so because they believe america brought the terror war on its own. the far left is very consistent. it s always america s fault. therefore, anything that weakus. these people drive much of the debate about torture. the cia controversy is similar to the anti-police movement we re seeing. that was ignited by the deaths of michael brown and eric garner. over the weekend there were a few well-planned demonstrations implying that american police and prosecutors do not value the lives of black citizens. in new york city, a college professor was arrested for attacking police. there is the attack. two nypd officers were injured in the melee. the man, eric linsker, teaches at the city college of new york and has been charged with assault on a police officer and insi inciting a riot among other sing it out. mr. jackson is entitled to his opinion. and it would be interesting to see if he can defend it. but a far more serious question is, does new york city mayor bill de blasio distrust his own police department? some police officials are acc e accusiaccus accusing de blasio of that and there s a petition that police officers are demanding the mayor not attend their funeral should they be killed on the job. jesse watters will have more on this intense situation later on. some demonstrators continue to shout hands up, don t shoot. even though 15 out of the 20 eyewitnesss testifying before the grand jury in missouri apparently did not see michael brown with his hands up in a surrender position. 15 out of 20. the protesters continue to put forth that scenario. they do so because they don t like the police. and they want to see the justice system torn down. last week, russell simmons said on this program that blacks selling hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, and meth were not committing violent crimes and should not be incarcerated. of course, that opinion would lead to anarchy in the streets and first world destruction of poor neighborhoods. the anti-police coalition is an interesting mix. comprised of race hustlers like sharpton, radicals like the new black panther party, white radicals like the loopy college professor who knapsacked the policees contained three hammers and a mask. political outliers like the communist party and other tear the system down groups. their numbers aren t large, but they can cause big trouble in the name of justice. which is the last thing these people really want. like the cia, american law enforcement is there to protect the folks. and generally speaking, they do a damn good job of putting their lives on the line. the police certainly make mistakes, but they do not deserve the demonization they re receiving from these protesters and some politicians. talking points believes a backlash is coming and the folks who want to destroy america s defense apparatus will soon be marginalized. let s hope that happens soon because what we are seeing now is hazardous to the health of every american. and that s the memo. next on the rundown, later, watters seeking new york city mayor bill de blasio. back in a moment. nobody told us to expect it. intercourse that s painful due to menopausal changes it s not likely to go away. .on its own. so let s do something about it. premarin vaginal cream can help it provides estrogens to help rebuild vaginal tissue and make intercourse more comfortable. premarin vaginal cream treats vaginal changes due to menopause and moderate-to-severe painful intercourse caused by these changes. don t use it if you ve had unusual bleeding, breast or uterine cancer, blood clots, liver problems, stroke or heart attack, are allergic to any of its ingredients or think you re pregnant. side effects may include headache, pelvic pain, breast pain, vaginal bleeding and vaginitis. estrogens may increase your chances of getting cancer of the uterus, strokes, blood clots or dementia so use it for the shortest time based on goals and risks. estrogen should not be used to prevent heart disease, heart attack, stroke or dementia. ask your doctor about premarin vaginal cream. the mercedes-benz winter event is back, with the perfect vehicle that s just right for you, no matter which list you re on. [ho, ho, ho, ho] lease the 2015 ml 350 for $579 a month at your local mercedes-benz dealer. or an enlarged prostate. these may worsen with spiriva. discuss all medicines you take, even eye drops. stop taking spiriva and seek immediate medical help if your breathing suddenly worsens, your throat or tongue swells,. you can get hives, vision changes or eye pain, or problems passing urine. other side effects include dry mouth and constipation. nothing can reverse copd. spiriva helps me breathe better. sfx: blowing sound. does breathing with copd. .weigh you down? don t wait ask your doctor about spiriva handihaler. now our lead story. the anti-police, anti-cia story line. joining us from washington, mary, and juan williams. would you fire the college professor arrested for assault and starting a riot? would fire him? i would fire anybody as long as, you know, their contract terms of employment allowed it that i felt violated, you know, what would be a morals clause or damaged the reputation of the institution that i was leading. and in this case, i would. i don t think that there s any excuse, especially when i heard you say that there were hammers in that bag. yeah. three hammers and a mask. all right. well, that s interesting because i certainly would put him on a leave of absence right away. and if convicted, i would fire him. i would give him the presumption of innocence. so mary can i raise a point with you, though, about your talking points memo? i think when anybody asks questions about excessive force by police or something like that, you know, then all of a sudden there are people who are going to say, oh, you hate the police. i don t think that s the case at all. why? did you not hear the channelcha? people admire the police greatly. we don t want to live in a police state. that led to the revolution. i don t think any sane person thinks they re living in a when you have unarmed people shot in the streets, people are going to raise questions. raising questions are fine. saying that they want dead police officers as these demonstrators did is not fine. that s a small group. by highlighting them, it looks like you re making a political argument rather than dealing with the case. i m reporting the news, juan. mary catherine, what about the police? what about the police samuel l. jackson is speaking about? apparently mr. jackson, multimillionaire, doesn t think he s free or, you know, not free. i was a little surprised at that. yeah, i would disagree with samuel jackson s political argument in his song, possibly with the idea of him singing more songs, but what i do think is that, yes, when people some of this stuff has revealed abuses. the senate report on the cia should not be treated as if it is even handed or comprehensive because it obviously is not. but when there are abuses and when the police go to excess, those things are worthy of protests. here s the thing. you re going to have jerks at a protest. and frankly, the left leaning a protests you might have more defecating on cop cars. same things. hold on. hold on. the left gives them a pass for that. entire movements, the left, media, try to this to them. entire movements should not be discounted i m not discounting anyone. i m reporting what s happening. you said what s going on now is hazardous to the health of every american. yes, to try to manage the they re allowed to assemble and do this. sorry, mary katherine. the goal of the protesters is diminish the power of the cia and undermine the authority of the police. that s the stated goal. the leadership, juan, is al sharpton on the and a bunch of i can t say that about senator feinstein, but a bunch of other very left-wing senators like in colorado who i m trying to bring perspective. this isn t a popular uprising like vietnam or anything like that. that s not that. it s organized by these people i mention ted mentioned. it s targeted by tsh that s where it is. i m listening to you. i have such respect. there are people demonstrating in streets across the country not many. five cities. five cities, juan. no, let me tell you, there are cities all over. maybe major, five. i have to tell you, there are cities all over the country with demonstrations. with regard to the cia and the lake, don t doubt that the american people, we fund the cia greatly. we appreciate their bravery and all that. but it s breaking the law. when you break the law, when you torture people, i think defenders juan, the poll clearly says most of the people back cheney. all right? so you re what do you mean it s not true? that s not true. look at the poll you just cited. 51% would approve of it. 50% said they did or didn t 29% were against it. 20% said they don t have an opinion. it s like 50/50. people are split. that s a spin. that s a spin. it was an easy question, juan. you have to take the law it was an easy question. majority of folks sided with chain. go ahead, mary. this is largely not a politically popular movement. i m maybe a bit more libertarian than most of americans on such issues, especially on surveillance and that kind of thing. many people do think we overstep. you re right this is not a politically popular movement, but there are people who have grievances and there are abuses and excesses. as long as they re legitimate because they re bad apples doesn t mean the fact country need to be traaddressed. if people feel they re not getting good policing or fair shake from people who have power over them, they absolutely should demonstrate. you should tell us why and exactly what. many people are doing that. i m going to leave you with this. if you re going to hold up your hand and say hands up, don t shoot, when 15 eyewitnesss that s symbolism. symbolism. all right. you re right. find another symbol that s accurate, juan, and i might respect it. good debate, you guys. directly ahead, on some liberal college campuses exams are postponed because of ferguson, staten island situation have students so upset. oh. later, watters confronting the mayor of new york city. some police officers believe do not like that. you can use it to track your actual energy use. find rebates that make equipment upgrades more affordable. even develop a customized energy plan for your company. think of it as a way to take more control over your operating costs. and yet another energy saving opportunity from pg&e. find new ways to save energy and money with pg&e s business energy check-up. harvard, columbia, georgetown university students are demanding that their exams be postponed because they say they re traumatized by the situations in ferguson and staten island, new york. with that, student at harvard law school, also went to georgetown undergrad, right? that s right. now, i find this very hard to believe. i really do. is it true? is this true? it s true. the letter that they sent to the dean actually said she was denying them humanity, denying the victims humanity by not delaying exams. it s ludicrous. who sent the letter. a group of harvard students. it was a coalition of about ten of them that sent the letter. and they want to have exams postponed? that s right. because they re traumatized. they can t handle this. they re too emotional at the moment. too emotional. harvard, to they credit, they have not extended exams. columbia has. you had an exam today? i did. eight hours. i could have used a so what s wrong with you, kayleigh, you re not emotionally broken up by this? i m not saying look, it s an absurd situation. let s face it, if you re in school and there s national tragedies all over the place. are they traumatized by isis beheading the americans captured by the terrorists? were they traumatized? did you see a letter written by harvard students an that? i didn t. a cop dies every 58 hours. one week before ferguson, an officer confronted a gunman off duty and was killed. there were no protests. there was not a but it s not the same thing, though. i have to be fair. when you re a police officer, you re trained, you re armed, and you know you re in danger. when you re standing on the street selling loose cigarettes, you re not expecting what happened to him. now, is it his fault that he didn t cooperate with the arrest? yes. do we hold police to a higher standard by not by backing away from situations? garner thing never should have happened. the brown thing, brown attacked the officer i think it s clear beyond a reasonable doubt that he did. that s it. game over. if you physically attacked an officer, the officer has the right to take your life. and that s what happened. so these people with their hands up, don t shoot, that i was referring to don t know what they re talking about. let s get back to these students. harvard law is the best and brightest, supposedly the smartest people in the country get in there. are they that immature that they can t fulfill the responsibilities because of things that happened they don t like? look, they re an isolated group of people leading the protests who i think feel that they don t have the time to study for exams. that being said, there are a group of students who have latched on to that movement and are using it as a they always do that. for their laziness. national review said social justice ate my homework. that s a good motto. how radical is harvard these days? the law school, these are strivers, people who want to be wealthy. they want to take part in the american dream. they want white privilege or black privilege, whatever it may be. they want to make it. i mean, are they very far left, your peers? not at all. having been to oxford, georgetown, and university of miami and harvard, i can say without fail, hesitation, harvard is the most bipartisan campus i ve been on. the federalist society, they re a thriving movement. they may not be as loud as the ferguson protesters but they re there. they re not all loons. this is a ethnic society that s primarily moving this, right? that s right. kayleigh, thanks for coming down from cambridge to talk to us. plenty more ahead as the fact factor moves on. looks like jeb bush is going to run for president. what does a close friend think about that? a hollywood scandal. hackers getting confidential memos that embarrassed stars and executives alike. we hope you stay tuned for those reports. could protect you from cancer? what if one push up could prevent heart disease? one. wishful thinking, right? but there is one step you can take to help prevent another serious disease- pneumococcal pneumonia. one dose of the prevnar 13 ® vaccine can help protect you . from pneumococcal pneumonia, an illness that can cause coughing, chest pain, difficulty breathing, and may even put you in the hospital. prevnar 13 is used in adults 50 and older to help prevent infections from 13 strains of the bacteria that cause pneumococcal pneumonia. you should not receive prevnar 13 if you ve had a severe allergic reaction to the vaccine or its ingredients. if you have a weakened immune system, you may have a lower response to the vaccine. common side effects were pain, redness, or swelling at the injection site. limited arm movement, fatigue, head ache muscle or joint pain, less appetite, chills, or rash. even if you ve already been vaccinated with another pneumonia vaccine, prevnar 13 ® may help provide additional protection. get this one done. ask your healthcare professional about prevnar 13 ® today. with contour detect technology that flexes in 8 directions for the perfect shave at any angle. go to philips.com/new to save up to $40. innovation and you. philips norelco. i saved more than that in half the time. i unfriend you. that s not how it works. that s not how any of this works. [ male announcer ] 15 minutes for a quote isn t how it works anymore. with esurance, 7 1/2 minutes could save you on car insurance. welcome to the modern world. esurance. backed by allstate. click or call. personal story tonight. jeb bush may run for president. speaking yesterday, the governor said this. i have no clue if i would be a good candidate. i hope i would be. i think i could serve well as president, to be honest with you, but i don t know that either. this now, here in our new york studio, cakarl rove. you know the bush family very well. if governor bush runs, and i believe he will, because he s not the kind of guy that seeks the spotlight. you know, he s not he doesn t like the attention that much. to put himself out like that as he is, there must be a reason. that s like sherlock holmes used to do. there was a reason why he did this on sunday. michael putney, pullney, a longtime south florida broadcaster was retiring. governor bush had a longstanding relationship with him and asked as my final interview, i d like to interview you. i m not certain he was planning on saying these things. he s made some noises, so has his son and things like that. so i m saying he s running for president. am i wrong? i don t know. i do i believe that he is tilting toward running, but looking, working for 41 and 43, i learned something a long time ago. 1977, george h.w. bush said i m not going to make a decision about whether or not i m going to run until after the 1978 election. i want to do everything i can in 77 and 78 to lay the predicate but i m not going to run until after the november 1978 election and we see if jimmy baker gets elected attorney general of texas. he did not make the decision until after the 1978 election. george w. bush said you can go out there, put on your propeller hat, do the things you think are necessary but i m not going to make a decision until after the 1998 election and i ll let you know whether i m running for president. yeah. so when he says there s something about these bush men when they say, i m not running he didn t say i haven t made a decision, i m going to make a decision. he s got to raise money, got to get in there. now, if he runs, some conservatives are not going to like it because of immigration primarily and other things. on balance, he was a good governor in florida. eight years. education, he s very, very good on that. but he s off on immigration and that s going to hurt him. well, it s going to. be something he has to dole with. i thought it was interesting, this interview is incidentally up on the website, wplg, it s worth watching if there s a political junkie. it s sort of like trying to divine what somebody is going to think and do in the future. he does talk about how if he runs it will be about big ideas, about a positive vision, about focus on his ideas rather than on his competition in the primary and he will run in the primary like he s going to run in the general election because he makes an excellent point which i ve long agreed with that if you try and be one thing in the primary and something else in the general election, people are watching and it undermines their confidence in your authenticity. all right. let s, you know, you re a political pinhead. you love all this stuff. most people, they vote on personality. he s different from w and different from his dad. what s the biggest difference between jeb bush and george w. bush? well, jeb, both of there are a lot of similarities. it s hard to pick out differences. one difference would be that jeb bush broke away from texas and moved to florida and he did so in order to create his own image, his own life. he loves florida which is sort of odd for people who don t understand florida, and i readily admit i don t. then, he as governor was a very involved, very as you say on education, a pioneering governor. yeah. he s not as outgoing as his brother. no. he s a more cerebral guy. his brother is flamboyant. his brother has the common touch, more reserved. he speaks better spanish than his brother. heck of a lot better spanish than his brother. okay. now, the bush dynasty may work against bush because people say, look, enough of the bushes. just like hillary clinton. enough with the clintons. right. how big a factor is that going to be? i think it s going to be a substantial factor. i think there are going to be two issues, two questions he s going to have to resolve. does he have a big and positive and optimistic agenda for the future that allows him to keep the focus on what s coming rather than focus on what s behind? second of all, whether or not hillary clinton runs for president. she is the one person who largely erases the issue of do we want to go back and have another re-round of bush? the question is do you want to of course she s going to run for president. what are you doing sitting here telling me maybe look, i think it s a more complex decision than people give her credit for. i think she s likely to run in large part because they have such a thin bench and pressure is going to be enormous for her to run. i m going to tell you right now she s running. you know how i know? i ve got