when louis. well i'm going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. since the day president obama took office republicans have been systematically planning to destroy his presidency by taking down the american economy is this an example of petty politics at its worst or if something even more sinister also why can't that romney stop why it would increase transparency in washington destroy the republican party all that and more in today's politics panel and his nights of daily take it's the end of the world as we know it and you shouldn't feel fine but this startling new research

reveal about one of the pillars of life on our planet. you know this house republicans on the oversight and government reform committee have scheduled a june twentieth vote to hold attorney general eric holder in contempt over the a.t.f. fast and furious operation program started under a different name by the bush administration which may have led to the death of a border patrol agent republicans argue that holder's obstructing an investigation into the operation despite the fact that holder the justice department are given thousands of documents to house republicans and holder himself has testified on the matter eight times republicans believe that holding a sitting attorney general in contempt during an election year could be embarrassing for president obama so they're going to take a shot at holding attorney general holder in contempt of course would not create

one single job however passing the senate version of the highway bill that would keep one point nine million americans on the job building our roads and bridges republicans refused to act on that. legislation which prompted senate majority leader harry reid to call out republicans for trying to crash the economy for their political benefit as reid said last week to reporters you have heard as i have heard that there's a battle going on between cantor and house speaker john boehner as to whether or not there should be a highway bill cantor of course i'm told by others that he wants to not do a bill to make the economy worse because he feels that the better for them well i hope that's not true said harry reid well it is true and now we have proof here's what the politics editor ed with the politics editor at business insider michael brendan doherty this weekend on build real time with bill maher just came right out and said that he had been told by

a senior republican senator that they had planned to block all legislation that might improve the economy paraphrasing here that might improve the economy between now and november. so there you have republicans won't do anything this year except to wait for the economy to tank and here's the bigger picture with regard to that question of the day of republicans committed treason sedition or just conspiracy to destroy the lives of millions of working americans so that they can make president obama one term president here's why i ask when louise and i first moved to washington d.c. two years ago there was this very fancy expensive restaurant on the back side of our apartment building right across the street from the f.b.i. headquarters more than once we walked by on the way home from doing this t.v. show and watched as senators and congressmen and their lobbyist buddies walked out to black s.u.v.s or limousines it was called the caucus room restaurant and according to a new book by robert draper that was where a group of republicans put together

a plan to destroy the obama presidency literally on the day it began as draper notes in his new book do not ask us what good we do inside the u.s. house of representatives quote the dinner lasted nearly four hours they parted company almost giddily the republicans had agreed on a way forward show united an unyielding opposition to all the president's economic policies begin attacking vulnerable democrats on the airwaves when the spear point of the house of representatives in two thousand and ten jab obama relentlessly in two thousand and eleven when the white house in the senate in two thousand and twelve. was there so too were most of the prominent republican members of congress including representatives eric cantor paul ryan and kevin mccarthy senators jon kyl jim de mint and tom coburn and frank luntz republican pollster and fox news employee was there as well they all sat around a square table perhaps that very one. and at the end of the obama at this was on the end of the and planning the end of the obama presidency on january twentieth

two thousand and nine obama's first day in office it was the day he was sworn in as the country's forty fourth president draper noted that representative paul ryan warren that everyone quote had to stick together representative kevin mccarthy chimed in saying quote we've got to challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign and quote frank luntz being there meant the fox news was almost certainly on board for this treason or sedition or whatever it is and their cover since then seems to back that up as new gary said after the dinner you will remember this day you will remember this is the day the seeds of two thousand and twelve were so. they drew up a national suicide pact destroy the republican the middle class at least economically and blame it all on obama because of thirty years of reaganomics and george w. bush's disastrous presidency two unpaid for wars unpaid for medicare drug benefit deregulation that led the banks to crash the world's economy the nation was already

in freefall when these fourteen men met the economy was hemorrhaging seven hundred thousand jobs a month people were losing their homes from coast to coast college graduates couldn't find work wages were collapsing people couldn't make their mortgage payments and millions were losing their health insurance because of the bush crash and they wanted to keep it that way for four more years and then a shift all the blame for that pain from reaganomics and bush a nomics onto obama to do that they had to make sure that obama failed to get anything of substance through the house of the senate congressman pete sessions after the meeting told the national journal that they were launching what he called quote a taliban insurgency and quote against obama and that's just what they did over two hundred pieces of economic recovery legislation from laws that would have ended outsourcing or at least reduced it dramatically to laws that would make the rich pay their fair share of taxes all shot down by republican filibusters in the sun even though democrats controlled the senate senate rules allow a single senator to put a secret hold on

