you know what? i have been known to wear a tan suit myself. don t forget, a politics nation baseball cap is always in style. thanks for watching. i m al sharpton. hardball starts right now. a dove named paul? a hawk named hillary? let s play hardball. good evening. i m chris matthews in washington. let me start with the president s decision today to hold off on air strikes in syria. i don t want to put the cart before the horse. we don t have a strategy yet. i think what i have seen in some of the yous reports suggests folks are getting further ahead of where we re at than we currently are. that s not just my assessment but the assessment of the military as well. we need clear plans that we are developing them. i will consult with congress. and make sure their voices are heard. there is no point asking until we know what it will take to get the job done. that was a surprise. the big debate is do we go the direction of george bush again back to pursuing grand goals of ideology? the freedom agenda or do we stick to the dovish stance of president obama trying hard the to wind down the military intervention in the islamic world? here come it is big irony. could the voters be asked to choose from are a dovish republican in rand paul versus a relatively hawkish hillary clinton? listening to what they are saying it s hard to see anything else. in a wall street journal op-ed today senator paul had strong words for people who pushed for stronger action in syria. he wrote, shooting first and asking questions later has never been a good foreign policy. the past year has been a perfect example. our middle east policies unhinged flailing about to see who to act against next with little thought to the consequences. this is not a foreign policy. he pointed out if the hawks got their way and we brought down the government of al assad, it would have been strengthened. the administration s goal has been to degrade assad s power, forcing him to negotiate with the rebels, but degrading assad s military capacity also degrades his ability to fend off isis. joining us are howard fineman and ron reagan. we were talking before the show. very much like the way he s been. dovish. stay out of this stuff. it s as though he read rand paul s op-ed piece. my head is spinning. you have rand paul writing an op-ed piece that could have been written a generation ago by george mcgovern, and the national committee came out with a statement attacking rand paul from the right. basically from the hawkish perspective that sounded like something that could have been produced by dick cheney or john mccain or rudy giuliani a few years ago. this is who he is. he ll go so far as to say, hey, i don t have a plan. i have no strategy as a way the to buy time, rather than shoot first and ask questions later. ron reagan, i have been looking at this for weeks nowment i saw it coming. rand paul is an isolationist, a dove. in many ways he conforms to what i think, probably for different reasons. i think the united states has gone way overboard in involvement in the world. too many fights, too many enemies looking for trouble. an itchy trigger finger. hillary clinton seems to want to be at least two notches to the right if not one notch to the right of the president. much tougher on russia, ukraine, the middle east, china, everywhere. she s much more ornery and wanting to fight. what s your thinking? what s going on with american foreign policy in the debate? the rand paul brand looks better on a bumper sticker than when you flesh it out. howard fineman is a fine editor. if rand paul were one of his columnists and turned this in as a think piece howard would send it back in no uncertain terms saying you need to put thought into it. what was he saying exactly? that we should learn from mistakes in the middle east especially and not repeat them. well, thank you very much, senator paul. next column maybe you can do something on the importance of washing your hands after using the restroom. what did this piece say? nothing. it said let s not be stupid in foreign policy. there is no prescription there from paul. the political point that up is down and black is white with hillary. what i remember about eisenhower is he didn t take us to vietnam. that was a good thing he didn t do. when it comes to foreign policy i believe some of the best stuff you do is what you don t do. lyndon johnson did a lot in foreign policy, right? yeah. a lot of foreign policy. as howard said rand paul s essay is like barack obama s don t do stupid stuff. they are a mirror immanual of one another. hillary clinton says not doing stupid stuff isn t enough. you have to do other things. what are those? that s what we ll see in the depate if she runs. if i had been editing rand paul s piece and i ll ask him to submit the next one to me, ron. you should. first of all, he should have said what he would do. ron s right. he didn t say, okay, you re cautious, you re smart. leave syria alonement stay out of it. that s true. what s wrong with saying we don t have to mess in everybody s rhubarb. why are we building syria, iraq, egypt, the emirates? we are largely leaving syria alone. we have not gone into syria. you want to ask rand paul, what happens when isis beheads other americans? what if they attack oil fields vital to the national interest, an ally we have a defense treaty with. what then? well, hands off? it s more complicated than rand paul s imagining would have it. here comes senator paul again. he called out hillary clinton by name for her hawkish views on syria. wrote, to interventionists like former secretary of state hillary clinton we would caution that arming the islamic rebels in syria created a haven for the islamic state. we are lucky mrs. clinton didn t get her way and the obama administration didn t bring about regime change in syria. that new regime might have been isis. on meet the press sunday the senator called hillary clinton a war hawk. listen. in a general election, were i to run there will be independent and democrats who say, we are tired of war. we are worried hillary clinton will get us involved in a middle eastern war. if you want to see a transformational election in the country let the democrats put forward a war hawk like hillary clinton and see a transformation like you have never seen. amazing stuff that this campaign has begun in 2014. two years from thousand. to look at history, a generation ago all the fights about intervention, isolation and so on were within the democratic party starting with johnson and kennedy, through mcgovern and so forth. now it looks like, if rand paul is to be taken seriously, that the fight will be within the republican party. i would have said, who are the unnamed republicans you are also putting in hillary clinton s camp? if you re going to get to hillary clinton you re doing one of these. come at me. where is that from? pittsburgh? you want to go directly to hillary clinton and set up the general election. who are the republicans you will take on here? it s great. isn t it good? yes. isn t it good we are debating instead of just doing it? we never had a debate about going into iraq, as i recall. a few of us opposed the war. john kerry, biden. who didn t support the war? hill ry. hillary. i don t want to get caught on the wrong side of this baby. i don t want to look weak. i have to look at strong as republicans. that kind of chicken is where the democratic party didn t show its finest colors when they said we don t want to be caught off base. i think you are right, howard. the great debate might be in the debates which by the way, the media won t be involved in the debates next year. we re not involved. i think if paul starts the serious argument within the republican party it could spread to the democrats as well. hillary clinton better watch out. who s going to carry the banner i don t know. for the dovish side. i don t know. who would be the dove against hillary if she runs? she sounds like it. a couple notches from the president. one would be appropriate. if she s two notches from russia, china, the middle east, somebody will commit against her on the left, i think. do you agree? boy, i don t know. i can t see anybody actually challenging her now are from either side from the democratic party. interestingly enough for rand paul he s got the opposite problem hand paul has decided to go into the republican primary running to the left of hillary clinton. that s a novel strategy for a republican. i have to say. i love it. some of the primaries and caucuses you can register on the day, go in and participate where the action is. i think that s one thing rand paul is looking at is a strategy. independents and dems to vote for him. if he s the only anti-war, let s be careful, let s get involved, get in other people s rhubarb to use your are phrase. that s from batman. i grew up with people like mark hatfield, john sherman cooper. these were the people opposed to the vietnam war, republicans out front. it s not the craziest thing for a republican to be dove issue. great to see you. coming up, karl rove s group crossroads gps commissioned a record looking at the republican party standing with women. the blunt finding of the group, female voters think the republican party is intolerant, lacking in compassion, stuck in the past. that s the republican view of their own party. also, what do you think when you mix a private donor s conference sponsored by the koch brothers, an unguarded politician and an audio recording. the latest behind closed doors look at what they really think. this time it s mitch mcconnell explaining what the republican agenda will be if he gets to be majority leader. yesterday, we saw the tragic consequence of what happens when a 9-year-old girl is allowed to shoot an automatic weapon, an uzi. for some gun people i can call them gun nuts, like the nra people, it s the tip of the iceberg. they want virtually no restrictions on guns. wait until you see laws pushed across the country. they are on a slippery slope on the far right. finally, people who speak with a forked tongue like mitch mcconnell and mitt romney. this is hardball, the place for politics. we re less than 70 days from midterm elections now. the senate race in iowa can t get any closer. let s check the hardball scoreboard. the latest poll has democratic congressman bruce braley and republican jo any ernst even at 40%. we have new numbers for the governor s race in the hawkeye state. terry branstad is up by 12 over jack hatch. that s 47-35. things are happening in iowa. we ll be right back. choose nexium twenty-foureople hour for frequent heartburn. i was worried about orange juice, coffee. everything. not anymore. get nexium level protection ™ and for a limited time save six dollars at nexium24hr.com for over 19 million people. 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[ female announcer ] everyone has a moment when tomorrow becomes real. transamerica. transform tomorrow. transamerica. could help your business didavoid hours of delaynd test caused by slow internet from the phone company? that s enough time to record a memo. idea for sales giveaway. return a call. sign a contract. pick a tie. take a break with mr. duck. practice up for the business trip. fly to florida. win an award. close a deal. hire an intern. and still have time to spare. go to comcastbusiness.com/ checkyourspeed if we can t offer faster speeds - or save you money - we ll give you $150. comcast business. built for business. welcome back to hardball. when president obama won 55% of the women s vote to romney s 44% republicans could no longer deny they had a problem. it was acknowledged in the 2013 rnc autopsy report. now a new report commissioned by two major republican organizations including one founded by karl rove. it has bleak news for the grand old party among women. it concludes female voters view the party as intolerant, lacking in compassion, stuck in the past. if hillary clinton is their democratic nominee for president in 2016 the republican party s un popularity with women voters could grow exponentially. joining us is kelly ann conway, a great pollster with the republicans generally and michelle bernard, president of the bernard center for women, politics and public policy who i can never figure out politically. kelly, you know karl rove and we all know him in different ways. what do you make of the republicans doing their own polling and coming out with words that suggest a real problem? i thought this polling was the opposite of breaking news. it s what we saw when developing the contract with america. it shows the caricature of the republicans takes hold. i can tell you what the party is doing. the party is doing its own polling. i have been involved in focus groups and we find there are certainly some of the stereotypes that persist. there are a number of policies that when explained matter. if you have a happy optimistic message that connects with people, remember the famous washington post poll after the 2012 election? mitt romney beat barack obama and who has a vision, he lost 81-18 on which one cares about people like you. even a majority of republicans agreed. there is no question you have to here s the question. why are women more susceptible to buying the caricature. are men buying the caricature of what the party is? sometimes. does it work both ways? sometimes that s true, chris. the genderer gap works both ways. president obama, president clinton, it is difficult for democratic candidates to win men much the way it is difficult for republican candidates to win women. in the case of clinton, she may be the democrats mitt romney in 2016. what evidence is it that she connects with all women? i don t know how good a candidate she ll be. it s one answer we have to wait for. how good a candidate will hillary clinton be? she has the name i.d., credentials f. she s great she walks away. if she s okay, it s close. it s a terrible summer of unforced errors for her in the book tour. terrible. okay. that was a late hit. to this one. 15 yards. 49-39 among women. my question is do you know why it s important? here s the answer before kellyanne gets back. there are more women than men so the gender gap on the women s side is lethal. not only that there are more women than men but women go out and vote. women go to the poll and vote on the issues that matter. what i like and find interesting. i know what people think about karl rove. i m a fan. we have talked about it before. i think he s a brilliant strategist. i watched him work. i personally witnessed him go out with george bush and work hard for the african-american vote. regardless of people say the increase bush got was negligible a 3% increase in the african-american vote is a big deal. i like the poll did you vote for bush? i think he got he once, not twice. first or second? when everyone was worried about the vote for the first or second time. i don t remember. would you vote for him again? when i was worried about terrorism, i saw the massacre in russia. i saw those children could have been mine. george bush was my man. the hanl out of the poll is that the republican party keep s doing autopsies on lots of things. how do we get white women to vote for us. how does the republican party get anyone that s not a white man to vote for them. in 2014 we have a poll that shows among women voters, republicans favored to run the congress, 37% want the congress in republican hands and 51% of women, a real majority want the democrats. explain that. is that caricature. not at all. they are probably going to vote for their incumbents. particularly in the house if they are republicans chances are that individual s connection with that woman and his or her performance on the job will trump party i.d. on the senate side it s fascinating. 2014 is incredible. you have female republics ded republicans . i bet you that mary landrieu, kay hagan and michelle nunn, three female democrats in the south are not going to run on the war on women, anti-woman republican meme. how can they do that? georgia, louisiana and north carolina. they re not talking not that it s the only issue. they don t talk about abortion rights down south. right? right. let me ask you this profound thing. you are fighting a number. 51-37. that s a huge change. it seems women i look at people like joanie ernst. i bet she ll do better among men. that s odd. people vote ideology not gender. correct. you have an african-american senator from south carolina who s a republican. yes. people you have our friend michael steele running in maryland. in our state, yes. he got blown away by the african-americans. they killed him because he s a republican. one of the things we have to look at and kellyanne is my favorite pollster, we have used her. we have to look at the browning of the country. if you look at how voters, the democrats of the republican woman who votes republican. most are married. most are white. most live in upper middle class families. the country is browning. you are seeing fewer white women just like you are anywhere else. and not getting married. they are not getting married. economic issues, the democratic party looks friendlier. i agree. people that go to church a lot, married tend to be republican. those who aren t married, don t go to church a lot tend to be democratic. kellyanne, please come back. we have so much to talk about. great conversation. i almost got a word in there. up next, a word to the wise for rick perry. if you have been indicted on criminal charges you should probably know what the charges arement another oops from the man from texas. this is hardball, the place for politics. one day, machines will be sprayed to be made. and making something stronger. will mean making it lighter. one day, factories will work with the cloud. one day. is today. tigers, both of you. tigers? 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[ applause ] more news after this. next up, speculation this week that the u.s. led fight against isis in iraq could expand into syria led many to point out a move could put us on the same side as bashar al assad blurring the lines of which side we are on. here is jon stewart reacting to that. could you see as crazy as it might sound some sort of covert cooperation between the u.s. and the syrian regime of al assad in damascus? you know, it is [ bleep ] like this that makes you almost regret us destabilizing the region in the first place. i get it now. now we find ourselves trapped between iraq and assad place. are [ cheers and applause ] finally, if there is one thing we learned about former presidential candidate rick perry during the 2012 campaign it was that he doesn t have the best memory. who can forget the oops heard around the world. the third agency of government, i would do away with education, the um commerce. commerce. and let s see. oh, my. i can t. the third one i can t. i m sorry. oops. that was a small oops. anyway, it seems the recently indicted governor of texas has forgotten which criminal charges have been filed against him. according to abc news he told a group of business leaders in new hampshire over the weekend that, quote, i have been indict bid the same body now for, i think, two counts. one on bribery, which i m not a lawyer so i don t really understand the details here. well, in fact, the charges do not include bribery at all. perry has been indicted for, quote, abuse of official capacity and coercion. you ought to know what you are being charged with. if you are talking about taking down the president make sure nobody is recording you. senator mcconnell caught on tape. that s next. you re watching hardball, the place for politics. thank you daddy for defending our country. thank you for your sacrifice and thank you for your bravery. thank you colonel. thank you daddy. military families are uniquely thankful for many things, the legacy of usaa auto insurance can be one of them. if you re a current or former military member or their family, get an auto insurance quote and see why 92% of our members plan to stay for life. let that phrase sit with you for a second. unlimited. as in, no limits on your hard-earned cash back. as in no more dealing with those rotating categories. the quicksilver card from capital one. unlimited 1.5% cash back on everything you purchase, every day. don t settle for anything less. i ll keep asking. what s in your wallet? and cialis for daily use 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 term injury, get medical help right away for an erection lasting more than four hours. if you have any sudden decrease or loss in hearing or vision, or any allergic reactions like rash, hives, swelling of the lips, tongue or throat, or difficulty breathing or swallowing, stop taking cialis and get medical help right away. ask your doctor about cialis for daily use and a free 30-tablet trial. hi. i m frances rivera. president obama says russian s ongoing incursion into ukraine will bring more costs and consequences for moscow. russia has stepped up military intervention inside ukraine. u.s. air forces targeted a tank, a humvee and other vehicles near the mosul dam. police say there is a strong possibility the body found is that of a 23-year-old american student from new jersey. he disappeared friday while hiking with a friend. comedian joan rivers is in a hospital after suffering complications of throat surgery. according to e news she s in stable but critical condition. thrill-seeking surfers have been hitting the waves but tropical storm marie has caused flooding and damage on the california coast. life guards rescued dozens from the water. then we take you back to hardball. welcome back to hardball. kentucky republican mitch mcconnell was are recently recorded bragging at a koch brothers retreat in california about what he ll do to destroy president obama s legislative accomplishment if he become it is the senate majority leader. mcconnell is currently in the political fight of his life in kentucky. he promises to use the budget process to defund things like the affordable care act itself. nbc news is not independently verified the voice on the audio but the recording was taken from the left-leaning youtube source called the undercurrent. let s listen. we re going to go after them on health care, on financial services, on the virlt tall protection agency across the board. all across the federal government, we re going to go after it and we are not going to be debating all these gosh darn proposals. that s all we do in the senate is vote on things like raising the minimum wage cost the country 500,000 new jobs. extending unemployment. that s the great message for retirees. the student loan package the other day. that s just going to make things worse. these people believe in all the wrong things. when the audio is that bad you know it s worth listening to. somebody snuck in the recorder. politicians get into trouble when they think they are addressing a small group of similar-minded people. remember mitt romney and the 47%? here it is again. same problem. 47% of the people who vote for the president, agree with him. 47% are dpen dend upon government who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to health care, food, housing, you name it. it s entitlement. that the government should give it to them. they will vote for this president no matter what. the negative messages the candidates are sending behind closed doors that get caught never play well when they are made public. jonathan ways man is is with the new york times and perry bacon is a political news reporter. the rule was don t say anything in politics unless you are ready to see it on the front page of the newspaper. right. that s a caution a lot of them can t abide by when they get in front of fat cats they are trying to kiss. exactly. it usually requires an exclusive cute deal that i will do something for you that will offend other people. let me whisper it when nobody is listening. your thoughts. this is a bipartisan problem. these are the donors backing you up. backing up the party. you feel you need to give them something. the mcconnell campaign said this is something he says all the time. this is not his stump speech. this is what he was telling a group of donors that s not just bank rolling mitch mcconnell but all the candidates that would make him the senate majority leader next year. this was the koch brothers? right. not just americans for prosperity. this was a koch brothers conclave for the whole afp, just universe of koch brothers people that wanted their money s worth. the audio always sucks because it means somebody snuck a cell phone in or a bartender. let s look at the bartender. we showed that one already. this is one from catching the democrats. this is the president of the united states in 2008 talking to a bunch of liberals in san francisco telling them we don t have to worry about lower level people who need guns and bibles. people have been beaten down so long that they feel so betrayed by government. let s pardon them that they get bitter and cling to guns, religion or antipathy toward people who aren t like them. as a way to explain their frustrations. the president lost the pennsylvania primary by nine points. in 1984 colorado senator gary hart was in a tight nomination fight with former vice president walter mondale over california and new jersey when he stepped into it, too, in front of a private audience in california. he described what it was like campaigning apart from his wife. the deal is we campaign separately. the good news is she campaigns in california and i campaign in new jersey. i got to hold a koala bear. mrs. hart said i won t tell you what i got to hold samples from a toxic waste dump. hart lost new jersey by over 15 points. they don t like to be called the solid waste types. it must have worked with the community in california. you never want to say something you would not say in public. obama would never talk about religious people like that in public. romney would never say that. i think mcconnell got away here because he said he ll block things obama is doing. that s not news. it was a total destruction. he said something similar to politico, laying out the idea for attaching anti-obama stuff to spending bills. he talked about it already in some ways. i wasn t shocked. let me go back. do you know what i think the news is? when talking to the koch brothers they are not interested in a mix of progressive here, but mostly conservative here. they want an end to government because they are in the oil and gas business. all they want is no more taxes and certainly no more environmental regulation. they want no more government. that s what the koch brothers want. i think go ahead. i think what s most significa significant, believe me is the optics of it. what you will do is see these audiotapes super imposed over a picture of mitch mcconnell looking mean. you will see them in october in the run-up. it feels like he didn t say anything particularly outlandish. it s not going to look good on an advertisement. how would you find a picture of mitch mcconnell looking mean? i have no idea. you re playing down your own scoop. good work here. perry, thank you. a programming note. allison lundergan grimes will talk to lawrence o donnell tonight on the last word. her first national interview. don t miss it tonight at 10:00 p.m. eastern. we ll be right back. age? 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[ male announcer ] it s one of the most amazing things we build and it doesn t even fly. we build it in classrooms and exhibit halls, mentoring tomorrow s innovators. we build it raising roofs, preserving habitats and serving america s veterans. every day, thousands of boeing volunteers help make their communities the best they can be. building something better for all of us. we re back with a gun range story. it confirmed the death was caused by a single shot to the head. the instructor at the bullets and burgers gun range was shot when the girl lost control of an uzi. it ignited new debate over gun safety. the fact that the recall is too strong for a child of that age seems a matter of common sense. it was reminiscent of a 2008 incident in which an 8-year-old boy in massachusetts fired the very same weapon with disastrous results. the gun tilted up, killing him in the process. unfortunately these tragedies are part of a bigger problem in the country which has seen an erosion of gun restrictions over the past 30 years. unsurprisingly the national rifle association has been con speck lousily silent since that event. for years the nra raised money on the notion that any restrictions on guns will lead to their confiscation which they call a slip vi slope. but there is a slippery slope on the other side toward complete unrestricted access to firearms. guns are ubiquitous thanks to advocacy of the nra. joining me is jim cavanaugh, retired atf special agent in charge and chief johnson of the national law enforcement partnership to prevent gun violence and police chief of baltimore county, maryland. thank you. i want to speak to mr. cavanaugh first. what is it about the nra s current position that seems to the allow them or force them to say nothing this these days since the tragedy where the young 9-year-old girl was shooting an automatic weapon. chris, i would say that lobby groups like the nra don t feel they have to say anything. today tuck in, get advice from the public affairs specialist to just stay out of the fray. you know they are very adept at maneuvering the trenches on the hill up there as you are know. they will probably stay out of the fray. if they say anything they something. i think they ll let it play out for the operators and ranges around the country. you know, there s associations for them. and they re going to be more the outfront speakers on the issue. does silence mean consent? well it often does in law. well, i think it does as far as they don t want to go any way against guns at all, no matter what. and that s what you described in your opening there. it s sort of a fanaticism and doesn t go to any moderation in anything. you know, it has to be one way or the highway and that s the way the lobby groups see it. they see it as just an idealism fanaticism with no compromise at all. what do you make of the no comment, mr. johnson, not even the words, no comment, nothing, just nothing. i mean, this involves guns. you know, uzi, a pretty dangerous weapon, is an automatic weapon. it s light. it s a submachine gun basically. and everybody with it can do a lot of damage. we saw what happened here. a lot of damage, unintended. totally unintended. it was the gun that killed people here. not just the person. certainly it s irresponsible on the part of organizations like nra not to speak out. it s, frankly, irresponsible to put an uzi of that capability in the hands of a 9-year-old. for groups like the nra who have been founded upon, you know, gun safety and range and the sport, itself, you know, putting a ruger .22 in the hands, for example, of someone to train them is totally different than putting a gun of that capability in a 9-year-old s hands. totally irresponsible. let me ask you, mr. cavanaugh, what would be a restriction that would make sense here? i know everything they see sounds like confiscation to them, the slippery slope. here we are at the other end has become a slippery slope. anything goes. from what you said, it sounds like they don t want to hear that you can have an age requirement, say 18, something reasonable about being able to handle an automatic weapon. that would be pretty liberal. they don t even want to see that at these gun ranges. right. i don t think you re going to see any lobby groups get in the press for any change here. they re going to stay out of the fray. it would generally be up to the sta states, chris, if there were any laws that talked about ages a gun ranges, and likely states that would pass the law don t need the law. and the states that need the law won t pass the law. and it s unlikely that we re going to have any change on the hill, and probably federal law wouldn t be the right place to address ages on guns anyway. so i d say we re not going to have any legislative change, although it would probably be good if little children were, couldn t do that, but the children need protection immediately. that s where common sense comes in. that s where range operators have to say we re not going to do this anymore. we ve had two deaths, they shouldn t be shooting these kinds of guns. they re submachine guns for the military, for the police, for trained people that collect them, certainly we understand that. in the citizens hands that have a permit for it. but not for children. it s not disneyland. you don t need to go out there shooting those kinds of weapons. chief johnson, seems to me even a fire hose had a kick to it. you need a couple serious firefighters to know how to handle one. an automatic weapon like this, what kind of kick does it have? what kind of sense would anybody have i don t want to speak over the dead. this guy s dead. the idea of putting something like that in the hands of a skinny little girl. a 9-year-old girl. doesn t make any sense at all to anybody, right wing, left wing, down the middle. i don t get it. well, certainly common sense should have been applied here, and the muscular development of a child of that age certainly is not to the point to handle that weapon. look, as a nation, we implement all sorts of different rules, policies, and laws in some cases to safeguard children and others. have to be a certain height to ride an amusement ride park. require bike helmets. but yet we won t tackle an issue like this. certainly here i think common sense should have prevailed. you know, we pass common sense laws in this nation. we re seeking common sense gun laws like a national background check. but in this case, you know, i don t care what type of rule, policies you may have put in place, or the way the range instructor hovered over the child. there s very little you can do with, you have a kid with that kind of weapon in their hands. that thing s going everywhere. here s a crazy law in vermont, which i thought was a pretty liberal state. apparently you can get a gun at 16, you can buy a handgun or a shotgun at 16 but have to be 17 to see an r rated movie. interesting how we make these judgments. thank you, jim cavanaugh, thank you jim johnson for joining us. another tragedy. and we ll be right back after this. e freedom of the open road? 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someone in the room is going to have a cell phone or some other piece of electronics and get you on the record and send it out even if, especially if, that s the last thing you want done. how do we know that barack obama talked to the liberals of san francisco about the people who, quote, cling to their guns or religion? because someone had a cell phone and put it out. and we know what he said. how do we know that mitt romney was talking down to the 47% he said lived off the rest of the country? because a bartender record it. don t you love this stuff, when a politician gets caught pandering to one group while putting down the other to have the other group learn what he was saying behind closed doors. it shouldn t surprise us, none of this. why do you think the press out of political fund-raisers? they don t want us or the public to hear what it is they re throwing out when they re throwing out the raw meat.
