Transcripts For MSNBC MSNBC Live 20110216 : vimarsana.com

top wall street banks. how the feds protect the bankers instead of prosecuting them. you don t want to miss that. mr. plus, how s this for outrageous? the richest oil companies in the world are getting $40 billion in tax breaks. a group of democrats want us to do something about it. ed markey is among them. and haley barbour s racism problem comes up again. today, republicans in the house tries the process to splash spending or dlf$60 billi to the budget. but what happened to one of the central planks of their campaign? this election is about work. it s about getting people back to work. why isn t the president focused on creating jobs that the american people are asking for? we are determined to fight for the future of the american people, to create jobs. the number one question in america continues to be where are the jobs? where are the jobs? where are the jobs? where are the jobs? where are the jobs? americans are still asking the question, where are the jobs? you just saw it right there. 2010, that is what they pounded home. that s what they ran on, where are the jobs? well, now that john boehner is the speaker of the house, he s singing a little different tune. over the last two years since president obama has taken office, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs. and if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it. if some of the jobs are lost, so be it? from the guy who ran the campaign on where are the jobs? of course he s wrong on the numbers. and the number of jobs created, the net increase was 58,000, if since obama has come in. so boehner was only off by about 142,000. you know why he was off by that? because he picked the number out of his back pocket. they just make it up! it s amazing. the office of management and budget found that, in fact, in 2010, there were 8.4 federal employees for every 1,000 americans. under bush, there were 9.1 federal workers per 1,000 citizens. do you know what that means? that means that president bush had more federal employees per capita. in fact, under president obama, we re seeing the lowest level of federal employees per capita since before 1962. so less federal employees per capita, and they call him a socialist anyway. oh, he s adding federal employees. it s time to cut the jobs. from the guys who ran on jobs. now, according to the center for american progress, the extreme cuts the house republicans want to make will have dire consequences. it s not just the federal job, it s first, you ve got the direct loss of 650,000 government jobs if their plans go into effect. the republican plans. but there s also the indirect loss of an additional 325,000 jobs for a grand total of 975,000 jobs lost. no one does more math than this problem. and we re proud of it. well, now we know the speaker boehner s response to nearly 1 million jobs lost with his party s spending cuts. it s this so be it. so be it. so be it. so be it. so be it. it s very, very clear. now with all the republican talk of cutting the deficit, they completely write off one simple solution. let me give it to you now repealing the bush tax cuts. did you know that getting rid of all the bush tax cuts would have saved $5 trillion over the next ten years, according to the congressional research service? so let me put that into perspective for you. president obama, deep spending cut, heating assistance for the poor, you ve got the, uh you kn the education cuts and it goes on and on and on. community cuts. they total $1.1 trillion over ten years. that s a lot of cuts, right? when you go to the deficit commission, the big cuts to social security, medicare, et cetera, et cetera, that was $4 trillion over basically ten years. by 2020, it would be $4 trillion. we don t need any of those draconian cuts. all we got to do is go back to the clinton tax rate. do you know how many jobs were created under clinton during his administration? 22 million. it totally worked. save the $4 trillion without cutting social security and medicare at all and with that extra $1 trillion, do whatever you like. heating assistance, the republicans do you want to do another war? that s probably what you would want to spend it on. i wouldn t recommend it. but it s such an easy solution. why don t we do that instead? well, let s ask congressman anthony weiner. he s joining us now. congressman, am i missing something? isn t that a million times more obvious solution? and a much easier solution? well, the short answer is no, you re not missing anything. the problem that we have here is we have a combination of things going on at once. we extended the bush tax cuts for millionaires and billiona e billionaires. that dug us a deep hole. now in order to dig out of that hole and others, they re doing basically the republican budget cutters are saying let s make air traffic controllers take a 20% cut. let s reduce the amount of cops on the beat and these types of efforts. but you know what is important to keep in mind here, the single greatest thing to do to reduce our deficit, our long-term debt is to get people back to work. when fewer people are working, fewer people are paying income taxes. more people are getting services for the government 37 we have to be careful we don t go in the direction that ireland and england went into where they slashed budgets during their session and axccelerated the downward spiral. which side are you on? if you think it s smart to cut air traffic controllers, when you probably want to vote