worse than back then crazy it's like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don't go out anymore we sit in the house and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller and always say is please at least we was alone in our living room let me have my toaster and my t v and ideology and regardless of media propaganda and regardless of all the brainwashing that those entities induce and that's a lot and i can also explain the factors in brainwashing which i just discovered a few days day and so here's the here's today's religious news thirty six individuals were trampled to death in the world's largest religious gathering and i don't know what exactly stampede but i understand there are reports that someone was rumored that they could get all three ammo for their high powered weaponry at the far end of the gathering and that may have started the rush  since it was a religious gathering on the sue me that's what they were after actually i don't know anything about the first six people died the world's largest religious gathering and meanwhile of course back at the bad again the former some of suggested want to just select the petty a file instead so we can better cover up all the priests in delicacies with children and stop the lawsuits hemorrhaging the vatican and riches and loot because others are still holding out for another nazi considering the loot origins u k meanwhile of course i'm being facetious now meanwhile back in the good ole usa the war on the poor and middle class workers of the by the capitalist one percent here made richard course by their greed and predation on the informationally challenged majorities here and this goes on mentioned in our media largely unknown except by the majority of us except for the military and police  have to move in and they made their targets these days generally are what used to be called peaceful protesters which they round up assault by the several hundred law and order so any good i suppose private army would do the same unfortunately they're not the private army they're supposed to be the public defenders but the public would be better served without any defenders given their actions so what goes on today and is ignored by the press and the media alternative media quite often talks about it they try to tell the alec wright and they do great damage to our middle class and to our economic well being and i'd like to get into a little a little about the economy and how that the postal system they're in the process of trying to destroy it so they can privatizing they can't compete with it as it is silly saddled it with the tremendous burden of having to fund seventy five years of pensions in ten years and of course that is bankrupt the postal system and the solutions to fix it or not to get rid of that but the dump all the advantages the post office office ok action just like this fact that you can now have a pilot program for electronic public comments on bills so you can have it in one input and what's going to happen and i just want to get information  one little thing here that's really simple but what happened on that friday they've been advertising for it and how but that you hundred people what they did that seem to be ok here i'm going to put this on right now here little ri now about fifteen hundred of them are participating at the rally on the state capitol grounds as part of that rally myself attendees are carrying firearms and that is ok because of washington's open carry law no probably should against carrying weapons on the capitol grounds that  this session because of all the recent shootings and gun owners say they want a part of the debate that's why some two hundred of them brought their gun the crowd wasn't as large as organizers hope but they came loaded with passion i want to watch this last excuse me by our government gun owners worried about laws threatening their second amendment rights came bearing arms of all sizes and colors amanda hurtles got her nine millimeter on one hip and her three year old on the other that's how a woman should be i think i do i mean if you want gun owners like her to talk about in the government's crosshairs right now because of recent shootings lawmakers have introduced  daughter to the capitol to let lawmakers know where she stands on gun control and here with the gun rally she had no problem walking through the capitol with her gun there is no law against it and i talked to her second hurdle likes a bill co sponsored by representative elizabeth scott it would allow teachers who have been trained to carry weapons at school it's not just kids and young people it's parents adds right grandparent hurdle and those who came packing to a libya just want lawmakers to think about them before passing any gun related and also the bill that would require gun owners to lock up their weapons around children you can also expect to hear from the other side we spoke with somebody from cease fire washington the pro gun control organization they say they will have members testifying in favor of those same bills they back on already so we're referencing a topic here relating to the second amendment which begins with in order to provide for a well regulated militia a well regulated militia is a basically the national guard of course and the regulations are that you can have military weapons in private hands unless it's  under the authority of a militia which is the national guard now in polls about universal background checks we find one of the supporters was wayne la pierre back in may of ninety nine we also note that today n r a members support universal background checks for purchase of weapons by seventy four percent the majority margin gun owners by eighty four percent majority margin the non gun owners by a ninety percent majority margin leaving seventy percent opposed i would call that the fringe the ban on high capacity magazines is still a majority fifty six percent i'm surprised and so low what's the point of high capacity magazines unless you're in combat a the idea of banning assault type weapons is also