporters do that's a great question and i don't see ron paul supporters supporting mitt romney the policies are just too different. so a number of things could happen they could continue to get involved at the state and local levels and i think a subset of the voters will support gary johnson and libertarian party there could be some that support you know mitt romney and obama but i think largely it's going to be either libertarian or they'll just continue to focus at the state and local

level so that they're ready for two thousand and sixteen do you think that some of them will just stay home and not cast their ballot and instead kind of prepare for the next time around yeah i think that's likely to happen in some cases definitely and i did see reports that there is a lot of talk about ron paul grooming his son for the next election to kind of fill his shares what do you think about that. yeah you know. rand has just started his political career and it's going to take some time obviously before he has the sort of consistency and proven incorruptibility as his father ron paul does but once he gets there you know this this you know small small libertarian group will have an even stronger force within the republican party and the foundation logan laid for rand to really take on a very significant role in american politics right well i guess we're just gonna

have to see how it plays out kelly thank you for coming on the show that was political analyst shelley wrote. thanks. so i had an hour of t.v. drill baby drill just so long as you disclose the chemicals they use first the obama administration has that has a new set of rules for hydraulic fracturing companies but they still miss the heart of the controversy behind the practice i'll tell you how next. very good. luck in the ilona so we'll get the real headlines with none of them or see the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and for what actually matters to those viewers and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anymore if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back to t.v. . r g is the

state run in english speaking russian channel it's kind of like. russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us. out of american power. things that are. revolution. very true going to school or drink or starbucks or surprising.

new rules over the controversial practice of fracking but are they enough last week president obama proposed national guidelines on fracking the technique extracts natural gas from the earth by injecting fluid deep into the ground the liquid mixture sometimes includes toxic chemicals that may make its way into water wells so the above obama administration's rules require drilling companies to disclose what chemicals they're using and test wells to make sure they're not prone to leaking now fracking companies say the rules are too restrictive the critics say they don't go far enough in fact they say it only applies to a very small percentage of natural gas supply in the nation that was drinking water still on the verge of becoming hazardous as a result of fracking talk about what the frack is going on i was joined by mike loued wig he's a reporter for truthout dot org we first discussed president obama's proposed guidelines take a listen well these new rules coming into the obama administration only cover

b.l.m. land which the land management and tribal lands and that is where the federal government jurisdiction only covers about eleven percent of our known gas reserves so most of the fracking operations in the country because by these rules. so what needs to happen now do they need to be expanded to cover some of the this other land or how do they fix this. well there is a patchwork of regulations state by state and actually the industry prefers that they don't want the federal government stepping in to make new regulations so they might have to follow rules that might overlap but. we're waiting on federal regulation to go beyond that and the e.p.a. isn't doing a study but at the end of the year so in the cases where the regulations do apply but it seems like as you just said they don't apply to

a majority of fracking sites here in the u.s. what is the likelihood that even in these scenarios they'll be enforced i think that the federal government can be enforcing these but as far as we know one of the big provisions of these rules is disclosure of the chemicals that the companies bring to the ground back in history has been trying to keep those chemicals some of them trade secret for years but they won't have to disclose these chemicals until after they're done drilling and that's one big hole in that in this rule that you know people who want to test their water before the drilling they get a baseline are nice of what was there before the drilling won't be able to do that so it sounds like it'll be too late the damage will be already done by the time people know what's what kind of chemicals are in the water the damage could already be done by then to be harder to hold companies accountable if you don't have baseline data on what was in your water before they start drilling now on the other side there the drilling companies say the rules go too far and that natural gas

it's touted as a great alternative to coal which comes with its own environmental problems so what do you say to that argument. natural gas can be cleaner than call but coal is also been regulated much more extensively than natural gas and also the a bomb and ministration has actually been working pretty closely with the industry their new interagency working group to come out with these rules got praise after praise from the industry for doing that so actually force are going to say they don't want to be regulated but so far i think they're pretty happy. many people are concerned about fracking including their breweries and here's one of the headlines that says fracking could poison your next to be here that's what it rains the founder of brooklyn brewery fears toxic chemicals are making their way into beverages so if the possibility of poisoned water is enough to scare you could avid beer drinkers push this fight over the edge was

a digicam i saw i hope that i don't take any for the bear but i think it might. take a bit more on the environmental movement than just micro and. right well i guess anybody to stand by because so what are you hoping happens next what needs to be done in order to strengthen these rules that you say right now are inadequate as they stand the e.p.a. has been conducting a study on fracking for the past about two years and that will be done the end of the year and they have been commissioned by congress to do that and the hope is that after they're done the come out on regulation that that process is taking a very long time and i think the for activists it's time to look at the state level states have a lot more power regulating fracking at this point in time to push your local and state legislators to take the kind of action right mike thank you very much for coming on the show that was michael leunig thank you he's a reporter for truthout dot org. a rough week for c.n.n. the network's prime time shows slumped in ratings the lowest c.n.n.

