france is targeting the last remaining militant strongholds in the north of mali civilians in cities liberated by the french led military coalition report widespread casual teens. u.s. and geo claims more than fifty countries were involved in america's notorious extraordinary rendition program some going as far as hosting cia black sites for enhanced interrogation of terror suspects. and president ahmadinejad flies into egypt in what is the first trip of its kind by an iranian leader in thirty years the visit is seen as an attempt to improve ties between the two regional heavyweights amid rising tensions with israel. and we have news just coming in an eight point magnitude earthquake strikes about three hundred twenty kilometers off

the coast of the solomon islands tsunami warnings are in place across the south pacific as governments urged populations to evacuate to higher grounds now we're getting unconfirmed reports that say a number of villages may have been destroyed on the solomon islands we'll keep you up to date on this developing story as more information comes in now yulia my colleague will be here in just about thirty minutes time or actually an hour's time but just ahead it's tom hartman with the big picture you're watching. well i'm john berman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture adam lanza jared laufer james holmes these are the names of the men who have committed some of the deadliest mass shootings in recent american history that's putting aside weak gun control laws the gun lobby and gun manufacturers under ronald reagan really helped

these men to pull the trigger and take so many american lives also because the american government have the right to kill potentially dangerous american citizens without the due process requirements of the constitution that and more and it's big picture politics and. you need to know this ronald reagan helped kill those twenty first graders in newtown connecticut and in the roughly two months since then he's helped kill more than fifteen hundred others who died by guns in the united states two of those gun deaths happened in boynton beach florida over the weekend forty five year old is such a senior rosa vall went to the home of his wife and two children on saturday armed with a pistol and a semiautomatic tec nine last year his wife had filed for divorce so cedar zero

armed with two handguns decided to kill her two kids and their two kids right in front of her he told her he was going to kill or that he was going to it that he wanted her to stay alive and suffer through watching her two kids killed in front of or even strangled one of his sons to death and turned his gun on his other son shooting him dead and then shot himself with his gun leaving his wife to deal with the carnage two more dead by way of the gun. three killed by reagan. and then there is what happened in texas on monday or misplaced dog led to the deaths of two more americans by guns seventy five year old dallas man accused his neighbors of dumping dog poop on his patio and since he had a gun on him you cited use it walked out of his to his patio looked up saw one of his neighbors standing on the patio above him and shot her dead then walked up the stairs into the apartment a shot her boyfriend dead two the couple had four kids luckily three were away for

from the home at the time of the shooting and the infant in the apartment was either ignored or missed. these four kids are now going to be growing up without parents in part because of ronald reagan right now congress is considering gun control legislation there's no question more background checks will lead to fewer weapons in the hands of criminals and fewer gun deaths there's also no question that a ban on high capacity magazines could save lives and future mass shootings but one thing no one's talking about when it comes to gun violence in america is ronald reagan the man who brought us thirty two years of reaganomics and us soaring any quality across our nation. today wealth inequality in america is higher than it's ever been it's even higher than in any other developed country in the world nearly the opposite of the way things were when ronald reagan became president it was reaganomics ronald reagan's tax cuts for the rich is unique in union busting is

ending free college education is ending in force for the sherman antitrust act is slashing the social safety net that has devastated the working and middle class americans who once lived the american dream are now living in desperation paycheck to paycheck deep in second mortgage credit card and student loan debt and one illness or job was away from complete financial ruin the bills pile up domestic disturbances increase in drug addiction and violence become response natural. sponsors for this inequality and since there are three hundred million guns in america that's the easily grab weapon for when americans respond to this inequality and it's psychological pain with violence. this is no theory researchers kate pickett of richard wilson at the quality trust in the u.k. have done the research on this issue and they found conclusively that the more an equal a society is the more social ills it has from violence to drug abuse to mental illness