fifty six percent thirty nine percent oppose that  are our democratic majority majority elected government so in other words we need our military rifles to commits addition and treason much like confederate southerners did one hundred fifty years ago to keep their immoral profiteering slave labor and some proponents alleged to have peace in christian values but promote the unlimited acquisition and sale a weapon specifically designed to kill people our own citizens while opposing progressive tax increases on the on the rich establishment members that help fund our police for quick response times so what this is about it's an attack on the regulatory federal government and that is harder to buy in control than our smaller state governments so i want to make sure they break it down to eliminate that the regulatory perils that powers the federal government because that's what hurts the one percent rich the most don't and if we can if we can make it hard to fund the federal government and lemonade their regulatory oversight which includes when every other which is inappropriate for citizens then they can succeed with their agendas and what are their genders while the koch brothers agenda who fund the cato institute heritage foundation the american legislative exchange council which provides the republican media propaganda their agendas are pretty well known and that's who you're up against and i'm not trying to directly tie in our interest and deregulating gun limitations but it does have a spillover effect in the regulated and the consequences on either side whether it's economic or whether it's personal security can be rather negative and i'd suggest if we want to rely if we want to protect ourselves our best reliance would be on funding police so they had better response times and so and also make sure they have more accountability so they can't act like a bunch of thugs like they do in seattle right and elsewhere portland oregon as well  of the washington post senior fellow at the center on budget and policy priorities jared bernstein and new york magazine contributing editor benjamin wallace wells president obama takes to the skies today with a message on gun safety and will deliver a speech in minneapolis just two hours from now among his top priorities instituting universal background checks the focus of a six figure super bowl ad taken out by mayors against illegal guns and broadcast last night to the beltway audience government gun i think what they'll do is turn this universe old checks on the law abiding into a universal registry of law abiding people and law abiding people don't want that i mean  you take something that is here and you say it's going to go all the way over there there's nothing that anyone in the administration has said that indicates they're going to have a universal right history and obamacare wasn't a tax until they needed it to be a tax well it was the supreme court i  don't think you can trust and while la pierre says he can't trust the president he also apparently can't trust his own members nine in ten americans support universal background checks including seventy four percent of n r a members given the fact that more than twelve hundred people have been killed by guns since the massacre at sandy hook elementary it would seem that the call for reform remains urgent and the desire for change no less so and i actually thought that the footage of l hundred nine was really powerful given the fact that he is really i mean it is a full throated endorsement of universal background checks do you agree with paul krugman that the n r a has revealed itself to be an insane organization and that actually has changed things somewhat in terms of the debate over gun safety laws yes it's run by lunatics that's clear people that were not always lunatics you know he was among those seventy to ninety percent that backed background checks back to back in the ninety's but you know they're not alone fortunately or in how much this week in the senate said listen if you start doing background checks then you have to refer to a list of if you're building a list that's where freedom goes to die something along those lines so it's  york magazine talking about the gun will you use the breakdown of the guns that adam lanza used at newtown to sort of tell the story about america and american gun culture and i thought this was a really interesting sort of insight from the piece you write the harvard law professor  glaeser once wrote a paper explaining that people tended to buy the most guns in places where the power of the state and its ability to protect citizens seems most distant rural america and the poorest sections of the inner city one way of viewing the vogue for assault weapons and those geographic distinctions have now become states of mind you know if we're talking about the shift in the army's politics from a decade ago til now there's this is this really interesting shift in the kinds of guns people and therefore what people expect the politics of gun ownership to look like a decade ago we were still talking about an america where you know most of the guns sold were rifles and you could still plausibly say gun ownership is a culture in two thousand and ten pistol in two thousand rifles were twice pistol sales basically two thousand and ten pistols past rifles we're now talking about a gun ownership culture broadly that's primarily focused on self defense and what's really good about that is it's a period of time when crime is declining pretty radically and so i mean when we talk about i mean there is some i don't want to put sort of cultural differences at the root of this but that is part of that and i thought actually chris wallace did a very effective draw drawing that out from wayne la pierre yesterday when they were the people of newtown tell that the people really think the president's children are the same kind of target as every school child in america i think that's ridiculous and you know what sir you talk one of the points of that ad that i want to ask you about is you made a class