the more things remain the same well iraq watchers here in the united states and surprisingly the republican press is having their usual privileged castro fee over a homosexual black man i'm not going to jail while the other side of the political fence the democrats press corps they're playing their favorite sunday afternoon pastime of moving the goalposts now that russia gate has blown up in their faces and once again lost in all of this right and left lunacy are issues important issues like the war in yemen now entering its fifth year the atrocities in this tragic conflict between the who the rebels and saudi arabian led coalition continue to mount this week the new york times reporting that the a hospital in yemen supported by save the children was hit tuesday by a deadly airstrike the charity officials blamed on the saudi led coalition an attack carried out on the war's or anniversary located about sixty miles from the city of saddam reports say that the coalition missiles struck a gas station just yards away from the hospital entrance and at least seven people

were killed including four children children this latest attack ads even more tragedy and loss to a war that the united nations has called the world's worst manmade humanitarian disaster. but what my friends what is led us to this point were a war entering into its bit the year that has killed thousands displaced millions in and put an entire country on the brink of collapse still goes on without any real change in policy by the countries directly beating it. let's find out by watching the hawks. that that's. what they like that i got.

it's like. watching the hawks. and capitalists five years entering in yemen war has been going on about as long as we mean to have that right you and i together eighty and i really give you one of those issues that got us both riled up and got us into this it was one of those things that made us go why is no one talking about this and to question it and here we are five years later and it still is if what who cares it's just another one of those never ending wars saudi arabia led there for military campaign which was called operation decisive store of these military campaign names and when they enter be in the you know in the conflict going on inside of yemen back on march twenty sixth two thousand for their team which many people say about the start you know they just passed four years and during in the fifth we just passed her birthday or anniversary of the i didn't put that together until you just when i heard they say

just like. they were going never stopped and we said well we it's that's the tragedy of it is that we're talking about it but nobody else and i mean this is new this bombing at the this hospital brought to mind the attack back in august of last year remember when we when we talked about a school bus that got hit where for you kids ages six to eleven were killed forty boys eleven adults also died in that strike and local authorities said about seventy nine people were ultimately wounded fifty six of them children if you remember that was back when we discovered that it was a lockheed martin missile one believe that school bus that tragic day because that's the problem u.s. is financing and helping and helping to train and supply weapons and arms to sob to the saudi led coalition in this strike it is and it's horrible it's tragic right and this is the kind of stuff that we look at we've looked at over and over again that you've seen this giving sort of covertly not covertly giving. saudi

arabia all of this this muscle essentially between guns bombs helping fuel planes in midair and giving them intelligence about where to strike it's hard for me to understand how we can continue to say this well we're not really we're not really involved you're telling them where to kill people that's a pretty important thing that you should have down pat and there should be a reason that you're doing it for the united states to be involved in that and quite frankly i mean what more do you need to know that you should question your allegiance to saudi arabia and their question saudi arabia's allegiance to human rights at the very least taking all of your foreign policy out of it why would you keep giving it to someone that keeps doing this the united nations refugee agency educated that more than forty eight hundred civilians. have died and their injuries civilian deaths and injuries are reported in yemen last year and that's just what they know about what actually gets reported that's an average of what they're

saying about ninety three civilian casualties per week that's thirty percent were killed or injured. inside their own homes. and a fifth of all casualties were inflicted on children and to me i feel like there's this point where you just have to stop the generals everyone and ask yourself is this worth it does this weaken our democracy around the world does this why are we getting involved i guess that's the question why we can that is the question at hand and you know a lot of like you're talking have politicians especially on the right side will be . oh. they're backing of who things but the other major problem that you're having here is this lack of media coverage and the lack of coverage that actually informs the viewer piers robinson a professor at the university of sheffield told al-jazeera when you have coverage which doesn't really provide context or a proper understanding of the keep actors in a conflict and also the role of their own government publics are left with a sense of a confused conflict where it's not clear who's right or wrong it's not clear

whether or not involved in this and that's the problem you have a misinformed public and that's how you see these catastrophes take place over and over again. auditing the pentagon has been a goal of many an elected official ever since the military industrial complex came crawling out from under a rock to suck up an endless supply of taxpayer dollars dollars not to make the country or the world safer but that line the pockets of the already rich twenty seventeen study by michigan state university found twenty one trillion dollars in an authorized government spending which led the pentagon to finally conduct its wait for it first ever audit ever it cost four hundred million dollars it took twelve hundred auditors and concluded that. the pentagon's accounting was simply as matt taibbi of the roll of rolling stone said to illogical to penetrate now whether it's the defense department of defense's habit of spending billions in the last few