friends in westchester county where she lives and they have seen, they have seen with their own eyes the vans coming into her driveway with the pantsuits. they have more pantsuits, pantsuits for every state, every color, every fabric, every season. all right? you don t start getting that many pantsuits if you re not running. all right. look. i had an interesting experience last week. i wrote a column, it was critical of her i mean, she s been a lousy candidate thus far. you re a republican, of course you re of course i m going to be critical. i get this e-mail late at night from a close supporter, a guy i happen to know saying how dare you do this? we expect you to say unpleasant things about her, keep saying the things. i wrote him back and said, i m happy to have gotten your e-mail, i hope she s surrounded by people like you who say you had a great book tour, your book is terrific, you ve got a great message, you re a fantastic candidate. i said, i want her to be surrounded by people like that who don t speak the truth to her. all right. are you going to resign from fox and run bush s campaign if he goes? no. no. i ve been detailed of keeping track of you. keep track of me. all right. exactly. educate you on politics. don t beget me if she runs business. you have to get with the pantsuit thing. that s the key to it. karl rove, everybody. when we come right back, megyn kelly on a big hollywood scandal caused by hackers. and then watters confronting the mayor of new york city. moments away. i m j-a-n-e and i have copd. i m d-a-v-e and i have copd. i m k-a-t-e and i have copd, but i don t want my breathing problems to get in the way my volunteering. that s why i asked my doctor about b-r-e-o. once-daily breo ellipta helps increase airflow from the lungs for a full 24 hours. and breo helps reduce symptom flare-ups that last several days and require oral steroids, antibiotics, or hospital stay. breo is not for asthma. breo contains a type of medicine that increases risk of death in people with asthma. it is not known if this risk is increased in copd. breo won t replace rescue inhalers for sudden copd symptoms and should not be used more than once a day. breo may increase your risk of pneumonia, thrush, osteoporosis, and some eye problems. tell your doctor if you have a heart condition or high blood pressure before taking breo. ask your doctor about b-r-e-o for copd. first prescription free at mybreo.com people, the new york times, variety, hollywood reporter, other outlets. embarrassed sony executives as well. angelina jolie, leonardo dicaprio, president obama got involved. sony is demanding the media stop printing stolen e-mails. the new york times for one says it will not stop. here now is the anchor of the kelly files and immediately after this, megyn, who s an attorney. they hired david boyce, big gun attorney, represented al gore in the 2000 election, to threaten never goes over well right. the media saying all these hacks that you re getting, you better not publicize them or else. we re going after you. is there an else here? he s faking it. those letters are not worth the paper they re printed on. no legal leg to stand on whatsoever. the press has every legal right to use the material though it s stolen. though it s the product of an illegal hack. we had this same conversation in 2008 when sarah palin, when running for vice president, had her personal e-mail hacked and talked about whether news organizations could publish those materials. and i told you back then, when it was a republican who was the victim, that they could do it. i tell you now that it s liberal hollywood executives at the news organizations can do it. i told you in both circumstances, i maintain this as well, the original hacker, of course, can be prosecuted. in palin s case he was. they believe it s north korea. you know, you know, what, sony made a movie that mocks the president of north korea. the plot line is kim jong-un gets assassinated. the north korean intelligence agencies hacked in and embarrassed that s the belief. they deny it, of course. the fbi is in charge of tracking down the hackers. but it s really hard to do that because most of them are overseas and go through a million different myriad ways to get in. even if you get them, it s out there. it s out there. it s out there. you can still send them to jail because the guy who hacked o reilly.com six or seven years ago, two years, he s an akron college student. he got two years. good. he served them. good. he had to make restitution, too. the fbi did a great job, by the way, getting this guy. he was a clown. he wasn t like, you know, the north korean secret service or whatever. right. the e-mails, themselves, basically chronicle executives who send e-mails back and forth disparaging stars. but you and i do that every day, kelly. i mean, we mock people all day long. first of all, we don t employ those stars to make our movies so that s dicier. they re talking about angelina jolie and talking about dicaprio. how despicable he was. that s i guess sort of juicy for the entertainment that s why they re publishing this stuff. the most incendiary stuff they came across so far, the hackers are promising a christmas present, is their conversations about barack obama. these are two liberals who run sony who are barack obama donors. they love him. who are participating in a big fund-raising breakfast for barack obama. before this breakfast they re having an e-mail exchange saying what should i ask him? oh, why don t you ask him to donate money for movies or whether he wants to finance movies? what movies do you think he d be interested in? these two go on to ping-pong back and forth. starring black actors. it s more than immature. that s immature. bernie goldberg, your friend is coming on the kelly file tonight and his argument is going to be those are not racist statements. i think it s immaturity. i think those are racist statements. you do? i m not saying these are racist people. you can make a racist statement without being a racist in your heart. explain to me the joke was, okay, he ll finance another jango. every single one was a black movie. why is that racist? they re taking a 52-year-old man, president of the united states, leader of the free world who has had all of these rich experiences that you and i will never have and you re making fun of them. reducing him to one thing. that is his race. that his interests in the world must only have to do with his skin color. let me get that by definition is racist. when i see someone who hates an ethnic group it doesn t have to be hate. just when i see someone who hates an ethnic group, i say that s a racist. right. when i see someone who makes a foolish, immature, thoughtless jest that wasn t funny, i don t ascribe them that label. i just think it s over the top. i don t agree with you because i think it doesn t have to be fueled by hatred or anger in order for it to be racist. i m not saying they are racist people. from what i ve read, their life work doesn t suggest they are racist people. let s admit these are racist comments and deal with snem. i m saying they re immature. the hypocrisy in the media giving them a pass on these comments and not giving people like donald sterling, not that he deserves he was a lot worse. the other thing we have to ask ourselves before we go is whether this is the kind of society won t to be in where somebody gets their private communications hacked and the media feasts on that s where we are. it s not going to change. shouldn t there be a moment s pause before we jump into that life in 2014 modern day two words. christmas island. no internet. can t get internet there. that s where you should go, kelly. misfit toys? christmas island. there she is, everyone. all right. watter ss on deck. big news in new york city. mayor de blasio wouldn t talk to us, so we sent watters out to him. you ll see it, next. 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possibilities. the connected car by volvo. innovating for you. give the gift of volvo this season and we ll give you your first month s payment on us. extremely dismissive so we put jesse watters on the case. are you a new yorker? yes, sir. where do you live? upper west side. what are you doing down here in the village? i have my shrink in a few minutes. what do you think about de blasio? what do you mean? de blasio. who s de blasio? i don t know what he does but i know his name. he s the mayor. okay. he seems to be doing his job well. i think he s better than previous mayors when it comes to racial issues. why did he inject race into the eric garner situation? because it is about race. it s entirely about race. but eric garner s family member actually said it wasn t about race whatsoever. okay. my wife works for the nypd. was your wife happy that de blasio threw the nypd under the bus? the guy was clearly wrong. i like the way he brings awareness to the shootings that have been happening. if the tea party were out here on the streets shutting down down bridges, would you be okay with that? what do you think de blasio s biggest accomplishments have been so far? i d be hard pressed to say, actually. it s not about like the mayor doing his job, it s about us coming together with him to help him do his job. when it snowed last year, our roads were the last to be plowed. because you re in the rich neighborhood. i think he s better than the previous right wing creeps that we have. do you know who de blasio is? no. he s the mayor. oh. you never heard of him? no. do you live here? no, i live in brooklyn. oh, he s the mayor of brooklyn too. now, de blasio wants to raise taxes. families here in new york have to live within a budget, why can t the new york city government? i think we should pay more taxes. why should we pay more taxes if the city just wastes it on corruption? i de blasio is basically co-mayor with sharpton. he likes to make everything a black and white issue. i ve got nothing against sharpton. do you know who al sharpton is? not really. i envy you. he won t come on the o reilly factor, why not? because it s terrifying. i think bill is the man. i m a big fan of bill s. if you re the mayor, you should be able to sit in the hot seat. he should step up to the plate? maybe he s trying to maintain his mystique. do you think it s going to happen? i doubt he ll change his mind. i m very persuasive. bill o reilly has a question for you. okay. are you his emissary. yes, i am. do you know watters world? i m sorry. i m watters, and this is my world. okay. we ve been trying to book you on our show for weeks. and your staff hasn t been very respectful towards us. i m sure they re very respectful. actually they aren t. i m sure they are. we re just trying to get to know you better. what s the problem? i appreciate the invitation and my staff will follow up. okay. let s take some serious questions. can you help us out, mayor? i ve talked to you, my friend. henry. you haven t responded. will you do the show? henry, just start talking, henry. you need rescuing. thank you very much. i never need rescuing. thank you very much. i need a real question. thank you, henry. who s henry? some reporter. did henry finally say no, he never did. he never said anything. henry was enjoying it. you re lucky you didn t get shot. de blasio s obviously and this is a serious story. he s lost 35-man police department. it s a mutiny. you really believe it s active or passive. everybody thinks he s made the garner situation worse, as a matter of fact. well, when you lose the police department, i mean, that s in this city, 8 million people, you got you re in big trouble. all right. we re going to continue to report on the mayor because i think you ve made a friend. yeah. he ll be looking forward to seeing you next time. sure. the factor tip of the day, drunken santas. the tip moments away. ame e e e nobody told us to expect it. intercourse that s painful due to menopausal changes it s not likely to go away. .on its own. so let s do something about it. premarin vaginal cream can help it provides estrogens to help rebuild vaginal tissue and make intercourse more comfortable. premarin vaginal cream treats vaginal changes due to menopause and moderate-to-severe painful intercourse caused by these changes. don t use it if you ve had unusual bleeding, breast or uterine cancer, blood clots, liver problems, stroke or heart attack, are allergic to any of its ingredients or think you re pregnant. side effects may include headache, pelvic pain, breast pain, vaginal bleeding and vaginitis. estrogens may increase your chances of getting cancer of the uterus, strokes, blood clots or dementia so use it for the shortest time based on goals and risks. estrogen should not be used to prevent heart disease, heart attack, stroke or dementia. ask your doctor about premarin vaginal cream. ainebriated santas in a moment. first, good tip for christmas gift giving. if you buy a copy of killing t patt patton, you get 50% off any of my other books. if you become a billoreilly.com premium member, you get any two nice gifts for the price of one. also, billoreilly.com christmas store action packed this year. we have great stuff including replicas, you see them there, of america s most important documents suitable for framing. all the money i derive from billoreilly.com goes to charity. now to the mail, race relations have worsened because of identity politics. instead of appealing to all americans, politicians are now clustering certain groups for favor. that is dividing us. lisa, maryland, o reilly, i find it tiresome that you continue to blame the grievance industry for bad race relations. my theory is because president obama s in power blacks feem more empowered to speak about their grievances. perhaps, lisa. blame white americans for keeping blacks down is fallacious. the economic situation for blacks under mr. obama has not improved at all. the message should be that all americans can succeed if they re willing to do the hard work necessary. that is not the message the grievance industry puts out there. chuck, florida, michele bachmann s idea to bomb iran s nuke facilities before they get the bomb is right on. i stand by my comment. glad you were able to explain that bombing iran would be a tad provocative. is her problem of naivete. we may have to bomb them down the road, but not yet. until we prepare the world for the coming storm which will be horrendous. mary henderson, florida. mr. o reilly, i bought three sets of your books, killing patton and killing jesus and gave two pattons to vets as christmas presents. that s very nice of you. killing patton s the number one hardback book in america even outselling grisham and patt patterson. we thank everybody who supported killing patton. the factor tip of the day commercializing christmas, here s the bad news. santa con, an annual display of debauchery in new york city where people dress as santa pub crawl and get blasted out of their minds. that happened over the weekend. no reason for this just a bunch of pinheads raising hell and defaming santa. here s a better christmas story. you hear a lot about commercialism and people dwelling on material things to celebrate the birth of jesus. commercialism is not a bad thing. giving other people gifts is a positive, makes them happy. jesus might like that. although i can t speak for him. also, spending money helps the american economy, which in turn helps the american worker. that s a positive. so the next time you hear someone bemoaning all the commercials, tell them there is an upside if you don t overdo it. now, stossel s on my case about this commercialism and we ll have him in tomorrow in a lively debate. that is it for us tonight. please check out the fox news factor website different from billoreilly.com. also we would like you to spout off about the factor. o reilly@foxnews.com. name and town if you wish to opine. word of the day, do not be garrulous when writing to the factor. in the true spirit of christmas, i think i m going to give mayor de blasio a billoreilly.com premium meu know, mr. mayor, i you d enjoy it. maybe not. thanks for watching.
down an american movie, censor an american picture it doesn t like, wrong in not calling him first before buckling before a north korean dictator. this is obama laying it on the line in a press conference that signalled all the audacity he s packed into a week since the november election, the deal on climate change, the protective order for people who came here illegally, and including the post of an american ambassador with the communist government in cube a taking questions from all women reporters in today s press conference, where will this obama audacity take us? i m joined by david corn, and by actor, writer and director sean penn who joins me now by phone. first of all, here s the president speaking about sony s decision to pull the interview, the movie that inspired the hacking. let s watch. sony is a corporation. i would agree with the president. i think that, you know, i m not speaking as an advocate for the motion picture industry or as a critic. but we have to realize this is a genuine emergency, this is the popularization of cyber war and it requires an alternate threshold on the thinking and the language that we use. when representatives of sony deny that they pulled the film and put it on distributors, that it s not really recognizing the same responsibility a parent has to drive the show when something threatens their child. in this case, it doesn t matter whether it s an individual, a government, or a company, the response of sony should have been to say, we ll make our apologies later and we ll put it online open and free for the world to see. so i would say it s a cop-out popularized taking a weapon and shooting at civilians on the street. it shows the possibilities. once those possibilities go out into the culture, just like guns, we ve got a computer in every household, and this is not technology. this is far from the hands of anyone. let me go over to david corn. your view on this as a guy who writes all the time. it does seem to be an easy call. as sean penn just said, they could have gone other routes besides the regal theater chain. we re going to put it on a network. they could have put it out themselves on a website. they could have said we take these threats seriously to the theaters. if they feel they can t have security, we ll do it another way. at the end of the day, unless they put it out they still can put it out. they can put it out for free. or set up their own website and anyone who wants to see it pays ten bucks and that s it. if they don t do that, at some point, probably some point soon, it just sends the message, that this works. i ve heard some conservatives today criticize the president for saying what he did too late, after sony already did what it s done. and the question, though, is, is this going to set a precedent or not? that s why i think it s right for the president and for the others to say, we don t agree and try to give them some more spine, give them some support, back them up a bit. and so sony still has a chance to make this right. but they re engaged now in what looks to be and sean penn, i want to bring you in. sony is engaged with a dialogue in the north koreans. they thanked them today by saying, thank you for doing what we told you to do. if you keep doing that, don t show this picture, then we won t cause you any more trouble, we won t release any more of the information from the hacking. it seems like they re almost in league now because they re being thanked for it, and told, if you re a good boy, we won t bother you anymore. it s an engagement of relations now, it seems. yeah, i think that sony has made themselves almost irrelevant in what s going to be a much, much bigger and more dangerous story. they might have been the trigger that participated in what was a mistake here. but, again, i think that if we don t take this on, on a united nations level, if it if we aren t waking up and recognizing that what happens once, and recognize that we just got hit by a truck and we can t tell ourselves that we have a mild headache and we can go home and go to bed, because you re going to wake up with blood in the brain. that s where we are on this cyber war issue. the declaration has been set. it s not even it s not sony. it s not even north korea. north korea is the size of mississippi. that can be handled by the mean spirited in a day. and it s also that which gets into the minds of a culture with a lot of disease in it. is there any way the creative community, the directors, writers, the actors, are able to leverage this? i mean, it s always dangerous in a tricky career to make demands be on, pay me and put me to work. but is there any way actors or writers could say, you re going to green light this movie, okay, when you green light it, it stays green and no dictator is going to stop it? do you think there s any chance, or is that