argument mean national state shooting association says he's now holding it right a lot of people who voted you know that seems like a man who knows how to hold i don't think look maybe it's me but i think the poll numbers are trumping cultural and class arguments at this point in the following sense once you get to seventy eight seventy percent among n r a members once you get to ninety plus percent among the public some of these distinctions because i think a little bit less important because  the sensibility now post newtown is that we have to do something and the question is how much so at this point i think the most important issue especially from washington we're in watching this unfold is we need this much in terms of gun control are we going to get this much this much that much and that that's what we'll have to see i don't think this is going to be blocked by cultural class difference i think to be bought by raw politics and the fact that far too many members of congress are still way too deeply in the pocket of the n r a well and speaking of people who you can l what it is ok so i guess that's not shutting the door right we'll take a look at it is opening the door to this actually being on the floor of the senate so maybe that is a good sign for people who are advocating for gun safety laws i think it is a good sign and i think lots of democrats want to be in the place where reid is saying the same chili oh i'm not really for the assault weapons ban but i do support these other mash measures and that's look like if you think about somebody like kagan who's going to be up for reelection in north carolina she could probably safely vote for any of these measures specifically the background check and still be fine in north north carolina not be such a target of the n r a i think in some ways the assault weapons ban it was like a fake poison now running and explicitly saying i am not seeking the support of the n r a that's kind of a watershed moment that somebody who's running for office is running away from the n r a to try to get elected that hasn't happened in a moderate district kill how important the background checks really are versus the assault weapons ban if you look at who is killed in terms of the type of gun use it's only five percent for rifles and assault weapons ninety five percent for handguns so i think we violence like we're talking about in chicago exactly yeah you know the disappointing piece of this that kind of is that we focus on the silver lining is look i mean you know we've got three hundred million guns out there in the country more so than cars so you know these things the last one hundred years you know they're being passed around and sold stolen you know these are all very very deadly weapons and so there were there is some momentum now and even some really good proposals that it's like a cash for clunkers program like the economists have looked at it say that you know the people who actually turn in their guns are turning in their older guns and buying new guns you know so in australia you know where they went they instituted this massive nationwide gun buyback in the in the immediate aftermath of the massacre in tasmania and i think something very effective that drawing guns out of the population but a very different culture there in a very unique moment you know in the united states go velocity bullets because they are designed to inflict the lethal injuries air fifteen is very much that way the bullet tumbles and is very high velocity so it's a military weapon and we don't need that for hunting and if you want to pistols anywhere outside the house and i would support that so i don't think we're going to lose our rights to be armed is just a question of degree and so i think we have more important issues before us i see this as a distraction from the economic class war that's devastating our economy and it's being done deliberately by republicans for political advantage and we've just gone through a near depression and they're trying to destroy the whole infrastructure but in order to privatizing and once they do that your costs are going to skyrocket services will not be guaranteed so keep that in mind there's a reason we have organizations like the u s post office as it's required to deliver the mail and deliberate in three days guaranteed that's why they have all those expensive processing centers that they're trying to close down so here's a debate on the on the problem and the false hoods involved with it that we saw in the ed chilled show and i thought that might be a lightning show from new york well once again it's our friends the republicans they are one step closer to destroying an american institution tonight i'm going to tell you the real story behind the post office and how we could save it this is the killing of american citizens is heating up in congress democrats  tonight folks thanks for watching this opening story tonight i'm telling you what to try to maintain my poise there this should be a day of celebration for conservatives as they continue to chip away at the backbone of america were announcing that we  moving forward with a change to our national delivery stansell the postal service delivery schedule consists of six days of package delivery and five days of mail delivery this story is everything i don't like about republicans the slow death of the united states post office folks it's underway and americans seem to sit back and accept that that's the way it is this once proud american institution will no longer deliver first class mail on saturday starting this summer aren't we proud moving forward now and i hate to be the one to tell you folks but this is only the beginning and i told you that this is going to happen you see the republicans have this real tricky strategy the laws they pass don't hurt you right away but they hit you hard down the road and this is a classic example most americans don't seem to notice what's going on here so check this number out seven out of ten americans they were asked were ok with cutting saturday delivery that's all