to dozens of other problems here's what they found violence in particular the bottom axis plots income inequality going from low levels of inequality to high levels of inequality the side axis plots homicides per million people see where the united states is it's an outlier way at the top when it comes to violence and also one of the most unequal nations in the world thanks to thirty three years of reaganomics singapore is the only other nation studied that had a higher inequality than the united states but it doesn't have nearly as many homicides which might have something to do with the fact that it's a stream only difficult to own a gun in singapore and singapore you have to obtain a license and provide justification for why you need a gun like target shooting yourself defense if you choose target shooting at the shoot your gun at an approved firing range if you do get a gun it will be a small one is pistols over thirty two caliber and all automatic weapons are outlaw so the strict gun control might explain singapore's lack of homicides despite huge

inequality rates but here in america we have no such gun control but we do have wealth inequality that rivals the roman empire again because of ronald reagan and that's part of what's fueling this violence which is why any gun control legislation short of virtually banning most guns of singapore's down will do little to really confront this orgy of gun violence in america only when we address the real force behind any quality and the violence it produces ronald reagan and thirty two years or reaganomics can we do something about the thousands who die every year by way of the gun in america. ronald reagan and those who carried his middle class destroying vision forward are the real triggerman behind all of these murders yes an assault weapons mad ban would do something to cut back the fire power associated with american violence or rolling back the reagan tax cuts and thus bringing back the american middle class would do

a lot more. dollars turn over tonight's politics panel joining me here cameron stewart seward research director associated in government studies at the heritage foundation karl frisch democratic strategist and partner bullfight strategies and vince colony's senior online editor at the daily caller so let me start when i ask you all the reaganites on the panel if we have any here. are you happy with what thirty years of reaganomics has done to this country so well you know i want to. welcome to the program oh thank you for having me on i would say this goes this goes well beyond quote unquote reaganomics from from years in years past i actually was was a wheel when reagan was around so i don't really remember but i've read about what it was like back then and you know you mentioned the key here and the stories that you read before this segment were you know the pivotal factor is mental health but what you find is that if there's also the equality trust has a as

a chart of mental health on a vertical axis inequality on a horizontal access you look at the highly equal countries japan norway sweden finland denmark they all have diagnosable mental health problem and by the way that they now actually have an international standard for this so they actually go below five percent we are the most on equal we're at thirty three percent and and there's a if you plot the scatter graph and there's an absolute line between rising inequality and rising mental health problems people have anxiety as they know that life is on fact here to. so this is a no this is but there's a very similar scatter graph for mental health so well you know mental health comes out of income inequality which can do a lot of reading and omics i don't think you can necessarily say if you are poor and you live around a bunch of wealthy people that you are going to be a mentally ill and b.

take what he's saying well and you know and take that in and go you know shoot up your family now i know this and certainly the mentally ill your mental illness goes well beyond strict economic go but i think i think it's perfectly common sense to know that when you don't deal with. income that is that in equal when you don't deal well with your poor when every political discussion is about helping the super wealthy as opposed to helping the least among us that we're probably not solving our mental health issues either or our health issues in general so the idea that you would have people who are diagnosed or are diagnosed as mentally ill in this country at a higher percentage than others is not completely out of balance i did not say that logical not only that the saying in response to gun violence that it's a mental illness problem is that's the you know the n.r.a. is whatever talking to experience at the matter is not only people are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of violence proportion to the rest of the population they're more likely to be victims you know it's been to i'm

surprised cameron didn't say that he's for marriage and i would think this is one thing that i would stress one your argument i think is this is a sad one to start off saying that reagan caused the deaths of these families reaganomics to. very clearly said in your segment that ronald reagan created this environment and killed these families where it was was a part of this and first of all best just very base political debate it does it's actually no place on the even in this panel you should hear what they have less than a rush limbaugh let me let me but let me go on but let me go on to you mentioned like in pop poverty and how gun violence affects areas of poverty that is a real problem in this country you can look at chicago right now and see the incredible amount of gun violence that's happening at the hands of people who are. wielding simple hand outs not assault weapons not the types of things that this debate is raging out of. and you can also see. any quality often some of it legally obtained and there are solutions to that problem that chicago doesn't necessarily have the stomach for we'll see if they can put more police in these areas a lot of