as a nation, we are united and when people harm americans, we don t retreat, we don t forget. we take care of those who are grieving and when that is finished, they should know we will follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice, because hell is where they will reside! hell is where they will reside! all right. mika, boy, what joe biden said yesterday, very strong. i m sure a lot of people, a lot of republicans on capitol hill have been calling for stronger words. it might take some of that. what do you think? i think he is tapping into a growing sentiment in a country that might be war weary but certainly is not impervious what we have seen the last two weeks. sounds likes the guns of war across america. you heard the vice president saying america would follow isis to the gates of he he ll to get justice. the secretary of state says they don t want to contain is circumstances, they want to destroy isis. you know what is happening here, they are hearing from constituents who are concerned and you also know, because they are politicians, internal polling, obviously, showing americans want action now. kay hagan she joined john graham and lindsey graham late night in a debate. al franken sent a terse letter to the white house calling for military action and they were not alone. but you know what? there were more developments, i think, mika, yesterday that weren t driven by political poles. the indianapolunited arab emira out. they are going to support america in any military action taken against isis. also the iraqi parliament. you know what would have happened if we shot first and then asked questions later. now they are begging us to take action. while it s one thing to have kay hagan calling for a stronger use of force, americans asking questions first and shooting missiles later may actually lead to our country not having to go it alone again. yes. as we protect other country survival. i got a question this morning and i hope it s a question my republican friends will ask and i hope it s a question john mccain and lindsey graham both will ask. i hope it s a question that everybody who is calling for immediate action will ask for. it s one thing for kay hagan to say we need to move now and i m angry at the president of the united states. how about this question? where is egypt? where is saudi arabia? where is jordan and where are the countries whose very existence american fire power against isis is dependent? that s what i want republicans asking. that s what i want these new democratic war hawks asking. if the united states is going to go after isis and destroy them, and we are, let s not go it alone again, and let s not, once again, spend american blood and american treasure protecting other tyrant s power. let s go right now to chris jansing who is traveling with with the president in wales. chris, the administration not ambiguous yesterday. it was seek, search, and send to the gates of hell. tell us what is going on there. yeah, you re going to pay that was the message, right? and what a difference a couple of years makes from the last nato summit. this is high stakes. i just was listening to the secretary of state general of nate tow saying we are not a cold war relic, we are involved. i saw the president going into a multilateral meeting with leaders. ukraine is not a member of nato but another high on the list of what to do here which is what to do about vladimir putin. but look. there s a lot that hasn t been done with nato. they have been sort of deescalating for a while. a couple of years ago the talk was how do we get out of afghanistan and spending less money. there are 28-member countries and four of them contribute what they are supposed to contribute which is 2% of the gdp so they are pushing for that and pushing for a rapid response force, about 4,000 troops they would have that would respond to a crisis within 48 hours. but i think to your point, joe, it s important to say that isis and what to do about the rise of extremism wasn t even officially on the agenda. we now know there are going to be a number of sides, there was a little bit of time already morning for president obama and david cameron to meet. the folks who were close enough said there was a lot of whispering going on. we don t know what was said. but there is a rising sense of insecurity here as there is around the world and particularly when it relates to isis. you see the foreign fighters and the possibility of them coming back to the homeland whether here in the uk or europe or in the united states. has put this on the agenda in a way it wasn t before, joe and mika. thank you so much, chris. greatly appreciate it. this is getting to widespread that you have turkey and qatar have not been the most helpful in this fight. turkey had what is called the jihadist highway, you know, any foreign fighters that wanted to join isis, you know, directly through turkey. they are now even joining in and trying to shut down the jihadist highway. yes. it s like a bell was rung last over the last day or two and the world is suddenly, pow. it s megahow the rhetoric has coalesced around this. how long will that last? they are talking tough right now. when president obama initially started talking tough and isis is a cancer and all of these things, my initial question is he just trying to look as if he is doing more than he really is? now it feels as if there is more of a momentum but the question this is going to be a very long that will involve building a coalition and holding the coalition for years. what are you going to do? there is more news on this. new details with steven sotlof sotlof, the second journalist to be beheaded. israeli reports say he faked being sick so he could fast on yom kippur. a debate on islam and gave a tribute to sotloff. steve had a gentle soul that this world will be without, but his spirit will endure in our hearts. today, we grieve. this week, we mourn. but we will emerge from this ordeal. our village is strong. we will not allow our enemies to hold us hostage with the sole weapons they possess, fear. the mother of james foley is speaking out, offering condolences to steven sotloff s family. diane foley says she hopes their murders can somehow lead to positive changes in the world. we just want to extend our deepest sympathy and hugs to the sotloff family, all of his dear friends and colleagues. steven was another talented, courageous young american out there trying to share all of their suffering of the people in the middle east with us. i would hope that their deaths might not be in vain, that they might awaken the world that we must act as a unified world for peace and for goodness and just work together. it was so wonderful having an opportunity to talk a beautiful family. to her and mr. foley. a wonderful and extraordinary family. wonderful gesture to come out of her mourning, which has to be so extraordinarily intense to try to do that. they are in a unlikely and terrible position and she is doing her best. she really is. harold ford, let s turn to what happened last night. kay hagan was in the debate. al franken in minnesota, if he is responding to constituents calls for military action, this is why it s spread. we had two republican, one pollster and one consultant, steve schmidt, who spends a good bit of his time, talking about like me what the republican party is not getting right and why they are going to lose elections. he said yesterday it s a wave election for republicans and internal polls have to be showing a big, big break. what does the president have to do? he s god to keep his head here and not just shoot missiles into the desert. what does he do? do you support this path of slow and steady and waiting for arab countries to ask america to get involved, or does he have to act faster? i think any president, including this one, has to act to protect the interests of the country, and i give the president some credit in being sober and smart and trying to be reasonable about this. i mean, you think about the doctrine where you identify the threat and the forces behind it to achieve your goal and you re able to exit. i think the president is trying to think about it in those ways. colin powell, by the way, let s forget about the slip on friday where he said we didn t have a strategy. if colin powell were president of the united states or secretary of defense or what we wouldn t be rushing into war, because you re exactly right. powell identifies a threat but before he sends the first troop in, he says we need to know what the exit date is. he got pushed in 2003. and never get pushed gep. i think president obama is trying to do that. his language has been awkward and at times maybe dangerous. you look at al franken and kay hag hagan, they probably represent different spectrums of the party. i think for them to be the way they are i think it s the president talking about what it is. i don t think the polling shows yet that these issues rank foremost on people s mind in all of these battleground states. i imagine if i al franken and kay hagan up for re-election you want to be in front of this as you possible could. the other major foreign conflict is russia and we will focus on that in our must reads. new developments there. in a few hours, the justice department will announce a sweeping civil rights investigation into the city s police department. they will look at the conduct of the ferguson p.d. over several years. in the last five years the justice department has opened 20 investigations of police departments across the country. true to her message. senator elizabeth warren is openly criticizing former house majority leader eric cantor s decision to take a multimillion dollar job on wall street. cantor will be the vice chairman and managing director of an investment bank, earning more than $3 million over two years. in an interview with yahoo! s katie couric, warren says it sends a bad message. you know, how wrong can this be? that basically what is happening here is that people work in washington and, man, they hit that revolving door with a speed that would blind you and head straight out into the industry, not because they bring great expertise and insight, but because they are selling excess back to their former colleagues who are still writing policy, who are still making laws. makes sense, right? the democratic senator was a little less blunt, however, when she was asked about hillary clinton s relationship with the financial industry. i m curious if you think that hillary clinton is too cozy with wall street? i know you ve disagreed with her in the past on issues like bankruptcy, legislation. you know, i worry a lot about the relationship between all of our regulators, government, and wall street. what about hillary clinton in particular? i worry across the board and here is part of why. we have got a washington now that works for anyone who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers, and it doesn t work for regular families. families don t have armies of lobbyists, they don t have armies of lawyers. and that is why i think it s so critical now that we speak up on these core issues. so very interesting, joe. i want your take. when it s a republican, it s bad, it sends a bad message. when it s a democrats, she is worried. worried. she s in a bad position. listen, if you re going to be a straight shooter. she should say it s not good. if you re going to be a straight shooter, you got to be a straight shooter. what is wrong with her saying, you know what? it s not good. her relationship raiseses a lot of questions. she gets paid a lot of money by a lot of these banks and then tells them that what they did is okay. with the hillary team, like, close in on her? she went down to goldman sachs and told them everything you did was fine, which was great. i d do that because i ve been trying to a job and begging for a job there for years now. who did? hillary. elizabeth didn t. she didn t. yes, she did. she went down and basically waived the wand of absolution toward them. you have to be a straight shooter for republicans and democrats alike. i think joe is right. if you re that critical. i agree. mrs. clinton represented new york state which is the home to the headquarters for the financial service industry. okay. i understand. her and chuck schumer the fact they stand up people in new york lost a lot of money in their pensions in the bust of 2008 and elizabeth warren supposed to be worried about them, should be worried about them. we have more politics to get to. scott brown in new hampshire and major news out of kansas and get to that in a bit. three-hour show. major news out of kansas? yes. what happened? what is the matter with kansas tell me! it s a tease. my father is not in kansas. he is here to talk to us. doctors zbigniew brzezinski will join us and tony blinken and andrea mitch and ayman mohyeldin. how do get your kids in a ivy league college of your choice? i can get them into alabama. actually, 20 years ago i could but not now. the latest on the condition of comedienne joan rivers. a brush with death off the coast. we will be right back. don t just dream of being the hero. make it happen. i can t believe we re missing the game for this. we re not i ve got xlte. it doubles our 4g lte bandwidth in cities nationwide, so be that guy with verizon xlte. now get 1gb of bonus data, and our best pricing ever on the more everything plan. thomas? look who is here. he is ready for the open today. are you going to the open? i am. i think so. if i can stay awake. i ve never been you wanted there. i ve lived in new york city now for 73 years, and i ve never been out to the u.s. open. i thought it was 72? no, 73. i was there when the guys were wearing skirts and, you know? really? i don t want to see that. you ll have fun. do you play tennis? i do. i m quite aggressive. that doesn t surprise me. and i hear your father cheats. he would never say he cheats. was it in? out. i think that was in. right on the line. mine. that s not surprising at all. let s take a look at the morning papers from our parade of papers. the boston globe two kayakers lucky to be alive after surviving a great white shark attack in plymouth, massachusetts. paddles and i looked over to talk to her and it came completely out of the water and got the bottom of the boat and flipped her over and knocked my my kayak completely over. i saw at least four feet of its head. four feet of it came up out of the water. it bit through the boat. bite marks through the bottom of the kayak. my gosh. both of them so traumatized by the shark attack they had to hold the beachside press conference for four and a half hours. what else do we have? stop! they were scared! i know. if i survived a shark attack i probably am not going in front of a bank of cameras but i d go home. the attack came after hours officials say they heard of a shark sighting in the same area and it was near ducksbury, massachusetts. the shark was between 12 and 14 feet long. that s big. this is exciting coming to us from the dallas morning news. tesla motors. you got your driver s license! no, i passed my precertification. i m there with every 15-year-old in america. are you kidding me? you don t have your driver s license and just got your precertification? i went to driver s ed in new york city and we watched dvds from 1994. they said if you had road rage, you put it in an audio tape. what do you do? did you right around on a bicycle in baltimore when you were 18? no. i got my license when i was a kid. then when i moved to california, i let my license conspirexpire. when you call california saying i want a new license, they can t send it to you. can you send it to new york? they said no. now you have to prequalify to take a test? yeah, i need my mom to come here and bring me a car. mommy, can you come take me? and a tesla as well? this car is great for people who can drive cars? and afford one. tesla making this big announcement, a plan to build a battery factory in nevada. i say nevada, you say nevada. it s a gigafactory and produce the batteries expected to make the batteries for the tesla car. if you ve seen these cars on the road, they are good looking cars and they are really cool. 4 to 5 billion is about as much mike bloomberg makes on a long weekend. no. that is about in one hour. get his numbers right. he gets upset. former mayor michael bloomering will return to the lead the company he founded. throughout his tenure as mayor, bloomberg maintained 88% ownership of the organization. detroit free press. protests over fast food workers are supposed to be across the country. they are will be targeted by demonstrators from the fight for 15 campaign. they want a pay increase up to $15 an hour. if you see them, walk with them. or just go in and buy a big mac. guys, seriously, this is ridiculous. i m serious. i haven t had a big mac in a long time. joan rivers is resting comfortably in a private room in mt. sinai hospital in new york. she breathing during a throat procedure. thoughts are with her for sure. certainly. the guinness world record sold in seattle. this hot dog features a bratwurst topped with beef and shaved black truffles and cav r caviar. the creators sold six dogs during his first day on the menu and all proceeds went to charity and customers looking for a bite of the dog must give two weeks advance notice. i think that s a foot long. i think i m sick. yeah. i ve got a plan. why don t we do this. you can have a big mac. no. i m just ignoring him. and you can support what the marches are doing outside so we will compromise on that. thank you. you should support the marchers. but then go in and have a big mac. the more big macs you buy the better the mcdonald s can afford to pay them more. did you hear our friend nicolle wallace is going to the view. i m so excited for her for so many reasons! she deserved it and she is going to be great and she is going to add so much to the show! it is such great news. way to go abc. how smart? off the mid terms of 2016. she is going to be fantastic! we will have her on and talk all about it. she is coming on friday. i m responsible for the shoes she wore at the audition. can you get me some shoes? coming up, the cost of taking on isis. is the obama foreign policy stretching the u.s. too thin? the new york times david sanger joins us with his behind the scenes reporting on that. first, today s must read opinion pages, including one from president obama and prime minister david cameron. we will be right back with much more morning joe. when folks think about what they get from alaska, they think salmon and energy. but the energy bp produces up here creates something else as well: jobs all over america. engineering and innovation jobs. advanced safety systems & technology. shipping and manufacturing. across the united states, bp supports more than a quarter million jobs. when we set up operation in one part of the country, people in other parts go to work. that s not a coincidence. it s one more part of our commitment to america. [ girl ] my mom, she makes underwater fans that are powered by the moon. she can print amazing things, right from her computer. [ whirring ] [ train whistle blows ] she makes trains that are friends with trees. my mom works at ge. oh, he fakes a handoff quaand he s making a run... for mattress discounters fall kickoff sale! right now, save up to $300 on sealy posturepedic and serta mattress sets. even get 24 months interest-free financing on every tempur-pedic. you re going to love their football field-size selection. this calls for a little touchdown dance. don t miss the fall kickoff sale at mattress discounters. mattress discounters mike barnicle joins the table for the must read opinion pages. vladimir putin has laid out a proposal to end the conflict in eastern ukraine. that s so nice of him. it s perfect. it s great. the timing is so interesting. the new york times reports the seven-point plan to deescalate months of bloody stalemate was apparently written out during a flight over siberia. he had on to dropped two reporters who had written something bad about him from 30,000 feet from the plane and went back to do the draft. he is multitasker. he can kick somebody out of the pl plane and kill them at the same time. as they consider a rapid response unit for eastern europe and another round of economic sanctions. meanwhile, another sign of weakening russian influence in europe. france has decided not to send 1.7 billion dollar amphibious warship manufactured for russia after coming under pressure from the united states. they say the behavior has under mined the security of the continent. our first must read is about putin s little document that he wrote up on his plane. putinesque cease-fire wall street journal. it s no accident mr. putin has floated this cease-fire plan before the nato summit in wales and before the eu discusses broader sanctions on russia on friday. mr. putin hopes to forestall sanctions and divide the west a strategy that has worked before. ukraine will not mr. putin s last military destination. i mean, are they really going to fall for this at nato in terms of dealing with sanctions? are we going to say, oh, thank you so much, you ve written this lovely that is ridiculous. gideon, i don t know what the options are for a lot of the eu countries. require some action. i think the nato countries are actually probably red-lined for putin. this wall street journal editorial talks about how putin uses kazakhstan is not really a country. i think my take is that putin s mainly got what he wants now. he has eastern ukraine where the russian speaker majority is and where the country s industrial base is. and with that, he basically has ukraine destabilized and weakened and that is all that matters to him. if he thinks, mika, like a politician, even a brudish politician. if he goes into kiev there will be a lot more pain for the russian people. i think he is where he is. let s talk about an op-ed written by david cameron who has been very forceful towards isis and also the president. mike barnicle has that. they are writing the times of london today we will not be coward by barbaric killers whether regional aggression unchecked or prospect that foreign fighters have a threat in our country. our nations have always believed that we are more prosperous and secure when the world is more pros purse and secure. so we have a real stake in making sure they grow up in a world where schoolgirls are not kidnapped and women are not raped in conflict and families aren t slaughtered because of their faith and political beliefs. that is why we have des core al qaeda and supported the afghan people and why we will not waiver in our determination to confront isil. it is interesting, joe, over the past couple of months how what has happened in the middle east with isil has altered really the dynamics of the political and economic dynamics of two countries and more, great britain and the united states specifically. it really has. but i ll tell you something else it s done. i m looking on the international page of the new york times. they talk about hamas, look at this. walking around claiming victory in a completely destroyed area. wow. this has also changed the calculation for groups like hamas, and they were feeling the noose tightened around their neck because of egypt and other arab countries withdrawing sport. the silence was deafing during the latest battle in the middle east war. because of isis you actually have arab countries starting to strike out against radical islamists. this is bad news for isis and also bad news for hamas. i would agree. thank you, harold ford. they are saying one thing in my ear. i ll let your dad answers if he thinks we should announce they won t be accepted in nato. i m curious to hear his reaction. one time he listens to alex in his ear he blows through it. i did but then i told them i couldn t take it. here is the deal. we have him on the show. kind of a big deal. but they did send me a t-sitter saying i m a big deal. mike allen that has report. president obama vowed a commitment to protect eastern europe from russia but can the united states sustain their presence there and two other parts of the world? the new york times david sanger is our guest and he talks about the three-headed monster confronting president obama. that is coming up. we know we re not the center of your life, but we ll do our best to help you connect to what is. hello! three grams daily of beta-glucan. a soluable fiber from whole grain oat foods like cheerios can help lower cholesterol. thank you! take and. exhale.in. aflac! and a gentle wavelike motion. aahhh- ahhhhhh. liberate your spine, ahhh-ahhhhhh aflac! and reach, toes blossoming. not that great at yoga. yeah, but when i slipped a disk he paid my claim in just four days. ahh! four days? yep. find out how fast aflac can pay you, at aflac.com. we will defend our nato allies and that means every ally. in this alliance, there are no old members or new members and no junior partners or senior partners. they are just allies. i believe our alliance should extend these defensive measures for as long as necessary. because the defense of tallin and others are just as important as the defense of berlin and paris and london. here with us now from washington is national security correspondent for the new york times david sanger. he writes in his piece this morning with his speech in estonie estonia on wednesday about the as a result nes vulnerable nations will last for as long as necessary to deter russia. president obama has now committed the country to three significant projection of american power. as david reports, it seems to cost a great deal of money. it did. david sanger, thank you so much for being with us. when i sasat on the armed servi committee we obsessed on being able to fight a two-front war. did we have the power and manpoman d manpower to fight a two-man war. it s not only expensive but it would stretch our military beyond its current capabilities, wouldn t it? it s a big stretch, joe. and beyond that, it s a stretch that nobody anticipated. remember. the concept in the first term was that the president would use drones, cyber, special forces and use those to deter adventurous major powers and you wouldn t have to have a big sustained presence. just think about the list that we put together in the lead that mika just read. it requires a lot of naval resources and no one doubts its long term because the chinese aren t going away. the isil effort is going to have to be a sustained one, particularly if we are concerned about putting