right you can't really blame them they don't have the right information and i think that it's a wonderful cost saving measure for the united states postal service to tell you the economy computer systems e ma everything changed honestly with e mails and stuff like that but it packages you know that's maybe they need to make cost cutting measures i mean they've been running on that for quite a while  know those folks look like just hard work and knowledgeable americans that care about the country but they're so wrong it's not about e mails and it's not about e commerce it's about the republican party destroying the middle class in this country and i want to how many of those folks right there who don't rely on the post office how they're going to feel when their netflix deliveries delayed what they're not here for saturday night favorite movies all right definitely take the post office for granted most everything americans know about the post office is absolutely wrong they haven't paid attention of the story and in the mainstream media here we go this morning the washington post is telling people that the post office suffered tens of billions of dollars in losses and recent years with the advent of the internet and e commerce really plenty of other media outlets while they are taking their information directly from the republican talking points on the story well thank god for the journalists over at think progress they have the story correct and they have a correct understanding of what has unfolded think prog less they lead with this very important detail congress has for years forced the united states postal service to prefund seventy five years worth of pensions for its employees a requirement not made of any other public or private institution this is without a doubt the root of the problem no doubt about it postmaster general pat donaghue finally put the blame where it's supposed to be another fifteen point nine billion dollar loss eleven point one billion was due to the amount that we are obligated to take the treasury to prefund retiree health benefits we had the default on those payments because we did not the finance hell of a business model and it's about time the public hears this directly from the postmaster general you see the lame duck law the postal accountability enhancement act was passed by the republicans in two thousand and six it has completely crippled the ability of the post office to function and be innovative in their services but this isn't the only thing the public doesn't get when it comes to the post office we generate all of our revenue from the sale posts we take no tax dollars we do not want tax dollars zero zero tax dollars in other words you're not getting shafted now let's just make sure that we're all clear on this issue the post office receives again as i said zero tax dollars for operations it's run as an independent agency postal employees or civil servants it's the only institution in america that has been forced to prefund for seventy five years a pension plan in a ten year window it would have a one and a half billion dollars surplus and do thousand and twelve without this pension requirement do we get that folks this is government intervention by the republicans before they handed the gavel to dancy polow say and this is what they stuck the workers with they want to destroy the post office because they want to privatize everything today i guess you could say is chapter one where is the banner mission accomplished for the republican destruction of the middle class in this country now congress and their allies the who he just loves the news he called it common sense for form of course is common sense to darrell i he's already proposed a bill to put more government regulations on the post office i so want to restructure the postal service by capping the growth of the workforce and cutting benefits and services cut cut cut cut cut cut your way into a profit i say has no problem leading the charge here folks because he's got a lot of money from one of the postal services main competitors you got it u p s fed ex has got a hand in this too by the way they're also a big contributor to the cause they gave almost twice as much to republicans than democrats last year in the congress now everything is going as planned for house speaker john boehner i know the german i assume is interested in moving the postal reform  bill i know that there have been a bipartisan conversation about how to do this and i would hope that the congress would act in a timely fashion really so in other words mr boehner you're getting real willing to step forward get rid of this line item in the budget that is strangling the post office here's the reality there is some bipartisan movement here on the post office democrats and republicans they want to stop this service reduction democratic congressman jerry connally and republican sam graves well they sent a letter to the postmaster general to keep saturday service all of folks what's he going to do he can't do what his hands are strapped is the congress the congress has to move on this south dakota congresswoman and tea party favorite christine gnome who's been asked to be on this program oh she fell off the bandwagon she's also trying to stop it she says i understand that serious changes need to take place to make the united states postal service financially viable but i do not support eliminating saturday delivery coming from such a rural state our postal service is critical to the way families and businesses operate you know christie congresswoman i've never met you're probably really a nice person and you're probably going to get thrown out of the republican party for saying that but you know if you have an issue on this you know you really need to take it up with your tea party crowd and you need to take it up with the republican party because republicans want to destroy the middle class voting bloc and drive this whole thing into privatization then what do you  small towns in south dakota this is an attack on real america does anybody care these my