a bill effectively killing senator tom coburn alone one of the participants of that meeting at the caucus room restaurant did this over and over and over to prevent anyone bamma successes with hold on bill that funded the f.a.a. funded highway repairs funded veterans' benefits funded food safety funded health care for nine eleven responders funding the new smithsonian museum about women's history funded nine eleven memorial funded bike paths in cities all over the nation funded wildlife protection on and on it went. republicans now say obama quote controlled the house and senate for two years but it's a lie the men from that meeting at the caucus room restaurant controlled the legislative outcome even sabotaging obama's stimulus and obamacare so that instead of becoming strong progressive programs that became essentially giveaways to big banks and health insurance companies they were so successful the federal spending has increased year to year under obama at a lower rate than any president since president eisenhower and you know

actually this goes back to eisenhower growth was really fast in the truman with the with the the war in korea really fast of f.d.r. so you could say this always goes all the way back to you know logically hoover. this was not the president's idea it's the austerity program that the men who are in that meeting have forced us all into so that they can crash the economy or at least keep it bad so the question what do you call it when a small group of republicans gather to intentionally sabotage an entire nation just so their party can win political power off the pain of working americans is it treason is a sedition or is a simply the most corrupt evil and petty sort of politics this town has seen since newt gingrich shut down the government and through millions of americans out of work as bill clinton made and flying back air force one i report you decide you can register your opinions over thom hartmann dot com or on facebook twitter and you tube and we'll report later in the week what you think.

now it's time to turn things over to our monday politics panel on our panel tonight sam sex progressive commentator and horace cooper conservative commentator and senior fellow at the national center for public policy research thank you both for joining me tonight and you and you if you heard my rant just to summarize a very quickly robert draper's new book documents a small group of republicans got together in the caucus room restaurant the night obama was sworn in and committed to each other that they would block any meaningful economic reforms in this country for four years to keep the economy in the tank and blame it all on obama knowing this that republicans committed treason sedition or is this just how politics works in this town. well i haven't read the book yet but i'm interested in reading it because i'm kind of curious to see the contrast climbs book that just came out also describes in detail the amateurish nature of this white house is carrying out of its stewardship of this economy and all other issues

and yet that's got a media mainstream media blackout i'd love to see what kind of documentation he provides now here's what i know from one thousand nine hundred two early one thousand nine hundred eighty two to the election in november of one thousand and two senate democrats did every single thing they could to make it harder for george bush sr to be able to claim that we were making progress in the economy in january of that year after he lost suddenly everyone announced how much progress the economy had made and how great things were i don't know that we what we call that treason i don't know that we call that sedition but it was politics and the question is is that the model that we want to have no one call those people out on it in fact i believe the senate majority leader got named one of the chief emissaries of president clinton's administration horse is partly right i mean this is partly politics the point is you want to embarrass the president to get to get

in office in the neck at the midterms and then get in four years later but we were in a. so in a time of crisis there was. seven hundred thousand jobs being lost month there's two wars you almost want to throw politics out a little bit during this time of crisis now the other thing republicans i could understand their argument if president obama came in with this wildly progressive agenda and want to do all these big things and republicans say no we're not going to let the country go that far president obama's acted like richard nixon pretty much first first three years in office he passed a stimulus not a little right wing consist of the stimulus package that every republican would go for during a time of recession the past month third of it was tax cuts the republicans or he wanted a health care plan that preserves the private health insurance industry we want an energy energy plan with cap and trade which has been supported by all republican presidents and the republicans still didn't want to vote for it even though it would help the economy even though it was their own ideas strictly for political purposes well the truth of the matter is of the package that was presented by this president even he in the white house said when he called

a bipartisan group of of congressmen and senators together he turned and said i won we're going to do it my way he said eight times in early on it did not turn out that way but he certainly set a tone early on that he was not looking forward to an open air life probably a good way to remember george w. bush saying i got some political capital he certainly didn't it didn't work out too well for him either and that's the point nixon is no model for telling us how free market conservative limited government types operate who is also not a socialist i mean well he might be a nowadays actually richard nixon might be a socialist in today's republican party i don't know if he was certainly a big government liberal if you look at the e.p.a. if you look at osha you look at the affirmative action agenda that holland has that motivation richard nixon did before before mitt romney did he so he certainly supported a very aggressive in fact government run arguably as well are progressive that obamacare as you know well i mean so he's no model. but we still have unresolved whether whether this deal during

a time of crisis was treason sedition or just politics as usual as you suggest it's just i would suggest that this isn't different from what we've seen and i would also suggest that while they had a supermajority they could have done a lot more to accomplish their agenda they chose not to get more more from monday's politics panel after the break. i was.

the and.