republican in the next congress. look, the tax rates, if it went back to the clinton levels, the rich would get about 3% or 4% of money over $250,000. or we could cut the other. pras like food safety. who wants to cut food safety? it s crazy. let me focus on the jobs, though. the center for american progress numbers just now, about a million jobs lost if the spending cuts go into effect. i know they re a progressive think tank. do you think those numbers are accurate? if they are, you guys should be screaming that from the roof tops, shouldn t you? yeah, i think they are accurate. and let me explain to your viewers why it is. when you cut the services, there s a knock-on effect. sure when you cut cops you re going to lose police officers in just about every district of the country, but when you cut back on investment programs, when you cut back even on the one i gave you, air traffic controller, which means fewer flights can fly, which means the airline industry has to take a hit. this is the impact that winds up happening when you swing at the budget with an ax rather than going at wit a scalpel. so not only that, let s remember something that i think john boehner leaves out. there have been more private sector jobs created in two years of president obama than in eight years of president bush. he s already created more private sector jobs than the last president did in two full terms. here s what i m worried about, though. whether it s president obama or now the fight in the house, it seems like people are accepting the republican framing. hey, we already gave the tax cuts for the rich and we cannot discuss that. that s off the table. so now let s concentrate on hitting the poor and the middle class. so go, give me your spending cuts. isn t it wrong to accept that framing all together? no, i don t accept the only answer is spending cuts to things like food safety and safety of our planes as they re landing. i agree 100%. democratswhofight.com is having this conversation. and homingly, the rank and file are saying we have to look at this frame much broader. we have to see if things are basically fair. is it basically fair for billionaires, literally billionaires to get tax cuts, and then say to senior citizens that we re going to provide only half of you help with energy. or we re going to say to middle class families trying to get pell grants to put their kids through college that we re going to slash those back to afford these billionaire tax cuts. i agree with you, we have to broaden our scope to talk about general philosophies in our country. democrats generally believe in the idea that we have to help the middle class and those struggling to make it. republicans agree with lower tax rates for millionaires and billionaires. which side are people on is the fundamental question. you know where i like to leave interviews? where i have 100% agreement. i only come on your show because i agree with you 100% of the time. thank you for your time tonight. thank you, sir. all right, now for more, let me bring in dana millback. first of all, let me ask you this, how many jobs fw s bills the republicans proposed since they came into power? let me cut on my fingers. none. really? none? how many amendments on abortion. there have been a couple. one prominently called hr-3. part of the problem is the whole notion of creating jobs from the republican point of view is just get the government out of it and the private sector will create the jobs on their own. they say by cutting government, we are creating jobs. that may be true in the very long term as the budget comes into balance over many years. but in the short term that s one huge whopper of an economic shock that could as you re discussing, nearly a million jobs could be lost and that could be the kind of shock that sends the economy right back into recession. you made an interesting point in your article today, though. when you talk about the politics of this, that may not be such a bad thing for the republicans. why is it? explain that? i don t want to say that republicans are wishing for the economy to go back in the tank. let s take them at their remarks at their face value and they they want to grow the economy and grow jobs b, but it is a political fact that it is in their interest if the economy is not growing very quickly, and if the unemployment rate does not budge by 2012. that s how a republican president will get elected and a rj laer majority in the house and conceivably taking over the senate. so certainly, if it does have the unintended effect, shall we say, of throwing the economy back into recession, there is a political dividend, even if that s not what the motive was in the first place. and that s exactly what the motive is. okay. so now on the other hand, the politics that they played with that clip from john boehner, not so smart. for him to say so be it, that s got to be terrible politics, doesn t it? i was at that session yesterday morning. as soon as i heard that, i said i think there s going to be a problem with that. and sure enough, the afternoon, it exploded. there were a couple of problems. one is the 200,000 figure, as you pointed out is wrong. and otherwise, it just sounds so callous. and even if we can understand what he s trying to say, and that is, yes, some jobs may be lost in the path to a long term larger number of jobs created, you don t say it by saying so be it. as i pointed out in the article, john boehner is not taking a so be it attitude towards workers in his own district. he