Transcripts For WMAR This Week 20100613 : vimarsana.com

polit politics, george will, donna brazile, tom davis and robert reich. and as always, the sunday funnies. $82 billion lost. god. it would be such a tragedy if any pel cans owned bp stock. and joining me now, house majority leader steny hoyer and rp house minority leader john boehn boehner. thanks for joining me. thank you. you got leader last night from president obama requesting $50 billion for emergency spending for state and local governments. you said there s spending fatigue on capitol hill. can you get this passed? i think it s accurate. people are concerned about the debt level, and we are as well. clearly, you can not not continue to stimulate an economy that is still struggling to get out of the deep ditch that we found it in, about 18 months ago. what the president is saying, is we need to expend additional dollars to make sure that we don t have significant layoffs in the next few months, which will again depress the economy. so that i understand what he s saying. i have asked the white house to look at the package that the recovery and reinvestment act that we passed, approximately 800-plus billion dollars. there are clearly funds in there that have not been expended to see whether or not there are some available for this more immediate priority, than some that may not be quite as. h p leader boehner, the president said in his letter, if this does not pass there s a risk the economy will slide back in recession. do you agree? i m concerned about tplight f teachers fireman, and police. that face the possibility they may be laid off. to send the letter with no opportunity to cut spending elsewhere is a little different. steny and i and other leaders were at the white house on thursday and this subject never came up. there was no indication this was going to happen. i m asking myself why is this happening on saturday night. the fact is that the spending spree in washington is continuing to run unabated. the american people are screaming at the top of their lungs, stop. and to move this, without finding other offsets in spending, i think is irresponsible. it s putting more debt on the backs of our kids and grandkids. it really begs, question, why don t we have a budget this year. we ve not the house has failed. not failed, in the modern era, to move a budget. and this appears to be a first time, in the modern era, that the house even considered a budget. i want to say, the theory is that you don t want to make vulnerable democrats vote for another spending bill, and that s why, for the first time since 1974 there isn t going to be a house budget. is that not true? whatever the theory may be, jake, the fact of the matter is, my friend, mr. boehner, voted for $2 trillion during the bush administration of unfunded spending. he said this cascade of spending you should be this should be offset with spending cuts? i hope we could do that. however, i said money already appropriated in the recovery and reinvestment act has not been spent, could be spent on these priority items. no one wants to see 300,000 teachers fire or police laid off. it s not good fort communities or the children. it s critically important spending. we ll work on getting that. i personally believe if we have dollars not expended in the recovery act, we can apply to this immediate need, and then look to later expenditures in the long term for investments. i think we ought to do that. we can t stimulate and oh press at the same time. every family knows that in a tough time, it s more important to have a budget, not less. if you think they re going to move a budget on capitol hill, you must obviously believe that elvis is still alive. i would like to move on to another topic other than as you know, the republicans didn t have a budget in 02, 04, 06. the house never failed to pass a budget in the modern era. the american public had no idea about that. the spending bills, to get the economy going and we re doing that. a letter this week, with 100 economists, signed a letter saying, cutting spending now will in fact help get the economy moving to get jobs back. in terms of getting things moving again. i would like to move to a different topic the president, we ve adopted statutory pay. which they jettisoned. you ignored it the president sent in a freeze in spending, and he established a commission to look at long-term spending control. all of that is positive movement. let s move on got it. let s move on to the oil spill, because i want to get your reaction, on tuesday. the bp chief operating officer p-doug subtles told the associated press that the flow should decrease to a relative trickle by monday or tuesday. by tomorrow or the day after that. doug su sutles said that. i don t know what relative anything is when it comes to the oil spill. it s only trickling. i want to know as leaders of respective parties on capitol hill, are you finding it tough to believe anything these guys from bp have to say anymore? certainly bp has not been accurate in its representations. it has been mislead anything the representations. what happened is outrageous, and american public are correctly, very, very angry. and the administration has been marshaling every aspect available to work on this problem. i hope he s right. american public hopes he s right. i don t know what a trickle is, but certainly a very, very substantial reduction. bp said they can handle 250,000 barrel spill. they weren t able to handle what they said was a initially, a 5,000 what then went to 20 or 25. now we think is a much greater spill than that. steny, guess what? i agree wholeheartedly with you. the american people want this oil leak stopped now. they want to know what happened. they want the gulf cleaned