ground troops on. so you re going to need an air campaign that, you know, is going to run up to probably a quarter billion dollars a month at the current rate. then if you need a sustained effort against vladimir putin who probably isn t going to leave office 2024, if then, that is a long commitment as well. there has been a lot of prrp leaders criticizing the president s so-called pivot to asia and it looks like he won t make that pivot any time soon with isil rise in the middle east. in many ways the pivot is hard to see right now, at least on the military side, because it requires the deployment of a new class of ships and a movement of resources that is going to take a while. but when you talk to the pentagon to the people who are doing it, it s slowly under way. now, isil could get in the way and putin could get in the way and people say we can t keep 60% of our forces, which is the target, in asia starting in about 2020 and, of course, you ll have another president to make a decision on that closer to the date. but it s headed in that direction. frankly, joe, when you think about all of these threats, it s china s rise over time that is probably the one that will require the most sustained attention. i m just wondering, and when you look at isis and the cost at 225 million $2 billion a year basically when you look at those numbers, the pentagon usually underestimates these things, what choice do we have? number one. how do they put a number on this? there s so much we still don t know about how to take on isis. that s right. it s very hard to put a number on it and in some ways the number is the least of it, mika. while $2 billion, $2.5 billion a year if you stay at this level, isn t that much when you think in the last years of the full presence in afghanistan, we were going through $100 billion a year. so on that scale, it s not that big but, remember, those are numbers, assuming we don t go after isis in syria and, of course, we all know that if you re actually serious about taking isis to the gates of hell, to use joe biden s line the other day, you re going to have to go to syria. david sanger, thank you so much. we greatly appreciate it. thank you, david. the problem is the pentagon always underestimates how much a war is going to cost. right now $2 billion a year doesn t sound right. if you re going into syria, if you re going to take isis to, quote, the gates of hell, that is going an expensive trip. the beauty store bandit. how one woman s request for a free makeover went horribly wrong. oh, my god. that s a makeover? that is news you can t use. up next the 50 ideas changing politics in america and the people behind them. politico has a list and we will explain the reason hillary is not on it. how did that happen? we will be right back. man: i know the name of eight princesses. i m on expert on softball. and tea parties. i ll have more awkward conversations than i m equipped for, because i m raising two girls on my own. i ll worry about the economy more than a few times before they re grown. but it s for them, so i ve found a way. who matters most to you says the most about you. at massmutual we re owned by our policyowners, and they matter most to us. ready to plan for your future? we ll help you get there. fill their bowl with the meaty tastes they re looking for, with friskies grillers. tender meaty pieces and crunchy bites. in delicious chicken, beef, turkey, and garden veggie flavors. friskies grillers. my motheit s delicious. toffee in the world. so now we ve turned her toffee into a business. my goal was to take an idea and make it happen. i m janet long and i formed my toffee company through legalzoom. i never really thought i would make money doing what i love. we created legalzoom to help people start their business and launch their dreams. go to legalzoom.com today and make your business dream a reality. at legalzoom.com we put the law on your side. great. this is the last thing i need.) seriously? let s take this puppy over to midas and get you some of the good ol midas touch. hey you know what? i ll drive! i really didn t think this through. brakes, tires, oil, everything. (whistling) republican scott brown is running for senate in new hampshire as you know. this video from a town hall in hudson released by an opposition research group shows brown react to go a question about how he would create jobs as a u.s. senator. here is the thing. when folks say, you know, what are you going to do to create jobs, i m not going to create a job. my job is to make sure that the government stays out of your way so you actually grow and expand and obama is a great example. the number one job right now is obamacare. a poll last knot month showed senator jeanne shaheen leading brown. that is getting closer. who knows what it s like the past week. we are seeing democrats scurrying to the right and taking a hawkish position. i suspect new hampshire, like a lot of other states, are tightening up. it s a jump ball right now. given scott brown s propensity for malappropriateness, jeanne shaheen has lived in new hampshire all her life and knows new hampshire. why is it a tie right now if that is the case? i think president obama is a big weight for a democrat to carry in new hampshire. all right. a big weight. let s go to politico. with us is the chief white house correspondent for politico, mike allen. politico is unveiling an annual list of key thinkers and doers who are reshaping politics in 2014. congratulations, joe! yeah. i m sure number one. and hillary is not in it, mike. why? maybe she is 51. politico magazine decided this year, rather than doing a traditional list of washington s powerful or rising stars, to do thinkers, people who, at a time when washington is locked up with gridlock and dysfunction, actually, are out promoting ideas. so that is why you find rand paul and ted cruz on this list. they are out actually, you ve got rand paul as number one. oh, my lord. explain. yeah. well, we have seen on this show, he has been talking about issues like justice reform, changing prison sentences and making it easier for people who have been convicted of small drug offenses, to get work again. whereas, hillary clinton has not been talking about idea. she had a whole book without ideas in it. being very safe. mika, you say good lord, but even mika is saying, wow, this guy is really interesting. number two. ambassador to main street you call her, janet yellin. explain. so the fed chairman who at the time when the fed used to be remote is now can talk a language that people understand and also is bringing a more populace view in the past. you talk about capital, a rock star. thomas piketty in a book very few have read. there have been some stats on that and how far into the book people comment, but he s someone would captured the debate about inequality. as you know, joe and mika, in 2016, whether you re on the right or whether you re on the left, this issue of income inequality is something every candidate will have to say something creative and convincing about. and let me just say it has a very compelling table of contents. as far as i got. no, i got a couple of chapters in. it s a compelling argument, not realistic how he is going to take care of the income divide but still very compelling. number four, ted cruz. ted cruz is someone who, not only wants to have his own think tank, is building a staff almost like he has a political organization, a government organization, and a think tank. he is someone who we saw this weekend in dallas at the americans for prosperity conference. very ambitious and wants to run about right ideas. look at number six. i love that. pope francis, washington s favorite populace. elizabeth warren takes on a cozy relationship. plus the u.s. is gearing up for a prolonged war against isis. the drums of war seem to be taking off in d.c. we will live to the white house to speak to tony blanket. first, stephen colbert answers the question will washington run easier if fictional character were in charge? news you can t use is next. eenie. meenie. miney. go. more adventures await in the seven-passenger lexus gx. see your lexus dealer. so what we re looking for is a way to plus our accounting firm s mobile plan. and minus our expenses. perfect timing. we re offering our best-ever pricing on mobile plans for business. run the numbers on that. well, unlimited talk and text, and ten gigs of data for the five of you would be. one-seventy-five a month. good calculating kyle. good job kyle. you just made partner. our best-ever pricing on mobile share value plans for business. now with a $100 bill credit for every business line you add. (yawn) . toaster strudel! more fruit in the filling, ya? mmm! ya! warm, flaky, gooey, toaster strudel! now, with more fruit! if energy could come from anything?. or if power could go anywhere? or if light could seek out the dark? what would happen if that happens? anything. everybody take a very close look. okay. at this next picture. the face of crime. brandy allen was arrested for shoplifting of 144 bucks of eye makeup at the ulta beauty store. here is her mug shot from fayetteville police. an officer found her in the bathroom flushing the toilet several times and asked to see what was inside her purse she pulled out eye shadows and running her fingers over the makeup to make it app it was already used and smudging it on her eyes. you look above the right eye it s sort of a david bowie look. i like it. stephen colbert thinking president obama could learn something. his idol is frank underwood. look at cameron s suit during the speech. it says power, dignity, and strength and obama s suit says i m a groomsman in an august wedding but even david cameron pales in comparison from frank underwood from house of cards. if you have not stolen your ex-girlfriend s netflix password yesterday, he s a washington power player rising to prominence in lying, scheming, back stabbing, and murder but gets things done in washington. president francis underwood, i can t believe it. please, stephen, i detest formalities. just call me president frank underwood. it s a real honor to have you here, sir. i m a huge fan. how do you get so much done? well, it s like i say, stephen, a dog doesn t need to show its teeth as long as his growl deep enough, the food bowl is full, and he knows where all the bones are buried. wow. i have no [ bleep ] idea what that means. but he sounds good saying it. he does. it s the top of the hour now. we were talking last hour, ayman, about how you look at what the vice president is saying and following isis to the gates of hell and what kay hagan said last night in her debate. al franken in minnesota, of all people, he is writing letters to the white house demanding action on isis. it looks like certainly, the president of the united states, the secretary of defense, they are not going to contain isis, they say they are going to destroy isis. i was asking the question, though. kay hagan is fine but i d like to hear from egypt. al franken is great but i think the saudis have more of a stake in this than we do. so uae came out yesterday very forceful against isis and said they are going to be on board and the iraqi parliament, it s pretty interesting too. are we going to see egypt, saudi arabia, and other countries whose very existence would be threatened by the rise of isis? i think you ll definitely see it on certainly levels. certainly intelligence, perhaps trying to cut some of the finances flowing to them and curb the ideology. will they join bush 41 coalition? if the u.s. can put it together. the bottom line they are american militaries pretty much but they don t have the ability for operational ability. what would the impact be in egypt if the generals came out tomorrow like the uae and said we are behind the united states of america, destroy isis? i don t know if they would use those exact words we are behind the united states of america but if they say we are standing with the united states of america. look at me, being an american. shoulder-to-shoulder strong against isis. the international community to destroy isis, i think it would have an important effect. they are dealing with elements of extremism in their own country. they are struggling with very similar ideology they consider to be just as extreme so they have an interest and stake in fighting isis. i m going to show you a picture from a place you recognize all too well. it s gaza. you have hamas claiming victory, despite the fact that so much was destroyed and they got pounded militarily. i said earlier, even hamas is hurt by the spread of isis. the middle east is changing and you have arab countries that are now striking out against what they consider to be radical elements. and this is one issue which as much as prime minister netanyahu say they are the same but that is definitely not bought in the arab world and nobody will accept that. i think a lot of people in the west would reject that as well. at the same time, as you mentioned there is this kind of perception that the rise of groups, any kind of group, particularly in societies where they may not know the difference between hamas and isis, their image and their reputation is going to be tarnished. people i think are generally fed up with what is going on in the middle east. this constant state of instability and just the violence and i think there s a lot of frustration generally, even inside the arab world. you got to keep that in mind. this is something that is new, mika. it s rising. we got the uae and egypt going after extremists in libya. that was crossing a threshold that hadn t been crossed yet. i think the arab world is changing dramatically. you have the president and vice president and secretary of defense showing some unity here and their sharp tone against isis. here is chuck hagel yesterday echoing the president. here is joe biden. as a nation, we are united and when people harm americans, we don t retreat, we don t forget. we take care of those who are grieving and when that is finished, they should know we will follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice, because hell is where they will reside! hell is where they will reside! the president sounding a tad bit more measured but biden is biden and tapping into the fears that certainly what we have seen the past two weeks have been arising americans. chuck hagel says the u.s. knows of more than a hundred americans fighting with isis overseas. in an exclusive interview with nbc news one u.s. citizen named don morgan revealed the details of his attempt to become a member of isis. someone has to defend islam and someone has to defend innocent people. i purchased the ticket with the intent of entering syria, either joining up with medical and food aide convoys or directly with the islamic state. a push came from being mistreated by people around me who didn t share the views i had. reporter: he decided to join last june and began to make his way from beirut to syria, but he was stopped on the way by authorities in turkey and sent back. morgan is currently in federal prison because he allegedly tried to sell a gun online, despite having a prior unrelated felony. somebody has to defend islam. i don t think it s him. i don t think it s him either. that is a pretty shallow bench, harold ford, if he is a guy going to defend islam. that is how they get to people. operationally, as we talk about destroying and degrading and tough language coming from the administration, what actually can be done? it seems that this threat is pretty disperse. how would an operational set of attacks what would it look like? why that sound bite is so important because it gets to what i think is actually the bigger problem which is this ideology and the sentiment people think they need to come and defend islam and bring all kinds of narratives to this ideology that we have been struggling with for the past decade and even lrng. what the u.s. can do militarily is stop people like this from traveling with the help of turkey. once they congregate in the battlefield, carry out strikes on those positions, try to target facilities they are using to store am nirks and try to go after key decision-makers within the organization. at the end of the day, you re going to still have people like that who want to go and fight because of an ideology and if they don t do something to stop that and make people feel they belong elsewhere and the psychological reasons why this guy wants to go, you re going to have these problems for a while. from the white house is tony blinken. thank you for being with us. a lot going on and happening very quickly. yesterday, certainly, the president of the united states, the secretary of defense, the vice president of the united states all talking about destroying isis and following them to the gates of hell. what is the first step? if one is going to actually travel across the river sticks and go to the gates of hell, what is the next step? is it getting allies to cross that river with us? joe i was listening to you earlier and yesterday and i think you ve got it exactly right. the president is being very deliberate about this. first, we got to look before we leap. we tried the opposite about a decade ago and that didn t help us very much in the middle east so we are being very deliberate about putting together a coalition of countries to deal with the isis problem. that coalition is critical. could i ask you, tony, i brought up a couple of countries that have a lot at stake here. so glad uae came out yesterday forcefully and good to see what the iraqi parliament did. what about egypt and what about saudi arabia? can we expect them to make the sort of statements that the uae made yet? the short answer is, i think, yes. what we are seeing is countries that don t often have a lot in common and sometimes couldn t cooperate are us starting to stand up because they see the isil threat is first and foremost the wolf at their door. we had a strong statement from the uae yesterday. i ve been talking to the saudis they are on. they are starting to put the coalition together and we have to be very deliberate about it. a lot of work to be done and it s going to take time and i think we will do it. when you say that certain countries are beginning to stand up and they are on board. what is on board mean? and which countries are you hopeful or even convinced that you will have collective unity on this? a number of things we have to do to achieve the goal the president said which is in the first instance disrupting isil and ultimately defeating it. first deal with the war fighting capacity. it tends to mask troops. we have got to take a whack at that. we started to do that in iraq. second, we have to get a support network. the terrorists financing. the propaganda. the recruits. all of that. the foreign fighters. third, we have to deal with some of its local support and move them back to the other side. alienate sunnis in iraq and, finally, enable local actors who can take and hold the territory with we may help them get with our air power and bringing all of that together and bringing countries together to do that is exactly what we are working on now. that is the comprehensive plan the president is enhancing. did you get a sense of supporting the syrian and giving them to the poopopposition you spoke of? when congress gets back, next week, we will talk to them about that. a train and quick program involve countries in the region hosting the trainers to make sure that we can strengthen the opposition so that it can both deal with isil and deal with the assad regime. tony, thank you. thanks very much. we greatly appreciate it. i want to follow up on what tony said, harold, really quickly. he is right. the president, and i know a lot of people get angry about this, you know? the president said something he shouldn t have said on friday. he said it inartfully. the whole world exploded like we weren t going to survive. did they want to send the missiles on saturday, sunday, on labor dah? i brought this point up in real-time you seriously would have thought i was walking around with makeup on my eyes like that lady that leave her alone. that knocked off the cosmetics store in arkansas. what was he going to do some we talk about leading from behind. this isn t leading from behind. this is saying we are not going to do your bidding for you any more. if you want to join us in a true coalition of the willing, then we will do it. and it sounds like. it s what they are doing. because we are being deliberate after not being so deliberate a decade ago, we are going to have egypt, we are going to have saudi arabia, we already have the uae. we already have iraq. i m sorry. that s starting to sound a little bit like 1991. we all talked about why couldn t we have presidents more like bush 41? it sounds like that is the direction we are heading. the deputy national security adviser right there, mika s father at a different time over the weekend, sounded clear, stronger, more passionate and forceful and, frankly, more understandable than the president sounded in his press conference. it was the brown suit. the president stand before the country and say we have no strategy you should just wait and no need to talk. i agree with you. what the president is doing, being deliberate i think is smart. at the same time, you know he was talking about syria. again, nobody that has watched this seven for seven years think i carry president obama s water. you know what i like to call him? the commander in chief. at a time of crisis, that is just child s play. and as you know. i would agree. because you grew up in a church. i ve seen your political commercials. when i was child, i behaved as a child. when i grew up, i put away childish things. i m serious. there is a true analogy. we can scream and yell over health care, this, that and the other but when we have a existential threat to the countries in the middle east it s time to put away s child play and start working and looking at the long-term range and i think he s got it right. you made two of three eloquent powerful statements the last several days on this. fountain president had that kind of confidence and clarity and consistency in his language it would have been a different take. nobody said he has ever been a good speech maker. oh, wait. yes he has. stop. in the words of george w. bush, it s hard, it s hard. it looks a lot easier from this side of the camera, harold p.m. you know that. i know but what our effort would actually look like on the ground. ayman and tony were clear that i think the american people have heard from the president over the last several days which i think is what we need here. a lot of people think we are going to deploy troops in a broad way. a different way to do this. ayman, i thought, said it well. a couple of more headlines and then to the break. my dad is on the other side and he is nervous already. raising the minimum wage on the arkansas state ballot after a petition received more than twice the signatures it needed. what more do people need to know about what we need to do here? if passed it would raise the state s minimum wage from $6.25 and hour to $7.50 an hour in 2016. mark prior embraced the increase in february calling it the right thing to do and signing on to the petition. his opponent republican congressman tom cotton has yet to make an decision. this is an important issue. i said it after labor day and believe it now. this is a bigger issue as we move forward and puts republicans, like tom cotton and like myself when i was in congress, you know, a couple of decades ago, in a difficult position. is it hard to take a position on this right now at this time? i don t think so. i don t think so. it s not. if you can get a deal out of it. exactly. mitt romney said on your show and he endorsed it. get a deal out of it! you can t win over the senate and control the senate if you re out of touch with american people on a lot of issues. in the kentucky senate race, a sliver of good news. a sliver. for mitch mcconnell. a new cnn/orc poll has mcconnell up four points over allison lundergan grimes. that is within the margin of error. it actually says five, but it s very close. i wouldn t count her out. i would not count her out at all. i think the national press is giving her a little bit of a bum wrap. i think she is a formidable xae candidate. i think democrats are fired up down there. we shall see. the democrat candidate for u.s. senate throws in the towel in kansas and how that may mean the party will hold on to their seat. one man thinks he has cracks the go ahead to get into the ivy league. build a gym for that school. okay. all right. first, dr. zbigniew brzezinski with his foreign policy views on europe and the middle east. you re watching morning joe. we will be right back. 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[ inhales, exhales ] [ male announcer ] and made the decision to quit selling cigarettes in our cvs pharmacies. now we invite smokers to quit, too, with our comprehensive program. we just want to help everyone, everywhere, breathe a little easier. introducing cvs health. because health is everything. sailing away joining us from washington is former national security adviser for president carter, dr. zbigniew brzezinski who always plays fair in tennis. he never cheats and plays fair. doctor, notable and quotables in wall street journal this morning. this is cool. dr. brzezinski writing foreign affairs in march and april of 1994. the crucial issue is future stability of ukraine and american policymakers must face the fact that ukraine is on the brink of disaster. you talk about a russian ethnic explosion in crimea. 20 years ago. 20 years ago. that, obviously, has happened. now vladimir putin bragging that he can make kiev in two weeks. where do we stand in this crisis? i think the west is now more united than ever before and the sanctions that are being planned are serious. i think, however, putin is trying to undermine that unity by proposing this sort of phony peace settlement of several points that he is planning to discuss with boris shinco. i think this is making them think they have accepted the plan. as far as i understand the ukrainians have agreed to talk to putin but not agree to accept his plan and that is an importance difference. on front of usa today can russia be stopped? should the u.s. provide arms to ukraine? that is the next step. in my view, absolutely. not to provide them with arms gives putin the incentive to escalate the military collision step-by-step knowing that the opponent is vulnerable, and weak and there is no cost for him in doing so. so i think we should be open about it. we should say to putin, we are providing arms to the ukrainians because they don t have any. we are providing defensive arms mostly so that they are not going to attack you. but you ll have enough arms to oppose what you have been doing which is peace meal the stabilization of ukraine and the gradual wrecking of its economy because that is happening. dr. brzezinski, mike barnicle is here and he has got a question. doctor, has putin s behavior somehow inadvertently done something within nato that is seemingly impossible to do for about a decade strengthen nato collective? ly. i think it s a good point. more and more people in russia even at the top are beginning to think he is slightly mad, that he is is not conducting an intelligent effective policy but weakening and isolating russia and if push comes to shove, it s a fate that it will become the vessel of china. we will move on to isis in a moment. putin scratched out this seven-point peace plan cease-fire with ukraine. how should this be received? i think it should be received as an opportunity for talking and i have no objection to that, and ukraine and the west can make counterproposals. but the plan itself is essentially designed to undermine nato s unity and to drag the ukrainians into a relationship in which the government in kiev has to negotiate with thugs armed by putin with putin sitting on the sidelines and pretending he is not involved. harold ford? quickly, doctor, i thought your interview over the weekend i think on cnn was outstanding. following up on one of the points you made. do you believe inexplicitly in any negotiations or cease-fire plan if something is reached we should say ukraine will not be accepted into nato? did i understand you correctly over the weekend making that point of view? that is correct. unless push comes to shove and we have a military showdown there has to be some accommodation. i think it s perfectly reasonable to have an accommodation in which ukraine becomes increasingly a part of the western and eventually of the european union but not a direct member of nato, which from the russian point of view is a security issue. so i think here is some compromise is justified and i think the basis for a resolution. ukraine is not going to be a member of the union, putin s empire idea, but is not going to be also a member of nato. nbc news ayman mohyeldin is with us. how do you think they are approaching is and we heard is there a sense it s a little too late to be doing that now or is that our only hope? well, if we focus specifically on syria, that is a problem in addition to isis. i think that the problem in syria is that the opposition to assad is weak angle the strongest of position happens to be isis. so i don t think we are really pointing in the right direction by continuing to wage some sort of a war against assad. assad, after all, was acceptable to the israelis and he was acceptable to us. he actually treated the nonislamic people in syria better than most other arab governments, so i think we have made a mistake here, which we should be correcting. our approach has to be there are several different battle fields, iraq, syria, potentially some others and we are not going to be engaged in all of them in one-sided fashion. dr. zbigniew vertebbrzezinsk thank you, dad. is this a best chance for the democrats to keep their majority in the senate? the shocking events in kansas for the race for the upper chamber. the offensive in ukraine, an on the ground look how math and science is playing a role in the conflict with pro russian separatists. i don t know. i think they can probably shoot those things down. all that and more when morning joe returns. when folks think about what they get from alaska, they think salmon and energy. but the energy bp produces up here creates something else as well: jobs all over america. engineering and innovation jobs. advanced safety systems & technology. shipping and manufacturing. across the united states, bp supports more than a quarter million jobs. when we set up operation in one part of the country, people in other parts go to work. that s not a coincidence. it s one more part of our commitment to america. you pay your auto insurance premium every month on the dot. you re like the poster child for paying on time. and then one day you tap the bumper of a station wagon. no