and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture after their fairly dismal showing in the elections earlier this month high ranking republicans came out and said that the party needs to change and stop catering to the interests of the far right but is that easier said than done for the grand old party lies former george w. bush speechwriter david frum also the u.s. government says the drone attacks in the middle east are targeted and don't put innocent civilians in harm's way yet our drones have killed hundreds of innocent men women and children when do we say enough is enough with drone warfare and if the head of the cia can't hide his e-mails in the federal government chance do you

and i have to keep our emails private of congress has its way you and i don't stand a chance at all how your privacy could be taking a major hit this week. you need to know this is a possible a grover norquist the multimillionaire k. street lobbyists long funded by billionaires is an enemy of the state pretty strong language but consider that he has connived over the years to get literally hundreds of members of congress to violate their own awful oath of office by pledging a higher of both to keep billionaires taxes lower. on an ongoing basis their acquirement for members of congress to swear an oath to our country is in the constitution itself it's an article six says the senators and representatives shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this constitution so starting with the

first congress and seven hundred eighty nine members were sworn in by saying i do solemnly swear or affirm that i will support the constitution of the united states during the civil war president abraham lincoln supported in congress asked on july second six eight hundred sixty two legislation requiring an oath that added the members of congress had not previously engaged in any quote criminal or disloyal conduct and quote which would have included pledging a will to the confederacy was called the ironclad test because it was designed to keep confederate sympathizers out of congress the members swore it and it was later discovered previously violated it by swearing an oath to the confederacy you could be prosecuted for perjury after the civil war that oath was replaced with one that didn't specifically exclude former members of the confederacy but still required members to pledge and oath first and foremost to the constitution now referred to as the modern oath it was an act that an eight hundred eighty four by law and is

used to this day its first sentence reads i do solemnly swear or affirm that i will support defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies foreign and domestic that i will bear true faith and allegiance to the same that i take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. and the constitution to which they take the modern oath explicitly says that congress has the power to impose taxes both to pay for defense and to provide for the general welfare of the nation and very first sentence of article one section eight says the congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes duties imposed on exercises to pay the debts and provide for the jet the common defense and the general welfare of the united states so how is it possible the one the constitution says that one of the very specific jobs of congress is to lay and collect taxes and the oath they take says that they that they will do so without

any mental reservation or purpose of evasion that a member of congress could possibly swear an oath to a multi-millionaire k.-street lobbyist that that member of congress will refuse to perform one of their constitutional duties and what sort of member of congress would willingly swear an oath to a front man for a small group of billionaires that that member of congress would violate the zero if he or she swore to follow the constitution without mental reservations and without purpose of evasion. is not a man who uses threats that billionaire money will be used to politically destroy members of congress who refused to sign his pledge an enemy of the state itself or at least an enemy of the very constitution that lawmakers have sworn to uphold without mental reservation or evasion joining me now is david frum former speechwriter for george w. bush contributing editor to the daily beast and newsweek and author of several books including his latest why romney lost an e-book available over at the daily beast site newsweek's let me make you an amazon and find digital retailers everyone

indeed and a fine book it is thank you very impressive david frum great to have you back and for graeme with us two prominent republicans have come out in the last five days now for the last few days backing away from the norquist pledge i think we're up to seven all together of high profile but this is for example lindsey graham just for example. love being a senator and i want to be a senator that that matters for the state of south carolina country when you're sixteen trillion dollars in debt the only pledge we should be making to each other is to avoid the timing grease and republicans republicans should put revenue on the table where this far and that we don't generate enough revenue is the. you know for years i've been doing a radio show for nine years and during that time i probably debated grover norquist thirty times he's always been the untouchable icon of the republican party is his crumbling like this a symptom of a larger crumbling within the right wing of the republican party i don't think it

is a crumbling i think of it so much as a thaw of ice cracking the republican party like successful organizations has been carrying on word ideas that worked very well a generation ago to understand and that's really the message of this election that the kinds of solutions that the republicans have been offering successfully are not the solutions relevant to present day america that was something you couldn't say after twenty after two thousand and eight now you hear republicans beginning to talk about it but even. generation ago at at what point in the history of this country have republicans offered solutions that actually work i mean i somehow or was in favor of a ninety one percent top marginal tax rate he was famously in favor so security is letter to his brother david in favor of labor laws that empowered unions. in one thousand nine hundred seventy nine one thousand nine hundred ronald reagan ran for president here are the problems the country faced very high inflation at that time the general liberal response was wage and price controls the conservative response