up. and they want it all done now. and i just think that bp ought to be held responsible for all of the costs that are involved in this. i said that right from the beginning. and i continue to believe that. i m not sure that the fellow government, though, was isn t also responsible, the laws were in place, the of materials that should have been in place for a spill this size, were not. and the reaction, i think, on the part of the administration has been slow. but having said that, it s time to get this thing stopped now. all right. so to clear up what you said earlier this week, on thursday, you said that the bp and federal government should take full responsibility. to clarify that, you think bp needs to pay? i said from the beginning, bp needs to pay for the entire cost of this. but the federal government, this is a failure of government. government is there to protect our shore, protect our environment. and there s been a real failure here. we ve been asking for 55 days. where is the inspection reports from this rig. the administration won t give them to us. democrats are pushing themselves to lift the liabilities. right now at 75 million. democrats pushing to lift the liability camp. do you support that? i believe lifting the liability cap on bp and for this bill is appropriate. i have concerned to lift them entirely for bp? absolutely. they should be held responsible for every dime in this cost. let me say a few words. first of all republicans holding up lifting the cap from the senate, 75 million, and as we see, to 10 billion. secondly, i think john boehner is right in this respect. the psychology of neglect, in terms of regulatory oversight, pursued in the bush administration. banking failure h-insurance prices going way up. oil companies thinking they can do whatever they wanted, because the drill, baby, drill crowd, all they wanted them to do was to drill. i think john s right. i think the regulatory psychology of the last administration was not appropriate and there was mistakes made in this administration as well. how long are you going to blight the bush administration. what s go on at mss as long as they re responsible, the economy or lack of oversight, john, inge going to do that. someone in washington going to take responsibility for what they are in charge of? i want to move on the administration has done that. i want to move on to foreign pole questions. there was a poll recently indicating that the american people rate the federal response to this oil spill as worse than federal response than katrina. 69% negative to the oil spill. 62% neg for katrina. do you rate this negative or positive? the american public is angry, rightfully so. bp is on site. the folk whose own the rig, hall burton, who constructed the piping, the concrete down there. they are responsible, the federal government was, immediately upon this incident, immediately. the coast guard was on site, unfortunately, tragically, we lost 11 lives but saved over 100 lives. onsite. thad allen, the admiral immediately put in charge 17,50 anational guard troops on duty right now. there s been a vast response here. a natural disaster came along, in katrina. and frankly, there were months before there was adequate response. leader boehner, attorney to israel, a member of your leadership team. congressman said this on thursday. remarkably yesterday, the president said it was time for israel to sharply limit its effective blockade in gaza saying the situation is unsustainable. the truth is, mr. president, your policy in israel is unsustainable. the american people are on the side of israel and israel s right to defend herself. mr. president, whose side are you on? mr. boehner, expressing concern about the crisis in gaza being the same thing as anti-israel? i think the israelis have a clear right to defend themselves. flook at this flotilla that came over, the first five ships that were expected. there was no problem at all. it s pretty clear to many of us who looked into this, that this last ship was intended to be a problem, intended to cause a conflict, and this was part of a much bigger problem that we see with the administration. where we ve we ve coddled our enemy, and pushed our friends aside in the process. they are raising a lot of doubts around the world, including the people of israel who are having serious doubts about our commitment to them, our closest ally in the middle east. i think one of the things when you hear mr. boehner, this is not a partisan difference. mr. boehner and i had a colloquy thursday, john know, i strongly support israel s actions. but they told these folks, come here, you re not going to break the blockade. because hamas, terrorist organization continues to attack civilian, men, women and children in israel and it is appropriate to have a blockade to make sure they doesn t get the weapons or other materials to affect those kinds of attacks which are criminal, which are terrorist acts. i think they did exactly the right thing in stopping that. and in fact, in my view, the sixth ship as john pointed out. we agree on this. five ships were stopped without incident. this sixth ship was stopped. there s some reason to believe that s exactly what they intended to do. al jazeera television showed attack on the boarding party, and they responded in self-defense. turkey knew if these ships came it would be a problem and israelis offered to allow those ships to be offloaded in the israelly port and all of the mu man tar yan gear goes into gaza. that s the appropriate thing to do. we have only one minute left. literally one minute left. history says we ll lose a few seats but retain the house. our goal is to take the majority of the house. not your goal, prediction. predict. you said 100 