>> hello. i'm llewellyn king, the host of "white house chronicle." it is coming up. we will be looking back at the year that has passed. one of the things that does happen to me this year is that i became interested in a chronic fatigue syndrome, a truly

terrible disease that afflicts may be a million americans and which nobody has a cure for, even a diagnosis. there is this lovely book, "the sound of a wild snail eating." it is a little volume, but it is a feel good volume, a christmas volume. it is about the author, elisabeth bailey, who was bedridden and stricken with the disease. it is one of those horrible, and degenerative diseases. she could not move in bed. somebody bought her a snail. later they got another container for the snail. she studied this mail because she cannot move or do anything. she listened to the strange noise that it made.

when two of them get together, they have a wail of a time having sex. this is a book that makes you feel good about nature. when she recovered somewhat, she investigated the 19th century naturalist who studied all sorts of things, including charles darwin, and she writes not at all about her disease, called only how she became to be in this position of examining the complex life, the interesting life of a snail. it is a marvelous, feel good book without any of that humbug about the human spirit and duress. you will enjoy reading it. i certainly did. it is one of the few books i plan to read a second time. we have a wonderful show. we will be right back. >> "white house chronicle" is produced in collaboration with

whut, howard university television. now, your program host, nationally syndicated columnist llewellyn king, and co-host linda gasparello. captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- >> thank you for coming along. and i have some of my favorite people at the table to discuss this extraordinary year that has passed. linda gasparello, in your christmas hat -- lovely. i have been trying to convince her to come on with a hat for 14 years, and at last, i have triumphed. joe mathieu from sirius xm radio, which features the audio of this program every saturday.

welcome to the broadcast. >> it is good to be here as always. >> we are glad to have julie .eff giesea remember us when you make your billions, please. we are so happy to have julie mason of "of the washington examiner," the life and soul of every program that she is on. >> thank you. [applause] >> you would not like the wages. julie, what have been the big things of this year that has just passed? >> obviously, al gore's problems. health-care reform. the midterms -- guest --

disastrous for obama. those were the standout issues. >> nothing with foreign policy? >> afghanistan seems to be going badly. iraq -- i know some combat troops that are heading over there. >> joe, what stands out to you? >> the war in afghanistan has not been in my mind. we have spent his entire year talking about ourselves, as in the those who are within our own borders, the midterm elections, immigration, which of course nothing has happened, and the economy and jobs. we have tens of thousands of men and women serving overseas in harm's way, not even one

mention of that during the midterm election cycle. >> one thing that has not been mentioned much is the impact of the tea party. >> absolutely. we watched that the party -- we are going to be seeing a lot of them in the future. i think there is something to mention about the tea party. we don't know whether or not the tea party is a movement or a moment. a could be just a moment. we have had these moments in u.s. history before. we had a moment in 1898 when we had a movement to get rid of a chinese immigration in the united states with the american working party. we had it with the coup coquelin in the 1920's. then again -- we had it with klan in the 1920's.lux

>> jeff, we are inclined to think that everything is changed by politics. much more has been changed by technology then it has by politics. what were the big technological things? >> wikileaks. that crystallizes not just technological developments but also developments in journalism and in government foreign policy. no. 2 i think is social networking with the real transformation of commerce, not just young people chatting with each other and sharing facebook profiles, but actually commerce, like groupon, the fastest- growing company ever. they turned down an offer to be $6 billion by

google. >> you did not start this company? >> no, i wish i had. [laughter] >> what do you think about wikileaks? does it end for you that so many critical documents were available to one person who could then give them to wikileaks? >> i think that is the main point. >> the problem is the supply side. >> everyone is talking about julian assange. he is so colorful, it is easy to follow him. we are not talking about the real issue -- how to prevent the security breaches from happening in the future. why was a private able to access this trove of information? why are we not hunting down -- i

think her name is julie stout. why are we not talking about how to prevent this thing from happening in the future? >> it seems to me that you cannot blame any one from publishing anything that they have gotten their hands on in the world that we live. you can stop smiling. i would've loved to been involved. i covered it. when and the publication, electronic or paper, starts self centering, then it is in a different place. >> there is a difference between self-centering and using information responsibly. julian assange has only recently