big deal. until your insurance company jacks up your rates. you freak out. what good is having insurance if you get punished for using it? hey insurance companies, news flash. nobody s perfect. for drivers with accident forgiveness, liberty mutual won t raise your rates due to your first accident. see car insurance in a whole new light. liberty mutual insurance. we re changing the way we do business, with startup ny. we ve created tax free zones throughout the state. and startup ny companies will be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in jobs and infrastructure. thanks to startup ny, businesses can operate tax free for 10 years. no property tax. no business tax. and no sales tax. which means more growth for your business, and more jobs. it s not just business as usual. see how new york can help your business grow, at startup.ny.gov the democratic candidate for u.s. senate in kansas has dropped out. democrat chad taylor was struggling and submitted his withdrawal yesterday to the secretary of state just moments before the deadline really to do that. now democrats in the state may rally around greg orman, an independent. according to a pp poll in a three-way race, pat roberts holds a seven-point lead but when taylor is taken out of the equation, the independent greg orman leads by ten points. orman ran as a democrat in 2008 but hasn t made up his mind who he would caucus with if elected. if i get elected, there is a reasonable chance that neither party will have a majority in washington and if that is the case what i ve said is i m going to caucus with whichever party is willing to go to washington and start trying to solve problems as opposed to just pleasing the extremists and their own base. and i think both parties are actually guilty of that sort of behavior. really, i think, in an attempt to make sure they win elections and not solve problems for the american people. pat roberts campaign responded by blasting democrats, calling the move corrupt bargain. joining us now from washington, msnbc political correspondent kasie hunt. before we get to the claire factor which is the back story behind this move, there are big implications here. potentially really big implications. just because the map itself is so on a razor s edge. whether republicans take back the senate or not is likely going to hinge on one or two seats. so the fact that suddenly it could come down to kansas? is not something that any of us started out this cycle expecting. it sort of reflects how far of an anti-incumbent on the ground now. sam brownback is also in trouble and orman has support from the modern republicans who have backed brownback. as far as the back story goes, a source telling me that senator claire mccaskill played a key role in getting chad taylor to drop out partially it s in her neighborhood and she was paying attention and realized an opening here and they credit her being a aggressive political strategist and pushing this forward. senator reed s office denied they had anything to do with getting taylor out of the race but it s probably pretty clear that, you know, they wouldn t go ahead and do anything like this without leadership blessing. well, claire getting involved, claire mccaskill, harold, is, to me to shows these implications are as big as she says them to be and could be the ultimate balance of the senate. what do you make about claire and others jumping in here in terms of she s from the mist and she understand that. i know. she has a greater appreciation for the political dynamics there. who would think this would be happening in kansas. how do you tell someone to get out of the race, you could help our party? how does that happen behind closed doors? if you want the issues addressed it s probably in your best interestses to move out. i don t know the back story what happened to this guy. listen to go that candidate, if this is the way in a direction we have headed in the national politic candidates saying i m caucus with the party doing the most to help the country, i kind of like. . whatever went on behind the scenes, this might be a win/win not only for kansas but the country. kasie hunt is an official political correspondent for us. congratulations. thank you. coming up, getting on college admissions like a broker bets on the stock market? why one man has made it his job to guarantee acceptance into ivy league schools. morning joe will be right back. fill their bowl with the meaty tastes they re looking for, with friskies grillers. tender meaty pieces and crunchy bites. in delicious chicken, beef, turkey, and garden veggie flavors. friskies grillers. woman: everyone in the nicu all the nurses wanted to watch him when he was there 118 days. everything that you thought was important to you changes in light of having a child that needs you every moment. i wouldn t trade him for the world. who matters most to you says the most about you. at massmutual we re owned by our policyowners, and they matter most to us. if you re caring for a child with special needs, our innovative special care program offers strategies that can help. great. this is the last thing i need.) seriously? let s take this puppy over to midas and get you some of the good ol midas touch. hey you know what? i ll drive! i really didn t think this through. brakes, tires, oil, everything. (whistling) well, joe, your stats are very respectable. you ve done some solid work here. but it s not quite ivy league now, is it? just when you thought it was safe to go into your locker room comes the terrifying true story of teens facing that most horrifying experience of all! getting into college! harvard won t be impressed that you aced history of polka dots. you may have cleaned contaminated waters from villages but you ve never got into an ivy league. how are we doing? used like yuvert of illinois. peter waldman is here how he can get your kid into college guaranteed. that s great! guaranteed. that s photographic. thawhat kind of numbers a we talking about? i guess anybody can be bought. what number, peter? well, let s see now. there was a ceo in hong kong who gave $700,000 to the entrepreneur whose name is steven mau who sow here in the silicon valley and that went through tutoring and class preparation and essay assistance. 700,000? he didn t keep that amount of money. he did keep 400,000. give us another example. well, let s see. mr. mau is now working with another hong kong executive s child. for $600,000 up front, for that, if this child gets into an ivy league school, 600 grand, if he gets into an ivy league school, mr. mau will keep that. if he doesn t, there will be other amounts of money he can keep down to, i think, about 90 grand. guaranteed 90 grand. instead of taking your basically kaplan course you re paying somebody 600,000 to get your kid prep your kid and get them ready for college. that s insane. harold ford, around new york, i mean, when i first moved to new york, i was shocked. i have two little kids. i d sit around the table and it would be like, they would go, we love your show, if you ever neat theater tirkts, just let us know. okay, great. i never go out and sit in an apartment and eat cold cereal alone. so i love transformer series. but they went around. help me with that and that. not that i didn t need any of that help. then i said i have a 5-year-old girl and i need to get her into kindergarten. they said we can t help with you that. they were dead serious, peter. now the insanity of getting your kid ready for college in america, among elites, is outrageous. i guess this is just one of those depressing examples of it. i don t know what it was like in alabama in your day. $500 a semester. now you re paying 30,000 for one of these elite schools. he also does tutoring and competes with kaplan and kudor and it will give you a guarantee. how? how can he guarantee this? what does he do? this is a math wise. he used to work at a hedge fund. he bets on these kids like a trader will bet on a commodities market. he says i figured out you have 5%, 8% chance of getting into that school. i ll base my fee on that and he takes a risk. he s a trader is what he is. wow. mike, you see those acceptance rates. stanford only 5% of students. they don t even let me on the campus in palo alto. peter, is there any way we can bypass the middleman, steven mau, and go directly to these people in hong kong he is dealing with and can we tell them that for a hundred grand, i can get that kid into umass-amhurst? in the end he was paid 400 grand to get his kid into syracuse which is a wonderful school but not that hard to get into. maybe some information will help them. i don t know if they read my story. we will find out. this is a good one. thank you for getting ub extremely early. i feel for you. we will check out the latest issue of bloomberg business week. . the crisis are russia and how fighters are turning to technology to get an advantage in that conflict. we will tell you who is joining whippy and rosy on the set of the view. someone close to us. we are so excited! it s not you, mike. we will be right back. 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[ female announcer ] everyone has a moment when tomorrow becomes real. transamerica. so as the conflict between ukraine and russia rages on the political stage, on the battlefield, ukrainian techies are putting their skills to good use. as our partners at vocative recently covered it s having a real impact. reporter: this looks like a regular mortar attack. part of the war that is being raged between pro ukrainian forces and separatists who want to return to mother russia but it s actually something different. the mortar shell is being guided by a tiny drone and financed by housewives and supporters over the internet. [ speaking in foreign language ] reporter: as the inequipped and underfunded ukrainian army repeatedly failed to wrangle the pro-russians, a series of armed pro-ukrainian militias aka battalions have formed to fight them. for the most part, this is played out as a low tech game of you steal my tank, i steal yours. translator: neighbor russia should take a neutral position and someone would watches a fight between a husband and wife and a someone gives a club to the husband and a knife to the wife to spice it up. russia is a provocativor and putin is a provocativor. now we have those for and against ukraine. if they want to live in russia, they are welcome. go [ bleep ] off and live there and don t tell us anything about our country. translator: the efficiency of the government is about 1.5% and doesn t solve problems on time and can t handle any serious tasks. therefore it s the main volunteers that supply the army. reporter: filling this void is outfits like this one that decided to give the funds to these militiamilitias. a bunch of i.t. guys. translator: the money was donated by kind housewives and sending sums to us. so our priorities are low cost, speed, and quality. reporter: volunteers assemble and sell jackets and belts and armor and all sorts of combat equipment, but it s the remote-controlled drone, the one kids aspiring to movie careers with their mom and pop s cash and given the putin-backed separatists a series flak. translator: they helped us find enemy tanks and we then destroyed. translator: since childhood i was always fond of aviation. our commanding officers took note of it. i was ordered to leave my combat unit for this unit of nerds. i m a computer programmer. as many other computer guys, i don t only work but i also spend a lot of time playing computer games. that includes flight simulators. this experience became very useful now because when you re operating a drone, it is, in fact, like playing a computer game. reporter: so throw the spraitists hasprai separatists putin watching their back, the nerd units are fast becoming a key game changer in the fight for ukraine so much so the separatists have allegedly put a price on this drone pilot s head. translator: they spent a special group to capture us is a telling fact. i think is demonstrates how effective our effective our work is. translator: this is a patriotic impulse, a real one. all ukrainian rulers did everything to destroy the ukrainian army, and now it is trying to reappear like a phoenix rising from its ashes. wow. we thank our partners for that perspective. what surprises you most about that report? i mean, for me, crowd sourcing of funds for, as they report, this unit of nerds, it s like a real live video game of war come to life. yeah, and it also shows you a lot about how the battlefield s changing. it s a small unit. not sure how big of an impact it s having on the battlefield, but very interesting to say the least. but it does give you a sense of this merger between militaries or those fighting and crowd sourcing and just how social media in general is just changing the dynamics of everything, including even warfare. i think it s absolutely fascinating. it makes it harder to drew the line between civilians and people fighting. they want to go after this unit. can they go after the people financing it? raises lots of questions. coming up at the top of the hour, strong words from the obama administration describing how the u.s. will take the fight to isis, but will military operations match the rhetoric? and then a french freezeout? why the country is finally putting an end to one of its military deals with russia, or is it? france s ambassador to the u.s. will be our guest. plus, tornado warnings have already been issued for the upper midwest, as a massive storm heads east. a full report is next. morning joe will be right back. 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(announcer) ask your doctor about linzess a once-daily capsule for adults with ibs with constipation or chronic idiopathic constipation. linzess is thought to help calm pain-sensing nerves and accelerate bowel movements. it helps you proactively manage your symptoms. do not give linzess to children under 6, and it should not be given to children 6 to 17. it may harm them. don t take linzess if you have a bowel blockage. get immediate help if you develop unusual or severe stomach pain especially with bloody or black stools. the most common side effect is diarrhea, sometimes severe. if it s severe, stop taking linzess and call your doctor right away. other side effects include, gas, stomach-area pain and swelling. bottom line, ask your doctor about linzess today. whenwork with equity experts who work with regional experts who work with portfolio management experts that s when expertise happens. mfs. because there is no expertise without collaboration. you owned your car for four you named it brad. you loved brad. and then you totaled him. you two had been through everything together. two boyfriends. three jobs. you re like nothing can replace brad! then liberty mutual calls. and you break into your happy dance. if you sign up for better car replacement, we ll pay for a car that s a model year newer with 15,000 fewer miles than your old one. see car insurance in a whole new light. liberty mutual insurance. there s talk that warner brothers is planning to revive full house. they re bringing back full house. i saw the new opening credits. i guess it s been off the air a little longer than i thought. take a look. everywhere you looked there s a heart i m here to hold on to everywhere you look there s a face of somebody who needs you john stamos does not age! he s like dorian grey. it s all that greek yogurt. so this is really great news. i am so excited! for nicole wallace. congratulations going out to two ladies who join the table at the view. rosie perez and nicole will join whoopi goldberg and rosie o donnell when the new season of the view begins on monday september 15th. that is great news! i ve never been more happy for someone. seriously. usually these choices are made for all sorts of reasons. she s so smart. she s so great. obviously a member of the morning joe family. we re so proud of her. everything is good about that choice. whoopi s great. rosie s great. and nicole adds some political heft. especially with the midterms in 2016. political heft. she s going to light that place on fire. i can t wait to see rosie and nicole. get yourself some nice shoes now. that s great news. i have to lend her my shoes. now let s turn to bill karins for a look at the forecast. we re looking at some severe storms expected today. early morning tornados. the lightning has been incredible this morning. starting in north dakota and then right through minnesota and now into areas of wisconsin. at one point we had about 10,000 lightning strikes as it was coming out of fargo and going just to the north of st. cloud. now heading towards duluth. we had tornado warnings. report of a 90-mile-per-hour wind gust that did some damage. but no tornados confirmed as of this point. we re also watching some pretty strong storms further to the south. these went through milwaukee overnight. they re threatening the chicago area and now heading right over peoria again. i m sure o hare will have some minor delays because of these. here s how we re looking as we go throughout the day today. severe weather possible in yellow. wind damage, large hail possible with the strongest storms, and it s another very hot day in the east. temperature at 90 in d.c. we ll also be watching that heat heading into the northeast as we approach the weekend. but things change. about three more days of summer and then it s going to feel like fall in the east as we go into sunday. so again, you know, very hot and stormy, but fall is on its way. before you know it also it s going to get dark earlier. it s already happening. i kind of like it. you like it getting dark. are you a vampire? i m a vampire. but anything that helps bring on sleep. help the pills help themselves. i can take less maybe. you never know. i doubt it. all right, we ve got a lot ahead here as we look at the headlines straight ahead, so the next hour of morning joe starts right now. those who have murdered james foley and steven sotloff in syria need to know the united states will hold them accountable, no matter how long it takes. while the white house is being characteristically calibrated and cautious over america s response, the vice president today used very different language. we don t retreat. we don t forget. we will follow them to the gets of hell. if you re actually serious about taking isis to the gets of hell, you re going to have to go to syria. what s the next step? getting allies to cross that river with us? we re being very deliberate about putting together a coalition of countries to deal with the isis problem. the administration not ambiguous yesterday. it was seek, search, destroy, and send. yeah, you re going to pay. that was the message, right? what a difference a couple of years makes from the last nato summit. there s been a lot of sabre rattling in eastern europe lately. the u.s. says it s now sending troops inside ukraine. with its new rapid reaction force, a spearhead, they call it. the spear clearly pointed at vladimir putin and his eastern european ambitions. president putin listed seven conditions for cease-fire. but the plan itself is essentially designed to undermine nato s unit and so drag the ukrainians into a relationship in which the government in kiev has to negotiate with putin sitting on the sidelines and pretending that he s not involved. today we are bound by our treaty alliance. an attack on one is an attack on all. if in such a moment you ever ask who will come to help the nato alliance, including the armed forces of the united states of america right here present now. so much going on, mika, over the last two hours. we ve had tony blanken come on talking about who may be coming onboard. certainly here at home, the sounds of the drums of war have really begun in earnest in this country. yesterday the vice president said america would follow isis to the gates of hell to get justice. the secretary of defense says the u.s. doesn t want to contain is isis, but rather they want to destroy isis. democratic senators became war hawks. internal polling showing americans want action. kay hagan joined john mccain and lindsey graham s side in that democratic debate talking about action. al franken sent a terse letter to the white house. yes, that al franken from that state of minnesota, calling for military action, and they weren t alone. but there were more important developments yesterday, maybe not driven by political polls, but the united arab emirates condemned a spread of the islamic state. that s important. it s also important they said they ll support america in efforts against isis. so did the iraqi parliament, who would have loved to criticize america if we had taken action earlier without getting their go-ahead first. and while it s one thing to have kay hagan calling for a strong use of force. america actually asking questions first and shooting missiles later may actually lead to our country not having to go it alone again. and carry other countries water. so the question is, where is egypt? tony blanken said they re going to be supportive. where is saudi arabia? i think they re going to be supportive, too. where is jordan? certainly you would think jordan would be supportive. and where are the other countries whose very existence depends on american fire power and us sending our sons and daughters overseas and spending our treasure to cut out a cancer from the middle east that is really in their best interest to cut out. we ve got nbc news chief foreign affairs correspondent and the host of andrea mitchell reports, andrea mitchell. about an hour ago, tony came on the show. i said, it s great about uae. it s great that we ve got the iraqi parliament actually begging us to come over this time. it s a little better than what happened in 2003. but where is egypt? he says they ll be onboard. where is saudi arabia? maybe they ll be onboard. where are the other countries? could it be that we re moving because we are being deliberate towards a scenario when bush 41 assembled an extraordinary group of countries, including syria, to fight against saddam hussein. if you recall back then, jim bakker spent months and months building that coalition of the willing, and it was extraordinary. you had syrian fighters going against saddam hussein, but it was a different situation then, and i think it s going to be a much heavier lift because some of these very countries like saudi arabia feel that the president should have moved a year ago labor day when he didn t. but a country like saudi arabia has the most to lose with a group like isis spreading across the middle east. so will we see the saudis publicly come out and be supportive of this? you might because of two things that happened this week. a refinery hit inside saudi in their key eastern area, the oil area. and also the arrest of 88 isis-related, they claimed, alleged terrorists. now, saudi arrests are notoriously difficult to ascertain. the saudis did arrest terrorists on their soil and announce it. last week, bobby was on the show and he said an important threshold had been crossed when you had the uae going into libya to pursue other islamist fighters. it s great that they did that. do we expect more arab countries to follow their lead? i think the statement from yusef was very significant. that was a big signal. they are concerned and basically their opposition is to qatar, to their fellow emirates. qatar has been anything but an ally with the united states, along with turkey. we saw the front page this morning of the wall street journal. i can t find it right now. that actually turkey is shutting down the jihadist highway. you ve got potshots from the right and the left. the president needs to do more, needs to stop saying things like we don t have a strategy, criticize, criticize, criticize. but what joe s been talking about tony blanken echoed. while we have this painful wait for maybe some collective action, what s the value of collective action and what does that actually look like? the collective action, if it works as joe was just defining it, would include some arab leaders, some arab states, and not just humanitarian missions. we want to see their jets in the air and we want their intelligence i mean, we ve got a lot of intelligence sharing, but we want we don t need them militarily, but just a signal of their jets in the air sends a powerful signal, right? absolutely. and it helps inoculate the united states from retaliation, even though people like the pathologically crazy people in isis are going to go after us anyway. at first when i heard you expressing the same abouts that i had about the uae, refueled in egypt, hitting islamists in libya two weeks ago, whenever, how could we not have known, how could our intel have not picked up that? i was listening to you, watching you in the morning and thinking that s impossible. they swear to me that they did not know in advance. that was preposterous. did you think it is preposterous on its face? listen, i know this. the uae is such a good ally of the united states of america. they would not blind side us. they just wouldn t. so anyway, who knows. mike, i ve got a bridge to sell you in brooklyn, right? giving the planes we have up in the air nearly all of the time, 24 hours a day in that part of the country, given our technological resources, of course we knew there was flight in the air. by the way, it s a good thing. the big thing and andrea, i know you speak to these people on a regular basis. the biggest difference between 1991 and jim bakker and george h.w. bush and today with john kerry and barack obama is that in 1991, there was no fear, no real fear in riyadh that saddam hussein was going to come for the throne. there is legitimate fear in riyadh. you know what the other big difference is? they knew that when jim bakker spoke, he was speaking for bush 41. there was no daylight between the secretary of state and the commander in chief. talk about the daylight between the secretary of state and the commander in chief, where the secretary of state almost by necessity, some close to him say, is having to go out there on his own. well, look at what happened last thursday, for the much-criticized we have no strategy yet. that was as much a signal to men named hagel and kerry right. that i m not ready yet, you re not ready yet. he framed it badly, but he was speaking internally as much as externally. isn t that remarkable? that s one way to look at it, too. i would probably just call them into my office. that s no knock on kerry, hagel, etc. the relationship between the white house and the secretary of state, including a woman named hillary clinton. i have heard for a very long time there s a lot of space between john kerry and the president of the united states. i just couldn t imagine that to be the case until we did find out last week that that no strategy was actually designed more for people in the administration than out, mika. quote of the day. i would have just called them into my office. let s get to some other news now. russian president vladimir putin has laid out a proposal to end the conflict in eastern ukraine. isn t that great? it s going to be over. the new york times reports the seven-point plan to deescalate months of bloody stalemate was apparently written out during a flight over siberia. in wales, president obama and european leaders will take his proposal under consideration as they consider a rapid response team for eastern europe and another round of economic sanctions. meanwhile, another sign of weakening russian influence in europe, france has decided not to send a $1.7 billion amphibious warship manufactured for russia after coming under pressure from the u.s. president hollande s office says russia s behavior has undermined the security of the continent. that s pretty significant news coming out of france. yeah, looking at this headline in the ft today about france halting that warship. when the sanctions were first announced, they excluded arms sales specifically because france was refusing to cancel this deal. now france has cancelled this deal. so that s why i think vladimir putin was writing on the back of an envelope over siberia. this signal. sometimes sanctions don t work, sometimes they do work, but this is a big deal. actually, we re going to be talking to the ambassador coming up after the next break. in just a few hours, the justice department will announce a sweeping civil rights investigation into the city s police department. the investigation will look at the entire conduct of the ferguson pd over several years. the probe will be similar to past investigations over alleged profiling and excessive use of force. in the last five years, the justice department has opened 20 investigations of police departments across the country. and if you re going to investigate a police department, i would put ferguson s near the top there. well, we ve got the investigation going on into michael brown s death, the shooting death of michael brown, so now we have an extended and expanded investigation that s not just going to look into months, but the years of police culture of what some people say is baked in. we talked about it an awful lot. a police culture where you ve got a minority population, overwhelming minority population, 53 police officers are white and you just wonder how many other cases led to this tragedy. we ll wait and see exactly what the doj will find. but we see cases like this here in new york city. so this is not an urban problem as much as it is a suburban problem. it s systemic across the country. so let the chips fall where they may. to some politics now. true to her message, senator elizabeth warren is openly criticizing former house majority leader eric cantor s decision to take a multi-million-dollar job on wall street. cantor will be the vice chairman and managing director of an investment bank, earning more than $3 million over two years. in an interview with yahoo s katie couric, warren says it sends a bad message. how wrong can this be, that basically what s happening here is that people work in washington, and man, they hit that revolving door with a speed that would blind you, and head straight out into the industry, not because they bring great expertise and insight, but because they re selling access back in to their former colleagues who are still writing policy, who are still making laws. so how was she well, politico named her the next liberal line. did she roar when katie asked her about hillary? let s see how the lion roared. not as blunt about hillary. i m curious if you think that hillary clinton is too cozy with wall street. i know you ve disagreed with her in the past on issues like bankruptcy legislation. you know, i worry a lot about the relationship between all of our regulators, government, and wall street, and here s what i think what about hillary clinton in particular? i worry across the board. here s part of why. we ve got a washington now that works for anyone