friends are middle class jobs these are the workers who fought to get the progressive agenda up and running in two thousand and twelve and hold it right there p your people these are your minority workers out there veterans you know that the post office hires more veterans and any other employer in the country i thought we supported our veterans it's also unnecessary  this is an unnecessary move and i don't see the collective upgrades that i'd like to see on this particularly from democrats this affects workers this affects rural and elderly americans this is politically motivated and it is morally wrong it is unnecessary we don't need to do this now i want darrell i said to come on this program and tell me that he thinks that every business model in this country because of health care and pensions should be funded seventy five years in advance in a ten year window you won't find one republican in the house to stand up and say that this is the business model that we've got to have for america there are a bunch of liars and cheats is what they are and they are screwing the american worker here this is the destruction of the middle class in this country this is been going on through the pas thousand and six and now boom here we are now the post office is cutting services now it's going to hurt small businesses and we sit back here as democrats and progressives and say ok i can't i just can't  know what these people are all about and i'm asking the congress to rescind this law to take it off the books and start over in give these fighting americans a chance to get your cell phones out i want to know what you think tonight's question will republicans succeed in killing the post office tax day for yes text b for now we've got a new number there for you folks it's six seven six two two you can always go to our blog at www dot m s m b c dot com we're bringing the constitutional or statutory authority to make this decision and we're going to see that he's challenged on legal grounds i've written him today demanding an explanation legally for what grounds he cites he has this authority remember that the postal service is the only service actually stipulated by the constitution of the united states this isn't just any service or any line of business secondly i want to see the analysis that shows the net savings by this action the postmaster general and lots of other conventional wisdom think has in this town love this site well it will save two billion dollars but what is the cost of lost revenue lost business that will follow from this decision sure they did their own study last year and they deep sixed it because it showed inconveniently that a seven percent reduction in first class bottom leads to a five billion dollars loss in revenue so i'm not sure this will actually save any money and will further accelerate the decline of the postal sorry how is this going to hurt real america house are going to hurt customers well most of our american families a especially our rule communities rely on saturday delivery many rural communities get their prescription medications their financial papers and other transactions in the mail our businesses rely on wholeheartedly with representative connelly our union has gone to the capitol hill and we have talked to our representatives and told them just how much this is going to affect the american working class people as he said we have many veterans we have families that depend on the postal service to you know there's also many other items other than just delivering the mail no doubt there's many businesses that rely on the mail to also be where is the effort to just erase this law and start over well i think that the senate passed a bipartisan bill that went some in some direction to do just that you mentioned their allies on our committee prevented every single democratic amendment that was designed to try to address the issues you sure correctly raised in the two thousand and six legislation what's so monstrous about this said the new you got it is they created this crisis in that lame duck legislation of the republican congress in two thousand and six and now they say well there's a crisis we created and there's no choice but these horrible decisions that will further kill a viable and vibrant  an artery if congress doesn't reverse this there could be a day when that could be two or three days away delivery and then no delivery i mean that's where this is going this is the republicans are trying to starve the united states postal service or is that a bridge too far what do you think oh no must certainly i agree with you you know this should be the time when the postal service should be expanding their business to reach out to to the middle class and to small businesses to to make their business they succeed you know this standard of service is an american tradition that so many american families especially our rural communities rely on it is in the constitution there is no doubt it is and know well this this republican post office pension plan the scam obviously to bankrupt and defund it is the obvious cause of their losses and it's done to to use as an excuse to privatized the us post office which due to a fawning caught corporate this media has convinced apparently seventy nine percent of americans except and support the loss of service on saturday starting august first as apparently their idea of the only viable cost saving solution one of course it is not but it is just another attack on the service that we all need enjoy pain and punishment on us because they are just basically too brainwashed or well paid off to do anything else and i would ask both what you can do for your country what collectively your country can has roots as a sign of distress and his angry neighbor eventually joined him and another we care deeply about the future of the country and we have solidarity with our fellow neighbors and another it is a verbal not and not a nonviolent form of protest even without wind these five flags are unmistakably upside down their anger is over the president's health