a lot of realistic proponents of stop and frisk done in a in a way that's. no new money to their list by the way one of the things that i think both sides are coming at the gun issue from a very interesting perspective which is the right is usually only talking about mental illness or hollywood and the left is usually only talking about banning certain types of weapons. all of those things probably play some role in the discussion here but what it ends up missing is the broad middle where if we know that many of the guns a preponderance of the guns used in to kill people when not in defense of your own home which is also a big problem people in the shooting members of their own family are obtained illegally so what do we do to take the legal guns off the market while on my side of the aisle we talk a lot about we're going to ban certain guns and through attrition eventually less of those guns will end up in the hands of of people who might use them for harm the problem with that is is that it doesn't go far enough and it does basically says

we're going to wait and what we should be doing is we should be registering guns in this country we should be licensing guns in this country we should be making people come back and show that they are competent to own those guns in this country and if the worry of the right which is that the government's going to come and take your guns away they can have this massive database and they're going to use it to pluck your guns away which is a not a second is a common refrain on rush limbaugh i have some scary news for my conservative friends the people with the largest database of go towards in this country is the national rifle association and for just nine cents a name you can get the name address and phone number of every one of their membership is a very simple thing the cross talk about and i respect the ideological side of the argument. talking about though is obviously creating these laws and designating what weapons are legal to have and it separates that are two basic points one that's been repeated a lot of times as criminals that's fine believe that there but the odds are there for which the other side of the coin i would be willing to listen to went out and bought a handgun tomorrow it was stolen three weeks from now i would rather find out three

weeks from now that it was stolen than two years from now when it's coming out of the home here's the other side of the so if if right now the federal government has . many federal background checks federal gun background checks in january at their second highest rate ever december was the record month january is that because there was anything going at a gun store a lot of micro what we know though is that they can't actually keep up with whether or not these background checks are falsified they can't even the vice president admitted to the n.r.a. we've watered away from the original topic and now it's about a laws on the book and they're not tonight's big picture politics right.

while go back to tonight's big picture politics panel joining me are cameron's

sword karl fridge and vince colonies let's get back to it n.b.c. news has obtained an official white house memo which lays out the legal justification behind using drones legal justification as the justification couched in legal language maybe not a legal justification then using drones for the targeted killing of american citizens abroad three americans have been killed so far a drone strike under the obama administration putting anwar al our locky son and samir khan according to the document president obama and other high level administration officials an order the killing of an american overseas if the individuals an imminent threat is incapable of being captured and the operation is compatible with the rules of war so what's an imminent threat well a document provides an overly broad definition arguing that even if the individuals not actively engaged in an imminent attack against america he or she can still be

considered him in. threat if they have in the past plotted to attack americans or remain a member of a hostile organization. he not shamsi shamsi the director of the a.c.l.u. is national security project said the white house's justification for targeted killings summarizes in cold legal terms a stunning overreach of executive authority the claimed power to declare americans a threat and kill them far from a recognized battlefield and without any judicial involvement before or after the fact hard to believe this was produced in a damage in a democracy built on a system of checks and balances so my question is very simple i actually have a couple of questions about this number one where where is where is due process and number two when is the blowback going to come back we know now that you know the reason bin laden put together nine eleven is because we built that air force base for the first gulf war in saudi arabia he was yelling about that back in ninety

eight you know when are we going to see blowback from this karl your thoughts we see blue back from this whenever our troops are harmed or hurt i think that they're i wouldn't lay all the blame. for it on that but i think that it's at least in part but the other thing i would say is we have to have an honest discussion about these issues and we we just don't have those in a lot of the media. we had back to back presidential elections in two thousand and eight we had dozens of candidates both right and left republican and democratic two thousand and twelve we had a good dozen on the republican side not once in the presidential primary debates in zero eight or two thousand and twelve or in the general election debates of away or two thousand and twelve did any questions come up about executive power and then we're shocked when these kinds of documents come out i would i would caution the audience that according to the reports i've read that's not the final version but if that's just a teaser i don't think i'm going to be too pleased if we do get the final documents have been requested by various members of the media. but i probably like a lot of americans out there i think when i think of drone. i think of something