who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers. and it doesn t work for regular families. families don t have armies of lobbyists. they don t have armies of lawyers. and that s why i think it s so critical now that we speak up on these core issues. so her worries seem far more specific, andrea, do they not, if it s a republican she s talking about than a democrat? yes. and i think she s being very careful not to take any shots at hillary clinton because the obvious fallback position for the party, if hillary clinton does not run, is elizabeth warren. aside from the fact that it would explode in the press the next day, elizabeth warren takes a jab at hillary clinton. but what would be wrong? what is the risk of saying, you know what? that s wrong, too. it s not good. i have great, great respect for hillary clinton, i support her in many ways, but i ve got to tell you, these relationships are too cozy and it s wrong. that would be consistent. it would also explode. exactly. there you go. great news out of nevada. talking about the american economy and trying to bring manufacturing back. innovation creates new jobs and they create them there. it does. tesla motors will announce its plan to build a giant battery factory in nevada following a five-state competition, the so-called gigafactory will employ 6,500 people and produce the batteries that are expected to power the new generation of electric cars. tesla is expected to spend 4 to $5 billion on the project. mcdonald s, wendy s, and other chain restaurants are expected to be targeted by demonstrators from the fight for 15 campaign. organizers want the right to unionize and have a pay increase of up to $14 $15 an hour. how much would that make my big mac cost? it shouldn t cost anything. profits are just fine. give these people a raise. i mean, this is a joke. coming up on morning joe, how the u.s. troop withdrawal had a lasting impact on our allies in south vietnam. we ll speak to rory kennedy in just a bit. up next, the new french ambassador to the u.s. is our guest. we ll ask him if france is committed to sanctions against russia, even if it means hurting their own economy. it appears so. you re watching morning joe. we ll be right back. in new york state, we re changing the way we do business, with startup ny. we ve created tax free zones throughout the state. and startup ny companies will be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in jobs and infrastructure. thanks to startup ny, businesses can operate tax free for 10 years. no property tax. no business tax. and no sales tax. which means more growth for your business, and more jobs. it s not just business as usual. see how new york can help your business grow, at startup.ny.gov we are a collection of smalls. a home saved. a hero homebound for a new opportunity. a kitchen that kick starts careers wells fargo invests in our communities a little differently. small measures that add up to make our whole even greater. little by little we can do a lot. because. small is huge. visit www.wellsfargo.com to see how big small can be. i know what my money is doing. i rebalanced my portfolio on my phone. you know what else i can do on my phone? place trades, get free real time quotes and teleport myself to aruba. i wish. france says it will no longer deliver a powerful warship to russia next month because of its support for separatists in eastern ukraine. french president francois hollande made the announcement yesterday after initially resisting pressure from the u.s. and other countries. the warship is part of a $1.6 billion deal between france and russia. russia is accusing france of bowing to pressure from the u.s. and warning it will likely increase tensions. and joining us now, france s ambassador to the u.s. it s very good, mr. ambassador, to have you on the show this morning. first, tell us if you can in your own words, exactly what the message is that you want to send by cancelling or at least suspending this deal. good morning. our first goal is to end the russian interference in ukraine. after that, cease-fire. the sanctions are not an end to themselves. they re a tool. so we are increasing in an incremental way the pressure against russia. so now the russians have crossed a new red line by sending their forces, their tanks, so we have to react and france has decided to react on its own. so in terms of this warship now not going to the russians, is the deal suspended or is the contract ended? those are two different things. yeah, for the moment, what we are seeing is the conditions are not met for the delivery of the warships. we do hope that in the coming weeks, in the coming months, if there is a political settlement, a political negotiation, if there is the evidence that the russians have stopped their intervention in ukraine, i think we could have a look at the contract. andrea mitchell? mr. ambassador, it s andrea mitchell here in new york. is the goal of france now to try to get putin to back down, and do you think that putin s last-minute plan that he apparently wrote on a slip of paper is that plan specifically to sort of get nato to bow to russia until after the nato summit? is that the timing of what putin is up to? i think the timing is obvious. putin is trying, as you said, to undermine the unity of the alliance. it s a sheer maneuvering. but at the same time, it s for president poroshenko of ukraine to decide whether the russian proposals are acceptable or not acceptable. it has to be a negotiation between ukraine and the separatists. we don t have to dictate the terms of the agreement. mike. mr. ambassador, your president has been fairly critical of the lack of action in the middle east with regard to syria by the united states, indicating here s a quote, if two years ago we had acted to ensure a transition, we wouldn t have had an islamic state. and i would like to underline the word we. we had acted. it almost always falls to the united states to act in these occasions. what would you think france s commitment would be going forward in action against isis if there is a partnership that comes together with the uae, with saudi arabia, france, england. you get it. what s france s position there? first, we need such a partnership. what we have done, there was an emergency. we have ability cted to stop th advance of the jihadists. we the french, we have sent weaponry to the kurds. so in a sense, that was an emergency reaction. now we have to build the coalition, for the countries which are interested. which are on the front line. you said the saudis. we need it for the turks. a lot of foreign fighters are going for turkey and going to the islamic emirates. and in this context, i think the summit organized by president obama of the security council about the fighters, the foreign fighters, would be certainly i think a useful outcome. and we have also to work with the iraqis, of course. what is the level of concern internally, domestically within france, within paris, with regard to immigration policies, with regard to home grown terrorists. they have a problem in great britain. we potentially would have a problem here. what s the level of concern domestically within your country? we have now, right now, we have identified something lake 360 french citizens fighting in syria and iraq. we have identified since the beginning of the syrian crisis around 1,000 french citizens who went for syria and now for iraq. it s obvious that these people are going to come back with some expertise. so i can say there is a high level of concern in my country, and i think all over europe. thomas. mr. ambassador, when it comes to the situation with russia, vladimir putin has responded to the denial of the delivery of the amphibious warships, saying that france will suffer the biggest blow-back financially because of the lack of delivery. how do you respond to that? you know, there are moments where you know, moments that you have to put your financial interests behind your strategic interests. you know, what the russians are doing, it s such a fret to the world order. such a fret to european security right now that we had to react. and to say very bluntly and very simply right now, the conditions to deliver the warships are not met, it s up to the russians actually to respond to our call. we have no interest to a long-term confrontation with russia. it s obvious. russia is not the soviet union. it s not an existential threat to our way of life. but, russia has to respect the basic rules of the international life. ambassador, thank you so much for being on the show this morning. thank you very much. thank you so much. tough talk. it really is. that s what we re looking for, among other places. coming up, george clooney s iphone was not hacked, but he is getting ready to tackle the phone hacking thing. that s ahead. but first, what would have happened with vietnam if president john f. kennedy had lived? we ll talk about the last days in vietnam with director and producer rory kennedy. morning joe will be right back. 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[ whirring ] [ train whistle blows ] she makes trains that are friends with trees. my mom works at ge. my mom works at ge. when folks think about wthey think salmon and energy. but the energy bp produces up here creates something else as well: jobs all over america. engineering and innovation jobs. advanced safety systems & technology. shipping and manufacturing. across the united states, bp supports more than a quarter million jobs. when we set up operation in one part of the country, people in other parts go to work. that s not a coincidence. it s one more part of our commitment to america. take and. exhale.in. aflac! and a gentle wavelike motion. aahhh- ahhhhhh. liberate your spine, ahhh-ahhhhhh aflac! and reach, toes blossoming. not that great at yoga. yeah, but when i slipped a disk he paid my claim in just four days. ahh! four days? yep. find out how fast aflac can pay you, at aflac.com. people holding letters saying, you know, i work for the americans. please let me in. journalists were arriving, and counting on being recognized to be let in by the marines. there was a sea of people wanting to get out by helicopters. but, well, they looked up at the helicopters, and i could see their eyes. that was a scene from the new documentary last days in vietnam, and the director and producer of the film, emmy award-winning documentary film maker rory kennedy joins the table. wow. congratulations. we ve seen it all over the place. you were getting great reviews. thank you, mika. i m excited for the film to come out finally this friday. you know, one of the iconic images you were talking about was that scene, andrea mitchell. 1975. saigon as the last helicopters left. and we pulled out, but we left all of these vietnamese behind, which is what rory deals with in the film, and how we pulled out, leaving our allies, our translators, our employees at the embassy. i think that s right. a lot of people are familiar with that iconic images of the helicopter on top of what they think is the embassy. in fact, it s not the embe sass. very few people know what took place the last 24 hours, or why it got so crazy, that we were ending up leaving from the top of the embassy in helicopters. at that point, we had about 6,000 americans in vietnam. the peace treaty had been signed two years prior. the u.s. said, it s too hectic, we ve just got to get the americans out of the country. but our film shows how americans who were in the country, in vietnam said not so fast, we have our vietnamese allies, our family members, our colleagues. we ve worked with these people. they ve helped fight this war with us. we re not going to leave them behind. and the film documents these extraordinary heroic acts that they took to get the vietnamese out of the country. let s watch another clip from last days in vietnam. putting his family on the plane. he had wanted to stay in vietnam to defend the country, and this full colonel had, like, eight kids and a wife. and he was in tears. the family the family were in tears. and i said to him, get on the plane. just go. go. it was a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible moral dilemma. it s a chilling story. you know, rory, just watching clips of the film, this is just my view. it might be andrea s view, too. but this country really paid a psychic price for vietnam, culturally and politically that i think we still pay in part. this film brings back so much of that in terms of what we tried to do heroically, as you pointed out. what we couldn t do. and it occurred to me just watching that clip and the discussions earlier this morning about what s going on now in the middle east. 50 years ago, this past summer was the gulf of tonken resolution. this is the result of the gulf of tonken resolution, when you willy nilly without hesitation jump into something. we jumped into vietnam and this is how it ends. i think that s right. what i really sensed focusing on the last 24 hours of the war in vietnam is there were very few options available at that point. and so there we are leaving from the embassy in helicopters. and, you know, i think it sort of begs the question of what is our exit strategy when we enter these wars, and how are we going get out, what are our goals, what are our responsibilities to the people who are left behind. and i think as you all have been debating this morning, the pros and cons of taking on isis, i think we have to be asking these questions. so before we go, who do we hear from in this? i understand you talk to some incredible players if this, including henry kissinger, among others. the film is really firsthand accounts exclusively. there s no narrator. no experts who are looking back. it s all people who are on the ground, or inside washington creating the policies that led to this moment in history. so it s a range of people and characters who were in the embassy, who were on aircraft, who were on boats, who were trying to get people out. right. does anybody the answer of what would have happened if your uncle had lived? or do you just come on at the end and said none of this would have happened. i d like to think that. the film, it really stays within the confines of really the last 24 hours, a little setup to that point, but it doesn t go back and tell the history of the war. extraordinary reviews. what a compelling story. thank you so much for being with us. and we can t wait to watch it. thank you for having me. last days of vietnam opens in select theaters tomorrow. rory kennedy, thank you so much. great to see you. still ahead, a fascinating story of an american citizen looking to join isis, and as he put it, defend islam. i think we may have been in better shape if that guy had been let in. richard engel has that report next. and then we ll take a trip to hollyweird, where rob ford takes the phrase running for office literally. morning joe continues after a break. wouldn t it be great if hiring plumbers, carpenters shopping online is as easy as it gets. and even piano tuners were just as simple? 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[ male announcer ] the wish we wish above all.is health. so we quit selling cigarettes in our cvs pharmacies. expanded minuteclinic, for walk-in medical care. and created programs that encourage people to take their medications regularly. introducing cvs health. a new purpose. a new promise. to help all those wishes come true. cvs health. because health is everything. secretary of defense chuck hagel says the u.s. knows of more than 100 americans who are now fighting alongside isis overseas. now in the first of its kind, nbc news interviewed one of those americans. richard engel has more on that exclusive sit-down. richard? reporter: good morning. i m in turkey, and as we ve reported, thousands of foreign fighters have gone to syria, many of them coming through this city. this has been the main transit point to go to syria to fight with militant groups like isis. we ve reported that americans have been among them, but until now, they ve been very elusive. we haven t been able to speak to one directly. my islamic name is nasar abdur-rahim. reporter: this is american donald morgan. he didn t hide his intention to join isis. i purchased a ticket with the intent of entering to syria, either joining up with medical and food aid convoys or directly with islamic state. reporter: morgan was raised catholic and educated at a military academy. my entire life growing up was surrounded by the idea that i would be 82nd airborne, i would be special forces, i would serve dutifully, duty honoring country. reporter: but now he speaks of his country as a potential enemy, and of isis, also called the islamic state, as a savior. the responsibility of the islamic state is to protect those who can t protect themselves. if it s not assad dropping a barrel bomb, it s going to be obama launching a drone strike. so, it matters not to me who the enemy is. reporter: morgan wasn t always like this. he served in the national guard. worked as a deputy sheriff. living in salisbury, north carolina. this is the house where don morgan live, at the end of a quiet street in a middle class neighborhood. and the questions on the minds of his co-workers and neighbors is why would someone want to leave suburban north carolina to join the vicious fight in syria? it is frightening that someone could go to that extreme. reporter: brian beaver has known morgan for 15 years. i would say he was a person that was on edge. it was like, what s it going to take to you know, this guy s going to fly off the handle one day. reporter: after getting in trouble with the law, morgan, an amateur bodybuilder, converted to islam in 2008. he followed the wars in the middle east on the internet. he pledged allegiance to the isis leader abu bakr al baghdadi, and his islamic state, the caliphate. isis doesn t have the objective to be a terrorist organization. reporter: morgan tried to enter syria traveling through turkey, but was deported to lebanon. running low on money, he decided to go back to the u.s., aware of the risk. i think there s a strong possibility that they ll charge me with supporting terrorist organizations and participating in terrorist activities. reporter: when morgan returned to the united states last month, he was arrested, but not for terrorism. he was picked up for an unrelated gun charge. he is a convicted felon, and he is accused of trying to sell a firearm over the internet, and because of his previous felony, he s not allowed to even own a gun. he pleaded not guilty. he says that he s not a terrorist, and poses no threat to the united states. but not everyone we spoke to agrees. okay, richard, thank you so much. really appreciate it. you just wonder what the lure is. not only for americans, but also quite a few british citizens and other westerners who are actually going over and trying to join up. and getting maybe a hold of people who are disturbed and angry. all right, let s go to business for the bell now. cnbc s brian sullivan. brian, take it away. yeah, hard to follow up with that, guys. great reporting as always by nbc and richard engel. anyway, let s talk about gas prices. maybe a little good news out there for consumers. gas prices really a tax on everybody. the longer you drive, they re aggressive. gas prices really eat into your wallet. aaa saying gas prices should continue to fall, so that is some good news. a little bit of relief for the american consumer, putting the money back into their wallets. apple had a big drop yesterday. as we did on our show yesterday, guys, apple is so big, people don t realize what the value of apple is. apple is so big you could take out the value of google and intel from apple and still have enough money left over to buy yahoo. wow. what? $618 billion market value. google is just under $400 billion. intel is about 194. yahoo is about 50. good news about august car sales, right? amazing news, guys. i know you guys have been big on the detroit story. we re going. i know you re going. 17 million cars annualized run rate sold as of the data. it could fall off. they re aggregating the data up from an annual basis. that would be the highest since 2006. chrysler has seen their cars more than doubled. i drive a jeep. go jeep. jeep sales going up more than 100%. some good news for the auto dealers, the auto sales people, and also hopefully for jobs, as some of these companies add more line workers, add more production in the united states. wherever it might be. and joe, i want to end with a question. i ve got a question for you, buddy. okay good. totally off topic. you won t see me for a couple weeks. but i ll say this. we miss you already. saturday night, virginia tech at ohio state. ohio state freshman quarterback, somehow they re 11.5-point favorites over my beloved hokies. do we cover? andrea would know the answer to that. andrea, do we cover? of course we do. i don t know the answer to that. brian, why are you leaving us? well, i m just going to be shifting you know, we re expecting a baby, so i m going to be trying to balance out a little bit of work, but making sure that i am as helpful as possible at home. look at him. aw! that almost makes me like you. i m tearing up. if any of your viewers have had a kid over the age of 40, this is a blessed surprise, i urge you to send me diaper changing tips. my skills are weak. you have shea in the house, a 10-year-old, right? an 11-year-old. oh yeah. we are enlisting her. we ve got a little doll, like this is what you do. shea is going to expect to be compensated for her efforts. i ll just speak for her. a little candy action? no, i think her allowance is going to need to go up. brian sullivan, thank you so much. coming up next, is game of thrones too much for croatia to handle? you and your children were asking that question just last night. we have the answers straight ahead. great. this is the last thing i need.) seriously? the last thing you need is some guy giving you a new catalytic converter when all you got is a loose gas cap. what? it is that simple sometimes. thanks. now let s take this puppy over to midas and get you some of the good ol midas touch. hey you know what? i ll drive! and i have no feet. i really didn t think this through. trust the midas touch. for brakes, tires, oil, everything. (whistling) before using her new bank of america credit card, which rewards her for responsibly managing her card balance. before receiving $25 toward her balance each quarter for making more than her minimum payment on time each month. tracy got the bankamericard better balance rewards credit card, which fits nicely with everything else in life she has to balance. that s the benefit of responsibility. apply online or visit a bank of america near you. whenwork with equity experts who work with regional experts who work with portfolio management experts that s when expertise happens. mfs. because there is no expertise without collaboration. are we still doing this? i ll clean out my purse. and we ll just toss it to lewis? look here in hollywood, we love when a hollywood story collides with a current national news story. george clooney is set to take on the subject of phone hacking. clooney will direct an adaptation of the nick davies book hack attack, the investigation into rupert murdoch s media empire and phone hacking. this has all the elements of lying, corruption, blackmail at the highest levels of government by the biggest newspaper in london. and the fact that it s true is the biggest part. nick is a brave and stubborn reporter. we consider it an honor to put his book to film. meanwhile, one of the stars of hbo s girls appears to be ready to take on a more masculine look. yesterday allison williams released the first photo of herself as peter pan, who she will play in the musical adaptation of peter pan live which airs on nbc in december. i think she looks pretty good. when she was cast in the role last month, she posted this picture on instagram telling fans she s been rehearsing for a really long time. now let s go from the childlike and the whimsical to the adult and inappropriate. lena headley is one of the few game of thrones characters that we haven t seen undress in the show, looks like that s about to change. production hit a roadblock when the church prohibited the filming of the naked scene in the city streets, but officials ok d the season five walk of shame from the famous church of st. nicolas, on the premise that lena doesn t set foot in the church. the show must go on. finally, rob ford is quite literally running for re-election, guys. here he is, the toronto mayor running from door to door this week, shaking hands, breaking a sweat, and hopefully not kissing too many babies. the internet, of course, jumped all over the images, and one intrepid youtube user produced this video, chariots of ford. that is a highlight reel for the ages. oh, my gosh. that guy. one more reason to mourn the early passing of chris farley. what he could have done. oh, right. with rob ford! you re right. that would have been great material. oh, my gosh. coming up next, what if anything did we learn today? 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wealth management at charles schwab yeah. have you looked up the leaked celebrity nude photos? any yeses? there s one yes. yes. were they hot? yes. are you ashamed of yourself? no. why should by? have you looked up the leaked celebrity nude photos? has nicolas looked it up? we re about half and half. yes, i have. are you ashamed of yourself? not even a little. are you really creepy? moderately. have you looked up the leaked celebrity nude photos? we re about half and half on this one. i do periodically. but the ones that just leaked. no, i have not. now i have a task to do when i get home. you d think with the x-ray vision welcome back to morning joe. it s time to talk about what we learned today. what i learned is a lot of tall guys. and she has heels on. giants. three forwards here. congratulations to our good friend nicole wallace, who joined the table at the view. what a great move. andy murray just couldn t do it against djokovic. now i m worried about federer. what did you learn today? i learned how hard it is to wake up three days in a row to do this show in the morning. yeah. he comes in this morning like oh, i m so excited. i was at the tennis match until 2:00 a.m. it s not when you wake up, it s when you go to bed. always a real pleasure. i m always ready any time. we ve got to take the show to london so we can wake up at 11:00. and watch a liverpool game. yes. if it s way too early, it s morning joe. but stick around, because peter alexander has the daily rundown straight ahead. president obama trying to rally international help as the u.s. sends more resources to the region and the vice president declares they ll be chased to the gates of hell. meantime, vladimir putin puts out his plan to stop the fighting if ukraine, but will the west let russia dictate terms to end the crisis that russia itself helped to instigate? plus, new developments in the fight to control the senate. highlights and low blows from last night s carolina clash. as well as a surprise turn in kansas that has one roughed up republican crying foul. good morning from washington. it is thursday, september 4th, 2014. this is the daily
