marvin in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture president obama had some great one liners in a speech to the d.n.c. last night where they enough to convince americans to give him four more years that and more in tonight's big picture rumble and another batch of weak numbers job numbers released today confirming that our economy is still hurting but by an american create new jobs across the country and help improve the state of the economy ask alan u.k. tonight's conversations great minds and how can we break the two party to wobbly

american politics i'll tell you in tonight's. are you ready to rumble joining me for tonight's big picture rumble our adam bitly editor in chief at net right daily and sam sax progressive commentator and contributor to alter net thanks guys for joining me tonight it should be entertaining interesting conversation the r. and c. and the d.n.c. both all wrapped up first here's something president obama said last night about giving voters a choice when all is said and done when you pick up bad ballot to vote you will face the clearest choice of any time when to generation. so are there clear choices in this election adam in your opinion no that's a silly question actually there is not a clear choice in this election if we're looking at mitt romney or barack obama the only clear choice i see is voting for the republican version of big government or

voting for the democrat version of big government democrat or democratic real name of the party. first we have we have candidates that both support medicare in the expansion of it. despite whatever they're standing by for all we know most about john is that you guys why should they kill off. the r. and c. convention was a tribute to medicare all week long i heard how they were going to say i know exactly how to tell you that they have to do that because they have to hide the fact that they're actually going to kill it so that their least get one senior to vote for a look i think i think it's very tempting to say that there is no difference between the two parties and depending on what issue you're looking at you know maybe there's not if you look at president obama's foreign policy or war policy i should say there really isn't that much of a difference and he's not. creative and maybe thought toward as if he's doing the prose ronnie's i mean is calling for you know let's go back to the cold war let's turn russia into an enemy let's let's let's invade syria we never should've left

afghanistan or x. iraq i mean you know last week he said that he would prefer romney and he would be opposed to obama being reelected but he wouldn't mind romney either confirm from the perspective of a progressive who was unhappy with the way bush handled foreign policy there hasn't been as clear of a departure from that policy as as most progress and so would like i don't we started out but it's not i'm telling you that you know romney's been advised by the same neo cons of push us into these wars but back to the question about differences on that we'll leave that up for debate but when it look when you look at health care policy when you look at education policy. there are significant differences that will affect the lives of millions if not tens of millions of americans all around the country hundreds of millions of them but health care policy you know we can sit here and say oh yes they're so different because on a stump speech at a tea party romney said something completely different to his entire life. i'm not buying that i'm not buying that there were many going to. yes by whitney as

a politician as the man in power he'd put in place romney care as a man on the street trying to get whatever vote taken one today on tax policy i mean there's a difference on where we're going to tax the rich although about difference really is only three percent pretty much well that and i just romney's plan is to lower it down to twenty five percent yeah it was so significant events that you know that is and they won super capital gains tax down to zero so paris hilton no tax at all but only come tax for something for making a living selling our butter on the poor waiting for you know when we sit here and say ok well here's her big differences that's the tax policy or it's the how they're going to handle health care education this is also assuming that they get exactly what they want government so a senate that is completely through you know available to do as they please in the house that's going to bring about their their stuff and get it through i think well i reckon obama if obama wins and republicans keep the house and take the senate then really nothing is going to happen for all we'll see least two more you will

see it i think has the strategy of using reconciliation that grover norquist laid out the financial times this week that the republicans are planning if the republican he's somebody that the democrats actually had i've had several democratic politicians one senator and two members of congress that i said you know is this are you guys are you all talking about doing this the way the grover norquist is talking about doing it and they're saying yes but is there any chance the democrats get a hold of this in the house and the senate or when the house or even hold the senate in citizens united i think that's the big i think it is that i think there's a reasonable chance i think a lot of people are saying you know what's with all this money are you saying this only because the united somehow only benefits republicans i'm saying that it really doesn't take a lot of money to flip a congressional election if you have you know five hundred thousand dollars and you're willing to spend it you could go in two weeks before the election and dump half a million dollars in there and flip and flip the election i think that's a mistake that is largely that is not as your problem. and i can get voted out because the democrats dump a bunch of money into that this we're talking about so i don't know what the swing

but on the swing it's going to go by the independent voters no matter what it was actually proves the rule but let's move on to foreign policy those let's parse out some of these topics here here's a knock on romney and paul. and ryan exceeding and their foreign policy experience. and my opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy. but. from all that we've seen and heard. they want to take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost america so dearly. after all you don't call russia our number one enemy. not all qaeda russia. unless you're still stuck in a cold war mind warp. and also joining us tonight brian darling senior fellow at the heritage foundation welcome bryan speaking of cold war mind war right yeah having me on the show yeah you know i so this knock on foreign policy can