was strict control of money that had been nixon's response as you have it was people of john's going to follow nick nixon did it but nixon was in thrall to the provide the prevailing ideas when john kenneth galbraith and milton friedman had a t.v. debate and if you were smart liberal minded person and felix wrote and others smart liberal minded people say wage and price controls are the answer to inflation and if not wage and price controls than targeting than other kinds of fiscal measures that was the smart thing to say milton friedman said inflation is purely a monetary matter we can do it with monetary monetarism he was right well that was he right or was it that the inflation was because both l.b.j. and richard nixon had with the vietnam war you know basically they had monetize the vietnam war rather than a monetary phenomenon and so it got wrong out of the economy just by virtue of time well it's a it's a monitor his point was and you're agreeing with you that it was a monetary phenomenon conservatives argued then at that time at that time the united states faced a problem of chronically sluggish productivity growth and conservatives argued that

lower taxes on capital formation would accelerate productivity growth and i know don't want to wait rate reagan raise the capital gains tax up to be the same as the as there is now to go in one thousand nine hundred twenty eight but they but the effect will he also do is he allowed you to by slowing down inflation you're not paying taxes on inflationary gains you're paying taxes on real gains the point not to belabor all of this is to say that what happened in one thousand nine hundred eighty was there was a. program suited to the needs of that time high inflation low productivity and generally sluggish technological performance and that's not the problem we have faced in the past decade and certainly not the problem we face since two thousand and eight and like the democratic party meeting the problems of the seventy's with the answers of the one nine hundred thirty s. we've been meeting the problems of the twenty ten's with the answers of the nineteen seventies so what are the answers for the twenty tens or the twenty teens

that the republican party can bring to the table and in that context to what extent is what you've referred to as the conservative entertainment complex either helping or retarding that well there was this one example the solution for the twenty tents . in the one nine hundred seventy s. because of the way when you had i think eleven two different tax rates and you're very rapid inflation people who weren't getting any better off would rise from tax rate the tax rate tax rate so fast that over the course of that decade the nineteen seventies a typical earner someone earning the average wage would start at the beginning of the decade paying a twenty or twenty two percent rate and in the decade paying a forty percent marginal rate no surprise taxes were a very important issue for middle class americans in the seventy's and eighty's today eighty percent of americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes unsurprisingly they don't respond to a message that is about income taxes and if you keep talking the most about income taxes you're talking to the most something that isn't relevant to their lives

meanwhile their wages are stagnating in large part because the incredibly rising cost of health insurance devour wages before the employees get the last point on this there's we talked about this last time i was on your show before the crash in the in the two thousand during the expansion the cost of labor to employers rose by about twenty five percent but wages were completely stagnant because every had a seventy nine you know this is between two thousand tween two thousand. too in two thousand and seven wages are completely stagnant cost of labor is rising the whole increment is all going to pay the cost of health insurance that's the great middle class problem of the twenty tens and that's the thing republicans need to be ready to talk about and yet the republican response has been let's hand it over to the health insurance companies and you've got you know united health care the largest one is paid stephen j. helms the c.e.o. over a billion dollars they have over one hundred people making over a million dollars you know they've been polling twenty five thirty thirty five in

some cases these health insurance covers point forty percent of the top medicare is operating at three percent overhead how can how can the republicans with a straight face say you know health care costs are exploding let's privatized more and you know give more money to shareholders well ironically of course president obama's solution was to expand the role i understand it was also richard nixon solution and there around the solution and that on the ideas that is the republican answer is a regulated private marketplace and use competitive forces to bring cost down and i kind of notoriously. made the argument back in two thousand and ten that if that's the direction the president wants to go that's not a direction that republicans want to fight every element of his or a lot of elements of it universal coverage is a good thing a competitive markets are in republican minds good things private ownership is a good thing it's better than having a state run monopoly medicare for everybody which is where the country would have been going because america would not but that's what veterans have they're quite happy with the v.a. it has the highest approval rating it's what people on medicare have that has the