seats? can you do it? we have a real shot of winning the majority. so we can put a check on this administration and all of the spending out of control here in washington, d.c. jake, they said that about mark cryst. he won by eight points. thanks for joining us. the tragedy in the gulf sparked a debate over energy policy. this week a group of high-powered executives said not enough is fweeing said to develop alternative energy. in a new report. bill gates are calling for more than a tripling of spending on research in government $16 billion a year and new board to oversea energy strategy. earlier i smoke with microsoft co-founder and chairman, bill gates. mr. gates, thanks for joining us. great to be here. obviously your oil spill in the gulf makes your proposal for $11 billion all of the more relevant, but i m wondering, some are criticizing the president s handling of the federal response to this bill by saying he doesn t have executive experience, that s why he hasn t been able to really get the federal bureaucracy moving the way it needs to. as a former ceo. do you think there s anything to that at all? any crisis like this. the key thing is to avoid them happening in the future. i m not an expert on oil recovery. bp is trying to minimize the damage here in a very complex situation. how do we get energy infrastructure that is this fragile? we have a supply chain where we send a billion dollars a year overseas, and you can imagine there will be disruptions when there have been in the past. we ve said now let s put a solution in place, but in fact, the only real solution is to take american ingenuity and fund r&d to get energy in different forms, that we re not sending as much money away and it s stable and reliable. let s talk about that. obviously, your proposal for $11 billion in additional spending for energy innovation. there s not a huge appetite right now among the american people for more spending with the record deficits that we have. forgetting the merits of your proposal for a second, how politically feasible is it? well, i would distinguish between spending, and investment. what we re talking about is about 1% of what the united states spends on energy, being devoted to r&d. so if you find a way out of the energy second sector to raise that 1% which is not a huge increase in the cost there. then you can tap into the unique ability in this country, through universities, national labs, entrepreneurs to give a form of energy that is both cheaper, not dependent on foreign supply, and is environmentally designed so that we re not emitting carbon and getting into the climate change problem. the only way you get those things is through the break through, and i m optimistic we re there, but we re not making the investment. today we spend only about 4 billion on energy r&d, compared to 30 billion on health, 80 billion on defense. that s your pintch. how receptive have you found lawmakers? there s obviously a tight budget. and it would be tough to say that this money should come from existing categories. the question is, can the energy sector, finance its own revolution, and create these great r&d jobs here in america? what s the risk if president obama in congress and the american people don t do this? the problem i run into is that we ll have more crises, like the oil spill, and we ll have supply disruption. we ll start to see more and more effects of the climate problem. the costs will go up, because you re looking for oil, in harder and harder places. you ll just be paying more and more. it s an implicit tax. if you don t innovate, it s this gigantic cost we ll be paying. some experts believe the only way to spur innovation and investment in alternative forms of energy, is disquaid american people and enterprise from using oil and gasoline. do you think a gas tax is necessary? that s not specifically necessary. you need some source of funding for this r&d. you take some parts of the energy sector and raise the money there. if you want people to switch, there s two ways to do it. one is to invent something that s lower cost. the other is to raise the cost of the thing that s forcing us to fund the military, or creating climate problems and help the new technology. the bulk of what s missing right now, that will force us, at some point to go for a very expensive alternative, is this r&d piece isn t getting done? why do you think that the innovation and technology that s part of the oil industry hasn t advanced enough in the last 30 years to plug this whole in the gulf. they re using basically the same technology they used 20 30rks years ago? why hasn t that advanced? certainly in retrospect, they need to invest more in the deep sea operation. deep sea operation is fairly complicated in terms of pressures and temperatures. obviously, now they re seeing the cost of not doing that. that will be reinforced in a lot of ways. you re going to get oil in very hard places. with other energy sources over time, you wouldn t have to try that hard. you wouldn t have to bring most of it out of them at least where the chance of something disrupting that, is very measurably. and we re not setting ourselves up to get rid of that over time. so tell us what areas you re looking at? the idea of the counsecil s report, you don t pick and say hydrogen or fuel cells but you get behind all those things and create metrics. in the solar area alone there s so many different approach. solar chemicals, solar electric. many different scientists. that s the beauty of america. you have hundreds of teams pursuing those things. and as they meet milestones, they can get more funding. the economic recovery has been slow, and relatively jobless, what do you think president obama needs to do? well, the president can t just