republicans really win a foreign policy argument against a president that is it had all these foreign policy successes around the around the world war start course i mean clearly the president gets credit for the capture and killing of osama bin laden but it ends there we've had a week foreign policy that he when he went over to to egypt stood next to mubarak and said tear this dictator down and they did and now they have the muslim brotherhood running the country and then i have my doctor see what is it and is older it is not as if it wants us to think that the end goal in our foreign policy should be freedom not democracy i mean you can have a country that has democracy once and democracy never again and you might see that media they may get democracy once that's not a goal and they don't have a clue as to credit anymore and in egypt right no rights of a replacement entirely we're going to have future tyro we don't know their tyranny well here's what i do know that it's up to the egyptians as to what kind of government they'll have not to our president or our congress and what governments will get as much as deliberately i mean this is spread all across the this is the

arab spring it's spreading all across the which the president obama ignored when it happened in iran and iran had started the persian spring and they want you want us to go to war in iran but the president did respond to me gypped and responded when the the arab spring spread to different countries but he was silent when it started you and i both know that if if the white house or if the united states in any official way had tried to interject itself into internal iranian politics it would have further polarize duran and would strengthen document right you know you support us going and i thought i saw you going to condemn him for not doing well i support the present going into pakistan. and violating their sovereignty and killing osama bin laden that's a very similar taken out so you know i said i should of ice totally support him i think he was right i think he's right to not listen to all the different things than than than injecting himself into domestic policy it was a stolen election i mean many independent observers believe that that election was

stolen and that we should have played a stronger role we should be a little bit stronger in our rhetoric in syria that we should and i don't know what i think we should be accusing anyone of election misbehavior at this point too but i know you can't draw the comparison between between iran and the united states still but look president obama and this is something we kind of briefly talked about a little bit before is that on this foreign policy issue president obama has been sort of a hawk when it comes down to it i mean he committed u.s. troops to libya so he's he became the. president since reagan that's committed u.s. military assets to a new war he's keeping the afghanistan where he expanded the war in afghanistan you know he says he ended the war in iraq well i mean we're still going to have some sort of troops there too you know there have that hasn't been significant military budget cuts i think we're probably going to have a hard time criticizing president obama when it comes to military foreign policy considering that they hold you know the matter is that the they are military budget

right now is three times what it was you know in the last year the clinton minister it's still increasing and it is and you know here's the thing i think obama has taken this issue completely off the table because. i don't think a single voter out there can honestly say that obama has differ significantly away from the bush administration's foreign policy well i mean he was no longer calling it the war on terror so the cables that's just a man talking about this let's move on economics trickle down economics is attacked at the d.n.c. clinton said that the nation can't afford to double down on trickle down and then president obama said this about how absurd republicans are with tax cuts. all they have to offer is the same prescriptions they've had for the last thirty years have a surplus try tax cut deficit to. try another. feel a cold coming on take two tax credits roll back some regulations and told us in the morning. i expected that to be the clip that just you know when it went totally

viral and i'm surprised that it hasn't as much as it did but is the g.o.p. myth about tax cuts beginning to break down here you know the president agreed with that when he signed the bush tax cuts and extended them in two thousand and ten so he's guilty he was blackmailed you know he wasn't even legal not going to sign those tax cuts and now he's claiming he still wants tax cuts he wants part of the bush not on the top two legislating is a pretty messy business and i think every public statement he gave on the issue he says i don't think the bush tax cuts for the highest income earners should be extended so to say that he approved of them is just simply not true if he has the power to veto and he didn't only knows then what in middle class taxes go up on the middle class that was one thing that was a compliment to the leader to play democrats clearly what america is that we're driving over this cliff basically committing suicide as a nation if he truly believed that he would have vetoed it and gone back to it forced the country to go so we're going to only what obama believes are the

american people starting to look at this and say you know we had ninety one percent taxes from one hundred thirty four until and went to seventy four percent until nine hundred eighty three and things went really well in the fifty's sixty's seventy's and eighty's and then they kind of went to hell over the last thirty years at least with the middle class and the rich got incredibly rich and now you have people like mitt romney paying only thirteen percent income tax you know less than his dentist does and he's making twenty million bucks a year there's something wrong with this don't you think the average american is saying this is screwed up i think even brock obama wouldn't support raising taxes back to those old tax rates i don't hoard and he wouldn't but i think a lot of americans who make as you have capital flight me united states would turn into france republicans becoming more honest about it it's not like they don't think tax cuts are good for the economy they want tax cuts so that government has no revenue so that they can kill government that's what grover norquist said he just wanted the government is small the dragon it has nothing to with they can not it has to do with destroying the government not as. they have never they have never