ago. we have very little information. on the phone, we have jennifer who apparently witnessed this event. jennifer, can you hear me? hello. hi, jennifer. hi, katie. hi, can you please tell me what you saw and give me any information about what s going on there. yes, i have it s quite terrifying. i m in shock right now. i came out of the subway at bowling green. i was heading to work at battery park at the ritz carlton hotel. and i come out and i saw a big i heard a boom, looked up and there was a big ball of fire. i m now looking north at the world trade center. it is the left twin tower if i m looking north. you can hear the emergency crews behind me. and it is unbelievable. when the fire first burst, it was hello? go ahead, we can hear you. like i ve never seen before. and as you know, i used to work in news, i ve never seen any fire like this in the air. and pieces of the building were flying down. it looks like it s like the top i can t even tell you. maybe 20 floors. intense smoke. it s horrible. i can t even describe it. do you have any idea what kind of plane it was? i m sorry? do you have any idea what hit the world trade center? what it was? yeah, what kind of plane? we re getting reports that an airplane hit the building. oh, i didn t even know that, honestly, i was walking up. i looked up and saw a big boom and fire. you know, i got to tell you, we were all saying around here it was very interesting that it would be a bomb and it would be so high up. so perhaps it was a plane. we have no no talk of a plane, however, i have to tell you, there s still there s something flying in the air. i mean, it s mind-boggling. it s horrifying. jennifer, it s matt lauer. i d like to ask you, while you were close to the building or have you since the explosion seen anyone who s been injured being taken out of the building? are there ambulances dealing with people on the sidewalk around the building? no, i have not. i have to tell you, my father worked in the financial center and i first called over there, it s next door, to see if he was okay. i couldn t get through. i m far away right now. i thought it might be a little dangerous to get too close. i saw lots of debris coming down. and right now i m in battery park. i don t know it s only it s probably a five-minute walk from here to the world trade center. but the smoke is incredible. i mean, i can t see the top of the tower. it s starting to cover the top of the second tower. in fact, we re looking pictures right now, jennifer, with a huge gaping hole on the side of the building and billowing smoke. so i m right now yeah, i see major fire. i definitely see fire. jennifer, you said you re looking north at the building. in other words, you rewe re loo north side of the building. i m on the exact opposite side. it appears that is where the largest hole is. you mentioned correctly, towards the top of the building. on west side of the building, we can also see some holes there that could have been from damage once the impact occurred. again, we ve been told that this is a plane. we don t have confirmation on that. but there is an enormous hole in the north side of that building. jennifer, can you tell us a little bit more about what you heard when you heard this explosion? describe it for us? absolutely. when i walked out of the subway i looked at the twin towers because i always look up there. right when i looked up, there was a boom. it wasn t that loud. like, it wasn t huge. however, what was unbelievable was the amount of fire. it was a big ball of fire that just went up. and i looked around at people. we were all horrified. i m stuttering because i mean, it s shock, i ve never seen anything like it, it s just horrible. of course this is real cause for concern because the world trade center is one of the busiest office buildings here in new york with hundreds, perhaps thousands workers who even the state governor has an office there. several thousand workers. given the time this has happened, it s only probably appropriate to surmise that people might have been in the building. you know, we ve seen stories in the past where planes have hit buildings, small planes, and it would be hard to imagine that a small plane could create that kind of hole in a building like the world trade center and create the damage on the other side of the building from the sheer impact. small planes tend to crumple and then fall down the building. we haven t talked to anyone who is close to the base of the building matt? yes, go ahead. i m just talking to a police officer and he said yes, he heard it was a plane. does he have any information about what kind of plane it was or does he can he tell us any more details? yes, may i i m going to put you on hold for one moment, okay? just to recap, if you re just joining us, you re looking at dramatic pictures of new york s world trade center in lower manhattan be where a short time ago we re told a plane crashed into the upper floors of the western most tower. you can see residual damage on the west side of the building. obviously fires are burning right now. there was, back in the 40s, a plane hit the empire state building. so right now, we re getting information it was a small commuter plane. we ll let people know soon we have more information as to what actually caused this. on everybody s mind, who was might have been hurt as a result of this terrible incident. we re going to be talk to more eyewitnesses coming up. we re back at 9:00 eastern time on this tuesday morning. we re back with dramatic pictures of an accident that happened just a short time ago. the world trade center in lower manhattan where we re told a plane some reports are, it was a small commuter plane, crashed into the upper floors of one of the twin towers. you can see fire and flames or smoke billowing from that tower. there s a gaping hole on the north side of the building. that s the side you re seeing to the left-hand side of your screen right now. and other damage to west side of that building, which is to the right side of your screen. this happened before the morning commute. while i m sure some people were already at work, immediately, there s speculation or cause for concern. this is the world trade center that was the target of a terrorist bombing years ago. so the question is could this be an intentional act. extensive damage has been done to this building. obviously, horrified commuters were devastated when they heard this explosion. another eyewitness, elliott walker, who is actually a today show producer. tell me what you saw. i was walking down the sidewalk, delivering my young daughter to school. we heard a very loud sound. the kind of sound when a plane is going fast past you. followed by an enormous crash. i don t think we can feel shockwaves but we sort of felt like we did. we could see the trade center immediately between the other buildin buildings. an enormous fireball was visible immediately. a secondary explosion i think. now from where i was on street a moment ago, you can see smoke leaving the building on their sides. it seems to be coming out on at least four or five floors. the air is filled with hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper that is just kind of floating like confetti. obviously, we re sensitive to this kind of thing in this neighborhood. have you seen any evidence of people being taken out of the building? of course the major concern is oh, my goodness human loss, do you know oh, another one just hit! something else just hit! a very large plane just flew directly over my building and there s been another collision. can you see it? yes, oh, my we just saw a plane circling the building. we just saw a plane circling the building a second ago on the shot right before this. i think there may have been another impact? can you tell? i just heard another very loud bang and a very large plane that might have been a dc-9 or 747 just flew past my window and i think it may have hit the trade center again. i didn t get the impression that it was that big a plane. it looked big from here. i did see a plane go by a second ago and it has now impacted the building. i m trying to see if it s the different tower. it s the second the first was world center 1. it looks like the second building was hit. this say piece of tarp. we may actually see another plane enter the picture here in a second. i wonder if there are air traffic control problems. let s go back to jennifer. did you see this happen? hello? jennifer, did you just see this happen, jennifer? matt, i ve never seen it looks like a movie. i saw a large plane, like a jet, go immediately headed directly into the world trade center. it just flew into it, into the other tower, coming from south to north. i watched the plane fly into the world trade center. it was a jet. it was a very large plane. it was going fast. it went past the building being built in battery park, went right past, almost hit it and then went in. this is so shocking of course to everybody watching. i ve never seen anything like it. it literally flew itself into world trade center. obviously now we move from what appears there it is right there. again, looking from south to north, and it went into the one on the right. that appears to be at least a 727. we saw a second ago here comes the videotape that we just showed you. you will see what appears to be a large plane. it could be a 727. right there. maybe even bigger. flying right into the side of the world trade center. it was at least a 727. it was a jet. i couldn t believe my eyes watching it right above me. and now you have to move from talk about a possible accident to talk about something deliberate that has happened here. we re going to immediately check with air traffic control in the area to find out if they had contact with either of these planes before the accident. what we ve just seen is about the most shocking videotape that i ve ever seen. what are the odds of two separate planes hitting both towers? elliott are you still there? yes, still here, katie. elliott, what can you see right now from your perspective? i don t face in that direction. i can t see anything personally. it is completely impossible to understand why this is happening and to figure out what the what in the world is going on. i think we have to be grateful the first one hit before 9:00 a.m. but it s now after 9:00 a.m. and i wonder how many people were in those offices. hopefully they were evacuated following the first incident and we can only hope it was a very short period time from when we first learned about this, was probably about 8:50 eastern time. the second incident occurred about 9:05. and so obviously that would be a short amount of time to get people out of the building. olley everhart is another witness on the ground. olley, can you hear me? yes, hello. please tell me what you re seeing. i live in lower manhattan. i face the north tower. the north side where the first plane crashed into the building. and right now, there s a lot of chaos on the ground. a lot of emergency vehicles. everyone from the world final center has exited and is walking north up to battery park north. there s just mass and mass of people walking north up town of manhattan. i happened to look on the first tower and actually saw people waving where the first plane crashed through, and then it was unbelievable, seeing this second jet come crashing into the second tower. what is going on? unfortunately, here in new york, many of our stations cannot see this, local station, because the antennas are on the world trade center. their backup towers are on the empire state building. but television communication in new york city is probably pretty much knocked off the air. we re looking at the picture here where it appears because of the angle i think that the towers are leaning. and i don t think that that is actually the case, because after the first impact, it looked as if the left-hand, the right-hand tower was leaning. and now somebody is saying we re getting a witness saying they are leaning actually right now. which will give you an idea of the type of impact we re talking about. and that perhaps they re buckling under the force of the collision, the hole that s resulted from these two planes. we re going to go to george shea, who has also witnessed one or both of these collisions. george, can you hear us? i can hear you. what did you say? i was in the car driving up, just out of the battery tunnel driving north on west street when an enormous explosion happened. it was larger than a construction explosion. i looked out the window. what appears to be an enormous tire smash into the ground. i believe it hit the car to the right of me. and it was just so scary. and there was also a ton of debris fall. i jumped out of the car. i ran south away from the building. i thought there would be further explosions. and have you seen anything injured on the ground, george? a man next to me was actually hit by a piece of debris in his arm. and they said that someone had been badly hurt in a car ahead of me. i m not certain if it was the car next to me. a lot debris was falling. very confusing because everybody i think immediately assumed that a bomb had exploded and that sort of, you know, had people thinking that further bombs may explode. it was sort a rush away. did you see, george, the second plane, that jet fly into i heard two explosions. there was a first explosion that was louder and then a second explosion, and i did not i could not see it. when i looked up, i saw debris falling and the tire, as i said, a very large tire. well, of course, this is, as we ve said, completely shocking video, and shocking turn of events. we ve been talking here that the first incident, one might surmise, that it was some kind of accident, and then to have a second, what appeared to have 727 jet, of course, the question of terrorist activity has to surface. the question of whether this was an intentional terrorist act of some kind. keep in mind, we re in an area here where there are three major airports. you have newark airport, kennedy airport and la guardia airport all within several miles of the world trade center. it s very unusual for a plane to get into this area without being completely tracked or identified by air traffic control. so you would have to imagine that, a, if this plane were headed right for the world trade center, there must have been someone trying to talk or communicate with that pilot. and for it to fly right into the side of the building well, the smaller plane, you can understand almost, but a jumbo jet, a large jet, completely let s rerack that video if we could, down in the control room where we actually saw the jet flying into the building. and i was mistaken elliott walker said it was a big plane, i was looking in the distance and saw a small plane, which might have been a helicopter. to see this plane come into the picture that is a big plane. there it is. and, i mean, it s hard to imagine, it s a 737 we re now being told. and flying directly into the midsection of the what would be the eastern tower of the world trade center. i m wondering if jennifer is still on the phone. do we still have jennifer on the phone? she s actually not on the phone. she was near a police officer. at least we could have perhaps gotten more information from that officer. needless to say, it s pandemonium, i am sure, down there. we gathered that from the eyewitnesses with whom we spoke and how terrifying this was for them to see. you can only imagine, as you get closer to the twin towers, a new york land mine, landmark, how what the scene must be like there. you talked about the buildings looking like they re buckling. they re designed to have a 2 degree sway in either direction because of the height of the building and to deal with wind and stress. but something like that is more than it s probably designed for. we want to go now to jane who i understand is a television producer here in new york. jane, can you hear me? yes, i can hear you. i m down here near the world trade center. i was walk down sixth avenue this morning at 8:42 a.m. a group of us saw a plane veer through the building, then we saw a huge cloud of smoke. and then fire came out of one of the towers. here, it s near the upper floor, as you can probably see with your chopper shots, and then about ten minutes ago, a second explosion in the second tower. lower down. that was not affected by the plane so i m not quite sure what happened there. right now, there s a huge gaping hole in one of the towers. the other building is on fire. this team down here is incredible. people are out of their office buildings. watching. crying. taking pictures. i ve never seen anything like it down here. jane, you said you saw the first plane. did you get a glimpse of what kind of plane that was? we are told it was a small commuter plane. well, it wasn t a cessna or anything like that. it was a larger plane. a midsized plane. and we could hear it very low. and walking down the street, a couple of us looked at each other, thinking, what s happening? then it veered drastically on its side through the buildings and then went into the upper floors of the world trade center tower. we want to just mention when the impact hit the first tower, you would hope that people who are in the second tower were beginning to evacuate. especially if air traffic control had some indication that this was deliberate. you d hope they were starting to get people out of the other tower before this second plane hit that tower. if you ve tried to go up we ve been upstairs in the towers, in the restaurant there, to try to get down i mean, the elevators would have been jammed no question. if there is an indication this was deliberate in the first case, you would hope they would immediately begin evacuate in the second tower. another eyewitness. dan detrick is on the phone. tell me where you are or what you re seeing or what you saw. okay, what i saw was one plane coming in low from the north. down over seventh avenue. ten minutes later, i saw another. it looked to be a small, you know, commercial plane i saw. it crashed into the top of the tower. there was a fireball. as we were waiting outside and looking at it, another plane came in low. i believe from the other side. and hit the sort of middle of the other tower. i saw both planes, two separate planes crash into each tower. again, the size of the planes, tell me about that. i would say the midsize looked to be perhaps a commercial airline, a midsize, not a jumbo jet. this of course is unconfirmed, but we are getting information from an employee of united airlines, again, we want to emphasize this is unconfirmed, but there is speculation that an american airlines plane was hijacked and crashed purposely, on purpose, into the world trade center. and that the second plane was another plane perhaps high be g hijacked, flown into the second tower. dan, tell me about people on the ground. are you at a vantage point where you can see what s happening on the ground? i m farther up in the west village. i m not on the ground near the base of the towers. where were you when it actually happened? i was walking down seventh avenue, at about oh, charles street, which is about 15 or 20 blocks north of the towers. well, obviously, this was a shocking thing for you to witness on this tuesday morning. you know, some wires just came out that said in 1945, an army air corps crashed into the 79th floor of the empire state building. that occurred in dense fog. this was a crystal clear day in manhattan. so it is completely unclear how there would be any kind of problems with visibility. dan, thank you so much for talking with us. hopefully, you can stay on the phone and we can check back in with you at another point in time. we really appreciate it. we want to report, remind people that world trade center bombing that took place on february 26th, back in 1993, the product of a terrorist attack. the result of the terrorist attack that killed six people and injured more than 1,000. of course that happened on a friday afternoon. i think, matt, you and al were working that day. i know i was at home in virginia watching it in disbelief. now it feels a bit like deja vu. of course, this is so much more bizarre. keep in mind, that killed six people, injured 1,000. the explosion happened in a garage in the basement. this was a direct hit on the midsection or upper section of the tower. the potential for injuries and death much larger. of course, also some people on the planes. exactly, if they were hi jacked, if they were en route to a different destination. bob kerr joins us now. bob, where are you, what can you tell us? katie, good morning, i m on the north lawn of the white house. the first thing we looked for here in light of what s happened is whether there was any unusual activity out here. whether there s an unusual police or secret service presence, people on the roof, that sort of thing. we don t see that as we speak. i did try to call the national security office here. as you know, the president is out of town. he is in florida. we re told he has been informed of this. i can tell you that the white house national security staff that remains here is in a senior level meeting. we re hoping to hear from them as soon as possible. but, katie, the reaction here, ton pictures you re seeing, to the initial pictures when they kay up, even in what s called the lower press office here at the white house, was one of shock, i mean, people are just standing around television monitors, looking at this. when i say people, i don t mean just the reporters, i mean the people who are actually in the office who work here at the white house. so very little information is coming out of the white house at this juncture. needless to say, if the speculation is true about some kind of terrorist event, this will be a major, major crisis for the bush administration. jim miklaszewski is at the pentagon now. mik, are you hearing any more information from there? according to u.s. intelligence officials, katie, there appeared, at least to their knowledge, to be no specific threat involving hijacking airliners or any attacks on buildings in the new york area. u.s. intelligence officials report this morning that there are, you know, they constantly are hearing about threats, possible terrorist threats against american targets worldwide. but as far as they know this morning, they have no early indications that anything of this nature could have occurred. pentagon officials are already calling this a terrorist attack. they say that they have not yet ordered the scrambling of any military jets. if national guard were to be scrambled in that area, that would be at the order of the governor. now, of course, the president does have the authority to scramble american military forces in defense, but there s a problem here, what, now, do you defend against exactly. if you put warplanes in the air, there s always a danger that they could misidentify a pilot s intention, although i believe, according to officials here are now off limits and restricted, but so far, the u.s. military and pentagon officials are scrambling to get as much information as they possibly can to determine what course of action, if any, the u.s. military would take. but, mik, they are describing this as a terrorist attack right now. there are some officials here in the pentagon who are calling this an obvious terrorist attack based on very preliminary information. the information that intelligence officials are getting in terms of a possible hijacked plane and of course the very horrifying video of the plane veering in to the tower itself is a clear indication to everyone here that this is not an accident. all right, jim miklaszewski, thanks. of course, the coordination that took place to have two planes hit the towers within 18 minutes. bob kerr, what can you tell us? it was interesting to listen to jim miklaszewski at the pentagon. of course the president has the authority to scramble military forces. this is a case obviously in which retaliation, if, indeed, it proves to be a terrorist incident, would be contemplated. the usual course of events is it s an investigation, you know, unless someone steps forward, claims responsibility, the white house and other arms of the u.s. government will say we have to determine who is responsible for this attack, try to pinpoint it, and then the u.s. usually says someone is going to be made to pay. but that is a big if. if we can determine exactly the or jen of this terrorist attack. and so there are some implications to that. let s go back to jim miklaszewski. bob, thank you. at the pentagon, you have more information? katie, bob s exactly right, but what their primary concern is right now is protecting the american public in the new york area right now. against any possible further attack, by the air. they have no indications there will be. but there is some concern since this appeared to be such a highly coordinated attack, there may be other terrorist attacks that could be planned either in new york or elsewhere. this is absolute ly the worst case scenario for the counterterrorist planners. apartly, according to intelligence official, there were no firm indications prior to this that anything like this could have happened. in terms of scrambling the u.s. military, it would be for protection for the time being and not necessarily even thinking right now about any kind of retaliation. all right, david gregory is now on the phone from longo key actually he s following the president. that s right. david. yes, katie, the president is about to begin an education event, which is obviously being canceled. the event will go forward. the president will come out and make a statement about this. he was made aware en route from his hotel to this school here in sarasota where he was going to talk about education. he ll make a statement. then we re told by white house officials that he will quickly depart for washington. we should mention that new york city airport or new york area airports have all been closed. the lincoln tunnel has been closed here in new york. we re getting ready to listen to the president. let s go back to jim miklaszewski at the pentagon. you talk about counterterrorist measures that are in place. can you shed any light for us on what kind of things are in place in the event of an attack of this nature? well, katie, it s very difficult for the u.s. military to response to this kind of thing, you know, right now, because it s unclear exactly who s behind it and if there are any other potential attacks or incidents like this, because this has obviously not been officially declared a terrorist attack, but all the experts who are looking at these pictures say there s no doubt about it, this was a coordinated terrorist attack. but who, and why, is very much unclear right now. and the problem with trying to then put planes on the air to try to prevent any further attacks is these are, after all, open airspaces for the most part. and it s difficult for the u.s. military to simply scramble jets and put them in the air and then, according to officials here, then do what? this area, of course, according to officials here, is obviously going to be declared off limits in terms of any air traffic. right now, officials here at the pentagon are simply scrambling to find out, first, what happened, and what potential reaction the u.s. military could provide in terms of protection. possible further protection against any further potential attacks. mik, important to note, if they were hijacked, if they were carrying passenger there wasn t much military officials could have done. you can t shoot down a plane like that, plus the injuries on the ground in a place like manhattan. that s exactly right. the president, as we said earlier, does, in fact, have the authority to scramble the military to put them up in some kind of force protection mode. the governor has the air national guard at his disposal. he can do that. but again officials are wondering exactly what to do in terms of protection and how. again, counterterrorist officials, this is absolutely the worst case scenario, because they re, right now, seems to be not much, not much they can do in terms of the aftermath. we re scrambling for information here. this reuters wire read, two planes crashed into the world trade center on tuesday morning causing huge explosions and kill at least six people. cnbc tv said there were at least 1,000 injured. both towers where thousands of people work were the scenes of a bombing in 1993. the fbi told the associated press that it was, quote, foul play and not an accident. a person who answered the phone that was reported by abc. a person who answered the phone on the trading floor at inner dealer broker cantor fitzgerald located at the top of the world trade center said, we re blanking dying, when asked what was happening, and hung up. there was screaming and yelling in the background and a follow-up call was not answered. an eyewitness said just before the first explosion he saw a plane fly over his apartment in the soho district of lower manhattan. jamie is on the phone, our national correspondent with more information. what can you tell us? i ve just spoken to top u.s. officials with the access to latest intelligence, and they said, quote, that this was clearly terrorist related. no question about it. they said that they couldn t give any further details now, not because they didn t want to share it, but because they just don t know yet. they re at the earlier stage it is. do they know, if a plane was hijacked? they would not answer that. and i think that it s because i think that they just are getting the earliest details, and they re afraid of putting out misinformation. but they said, you know, that it was clearly terrorist related. all right, jamie, thanks. we re looking again, if you re just joining us, both towers of the world trade center in new york city. where two planes have crashed into the towers. one certainly before 9:00 eastern time. one shortly after 9:00 eastern time. and, as you can see, the tower on the left was hit just above the midsection point. they re both 110 floors high. 1,300 feet above the ground. the tower on the right was hit more probably three quarters up the tower. fire burning in both towers. we actually watched the second plane hit the building. you ll watch it enter from the right portion of the screen and then make contact with the left-hand tower in what is shocking video. and here it comes right there. you can see the impact on one side of the building and the residual damage coming out of another side of the building. and one can only imagine that that one occurred shortly after 9:00 in the morning, how many people were in the building at the time of the impact. it s a large plane. we re told it was either a 737. some reports the first plane was a 757. some kind of air bus. that was what the united worker told us. apparently that had been that it was an american airlines plane that had been hijacked. hijacked from boston to los angeles, but we re just getting initial reports of that. again, we must tell you, we re trying to get as much information, but it is trickling in at a very slow pace. so all of this is unconfirmed. and of course speculation of the terrorist attack is unconfirmed. although that is what some pentagon officials are saying. let s go to president bush right now. unfortunately, we ll be going back to washington after my remarks. the secretary and the lieutenant governor will take the podium and discuss education it i want to thank the folks here at booker elementary school for their hospitality. today, we ve had a national tragedy. two airplanes have crashed into the world trade center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. i have spoken to the vice president. to the governor of new york. to the director of the fbi. and i ve ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act. terrorism against our nation will not stand. now, if you join me in a moment of silence. may god bless the victims, their families and america. thank you very much. that, of course, was president bush, who is in florida, he was speaking at an elementary school. he had planned to be talking about literacy. obviously, he had to chance. he mentioned this is an apparent terrorist attack. he is traveling back to washington. he said he spoke to the governor of new york as well as the vice president. that all the resources will be brought to bear by the federal government to determine who did this and who was responsible for this terrible, terrible event. and then of course it was followed by a moment of silence for the victims. we re going to go to andrea mitchell now who has more information on this tragedy. andrea. matt and katie, i ve spoken to a top u.s. official would says early reports to our intelligence committee and to other officials within the administration are that this was a hijacked american airline, plane en route from boston to los angeles. one of the two planes they say was apparently a hijacked american airlines plane. they caution that early reports still need further confirmation, but this is at least what the government is being told by american airlines officials apparently. they are assuming and they ve obviously informed the president that this is a terror attack. andrea, we have no information as to how this flight was taken over, how much warning air traffic controllers may have had that someone hostile was at the controls of this plane? exactly right. they had no other information. just that at least one of the two planes was hijacked from boston en route to los angeles. presumably after it had already been in the air and en route. because i was told en route to los angeles. so probably after it had taken off. as you know, those are very short flights. those are usually 757s on that route. but this clearly, according to the u.s. government, is a terror attack. as you heard the president say. now, one of the things, matt and katie, we should understand is that there was no specific threat that the u.s. government is aware of. no specific terror alert. other than the world-wide caution that had been reissued in recent days because of the strife in the middle east, because of concerns over terrorists. of course, the best known is osama bin laden. but no alert coming from his organization. and as far as they know, as of this morning, as of this minute, he is in afghanistan. as we should mention, andrea it appears this was a well-coordinated bombing or terrorist act because of the fact that two planes were used. both substantial in size. and the fact that they both hit the world trade center within 18 minutes of one