welcome back to the monday politics panel joining me tonight are sam sax progressive commentator and more as cooper conservative commentator and senior fellow at the national center for public policy research let's get back to admit romney claims that under president obama federal spending this was a statement he made yesterday afternoon early today federal spending has accelerated faster than any other time in recent history and i mean looking at recent history although with the eisenhower administration according to independent fact checkers as you can see from this graph that's on the screen right now federal spending growth has been slower under president obama than any other president

since eisenhower and as i said earlier they just went back to eisenhower f.d.r. the new deal was truman had the war in korea i would say it goes back to hoover anyhow thanks in large part to the republicans in washington who forced austerity on america in my opinion just to crash the economy these numbers for obama are as small as they are so is this claim by romney just another part of his lie lie lie campaign strategy i mean he's lied about what presidents tried to do with medicare he's lied about how many jobs the president's critics lied about how many jobs he's own created now he's lying about this i think this is part of his stump speech i think just repeats this claim that president obama has increased spending more than any other president in history over and over and over again it's a lie over and over again as that as that chart shows but that chart also shows why the recovery has been slow if you look at reagan's increase in spending if you look at carter's increase in spending they were all high they were all during times of recession poor economies you need government spending during times of recession and

republicans have not let president obama spend the money he needs to do more since that is the big why officially republican campaign strategy this isn't about a big lies about the way what republicans were accusing romney of before he got the nomination this isn't about a big lie this is about a misunderstanding or disagreement on how to do the accounting whether or not you start mr obama's administration's budget with zero nine or whether you start with the zero ten now there's an emergency. pending there's more spending and there was his stimulus spending all that got pushed in to the zero nine budget cycle even though it normally should have been part of the zero ten budget cycle when you take all that out it does look remarkably like it hasn't been a lottery. depends on who you are some people say no some people say yes but the point is mr obama advocated it and is bragging about how he is the least spending president and a generation so now maybe mr draper's claim that this was some conspiracy to stymie him or he's standing up and saying i'm taking credit for who's lying well

accounting tricks aside i mean if we're looking at the bailout or the stimulus or whatever you just mentioned those are one offs those are things that go on the on the balance sheet one year and then there are many they're not structural problems like the bush tax cuts were like the wars decade long wars were that bush put on there and didn't even try and tried to not get it wrong with that is that it did change the baseline there were appropriations numbers that were adjusted to a comp to accommodate to the sizable eight hundred billion dollars stimulus package so things that had been undecided as you know seven in zero eight among congress and president bush instead of there being a let's cut the baby in half solution they gave it back the role of the russians where this is this is not the only time that mitt romney has laid out something that we know we knew at the time was not truthful or later it came out to be not true for i challenge whether or not that's the case is what i'm saying here in this case when there is an actual dispute over what is the right number to use and what's right starting to well if we look if we look at the chart again i think the

leader in there was carter thirteen percent it is thirteen percent president obama's at one point four percent so if you want to throw the stimulus package on there that's a look as if you have to coordinate the whole the heritage foundation to still while it's still like a lot to say which is a lot different then one point four which is also a lot different than federal spending has accelerated faster than any. there are times in recent history. that i'll grant you that but it's certainly going to run before the war ok let's turn over the war on working people here's a governor indiana governor mitch daniels said on sunday. are you saying that you would like to see no public worker unions. i think really government works better without them i really do so government employees should not have the right to talk back to government according to republicans so horace if government is so bad why do republicans want to say to workers that they shouldn't have the

should be forced to submit to its every whim but actually i think george meany the president of the a.f.l.-cio started with the premise that government and public sector unions should never go it was the other republican no he wasn't f.y.r. f.d.r. that but while the right winger also said the same thing up through the fifty's there was a bipartisan consensus that this wasn't the case and nobody thought that this meant that you were somehow anti federal worker or anti government worker. there's for thirty years there's been a war on unions and it's succeeded in the private sector it's taken you take new year rates from thirty percent down to i think seven percent and i've been sector what it hasn't succeeded against is workers in the public sector their union rates are around thirty six percent still so republicans basically are doing now is they're telling people who used to belong to private sector unions look at those public sector unions they're getting paid so much money they have so much benefits when in reality they're unionized workers that's where you need unionized workers to get better paying benefits because they can they can join together in the they

have a say at the table with their boss and rather than rather than bringing down public sector workers down to where private sector workers are now should we be raising private sector workers as i want to do this is not part of some right wing conspiracy this was a bipartisan consensus it's only progressives who took off and perverted the process and pride to turn what was a normal understanding if you work for the government you can trust that the taxpayers and the public officials together will see to it that you get promoted the best it wasn't this this is the rest of this is and hundred thirty five though you never know that i should fifty five government it wasn't one thirty five either if the government is so evil as we have heard ever since ronald reagan's first inaugural address the government is so evil why do republicans not want people who are employees of the government to be able to speak back to it you want to be able to speak back to it but unions are not an example of that unions led the bigoted effort to prevent blacks from being able to do construction work from doing highway work from all manner of even in government even in government unions it was unions