too far a hope, that the creative communities will say, i m not making movies to be stopped by the bad guys? i think there will be discussions and there will be attempts to put lobbies together on that basis. but i think that the very first thing that those in hollywood or wisconsin can do is stand up as a country and stand up as a united country that this be taken in a serious way. well the me show you more of the president today. i thought it was a first-rate press conference. clarity, and good guys, bad guys, it wasn t the soft line he sometimes has taken before. here talking about north korea and the sony hacking. let s watch again the president today. i think it says something interesting about north korea that they decided to have the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie starring seth rogen and james flacco. i love seth, and i love james. but the notion that that was a threat to them, i think gives you some sense of the kind of regime we re talking about here. they caused a lot of damage. and we will respond. we will respond proportionally and in a place and time and manner that we choose. i wonder, when you make a movie, you ve made some really important films, and i was thinking, part of the decision to make a movie is that you want the bad guy to hear it. it isn t just a joke by seth rogen, a satire movie, but it wouldn t bother you a bit to know that the people being satirized hear it and it hurts them and humiliates them. what did you make of the president saying, it s a seth rogen movie, it s a bit over the top to begin with, that it would scare them? well, you know, i go back to, i think it was 1997 when martin scorsese s film came out on tibbett and the chinese were in negotiations with disney, who backed down tremendously on the release of that film as a result. and whether or not it s the president framing it as a marginalized threat based on the movie, it really goes deeper than all of that to me. i think that when eisner was interviewed and said disney was not in the human rights business, they were in the entertainment business, that he really missed the mark. we are all in the human rights business today, whether in our economy, or in our homes. and i do think that sony does have an opportunity now to do something heroic, but more importantly, i think that moscow and beijing and washington have something to do that s very important. because this is something that threatens all governments, all corporations. it calls into question, you know, where we divide our capitalism and our recognition of human rights, and i think it s a really, really big historic moment. and if it s not taken by the reins by some brave people, we ll be heading into a world that we never imagined. sean, thank you for coming on and for the great work you ve done, all the greatest performances, dead man walking, every one seemed like it dealt with an important issue and you were on the right side. thank you very much and thank you to david corn. coming up, president obama in his press conference, it was kind of a press conference, not the idiotic swagger of w. it was real, it was human. this is a changed president, a confident president. you can see it in the way he s talking and acting. if you watched it today, you may have noticed that the president made some history today. he called only on women reporters. didn t mention it. i noticed it halfway through. somebody called it to my attention when we were covering it live. more on that decision in a minute. and this is hardball, the place for politics. my baby drove up in a brand new cadillac. my baby drove up in a brand new cadillac. look here, daddy, i m never coming back. discover the new spirit of cadillac and the best offers of the season. lease this 2015 standard collection ats for around $329 a month. l today sony pictures released a statement that said the studio did not cave to the threats from the hackers. the studio says that when theater owners refused to run the movie, they had no choice but to pull it. we ll decide. the statement adds that the studio is surveying other platforms in which to release the film. i ll believe it when i see it. we ll be right back after this. thank you. ordering chinese food is a very predictable experience. i order b14. i get b14. no surprises. buying business internet, on the other hand, can be a roller coaster white knuckle thrill ride. you re promised one speed. but do you consistently get it? you do with comcast business. and often even more. it s reliable. just like kung pao fish. thank you, ping. reliably fast internet starts at $89.95 a month. comcast business. built for business. hello, everybody. we really got a full house today, huh? well, all i want for christmas is to take your questions. well, since the midterm we ve seen there again a self-confident forward-leaning president. and in today s final press conference of the year that he hopes will capture the year, he commanded the room, ticking off his accomplishments. here he is. all told, over a 57-month streak, our businesses have created nearly 11 million new jobs. america s now the number one producer of oil, the number one producer of natural gas. our rescue of the auto industry is officially over. we ve now repaid taxpayers every dime and more of what my administration committed. we ve created about half a million new jobs in the auto industry alone. about ten million americans have gained health insurance just this past year. we re leading the coalition to degrade and ultimately destroy isil. and in less than two weeks, after more than 13 years, our combat mission in afghanistan will be over. there he is talking about his successes. joining me now, washington bureau chief for usa today. and from national urban radio. we ll have you on to talk about your book, april, if you d like. april, you were there today, and i want to know what the reaction was from your male colleagues to the fact that not one i could be a male and say, why did you invite us if you weren t going to let us involve ourselves in the q & a process, mr. president? your thoughts and feelings. you know for one thing for sure, in this town, it s a white, male dominated town. i know for a fact. i just walked out of the white house and the press area. many of our male colleagues have been going into the press secretary very upset that they were not called on today. but let me say this to you. as a woman, as someone who s been covering the white house, it s nice. and someone who sits in the third row, not the first row or the second row, but the third row, it s nice to see a change of pace. and from some of the white house sources that i talked to tonight, apparently there was a plan not to go this is not the first time, but not to go to the networks. this is not the first time that this has happened. they said, okay, since we see we ve got a lot of women in the audience who are really good at what they do, let s call on the women. so he didn t call on you. yes he did call on me. you demanded chris, i raised my hand like a reporter s supposed to. why don t they have the old tradition of reporters waving their hands and the reporters get the attention of the president. i raised my hand. that started during the bush years, like a good reporter is supposed to. who else raised their hand besides you? i don t know. i didn t see behind me. anyway, good for you. and how would you describe the men s attitude? we were they whining or bitchy, the fact that they didn t get called on? let me tell you something, the cameras on the front row, they ll keep cool. but behind the scenes, they re not happy. phone calls are being made. but they ll be cool. you ll always see a cool demeanor, but they are not happy with it. what do you think of that, susan? i didn t even notice for the first six or seven, then somebody pointed it out and said, it s all women. and he s going to keep this up. and he went to the end and i think clearly they had a plan to do this. what s the point? a little mischief. why not? what s the purpose of this thing? what was the quality of the questions? i have to tell you sounded pretty good to me. i have to tell you, i didn t notice anything was going on. in fact, i wouldn t have noticed they were all women. so that s a great thing. let s talk about the president today. april, you cover him all the time, and susan. there s something different about the president. i wouldn t call it swagger, because i hate it. some presidents being like w. swagger sitting down, i don t know how they do it, but they do. the french word i like is alon, a quiet self-confidence in the president. he didn t have before this election. something liberated this guy. i don t know if it was liberation, but i think it was more so what he had to present to america, an optimism. because they got a shellacking in november. and he had to come out, everything is changing, i m optimistic, we are americans, we can fix problems. that s what he said to the end, we can fix things as americans. so i think he wanted to come out with an optimistic tone, looking forward to the positive. and one thing that i took away was when he said with the democrats and the republicans, the fight, he said, yeah, there are fighting, but there are things that we also agree on. so he s looking to the positive in 2015 in closing out 2014. how did you react to him talking about the quality in fact, let s watch him respond to you. okay. i actually think it s been a healthy conversation that we ve had. these are not new phenomenon. the fact that they re now surfacing, in part because people are able to film what have just been in the past stories passed on around a kitchen table, allows people to, you know, make their own assessments and eflgdss and you re not going to solve a problem if it s not being talked about. did you buy the fact that people and race relations? i saw his optimism and his hope. you have to remember, when you talk about race in this country, the president did get it right. this is centuries old. centuries. and it stems from slavery. went to jim crow and it s moved on. it s not just a legislative issue. it s a heart issue as well. i do think people want to see a better day, but are there still vestiges and residue of the past? oh, yes. as a reporter, i did like the fact that he did kind of change his answer. because i asked him six years ago this month, in the oval office about the state of black america, and he harkens to charles dickens talk about the the best of times and the worst of times, yeah. yeah. for african americans who have a good education, it s a good time. but for those who don t, it s unemployment and lack of opportunity. when he talked about black america, as well as all america is better in the aggregate since his administration, it was interesting to hear that versus six years ago this month in the oval office from my interview that i had with him. thanks so much. you know, one thing that struck me about his answer was how much different just cell phone technology makes. that picture, the video of eric garner makes all the difference in settling the he said/he said debate. it makes all the difference for people who might have denied what had happened there. there was no denying it. i don t know anybody that thought that was a proper decision. sometimes you have to have a trial before a jury before a thank you. i raised my hand, chris. by the way, i love the weather today. did you like the weather today? it was okay. see, you have to disagree with me. [ laughter ] i proved it now. every time i say something, this reporter has to find a different conclusion. anyway, it s style. thank you very much. coming up, a new biography of john f. kennedy jr reveals new details about the relationship with his mother jacqueline kennedy. the author joins us next to talk about a little bit of glamor here in politics. and this is hardball, the place for politics. i got it. now jump off the bridge. what? in 3.2.1. are you kidding me? go. right on time. right now, over 20,000 trains are running reliably. we call that predictable. thrillingly predictable. right now, you can get a single line with 3 gigs for $65 a month. 3 gigs . is that a lot? that s about.100 app downloads, 45 hours of streaming music, and 6 hours of video playing. (singing) and five golden rings! ha, i see what you did. (singing) four calling birds.three french hens. (the guys starts to fizzle out) two. turtle. doves. i really went for it there ya you did. you really, really did now get 3 gigs of data on one line for $65 a month. switch to at&t, buy a new smartphone and get $150 credit per line. intbladder leak protection.ant new always discreet underwear for sensitive bladders from always, the experts in feminine protection new always discreet underwear absorbs heavy bladder leaks faster than the leading brand, so you can feel comfortably dry. plus always discreet has a discreet fit that hugs your curves. you barely feel it. new always discreet underwear. now bladder leaks can feel like no big deal. because, hey, pee happens. get to the terminal across town. are all the green lights you? no. it s called grid iq. the 4:51 is leaving at 4:51. they cut the power. it ll fix itself. power s back on. quick thinking traffic lights and self correcting power grids make the world predictable. thrillingly predictable. worked for president kennedy in the white house. they had a great time. people loved politics. it was a positive thing. and that s been missing. yeah, i mean, i think it s like anything else. if, you know, the trick is catching people s attention. and the only thing that people see are a bunch of men fighting on television all the time, or negative commercials on television, or acerbic editorials, they ll turn their attention somewhere else. we wanted to bring some fun, some levity, but be serious-minded at the same time. christopher anderson joins us now. he s out with a masterful biography called the good son. thank you for joining us. i ask that question, what did we miss about the upbringing of john kennedy jr? first of all, i have to say, you look much better today than you did back then. [ laughter ] and i love all your books as well. look, what we didn t get right about jfk jr is that he was more bouvier than kennedy. that was a wonderful interview. you mentioned alon and president obama and a transformation that s taken place here and that is a quality that both jfk jr and his father had in spades, but i think more so in the case of jfk jr, because he was really a natural politician in many ways. his dad was a little reluctant with the kissing-babies thing. but john could connect with people. he was self-efacing and incredibly articulate. if you look at the pictures in the relationship with his mother, and the reason i wrote this book, that was a phenomenal relationship he had with jackie. they were each other s protector from the very beginning. did he ever think of becoming a european movie star? he looks like a european movie star. he looks french. there s the bouvier. you see pictures of his grandfather on his mother s side. he looks like that side of the family. he did want to act, as you may recall, and jackie pulled him back from the brink. she did say one of the most wonderful thing was seeing him act and she did on many occasions when he was at brown university and afterwards, but she thought there were great things ahead for him. her whole attitude was hands-on. she said if you bungled raising your children, nothing else in life matters. so she kept him away from people are going to go out and buy this book right now. it looks like candy for christmas. especially for those of us who grew up with the kennedys. the pictures in this book are enough. let me ask you about his possible running for politics. i talked to kennedy jr and said his numbers were very good. my question, john f kennedy jr, did he get polling done and see if he could beat hillary clinton? indeed there was a private poll, taken just before his tragic crash, his death. and he, by all accounts, his close friends said he intended to seek the seat of daniel patrick moynihan. he had gone to the new york chairwoman of the democratic party. he was intent on beginning his political career. ed koch told me, even if she tried, she couldn t have got that seat from kennedy. i think he was right. let s talk about the horrible ending. i read along the line that jacqueline kennedy was concerned about her beautiful son s interest in aviation and wanting to be a pilot someday. absolutely. and it s so unbelievable. it s a premonition from hell, but go ahead. she shared that with maurice templeton, the last significant relationship she had in her life. look at the kennedy track record. uncle joe died in a plane crash. his aunt kathleen teddy was almost killed. alexander o nasis, the son of john s stepfather was killed in a plane crash. so there s a long and terrifying list. that was the one thing that she worried about. it was only after that she passed away that he went ahead with his plans to get his license. and we see the tragic consequences. great book. the book is called the good son, about the attractive son of kennedy. you have a great son-in-law running a good part of this network. thank you, he s a great guy. sure is. up next, the big fight on the right between rand paul and marco rubio s regarding president obama s historic shift of policy on cuba. plus stephen colbert says farewell. what a show it was last night. all that straight ahead. you re watching hardball, a place for politics, where you hear the debate. and cialis for daily useor you. helps you be ready anytime the moment is right. cialis is also the only daily ed tablet approved to treat symptoms of bph, like needing to go frequently. tell your doctor about all your medical conditions and medicines, and ask if your heart is healthy enough for sex. do not take cialis if you take nitrates for chest pain, as it may cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure. do not drink alcohol in excess. side effects may include headache, upset stomach, delayed backache or muscle ache. to avoid long 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coast, but it will be a wet one. a storm system is expected to bring rain from florida to maine along with high winds. the midwest will see snow and ice. and health officials say the flu is widespread in 29 states. the strain in most cases is not covered by this year s shot. back to hardball. at a minimum, i would say this, barack obama is the worst negotiator that we ve had as president since at least jimmy carter and maybe in the modern history of this country. i intend to use every tool at our disposal in the majority to unravel as many of these changes as possible. this is all one-sided. that s what happens when you send a speech writer to negotiate a deal with a dictator. i think it sends an awful awful that the u.s. under this president is no longer a reliable ally in the feet for freedom and democracy. you saw marco rubio, jockeying for position in a crowded republican field of possibilities, launching an assault on president obama s deal to restore relations with cuba. he has a fight on his hands with senator rand paul of sdk and things are getting personal. rand paul bucked rubio by declaring his support for president obama s goal to end the cuban embargo. i mean, if the goal was regime change, it sure doesn t seem to be working. and probably it punishes the people more than the regime, because the regime can blame the embargo for hardship. if there s open trade, i think the people will see what it s like to all of the things that we produce under capitalism. so in the end, i think probably opening up cuba is a good idea. here s rubio with his lesser abilities going back at paul on fox last night. like many people that have been opining, he has no idea what he s talking about. the embargo is not what s hurting the cuban people. it s the lack of freedom, and the lack of competent leaders. today, the senator unloaded on rubio, saying, i m a proponent of peace through commerce. i believe engaging cuba can lead to positive change. seems that rubio is acting like an isolationist who wants to retreat to our borders and build a moat. i reject this isolationism. it s a shot here against rubio. he was 7 years old during camp david when jimmy carter, the guy he said wasn t a good negotiator, brought together israel with his major strategic enemy, egypt, and forced a permanent peace treaty between the two of them. match that, marco. just do something like that in your lifetime. let s talk about this interesting fight on the right. we grew up with the idea, we all did, that the republican party was the hawkish party, anti-communist, anti-everything, anti-everybody, let s go to war. and now you see an interesting intra-mural battle where you see rubio carrying the traditional baggage of the hawks. but then you see rand paul, who s got to be the most spontaneous, and i have to say scrambling arguer i ve ever seen. he doesn t say in the pocket. he s scrambling like rg3. he s always got something. you know, it s an epic battle between conservatives and libertarians it s epic, but it s new? it s fairly fresh. it s been simmering for some time, but coming out before the 2016 cycle and rand paul is playing on that and he s also playing on the fact that this is marco rubio s token cuban kid moment. hey, i m cuban american, let me get some headlines here. so this is his way to come out and say really outrageous things, whether they be right or wrong, just so he can say, i m out in front of the beipack, because he knows rand paul is playing it effectively ahead of that cycle. one thing rand paul is doing, why he s taking obama s position on this. he s saying, we do need to change up our strategy on this. he knows there s young voters who want to vacation in cuba. they know the strategy is outdated. and the cuban american vote is about 50/50 now. it s a wash. so don t assume you have to move in the direction of the red hots. the issue of cuba is no longer a defining issue for republicans. 