pull the levers and make the economy take off. the right of urgency steps were taken. do you support the stimulus and t.a.r.p. program? i don t think i need to get into the particulars. it s easy looking back to say okay. could have been this or that. the incredible measures needed to be taken to make sure there wasn t a collapse, both in terms of stabilizing the financial system and priming the pump of the economy, because it had been slowed down so much. and now, we re seeing the benefits that those things have been done. now, this is an international problem, and so everybody s status coming in, you know, are those governments overspending, our own government looking at when do you cut back? it s a tricky thing. because almost everybody agrees, we need to keep spending up, not take all country deficits to zero right away. but over time, you have to move in that direction. getting the timing right on this, is a very tough challenge. do you think there s another stimulus to keep spending up? in terms of the u.s. in particular, lots of people have views, plus and minus on that, in terms of, if you did a smaller stimulus, where exactly would you target. 16 million for energy r&d. that s a type of stimulus. creating jobs and nice investment in the future. you get a two-fer like that. that feels particularly attractive that you can do that. do you think health care legislation will do enough to contain costs and control the deficit? the health care bill broadened coverage and there s a lot of beyond that. do you think it s going to contain in terms of cost containment, that step alone, in my view, is at most, the start of how we look at, not letting medical cost costs continue to go up. it creates the dilemma that if the government is funding those costs and you feel your tagsation levels hilt a limit. what are you taking the money away from? not taking it away from social security. it s a tough problem. if we could innovate to reduce those increase in costs that would be great. i think there s a lot of work to be done there. people, in some respects, are maybe tired of hearing about health care, but in terms of really reducing the cost, no, the years ahead, that s going to a lot of experts and politicians are going to have to think about how that is achieved. last month, apple passed microsoft in market capitalization, making a marked moment where microsoft lost its status as the highest tech company in the world. why does this happen and do you have confidence in steve vollmer? microsoft is doing a lot of great stuff. the opportunities are phenomenal. the way people think about tvs, about reading, about learning. software is going to revolutionize that. our company, and our stock has gone up, it s gone down. and, you know, we ve been the most valuable. not the most valuable. that will change again and again and again. there s room for one company to succeed in the industry. i happen to like the things that steve s doing. it s not my full-time work, but as a board member, i see a lot of great things going on. bill gates, thanks so much for joining us. the roundtable is next with george will, donna brazile, robert reich and tom davis and later the sunday funnies. helen is retiring. i ll be the first to say mazal tov. first resets everything. first moves us forward fast. we all want first. first isn t later. it s now. what will you do first with evo, the first 4g phone? only from sprint, the now network. deaf, hard-of-hearing and people with speech disabilities access www.sprintrelay.com. to chart a greener path in the air. and in our factories. to find cleaner, more efficient ways to power flight. and harness our technology. for new energy solutions. around the globe, the people of boeing are working together, to build a better tomorrow. that s why we re here. that s why the gulf spill is a tragedy that never should have happened. i m tony hayward. bp has taken full responsibility for cleaning up the spill in the gulf. we ve helped organize the largest environmental response in this country s history. more than 2 million feet of boom, 30 planes, and over 1,300 boats are working to protect the shoreline. where oil reaches the shore, thousands of people are ready to clean it up. we will honor all legitimate claims, and our clean-up efforts will not come at any cost to taxpayers. to those affected and your families, i m deeply sorry. the gulf is home for thousands of bp employees and we all feel the impact. to all the volunteers and for the strong support of the government, thank you. we know it is our responsibility to keep you informed and do everything we can so this never happens again. we will get this done. we will make this right. ies put me in a fog. now i m claritin clear. claritin works hard to relieve my worst symptoms without drowsiness. .so i stay as alert and focused as someone without allergies. for me, claritin is the perfect allergy medicine. i only live claritin clear announcer: this is a baby. a baby generating data in a neo-natal ward. every heart beat, every breath, every anomaly. from over a thousand pieces of unique information per second. helping doctors find new ways to detect life threatening infections up to 24 hours sooner. on a smarter planet. analyze the data and you can predict what will happen faster. so you can do what they re doing in toronto. and build a smarter hospital. let s build a smarter planet. coming up next, the roundtable and the sunday funnies. the democratic senate nominee of south carolina, alvin green, is a mystery man. we should be pro-south carolina rather than antigreene, speak of me. where did you get the ten grand? my own personal money. where did he come from and how did he win? how do you think the people who voted for you on tuesday knew