was fighting for this thing that looked very much like an earmark to make sure this engine at the pentagon said it does not want for the new joint strike fighter, makes sure that continues to be built. he actually lost that battle today. dana, one more quick question. i want to talk about the-35 at the end of the show. i thought that was really interesting. but is there a price to be paid here? are the republican voters waking up today and going when are they ever going to do anything about jobs? or have they not gotten that message yet? you know, i think it s going to be measured by results, and, you know, they ll get some credit, of course, obama and the democrats will get more credit for it, because they re mostly in charge, if jobs grow in advance of the 2012 elections. so look, and the reverse is true. if people feel that the republicans are doing great damage with these cuts. but, you know, it will take disht s not something in the abstract that people can grasp right now. they re going to have to wait and see their kid s headstart program canceled or they re not going to be able to take that flight they were going to take. that s how it will begin to be felt over time. thanks for your time tonight. now it s a question i ve been asking for year, why are some of the wall street bankers who crashed our economy not in jail. matt taibi has that answer again. and michel michelle bachmann is again. it s pain relief without the pills. no pills, no pain. how can you get pain relief without taking pills around the clock? 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the gulf of mexico. $53 million, gone. some of that is going to bp, a foreign oil company. markey introduced a bill to end tax breaks. that s worth over $40 billion of five years. by the way, that s separate. that s outside of the $53 billion, okay? all going to the companies that are the most profitable in the world. take that $40 billion, plus the money saved over the next five years, put those two together, just over the five-year period, and you would put about $51 billion back into the pockets of taxpayers. $51 billion. you might say oh, but the poor oil companies, they need the money, too. really? let s find out. you know what the profits were for exxonmobil in 2009? $19.3 billion. it looks looic they re doing pretty fine without us. chevron, $10.5 billion, conoco phillips, $4.9 billion. that s not revenue. that s profit! okay? now, how about them giving back to us. are they giving us any taxes? exxon mobile in 2009 got back $156 million from the u.s. government. they paid nothing. they got $156 million back. chevron got $19 million back. but you think well, okay, 245 must have been their tax no. to other country, exxon paid $15.2 billion in taxes and chevron paid $7.8 billion. you know that means? yeah, they pay taxes. they just don t pay it to us. they don t give us the royalties, they don t give us the taxes. the whole thing is outrageous. whether you re a conservative or a liberal, it shouldn t matter. why would you want our money going to the most profitable companies in the world? it s basically a bailout for big oil. it makes no sense. now luckily, there s some people in congress fighting back on this. with me now is democratic congressman ed markey of massachusetts. great pleasure to have you on. seems like a lovely bill you put together. soo so i you know, some people have to be incredulous about this. are you saying if we re drilling in the gulf of mexico, the united states taxpayer drill, baby, bill, baby, drill, we get zero dollars for that? that s right. because of a glitch in leases put out thereto in the late 1990s, bp and other huge multinational oil companies are drilling for free. they don t pay the american people anything to drill in public waters for the oil, which is owned by the american people. so what my amendment will do is to remove that loophole because, oil companies who are making $100 a barrel don t need tax breaks or loopholes to make sure they make the $100 billion a year, which they made last year, and the $1 trillion which they made over the last ten years. we have republicans telling me every day, hey, we have to drill over here so we can have the oil. but you re saying we re not getting a dime for that oil. and bp is a foreign company, and then okay, do i have this right? bp can then sell it to anyone in the world, the oil they got from our gulf of mexico and they don t have to sell it back to the u.s. at cheap prices or anything like that. is that right. there s no requirement at all. all they have to do is drill for the oil, sell it, make a profit and they don t have to give anything back to the american people at all. we re making cuts to the american broadcasting system, but the republicans don t have to put out any cuts to the oil. we have to reduce the size of the federal deficit, but we have to be smart about it. who doesn t need a subsidy? you don t have to subsidize oil companies to drill for oil any more than you would have to subsidize a bird to fly or a fish to swim. they re already making so many profits that they don t need an extra $50 billion from the american tax payer. so i want the viewers to understand, the next time you hear drill, baby, drill, or anything about drilling in the u.s., we don t get any of it. we don t get any of it, right? well, for certain leases, y e. yes that are out in the gulf of mexico. it s about $50 billion that the tax pair will not get back. and there are another set of tax breaks that give the industry $43 billion