20 years ago, the republicans came down hard. a lot of them in the house in the senate now don t care about this one way or the other. it s ancient history. they re more concerned about domestic policy and spending. it s going to be much more difficult for marco rubio to try to push rand paul to the side than maybe five or ten years ago. how does the white house sum this strange bedfellows situation up? president obama said he will continue to press this on. he had a press conference this afternoon and said he was planning to do what he wanted to do despite congress s opposition, and this is obviously one of those things. but he d rather work with congress. but this is definitely something they ve come out for and they are full throttle to do what they want to do. here he is, he fired back on critics of the cuba deal. let s watch him. what i know deep in my bones is that if you ve done the same thing for 50 years and nothing s changed, you should try something different, if you want a different outcome. and this gives us an opportunity for a different outcome. through engagement, we have a better chance of bringing about change than we would have otherwise. change is going to come to cuba. it has to. they ve got an economy that doesn t work. that sounds so millennial. the old guys didn t get it right. we ll try something new. it s a reflection of the administration trying to pivot into this kind of a mode. i think it s going to be, people want to get everything they want on this deal. republicans may be able to force their hands on things like maybe opening an embassy how do you do that? how do you stop the president who has the right to declare diplomatic relations with another country? they ll go to go to congress to approve shipping money in the state department to open up the embassy. congress will say no. they ll need that. without that, that could have an impact on some of this. but it depends on how much having a physical embassy matters. is that the house and the senate? both. obama made this announcement a week after they pass a $1.3 trillion budget. so he has the seed funding to move forward with the staff it strikes me as a little pissent. to not let the guy name an ambassador. just seems so petty, kate. it s not like debating. it s saying you can t do what you have a right to do. it s like saying we re not going to pay for the white house meals anymore, or close down the electricity in the executive branch. just seems so small-minded to use your power that way. congress will do everything they can to stop it the way they think they can. i called the man who is down there already ambassador. so there may not be an ambassador there, but there s a presence there. it s going to be very difficult for them to really the fundamental change has already happened. we are now talking about having normalized relationships with cuba. it s a fundamental shift and there s not a lot republicans are going to be able to do other than the cuban americans, jose diaz-balart, that would be hard for the republicans to shoot that down, i would think. in many ways, there are things that have ticked down over the years. the president has, you know, loosened travel restrictions. there s a pretty robust u.s. presence there, where they route things through the swiss government. so there s a presence there. really quickly, the underreported political dynamic, russia is about to build a spy base and the cuban relationship with venezuela and with people like iran, north korea, it s a very clever move by the president. and it could continue in the wrong direction for a while. i don t want to deal with the communist government. i don t want to meet with these guys. i ll go with a travel agent. their time is up, by the way. the roundtable is staying with us. coming up, stephen colbert s big send-off last night. looked like a lot of fun. alan alda, george lucas what a crowd. we ll talk about the beautiful song they sang on the way out the door last night. this is hardball. thanks. 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(mandarin) cut it out. see you tomorrow. state of the union address will take place on january 20, that s the date that house speaker john boehner chose. we ll be right back after this. but i ve managed.e crohn s disease is tough, except that managing my symptoms was all i was doing. and when i finally told my doctor, he said humira is for adults like me who have tried other medications but still experience the symptoms of moderate to severe crohn s disease. and that in clinical studies, the majority of patients on humira saw significant symptom relief. and many achieved remission. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened; as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. ask your gastroenterologist about humira. with humira, remission is possible. when electricity is generated here s awith natural gasu: instead of today s most used source, how much are co2 emissions reduced? up to 30%? 45%? 60%? the answer is. up to 60% less. and that s a big reason why the u.s. is a world leader in reducing co2 emissions. take the energy quiz round 2. energy lives here. if this is your first time tuning into the colbert report, i have some terrible news. this, in fact s your last time tuning into the colbert report, until no, no, no. folks, until ten years from now, when they reboot it directed by j.j. abrams. we re back. it s officially the end of the era. stephen colbert signed off and the satirist did it in style, leading a massive course of celebrities at his sing-along. just like you always do tell the news keep the dark clouds far away we ll meet again we ll meet again. . some sunny day just like you always do till the blue skies dry the dark clouds far away so will you please say hello to the friends that i know tell them i won t be long they ll be happy to know that as you saw me go i was singing this song we ll meet again don t know when don t know where but i know we ll meet again some sunny day we re back with our great round table. charles and katie and john. did you realize what was going on is there? the last music from dr. strangelove when the bombs are dropping, and then henry kissinger while they re singing we ll meet again. what did you think? i was supposed to be there but i had a brother-in-law party last night. i m curious to see what happens when he goes will he be a new permit? well, he has to be. he can t be himself, though. but i want to see how much of the politics he s able to bring into late night sort of basic television. i think that that will be an interesting thing because he s done such a great job of helping along with jon stewart create this new brand on cable. and i noticed kimmel is getting better. isn t he? i don t know what the competition will be. i have a feeling he s a really nice guy when you meet him but he s a regular guy. i think he has to develop a hybrid of the guy he plays because chevy chase, as i said the other night, didn t work as chevy chase. he just disappeared because when he wasn t playing that character like jerry lewis played a character, the jerk, he called him. most guys play somebody. right, right. he made political news reporting more approachable, the whole game of politics more approachable. he represents that rat pack. let s watch more from colbert s sendoff last night. he reflected on some of his major accomplishments over the last nine years. zoe all those things they said i did, save olympics, the rally to restore sanity and/or for and/or cat stevens career. none of that, none of that was really me. you, the nation, did all of that. i just got paid for it. thanks. thanks. that was really cool of you guys. nice when good things happen to good guys. thank you. when we return, let me finish with president obama today and how things are going racially in this country. i m going to let the president speak for the president. you re watching hardball, the place for politics. thanks to angie s list, now it is. we ve made hiring anyone from a handyman to a dog walker as simple as a few clicks. buy their services directly at angieslist.com no more calling around. no more hassles. start shopping from a list of top-rated providers today. angie s list is revolutionizing local service again. visit angieslist.com today. .the getaway vehicle! for all the confidence you need. td ameritrade. you got this. were. the gap between income and wealth of white and black america persists. and we ve got more work to do on that front. i ve been consistent in saying that this is a legacy of a troubled racial past of jim crow and slavery. that s not an excuse for black folks. and i think the overall majority of black people understand it s not an excuse. they re working hard. they re out there hustling and trying to get an education, trying to send their kids to college. but they re starting behind oftentimes in the race. what s true for all americans is we should be willing to provide people a hand up. not a hand up but help folks get that good, early childhood
and glove with the president on selling the healthcare plan, the president sends out four tweets about predecessor wiretapping him. did that help or hurt? that was not part of the campaign trail. how far off course did that take you? i think it was there s really often into new territory. there is part of what the intelligence kmo committee is investigating. late today, the justice department told them it immediate more time to review the request. the spokesperson sean spicer said the president made the stupid charge. spicer dodged some of the wiretapped him. now they are trying to weasel out of it. i think the grown up here is mccain who saying put up or shut up. they have gotten away with the fantasy that there were 3 million fraudulent votes casts. this president does not get called into account for putting out false statements. even though it involves something of historic magnitude an it doesn t seem to stick with donald trump when he fly out lies. i think there are people who believe it. i don t accept it. somebody should tell the speaker of the house he is being a felon or not. it isn t funny. how does a president order a wiretap. what does he have to do i don t think it s constitutional. but how would it be done? i don t have the wildest clue. here is the deal, two things you have to keep in mind. number one, the president didn t ask for prosecutor he didn t call for investigation. sean spicer later covered it up by saying a want a investigation. aihe was sick doing. ere is the big eger problem, they are in campaign mold. i sat in a bunch of focus groups and rust belt states people who vote for trump, they like him, they love him agenda, when you ask him what would he change. quit shooting from the hip. they want him to be focused and that is a problem for him. wiretapping could be a host of surveillance uniques. just find out obama had phone taps. this is mccarthyism. tap my phone during the sacred this watergate or sick guy. referring to the former president. let s watch what he said a week ago. does the president believe that former president barack obama committed a felon. i think the tweets speak for themselves. when did president become to believe that the president obama wiretapped his phones. i think it speaks for itself. this would be a bone i will chewn because i nnot understand how sitting president accuse former president of a felony. you have to get a fisa agreement is not something president s do. it s done by prosecutor. your thoughts. sean is right. the tweets speak for itself. he accused the former president. he made a inflammatory statement and accused former president of a felony. this is part of false things that the approximatepresident i person and he calls for an investigation to try to bury that. even if we don t know if there s any kind of legal consequences or recourse in terms of catching him in a lie, it s important to do that because of this pattern of eskalation. we may laugh at it but they believe it. i think he should act like the speaker of the house. it seems like trump is using you to hide behind. you re the intelligence committee give us evidence or reason to believe there s wiretapping by the former president. they say we have not fwn abbeen to get the information. they say you investigate. we say okay, we have to get the investigation from the justice department. this is to keep the story alive. why are they doing this. why don t they talk? we have a hearing coming up on 20th. he may take that opportunity to say what he wanted to say which is to debunk this story. i think it was their best bet on how to make it go away by saying it s your problem. this is a serious enough charge that you can count on us to in the open hearing to ask the people there, whether is anything to this serious charge what is complicated about finding out if the president order wiretap. why is it complicated? it s not. they can have doj in his office to say is it true or is it not true. he may not like the answer is the reason why he wasn t want to do that. kellyanne ask about the claim up in jersey. do you know whether trump tower was wiretapped. there s many ways to surveil each other. you can surveil through the phones, television sets, my crow waves that turn into kellyanne said she was not talking about inference to surveil trump tower but surveillance uniques. let s watch. why would you make suggestion without evidence. i wasn t i asked you have no evidence that was used against trump tower. i have no investigation that s why there s an investigation. however, i i m not in job of having it looks to me like they are trying to bury the story. was the current president wiretapped by the former president that s a simple question to answer. if you don t know the answer, say i don t know. look, i have to give credit to kellyanne conway. she is loyal to this president. she doesn t have a good answer. she hasn t been included on why the president said what she did. why is she making the rounds? she didn t go on the rounds on you can imagine coming on this show, and you re boss within the last week accused his predecessor of having tapped his phone and not be ready with a quick answer. let s be honest. i m always honest. kellyanne not be able to give a bad answer you re saying what i m saying. it s called the run around. that s not what i m saying. what are you saying? i m saying in this particular case, she is already said that the president has information that she is not authorized to have and therefore she could not talk into the situation. all he did was talk about what surveillance means and it s much broader. you can google that and find that out. thank you for being on the show. coming up, non-bipartisan say 14 millions will be left cold if republicans plan to push healthcare. we have to figure this one out. what s going to replace obamacare. not much. the problem of them lose healthcare become donald trump s problem. don t you think? more carrying marijuana is underfire for comments like that. we can t restore our civilization with someone else s babies. for the trump white house it s about disruption. you needs to make sure people see him as rebel. let me finish with trump, you ain t going to like it. this is hardball where the action is. well, a 103 yeah, 103. well, let me ask you guys. how long did it take you two to save that? a long time. then it s a fortune. well, i m sure you talk to people all the time who think $100k is just pocket change. right now we re just talking to you. i told you we had a fortune. yes, you did. getting closer to your investment goals starts with a conversation. schedule a complimentary goal planning session today. tech: don t let a cracked windshtrust safelite.plans. with safelite s exclusive on my way text . you ll kw exacy when we ll be there. giving you more time for what with safematters most.ive on my way text . (team sing) safelite repair, safelite replace. you saw how kellyanne conway answer the question about her boss s wiretap accusation. earlier today trump tweeted this message. it s amazing how rude media is to my representatives. be nice. we ll be right back. inspecting towers way up high avoiding turbulence in the sky. personalizing treatments with dna and recommending who should play. a dress that thinks, which crops to grow, tax prep to help keep payments low. you can find me on an oil rig, i answer questions small and big. hello, my name is watson. i answer questions small and big. here s to the wildcats this i gotta try .. bendy. spendy weekenders. whatever kind of weekender you are, there s a hilton for you. book your weekend break dire at hilton.com and join the weekenders. bp engineered a fleet of 32 brand new ships with advanced technology, so we can make sure oil and gas get where they need to go safely. because safety is never being satisfied. and always working to be better. gave. that was trump and members of the administration defending the proposed healthcare act. if passed the price tag will reduce federal budget. 24 million will be uninsured by 2026. if they if they are willing to take spokt responsibility of those remember this. the pottery barn rule, you break it. you own it. president accused media of looking better than it really is. the press is making is look wonderful. if we end it, everyone is going to say remember how great obamacare used to be. it was so great. it s a little bit like president obama, people liked when he was left. when he was here, they didn t like him so much. here what they had to say late tonight. i hope they would pull the bill. that s the decent thing to do. numbers are important. they see the numbers. they should know how that transfers into people s lives. the republican hand picked head of cbo has confirmed what he democrats have been saying all along. trump care would be a nightmare for the american people. remember when he was candidate he said everyone would be covered and cost would go down. he had no intention of keeping either promise. congressman bar ton, thank you for coming on today. 14 million fewer. i respect cbo but they are not infallible. they are seldom ever right. 19 million americans under the affordable care act chose not to take coverage even though this was main dated. they either paid tax penalty or they asked to hardship exception. 