that's keeping our troops out of harm as it goes about trying to kill the evil doers but because we don't have these discussions in the media very few americans are probably aware that thousands upon thousands of innocent people are killed with these drone attacks or the news that we're seeing here that the administration thinks that it's perfectly acceptable and then also the g.a.o. said this has to be because without any kind of due process of law we could since we have the rules of law of war and yet we're doing this since inside countries with whom we are not at war in fact they're allied countries of ours and there is absolutely no due process involved it seems to me like this is violating at least two major parts of the council as you well i allers act in the end the fourth amendment i'm not i'm not as concerned about like the optics and the the side where our enemies feel like they're having the rights of seven from the right there whatever whatever perceived rights they may think that they have in french what i do have an issue with and i think what what has come out especially among civil

libertarians and liberals who have constantly been against these types of national security presidents are that the fifth amendment is very clear about what the what american citizens are afforded and that is due process now you know even in a domestic engine incident where somebody is even only a threat to other people obviously cops can engage them and sometimes kill them whether or not they engage in due process but i think the most troubling thing that comes out of this memo is an indication that regardless whether or not they do pose an imminent threat of any nature that these drone strikes violate what our fifth amendment rights like it or not the fifth amendment does exist and it needs to be recognized in the case of american citizens even even if they're abroad let's talk about drilling gas prices too is very interesting we conservatives and liberals. are all concerned about this where you when you when they go about it when they know about it that's the thing we need more conversation on any of the gas prices two issues it's been a drilling boom in america with oil production within the united states increasing thirteen point eight percent last year but a new report by the information energy or the energy and information ministration

shows that households. betting on gasoline is at a thirty year i gasoline prices have increased dramatically over the last two years americans are now spending about four percent of the total incomes on gas about three grand a year meanwhile while oil production surges and gas prices climb trans national oil corporations are rolling cash exxon mobil the most profitable country in the history of the world reported profits of forty five billion dollars last year in the top four oil companies reported total profits in aggregate of over one hundred billion next year the u.s. is a net exporter of petroleum products in fact last year petroleum products were our number one export first time since one thousand nine hundred sixty two so isn't this a newsflash for the drill baby drill crowd that more drilling doesn't mean lower gas prices in fact cameron what it means is we get the crap from from the pollution from the from the distilling we get to pay for protecting the oil lanes to saudi

arabia but the oil gets shipped out of texas to england and to china and to mexico and to brazil you know you were talking about all the money that exxon mobil is making why not bring some of that money here and that's what drilling to us when you open up drilling you open up the land for for exploration both on shore and offshore that you know although although i want to hear how much do we make off a barrel of a barrel all hold on although the domestic oil production of oil is a natural is a internationally traded commodity right so what we produce here is not going to have a really super large effect on the international trade in oil that has great fear conservative media will be they would never say i don't want to have you know all the bible without its price was no outside outside the news forces of the of the international market a bear a lot of weight now it does anyway as i said well i'm going to be asked probably always waited waited and waited production here but will comes with increased

production here. in greece to exploration all that our jobs are economic if movie set to begin our number one export was not refined oil products the price of gas the us is to drop by a dollar a gallon and least so let's keep increasing the production here you get into the i'm alex cohen let's put an export tariff on refined oil products karl i am shocked that we're having a debate in which conservatives are talking about world markets affecting the guts of price after spending four years talking about how obama is this possible for you to increase domestic production which would we are producing a series we don't want to hear all the words forty year producing more oil and crude products than one week's credit for what the private sector does that's not on federal lands that's his favorite thing to do ok and i would do is that you know watch the debates knows that everyone who's seen what's going on in north dakota knows that everyone who's seen what's going on in southwest and western pennsylvania knows all of this is the whole thing that they were talking about during the debates was what or whether or not obama had approved certain licenses