struck me they've just never done but the fact of the matter actually did if you did let's just say argument's sake i'll say you raise taxes to ninety percent knowledge americans you still wouldn't go come anywhere near to balancing the budget the problem isn't the lack of mexico no the problem is the fact the corporations have gone from pain thirty four percent of the federal you know of federal revenues to around nine percent for that but only as a federal government's too big more rubble right after this break. here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we americans call a dollar. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about you sir are a fool you know what that is my carousel is a good one if you wish me to feature isn't

a liberal chris good point. because usually the voters. get to know the corporate media distracts us from what you and i should care about because they're profit driven industry that sells a sensationalistic garbage because that breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that. you know 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 realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture .

back to welcome back to the night's big picture rommel joining me are adam bitly editor in chief of net right daily middler sam sacks progressive commentator down at the end and contributor to alter net and joining the panel brian darling senior fellow of government studies at the heritage foundation. moving on to this point the democrats like joe biden been making when asked if we're better off today than we were four years ago check this clip because of all the action she took because

of the policy. because of the determination of american workers and. bravery of our special forces we cannot probably say what you've heard me say the last six months . as it was i so sam are we better off than we were four years ago i mean i think we're i don't i'm not very comfortable with kind of talking point it seems a bit macabre to me i think general motors out a dead guy and yeah you know i think general motors is something that should definitely be touted i think if you looked at newspaper headlines from two thousand and eight install that everybody is talking about brink of collapse this is the end of america as we know it compared to what we see today i think it's pretty obvious we're better off. you know the president said we're not going to spike the football when it comes to comes to. biden's speech sounded a lot like spiking the football and it goes out to all incomparable we're ok and.

it's hard to argue that we're better off anywhere really we were losing eight hundred thousand jobs a month in the last month so that above the issue of this administration they have not come back i know that well four and a half million of them have come back for four point three million but when you point out the better off though new jobs have come back well how are we better off when we have created the jobs everyone has had a losing we have the. lowest participation in the job able bodied participation in the job market right now for the last thirty years we lost fifteen thousand in the job market and growing dream jobs in the last month we are unemployment too high unemployment way too i was at twenty three million unemployed or underemployed americans i don't think they feel like they're better off just because a bunch of union workers at these government motors get a bailout it's mostly government workers that have been laid off in a seven hundred thousand of them by by mostly republican governors in the red states and i had they not been laid off the unemployment rate right now would be in

the seventy's and maybe even one of the receipts they got laid off was because of the stimulus plan and now they got right on because the republican governors are trying to get rid of you know unionized employees in their states and we probably will have to rephrase the court i mean better off than we were four years ago you know roosevelt was reelected with unemployment very high he was the last president got reelected with unemployment was about you know cerberus started out fifteen or thirteen percent i think if you had it that i think it's above no one has been reelected above seventy percent there and that was because people understood that this isn't a normal recession this is a depression i think that president obama is going to have to make that argument over the next few months and bill clinton kind of made that argument that look no president could turn this around in four years so ask if we're better off than four years ago it should be you know are we at least moving somewhere where we might be better off four years from now and i think they can they can make that argument if they can somehow get republicans on board with doing what republicans have done

historically and that's stimulating the economy so so republicans want to do it what republicans did in one hundred twenty nine in response to the same crisis they want to do the same thing herbert hoover did which is let the market you know what was it the treasury secretary mellon said liquidate everything that's the same thing that there romney said both about housing he said let the housing market collapse totally to the bottom and then let the investors move in buy up those houses rent them back to people used to live in them and with g.m. detroit go bankrupt and there was little. everything it's the exact same philosophy but the food is a philosophy of president obama it's to grow government it's to move to strong bev i'm unsure about might this flossy of a government you know the extension of the war and the result of six hundred thousand government workers and since he writes you government is slowing growth it's not growing as fast as it used to but it's still growing and growing making it why is that slower than why isn't that a metric that is bad in and of itself because if there's more need there should be more coverage there isn't and this is a time of crisis you've got people who are hungry you've got people who are

unemployed right and anyhow we're. i hate to have the last word here but we're we're out of time the flood so brian adam sam thank you very much for joining us. so the conventions are in the books and we're two months away from the election or two months away from americans having and ultimate choice vote for the democratic vote for the republicans actually that's really not much of a choice at all in fact other democracies around the world would laugh at us if we claimed that a vote between one of only two major parties was actually a legitimate choice the truth is a two party system isn't really that democratic at all and most of the other democracies on the planet know that that's why they've reformed their elections to prevent a two party doowop away from taking over their representative governments you know