has seen in fifteen years on tuesday piers morgan tonight your only thirty nine thousand viewers and that's a bit small compared to the host whose slot he took over larry king's viewership stood strong for years but pierce isn't the only one despite being paid millions and millions of dollars many new stars are. new stars that is are losing their ratings and their viewers so what's going on we explored you know if you buy a ten million dollars chandelier you should have a house to put it fired from current t.v. keith olbermann compares himself to a multimillion dollar households next year you're the chandelier and. the political commentator now suing the same thing that worked for forty fifty million dollars blaming them for shoddy production and from liberal to conservative slanted media not too long ago fox said goodbye to their top political pundit captivating america

with his conspiracy theories are you you will have a secret you're the answer emotional outbreaks i am not a journalist i'm just a guy who cares. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about my country even fox had enough of the antics and oprah considered to be the most influential woman in the world. with the highest rated talk show for decades her own network isn't quite living up to the hype it was the usa today headline that was it oprah not quite standing on her own and it just did. the network reportedly lost three hundred thirty million dollars since it started airing last year former morning show darling katie couric rakes in fifteen million annually that's a page from my notebook on katie couric c.b.s. news but today she's not doing it in ratings you receive b.s.

in the evening and c.n.n.'s prime time silver fox once always found on the front line and scene of the crime the. can now be found here i know all the real housewives of beverly hills despite millions in compensation why are stars in news who are losing their shyness because big corporate they're going to dumb it down to the least common denominator and of course it will be almost like entertainment meanwhile recent statistics show you are leaving the mainstream networks and drove from march of last year to march of this year c.n.n. lost a staggering fifty percent of its viewers fox lost seventeen percent imus n.b.c. fared well in comparison with a three percent rise in viewers so where are they turning to instead social media and online outlets are giving the mainstream a run for their money and whenever you have that huge gap between what you're reading online on facebook and twitter and what the evening news is showing you

that some people choose alternative outlets well times have changed and viewers now have the luxury of options so if they don't like what they're seeing they simply stop tuning in. or if they don't like what they're reading. they're just one click away from many outlets that will report on the news they find important and washington liz wall r.t. . well it's no secret america is battling an obesity problem but until recently no one really understood how far reaching or how serious this problem is new numbers suggest that one in three americans is overweight twenty six million americans have type two diabetes an additional seventy nine million are more are pre diabetic disturbing facts that a new h.b.o. documentary called the weights of the nation is attempting to shed light on take a look. i'm five foot turn and two hundred forty two pounds

i always say this is the biggest i'm ever going to be and i said that twenty pounds a third of americans are obese and another third is overweight obesity is the biggest threat to the health welfare and future of this country i've always been overweight i've got diabetes to sleep apnea heart disease everything turned. so we know that there's a problem in a very serious one at that and yet people are not getting upset about the statistics but the stigma around the word obese so is this sensitivity to a way for americans to avoid talking about the real issues larry harford us with the resident dot net went to the streets of the big apple to take a bite out of the issue. the u.k.'s national institute for health and clinical excellence has issued a suggesting that the word obese might be too upsetting and derogatory to use is

a case of political correctness gone mad this week let's talk about that almost forty pounds is that when you were still heavy and someone called you obese with that offend you. i have been called worse you know what's worse kinds of wannabes are calling someone fat. the same thing. so should we not address the facts because it actually you can dress it like that's just a race of toilet which has better things we don't but it's bad for people like hot leads the heart trouble and they die read cover to cover. sweets who is in charge of deciding when a word of slang and when and word is the proper term we'll i mean you do you don't really want the government to be in charge of that that's for sure of anything yeah i mean the government shouldn't be in the in the in the game of policing what you say certainly of what you think you know what if someone called you whitey somebody

called me why do you have so the property accurate but siri but you would you be offended no so why do people take offense to some words and not other words. probably because they care about what other people think it's an insecurity so we should just stop caring about what other people think and then the whole p.c. thing will go away it's not like you should stop caring what other people think you should start caring more about what you think they get matters in the context that it's used like if you look at somebody and say damn they're obese and in that context i think it's derogatory i think to say the word obese or say obesity in general when you're talking about a condition is would not be derogatory just a statement of of a problem in a society maybe if we ever get this word to people would feel oh ok maybe oh it will be good. regular people so there's no problem and what if you want think about what to take exactly like what are we afraid to call it drug user or drug user

exactly you know this isn't being so white where we should escape from the problems tried the problem. for the it's whether or not you think the word obese is derogatory the bottom line is it's also a medical condition and simply avoiding the word is not going to make the issue go away. and that's going to do it for the news for this hour but states here on the alone a show is coming up at the top of the hour my guest host of skin will speak with former chief of staff to colin powell colonel lawrence wilkerson on the to my tensions with iran and continuing with the n.b.a. coverage christine will speak the press had plaintiffs in the suit that caused a federal judge to overturn the indefinite detention provision of the n.c.a.a. just last night at all new power mart because stores.