another. obviously, a lot of planning went into this attack. let s go to nbc s jim miklaszewski at the pentagon. senior military officials at the pentagon are saying they are getting information that the american airlines flight 11 after it left boston apparently was hijacked, and was diverted apparently, the early information was, was being diverted to jfk for some reason. and then obviously nobody knows exactly who was at the controls of the plane, but it broke off its route to los angeles and was headed towards jfk. that was the initial information that officials had received when, obviously, it did not go to jfk, but veered off and headed towards the world trade center. but, again, no indication as to who may be responsible or would was at the controls of that plane when it rammed into the world trade center, matt. mik, thank you. we re going to be talking with you throughout the morn. right now, larry johnson, a terrorism expert. a former deputy director of the state department s office on counterterrorism. mr. johnson, can you please put this into some kind of perspective for us and give us your insight on what might have happened here? well, you know, first, we need to be cautious before jumping to the conclusion that it s necessarily terrorism. i would be inclined based upon the preliminary reports we ve seen to say that that s the case but there s always the possibility that you may find out after the fact this was some suicide pact for some reason that had nothing to do with politics. that said this is a first. back in 1992, there was excuse me, 93, there was a lufthansa plane hijacked from germany and it ended up landing in new york. one of the concerns we had at that time was the possibility of that plane under the control of a hijacker flying it into one of the buildings. so, you know, my concern now is th that, you know, we ignore terrorism we talk a lot about it, but we ignore taking very practical steps on security fronts. until something like this happens. and then the pendulum swings out to an extreme. the next thing you hear are people talking about putting surface to air missiles on top of buildings to prevent this kind of thing. this is a very rare event. it s unlikely to be repeated. but, and i think president bush put his finger on it, we have to find who did this. and any country, any nation in the world that is in any way involved and responsible if it turns out to be terrorism, will require a response from the united states. the united states has got to be willing to pay that price. mr. johnson, obviously, we re completely stunned when about 25 minutes after the first explosion or after the first plane crashed into one of the twin towers, another very large plane did the same thing, and we ve been talking with our correspondents all morning about sort of if another incident could happen on the heels of these two. what kind of measures are in place to prepare for something else that could conceivably happen? well, i think one of the steps is already being taken. i was at national airport when this occurred. they ve shut down air traffic in and out of the city. apart from shutting down the air traffic, you re talking about an enormous disruption economically for the nation right now with the air traffic not going in. people are going to err on the side of caution. i think across the board you re going to look at the major hubs in the united states where there are large buildings, chicago, atlanta, los angeles, and they re going to be extra measures taken. one possibility is you could start putting up air cover and require the planes stay within a particular area and don t approach any closer and if they approach you would go to the extremes of having u.s. air force intercept. i wanted to ask all morning, correspondents have also been saying, particularly bob kerr and jim miklaszewski and andrea mitchell that there was no warning attached to this event. generally speaking, do we get some kind do u.s. officials, government agencies, get some kind of warning from a particular group or is this pretty i mean, fairly typical in terms of an event happening without any foreshadowing? no, katie, this unfortunately is typically. it s only in the movies you get advance warnings. you look at every major terrorist incident against the united states. pan am 103, the world trade center, the uss cole bombing i m sorry to interrupt you. jim miklaszewski has some new information at the pentagon. i don t want to alarm anybody but apparently it felt, just a few moments ago, like there was an explosion of some kind here at the pentagon. we re on the e ring of the pentagon. we have a window that faces out toward the potomac, toward the kennedy center. we haven t been able to see or hear anything after the initial blast. i just stepped out in the hallway. security guards were herding people out of the building. i saw just a moment ago, as i looked outside, a number of construction workers who had been working here have taken flight. they re running as far away from the building as they can right now. i hear no sirens going off in the building. i see no smoke. but the building shook for just a couple of seconds. the windows rattle erattled, an security personnel are doing what they can momentarily to clear this part of the building. again, i have no idea whether it was part of the construction work, whether it was an accident or what is going on. we re going to try to find those details and get them to you as soon as possible. but interestingly enough, one intelligence official here in the building said when he saw what appeared to be the coordinated attack on the world trade center, his advice was to stay away from the outside of the building today just in case. now, again, nobody has any indications of exactly what happened. but it appears that there has been some kind of, it felt like a small blast of some kind. again, the windows shook. the windows rattled. and people i m looking out the window now. the construction workers are still keeping a good oh, i m sorry, the construction workers are still keeping a distance. that s all i can see. i see no other security activity right outside. but to get more information, i m going to have to break away and walk down the hallway and see what it is exactly that happened here just a few moments ago. mik, see what you can find out, please be careful and let us know what s going on there. meanwhile, we re going to go back to david gregory who is in long boat key, florida, where president bush was, going to a school to talk to kiddings. a little bit more about how this unfolded and watt president is going to do next. the president declared this aapparent terrorist attack. he offered a prayer for the families. promised to hunt down, in his words, the people responsible for this. he will now travel back to washington. aides are telling us now he will immediately convene a national security meeting to see what steps david, i m sorry to interrupt you. we re looking at live pictures of the pentagon where there is billowing smoke. jim miklaszewski just reported he heard an explosion. right now, an aerial view of the pentagon. mik can you talk to us? officially, nobody knows exactly what happened. i think the picture is pretty clear. according to one army officer who went running past me at a full trot, he says it appears a bomb was detonated at the help la port. the helicopter landing area, just adjacent to the e ring. the offices nearest the heleport area are u.s. army reserve officers and the army reserve offices are located there. as you can see, it appears to be a pretty significant blast. to give you some perspective, we are almost on the opposite side of the building, the world s largest office building, and as i reported to you, we could feel the building shake and the windows rattle. as i was in the hallway just a few moments ago, i could smell an acrid kind of smoke, the kind of almost like what you d smell when a flouorescorescent goes bad. i don t know if you can hear the sirens outside right now, but it appears that i think people here in the building are already describing as a highly sophisticated coordinated attack. not only against the world trade center, but against the pentagon and u.s. military right here in washington. mik, tell me again, i worked at the pentagon as well. it s a huge building. i mean, it s miles and miles of offices. at what location did this seem to have detonated? it s at the helio port, which is, as you sit in the pentagon, you have the potomac river and washington, d.c. on one side and the helio port is located almost exactly on the opposite side of the building, along one of the highways, easily accessible. even though they ve increased security here significantly at the pentagon within the past couple of years mik, i want to mention we are hearing, again, unconfirmed reports, this that was the result of a plane crashing in the area as well. i have no idea, katie. all i know is that people who were in the building who came running from that part of the building thought it was a bomb of some kind. according to chris brown, my colleague who just came in, it appears that whatever it was, and perhaps it was a plane, if those are the initial reports, crashed into the or the damage is on the roof of the building at the helio port side of the pentagon, which is just opposite of the potomac river, as i just said. we re looking at the white house, mik. we are learning there have been some evacuations from the white house. i m assuming that everyone is being evacuated from the pentagon. well, nobody s given us the official word yet. but i think that s probably a safe bet. thank goodness that was a helicopter that just flew by. i m just a little nervous now when you hear aircraft go past. but they have, in fact, evacuated that portion of the building. usually, they have sirens that go off in the building, alerting you to the fact that it s time to get out. i haven t heard those yet. but just judging by the pictures, it s clear that that part of the building that is not damaged at least has been evacuated. like i said, in the hallway, it was pandemonium. people were rushing from their offices, rushing outside you re in your office at the pentagon right now, reporting to us? i am in the office, but i m at the opposite side of where this crash occurred. all right, why don t you see if you can gather more information. please, again, be cash freful. we ll go to matt. i m joined by tom brokaw. we ll try to recap what s been going on all morning here in the east coast and in washington, d.c. we want to go to today s national correspondent jamie gangel with some more information. i want to tell you u.s. intelligence sources are confirming the reports that one of the planes was a hi jacked flight, an american flight from boston to los angeles. they are also now looking into what s going on at the pentagon. they don t have any details. but they have now put government buildings around the city of washington on a heightened state of alert. i think part of that is happening formally but obviously people are seeing what s going on and some people are leaving buildings as well simply because of the concern following these latest reports from the pentagon. all right, jamie, thank you very much. again, joined by tom brokaw and katie s back with us. let s try and recap. it s 9:47 eastern time. try and recap what s going on so far this morning. and the news is terrible. just before 9:00 at 8:42 actually. 8:42, a plane crashed into the right-hand tower of the world trade center. about three quarters of the way up. you can see the smoke billowing from that point of the building. and then about 18 or 20 minutes later, a second plane, a large plane, we saw it actually on tape hit the left-hand tower of the world trade center. we have confirmed reports now that there was one plane hijacked. american airlines from boston to los angeles. that is apparently one of the planes used in this crash. there s a report on dubai television that, in fact, the group claiming responsibility, is the democratic front for the liberation of palestine. this comes ironically on a day when the israeli foreign minister shimon peres is scheduled to meet with yasser arafat. we ve had the meeting in south africa for the last several days in which the palestinians were accusing the israelis of racism. the united states vacated that meeting. and the israelis vacated that meeting as well. but there has not been one specific incident. it s also worth pointing out terrorism always had two prong, to it. the physical threat and now the psychological threat. this does seem to be surreal but, in fact, it is real, when you have an explosion of undetermined origin at the pentagon, the most conspicuous symbol of american capitalism, the twin trade towers here in new york, two deliberate attacks on those towers today. and the capital, by the way, the u.s. capitol has been evacuated. evacuations taking place at the white house. many people in the pentagon have left that building as well. airports in new york here, in this building in midtown new york, they have asked a lot of people at 30 rockefeller plaza to leave. it s another high-rise capital building. which is in new york. i came down the length of man hadden. a lot of people were simply unaware of what happened. as they tuned in the radio of w happened as you tuned into the radio and then they began to get it. it s election day here in new york. primary day. and you have happen what you never thought would happen. as terry johnson, the former deputy director of the state department office count counter-terrorism claims it is a first. he s never seen anything like it. he talked about in 1993 a german plane being hijack and there were fears when it was flown to new york there might be something. we have this as major development. the federal aviation has shut down all air traffic nationwide. this country has been immobilized by these terror attacks in terms of air travel today and we don t know where it goes from here. wi just ask that you stay with us so that as we get hard information we can share that with you. there s going to be a lot of speculation. the president has described this as apparently a terror attack. they have determined that the flight from boston to los angeles was hijacked. that s believed to be the first plane that went into the twin towers. let s go to the former director of the fbi here in new york. mr. kallstrom, i m sheer you have never seen anything like this. do you have any information that would be helpful to us? not as it relates to the tragedy, but certainly a horrible tragedy. a lot of us have seen the hatred in the world, have seen the bombing of the world trade center, they saw the conspiracy to blow up the tunnels in the united nations and fbi building back in the 1990s, the bombing of the uss cole and the bombings in africa. they know that it exists but now it looks like it s culminated in this absolutely horrendous act against the united states. as someone who s investigated these crimes in the past, when we think back to 1993 and the world trade center bombing and what it took in terms of coordination and planning to pull off that one bomb in the world trade center, can you even speculate as to what it might take to coordinate this what we think so far is a three-pronged attack this morning? matt, it obviously took a lot of coordination. there s a lot of groups in the world who have the ability to coordinate these types of attacks. as you know and most people should know, the united states is an open society. i mean we ve talked for years about the downside of having our borders basically open. on any given day, people fly into our airports, undock mustn ted and turned into the population. they re certainly not all terrorism. they re not terrorists. we live in a free society and i m not espousing we challene i that. right. it s very, very difficult to keep track. if you could stand by for a motor vehicle because jim miklaszewski has more information for us. mik? katie, we encountered someone who survived whatever it was. one of the survivors who was reportedly injured, had various lacerations, was on the second floor of the d-ring. that is one ring inside the outer ring of the pentagon when suddenly there was this horrific blast. and he said that the second floor buckled upward and the third floor above him actually collapsed downward. the scene on the other side of the building as it s being described to us, there are people being removed on stretchers. security forces are evacuating the building right now, and according to the officials here at the pentagon, they still don t know exactly what it was, but as you reported, katie, eyewitnesses said it was, in fact, a plane that crashed into the pentagon. mik, any idea i wasn t sure if you said of the amount of people hurt or worse? not at all, katie. on any given workday, it s a small city, 25,000, 30 thousand may be working at any one time. that portion of the pentagon, by the way, had just been remodeled and just reopened. if the crash had occurred just a few months ago, that section of the pentagon would have been virtually empty. but at this time of day early morning or mid morning, the pentagon s very busy. it s impossible to say how many casualties there may be. but there have been a large number of people sighted being removed on stretchers. and, again, as one survivor said, the floor just buckled up under him and the roof caved in on him. all right, mik. thanks very much. we re going to move a couple of miles away from you at the white house where bob is standing. bob, we understand it s been evacuated? reporter: that s true. as soon as word came of the pentagon incident, we were rather forcefully removed from the white house. the scene was one of administrators, cooks, whatever, running at fairly high speed all the way out of the building through the top gates. then we huddled for a while in lafayette park across the street, and we ve been moved now from there a block or so away. the offices along jackson place which are across the street from the white house and adjacent to lafayette park also have been evacuated. and in the most surreal scenes here at the white house, a white plane, a very big jet, was flying an unusual pattern near the white house over lafayette park very slowly. it made one circle, and then we have not seen it since. there was a lot of concern about what that plane might be, but, again, it s only speculation. but most people say that since flights have been cleared from u.s. airspace and it was a totally white plane, looked unusual to all of us, that it was a government plane of some kind. we should point out that we re looking at pictures, bob, as you speak of the world trade center because all of the camera crews have been evacuated from the white house as well. when do you expect president bush to arrive there, bob? reporter: well, katie, he s coming back directly, so you figure it s about a two-hour flight. you can do the math. the reason that i said it was so surreal is that within just about 20 minutes ago they were still conducting tours. you had hordes of tourists at the white house lining up outside to get in. there seemed to be absolutely no unusual activity outside the white house until word came of the incident at the pentagon. so it s been quite a dramatic shift here. you know, in terms of responsibility, tom and matt and bob, apparently a senior official from the radical democratic front for the liberation of palestine denied on tuesday the group had any connection to the plane crash. an anonymous caller had told television that it was behind the crash, but, quote, i emphasize that the story released on television by an anonymous person is totally incorrect. a senior official from the dflp bureau in the palestinian territories told reuters. they re against hijacking planes and against endangering the lives of civilians who are not connected with this struggle of the region, he said. there are going to be a lot of claims and counter-claims in the next 24 hours or. so this is task for investigators of an extraordinary magnitude to try to determine who did this and how they got away with it. you think about it. an american airlines flight on its way from boston to los angeles was hijacked in midair. they have sightings of the plane and they have hard evidence of that, brought down here and made to fly into one of the trade towers. did one of the hijackers get control? did they shoot the pilot? it boggles the mind to figure it out. you talk about transmissions. i m just curious. do you have any evidence they say they re sighting transmissions to know that the plane had been hijacked. we want to let everyone know this is an exceptional development. the faa has banned all takeoffs at all airports across america. this country in terms of air travel has been immobilized. a goorks portion of the nation s capital, the center of the world, has been immobilized. that was a very haunting description bob kerr just gave of that low flying aircraft near the white house. one can only wonder if that was what ended up in the pentagon. we f we can see that. it looks like a live picture of part of the building falling away from the building. if we can rerack that. i don t know if it s another explosion or a portion of the building falling away but something major just happened that building. we have the tape. watch what happens in the left-hand tower. i don t know if this is the correct tape. something there is about to happen, falling away right there. it looks like a big chunk of it has been peeled away. one can only hope that the area has been evacuated but you wonder about the emergency vehicles and the people who might have been injured early in the morning. you remember when the bomb went off in the basement of 1993, the damage in that building, how much chaos there was that time. these are two coordinated air attacks on the building, tupper reaches of it. that will have an enormous effect. those buildings, i think it s fair to say, will have to be brought down. it s too early to speculate but it appears there s been that kind of damage. we have somebody on the scene. we have a reporter from wnbc. the reports are that it was being diverted to jfk. and just for people who aren t familiar with the geography of this area, the southern tip of manhattan would be very much near the flight the landing pattern for jfk airport. it could have been easy for the hijacker to pretend he was going to land the plane and then divert off. someone did what he described as a sharp right turn right toward the world trade center. then lost sight of it. one eyewitness sailed he was getting off the path train at the world trade center and saw bodies falling out of the building as he approached it. police told him to get out of the building immediately and he ran outside and watched people jump out of the first building and there was a second explosion. this footage we re seeing right now shows that the damage is so severe. i mean we had seen what seemed to be two fairly self-contained impact craters before and now it appears something much more dramatic has happened to at least one of those towers. these pictures are beyond belief. we have a report that the second plane may have flown out of newark, new jersey. this is an official who was speaking on the commission of anonymity. again, there is no confirmation of that. we just know there were two planes that went in. the first was an american airlines flight from boston to los angeles. we re seeing it from the harborview, this continuing damage to the world trade center. incidentally, tom, i want to interrupt you for two seconds because apparently jamie gangel has more. jamie? reporter: we have spoken to officials of the highest intelligence and they re confirming it does appear at the pentagon it was plane. again, they re saying now a third plane was involved at the pentagon. and, of course, this has been a nightmare, katie. everyone has been terribly worried about the suitcase-sized bomb of some kind or an airplane or an attack on our subways in the large cities, and this obviously no one had anticipated. three airplanes that were deliberately aimed at critical targets in america. we can only hope that it s open for over for today, but officials are taking no chances on all that. they re evacuating all critical buildings because as mr. johnson said earlier, this is an open society. james kallstrom from the fbi also pointing out that almost anyone can come in here. they have access to so many instruments that can be used as instruments of attack and terrorism and that certainly has been the case today. let s go to our state department correspondent andrea mitchell. andrea, what can you tell us? this from the fbi. the state department has been evacuated. there was a meeting going on. other top officials were in the situation room at the white house. colin powell is in colombia on a two-day trip. but this is very interesting information, katie and matt, from the fbi. they had been maintaining a mavis resc massive rescue. thaw were scheduled to fly back today commercially. so all of those people are out of place. it s fair to say according to sources that we ve talked to here at nbc that the fbi rescue operations and other operations are in chaos right now because they can t reach officials in new york. all of their phone lines are down and now you ve about got all of their special experts on this stuck in mentor ray, california, trying to get a military flight back because there are no longer commercial flights. so they re seriously out of pocket and there s a real breakdown of the fbi anti-terror coordination team which is, of course, the principal team that would lead any effort and was so effective under james kallstrom during the world trade center bombing and the twa bombing which, turned out nout to be terror. is the state department taking the blame for this from the palestines? seriously? are they dismissing it or who do they feel are responsible for this? i think it s far to early to figure this out. they have one instant reaction as you know but it could be wrong. an immediate reaction in a case like this would be to look toward osama bin laden and the collateral groups connected to him simply because he has proved with the embassy bombings in africa that he is the one terror leader who is capable of this kind of highly coordinated attack. the bombings went off in tanzania and kenya almost simultaneously. it was extremely well coordinated. they proved their case to a jury effectively and have managed to develop a great deal of information from sources from, in fact, turning some former members of his network. so they believe, tom, that he is the most likely person but it s far too early to say anything. we want to tell you american airlines has confirm thad one of its airlines, flight 111 from boston s logan airpt scheduled to go to l.a.x. this morning, 45 minutes later it was diverted into the world trade center. it was the airline that was involved. we can only assume on a popular flight like that, that it probably had a capacity load of passengers and crew onboard. there was a hijacking. that was the first plane involved. there s a second and we don t know the origins of a third plane that deliberately flew itself into the pentagon this morning near the heliport. jim everybody shelf smiklaszew e the building. this is about an hour after it. we saw a portion of one of the twin towers actually appearing to fall away from the rest of the building. can we go to the tape? right here. when you look at it, the building has collapsed. that tower just came down. let s go to bob bazell who s at st. vincent s hospital. bob, what can you tell us? reporter: it s one of the hospitals closest to the world trade center. in the last few minutes, ambulances have been coming in one right after another. most of the people they re bringing in have second and third degree burns. very severe burns. they say the smoke inhalation people will be the most serious but they re not even close to getting them yet. there s a triage unit in the unit. then tire staff of this hospital has come in from wherever they are across new york city. as soon as balances pull up, dozens of medical staff rush up to it. the service workers i spoke to have been down at the trade world site. they say this is the tip of the iceberg. bob wi, what are they tellin you about the people? were there many people inside the building o sit too early to tell? reporter: it s too early to tell but there were thousands of people before 9:00, the start of the typical work area because it s such a large area. so the number of casualties is just enormous. the ambulances are lined up. they ve been summoned and are in a queue. bob, we re also looking at the lower end of manhattan as the result of the collapse of one world trade center. that whole financial district is now engulfed in smoke and debris and there s probably going to be a lot more smoke inhalation problems. almost certainly, tom. i was actually standing and saw that collapse and everybody here just gasped. even the medical workers and the ambulance attendants when they saw that, people who are used to tragedy, grabbed each other and hugged each other and one started to cry. one wonders about the triage un unit. exactly. close to a building trying to evacuate people. and when a building of that size falls, it does not fall in its own footprint. reporter: one can only imagine. the consequences go on. not just to the trade center and the peer people trap and caught there, but that, of course, is the heart of the world financial markets that s been shut down. so the ripple effect continues this morning as we all try to adjust psychologically and intellectually what s occurred here. it s difficult to comprehend. but this country, the strongest country in the world has been the target of major coordinated attack and the end is not over yet. even if it s just confined these three targets. the ripple effect goes on. all air traffic has been shut down. no financial markets today, businesses have been stopped across the country. and, of course, who knows the human toll that will be the result of this action. matt just pointed out to me on any given day, tom, 50,000 people work at the world trade center. and at 8:45 in the morning, if they re not in the building thaerks re around the area. hate to keep going back to the tower but if you consider this plane hit at mid structure and would have taken out the electrical in the building where elevators didn t work and people are struggling to get out of the tower and it takes a long time to come down a hundred stories and when you think of the collapse of the southeastern tower, it s just unbelievable. mina, hi. hi, matt. tell us what you saw. reporter: walking toward the twin towers it just collapsed. it looked like the building just demolished. smoke, clouds clouds of smoke everywhere. people running toward me. was going toward the twin towers. people were going away from the towers and it was just people running like i ve never sohn a scene like it. from where you were, minna, did you see anyone being treated? reporter: no, matt. i hadn t gotten that close yet. they were sort of blocking off the street. now what they re doing is clearing out the area and more and more emergency officials are coming in to help. can you just give me the reaction of people, the pedestrians? everyone is in tears. i met someone who was in the building to the right of where the first thing happened. all crying, wondering if the people they know in the building next door are okay. thank you very much. take care of yourself. jamie gangel, our national correspondent is now on the phone. jamie? reporter: buildings around town have been evacuated. the white house has been evacuated, the capitol and the pentagon. officials tell me they do believe at the opponent gone that was a third plane going down. they have had the intelligence sources i talked to say they have not received any claim of responsibility yet. jamie, have you gotten any information from reagan national airport as to air traffic in the area this morning or anybody who might have somehow traced this plane or figured out where it came from or where it was going? reporter: they still do not have any of those details yet. it s almost impossible. they were confused for a long time as to whether it s a bomb or a plane. they say now it appears to be a plane but they say that is all the information that they have. as you know, the faa has shut down all aircraft and are going back to try to sort that out but they don t have any information yet. do they know what type of plane? reporter: there is no unfortunately they don t have that yet. all right, jamie. thank you very much, jamie. we ll be talking with you. it goes without saying this is the most serious attack on the united states in more than 100 years, not during 1812 or the damage we did during the civil war has this country suffered this kind of damage within its interior. obviously pearl harbor, world war ii was hor riffic as well. but there s never been an event that has magnitude to the degree as this one. everything has been shut down. the pentagon has been attacked. there s an untold loss of life here in manhattan, the nerve center, to say nothing of the pentagon. this is a shot of new york city many people can t understand. one tower. it looks like a movie and it combines the horror of the twa bombing and the federal building bombing. by this time i m sure everyone is up across the world. for those of you just joining us at 8:45 eastern time, 8:42 eastern time, american airlines flight 111 from boston to l.a.x. was crashed into one of the world trade center buildings. 