joining me to discuss this is radley balko senior writer and investigative reporter for the huffington post rally thanks so much for joining us tonight this is this one really has my blood boiling this story makes me so angry but maybe you can try to rationalize for us a little bit and go back through history tell us how it is that we came up with this system with the zero tolerance policies. well i'm not i'm probably not going to get less angry. look i mean i think we are criminalizing everything in our society and we finally reach a point where we're criminalizing childhood look i mean kids need to be able to make mistakes and part of being a kid is making mistakes and they need to be able to make them in a way that doesn't affect them to the rest of their lives and you know the criminal justice system is a very instrument for correcting mistakes and you know i think we saw it starting with these texting excuse me sexting prosecutions where you know teenagers have been showing their body parts to one each other to one another or basically all of human history. and technology into the mix and al

huffington post media group editorial director. john heilemann is new york magazine the national political columnist. two heavyweights on. the dow jones industrial rallied today, a two-thirds reprieve, howard. my question is about jobs. it seems to me that the president has a couple things he's got to do to get control of events and not just watch them, which he seems to be doing. one is, get control of the debt debate by talking honestly about what cuts need to be made and what taxes need to be raised. let's move off from that tonight. let's talk about the jobs program he need to push for right now. it seems to me that mainly it's a political challenge for right now to get the attention of the republicans force them to deal with the jobs issue, force them if necessary to say yes or not to creating jobs in their own districts. history, common sense tells us it's hard for a politician to say no to a job site in his own or her own district. how does he do it, howard? you and i know politics. doesn't the president know politics? >> well, i don't think he knows it the way you know it in this context, chris. which is that you've got to be specific. the stimu