second highest approval rate in the country. why would it be such a disaster because what you would find is you would extinguish the origin you would extinguish the sources of innovation you would freeze and weiss's medicare because it's what medicare does is it freezes in place the way medicine was done in the one nine hundred sixty s. medicare is a system of hospital insurance now it's also a system of drug insurance you get sick the doctor prescribes. procedure the doctors paid for prescribe you suggest you can never if you cannot change well innovation is very hard for innovation to happen in the public sector it tends to happen faster in the private there would still be private insurance companies even if they weren't primary well there are there are in every other developed country but not of well there and they're not there are in holland germany and offer in secondary insurance yeah but that's not the shape that if you're this is taking us a little bit into maybe more details on this than anybody can swear to but the ship

the few people who are young who use a little bit of the secondary market don't shape the market is shaped by the older people he's most like i wish we had more time i would love to get deeper into this conversation but where the where the republican party can go i hope i help you come back thank you to david frum thanks so much for being with us tonight order of. parents versus social workers dot nabby last stop. that many children have become prizes to fight for why does the last threaten families of the social fold if you see me in the form of they have a right of will hold many more the faith that they have any kind of suspicion about the will be more for your for your children are often a just better at bringing up kids than their own mom and dad you think we have an

industry that is so. concentrated on the other foot trade. mission free cretaceous free just for charges free. range of free risk free. to tide free. the old free broadcast plug in video for your media projects and free media oh god the hearty tom. i. i.

i. i i. i . in the us to the rest of the news so much for that twenty fourteen withdrawal date from afghanistan and times reporting the senior officials in the obama administration are working on plans to keep thousands of american military troops in afghanistan beyond two thousand and fourteen one scenario leaves up to ten thousand u.s. and several thousand nato troops in afghanistan after two thousand and fourteen to assist with afghan security forces and police this is by far the longest war in our

nation's history all the way back to george washington and keeping more troops there in afghanistan beyond the withdrawal date is dangerously misguided in my in my opinion it's time for the president to stand up for the peace he talks about it's also time for him to end the covert drone war that he doesn't talk about as we learned recently from a new report by stanford and new york university law professors it's becoming increasingly obvious that drone warfare is a real problem in the middle east that report titled living under drones expose the fact that thousands of people mostly civilians killed were killed in drone strikes in pakistan and that there was a link between these strikes an anti-american sentiment the pakistani foreign minister has come out to blame the drones for and i'm american sentiment in her country or is it shouldn't be too difficult to understand that if you're trying to win hearts and minds in the middle east incessantly hovering lethal drones about

those same hearts and minds is not a really good idea yet that's exactly what we're doing filmmaker robert greenwald was recently in pakistan where he's working on a new film tackling this very subject or joins us now to talk about what he found over there he's the activist and founder of brave new films robert welcome back to our program thank you it's great to be with you and. to be back thanks for joining us first of all is there a website you had for a for your trip to pakistan and for this work that you're putting together. yes war costs dot com which as our general work around war has it is a website this facebook and it's also on my twitter account robert greenwald and my facebook account any and all of those will have the blogs the videos the researches and the investigations will be doing great thank you robert tell us about your trip to pakistan. where i went to pakistan and the idea was to interview research investigate and really the same way when i went to afghanistan and came

back and talk with you tom and many of your listeners and viewers to see and feel and sense what was going on and i met with a whole variety of people everyone from the potentially the next the elected leader of pakistan imran khan to journalists to reporters to doctors who were treating drone victims to elected officials the after the pakistan parliament has voted three times unanimously to oppose drones and then most movingly and troubling only and upsettingly drone victims their families. young young boys fathers whose mothers had been killed and tribal elders who talked about drones attacking them as they were having meetings among their families i remember when the initial invasion of iraq happened and amy goodman actually has gone around with a kind of a tour of this video c.n.n. was showing c.n.n.

domestic was showing the simulations or some cases aerial photos but in most cases almost cartoons of the smart bombs going in chimneys c.n.n. international which we were not seen in the united states was showing people on the ground being blown up. and people dying as a result of that do you think that the reason why eighty three percent of americans support this drunk this drone war whereas the pakistanis are horrified by at is because we're our media is totally failing to show us what it really is doing. well i think there's a couple of clips i think there's a couple of problems and issues with the drone campaign first of all it's being launched in areas which are basically very primitive and basic and where there is virtually no media to report back accurately so what they're doing is

they're taking the word for the cia the cia is saying drone launched ten militants killed twenty thirty whatever it is no substantiation no transparency no way to make that to challenge that what the drone victims are doing who are coming forward are saying no i was with a man tommy was holding at three three young daughters one of the little been injured he was holding up a picture to me of his mother sixty five year old gray haired woman pointed at the camera and said to me in washington this is not a terrorist this is my mother so that's what we all need to do to counter to cia and to get the word out there that many innocent people are in fact be killed and the cia right now has sort of. convinced the media to just put out their word but i think they will come to understand very quickly as one of the people i interviewed said this is devastating in terms of the media as the iraq war because