months of a fiscal year to make sure their budgets don't go down there are kanan in comprehensible accounting systems or their routine of looking the other way when theft occurs many believe fixing the problem is more dangerous than just feeding the beast in a recent piece for rolling stone investigative journalist matthai evie called the bad egg on the world's largest producer of wrong numbers and ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hi it's all the other rats nest underneath here to discuss the rats nest cheating taxpayers out of trillions of dollars contributing editor for rolling stone investigative journalist and author matt levy welcome mat. how are you doing matt always a pleasure having you on i've got to say a little over the years we see the law to hey mate about you know ten thousand dollars toilet seats but but that is one of the major problems you know causing all this last year it was revealed that the mabel contractor mitnick to one hundred was

charged in blood guilty to bribery maybe officials and you know in exchange for prostitutes cash in exchange for classified information is the pat letter case and out of there's this kind of tony soprano style business is part of the course for a pentagon that loses you know the misplaced his woods twenty one trillion dollars and can't be found. i think the twenty one trillion dollars figure is a little bit misunderstood but it is actually the root of the problem it isn't actually that they lost twenty one trillion dollars of money it was actually misspent it's that the pentagon's books have twenty one trillion dollars worth of wrong numbers in them basically what happens is every year when they submit their request to congress for a budget instead of actually counting up how much money they've actually spent and producing the audit trail for what was spent they just fill in numbers that they think are supposed to fit the budget request so they're make they're essentially making up their financial reports and the accumulation of all those wrong numbers

is how you get that twenty one trillion figure those those wrong numbers are called plugs and the problem is when you're plugging everything if there is corruption underneath of somebody's overcharging you you'll never discover it because somewhere up the chain the numbers are going to be fixed and so that's how you never you never find out about any of the corruption or need. wow and i think that's the sort of shocking about the as i call that leonard case which fannie mae that for the viewers at home it was it was a fad gentlemen given you know he was giving prostitutes in cash and luxury gifts to maybe members of the navy to get. a leg up on military contracts and not this is what made me wonder about this is that we have you know the u.s. has eight hundred military bases and over eighty countries one of the biggest things that kept coming up in this with this we don't know how many i mean it notoriously as you present your article the sort of notoriously known the pentagon

for not being able to count buildings or planes or blackhawk right up to earth. so it's like if we know this if there's if we know that there's little to no oversight of their spending or what they have how can we begin or how do we begin to rein in or reappropriate funds for more productive endeavors than say i don't know the f. thirty five or the fourth class aircraft carrier like i could we may how do we get that money away from those things and into things that are more productive. well the two fixes that are obvious is that you have to have a single unified integrated modern accounting system where every transaction would be registered automatically throughout the entire armed services and also i think you would need to have something like radio frequency id or at least serial numbers on every single item that they have. mazing story they didn't even have serial numbers on nuclear bombs until two thousand and six and two

thousand and seven when two things happened one they accidently sent nuclear nose cone parts to taiwan when they were actually ordered who'd actually ordered helicopter batteries and another case the accidently flew six live warheads across the united states over population centers because the misunderstood the thought these were decommissioned weapons that they were carrying so they started to put serial numbers on nuclear weapons they haven't done that to everything else if we had like radio frequency id and serial numbers and everything and we knew where everything was. all times fast would be impossible. or at least very difficult and we'd have a much better handle on where everything is and it's possible i think that's what's really possible about this is that you know i work for big companies like disney and they do track everything from toilet paper to the pens you buy and it's hard to

imagine why we don't here it is truly it is truly truly sad mad to hang out we're going to be right back with you but for now we've got to go to a break so let's go to the break as we go regulars do not forget to let us know what topics what you think about topics are covered up facebook twitter and you tube and see our poll shows that are to dot com coming up we continue our discussion with journalist and author matt taibbi as we venture into the fallout from the end of russia staterooms from the. ukrainian presidential elections just days away but the cause of eligible voters still don't know who to support with thirty nine candidates in the race is the

choice to broach. the subject to. what politicians do you should. put themselves on the line they get accepted or rejected. so when you want to be president and you. want to be rich. and she'd like to be this is what the three of them will be. interested always in the why. should. i. private companies that have got a lot of v.c. venture capital funding are ready to go public this year i saw the list they're all going out of the forty fifty sixty seventy billion dollars valuation so the prediction here is that it will be the end of this cycle you're going to. like two

thousand and one style. due to the fact that there's nothing to support the valuations of these companies and very quickly well. the investigation did not establish that members of the trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the russian government in its election interference activities twenty three magic little words that have thrown the united states political scene and mainstream news media that covers it into a level of chaos spin teeth mattering and skullduggery not seen since the royal rumble was held in the upside down of stranger things since the election of donald trump to the us presidency in two thousand and sixteen the us news media stoked by grandstanding politicians anonymous intelligence sources and rising ratings created