there are six political parties represented in germany's congress the bundestag and even more parties represented in state parliaments around germany including the pirate party australia two has six parties represented their parliament and the italian parliament as as well as well there are six major parties represented. and more than two dozen smaller parties that are represented in some ways well brazil has fifteen parties represented in their congress israel's parliament has like eighteen parties and more parties means more ideas more parties mean more people have access to the political system and care about it more parties means a more responsive democratic government small d. in the united states though we have only two parties represented in congress plus two independents joe lieberman and bernie sanders so why is that how have other democracies been able to break the two party to optimally that we here in america have not been able to well it in america we have something called first past the

post elections are winner take all actions take the house of representatives for example there are four hundred thirty five seats each corresponding to a specific congressional district h. district a list of candidates run for office whatever candidate gets the most votes wins the one seat that's up for grabs and everyone else loses and gets nothing. even if the winner wins by just one vote he wins it all the loser gets nothing that's a winner take all election but only a handful of democracies actually nine of them have winner take all actions like we do in the united states in fact in more than ninety other democracies around the world they don't have winner take all actions like we do they have something called proportional representation and that's one key to breaking a two party to operate here's a proportional representation works rather than voting on the candidate you'd want to when you vote for the political party that you want to win the ballot will have

for example a democratic party listed in public and party maybe libertarian party in the green party and maybe even the socialist party and under each party will be a list of candidates affiliated with each party see you know who the individuals are who will be representing you should the party win so let's have a sample auction and let's assume that the democratic party wins forty percent of the vote the republicans win twenty percent of the vote the green party wins twenty percent of the vote the libertarians get ten percent of the vote and also socialist got ten percent too so democrats since they won forty percent of the vote they would get forty percent of the seats in congress republicans get twenty percent so they get two seats the greens won twenty percent as well so they get you know twenty percent of the seats and since the libertarians and the socialists each won ten percent they'd each get ten percent in this case one seat so now we fill ten seats in congress in a way that's far more performer all of congress that way this far more proportional to how the voters voted rather than just

a winner take all. and smaller parties like the greens and libertarians didn't have to have as much money to try to win they just needed to get a certain threshold to have a voice in government. the important thing about proportional representation like this is that the lowers the barrier for third fourth and he was fifth or eighth parties have access to our government and once multiple parties get a chance to govern they get their message out better they rally more supporters they try to improve their party standing in the next election more people get more action about demo democracy this is something we should seriously consider in the united states and if this is too radical then the very least we can try something called instant runoff voting or are. with i.r. v voters aren't forced to select just two candidates they have a choice to rank the candidates they want in order putting the candidate they want most to win at the top and the candidate they want least to win the bottom is all

they do in australia new zealand when the votes are counted if one candidate received more than fifty percent of the first place votes then they win but if not then the second choice votes get counted and so on until a candidate does receive fifty percent of the votes with i.r.b. voters can boldly choose a third party candidate at the top of their list without feeling like they're wasting their vote more than three hundred state and local governments are currently using instant run of voting in the united states right now although no federal elections are currently using them again this is something we should seriously consider adopting to give third parties a better shot at winning seats in our government. the point is this we haven't had any serious reforms to our democratic government in a really really long time in fact we have a pretty ancient democracy compared to the rest of the world in eight hundred sixty one philosopher john stuart mill argued for proportional representation in his book representative government he argued that winner take all actions inevitably

disenfranchise minorities or keep down minority parties or third parties or fourth party or fifth words and ever since mill wrote about this most democracies created after were based on proportional representation rather than the winner take all that we've had ever since the seventy's and eighty's we need to make a change here in america to obviously the tumeric major parties are going to resist that they love their stranglehold on power with several other political parties spearheaded by the green party are fighting for these critical reforms we need more voices we need a real choice in the united states of america something to think about over the next few months as democrats or republicans dominate the selection cycle and it's a great reason to vote for a democrat while still participating in the green party which is working so hard to bring. voting to communities across our nation. after the break get vine american products help put americans back to work and give

a boost to our failing economy last gallon u.k. in tonight's conversations with great minds.

thank. you. laurie mr. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is. welcome to the big picture.

birdseye's conversations of the great minds i'm joined by alan u.k. alan is an entrepreneur and underwater kinetics which he started forty one years ago as a software at the university of california san diego elon holds over fifty patents .