who you were or even that were you running? you know, i think that they saw i think because they you know, i just think that they recognized i think they heard of my name. this is for real. yes, i am for real. the quizzical stylings of al greene, democratic candidate in south carolina. we ll get to it in a minute. with george will, tom davis from the university of california at berkeley, robert reich, former clinton labor secretary. and democratic strat judge donna brazile. thanks for being here. the fallout from the oil spill became transatlantic. look at head lines, obama killing all our pensions, cameron fames to back bp in fight with obama. back off obama. this is how the british press is treating the disaster. bp the biggest company in the uk. do they have a point? sure they do. this is a reminder to americans of all time. when they attack wall street and big business, they are attacking the people who support their pension funds. i don t know how many americans depend also on bp, but a lot of them do. it s an internationally traded stock. when you turn on the company, the liability of which is unclear at this point, but congress, according to the interview that you just condu conducted, is thinking of passing something that looks like a bill of retainer. which is single out punishment and legislation of a particular corporation. this will ripple through people s 401(k)s and elsewhere. when you were in congress, you were the head of the national congressional committee. you were focused on the mood of the public, what did this oil spill do to the mood of the public? it hadds the narrative, government, wall street, bp, the anger out there, i think is greater than we ve seen in at least a generation. and this adds to the narrative government, siting there powerless, just making speeches. professor reich. on wednesday when president obama and other white house officials meet with bp executives, do you like that i called you professor? you re smiling. when he meets with bp executives one of the things he pushes for is an escrow account for bp to put money in. and a third party will give out to people whose lives will be impacted by the spill. where do you see this headed? well, look, jake, bp does not have unlimited resources. it has a lot. but inefitiably, there will be a clash, the cost of clean-up, the cost of containing the oil spill damage. cost of plugging that hole will be in the tens of billions of dollars. how much is born by the american tax payer and how much by bp. but the present spectacle of the coast guard, asking bp to speed up this clean-up, is absurd. the federal government needs to be this charge. the president needs to be in charge of this. use bp s expertise, use bp s resources but the president must be in charge of all of this, otherwise, he looks like he s just standing on the sidelines. the administration has been constrained by the oil pollution act of 1990 which gives responsibility for the lead role in trying to not only fix the problem but contain the problem. that s been a problem from day one. they ve waited for bp to come up with the answers and we know bp continues to mislead people. i don t have any sam paththy. i probably have stock in bp because i have mutual funds. let me tell the people of great britain, this is not personal. this is not national identity. this is about a big region of our country that now has to deal with oil spills that will go on for years and years and years, threatening the livelihood of human being, marine life, sea life and a way of life for people who make that their homes. 14 million americans. when it comes to sympathy, anger, love. go down to the gulf coast. because we have all of it. we re angry. tomorrow, the bp directors will meet, i hope they hold that money in escrow. dividend money? absolutely. they make 6.8 billion in profit as of march 31st. holding escrows until investigation is completed. while they are at it. processes claims. people are wait anything line, in st. bernard parish for food, because they cannot go out and fish. they can t hunt, so they can t feed their family, they can t pay their mortgage. i have a lot of anger. go beyond escrow, go to temporary receivership. you think obama administration should take care control of bp or bp america? bp america. this is going to get larger and larger and the president looks like he s waiting on the sidelines. but secondly, we have no way of knowing, as american people, that bp is actually telling the truth, that all of its resources are being put to the appropriate use, and that it is appropriately balancing the health and safety of americans against the cost of doing this cleanup. this is a for-profit organization, bp, that s answerable to its shareholders, not to the american people. president obama is going down to the gulf, alabama, mississippi and florida tomorrow. and when he gets back, he s going to give an address to the nation from the white house tuesday at 8:00. last time he went down. his own white house video cameras, caught him talking to residents down there, and this is what he had to say. dive down there and flood the whole i can t suck it up with a straw. all i can do is make sure that i put honest hard work, smart people in place, to implement this thing. congressman, this is the president being confronted with the limits of his own abilities, even though he s been a big proponent of government, ability of government. here he is saying i can t do this, i can t suck up the oil with a straw. this is a dilemma for him. it is. i did katrina. unforgiving storm. even if you did everything right. there s a lot of anger, a lot of disappointed people. you have the same circumstance here. you have to ask yourself. where was mms. this was a dysfunctional