begun to become more responsible about the information. >> we were in europe together. he's a very gifted people in foreign service were working terribly hard and felt terribly undermined. they were waiting for the drip feed for more, more, more. they did not have any revealing cables in that case, but a terrible blow to all of our ideals about diplomacy. >> and to what end? >> with transparency, i think we need to take another look at what we want out of transparency. frankly, with policy, you need

secrets. they are morally defensive. these are morally offensive secrets. we need to have them in order to do the work of diplomacy, and we have yet to see how wikileaks is going to unravel the very good work by these people in the state department -- >> as long as we have a 20,000 people with top security clearances, this will continue. we are attacking this from the wrong angle. this could be any website. you have 800,000 people which access to this information, and this stuff trickles down. the pentagon not allowing the people who work there to visit wikileaks on their computers? >> the whole business of what we classify has always been this are pretty quick there is a whole movement in which

governments are increasingly opening their data sets. right now, there is a foundation here in washington and they have all kinds of interesting applications of how people are making use of government data sets. why hasn't that hit the foreign -- why shouldn't the public have access to more information than we do now? granted there is a need for secrecy, but why is there -- >> there is too much that is secret. i wrote a study once for the pentagon out of what was available information. it was before we had any way of keeping track what we have done except for carbon copies. that tells you something, doesn't it, julie? i did it, and then i lost my copy of it. i try to get a copy from the

pentagon. they said it was classified. i said that i wrote it. i wrote it from open sources, primarily at the washington post and the new york times. please, could i look at it or get a copy? "no, you don't have clearance." we are classified in way too much. in fact, it should not by principle. he reduced the amount of classified stuff so that people would respect it. we did not want people to go out there and build nuclear weapons. unfortunately, since then, to cover part of your anatomy with classification. >> you always bring everything back to the anatomy.

>> it is quite important, you know? the rest of us need bodies, and we have to keep them moving. >> this underscores another issue -- network security in general. it is in a lot of different corporations. apparently, wikileaks has a trove of files from bank of america. there are crucial issues in all companies with having an open, collaborative environment on one hand but then on the other hand be able to lock down information and protect intellectual property as well progress for the benefit of our listeners -- >> for the benefit of our listeners -- >> i am going to get a phone call after this.

>> thank you, linda. for the benefit of our listeners, you are listening to a rather confused edition of "white house chronicle." [laughter] linda gasparello, joe mathieu, jeff giesea, and julie mason. [laughter] i think we better get back to the program. a 12 deal with this issue of why we are so blind -- and i want to deal with this issue of why we are so blind. everybody waves the flag and talks about how we have the best organization in the world and

yet it is notour daily conversation. how can we be fighting a two wars, have commitments all over the world, be facing the north koreans, and all we can talk about it is a trivia, local washington trivia? >> i think that is far too harsh. i think for this year, talking about the war in afghanistan, we were upset with our economy. when people are losing their jobs, they are thinking about their own lives. that was the most critically important issue of the year, the economy and help people were making their way through it. now with our unemployment rising to 10%, with an uncertain future for us for the near term, at

least, with closures set to rise again, it is really critical. at this point, foreign policy is going to have to take a back seat. we have to believe that some of the things that the president has said are working out. the fragility of the situation in afghanistan -- i think it could go either way. we have made some moves toward stability. they could be undone in an absolute flash. it is unlikely they will be done in an absolute flash. >> who are we talking about not talking about afghanistan? it is the media, newscasters and politicians. if you leave the beltway, if you leave a lot of a enclaves in america, particularly the larger cities and start talking to

people, this is a very much important issue because they have sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, friends are relatives who are serving and dying and fighting in places like afghanistan and in iraq. you can quickly forget about it, but there are thousands of families around the country who are deeply concerned about this. >> julie, do you think that is true? >> part of the problem is that this war is dragging on and on and on. it is terribly expensive and very dangerous. there is a great sameness about the news from afghanistan. the news is about what is different. a war grinding on for another year does not reveal make big news. >> i was at a desk handling of