a cottage industry pushing the russia great narrative that the campaign had colluded with the russians to influence the outcome of the election and put a controlled puppet in the oval office but not us twenty three magic little wards have all but destroyed that cottage and have brought to light the us news media failure on a scale many believe is even worse than the iraq w m d you did joining us and once again is the author of this hero book hate inc how and why the press makes us hate one another welcome back met. are you doing. i just want to say this right away off the top a thank you for the good work that you've done on russia gate over the years in the coverage of this you are one of the few same voices out there who kind of was looking at this realistically it honestly and also bank would do i feel good finally being able to have this honest discussion with your pup this because it's but i'm just saying right i mean it's been difficult yeah were a few days in the aftermath after they dropped this what kind of you know you kind

of talked about the potential fall out the bad happened earlier this week on sunday now a few days him what do you make of the fallout from this you know is that what you predicted you know what what what do you see happening. i think it's about what what we could have expected of you know obviously there's if you watch tennis and b.c. they're not going on air and saying god we got to run we're really sorry we're going to go back and fix that you know who you trust us for we're going to go under the hood and get this right they're actually just basically doubling down on this and moving on to a new. idea which is that the thing that's important is obstruction and not collusion i also think with everybody should be on their they should be cautioned that if and when the report sees the light of day it's going to be full of all kinds of stuff and the people who always believed that there was

a collusive the arrangement between trump and russia are going to go back to believing it again they're going to take whatever that information is in their report and they're going to construct a case and say well it didn't legally meet the standards for a crime but it's still true so we're in kind of a purgatory right now where you know that there is a statement out there that says that it didn't happen but it's by far not over let's get some and that's the way to put it most definitely you. in the aftermath of the mauler report c.n.n. president just sucker in defending the network's coverage of the russia gate which i before i say this quote it just says a lot that he came out to a putz it already had to make a statement to get ahead of what he thought if if they didn't do anything wrong and they felt that their coverage of stellar something tells me zucker would be out defending the network in the new york times but he did and what he said is that quote we are not investigators we are journalists and our role is to report the

facts as we know them which is exactly what we're hearing what we did. come up to see you're a journalist coming from a family of journalists. did c.n.n. one just report the facts and what are your thoughts on that birthday it meant that we're not investigators were journalists we're here to report the facts as they are as we know them. well look that's that's an incredibly self-serving quote and its purpose is it is incredibly obvious what what that's all about is if this thing goes sideways we're going to blame it on our sources. so we're not the investigators they are they told us this stuff we believe them this is exactly the same script as the w m d mess you know we did our jobs how can you blame us we're just good honest journalists were you know we report we're told and you know how can you blame us for that that's just bogus all journalist service gaiters is it's our it's our job to be on the lookout for the possibility that we're being lied to

that figures into the equation of everything that we do and we're also responsible for looking. at the forest for the trees every time we sit down to do a story there's a story makes sense internally does it make sense in terms of in the context. of a larger series of events that we've been looking at over the years you know we we have to make those judgment calls it's not as simple as yes a high ranking official told us something and we put it we put it down on paper we have to we we got to make all those calls so it's on us if this turns out to be true it's one hundred percent our fault most definitely and you know one of the things that i think unlike a lot of the author networks are you know you're on most of the seas you see amends fox even through certain extent you know one of the things that they're not doing is actually asking why did this happen how did this happen what factors played into allowing this level of lack of journalism take place. you know so i ask

you you know what happened why did how did we get to this point what what let's do our own look at it and do what they should be doing and ask. how do we want a good person for. well that there's three questions we've got to ask one of them we can't we can't know the answer yet because it hasn't been reported the first question is how to russia good start what's the origin story of this we we've heard something very vague about how the british g c h q ended up briefing the cia because they intercepted something that troubled them a lot and that turned into the f.b.i. investigation but we still don't we have no idea what the actual timeline is there and what what they were actually intercepting and what prompted the actual beginning of this investigation but i think the real beginning of the problem was the beginning of the trump campaign when every single pundit in the universe

dismissed as laughable the idea that they could win the nomination you remember dana milbank from the washington post promising to literally eat his column if donald trump won the national nomination which he ended up actually doing humorously. and what was what's interesting about that is that the journalists total left audiences totally unprepared for the possibility of the trump could when they constantly told us that it would never happen and so when it did happen we scrambled for an alternative explanation and the conspiratorial one fit better than what they've been told i think journalists were just not tuned into the level of anger in the population that trump was the beneficiary of and so we haven't gone back and done the job of explaining to america how was the dollar trump got elected what was the real reason is that he got elected and has written as a result we were overly susceptible to this conspiratorial explanation and the third