or whether or not the administration just let them lapse and get reinstitute or was or was in the minds of fox news refusing to even the issue that was here so here's was here's a here's another point i want to refer back to the numbers that you mentioned you said that gasoline prices that are at their highest share as a percentage of household income now than they've ever been and a lot of that also has to do with the fact that household incomes have actually dropped since obama took office by eight percent i mean so since at it since the last year the bush administration but we're talking about the great bush reset i understand that bush is a component to this but under but also recognize this during the campaign the d.n.c. very clearly in the president very clearly said look we own this economy now no more talking about bush and they said they were asked on this thanks so we're not part of the administration we can still blame bush and recognize you're lucky you're not part of them so recognize that an eight percent drop in median household income plays a huge role in the fact that gas prices are taking a higher share of what we're paying out in our checkbooks and we just need to give more money to corporate america because of the poor will do better i would i'm wondering why we don't create the equivalent to last

a permanent fund you know everybody. alaska is two thousand dollars a year just for living there because they had the good sense to say this oil under our ground we're going to actually charge a few bucks for this stuff you know the oil companies there still make and maybe we can do that if the president would let us and by the way i don't want a lot of actually you know i don't know yet if you know one of the things that has been discussed is you know the president and the democrats in congress took a lot of heat for you know tax credits for eco friendly cars raising gas emission prices imagine how much worse off we'd be had that not been the case some of the stories that i've written about this issue have noted that you know the cost to the average family is about the same as the payroll tax deduction but with the increase it without the increase of people driving fuel efficient more fuel efficient vehicles this crunch would be even more difficult for somebody who are going to descending into. that was there i want to move into the start of free internet for everybody the f.c.c. is considering plans to set up three high speed public wi-fi in both major

metropolitan areas and rural areas currently the united states ranks sixteenth in the world in access to high speed internet caution and speed microsoft and google are two major propellants of the plan meanwhile the telecom giants want the wireless spectrum completely privatized are horrified by the idea of free public access to high speed internet in the internet just the next generation of the commons that should be owned by all of us and available for free at a minimal price like police firefighters water facilities or perhaps more appropriately the public library isn't the isn't the internet this generation's version of the like that i don't for one i'm kind of surprised that your super excited about the government having regulation control over information flow i mean that's you do you do realize that what comes with the government owning this property comes from the regulations that would follow oracle is a lot more accountable than corporate america why i don't know your government is all you know under almost most all of your internet stuff is passing through government pipelines anyway or pipelines that are you excited by the prospect of

senator. that was decided at a broad range but i mean i guess what i'm excited about if you go throughout the u.k. not only can you get a cell phone with the same kind of data package you pay one hundred fifty dollars a month for here in the united states for a fraction of the cost and choose from dozens of twenty two dollars a month in france with unlimited data and choose for and faster uplink it down like estimates and choose from dozens of different companies in the u.s. you've got a few that you can to choose from i would love to see the kind of competition that you're seeing in the u.k. when it comes to internet ken i would love to see the government force corporations to be competitive but i just want to make two points here number one of course google's excited about this because they will put although providing it for free they're going to put advertisements all over it make more money right so you know this first of all the whole question here is who is going to build these free networks the f.c.c. is not going to own the interest in isolation if you do you don't want to get

a lot where you're not making i was also not different than having public libraries . i would argue the better route for this is to go what we've been talking about for months here in the in the public forum here is to auction this off the this privatized to private privatized ok private time zone if you're worried about if you're worried about you know senator joe lieberman now you've got one right among others and now you have private corporations who can make decisions about what we see and don't see and they are not accountable they want that oh absolutely spent and you have a right and the government won't and if the companies doing things we don't like we can we can vote the bums out of office you can't vote. for us and you know we got we have to wrap it up in cameron for carl you are locked in a monopoly real competition. thank you all for being with us tonight we'll be right back.

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