10 million did go into private exchanges. it seems ill lodgeble that 14 that chose individual chances, i don t see how you get to the number. do you respect the cbo, he pointed out that the leader was picked by republicans and the caucus. now you say you respect them but you don t trust the numbers. explain it? it doesn t matter who the director is. the cbo is almost always wrong. in my 32 years in congress i cannot recall them ever being right. they say 24 million fewer people insured by 2016. i m wondering, that s a lot of people if it s 24, 23, or 26, that s a the of people that s not going to be covered by a plan that s supposed so cover everybody. give us a couple of years to get to the transition and let the american choose. we think you are going to get better coverage, lower cost, you will choose to get the coverage not mandated. we need to put the plan in place and give it a chance and see what the american people think. it seems to me, that the democrats created social security are no republicans voted for. the same with medicare and obamacare. this is something first social entitlement programs that the republicans will have their fingers on. they will call you, say you voted for this. aren t you worried about having the hammered put next to your head. instead of blaming the constituent, they will be blaming you, aren youorried about that. we cannot be you are scot-free of that one. we asked the democrats to help us but for i guess perhaps some of the reason you eluded to they are too busy defending something that s failed to work with us. that s a fair charge you made. ruth, let ask you about this. i think promises were made in this campaign and one of them was obama made a lot of promises too, this guy is making promises about deliver it is what obama could in terms of coverage at cheaper price. maybe same price but not the coverage. i m attempted to keep going about the attention must be paid to cbo scores. it s just complete logic with the take aware mandate to require purchase the health insurance. when you spend more than a trillion dollar less in terms of subsidies and maedicaid costs, it s going to make sense there s going to be fewer, it s a significant number and i think there s a lot of angst among republicans on the hill looking at the numbers. republican lawmakers express their opposition to this bill. i would say to my friends with whom i serve, do not walk the plank and vote for a bill that cannot pass the senate and have to face the consequences of that vote. i think that s not because of the specific this is unacceptable. but because i think we can do better. in a number of areas of concern. you say that speaker ryan is pulling the wool over the eyes of the president. i think the s a separation between the two. i talked to the president three times and he willing to negotiate. what i here from paul ryan it s a binary choice. what does it mean. his way or the highway. congressman, it seems to me there s to safest positions, you vote for something that pass or vote for something that fails. are you comfortable with the bill you re looking at on the house side from the ryan s office and something you are comfortable defending. i do want to improve it. i do think that the way we treat the medicaid expansion states is too rich. i would like to end increase in expanding medicaid coverage for healthy adults after one year and a day when the super march goes back to two third federal government one-third state match. i do think what the energy and commerce committee and the ways and means committee we have to protect the people that chose to participate in it or forced to. we need to move to better system, more choices, or freedom. i m not sweating we are trying repeal and replace obamacare. congressman, who are getting nervous. thank you. up next, ohio congressman no stranger to outrageous statements. tonight he is doubling down and not backing down. this is hardball. we ll be right back. verage comps have come together to bring you more ways to help reduce calories from sugar. with more great tasting beverages with less sugar or no sugar at all, smaller portion sizes, clear calorie labels, and signs reminding everyone to think balance before choosing their beverages. we know you care about reducing the sugar in your family s diet, and we re working to support your efforts. more beverage choices. smaller portions. less sugar. balanceus.org. how to win at business. step one: point decisively with the arm of your glasses. abracadabra. the stage is yours. step two: choose la quinta. the only hotel where you can redeem loyalty points for a free night-instantly and win at business. explore your treatment options with specialists who treat only cancer. every stage. every day.. at cancer treatment centers of america. learn more at cancercenter.com/experts what if we treated great female scientists like they were stars? 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[mile dresselhaus was seen having lunch today.] [.rumors of the new discovery.] what if we lived in a world like that? (crowd applauding) we know a place that s already working on it. snow. is not jt inches feet as much as two feet. from west of philadelphia up to scranton andality ban knee. hartford 12 to 18 inches. philadelphia a little less, 6 to 9. washington, d.c. 1 to 3 or 5 inches in some spots. coastal flooding. there will be some snow there but some mixes with rain and ice. but a major storm about to impact the northeast. now back to hardball. i would ask you to go through through history and figure out where are the contributions made by these people. western civilization itself rooted in western europe and united states and every place where the christianity. welcome back t hardball. that was republican from ohio steve king. questioning non-white subgroups, he called them. he is under fire again. reporting he tweeted builders understand we cannot restore our civilization with someone else s baby. when asked to explain when down down on his comment. i meant exactly what i said. i said the same thing ten years to german people or people that is declining that is not willing to have enough baby to reproduce yourself. you cannot rebuild with someone else s baby. you have to keep your birth rate up. many republicans were quick to condemn the remarks of the congressman. he tweeted what exactly do you mean. do i qualify as someone else s baby? the sentiment shared by is eplur russ ennumb. here s what he told fox news. i disagree with that statement. we are a melting pot. my families here because potatoes stopped growing in island. we re a melting pot where people come from all the walks of live from around the world to seek a bett better life. congressman, what do you think he meant and do you defend it? i do. it s good to be with you. i think he is getting a bum wrap. peoplen the media are calling steve king a racist and zeenphobe. he said if you want to come here you have to come here legally. if you want to come here legally, you have to assimilate and askrib to our american values, he said american can t survive. you re not a racist to believe that. let s ask jonathan what is your reaction? chris, what congressman king said is part and parcel of a history of things that he has said that are racist or xeno phobic, we know when congressman king talked about people coming over the border with calves the size of can te lopes. calling mexicans drug mules. congressman king has a problem. he has a xeno ph obe. they are hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. those would be legalized with the same act. that s the guy you re defending right now. there s a pattern of prejudice here. putting it lightly. i don t think it is. against mexican. no. mexicans have come up. the media obsession with making this about race. this is what they did with trump supporters during the campaign. what former congressman wilson is trying bait a conversation where he is trying to pull in people who voted for president trump and lumping them into being racist. we are talking a congressman who has a history of making racist and xeno ph obic statements. what america is above all else is an idea. people come here for opportunities, they come hear to spe here to seek a better life because that s the idea of america. when you have a congressman who degrades people who come here denounced what king said. jonathan, it s not racist. it s about value and cultture. if your going to come here, jonathan, then subscribe to that idea that i think people do. many do, cis. but many don t. we n holland. holland has the homogenus african-americans have been here longer than us. the point has been made by history, you re right. they were yearning for prfreedo. i appreciate the point you re trying to make. it has to do with cultural thing. thank you jonathan you better to subscribe to that or you should not be here. freedom and all things. coming up, haven t you noticed that shaking things up is his way of being a rebel. it s his way of letting us know he is still alive. part of reason he firing up the u.s. attorneys. he likes to cause trouble. this is hardball where the action is. to modernize this industry. find out how he turned things around on sunday morning at 7:30. visit open for ideas to help you grow your business. more complete allergy relief in a gentle mist you may not even notice. using unique mistpro technology, new flonase sensimist delivers a gentle mist to help block six key inflammatory substances that cause your symptoms. most allergy pills only block one. and six is greater than one. break through your allergies. new flonase sensimist. say carl, we have a question about your brokerage fees. fees? what did you have in mind? i don t know. $4.95 per trade? uhhh. and i was wondering if your brokerage offers some sort of guarantee? guarantee? where we can get our fees and commissions back if we re not happy. so can you offer me what schwab is offering? what s with all the questions? ask your broker if they re offering $4.95 online equity trades and a satisfaction guarantee. if you don t like their answer, ask again at schwab. dearthere s no other way to say this. it s over. i ve found a permanent escape from monotony. together, we are perfectly balanced. our senses awake. our hearts racing as one. i know this is sudden, but they say.if you love something set it free. see you around, giulia attorney general jeff sessions supported the decision. this should not come as a surprise. president trump enjoys shaking things up and playing the role of rebel. catherine, it seems to me, there s a rotation, when you come into presidency, you get rid of the old administration. this guy he told him he was not going to fire them. who i don t know who matters at this point. it matters who calls the shots. trump is the president. i never thought that dublin came up with the idea of invading iraq. i m sorry. when trump made the promise that he was going to keep him on. i m not sure he thought through it. we know he put in the call. the white house is saying that. there was some indecision. it looked like trump wanted to keep him. but he was always the guy going after fox. so i ll go to you. why do you let that guy look like a hero today. why did this guy get fired? nobody else can name except mr. fishman. he was going after a lot of corruption. the guy who is going to replace him with roger s personal lawyer. is he going to get it. it looks like it. you think this was done to protect fox? yes, it may have been a quid pro quo with fox. you believe that was the deal,uid pro quo. trump is the tank with fox. i done think what was the deal? somehow he told him i m going to keep him around. he made the promise to him after the election but there was nothing knew, going after fox wasn t new. going after murdock. there s a lot of substantial evidence. why did he fire him? i don t know why he fired him. many people don t know why he fired him exception for his inner circle. what about bannon? bannon probably knows. trump was going to get he doesn t like telling people they are fired to their face. on the campaign when he fired his campaign manager he didn t do it in person. people would say, everything he does has a second purpose which is to create shake-up mentality. could it be this is where they agree getting rid of u.s. attorneys on the boss things are changing. i m sure that sart of it. in my view tmp or bannon? trump. this is his way throughout the campaign. every day we talk about trump, every second we talk about trump. he s won. he those he has to keep the grand if it he disappeared for a week it would be unimaginable. if you fire someone in new yorks all the bells and whistle this is hardball where the action is. but through good times and bad. .at t. rowe price. .we ve helped our investors stay confident for over 75 years. call us or your advisor. t. rowe price. invest with confidence. we re coming back to the hardball round table including what i don t know and what is going on in the west wing right now. back after this. everyone deserves attention, whether you ve saved a lot or just a little. at pnc investments, we believe you re more than just a number. so we provide personal financial advice for every retirement investor. wheyou wantve somto protect it.e, at legalzoom, our network of attorneys can help you every step of the way. with an estate plan including wills or a lingrust that grows along with you inand your family. a lingrust legalzoom. legal help is here. afoot and light-hearted i take to the open road. healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me leading wherever i choose. the east and the west are mine. the north and the south are mine. all seems beautiful to me. to take advantage of this offer on a volvo s90, visit your local dealer. you totanobody s hurt, new car. but there will still be pain. it comes when your insurance company says they ll only pay three-quarters of what it takes to replace it. what are you supposed to do? drive three-quarters of a car? now if you had liberty mutual new car replacement™, you d get your whole car back. i guess they don t want you driving around on three wheels. smart. with liberty mutual new car replacement™, we ll replace the full value of your car. liberty stands with you™. liberty mutual insurance. here s to the wildcats this i gotta try .. bendy. spendy weekenders. whatever kind of weekender you are, there s a hilton for you. book your weekend break direct at hilton.com and join the weekenders. we re back with the hardball round table. katy, tell me something i don t know. i ve talked to a couple of my sources over the weekend and everyone keeps saying how cope set particular things are between all of the factionand the meetings go well. yes. but then everybody leaves and they get on the horn with their minions and their reporters and spin a different story. do they rat each other out? yes. exactly. we don t know anybody like that in the media. that never happens in the media. go ahead, ali. there are about 110 unicorns in the u.s. tech startups worth $1 billion. of those 110, 50% of them have at least one nonamerican-born founder. so your point? somebody else s babies are really good for something that we consider very american. that is entrepreneurship. by the way, the problem with the french is they don t have a name for entrepreneurship. remember w ? we re going to hit the debt ceiling this week. when are they going to vote on the debt ceiling increase? that is to be determined. they are going to try to take memb measures to delay it and ideally there won t be drama surrounding this. democrats suggest there may be a showdown whether funding for the mexico wall it forces the opposition party, the republicans likes to be the governing party because nobody wants to vote for the debt ceiling increase. they should get rid of it. but not while the republicans are there. it s too much fun to make them do it. katy tur and catherine and ali lshi, thank you. when we return, it s trump watch. let me talk to you about retirement. a 401(k) is the most sound way to go. let s talk asset allocation. -sure. you seem knowledgeable, professional. would you trust me as your financial advisor? -i would. -i would indeed. well, let s be clear, here. i m actually a deejay. [ laughing ] no way! i have no financial experience at all. that really is you? if they re not a cfp pro, you just don t know. find a certified financial planner professional who s thoroughly vetted at letsmakeaplan.org. cfp. work with the highest standard. introducing new depend silhouette active fit, with a thin design for complete comfort. they say move it or lose it and at my age, i m moving more than ever. because getting older is inevitable. but feeling older? that s something i control. get a free sample at depend.com. remember when you said men are supeyeah.ivers? yeah, then how d i get this. .allstate safe driving bonus check? .only allstate sends you a bonus check for every six months you re accident free. silence. it s good to be in, good hands. trump. it s about who he wants to be. you know how you hear a lot today about their existence, i think donald trump wants to be the resistance. get it? he doesn t want to be the person responsible for getting your health care coverage, the person who you call or blame when it s not working for you. no, donald trump wants to be the person who gives speeches and/or tweets attacking the current health care program. he wants to be the resistance. this explains his arm s length distance from the republican health care bill that s supposed to repeal and replace obamacare. it explains while he ll be happier if the bill gets stoed in the house or senate because then he ll be able to blame the democrats. the fact is, no matter what bill gets passed, donald trump will get shorthanded. there s not even less of a chance of the congressional democrats that are going to help him destroy obamacare. that leaves him, donald trump, with the prospect of signing a health care bill that cuts millions of americans from their health insurance. does anyone expect those
this was the last day before the trump presidency s 100th day. and congress put in less than half a day because there is no trump agenda item alive in congress right now. there is no bill moving anywhere in congress now. no legislative vehicle that is a trump agenda item. we have never seen a 99th day like this for a president. every president s busiest legislative year is the first year. it s when their power of persuasion over the congress is at its highest. and it only goes down after that. what a president accomplishes in his first year is usually most of what the president will accomplish in his first term. this is so clear historically that when bob woodward chose to write a book entitled the agenda, he decided to focus entirely on a president s first year. and he picked a president with a loaded first year agenda, bill clinton. at this point in bill clinton s first year, the congress was working overtime. at the same time, congress was working on nafta, a giant tax bill which was inside a giant budget bill. they were also working on a world trade agreement and the beginnings of both clinton health care and clinton welfare reform. along with little things like an emergency extension of unemployment insurance. some of those things made it all the way to the finish line and became law in the first year. some in the second year, and some not at all. but they were all important in the first year. they were all being worked on every friday afternoon of the first year of the clinton presidency. and i don t necessarily mean that the house and the senate were in session every friday afternoon, although they were a lot. what i mean is anyone casually following the news could tell you what the clinton agenda was and what parts of it congress was actively working on. that is not true tonight. well can t tell you that they re actively working on anything. republicans in the house have certainly wanted it to appear as though they re working on a health care bill. but when congress is really working on something, the house and the senate both have to work on it. notice that no one in the senate has been even pretending twork on a health care bill or consult with the house in any way on a bill that would have to pass the united states senate. so nothing about what house republicans are doing or have been doing on health care reform actually looks like a real legislative activity. and it certainly isn t real enough to keep them in washington after lunch on a friday, even though the trump presidency desperately needed some kind of legislative accomplishments within the first 100 days there is only one thing we can promise you about the second year of the trump presidency, and that is that the trump presidency will accomplish less in the second year than in the first year. and that is because all presidencies accomplish less in the second year than they do in the first year. because as presidents always discover, when congress enters an election year, congress does even less than congress did the year before. they don t take risks. that is just a fundamental rule of congress that has nothing to do with president trump. when you factor in how much time congress is going to take off this year for christmas, for thanksgiving, for the entire month of august, the fourth of july, memorial day week, donald trump is now more than a third of the way through his first year of dealing with congress. and he has nothing to show for it. less than any president in modern history. and that could be why he is saying things like this. well, i loved my previous life. i loved my previous life. i had so many things going. i actually this is more work than in my previous life. i thought it would be easier. i m a details oriented person. i think you would say that. but i do miss my old life. i like to work. so that s not a problem. but this is actually more work. okay. that s amazing stuff. could we just replay the middle of that. i thought it would be easier. i thought it was more of a i m a details oriented person. more of a what? i thought it would be easier. i thought it was more of a and then he does that donald trump thing. he cuts off donald trump. he doesn t let donald trump finish donald trump s thought. that s the most important sentence in what he just said. i thought it would be easier. i thought it was more of a feel free to tweet me your guesses about how he was going to finish that sentence before he decided that he shouldn t finish that sentence. whatever