in breaks that are 100 years old at their oldest, and at $100 a barrel, why are we providing tax breaks for the oil industry when people are being tipped upside down at the gas pump, having money shaken out of their pockets to give to the oil companies for their profits right now. congressman markey, here s the last point. this has got to be the easiest bill in the world to pass. give me names, name names. who s holding this up? i m telling you what, we will have the vote sometime in the next 24 hour, and then i will have the list of names and you will know who believes the oil industry, while they re reporting record profits still believe that they need american taxpayers money as they re cutting the programs for the poorest people in our society. free lunches for the oil industry they say? okay. free lunch for grandma. uh-uh. that s an extravagance the federal government cannot afford. we re going to have a vote on that in the next 24 mourps. hours. i m going to be very curious which of the so-called conservatives are going to vote for bailouts for the oil companies. hailey barbour is under criticism for race. and this senator has a jobs plan. but wait until you hear it. watch out, kids. that s next. oceanographer: diving to 4,000 meters. - boy: go down! down. down. - boy #2: whoa. straight, go straight. no, to the right! kids: to the right! to the right! go to the right! boy: go to the right! - boy #1: whoa! - boy #2: whoa! boy #3: what is that? well, that s a. i don t know. whoa. can we call him blinky? - announcer: expert teaching. - kids: whoa! deeper learning. together, we are the human network. cisco. until the combination of three good probiotics in phillips colon health defended against the bad gas, diarrhea and constipation. .and? it helped balance her colon. oh, now that s the best part. i love your work. 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[ male announcer ] just like you, business pro. just like you. go national. go like a pro. it s the battle of the micheles, michele bachmann versus michelle obama. over breast pumps. obama wants to offer tax breaks. you would think bachmann would be for that, wouldn t you? uh-uh h. for the left, government is the answer to every problem. to think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump for my babies? i mean, you want to talk about the nanny state. literally. new definition of the nanny. hard left? okay. now look, if you re breast feeding, though, wouldn t you not need a nanny? this would be the exact opposite. it would be nanny-free state. i m trying to play logic with bachmann wheer, which is a terrible idea. she would probably say whatever, dude. it s socialism, i tell you, socialism. then she took some time-out to make one more mistake. can you imagine if laura bush was doing that? out for this legislation? i think the media would have been after her. yeah, i can imagine that pretty easily since laura bush did try to pass the legislation called the ready to read, ready to learn education initiative. by the way, she also was a major advocate of no child left behind. if she was a democrat, bachmann would say look at the nanny state with that is all their teachers trying to get our students to read and learn. socialists! hard left. but bachmann better watch out, okay? because she s got to compete with a new person in town. it s missouri state lawmaker, and she s trying to out tea party the tea party leader. she wants to get rid of her state s child labor law, saying they intrude on parents rights. she has introduced a bill, eliminating the prohibition on employment of children under the age of 14. what s more, it would allow them to work all hours of the day. fun for everybody! oh, the good old days of child exploitation. do you remember these lovely days? when we had the kids working at the factories for 10, 12, 15, fie sometimes 18 hours. good, old conservative america. i literally cannot believe they introduced this bill. it s stunning. now, speaking of stunning, mississippi governor haley barbour is having a hard time shaking the old white southern republican. here s mr. barbour s plan. i don t go around denouncing peel. that s not my plan. i don t even denounce the news media. wow, aren t you merciful? but it s not true he doesn t denounce people. he was forced to denounce segregationist white citizens council after he said they were just great because they kept the kkk out of town. now, after an uproar, he released a statement calling them indefensible. but denouncing people who want to honor the kkk founder is too much. oh, i can t denounce the people trying to support him. and by the way, ironically, this is from the party who thought denouncing reverend wright was the most important thing in the 2008 election. all right, now for fun times at the united nations. the foreign nister of india got up to give a speech. he started reading what was put out on the podium, which turned out to be the speech for portugal. so the indian foreign minister is giving a shoutout to the portuguese speaking nations of the crowd. then he started praising the cooperation between the u.n. and european union. india is not in the european union. he s going on for three minutes when the indian ambassador went up to him and said you re a little pitchy and i think you ve got the wrong speech. the foreign minister s response was, does that mean i have to start all over? yeah, dude. you just read three minutes of portugal s speech. you ve got to start with india. then he started all over. at least it s