care law as well as his effort to ban assault weapons and limit high capacity magazines though the president and his supporters  congress argue that no one's coming for anyone's guns and polls like this one show a majority of americans support the president's gun control plan c o argues that the president's plan is just the first step it's the still a taboo that guns lou and and that alone is a is a huge problem but seale didn't put the flags up without considering our veterans he's won two serving eight years in the coast guard and army including a tour in iraq i can as citizens i think they're being used to distract us from the real issues while they steal a spline and destroy our infrastructure and privatized we what we have to be focusing on is stopping the corporatist and anti regulatory ideology which this very much is part of and the predatory media propaganda from the right that preys on us and all our democracy these people are engaged political power these people are engaged in an economic class war against the middle class and the poor against you if you keep willingly supporting their social path attacks on your quality of life which are economic attacks largely you can best treatment is the information is accurate no we're giving the edge to you like numbers i got numbers for you tonight there is big economic news today records are being broken but there is still a major story of income inequality underneath all of this first the numbers the nation's economy added one hundred fifty seven thousand jobs in january and the unemployment rate while it ticked up to seven point nine percent but the jobs numbers for both november and december were revised upwards significantly this means more than it was but to no i mean no jobs were created last year the best number since two thousand and five and better than seven out of eight years in the bush cheney era and the economy has now gained five and a half million jobs out of the seven eight point seven four million jobs lost in the great recession we got a long way to go no doubt about it now the stock markets on a roll it topped a fourteen thousand today for the first time since two thousand and seven hundred thousand can trucks construction jobs were added in the last four months of two thousand and twelve and today chrysler posted its highest sales in five years and there's another side of the story of course millions of people are still out of work the economy actually shrank by a tenth of a point last quarter because of what government cutbacks two thirds of americans are planning to delay the retirement according to the wall street journal because of the financial losses income stagnation and layoffs over the past several years no income inequality in the united states actually folks has gotten worse and we now rank in the middle of latin american countries which have historically had poor economies and high levels of income inequality we've got a lot of work to do let's turn to senator bernie sanders of vermont senator great to have you with us tonight thanks for joining us my pleasure there's still an ugly underbelly to this economy as it stands right now this past election was themed about and focused on the middle class what can we do senator moving forward here in the short term your thoughts well first of all we have to do exactly what you are doing now and focus on an issue gets that gets very very little attention and that is the fact that we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth worse today in the united states than at any time since one thousand nine hundred twenty eight before the great depression and from a moral perspective moral we have to ask ourselves whether we think i acceptable that the top one percent owns thirty five percent of the wealth in america when the bottom sixty percent owns two point three percent of the wealth whether it is acceptable that the top one percent earns more income than the bottom fifty percent and in the last study that we saw in two thousand and ten ninety three percent ninety three percent of all new income went to the top one  not the kind of country that we feel comfortable living in i don't think so i don't think the american people believe that i think that's what this election was all about i mean when you look at it middle class families earned more in one thousand nine hundred six than today i mean it's absolutely amazing the middle class are still asked to share the sacrifice with the cuts to the big three it's right we have to grab this conversation exactly right and ed what this is also about it's not only more ology and  about politics what do you think the big money folks are doing the big corporations who are enjoying record breaking profits the wealthiest people doing phenomenally well they're not sitting on their money they're putting huge amounts of money into the political process so they get even more tax breaks more ability to outsource jobs more ability to put their money in tax havens in the cayman islands and furthermore it's not only a political issue and an economic it is an economic issue and that is if consumers do not have the money if the middle class and working families do not have the income to spend how you're going to create jobs well that you've got a senator your thoughts on what policies would reduce this wide gulf of income inequality but let me just pick off a very few i think what almost all economists recognize is that when real unemployment is over fourteen percent counting those people have given up looking for work and are working part time we need to invest significant sums of money rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure roads bridges water systems mass transit et rather quickly second of all we have got to demand that wall street stop sitting on the huge amounts of money they are and get that money out of the productive economy so small and medium sized businesses have the capital to expand and also create new jobs as a plan that needs to be discussed and americans ought to get behind senator bernie sanders thanks for joining us