jonah goldberg is editor at large for national review online and a fox news contributor. jonah, good to see you. so, almost $50 million in my money, your money, taxpayer money of all americans for 225 conferences in just two years. why did they even have one conference off sight? it just doesn't make sense. >> i mean, i don't know, i think you can say that they can have a conference every now and then, but the wild mismatch of the spending with the necessity is just sort of part of the problem and does contribute to this idea that, you know, this is i.r.s. agents gone wild. and so far by far my favorite thing about this which really highlights the panic that the i.r.s. is in or the crisis that they are in is that the inspector general found out that the reus arcouldn't find it i.r.s. couldn't find receipts for some of its own expenses. it's that o out of a tom wolf novel. it's too good sthao we ar. >> we are going to sis spell some of the myths of the spending and expose some of the truths. the big news story has been what i think will turn out to be two whistle-blowers in

let's talk about it with jonah goldberg editor at large for "the national review." and a fox news contributor. you have said that people ought to be generally skeptical about government. if that is the mindset in america do the numbers surprise you in anyway, 62% don't like these things. >> it doesn't surprise me. in some ways i'm surprised it's not higher. my basic position on this is i've decided that there were no abuses at least that we know of, in terms to of the nsa scandal, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't give us all sort of a little queasiness about this. look, maybe the 7th seal has been broken and the river is about to turn to blood. i actually agree with john conyers for the first time in a while. there is a crisis of trust. after the i.r.s. scandal, the benghazi stuff and all of these things and i believe james clapper just flatly lied to congress the idea that we should take anybody's word for any of this stuff defies the imagination. it's ridiculous. i think now that the cat is out of the bag you have to sort of reassure the american people tha

you don't have jonah goldberg that's is doing anything from an ideology standpoint that agrees with obama. he's simply getting ready for the future. but the point is, the public discussion of course becomes extremely important. we're hearing stories about the office question. the nsa. we're empowering the nsa with all these things. these are the same people who got it wrong on iraq, all these people who are spying on us. we have corporate america not the government, oh who is in the spook business. what do they do with that information beyond there. the james clapper story, he ignored it when he lied, when he committed perjury, but now that story comes to the forefront and we start paying attention to what is important. we pay attention to the way the media has been manipulated completely. "new york times," can you imagine, "the new york times" in almost attacking snowden because he didn't leak it to them. he leaked it to the guardian. it wasn't a controlled leak by the government as we see so often. when obama wants to look good, who does he go to? he goes to the wall street journal, "th

i think i quoted jonah goldberg. it is time to have the discussion again of the appropriateness of unionism in the public sector. unions in the private sector are fine. we are suffering the consequences. i will take one more and then i would head out. >> first an observation about hem's comment earlier when talked about social welfare. when congress set up that statute in the 1950's, there is no evidence congress intended to exclude political activity. i wondered about your thoughts on this. do political activities were people are trying to improve their government, could that improve the social welfare in of a nation if people used political activity? >> obviously, that is my view. we should be encouraging this sort of thing and not discouraging it. this disclosure thing has nothing to do with anything except going after your donors. they were never offended by this until the last few years and conservatives started doing more of that. this is a fairly recent outrage here. this is about nothing other than getting th

bill: it's great to see you jonah goldberg, editor at large for national review and a fox news contributorhe said the president should be able to stand up and say this is a good program, it is saving american lives. i think he has come close to saying that, but only on one occasion. and it wasn't using the oval office or the east room of the white house, it was out on the stump. what do you think of that? >> yeah, i mean there is a strange dynamic at work here in that because of obama's u unpopularity on the right among conservatives people like dick cheney think they have to come forward and shoeport the program among conservatives. there are a lot of conservatives and libertarians that are advertise trusting of the program because of the i.r.s. and benghazi and obama care and they just don't trust this president with that. i think dick cheney its absolutely right about that. he wants to keep the program going and he thinks it's a vital program. barack obama has the reverse problem is that all of the controversies, not just the nsa but all of them with the exception maybe of benghazi hurt

we're going to bring you the best of that q&a, plus reaction from jonah goldberg and a.b. stoddard.wright, a cybersecurity expert, among the best of them. he's going to tell us how we can avoid people spying on the internet, on our searches and on our e-mail activities, so you're not going to want to miss that. plus steve moore on what it's really going to take to bring a dent in unemployment. there's a biggies agreement among a lot of the top economists in the country. we're going to break it down coming up on "happening now." the great outdoors... ...and a great deal. thanks to dad. (gasp) nope. aw! guys! grrrr let's leave the deals to hotels.com. (nice bear!) ooo! that one! nice! got it! oh my gosh this is so cool! awesome! perfect! yep, and no angry bears. the perfect place is on sale now. up to 30% off. only at hotels.com martha: we're monitoring the fbi director's hearing, robert mueller being asked questions by the house. here's a moment ago with john conyers, congressman conyers. take a look. >> because of the actions of nasa and the federal bureau of investigation, it's my

jonah goldberg, editor-at-large for "national review" and fox news contributor. good to have you here. what do you make of the argument it does go to washington because it came from the mouths of senators? karl didn't argue it went all the way to the white house but he thinks that is bad enough. >> what you say there in very short order was plouffe changing the terms and assumptions of his argument to basically, to any ground he could defend and he couldn't really defend any of it. first of all, original charge this was political. of course it's political. as charles krauthamer likes to say, political groups of one kind were targeted. that makes it political. you can't get away from that. the second question whether it came from washington or not. we know that there were a lot of senators who wrote letters to the irs, who invade, who rang witnesses from the irs saying you have to go after these groups. we know that president obama set a certain tone and we know that these guys have now told the cincinnati operatives, or agents have told darrell issa's group they

jon: joining us now is jonah goldberg, editor at large for the national review and a fox news contributor commercial makes me want to run right out and sign up for obamacare, jonah. how about you? [laughter] >> yeah, no, absolutely. jon: i get a $150 check, apparently, if i sign up. >> i'm not sure you do given where i hope they're paying you, but -- [laughter] finish. jon: yeah -- go ahead. >> okay. we'll just move on from that. look, i think this is a fascinating effort, and maybe it'll work. i sincerely and profoundly doubt it. i think that these guys are, you know, they're very, very good at organizing people. the problem is that it's one thing to get people to be part of a sort of, you know, pepsi ad campaign thing for voting for a president, it's aspirational, it's schmaltzy, it's poetic. this is asking young people, young, healthy people who are disproportionately poor and out of work to spend hundreds of dollars on health insurance that by definition the benefits of which will be -- [inaudible] and that is a much harder sell. and i have some deep skepticism that they'll be able to