not just our u.n. ambassadors like john bolton that are embarrassing anymore. now, bernie madoff said the banks had to have known about his scheme. no, the banks wouldn t do a thing like that. they would be, of course, totally honest with their customers. matt taibbi with how the feds protect the banks. ready sensei. hey tough guy, that cold needs alka-seltzer plus! it has the cold-fighting power of an effervescent packed in a liquid-gel for all over relief! hiyah! dude! hiyah! funny how nature just knows how to make things that are good for you. new v8 v-fusion + tea. one combined serving of vegetables and fruit with the goodness of green tea and powerful antioxidants. refreshingly good. welcome back to the show. you ready for more? now, here s a question. why isn t wall street in jail? it ses a question i love. also the title of a great new article in rolling stone. matt taibbi started looking into it. an investigator gave him this spoiler alert. quote, everything is f d up and nobody goes to jail. that s the whole story right there. now, that turns out to be slightly inaccurate. one guy did got to jail. he name is bernie madoff. he s serving a 150-year prison sentence. but he said in a jailhouse interview released today in the new york times, quote, the banks had to know, but the attitude was sort of, if you re doing something wrong, we don t want to know. and that gets it exactly right. they didn t want to know. they re making money hand over fist. who wants to find out? by the way, you know why may dolphin went to jail when no one else did? he stole from the rich. that was stupid. if you steal from the average guy, you get away with it. dick fuld was running lehman brothers and it imploded. you know what he walked away with? $529 million. he s suspected of hiding compensation to make it appear that he got less and he s also suspected of lying about his compensation to congress. what kind of charges did he get? none. how about punishment? squat. now, let s go to joe cassano. he worked for aig financial products. and that wey crashed fantastica. largely because of joe cassano. he got $280 million. he said his derivatives wouldn t lose a single dollar in the market. oh, he also faced no charges. how about punishment? zilcho. who could have seen that happen. how about john mack? the current chairman of the board of morgan stanley. he was investigated in 2005 for allegedly giving out insider information. s which may have resulted in a quid pro quo deal worth $10 million to him personally. he also faced no charges and no punishment. the way that went down is a perfect illustration of everything that s wrong with our financial system and why they get away with all this. gary aguirre was an sec investigator who smelled something fishy. he was the good guy, trying to do the right thing. what happened to gary? well, he went to his bosses. they were paul berger, the sec director of enforcement. oh, he got fired. he went to his boss with the guy we just told you about. are you sitting down? his boss is now the boss at morgan stanley. lynn thompson was another boss of gary. now she s a lawyer representing wall street firms. weird. didn t see that coming. now, here s the external force to make sure there was no investigation. mary joe white, an attorney representing morgan stanley. guess where she was before that? she was the u.s. attorney in new york. the top cop on wall street. and of course, there was gary lynch. before that, he was the sec s director of enforcement. do you see what s happening here, guys? it s called a revolving door. they re waiting for the payout. are you going to investigate the gier w guy who might give you millions of dollars in your next job? if you re a real good guy like gary, guess what happens? boom, fired. gone. everyone else gets paid and the good guy gets fired. now you see how they get away with it? matt taibbi wrote the article. it appears in the new issue of rolling stone. it s fascinating. i ve got a lot of guys who i went to school with who are part of the circuit. if you fetell them what you tel them or i tell them they say come on, you re being totally unfair. they re just good guys trying to do their job? no, we re not being unfair. in this country, the reality is if you go out and sell a dime bag on the street and a cop sees you, there s a chance you will actually go to jail and do real jail time. but insider trading, fraud on a massive scale, stealing billions of dollars, putting millions of people into foreclosure, defrauding thousands of janitors and cops out of their pensions, nobody is going to jail for this stuff. it s a class issue. these guys do not go to issue. madoff was the only person in the entire financial crisis who s doing time. it s an incredible situation. it s really, really dangerous thing for this country. they said i use bad judgment. my bad, dog. i lost a couple billion dollar, but there s nothing criminal here. no. look, all of these banks oen a larger level were complicit in a sort of general fraud scheme, a enthat fra and that fraud sc to sell toxic mortgage-backed securities as aaa-rated investments. during the mortgage boom, they were essentially selling worthless crap as aaa-rated investments. and they were selling it to people like pension funds. that s why your pension has decreased in value. that s security fraud. all these banks were complicit in. but at another level, they were also involved in basically every kind of crime you could have in the financial services market. insider trading, they were