he was going to say, donald trump himself decided he shouldn t say it. it was against donald trump s better judgment. imagine, imagine what it had to be for donald trump to think oh, better not say that. he thought it was going to be more of a what? the president gave that interview yesterday. he knew congress would be gone less than 24 hours later, and he would be stuck with his 100 days of zero legislative accomplishments on the donald trump campaign agenda, which was supposed to be the trump presidency s first year agenda. some of it was supposed to be the trump presidency s first day agenda. but just about all of it was supposed to be the trump presidency s first 100-day agenda. a deadline that the president himself imposed. that s why i proposed a contract with the american voter. it s a set of promises for what i ll do in my first 100 days. it includes getting rid of immediately obamacare, which is a disaster. and now he misses his previous life. did you hear the way he said that? he sounded like the narrater in a british novel looking back on his previous life from his now much more troubled, tragic life. well, i loved my i i love mid previous life. i loved my previous life. i had so many things going. has there been a more poignant line uttered by a president in his first 100 days? i loved my previous life. did you hear his voice completely fall out when he said i had so many things going. on the word going when you listen to that again, on the word going, he just sinks. the man has never been more publicly self-aware, more publicly introspective, which isn t saying much because introspection isn t donald trump s thing. ask yourself how happy is your president. well, i loved my i i love mid previous life. i loved my previous life. had so many things going. so many things going. in a speech to the national rifle association today, the president once again revisited his glory days. actually, it was his glory day. what fun that was, november 8th. wasn that a great evening? you remember that evening? remember that? [ cheering ] remember them saying we have breaking news. donald trump has won the state of michigan. they go michigan? how did that happen. he goes on and on about it. you ve heard it all before. he was supposed to be telling them about how he dramatically to everyone s surprise pulled off a victory in getting obamacare repealed and replaced when everyone said he couldn t. but he doesn t have that story to tell. and so he tells his favorite story, the election night story. and now in interviews he is looking back plaintively at when he thought it would be easier. it s so much easier to be presidential, because i don t have to use any energy. you know, being presidential is easy. much easier than what i have to do. you re going to have such great health care and a tiny fraction of the cost. and it s going to be so easy. the wall is peanuts. that s going to be one of the easy negotiations, believe me. we re going to make america great again. it s going to be easy. joining us now, nicholas kristof, pulitzer prize winning columnist for the new york times. charlie sykes, editor-in-chief of write wisconsin and an msnbc contributor. nick, the one contribution i had to campaign coverage when it would come to a trump speech or debate or something is to simply say that s not going to happen. get rid of nafta, that s not going to happen. coy rattle off all of the things that weren t going to happen. i did expect the big tax cut to happen. republican presidents get elected, they cut taxes. there is a way to do that. george bush did it right away. so i m sitting here not having come close to predicting they would get zero on the tax cut. but i don t have any other surprises. are you surprised where we are in the 100 days? i think i had more faith than you did in the president s incompetence. okay. it seemed to me doubtful he would manage to get these things through. and i m indeed, i don t think he is going to get a health care bill through. i don t think he is going to get a tax bill actually passed. and i doubt he is going to get an infrastructure bill, which is really the lightest load of all. actually through. i think that s why he is so plaintive. i thought he thought this was going to be like being america s homecoming king, all cheers. and in fact it turns out to be about policy which he is not interested in and about msnbc and the new york times saying he hasn t accomplished anything. right. and charlie, i get the feeling that the president thought i get to be popular by being president. that yes, it will be great if i have a bunch of accomplishments in the 100 days. but if i don t have a bunch of accomplishments, don t i still get to be popular? i think there is a lot going on there. you re right. this is the most poignant and revealing and defining point of his presidency. you unbutton it a little bit. what he is basically acknowledging is how manifestly unqualified and unprepared he was. he had no idea what it was going to be like to deal with congress. he had no idea what it was going to be like to deal with a federal judiciary. he didn t understand the constitution. he had no idea how complicated the executive branch was. and frankly, he obviously had no idea the gravity of the decisions he would have to make as president of the united states, including on international affairs and trade. but what an amazing thing for him to sit down and go yea i really had no idea what i was getting into. and when i promised that everything was going to be eds, easy, i really didn t have a clue. remarkable. and it is semi public information. once you re elected president, to your surprise on november 8th, you have time to grab bob woodward s book the agenda. it s not a long book. it s about the first year of presidency. it s the single book to read if you re president. you d pick up a lot. george mitchell would come to trump tower, and he would tell you here is how it works. he would happily tell you that, if you just took the time during the transition to have this kind of inquisitive mind what is it i m getting into. i don t think he has that inquisitive mind. i don t think there is any national politician i ve ever known in my journalistic career who has been uninterested in policy or as ill informed about policy as president trump. and i think this was compounded by the fact that he essentially wanted to blow up system that he didn t understand and was trying to recruit allies who also wanted to blow it up because they had that instinct were unfamiliar with what they were trying to blow up. that s why he indeed of the top 550 positions of the administration he has only nominated 10% of them. he doesn t have allies around the gofrt. 200 vacant jobs at the state department. charlie sykes, the incoming presidents have all somewhere been on the scale of egomaniac to go off in that direction in the first place. but they have all had some measure of humility, varying measures of humility as they enter this transition into the presidency where you can see them and they will report this to people and to friends feeling the enormity of it and feeling daunted by how much homework they have to do before january 20th and how much homework they re going to have to do every night after that. yeah. it s one thing to have a great ego. but i m not a psychologist. i don t play one on television. but donald trump is a narcissist in the classic term. if the normal range of ego is here, he is over here, unburdened by not an inquisitive mind, unburdened by much introspection. and obviously has no sense of humility. so i m actually not thinking that that admission he didn t know what he was getting into means that you know what? i need to study more. i need to think more, i need to listen to more intelligent people. here is a man who came into the presidency and surrounded himself with the clown car of staff, many of them still there. when he was asked what made your job harder than you thought. mr. president, day 99. what s made your job harder than you thought? we re moving awfully well. we re getting a lot of things done. we are i don t think there has ever been anything like this. it s a false standard, 100 days. but i have to tell you, i don t think anybody has done what we ve been able to do in 100 days. so we re very happy. nick, i agree with him it s a false standard. but it s a standard he laid down for himself. but a first year is not a false standard. and when you re more than a third of the way through your first year and you have zero, it s worth talking about. yeah. it s a lot more whatever everybody is talking about is no significant legislation passed, and that is true. but if you look at the cabinet, he has one of the least impressive cabinets one has seen. he has appointed the least number of people to the administration of anybody recently. he has the worst approval rating of any new president in polling history. and there is really nothing on the horizon that would give one reason to think that things are going to get better. i mean, it has to be said that bill clinton had a somewhat rough start, not by these standards. john kennedy had again a somewhat rough start and they both managed to overcome that. in the case of president trump, though, he has he comes at it from so much more difficult position. in foreign affairs, i must say there has been a real improvement by getting rid of mike flynn, bringing in mcmaster. he has switched positions on one issue after another and brought himself much closer to the traditional conservative republican position. and there is certainly much more of a reality-based posture in foreign affairs now than there was at the beginning. charlie, your final word on the 100 days of president trump. well, the good news and the bad news for donald trump is that he has that echo chamber that no matter how bad he does, he has the alternative media reality machine that is going to beef him up. the bad news for him is it s going to insulate him and he is not going to hear what he needs to hear. i think that the one thing that is probably the most troubling development is, and i know this word has been overused a lot. as we near the 100 days, how much of his behavior has been normalized? how much we have absorb and normalized his approach to the truth, how much we have normalized that he continues to use slurs like pocahantas. the bizarre erratic nature of this presidency. and i think that s something that we were concerned about at the very beginning. but look, there is huge steaks for everybody, for conservatives, liberals, democrats, republicans in at least stepping back and going okay, we got to put the country first. we re no longer in the the celebrity apprentice. this is tougher than reality tv and the stakes are a little higher for all of us. charlie sykes gets the last word in this segment. nick kristof, charlie sykes, thank you both for joining us. coming up, it is trump versus ryan. it really is. the back stabbing backstage between president trump s staff and speaker paul ryan s staff, and how paul ryan became the most unpopular person in american politics today. okay let s call his agent i m coming over right now. the newly advanced gle can see in your blind spot. onboard cameras and radar can detect danger all around you. driver assist systems can pull you back into your lane if drifting. bye chief. bye bobby. and will even help you brake, if necessary. it makes driving less of a production. lease the gle350 for $579 a month at your local mercedes-benz dealer. mercedes-benz. the best or nothing. trust #1 doctor recommended dulcolax. use dulcolax tablets for gentle dependable relief. suppositories for relief in minutes. and dulcoease for comfortable relief of hard stools. dulcolax. designed for dependable relief. 60% of women are wearing the w.experience leaks. introducing always my fit. find the number that s right for your flow and panty size on the top of any always pack. the better the fit, the better it protects. always. are you disappointed with how the republicans have handled these big issues? health care went down and there was some suggestion it might happen today. but now it s not going to happen. i m disappointed that it doesn t go quicker. i like them a lot. i have great relationships. don t forget, most of them i didn t even know. right. but many of them, like the freedom caucus, i see them we love our president. we re doing this for our president. you look at this. you look at the moderates, the same thing. we love our president. i m disappointed. i tell you, paul ryan is trying very, very hard. i think everybody is trying very hard. it is a very tough system. the attempt to repeal obamacare is doing damage to paul ryan. he is now the most unpopular politician polled in the nbc/wall street journal poll. the number of americans who have are positive view of paul ryan has dropped from 40% to 22% with the number of negative views of paul ryan has climbed to 45%. according to a new fox news poll, democrats hold a five-point advantage on a generic congressional ballot. the latest gallup poll shows obamacare has an all-time high approval rating for obamacare of 55%. last night at an event in new york city, president obama pointed out that the affordable care act has never been more popular than it is now. and it is more popular than the current president. according to gallup, donald trump s approval rating is at 43%. joining us now, evan siegfried, republican strategist. joining us karine jean-pierre for moveon.org and josh barrow, senior editor for business insider and an msnbc contributor. i was struck by the president going out of his way to say nice things about paul ryan in the interview we just heard because let s listen to this quote in time magazine. this is from an adviser to speaker paul ryan who says it s all about the show down there at the white house, says an adviser to speaker of the house paul ryan. they want the trailer, and we re trying to make the ken burns documentary. karene, i have not seen the adviser to the speak ever make comments about that about the white house when they re trying to work together. yeah, that s about right with this administration, with this presidency. i mean, look, lawrence. what you have is the most unpopular president of this time in our modern history and unpopular now. unpopular speak over the house who have teamed up to get exactly nothing done. they haven t been able to accomplish anything in this 100 days. and the thing about it is that the republicans have the largest majority right now currently in the house since 1928. and the only thing they were able to do was fund the government for another week. and now they re learning that governing is indeed very, very difficult, beating up on obama was easy. saying no was easy. but when it comes to getting things done when they actually have the majority and all of the three branches, they can t get it done. there is another quote in time magazine that is kind of extraordinary. another statement says more than once, white house officials have told paul ryan that his role as speaker may be in jeopardy if he does not do more to help trump. it s jekyll and hyde with this guy one ryan adviser says of the president. but we re talking about him. so that must mean he is winning. evan siegfried, i m amazed to see white house officials thinking as they appear to threaten paul ryan that they could get him removed as speaker. that possible? no. the house republican conference can have him removed as speaker. i know technically how it happens. but does the white house have the power to get enough republicans in the house to overthrow paul ryan? what we re seeing here is a white house and a president who misunderstands the fundamental function of what congress is. they are a separate but coequal body. and you see the president in how he has handled legislation, especially in the ahca. it was like the ceo mentality and congress are the middle managers who get things done. and president trump comes in and fixes it. the president needs to actually be working with congress. because congress, if he keeps treating them like this, they re going to slow walk the legislation just to remind him he has power and congress is 435 people with very big egos. what is your reaction to these statements from paul ryan people from his team about this kind of friction with the white house? i think there is a reason this stuff is showing up as anonymous grumbling in press rather than open warfare which is that both trump and ryan need each other, much as they may dislike each other, to the extent that ryan and his caucus hope to get anything done, they will need to rely on donald trump not only to sign it, but to put his political capital behind whatever fairly unpopular thing republicans in congress might like to do on health care or tax. i think they re not going to get it done anyway. but they have less chance of getting it done if they were in open warfare with the president. and i think people in the white house know that it s not really paul ryan s fault that they can t get votes for these things. they can t get votes for these things because they re very unpopular, and because trump lacks the skills in the political capital to gather the votes for them. and if they caused some chaos and tried and maybe succeeded to push ryan out of his speakership, not only would that weaken the president s relations, whoever replaced ryan would probably be even less effective than ryan in the role. so none of them like the situation they re in, but none of them can improve their situation by actually going war to the other. so they just complain about each other to the press. according to a new politico article, there are at least some people in the white house who think they have a better idea than dealing with paul ryan. and that s on the tax bill. we have one of them saying we aren t listening to anyone else on taxes, says one senior administration official, referring to ryan. it s our plan. karine, that s not the tax plan that paul ryan has been talking about. if they think they can go it alone on a tax plan without the speaker of the house with them, that s going absolutely nowhere. that s exactly right. i mean, look. when you go back just a few years ago with president obama and nancy pelosi, they actually had a wonderful working relationship. and nancy pelosi was able to deliver for president obama because she understood and he understood how the government worked. and this you don t get you don t see this at all in this relationship when it comes to paul ryan and donald trump. and if the administration decides to go that route, they re going to lose. josh, the comments you see in the time magazine article show you that there is a war going on here that is incredibly unprofessional. and it sounds like the ryan people have just abandoned the norms of professionalism in order to mount public defenses of paul ryan. well, i m sure they re exasperated. and wouldn t you be? i don t think they intended to be in this position where they were relying on donald trump. they thought they would have a sort of normal republican like marco rubio in the white house who would be more helpful in gathering votes in congress, more engaged in the policy process and less embarrassing in their public comments. so i think it s only human to find this situation untenable and awful. but i do find it funny, describing themselves as trying to make the ken burns documentary. yes. there. have been an audience at both ends of pennsylvania avenue. and a lot of the blame for what has gone wrong in these first 100 days does lie with republicans in congress. i don t think it lies so much with ryan personally. i think the republican party as a whole was nowhere on health care policy for seven years. all they knew is they hated obamacare and it was inevitably going to blow up in their faces when they had to make policy on it themselves. long before donald trump was a politician for real. thank you for joining us tonight. really appreciate it. thanks, lawrence. coming up, donald trump, what he said about michael flynn tonight in a new fox news interview. left, when he resigned, you said these birds once affected by oil with a crust made chfrom scratche and mixes crisp vegetables with all white meat chicken, and bakes it to perfection. because making the perfect dinner isn t easy as pie but finding someone to enjoy it with sure is. marie callender s. it s time to savor. rick stengel, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. he is also an msnbc political analyst and evan siegfried is back with us. rick, the president said i do feel badly for him. what does he fired him. what does he feel badly for him for? i don t know. okay. so i m not the only one who couldn t follow. yes. i m not even interested. what about the obama administration approved his security clearance? well, it s absolutely absurd. the obama administration fired michael flynn in 2014 for all