hearing. minerals management service? absolutely. i was in congress when we were moving it back and forth. there s more kulpa tilt. it s easy to blame bp, put it all on them. but i think the thorough investigation is going to show there was a breakdown all through. george. well, their is a breakdown all through. i don t know why he thought it was a moment to start a criminal investigation of a company that is in charge of this. and bob wants the government to take over on the principle that the government will run another corporation well. i don t understand any of what s go on. the president, i don t know why he s coming back to talk us to. he s been talking about this nonstop for five weeks. some people believe he hasn t said enough, george. this is his fourth visit. what could he possibly say? i do believe he needs to answer some questions that everybody raised about the containment of the current spill. whether or not there are enough federal resources to contain what has been in the gulf to make sure the states have the proper boomers, the skimmers, all of the other resources that they need in order to contain the spill. i think he needs to update us on everything he understands. look, he may be able to split the sea but i don t think he can cap the well and i think it s foolish to think the president can split the sea. it s training his political capital. he needs to address this. there s longer-term issued including moratorium that needs to be addressed. i want to turn the to the other crisis the company is facing. retail sales figures came out. i know you wanted to say something about this. they are down 1 tonight r.2% during the time the economy is recovering. what do you think the significance is? this is very unusual. hopefully this is just an aberration, but we have this on top of 21,000 private jobs created in may. not a lot. no. at this stage of recovery, particularly this deep of a recession, you need a lot of job growth and you need a lot of retail sales growth, that gives american consumers that can t afford it. they are coming out from under huge debt loads, and many of them are still facing the prospect of joblessness. this is why it is so important, given the private sectors and consumers, inability to spend more, for the public sector to spend more, at least in a short term. i mean, the public is not being told, and here s where presidential education is very important, donna. the president is not educating the public, and the public is not being told that there is a huge difference between short-term spending, to stimulate the economy and get the economy going. and dealing with the long-term structural deficitly is mostly about health and medicare. and these are two different animals entirely. all right. i want to move to politics now. you guys can talk more about the economy in the green room segment that we have later. but we had really amazing primaries that happened on tuesday in california especially where you hail from, bob. the fiorina versus boxer race. the former hp chairperson won a nomination. here is carly fiorina s greatest hits while she was wired for sound from a tv interview. saw barbara boxer and said, what everyone say, god, what about that hair? so, yesterday, you didn t forget the hair. forget barbara boxer s hair for a second. there is a possibility that barbara boxer will be so yesterday. she vulnerable. she is vulnerable. i think what we are seeing in california, again, if you look at the history in this country, everything that is good, everything that is bad starts in california. what we see in california is a huge, huge amount of spending. republicans going through the gauntlet of that right wing republican primary, forcing fiorina and whitman to the right. now we re not going to have primaries to kick around or parties from california after this year, because californians, in a flight of just desperation, said we can t stand it anymore. and we re getting rid of parties essentially. tom, you wrote a memo to your successor, at the national republican congressional committee, pete session, outlying the lay of the land, what you think voters are doing right now, what they are thinking right now. what do you tell them? it s clear anger is worse than it was in 1994, 2006 when congress was. that s clear, republicans had a better recruiting year than anybody has in terms of recruiting challengers. that s on the plus side for the republicans. on the down side they had a party branding issue. the voters threw them out in 2006 and 2008. you ask which party is acceptable. neither is but democrats rank slightly higher than republicans. the democrats are prepared for this. they have all of their candidates have over a million dollars in the bank. they ve seen this wave coming. they ve constructed a high sea wall. you don t have the open seas the republicans had in 1994, and the democrats had a 2006. instead of a wind at your back, it s kind of a cross wind if you could be scott brown and get your sail up, and hoist it right, you can ride it into shore but rely on they re the other guys, will not work through. the republicans have to take this anger and translate it in districts across the country. they have a possibility of taking the house back. this is not automatic this. is one of the strange years. voter anger, is deep and all of these things we re talking about add to that narrative. george, what conclusions did you draw in any? how hard to draw national conclusions. in california, barbara boxer, 69 years old. running with jerry brown, 72 years old. it s not a youth movement. but barbara boxer got more votes than carly fiorina and principal combined. even though on the republican side to bring out the vote. in arkansas, right to work state, out of 