widing billions of dollars in losses. a lot of these banks were involved in enron-esque schemes to hide losses. again, fraud. you know, insider trading, all of that stuff was going on. and nobody got prosecuted for it. . at the banks, were there e-mails saying hey, we know this stuff is toxic or we know it s not going to work or we know it s junk? yeah, absolutely. a great example is the bear stearns hedge fund blew up. this was the one case that went to trial. blowing up of this fund is what caused bear staerns to go out of business. but they had e-mails saying look, we are never going to make money on this stuff. and then a few days later, they were out saying publicly, this isn t a disaster, it s all going to be fine. that s just straight up fraud when they do that. that s what a wall street crime looks like and they weren t convicted for it. then you ve got goldman sachs e-mails. why are they doing it, right? it seems like that s going to sink your company. it sunk aig, sunk lehman brothers. why do it anyway? the system of incentives on wall street has been completely perverted. it doesn t matter they don t care if they blow up their companies. they don t care if we have to end up having to bail them out. they get their bonuses anyway. even the ones who are in to disgrace now, guys like joe cassano who helped blow up aig, he lost he made $280 million and he s keeping all that money. it doesn t matter how irresponsible or how wrong you are, the incentives are there for these guys to do all this stuff because they never have to pay in the end. the taxpayers had to pay every dime of that $280 million eventually when aig went under. it s crazy. why don t they prosecute? well, i think the key issue mere is the revolving door. every source i talked to researching this story pointed out the same thing. all these guys the two main cops in the sec, the u.s. attorney here in new york, if you re one of the top investigators in the sec or the u.s. attorneys office, when you leave those offices, there s a partnership waiting for you at one of these big corporate defense firms. and they re worth millions of dollars a year. they re all the ekwi lent of all college basketball players waiting for their first nba deal. it s an enormous amount of money. it s a merry-go-round of lawyers who all know each other. they re all on a first-name basis with each other. you have a situation like aguirre, he s trying to investigate morgan stanley, and morgan stanley s lawyers are going five levels above his head. they re talking to his boss s boss s boss while he s trying to prosecute this case. it s implicit saying hey, if you re good, you re a team player, we have a job at morgan stanley waiting for you with millions of dollars. or the law firm working with morgan stanley. great piece, matt. really appreciate your time tonight. all right, now this navy vet says his constitutional rights were trampled when religion ripped him away from his kids. but he s a step closer to justice today. chronologically i m sixty years old. is it the new forty, i don t know. i probably feel about thirty. how is it that we don t act our age? [ marcie ] you keep us young. [ kurt ] we were having too much fun we weren t thinking about a will at that time. we have responsibilities to the kids and ourselves. we re the vargos and we created our wills on legalzoom. finally. [ laughter ] [ shapiro ] we created legalzoom to help you take care of the ones you love. go to legalzoom.com today and complete your will in minutes. at legalzoom.com we put the law on your side. the unlikely birthplace of a fundamental idea. it s where ethel percy andrus found a retired teacher living because she could afford nothing else. ethel couldn t ignore the clear need for health and financial security. and it inspired her to found aarp. for over 50 years, we ve continued that work, to help all americans pursue their best life. discover more of what we do, for every generation at aarp.org. sometimes it s hard to find voices you can trust in politics. that s why this next story is such welcome news. justin bieber has stone out about his political views. oh, thank god. this is what america has been waiting for. now here s what he had to say about health care, quote, you guys are evil. canada s the best country in the world. we go to the doctor and we don t need to worry about paying him. but here, your whole life, you re broke because of medical bills. that s actually not that bad. it s astute. canadians pay for health care through taxes but their system is ranked higher than ours and they don t have to worry about going bankrupt over medical bills. don t get too excited. this is what he says about abortion. i don t really agree with abortion. it s like killing a baby. but you do have to give it to him. he s bipartisan. this is what he has to say about the two parties. i m not sure about the parties. 4 but whatever they have in korea, that s bad. very astute again. i think he s talking about north korea, and i agree with him. i m back to voting for him for president. but he s canadian, so it s back to the drawing board. 