kinds of reasons. now if donald trump, i believe he was in the private sector. if you re hiring somebody from a competitor who was fired, wouldn t you check him out a little bit so they didn t do they didn t do their due diligence on him. what he doesn t understand is the fact that all of these things that flynn did, he did during that period between when he was fired in 2014 and when trump had him as national security adviser. and bringing in a national security adviser requires a much higher level of vetting than just to look at classified documents. that s pretty easy. evan, the president fired the man for lying. and the president says he was treated horribly. is there some translation here that we re missing? i m sure there is in trumpese. the president is now saying i am being saladed with this and he is trying to blame president obama. the truth is nbc news is starting to report the trump administration or the transition team also did their own vet of michael flynn. so if they didn t catch this, it was an incompetent vet, and we have to look at other areas. if they did catch this, that is even more worrisome because they looked the other way there is a real problem going on here. rick, the on the vet, let s say you ve decided we want this fired general from the previous administration because he says things that we like. you still have that vetting responsibility that evan was just talking about. again, the vetting is done by the civil service, by the fbi there is an fbi background check. they have to do that for every new person coming into the administration. they call your second grade teacher. they call your neighbors. they the all of those things that is done. that is one of the permanent functions of government. i just i just don t get what what is he clinging to here? when he says he was treated horribly, what is his objective when the president says that? he is the one who fired him. i think that the president feels any time the military is disrespected in any way, shape or form in his mind, that it s absolutely horrible. and yes, we should respect. actually, isn t it that he feels that he had to fire him because of what the press did to him. right. so he is indirectly blaming the press. would he have not have fired him if the press didn t reveal he lied. all right. we have to take a break here. evan siegfried, thank you for joining us. coming up, what donald trump doesn t know about pocahantas. he got a big reaction from his audience today when he talked about pocahantas. he needs to know a couple of things about that. whoa that s amazing. hey, i m the internet! i know a bunch of people who would love that. the internet loves what you re doing. .so build a better website in under an hour with. .gocentral from godaddy. type in your idea. select from designs tailored just for you and publish your site with just a few clicks-even from your. .mobile phone. the internet is waiting start for free today at godaddy. .or breathtaking style. .there s a c-class just for you. decisions, decisions, decisions. lease the c300 sedan for $389 a month at your local mercedes-benz dealer. mercedes-benz. the best or nothing. here is donald trump today speaking to the national rifle association. i have a feeling that in the next election you re going to be swamped with candidates. but you re not going to be wasting your time. you ll have plenty of those democrats coming over, and you re going to say no, sir, no thank you, no ma am. it me pocahantas. remember that. that is the name that donald trump uses for senator elizabeth warren, to the delight of people who think pocahantas is a disney character. pocahantas was real person. born about 1596. she extended her personal welcome to the english settlers who arrived at jamestown, virginia when she was about 19 years old. captain john smith wrote a praise-filled letter to queen anne about pocahantas saying pocahantas saved his life when his father was to be have him executed. pocahantas laid her head on his chest so smith could not be beheaded without pocahantas suffering the same fate. in his letter to the queen, john smith said she hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine and not only that, but so prevailed with her father that i would safely conducted to jamestown. pocahantas was not her real name. she and her tribe decided to hide her real name from the english settlers. william stiff was born 100 years later and became an historian. he wrote a book titled the history of the first discovery and settlement of virginia. william stiff explained why pocahantas hid her real name from the english. it turns out although she bravely welcomed the english, she and her tribe didn t trust them. william stiff wrote her real name it seems was originally matoax which the indians carefully concealed from the english and changed to it pocahantas out of a superstitious fearless they by knowledge of her true name should be enabled to do her some hurt. and tonight 400 years later, the president of the united states is trying to do elizabeth warren some hurt by throwing a name at her that was invented by native americans to protect a woman. that s what general liability s for. what?! -injured employee? -ow. workers comp helps you pay for a replacement. what s happening? this is carla. how s it going? and if anything comes up, our experts are standing by. boo! lwho s the lucky lady? i m going to the bank, to discuss a mortgage. ugh, see, you need a loan, you put on a suit, you go crawling to the bank. this is how i dress to get a mortgage. i just go to lendingtree. i calculate how much home i can afford. i get multiple offers to compare side by side. and the best part is. the banks come crawling to me. everything you need to get a better mortgage. clothing optional. lendingtree, when banks compete, you win. okay! .awkward. she pretty much lives in her favorite princess dress. but once a week i let her play sheriff so i can wash it. i use tide to get out those week old stains and downy to get it fresh and soft. you are free to go. tide and downy together. today north korea launched its ninth missile since president trump took office. according to u.s. officials, the short range missile exploded midair shortly after takeoff. tonight president trump tweeted north korea disrespected the wishes of china and its highly respected president when it launched though unsuccessfully a missile today. bad, exclamation point. this missile test comes one day after president trump said this. there is a chance that we would end up having major, major conflict with north korea. absolutely. i d love to solve things diplomatically but it s very difficult. rick stengel is back with us. rick, the president s tweeted reaction to this, basically saying how could they possibly disrespect china. uh-huh. well, he s trying to show the world that he formed a romance with president xi. of course what he is realizing about diplomacy is it is a multilevel chess game, you have to rail against china for a balance of chad but work with them on north korea. you have to work that balance. he doesn t seem tosy say that he completely surrendered all positions he has in regards to trade saying of course i m not going to talk about currentsy manipulation because he is helping us with north korea. it doesn t seem like he is trying to balance owes things. yes, i guess he is folding his tent on that already. and maybe he made a distinction that this is more important. obviously it is very important. china has the most leverage with north korea. more than we do. all of north korea s trade passes through china. even the talk of new rounds of sanctions which i support is a little bit toothless because there is hardly anything to sanction there. they have an economy the size of maine s. they have apparently figured out how to live with deprivation. they figured out how to live with deprivation in order to have a nuclear program. the nuclear strategy is their strategy. you have a leader desperate for attention, i know that sound familiar, and the way he does that is through the nuclear strategy. the president leaning entirely on the chinese is one part of it. the other part of it is he raises his rhetoric to a combative level, the trump rhetoric that we ve never seen in an american president before. it s entirely irresponsible. it s tactical impatience to contrast with secretary tillerson obama s strategic patience was the wrong thing. this good cobb cop/bad cop thing is reversed. the secretary of state is supposed to be the bad cop. the president is supposed to be the bad cop. the where do you see this going? president trump s rhetoric can t get any more heated. he is escalating the rhetoric. people around the word are saying we have to deescalate this. trump is single handedly escalating it and turning it into something that kim jong-un wants. he wants attention and this tension of world war three going on. coming up, a hundred nights of late night trump comedy. i m dr. kelsey mcneely and some day you might be calling me an energy farmer. energy lives here. source of inflammation that contributes to both joint and skin symptoms. it s proven to help relieve pain, stop further joint damage, and clear skin in many adults. humira is the #1 prescribed biologic for psoriatic arthritis. humira can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. serious, sometimes fatal infections and cancers, including lymphoma, have happened; as have blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure. before treatment, get tested for tb. tell your doctor if you ve been to areas where certain fungal infections are common, and if you ve had tb, hepatitis b, are prone to infections, or have flu-like symptoms or sores. don t start humira if you have an infection. want more proof? ask your rheumatologist about humira. what s your body of proof? and is a now a master class in a hundred days of comedy. in honor of our new president dress rehearsal s over guys, the tragedy has begun. he focused on the size of his crowds, the size of his ratings, the size of everything. instead of the cia he should be talking to a cichiatri serks, the. if you want to make people safe, stop making them walk this the streets. big news out of the kremlin sorry, misread that, the white house. when asked if the allegations were true, sessions said absolutely niet. i can t believe jeff sessions lied to america. especially after this country spent so many years buying his cookies. trump would like us to focus on his scandal about obama wiretapping him. trump said it was upsetting because he is a private man who likes to keep his thoughts to himself. where did trump get the info, from the cia, the fbi, out of his a-s-s. the chairman is killing it, it, being the trust in his investigation. didn t literally mean that prep president obama wiretapped him. he also said president trump didn t literally mean for people to vote for him. bad news, mexico didn t give us cash for the wall? good news, we have new hands. $400 million tax break to the rich and the poor will receive a box of band-aids and airborne. you can t tear your eyes away from sean spicer. it s like watching a car crash that knows nothing about the holocaust. hoentlely, though, are you okay. are you kidding me. job approval rating is at just 36%. trump was confused. he said, how can they disapprove of a job i m not even doing. done, that s enough fun for tonight, can i have my desk back. yes, of course, mr. president i ll go sit at my desk. president trump on friday walked out on an oval office signing ceremony without actually signing his two executive orders on trade. that s literally our best hope against the trump administration, him forgetting what he came in the room for. president trump recently bombed syria while eating the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake america has ever laid eyes on. that s a fact. you don t know what cakes i ve seen. these hundred days have been such a success. and i m so sad my presidency is coming to an en.
the end seven years ago we were left with something that is unsustainable, we were left with something hurting americans back home, that s hurting health care coverage and it s a binary choice, a choice of continuing down a path of affordable care act that s not working or repealing it and repairing it and moving forward in the process. i ran on that in 2009 that i was going to repeal and replace obamacare i m going to vote yes so we can repeal an start the process of of repeal and replacing obamacare. do you have a sense of other februaries of the freedom caucus if they are moving forward? i don t. the wednesday group, the friday group, i got a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle, what i m hearing is everybody has their opinion. the real problem is there are two choices either move forward and repeal this bill that everybody wants us to repeal back home and what we all ran on or you re going to allow it just to continue. because you heard the president and i ve got to give the president a lot of credit. he has worked with everyone. i spent an hour and a half in the white house with him. he has listened changed things and actually helped the process and i think at the end people have to realize this is part of moving forward and he wants to get this done to move on to tax reform and i m hoping others will come on board an vote as well. if it does not come to a vote or does not pass, what then? what happens? i think like the president said and i m a businessman as well, you can t just keep going back and forth and back and forth. he wants to move on to other things. i would like to see tax reform being done, i hope we can move on to that, but at this point it s a binary choice, you re either voting for the repeal and replace process to begin or allowing obamacare to continue and move on to something else. the critics say what s the rush? why do you have to do this so quickly? why not go back fix it, make it better, you said yourself you hate the way the process was dealt with, the chances of passing in the senate are very minimal, a much smaller republican vote, why not go back and improve it so you love it and your colleagues love it. i hope it does go to the senate, that is the process, let the senators do what they think, send it back, let s keep it moving but the american people want to see things getting done, we have immigration reform, tax reform, all things on the plate. we can t just continue to say well let s go back to the drawing board. it s time to move this process forward. time to move on to the next agenda item. again, i might not like everything in the bill but i know it s the opportunity for us to repeal and replace and repair and move this forward and get on to the rest of the agenda. thanks very much for joining us. thank you. david chalian, political director. the big picture here? i keep thinking back to on election night when the results were clear and we saw that donald trump had taken the oval office and republicans had the house and the senate, the first thing that people discovered or started analyzing and talking about well obamacare is gone, that s clear they have the house, the senate, oval office. and have been talking about it for seven years. of course. and i can t believe we re sitting here watching this potentially fall apart. again, they still have to cast these votes so we don t know exactly where this will land but if this is going to go the way sean spicer s briefing seems to suggest that it is, paul ryan and donald trump are going to be the ones that saved obamacare and kept it in place is a bizarre outcome. and what s more bizarre is republicans will be blaming each other no doubt if it loses the president will blame the democrats an whatever else, but you not only have republicans blaming each other but you have house republicans saying the reason we can t do this is because we don t trust the senate republicans and it s just this incredible mess that i don t think donald trump had any idea what he was walking into when he became president. someone who was sitting in the white house tonight of the election, we fully thought obamacare would be dead long before now, so the fact that it is still alive is not something i think the obama team, most democrats expected in any way. the interesting dynamic which gloria touched on that s happening now there s no doubt the man plaqcconnell is workinge sweetener no way he s keeping the cuts and especiasentials, at of them are going to walk the plank. can you explain for our viewers what is happening now? are they still making calls trying to wrangle votes? what s happening now is they are going one by one and no longer talking about gee, what do you want in and what do you want out? that s been done, this will be the bill that will be voted on. it s set what they are saying to them are the political arguments and making process arguments. you have got to start this process, if you don t start it here it won t start anywhere, taxes have to start in the house of representatives constitutionally, so will you move to process forward? and that s the major argument they re make k, frankly not unlike 1986 when the house took up a tax reform bill had almost no reform as president reagan, bradley or dep hahart wanted it. some defeated that rule, and i remember ronald reagan came up to the hill and spoke to house republicans and said i pledge to you if this doesn t come out right in the senate, i will veto it but i have got to have this process move forward. the problem i had with jack was whether he would rule for the process to go forward and he said no, couldn t, hated everything in the bill and he turned around on the stair above me and said shut-up i don t want to hear you talk about it again, i m voting for it we have got to keep the process going. that s what is happening right now. we have all seen the house of cards. how tough, how bare knuckles, you re saying one-on-one, talking about somebody saying shut-up. well that was a member to a staff person, so it s easy. working for jack as a staff person he had the right to say anything he wanted to me. having said that member to member let me walk you through what i think is going to happen, this will happen next, this will happen next and that s what members are balancing right here a bill they don t like everything and, they like some things not everything, is it more of a risk to send to the senate or more of a risk to stop it in the house and see what happens after that and that s a balancing act but these conversations aren t vicious kfr conversations they are here is what i think what do you think? we have seen concessions for memb members of the freedom caucus, work requirements for those w who sooner into medicaid rather than later and that s brought some of the freedom caucus firmly believes this doesn t do enough to bring down premiums and expand choices for the american people, problem is when they made concessions for some to have more moderate republicans fell off the vote so today we had vice president pence working hard on the hill as you indicated one-on-one with some of these people. that s why it s so complex, it s like whack a mole. what i m hearing more than anything donald trump wants people to go to the floor, have a record, but those that are no aren t concerned about what donald trump thinks, more concerned about their constituents back home and that s more motivating. david gurgen what do you think? i understand the instinct on the part of the white house to stand up and be counted who was loyal and who didn t for later purposes. but the fact is he s in a position right now where he needs to unify the party and everybody on the line is paying a potential price back home and from the point of view of trying to unify a party this is not what you due, hug each other and saying let s be positive we re moving on. but donald trump is used to walking out of negotiation. if he didn t like a deal, we walked off the deal an moved on and this is what i think he is saying now, we have to get this other with and move on. in the end david, you know the speaker well, you used to work for him. it s his decision not the president s decision, it s paul ryan s decision. it is a decision that paul ryan and mccarthy and the leadership will ultimately make, but this is one you want to have as much team support for making this decision and at least i presume that the stories i saw about the speaker going down to the white house were correct. that was one place you could get everybody with an opinion in the white house same place same time as opposed to calling the president up on the phone and address the decision head on. the president has done everything he can do, with one exception, time. uh-huh. and you can take more time if you so desire and move. is something going to have to happen on health care in the next two years? yes, and everybody working with the president knew this, secretary clinton wanted to do raise taxes. every