thing quickly is that the money was huge because because of the nature of russia gate this thing sort of like hockey. you know ratings for cable stations went up after the election down by enormous number so that provided a huge disincentive to steer away from the from the narrative i think one of the things that keeps coming up at least and our discussions here about this too and that keeps showing to me is now you have a whole bunch of people that rachel maddow who i guess can't i guess can she go back to fly fishing trout fishing now or not i don't know. if it's a thing where it's what do you do like what else do they do with their time and it brings me to this question that i have to ask you could how do we fix this it seems that this idea of access journalism they didn't need the facts and i'm sure the rachel maddow and the dockers' of the world have their sources saying we absolutely have this we have them you know dead to rights we've got trump on

a video or whatever that's within the intelligence community what do we do about that kind of access journalism where they're getting fed information and well i've i've written about this many times in the past this is a massive loophole in the whole system of western journalism this this problem of being fed thing by unnamed government sources and very often you'll see the traditions go to more than one person you'll see for people familiar with the matter or for current form or a former officials told us today and those stories here's the problem with those stories unless unless you're dealing with somebody with a reporter who has an established relationship with the intelligence community the intelligence community has no compunction whatsoever of a burning the media they don't care they'll just go to the next reporter the next time. and so you saw in this instance with russia this enormous quantity

of stories that just blew up in the faces of reporters you know the new york times as. a story that says the trial campaign had repeated contacts with russian intelligence for sources all unnamed then james comey comes out in testimony says this is not true. you have to be extra suspicious of those kinds of stories because that's where the potential for danger always is always the highest there was there with it was there with the gulf of tonkin with the missile gap you know you name it go back in time. is long is they don't have to put their own names on the information they managed to get it out there every time we got a force in the go on the record we definitely do and i mean that's what the that's the thing that brings us up is i actually do have a lot of sympathy for the journalists who said well you know my government told me in my sources intelligence told me and i think i'm doing the right thing and i

think that just proves to us that our job is journalist any of this is to second question is the second question a question that sources do you do become researchers don't be don't be a soccer fan and they gasp then. you know if. you're good you're going. no i was going to say if it i mean i think journalists need to be aware i mean all they have to do is read a history book and be be cognizant of the fact that there's an incredibly long and storied history of the government lying to reporters you know on unlike most normal sources where they have to have a continuing relationship with the reporter and those relationships are very important the government doesn't you know they just don't worry about burning reporters the same way other sources kinds of sources do because that they're the stewards of the information are the only ones who have the story so i just think reporters need to be more aware of that they don't and that's on to say that everything about russia it was wrong and you know there's

a lot of stuff in there that was right but some of it was wrong and i know and i think i think we've got to be aware that i couldn't agree with you more matt thank you so much for the great reporting you did on this subject and i look forward to seeing what you're up first down the line always a pleasure thank you. thanks tyra banks thought of them. benjamin franklin is a person one could say broke all the rules played all the fools and eventually becoming thunderstruck after e famously flying a kite in a thunderstorm now franklin was trying to prove that there's a lot of power in storm clouds now a group of researchers in india using the same technology that was used to find the hidden void within the great pyramid f.-f. ron in giza have managed to find out just how much power is enough under a cloud turns out a whopping one to two google volts of electricity that is just around ten million times more powerful than what is in your average american power outlet or you know a million volts of electricity nearly enough raw power to supply new york city all

of new york city with power for just under half an hour and while this mega measurement still has to be verified it should be noted that a scotus made me scottish meteorologist charles wolf that actually predicted that the undercover had a billion or more votes all the way back in the one nine hundred twenty s. and that leaves john was our show for you today remember in this world we're not so beloved up so i tell you well i love you i am so welcome to the top of the well if keep on watching those hawks never break in the body. join me every so straight on the alex simon show and i'll be speaking to us of the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you that.

you. cannot follow and multiply the only good thing for them is not the end of the rooms . novembers got a lot of photos of stuff to get up. close up on the ball but they just let me get this thing. she remembers it was you make a. noise there yourself. john bombard from the sun on my last book you go to the british course there's enough of them roughed up. i mean the guy was a bunch of london and. if. the thing.

with gold make its manufacture come sentenced him to the public well. when the running closest protect themselves. when the financial merry go round lifts and we know one person. with no middle of the room signals. to lose any more you leave room for. politicians to do something. to put themselves on the line to get accepted or rejected. so when you want to be president or interim or somehow want to be rich. but you'd like to be prosperous what before three in the morning can people that

i'm interested always in the waters of our. question. was one of the richest companies certainly the. now it's one of the poorest countries of the was. president. also this morning developing news story. take control of a turkish merchant ship. rescued. they're not castaways pirates. demands a u.s. drugmaker return billions of dollars that allegedly overcharged.