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[ male announcer ] not all steel is created equal. not all manufacturing processes are created equal. not all engineering standards are created equal. which is why not all luxury vehicles are created equal. the hard way means never taking short cuts. the hard way is how lexus inspires absolute confidence. this is the pursuit of perfection. see what it takes at lexus.com/thehardway. this is the pursuit of perfection. but you can still refinance to a fixed rate as low as 4.5% at lendingtree.com, where customers save an average of $293 a month. call lendingtree today. introducing honey bunches of oats, raisin medley. there s nothing like it! the only cereal with 1, 2, 3 kinds of raisins and crunchy multigrain flakes. you gotta try new honey bunches of oats raisin medley. stiemts when you fights back, turns out sometimes you can win. a father in inn got a raw deal in a custody bat. he shared 50-50 custody with his ex-wife for four years. in the fall, that was reduced to only four hours a week and he wanted to know why. why did that happen? well, it turns out. he found out the judge ruled that, quote, the father did not participate in the same religious training as the mother. father was agnostic. which apparently was unacceptable to the judge. the rules also stated, quote, when the father considered himself a christian, the parties were able to communicate relatively effectively. now, of course, that s a weak excuse for discriminating against him. i had him on msnbc october 29 of last year to talk about this. have you made any demands for your beliefs? i mean, isn t this isn t this a giant constitutionalish now? don t you have the exact same rights as your wife? yes. yes, and i have filed to stand up for the equal rights for religious freedom that we have in this nation. and guess what, that fight, it actually worked. the indiana court of appeals has restored his rights pending a decision in the case. let s find out how it happened. craig, first of all, how sure are you that this was because you were agnostic? well, you saw the court order. after looking through everything, it just, there doesn t seem to be much left to explain, other than the fact that he decided to point out my religious preference twice in the court order with nothing else really to substantiate a change for the children. which would be needed based on indiana code to change a previous custodial agreement. right. what are the different things you did to try to get custody of your kids on a 50-50 basis. we got the appeal filed and we re still going through that process. obviously we put in the motion to stay, which is what s been granted by the appeals court now. and we did the protest. i ve been just filing motions to try to preserve what little rights i still had according to the indiana parenting guidelines. and really tried to just keep on top of making sure there was no question, you know, how much i wanted to be involved in my children s life. how did you wind up fighting back? did get any legal help? i had help from an indiana custodial rights advocacy group here. the executive director, named stuart showalter. once this came into the public view, the aclu also of inn here decided to represent me on the state level. and that s who s taking on my case now on the state level. right. so the case isn t over. they ve done a motion to stay, which means you can get custody of your kids as the case goes forward. that obviously has to be a very good sign. now you re back sharing 50-50 of your kids and you get to see them a lot more? that s correct, yes. i got the order yesterday and we re proposing that it begins starting on monday next week. and i will once again have split custody 50-50, half the month and half the decision, and say in what s going on in my children s lives, yes. it s great to see a little bit of justice. we ll see how the case finally concludes, of course. thank you for joining us. really appreciate it. all right, now the president of the tea party fought together today. can you believe that? and they won together. what did they win on and how did they do it? that s next. 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[ male announcer ] just like you, business pro. just like you. go national. go like a pro. that s not how successful investing is done. at e-trade it s harnessing some of the most powerful yet easy to use trading tools on the planet to help diversify, identify opportunities, take action. it s using professional grade research and your brain to seek maximum returns to reach your goals. it s investing with intelligence and cold hard conviction. you made the money. you should have everything you need to invest it. e-trade. investing unleashed. the battle over the f-35 fighter jet has been raging for months now. now, why is this important? one, it s expensive. but second, it s symbolic. can we cut wasteful spending when every reasonable person in the country says we should. look, even the pentagon doesn t want it. our defense secretary robert gates spoke out about it this week. the president and i, as well as the department s senior military leadership have expressed our opposition to continuing this costly program. we consider it an unnecessary and extravagant expense, particularly during this period of fiscal contraction. i mean, isn t this crazy? the pentagon says don t give me the plane. but some people want to give it to them. obama s budget said we ve got to get rid of this alternate engine. who was fighting back? john boehner. and eric cantor, also in favor. you want to know why? boehner s district is just outside of the main ge plant where the alternate engine is built. full disclosure, ge is one of our parent companies. but apparently that isn t stopping me, so here you go. eric cantor s district also includes a rolls royce plant. that s another company that works on this engine. it was lost today. 233 to 198. that s 110 rep