the vietnam war. it was like the same story every day. in those days, it was men killed. always, "more of the enemy was killed." it was terrible because the initial stories, 400 miles from saigon. in washington, they were winning the war in the suburbs of the saigon. people got tired of it breed there was a steady death rate, and the arguments. until the protests started, the story was boring. then the story became the protests. we ended up walking around the white house with candles. we were making -- we were not

making new news, but they did not get that much attention. men running in the jungle, men and jumping out of helicopters and running -- they got to be boring as it was terrible. >> a, a draft that we don't have now. b, -- you are called anti- american if you protest sometimes. the president unveiled a the results that we got, but also, the casualties were much higher. we have had thousands of americans dead, but my generation is not familiar with a headline where hundreds or even thousands of people were killed in one military action. when you hear about a roadside bomb with two or three people

dying, as tragic as it is, it does not make the headlines like in the vietnam war. >> many issues are not covered in a way that appeals to the general population. another example of this is the federal deficit. we are talking about all these other issues when this country is practically bankrupt, and no one seems to be communicating that to the american public brickworks the story is talked about but we cannot -- it is not going to happen. it is not possible. >> and it seems like both sides of the political spectrum are compromising by cutting taxes and spending more, to things that put us more in debt. we are addicted to get pretty we can talk about all these issues

on the periphery when it is staring us in the face that we are on the path to bankruptcy. in my view, we need to tackle this issue. >> at some point -- >> we are printing money. >> in retrospect, that may end up being the story of the 2010, washington tone deaf to these issues with a president who could not affect change to the extent that we thought he could. >> what can obama do? obama was like the man who read an introduction, and nobody cared about it. suddenly, it was bill clinton and bill all the time.

>> the dynamic between those two is fantastic to watch. no one really believes that. obama is a different president from bill clinton. he goes about things in a different manner. look along it took him to come up with that afghan strategy. maybe obama could use a little more bush, decisiveness, or fortitude, which would bring him more onto the clinton side. obama is not as politically widely as clinton was pretty he did not come out with a strong understanding -- >> how does the internet convey information in the newspapers and in broadcasting? big headlines, big pictures, big

names writing it is necessary. the internet seems to be -- you have to read it to find out. we don't be a -- we are unable to grab people by the throat. do you feel that? >> i do. i think there is a number of different forces at play here. one is, we have soldiers conveying information to their families, blogging, putting up youtube videos and doing funny dances and making their own videos. then on the journalism side, i think there are new forms of journalism that are emerging, like data journalism. like the number of people who have been injured or killed in afghanistan. i think those services are incredibly valuable, because on

a real-time basis, we can go back and look and see and sort where these people are from, how many people were killed and injured in my home state. it is interactive. we can't cover this through a narrow land. we have to look at the whole picture. >> it is time for our high points and our low point. the hatted one. >> because of the horrible hair day. >> you are not supposed to give it away. [laughter] >> everyone is wondering anyway. i learned a new word this morning from our director. i had him write it on a napkin. i cannot pronounced this as well as he can.

it combines hanukkah, ramadan, christmas, and the winter solstice. should i repeat that again? [laughter] >> joe mathieu from sirius xm radio. >> might low note for this past week was the end of "larry king live." my high note for the week is the end of "larry king live." [laughter] >> jeff? >> thinking about this makes me want to cry. for me, the low point is that tears are not going to solve the deficit or the fiscal situation that we are in. >> how do we know what to do without larry king to tell us? do you know what is going to happen to him? people are going to get tremendous confidence in their belts again.

[laughter] >> it creates an opportunity for a whole new generation of suspenders. >> my high point of the week, president obama signed a bill to make healthy and school lunches. the white house chef made a youtube video with elmo. doing a little dance -- whoo! that was my high point. >> we know what kind of christmas you are wanting to have. [laughter] that is our program. we wish you a wonderful christmas. i will talk to these people about remedial journalism right after this program concludes. bye-bye.

>> "white house chronicle" is produced in collaboration with whut, howard university television. from washington, d.c., this has been "white house chronicle," a weekly analysis of the news with a sense of humor featuring llewellyn king, linda gasparello, and guests. this program can be seen on pbs

stations and cable access channels. to view the program online, visit us at whchronicle.com. to view the program online, visit us at whchronicle.com.