1.1 million workers, 41,000 are un yons. unions went in and spent $10 million accusing blanche lincoln of being individually subservient. surprise, surprise. she won. starting out 20 points behind her republican opponents. in nevada, harry reid, might, on a good day get to 43% in nevada. hes to figure out in a canny way out to win with 43%. here s how you do it. spend a lot of money taking down your strongest opponent. you pick your opponent. there are six other lines on that ballot, individual candidates, that will disburper the vote. and you can vote like any of these people. in that sense, he may have brought down to 43% the winning total and his threshold of victory. let s talk about that arkansas primary. senator blanche lincoln did finally beat bill halter who is supported by labor unions. that night she beat him, an anonymous white house official called ben smith at politico and said organized labor flushed 10 million of their member money down the toilet. on a pointless experience. asked about the quote here s what president secretary robert gix said. first i would say the president wouldn t agree with that characterization, but i think that whether or not that money might everybody better spent in the fall on closer elections, between somebody between people who cared about an agenda, that benefitted working families and those that didn t. that money might come in more handy then. donna, is the white house risking alienating labor with that kind of talk? i think, for the most part, labor decided to ignore those comment comments, although some of them were a little bit they were not too satisfied with that comment. organized labor does not exist to elect democrats. they exist to help workers, improve their jobs. benefits. i think the white house needs to be careful in alienating labor. we don t have the sea legs to go knocking door to door to get the few democrats they support elected to office. i know that from being there for 430 years electing democrats. she ran a good campaign p. she ran against washington, the money did make her the outsider. she was able to reconnect with her base. she pulled her base out. she still had trouble in the general election, ran a smart strategic campaign and bill clinton helped us. 90% much the people in the state still love him and was able to pull out the stops to get her elected. this was ladies night across the country tuesday. double or nothing in many states. we have now more female candidates running for government. as a result of the voter anger. that s a good sign for women candidates. that said, not all women are equal in this battle. i thought carly fiorina s comments about barbara boxer is catty, old school. we ve long since stopped talking about women s hair, headlines, et cetera. we don t talk about male grooming, their ties. i get comments about my tie all of the time. that s because you re married to a smart woman. the republicans spent a lot of money. $100 million, that s a lot of jobs. that was their own money. let me say, in that gubernatorial race, we had two candidates that spent $100 million of their own money. let s talk about that. the other ceo running for governor as opposed to senator, meg witteman from ebay. here s jerry brown, the democratic gubernatorial candidate. told a local reporter by the time whitman is done with me two months from now i ll by a child-molesting he left the line off. goebbels invented this kind of propagan propaganda. she wants to be president. first woman s president. regardless of the tastelessness of comparing meg whitman to a nazi propaganda. jerry has a point, not the go b goebbels part of it. she spent her own money in the primary. it meant the organizing on the ground is really less and less important. if you can spend a huge amount of money, or you, like jerry brown, have a brand name of recognition, you can get through, and possibly be elected. if you don t have a lot of money of your own and don t have brand name recognition, you can for get it. california has a history of very rich candidates losing. there s a thing as declining marginal utility of the last dollar spent. republicans may be reaching that. we re see campaign finance reform. the parties no longer have their fall. what s happened the money is move ago way from the political parties, out to the t.e.a. party. to moveon.org to labor. but connect the dots, i think there s a very important point. we ve got so much anger in the electiorat electorate. a, we ve got a economy not functioning for many people. b, we have a lot of physical representation of things out of control, such as the oil in the gulf. and thirdly, we have political parties that people now feel are not representing them at all. there s this kind of antiestablishment earthquake going on in the country and politicians ought to be aware. not just incumbents. donna we only have 30 seconds. you talked to carol fowler about this bizarre nomination of alvin greene, what did she tell you? it s a mystery. no one can understand it. no one can explain it. there s all kind of conspiracy theories out there. this guy came from nowhere. walked in with a cashier s check with his name scrolled on it h. went to his dad s house, never campaigned, and won. the roundtable will continue in a green room. later you find fact checks. we teamed up with politifach. still to come, the sunday funnies. less travel? more video conferences? limit the cell phone minutes. that s not good enough. we re not leaving this room unless we can cut something else. can they really keep us here? what about all this stuff? what stuff? all this stuff. what does it cost to create all this? time, effort, people. how much? it could be millions. millions. 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