we're not getting the fair and realistic answer as to what's happening why and that was the analogy that i was i was thinking you know trying to point to the ben emmerson the u.s. has been the united nations special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights has said that this is big. sickly a war crime drone warfare. kind of a two part question here based on your investigation would you agree with that assessment and b. what do you think we're we're we're seeing some reports that there's actually a debate going on inside the obama administration about you know more or less how that's done all i kind of thing with regard to the drone warfare do you think that there are voices within the obama administration that are suggesting that they might have even crossed the line into into war crimes. well i i we do understand from people we're talking to when people we're interviewing for the documentary itself that there's a real debate between the cia which is launching these drones and is only used and

remember by the way we are not at war with pakistan we are sending drones into pakistan violating their sovereignty in defiance of their parliament and what they've asked us to so you have that on the one hand the cia on the other hand apparently you have people in the state department who know that this is not we're not going to be able to kill our way to a solution and who are exposed in the expansion of the drones who which may in fact be both illegal according to the united nations and the war crimes particularly as i've heard it explained tom the potential war crimes are what's called double tap which is a drone it's a populous there are injuries and then as people go out to help entry and minister those that did it a second drone strikes that double act may be may in fact although we're not sure the policy if so that in fact may be illegal war in fact that's how some of the

i e d's were done and. assess terrible stuff that's region your own terrible stuff there are mexican drug lords operating and living inside the united states if mexico were to send drones over phoenix arizona and take out you know part of a city block the americans would respond you know we'd be a war with mexico the next day how is it that americans don't get what is what it's like for the pakistan. that well some don't get it some sadly don't care and some are not being informed about what's going on and many people think it's a safer cheaper way to protect ourselves but in fact tom i can tell you after you know speaking to see. so many people in all stratas of pakistan society and so many of them have said this over and over again from imran khan on down this policy could not be more dangerous to the united states of america remember the times

square bomber was there because of the drones remember that we're talking about a culture and society extended families built on loyalty and commitment to having memphis family members killed we have making wife long enemies of every single one of them every single one in their extended families we now have hundreds of thousands of people in the swat area who detest what we are doing because of the innocent people we are killing over and over again and for brennan and anybody to say that their these are precisely the president to say these are precise instruments it's inaccurate the instruments may may or may not be precise but the way that they are targeting people is based on bribing local people in the area who are giving information often about neighbors or enemies of theirs and therefore the drones are settling into disputes rather than taking out high value targets

according to the n.y.u. stanford study get this two percent of those killed are high so-called high value targets amazing robert greenwald thank you so much for being with us tonight sir my pleasure. on assimilation news republicans in florida are finally fessing up to it the whole plan on election day was to suppress minority voters palm beach post is reporting that a number of former and current republican officials in that state have admitted that laws that cut down on early voting had one main purpose to prevent people who tend to vote for democrats from voting at all as former florida republican party chair jim greer said the republican party the strategists the consultants they firmly believe that early voting is bad for republican party candidates it's done for one reason and one reason only we got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us former republican governor charlie crist said that while

he was in office between two thousand and seven and two thousand and eleven he was approached by republican officials to cut down on early voting too as the palm beach post reports kris said a telephone interview this month that he did not recall conversations about early voting specifically targeting black voters but he said it looked to me like that was what was being suggested and i didn't want them to go there at all and stay tuned expect these efforts to continue heading into the next election. crazy the word grave you're in germany it think there are to be books laws on the books in germany making peace geology a crime but there's no law makers in germany are just now introducing a law that would make you having sex with animals illegal so what prompted them to

make this decision well there's been a huge rise into the rotting in germany is worth people going to visit to abuse animals ranging from llamas to go for the daily telegraph each year thousands of germans talk on line about having sex with animals and now farms are even pimping out their animal animals for sexual exploitation the proposed law would ban so-called animal brothels in germany and also make it a crime to train animals to have such given the i was decision seems likely to be ruffled the feathers of the underground to launch animal loving community in germany i think we can all agree it's really for us. after the break congress really wants to know who you're e-mailing what's happening on capitol hill this week and hopefully your right to privacy take a huge hit. me

please leave me to you. if. you leave. me.