thomas friedman is a line producer that means he does everything to keep us on schedule and budget. you can't imagine how much i love him. >> it is an honor to be on your team after all these years. it is like going to school with a professor every day. you are the professor and i and the students. we are glad to have joined us, a conversation with a valid, coming up right now. >> there is a saying that dr. king had. he said, there is always the right time to do the right thing. i just try to live my life every day by doing the right thing. we know that we are only about halfway to completely eliminate hunger and we have a lot of work to do. walmart committed $2 billion to fighting hunger in the u.s. as we work together, we can stamp hunger out. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. tavis: any actor that decides to embody mark twain not only has to measure up to his larger- than-life persona, he has to compete with the masterful portrayal. he has turned his obsession with the man credited with writing the first american novel with -- to a powe

thomas friedman writes, if churchill could see us now. a political drift as a country, optimists quote winston churchill's line that america will always do the right thing after they've exhausted all other possibilities. i don't think that's true anymore. churchill never met the tea party, and he certainly never met today's house republicans, a group so narrow-minded and disinterested in governing and the necessary compromises that go with it, that they are ready to kill an immigration bill that is manifestly in the country's economic, social, and strategic interests. proving churchill at least half right, we have foolishly ignored immigration reform for years, but today finally we found a coalition of senate democrats and 14 senate republicans who have courageously compromised on a bill, though not perfect, it still spends too much on border defense, opens more opportunity for the high and low-skilled immigrants we need to thrive and give those already here illegally a legitimate pathway to citizenship. yet it appears that brain dead hou

. >>> "new york times" columnist thomas friedman joins us conversation. plus, more than 500 i mates including senior members of al qaeda have escaped from abu ghraib. details on that straight ahead as well. >>> first bill karins with a check on the forecast. >> up in bosboston, in between there and providence, heavy rain is on the way. it's already exited new york city where the roads are plain old wet. from westchester into boston, heavy rain to deal with over the next hour, hour and a half. and then it will clear out. i tell you what, it is extremely humid in the east. it's not as hot. yesterday was only in the 80s, but it's still very humid. that's going to spark additional showers and storms. keep the umbrella handy. the midwest, you get relief. 79 degrees. that's a beautiful break from the summer heat. and tomorrow that front clears through new england for some great weather ahead. in washington, d.c., where it's been hot and humid, like, ten days in a row, your relief comes thursday. that should be a great day. sunshine and it's a fabulous forecast.

i think what people say, folks like president obama anthem liberal columnists like thomas friedman of the new york times as well as other big government types of persons the financial crisis hit, they have been advocating heavy government spending, they want more stimulus spending, more infrastructure spending, more funding for renewable energy projects, they want all kinds of things and when they got pushed back from free market types and folks who believe in limited government they started using china as their example and started using china to goed conservatives into a sort of this position of having to adapt their rhetoric. china as many of you know has grown dramatically in the past three decades. they began undertaking economic growth in 1978, open up their economy to the world, but it is still a communist country, a it is build politically fat suppressive and a lot of things are still run by the state which is why commentators these days like to refer to china's economy as a state capitalist economy and folks like barack obama for a long time kept pointing to the roads and brid

i do not think anybody embodies us more than thomas friedman in terms of the vacuous warmongering nature of the corporate media. ave a number of corporations that control the media over this time that we are talking about. it tells that story in another way. stage. this corporate we have small amounts of information being mediated through actual media. we have large amounts of propaganda coming through the media. a hugesame time, we have amount of information coming from the public into the whole. the black box of the corporate state. i do not think anyone embodies us more than michael bloomberg, who orchestrated massive spying campaigns. he was the master of massive spying campaigns on the muslim community. he says this type of spine is inevitable. to put it simply, we have seen massive increases in corporate and government secrecy, a decrease in individual privacy. , we'rehe nsa revelation about here. who has taken on the corporate state? has there been -- what are the successes, the mechanisms which information has come out? i have broadly outlined four categories. when i said journal

thomas friedman writes in "the new york times" taking it to the streets thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, twitter, facebook and blogging, aggrieved individuals have much more power to engage in and require their leaders to engage in two-way conversations and they have much greater ability to link up with other who share their views to hold flash protests. the net result is this, au tocracy less sustainable than ever, look for more people in the streets, more often over more issues with more independent means to tell their stories at ever-louder decibels. leigh? >> he makes interesting points. there's the convergence of many things happening. the social media momentum, obviously, but he also makes a point that the strange middle class is driving a lot of this unrest. even here, with occupy wall street, and all over the globe, and it's just more people fighting for fewer jobs and taking to the streets. and then the other point is that when you put in a new democracy, the notion that those rights that one person is actually taking over more of the power, is a theft of a

i don't think anyone embodies this better than thomas friedman in terms of the vacuous war mongeringnature of the corporate media. so here we have the number of corporations that control the media over this in the period of time that we're talking about i think tells that story in another way. so we have this corporate state. we have small amounts of information being through actual meter graph large amounts of propaganda coming through the media. and at the same time we have a huge amount of information coming from the public into the hole, into the blackbox of the corporate state. i don't think anyone, i don't think anyone embodies this more than michael bloomberg, who orchestrated massive spying campaigns. before this weeks massive spying campaigns he was a master of masters by campaigns by the new york city muslim community. and he says of course that this type of spying is inevitable. to put it simply, we see a massive increase in corporate and government secrecy, and a massive decrease in individual privacy. and really after the nfa revelation of this last week i would say we a