republican some form or another wanted the market to shift over to the market and that s what we re going to have to have it because aca does not have a long life expectancy here because the costs are going to drive people away. president trump is fooling himself if he thinks he can lose today and just move on like tax reform is going to be a slam dunk, the last time was a very difficult task that involved president reagan s leadership. we re not through with health care. republicans said they would do something about it they campaigned the past seven and a half years through four elections and then have one house vote and then say too bad? there are issues the affordable care act may not be in a death spiral as much as republicans argue, but the congress and white house probably need to address if they refuse to do that who takes the blame for a system that continues to get worse. let s listen to sean spicer explain from his perspective and the speak eaer s perspective wh repeal and replace obamacare comes first. wouldn t it have been wiser to work with the freedom caucus first to work on infrastructure? we talked about this since 2010 and every republican with the exception of probably a handful that they would do everything they could to repeal and replace obamacare and to get in and say hey, you should have done something else wouldn t be fair for the american people who said okay i ll vote for you but i want you to fulfill this pledge. do you feel, david chalian, that the president was really enthusiastic over these past few months since he took office in making sure this was the first issue on the legislative agenda? yeah, i think we ve seen what donald trump looks like when he puts everything on the field, i think we saw that during the campaign in stocome of the dark moments, i know sean said he was doing everything he possibly could. i think there will be a lookback and i don t know that the republican leadership ton the hill feels donald trump did everything he could, so that may be revised and again if indeed the vote goes down this relationship between ryan and trump will be forever changed because of this moment and how they move forward together i think is going to be a really determinative thing for the rest of the agenda. i think when you look at next steps, if this goes down, the question is whether you now need to do things incrementally as oppo opposed to these massive bills a where you do play whack a mole as anderson was saying, and go back to health care and say this needs to be fixed and that needs to be fixed i don t know whether republicans would play on that and dave, you may know more on that than i do, but the question is these massive things given the polarization and the congress will be done anymore this way. it seems almost an impossible task. the roll call of the house of representatives a little more than an hour away, another fight up on capitol hill, this one involving the investigation over the trump campaign s possible ties to russia. you re going to hear what the republican leader of the house intelligence committee did that is now infuriated several members of his committee. this is cnn s special live coverage. snoo another major story unfolding on capitol hill. one is close to donald trump now volunteering to be interviewed by the house intelligence community with ties to russia. stone saying it isn t his bag of tricks, manafort s ukraine, carter page who allegedly advised the trump campaign on foreign policy saying he s also willing to talk. want to bring in manu raju. we are hearing tuesday s hearing has been cancelled? reporter: that s right. that s prompting a lot of concern of people on the committee who believe they should have moved former. former national intelligence committee officials to talk about russian meddling and contacts and any alleged coordination that may have occurred during trump campaign and russian officials, devin nunes said he would not move forward on this because they would have a private classified meeting with james comey, and mike rogers to get briefed going forward but democrats are furious. they believe it s going to prevent the public from getting a clear understanding of what s happening in russia, and adam schiff is joining calls criticizing devin nunes and i asked him if he does not agree with others who believe devin nunes is not fit to sit as chairman. as i said we re we are not going to get in a era because they were mentioned a press story and i am highly concerned about that. to take evidence that may or may not be related to the investigation to the white house was wholly inappropriate and of course cast grave doubts into the ability to run a credible investigation and the integrity of that investigation. do you believe that he can still run this committee or should he step aside? ultimately that s the decision that the speaker needs to make. and i think the speaker has to decide just as well as our own chairman whether they want a credible investigation being done, whether they want an investigation that the public can have confidence in. reporter: now anderson, it is significant that these three former trump advisors have agreed to come forward. nunes said he did not want to bring them forward because he wanted them to voluntarily come forward. and carter says he wants to clear his name and does not believe he s been treated fair by the democrats on this committee, just before coming on air he told me his presence is that he would like to testify in public not in a private setting a because he does not believe that the committee democrats would treat him fairly and says he s tired of these innuendos, page willing to go public, the question is will they agree to have public testimony that may not look so favorably from the trump campaign trying to distance themselves from russia. would this classified briefing be on tuesday and any word on when the next public briefing would be? reporter: we don t know, devin nunes suggested he s still open to a public hearing, did not commit to a day, but a new focus going forward to demand a public hearing, because much of what this committee does is in secret. thank you very much. back now with the panel. i mean, i don t even know where to begin. let me ask you, anderson because you had that amazing interview with carter page. you got to talk to him and he was described as an important policy advisor for the trump campaign. which is why i said allegedly, because the timeline is very strange. then candidate trump was under pressure to kind of name significant people who were his national security team and finally after some delays he came out with five names one he said carter page phd, that seemed to indicate they had met. i talked to carter page who claimed repeatedly in russia and elsewhere that he attended meetings with candidate trump. upon further questioning what carter page meant by meeting he says he was using meeting in the russian term of the word which means he attended rallies that donald trump gave like in bismark, north dakota with 25,000 other meetings and i said does that mean anybody who has been to a rally with donald trump means they have been in a meeting with donald trump? apparently he likes to stick with the russian meaning. you spoke with another former advisor? who feels the same way that you do about the closeness of carter page to donald trump. and we should point out that the campaign itself within a short amount of time started to distance themselves from carter page. and paul manafort, but i spoke with roger stone today who wanted to point out don t forget paul manafort announced this morning he was willing to testify before the committee without a subpoena and very short order also heard from roger stone and carter page and speaking to carter page he made it clear he says he has nothing to hide an wants to clear his name and this letter from his attorney his lawyer says mr. sohn is eager to because of the way he has been portrayed. so now they are ready to testify, some publicly and we will see whether the committee wants to do this. but it is interesting how they are characterizing the relationship with now seems like paul manafort was a bystander. a summer intern. a staffer and certainly carter page as well. one thing i think is interesting, nunes and schiff used to do two different conferences and i think there s clearly some rift there and may need to call for special counsel to come look at this because there s clearly some internal strife there and i think to get to the bottom of this, we have to remember this is all about russian interference and the rest is collateral damage. virtually every democrat on that committee right now is saying just that but you don t really hear that from republicans. and it s interesting because the democrats were playing pretty nice from the beginning they wanted this to be bipartisan, more so on the nat side burr and warner still have a pretty good rapport and it was a matter of time before the dam was going to break on the house side. a lot of people are calling for an independent investigation, but now with these individuals of willing to testify publicly may have a different definition. what s also irritating to the ranking democrat adam schiff is that the is chairman now cancelled an open hearing i think scheduled monday with james clapper either monday or tuesday next week with former director of national intelligence, cia director john brennan, former acting attorney general sally yates and it was going to be an open meeting and now for some reason devin nunes is canceling that. they had a right to object, it s been planned for some days, i think what some draemocrats wanted was to hear from clapper and yates on patterns of how the russians interfered, to set up the narrative of how this unfolds an then to show what the various individuals who have been implicated in all this what they did and how it fit sboos t fits into the narrative, now look, isn t it interesting this american did this, a and this american did this, that s what they were hoping for. and have a right to be angry, but for the three guys who have come forward, they ought to have the chance to come forward. the snares involving presidents speaking out for themselves they may have things to deny, may say they have done nothing wrong, their interests may not be necessarily in line. but they will be under oath, they will be under oath. i don t mean they would be telling a lie, but telling the truth could create problems. who knew what when, which is what people are not focused on, it s the collusion, roger stone certainly alluded to this if there was information previously known about plans to leak the e-mails about the hacking that s a problem whether it s criminal, that s not for me to define. i think part of what s happened is politics has broke up this week in the intelligence house committee. shocking nunes made a mistake and schiff came out and said some things he shouldn t have said. if you want to lower the temperature and work together in a bipartisan fashion, put some time in, calm down, we got a lot of time to go here. all i m saying is take some of that time. it doesn t hurt to take some of that time to sit back down, look at some things and then bring all these people. usually this house intelligence committee, senate intelligence committee there usually is cooperation between the republican and democratic leaders. and they have gotten to a political spin. i m not sure they had the resources to do it to be honest, this investigation has grown and grown and grown, and you ve got members of the senate and house going into vaults at langley looking through thousands of pages of loose leaf notebooks, and seems this undertaking is growing and growing, i m not sure they are ready. the speaker saying he does not have the votes. the vote could happen less than an hour from now. we have a lot to talk about. you re watching cnn s special coverage. in less than one hour the house of representatives will be casting vote os on a critical tt of the trump presidency, will the republicans have the votes the repeal and replace obamacare. congressman, thanks much for joining us. thanks for having me. you re planning to vote in favor of this legislation to repeal and replace obamacare. but what do you think? you ve got your finger over there. is it s going to pass? well, look, it s touch and go, these things tend to be decided at the last minute and we re certainly in that situation, but we will wait for the votes an see what happens. what would be smarter from your perspective if it looks like it s going to fail for the speaker, majority leader to just pull it say we re going to think about it work on it we ll get back to you or let this vote go forward and have an embarrassing defeat. i m not sure about the quote of embarrassing defeat. look, i m a big believer in when you finally schedule something, karr carry it through, the members have lhad a lot of opportunity o participate, i m very proud of what the speaker and president have made. i think they have been representative to all sides but there comes a point on these things when you have to go in and press a button red or green and so my advice would be to go ahead and vote. congressman, it s anderson cooper i was wondering if you could describe the impact that the president has had on the bill? i met with him fairly early about the deputy whip team. he was very knowledgeable about the bill, very engageing, strategic in his thinking, high energy, and said be open to changing the bill, if people bring you a good idea no matter where they re from, take it and work with them, and he s been true to his word and he s excellent in this deal making and consensus making and if it doesn t work out it s not his fault. i think congress has to look at itself. what is the next step if it doesn t work out in terms of repeal and replacing obamacare. well, then you have to move in chunks, we have a chance to get every american covered to get the tax credit designed for their care. ours is going 69% and we re down to a single provider so we don t really have a lot of options but obviously if this solution doesn t work, sit down and try and craft another one. thanks very much for joining us. wolf, may pleasure as always. we will be speaking with a spokesperson from the coke brothers, who are offering to support republicans who vote against this health care bill, our cnn special live coverage continues in just a moment. welcome back, quite a day in a short time the house set to vote on the bill. cnn s phil mattingly is with us what do you hear. reporter: it just doesn t look good, the most interesting element is everything they have tried over the last couple of days has ended up not working or in some cases backfiring, one interesting thing in talking to aides the last couple hours trying to recognize when did the bottom fall out, when did things fall apart? and that s a question we re going to be looking back to if this does indeed fail or gets pulled from the house floor, but i m hearing it s not the conservatives, or the freedom caucus but it s the moderates. and months ago i was told repeatedly keep an eye on them, new jersey, pennsylvania, new york, if they start the flee this thing will go down. that s pretty much exactly how this went down. i ve been told privately a lot of the the tuesday group members are not in line and not coming over in part because of the compromised language they tried to hand out to the conservatives, that leadersh end up going along with, so result of them trying to schiff to thi the conservative side, they didn t bring in tfreedom caucus side, you know it s short and any of the undecided, undeclared what it would do things going forward? we don t know, i can tell you what s what s going around capitol hill g.o.p. sources, that s their biggest concern about what the president wants to do right now, put this on the floor so it s an open question whether or not that s going to happen but as recently as a couple minutes ago, as of right now still scheduled for a vote. we will be watching closely, as soon as you hear anything thank you very much. james davis from freedom partners, a group linked to the coke brothers, you oppose this legislation and you re telling republicans in the freedom caucus and elsewhere if you get punished by voting against it you will come up, freedom partners will come up and help them with money, right? we have seen republicans run on the idea they re going to repeal this an this current legislation does not do that and so we want to stand by those who take position and let them know they re not alone. this doesn t repeal? it doesn t repeal. this keeps all the mandates and regulations in place that have driven up the costs of obamacare premiums over the last several years and also uses the tax credit as a subsidy just virtually indistinguishable from the obamacare subsidies so there s a lot we need to do to fix health care and this bill doesn t do it. if you repeal it then focus on individual solutions bills you can put forward to take care of the vulnerable population that everyone agrees those with preexisting conditions and then push those pieces of legislation through congress, through the legislative process, i think that s a better path. it s not going to be if this goes down it s not going to be another huge bill it s going to be step by step by step? absolutely. that s one of the major criticisms we had with obamacare, from the start, so why do this? we ll get better policy when we focus on individual problems and also more politically palatable. the president, according to sean spicer, we just heard him at the white house briefing says the president has committed everything he can, he understands this is it, this is do or die, if you don t do it now forget about it he says it s over with, you ve got to pass this legislation now, why is the president wrong? because it s more important to get it right than fast, this is an opportunity to get it roog right, so if it doesn t pass they need to go back to the drawing board, and figure out how to put the pieces of legislation together. you are very well plugged in with conservative republicans. what s going to happen? i don t think it s going to pass. it looks like with moderates also jumping ship on this bill that i don t predict that it passes. stay with us, david chalian, yesterday a lot of people were pretty upbeat those who liked the legislation believed the president would get it done but today met with pes michl. mike pence described what was an intense meeting with the freedom caucus left the meeting tight lap lipped nipped. all david. david gergen. and the idea that jim is talking about is makes good sense but you have to understand one thing about it, all that will be done under regular order which means you will need 60 sen votes in the senate. people supporting that strategy has to understand that s what it mean, this will not be done in regulation, you have to do it in constrictive regulations, and you have to physical the byrd rule. is there a concern that the president will feel burned? the president has talked about moving on already talked about wishes maybe he had done infrastructure or tax reform, is it possible he will want to move on? i think he s told us a while, he said if we lose this we ought to just live with obamacare, of course that isn t good for the country, if this goes down you re going to live with obamacare and let it go into a death spiral, that s what they expect. i actually think that would give the democrats an opening and they could come forward, we re delighted we saved obamacare we know there s problems and we would like you the republicans to work with the fixes and make sure it doesn t go in the death spiral so when the republicans refuse to do that as they will, the democrats can say when it does go into a death spiral they can say we tried to work with you, who is going to be left with the tail on the donkey? the public. well, i agree with that. the voters wanted changes wanted something done and now not getting anything. they don t like this bill. well, i was just going to talk about that because the recent polling shows this bill has a 17% approval rating, so if you re a member of congress do you want to kind of walk over that cliff voting for a bill that has a 17% approval rating and i know we go district by district by district and some won by an overwhelming margin they can clearly make their case but if you are a moderate republican and these essential health benefits ten essential health benefits have been eliminated from the bill like maternity benefits, substance abuse, mental health coverage, you re never going to vote for this, no matter what donald trump hold on, we re getting closer and closer to the actual vote. we are now hearing from key conservatives who president has been courting, brand new sound coming in from the freedom caucus, that and a lot more right after this.