that said to blacks that they could not participate so the idea that there was going to i want to was not a union no they said they specifically saw out in the twenty's and thirty's that i was asserting that act is terribly built around this race is premise of the idea that they're the paragon again the red not in the twenty's and thirty's their history is who they are that was what they began as and they haven't changed much today they still continue to try to wait. practive advantage ok without regard to the benefits we keep talking in vague these union workers we're talking about teachers cops firefighters nurses here should they not get this should they do not get quality pay and benefits if you're a great nurse you don't need a union to represent you your great teacher as my mother is she doesn't need the n.e.a. to represent her your great fireman you don't need a union to represent you you only need those things when you are the least in the group when you have no want to maybe you have been extravagant a person running for president mitt romney who's saying that we don't need any more

teachers we don't need any more cops we don't need any firefighters in criticizing the prison for wanting to hire those then you might need some protection as i don't believe it's the president's job to be hiring policemen teachers are firemen and that frankly is a fundamental divide in this country between those who believe that's a federal responsibility versus those who say that that's a local response to it right that used to be responsible to the states unfortunately since the two thousand and two thousand and seven financial meltdown people were unemployed they don't have revenue to pay governments so you've been wiped out so they're going to do not believe that it's the only go to their start up to the right man to do that i know some people don't believe that but so we can go hands off and out of these save the labs but if you don't if you want to experience say you're right i thought about seriously but let me just if i may may move the topic here a little bit republicans have been talking about injecting transparency to spend the money in fact the supreme court citizens united talked about that as a remedy to the citizens united self but when hal rogers the republican chairman of the house appropriations subcommittee was given an opportunity to vote on an f.c.c.

rule that would have required radio stations to simply publish on the internet who is buying the advertising he said no we can't do that what is the republicans don't like about transparency can they only win elections with secret donations from billionaires or from mahmoud ahmadinejad this is this is the smallest tiniest effort for transparency we need mass transparency we need to know what everybody is spending these elections this was just one sliver here. make public who's funding these things they're just in a piece of paper somewhere locked away you have to ask for this we're simply saying post them online it's much easier for us to sit so republicans can even come to the table and something so small that is your progressives there was a huge bipartisan consensus that transparency was the solution to most of these campaign problems and then all of a sudden people started getting the names and addresses of contributors for causes they didn't like and they started harassing them they started late night phone calls they started all manner of boycotts against the people who had small

businesses i won't buy your flowers from you all of a sudden now we have to say should you be allowed to participate in the political process without reprisals on the part of people to it isn't that first of all these these donors are not if you're a if you're a big corporation you're donating you're not pleasant for a phone number of it's different and secondly if you're if you're a fat cat millionaire billionaire you've got enough home phone numbers that you know putting those on there what are we in for a red herring no no no it is only total red with the marriage vote in california there were donors who were giving one thousand dollars they were giving five hundred dollars and those people had their names and addresses put out and were called upon to attack and that has caused a lot of people including myself to ask what is the best way for people who are without courage i don't know that's i don't know you it's not about to go to a campaign you're going to have an all or laser on the action and agreement that there will not be reprisals against people exercising not big corporate america

bacon fend for themselves not millionaires they can think of themselves living up to their telephone numbers on line what's wrong with simply putting the name i have a flower shop and i buy and these are bad television stations because i have a lot. if i have a flower yes you know what you can buy ads ads around washington d.c. for as little as twenty five hundred bucks you can buy ads in washington d.c. on cox cable for as little as twenty five hundred bucks and now you're going to tell me it's ok for reprisals. against people because of that if we can't come to an agreement on something like that and you know and you're also going to say you're saying we should absolutely keep it secret republican don't think every little guys shouldn't have that kind of that kind of little wind sex or a scoop or thanks for thanks for joining us thank you.

crazy alert police in the puppy poop residence of the holy city of jerusalem are fed up with all the doggy doo left behind by dog owners in that city and the doing something about city officials are starting a doggie d.n.a. database where they're going to be able to match dog droppings to their canine culprits first the city will be collecting saliva samples from all registered dogs in jerusalem and then the samples will be entered into a d.n.a. database the quote project calls for establishment of a database of dog d.n.a. to allow us to reduce the soil and pavements parks and public spaces so he hopes to get saliva samples from between seventy and eighty percent of the nearly eleven thousand dogs are believed to be in jerusalem a positive match is made the owner of the pooch will be fined seven hundred fifty shekels about one hundred ninety three bucks rumor has it the pooper scooper and privatized pound industries a lobbied the jerusalem city council hard before the decision was made. coming up a mare from michigan has an idea on how to stimulate the thousands of struggling local economies across america dr verge of an era where of lansing michigan about

as patriotic plan that evolves will spur economic growth from coast to coast. emission free credit take should free in-store chargers free arrangements free. three stooges free. downloads free broadcast quality videos for your media projects a free radio done to our teeth on time.

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