15 minutes later another plane hit the other one. that building has now collapsed. within an hour of those two attacks, the pentagon was hit now we re told but a plane. president bush has been on the air. he was in florida. apparently saying it was a terrorist attack. even believes that, coordinated from the air. and the consequences in terms of human loss hassy tote be determined. we want to go down to the hospital. they ve been treating some of the injured. kathleen, can you hear me? yes,ky. kel you tell us about the people you ve been treating and the number? we ve seen a steady stream of patients for approximately an hour and a half. i can t tell you i ve seen the most serious ones because they re going through the ambulance bay. there s a high level of activity here. the first care is care of the patients. we do not have tally at this time because of the level of activity at the hospital. we have responded to family and friends who have come seeking information to the hospital. just quickly, kathleen, how far is the hospital from the world trade center? perhaps a five-minute walk from the trade center and we were the first responder after the attack in 1993 so unfortunately we have some experience. how many hospitals in the immediate area are there? we re the only hospital south of new york city. we serve a large amount. our emergency room is the high priority of this hospital and the staff ha been doing a heroic job in term os responding to the patients. kalgt lean, what about the triage unit that s on the ground there? is there a team of medical nyu on the scene as well? yes, they are. i cannot tell you because i m not on the scene. but you have your medical personnel at the scene. that is my understanding, yes. they ve obviously evacuated the whole area. now i m told that there s a concern about the collapsing of the second one as well. there s been a lot of damage on the upper floors of all that and it ooh mess than 100 stories high. it wouldn t take much to bring it down. contact leap, thank you very much. we appreciate it. thank you. we re told the spokesman for yasser arafat, the leader of the palestinian the leading of the pla. palestinian organization that he has arafat has come dinned whoo has happened in new york. they re completely shocked md a apoint. it s a front that was later denied as well. we don t know who, in fact, is responsible for this but it was fairfully planned an coronado nated. we ve had a an efficient attack on the part of this country. pat dawson is on the ground near the world trade center. pat, are you there? pat dawson, can you hear me? okay. he s having some audio problems. we ll get to pat in just a moment. just amazing. you have to stop and think about the hijacked plane and the passengers on board as it could have been up to an hour that they realized something was dramatically wrong with this flight and then thinking that perhaps they were going to john f. kennedy airport here in queens actually and the plane suddenly veering into the world trade center tower. what s striking to me is we didn t have an earlier report. a lot of people monitor that. until this happened the plane left at 8:00 this morning. 42 minutes. it was about 42 minutes later that it occurred. a number of people saw it at the low altitude and took the sharp right up the. moments later the world trade center was hit. it was about an hour after that that jim mick la shelfky told you, katie. and now we ve ben on plane. there are people who circulate been hurt there, we hope no one was killed but it seems like a graig magnitude. the white house has been evacuated. here s the pentagon right now. let s take a look at the pentagon. smoke continues to bill lowe out of that structure. as tom said it s unclear how many people were hurt and if it was a plane. they suspect it was a plane. let s go to pat dawson. can you hear me? we cannot tell you much more in terms of specific information other than to say there are perhaps hundreds, perhaps in the thousands of emergency workers in the last hour and half have managed way way to work down here. 6 we re standing here 10 to 12 blokts north of the world trade center. these firemen, you can see, firefighter are walks down toward the site now and they ve bit rally been arrived by the past hour or so. probably in excess of a thousand or more from new york city and surrounding areas to converge on the site to try to make some sense of it. as you can imagine, they re trying to sort out who s alive, who s not. as i said before we did speak with some of the police officers. that s the organization that has jurisdiction over the two buildings specifically as well as bridges and tunnels. i spoke to two of them who were down there when the building capsed. that loss of life had to be horrific, most of them who had been evacuated. they have no idea the level of loss of life. i asked him as he suited up why he s going in. he said it s my job and there may be some of my brother officers in there, there may be other people in there. so those officers going in there, as you can see, all kinds of firefighter s going in there converging on the site. we can t give you much of an organizational sense other than telling you what you already known, which is two separate aircraft have struck the two towers of the world trade center. as memory serves, i think each of the billings stands 110 feet tall. it depends which way the wind blows as to whether or not we re enveloped in some of the wind and smoke. as you can see from the pictures the amount of dust from the fire is still burning. flames and ash are extraordinary at this point and at least a few emergency workers have said they re not really sure that other tower would stay up. they didn t think the first one was capable of coming down but it did. they re saying keep back as far as you can chld many, many hup dleds of these workers are heading out toward twain those buildings. the original crash took place just about quarter to 9:00 by my reckoning. i don t know the exact time. but about quarter to 9:00. obviously the building wouldn t be packed but it was still early enough. we were-ing to pat dawson. katy and tom i was thinking while pat was talking. you both spechbt time at that building in oklahoma. how many stories was that? i m sorry to interrupt. there s car bomb that exploded outside the state office. can that s from the control room? can we go to anyone for information on that. where is andrea mitchell? is she at the state department? the state department has been evacuated as well as the white house. the u.s. capitol has been evacuated. obviously the pemt ot has as well. we ll go to mik. what is the latest from the pentagon? they ve not only evacuated the area but they re clearing the entire area. security forces have report thad they ve seened information of even hijacking. it s about 20, 25 miles out of washington, d.c., heading in this direction. donald rumsfeld was refusing to leave the building. we ran into the top naval officer, and they were loading him to take him to an alternative command site. they were taking admiral clark to an alternative command site. reporter: can you hear me? yeah, mik, go ahead. reporter: i m sorry. officials here are taking it very seriously. we were standing with secretary rumsfeld. that have set up an alternative command sight in the area. the latest reports are that another plane may have been hijacked and headed in this trekz. katie? we should also tell you, mik, this is tom brokaw, that all international flights headed to the united states are being diverted to canada, this at a time when jim mick la shelf i can tells us there s an unconfirmed report that there s another hijacking. all planes have beea been attac. andrea mitchell is standing by. she has more information. secretary of state colin p powell is on his way from lima, peru. state department officials and the nsc have been evacuated as well. condi rice was in the situation room and cia george tenet has been holding office in langley, virginia. as i reported earlier, teams were stranded in monterey, california, where they were on a secret military exercise against this kind of event. to iner er erupt for a second, can you give us a report of a car bombing outside the state department? i cannot confirm that. we got information but it s not confirmed. andrea, thanks. i m sorry to interrupt. we re going back to the pet gone with jim miklaszewski. i ve got my eyes peeled but security force over the area have blared out anyone near the pentagon to take cover immediately. there was earlier an indication that another plane may have been hijacked and headed in this direction. so far we see security helicopters circling the pentagon. again, the skies are crystal clear blue and i can t see the speck of an airplane but security forces here obviously alarmed enough and telling people not only to take some distance from the building but take medial cover. can you tell me a little bit more. let s take a look. the other tower has just collapsed. you re looking at live pictures of the second trade center collapsing as a result of the crash of the airplane into the side. that is, i believe, the first tower that was struck at 8:42 eastern time. that has now fallen to. there s been a declare racing of war. where s wayne, where s wayne, where s wayne. pat, can you hear us? obviously there is pandemonium downtown. pat is not far from the world trade center as you can hear from the sirens and you can only imagine the confusion and terror that s in that area after not one but both trade center towers have now collapsed. more than 100 stories of steel, concrete, electrical. there it is. that s a videotaped replay. we re back at 10:30 eastern time on this tuesday morning, this horrific incredible not be believed tuesday morning. you re looking at live pictures of the world trade center where just a few minutes ago within the last minute actually, the second twin tower collapsed. just to recap if you re just joining us, around 8:42 eastern time this morning here in new york city, a plane crashed into the right twin tower of the world trade center, about two-thirds of the way up the building leaving a huge gaping hole, a huge fire, and tons of bui billowing smoke. about 25 minutes later a huge jet, believed to be a 727 or 737. or even reports of a 757. crashed into the second twin tower. the first plane incidentally was on flight from boston, massachusetts, to los angeles. here s the video of the second plane striking the tower. that right. we re not sure of the origin of that plane, is my understanding. the first plane that caused that hole on the righthands side in the other twin tower was from boston to l.a.x., los angeles. it was what followed was unclear. we should note about an hour after the first collision at the pentagon, reportedly another plane crashed into the pentagon, which is just outside washington, d.c., in northern virginia. all air traffic has been stopped. government buildings have been evacuated as well as other buildings in the country. the sears tower in chicago. you can imagine other billings in major cities and small cities are going to be evacuated as well. there s been an unconfirmed report of car bombing. we have not been able to pin that down. jim miklaszewski has a report of another hijacking. we tell you that so that you have as much information we can possibly get. at the pentagon, all people outside were told to take cover just moments ago but jim miklaszewski say the skies are clear. there was an unconfirmed report that plane that was hijacked was headed for washington. we want to mention the president is on route from florida where he was there to visit an elementary school to talk about literacy. obviously his plans have change dramatically. colin powell is also on his way back from lima, peru. he was scheduled to be in colombia. probably not at the white house. they ll probably take him to a sif location, some in the hills of georgia. air force one is a usual one where they have a fighter jet. that s where we stand. think about the loss of life that we could have seen this morning if you think about the fact that when full the world trade scepters hold about 50,000 people. no telling how many people were there before 9:00 this morning and then shortly after 9:00 in the other tower. but if you look at this picture here, tom and katie, at lower manhattan, it appears the terrorists have succeeded this time in doing what they wanted to do back in 1993. this is war, a declaration on the united states. the pentagon which is, of course, the headquarters of the mighty military of the world balanhas been attacked as well. all flights taking off after these attacks were grounded. international flights have been sent to karen da. transatlantic flights going to canada now. there s been great chaos visited upon this country to say nothing as wow pointed out, matt, so importantly, of the untold loss of life and we know it s going to be horrendous. we don t know what the exact numbers are but we can only tell you by looking at the pictures that you can guess as well as we can that there are going to be a lot of people who aren t going to be able to escape that. back in 1993 when the bomb blew up in the basement of the world trade center, so many survivors told us how long it took them without power in the elevators to walk down the smoke-filled stairways. of course, the triage unit thats be s been set up. area hospitals are receiving victims. and as matt said 50 thousand capacity when everyone is in the billing. but many people at 8:52 a.m. are at their desk in their offices. one young man was working at his devg when someone call and said what s happening and he said we re blanking dying here. there s a picture of lower manhattan, ladies and gentlemen, the most important city in the world in so many ways and now it s been attacked by terrorists at the world trade center, and the damage is beyond our ability to tell you in complete detail. let me tell you i was going to say. here s what the president said. he canceled an education appearance. here s what he said a short time ago. ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for america. i unfortunately will be going back to washington after my remarks. secretary rod pace and the governor will take the podium and discuss education. i want to thank the folks aet the booker elementary school for their hospitality. today we ve had a national tragedy. two airplanes have crashed into the world trade center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. i have spoken to the vice president, to the governor of new york, to the director of the fbi, and i ve order thad the full resource of the federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act. terrorism against our nation will not stand. and now if you ll join me in a moment of silence. that that was george w. bush about an hour ago speaking from long boat key, florida, he is en route to washington, d.c. we re looking at pictures on the ground or we were of apparently some of the victims. let s go to pat dawson if he can hear us hchl s on the ground. this extraordinary. these are the emergency workers coming back. it was just about ten minutes ago we described to you the possibility of that north tower collapsing. about five minutes after we went off the air, it did collapse. once again we have no idea at this point the loss of life. i can only tell you there were hundreds of emergency workers down there about five or six blocks. it took probably about i would say no more than 50 or 60 seconds for that dust cloud to make its way up here as it began to envelop us. we had to literally move out of the way. there were dozens and dozens of firemen trying to run past us. in fact, even our cameraman got in his car and drove. the people who you see here are pretty much all emergency workers. many of them i have seen in the last two to three minutes quite frankly are coming out of here and remember this. these are professionals. they re coming out of there looking completely stunned, in shock many of them. struggling for breath. obviously in serious distress, breathing problems are the biggest problems for those who man amged to make it safely out of that area down below us. you can t see much more than a block south of me right now and the world trade center probably stands about ten blocks south of where i am at this moment. and as you can see now, the dust is beginning to pick up here. it really depends on which way the wind blows as to whether north we get heavy dust or not. but at this point i can tell you in the first few minutes emergency workers were trying to get out of there, just survive. you could see that written in their faces. the situation was so desperate they wanted to get out of there. now many of them are getting ared to regroup. a couple have asked where their commander might be. they re trying to go back in there and take care of the people who are in serious trouble. it s no way to if i slip into language that seem as little mel oh dramatic, give me, but this is a circumstance that s very, very difficult to describe which certainly sounds melodramatic. this is something i have never seen before. as i say, the emergency workers themselves trying to gather themselves. you see a police emergency service unit. they re trying basically now to re-establish some kind of a safe perimeter. and many of the workers just happy to be alive. that picture tells it all. happy to be alive after surviving what is an extraordinary event. as we said earlier, 110 stories each. i will tell you that what fell what i saw fell had to be at least 40, 50 stories of that building at first. the skeleton was left at about i would say the 50 or 60th floor after the shell after the structure of the building fell down, the skeleton, the steel skeleton was literally sheeved off and it took probably another 30 seconds before the skeleton collapsed into the street. that was the last we saw of the world trade center. and that was maybe ten minutes ago. when that metal skeleton collapsed into the street. that s nbc s pat dawson. he s standing ten feet from where the buildings used to stand we now have an ap news alert out of pittsburgh. officials at somerset county airport are confirming the crash of large plane north of the airport. that s about 80 miles southeast of pittsburgh. again, officials at somerset county airport confirm the crash of a large plane north of that airport which is located about 80 miles to the southeast of the city of pittsburgh. we do not know whether that crash of that plane is related to what has become an obvious terrorist attack both here in new york city and in washington, d.c., at the pentagon. matt, we just got word that the state department security officials are denying those reports of car bomb at the state department. bet city stewart is at the c street area. officials are still believed to be in the operation center. those are highly secured areas in terms of penetration physically. colin powell was headed for peru. he s headed back. we ll have a conference at 11:30 or noon. that is likely to take place at andrews air force base or another safe place. another plane reported to have gone down, this time in the pittsburgh area. there were planes in the air at the time there were orders nof more takeoffs wchl don t know how much more damage the terrorists had in mind. let s go to bog haiger who is, of course, nbc s aviation expert. bob, what kind of information are you getting from your sources? not a lot, katty, from the faa. they re not talking any more hijacking. they can tell a hijacking in progress because the original pilot can press buttons to set off a code but maybe as mat over security they another saying anything about that. they did stop all takeoffs in the u.s. at 9:25 this morning. and then for pilots in the air, they were asked what to do about them. they were to continue on to their destination as long as it was not the new york or washington area or the airport if that s what they wanted to do. personally i saw the blast take place moments after i was trying to get up to new york, you could see the smoke billowing out of the pentagon. i can give you a little zrimgs of what it was like on the streets of washington. it was quite crowded trying to get back to nbc. they have not only given the white house but other buildings, but at this point they ve given all federal employees to leave their offices and get home. so there are traffic jams in washington. bob, i m sure you re going get more information to us momentarilier but first we want to go to jim miklaszewski at the pentagon. mik? ka katie, they re still cleag people out. there was a very telling dramatic moment just a second ago when a u.s. air force f-16 flew very low level, did a wide sweeping turn around the pentagon and back over washington. and as one official said next to me, my god, they re now covering over washington. it s been described as a declaration of war. let s go back to manhattan where the situation only gets worse, not better. that is the financial district of the world. it s also a residential area, great commercial area. both twin trade tower buildings have now collapsed onto the ground. there is an untold loss of life. the ripple effect goes on with all the smoke and dust that s spread out across that very densely populated area. it goes down below ground as well as in the high rise buildings there. there are many residential structures in that area as well. some heroic rescue workers were down there trying to get people out of the building when the first building came down and then the second building did as well. without any sound in looking at this, there is kind of a surreal quality, but that is the epicenter of great, great national tragedy and a great loss of life, no question about it this morning. we re talking about people who were hurt, perhaps killed in this blast. many of them have been brought to area hospitals including st. vincent s hospital. bob bazell is there. what s the latest? reporter: well, ka katie, ambulances continue to come in. roads streets have been closed off so they can continue to come in. several buildings that were not involved in the world trade center area have been shut down and people told go home. many wandering aimlessly on the streep, people openly weeping and hugging each other. at times described as the beginning of war, but the casualties keep coming in. burns, smoke inhalation very severe. all the medical people i ve talked to say this is the tip of the iceberg, we expect casualties to come in all through the night and way beyond. bob, if you can just stand by for a moment because we have this report from ap. large plane crash tuesday morning just north of the somerset county airport 80 miles southeast of pittsburgh. the plane peering to be a both 737 crashed. according to county 911 dispatchers wpix-tv reported. the crash came at the same time as two planes crashed in new york city city and the twin 110-story buildings collapsed. it also struck the pentagon although that was refuted. spread fear across the nation. there wither no o details and it was not clear whether the crash was related to the others. again, that was a report, a bulletin issued by the associ e associat associated press. what s so stunning about all this, matt and katie, there s been no indication that this carefully coordinated massive attack was going to occur. there s been a complete intelligence failure here and there will be obviously down the road a price to pay for that. that s actually not all that surprising, tom. we talked in the past following every terrorist attack how vulnerable tl united states is and many experts saying how unprepared they are. the question is can you ever prepare for an attack like this. that s true. but we have people out there. but to have this kind of attack, this sophisticated, this efficient, striking at the heart of the nation s capital, new york city, now if this is true that this plane went down as a result of the attack, we don t know whether that s the end of it. this is massively well coordinated attack of some kind that is nothing short but a declaration of war on this country. and terrorist experts and intelligence experts are saying there are a very few number of terrorist groups that are capable of planning and a couple of names come to mind. i m not going to throw them tout because we don t have any reports. before i go to jamie gangel, some of the eyewitness reports are chilling. one man talked about getting off a path train, that s a subway train, and looking up at the first building after the explosion and seeing people jumping out of a window, hearing people jumping out of a window attempting to get to safety and when the second explosion occurred he felt the heat of the explosion on the back of his neck. jamie ganger, our national kropt, she s joining us on the phone. jamie? reporter: matt, speaking of the intelligence officials you were just mentioning, now we can finally no longer reach anyone on the phone at the cia. apparently they have been evacuated. we knoll the national security agency which is the eavesdropping agency which is south of ft. meade, maryland, they have been shut down. which we ve heard in both places is all nonessential personnel have been told to leash and i can only imagine they are trying to move some of their operations out of the buildings as well for backup procedure but in addition to whatever intelligence was or was missed in all of this, we now have perhaps some problems gathering intelligence as those buildings are now being shut down. let s go back to the enormity of it. all planes in this country have been grounded. i mean you think about the impact that has. i mean is there ever a time we can imagine something like that ever happening before? the most powerful nation in the world and national security officials and terrorist experts have been saying for some time a small band of very willful and sophisticated people can bring us to a halt and they ve done just that. there s a psychological terror as a result of all this as you can only imagine how it plays out across the country today. people not living in new york are dwirning what happens around me. it is hard to overstate the consequences of all this and this is just the beginning. we ll be living with this story and dealing with the consequences for some time. the united states will challenge as a result of all this. we already thought there was a lot of security at the airports and so on and yet there was a successful hijacking at boston airport and the consequences we re seeing on the screen this morning so this is going to change this country profoundly in not just the coming days but coming months to say nothing as you ve been saying, matt, on the horrific loss of life. on that subject, to complete a thought i start before, you both were out at the federal building in oklahoma city, a much smaller building and it took the rescue workers more than a week to find all in the wreckage. we have two buildings, each 110 stories. it s mind-boggling what it s going to take over the next few weeks to find survivors and victims. it continues to be a terrifying situation because there are a number of planes up in the air as this took place and a number of unconfirmed and frightening reports that we heard earlier through jim miklaszewski, that someone had gotten word at the pentagon there was another plane north of pittsburgh. it s completely unclear. and it s unclear whether these planes en route were grounded themselves. in other words there were emergency landings or what. thing it s very difficult to get any communication with airports all across the country because they re i m sure completely chaotic. katie, you know in your time with oklahoma city and spending time with the victims, the whole psychological feeling and in a way our sense of innocence, this is fortress america, it couldn t happen here. we said it about the more rah federal build and columbine high school. this is a whole different magnitude. i have to say i have never, ever witnessed anything quite as horrific, i hate to keep saying it because we have seen these types of things play out in movies, and, you know, in worst-case scenario worst-case scenarios and in dramatic incidents, but certainly no one has ever seen this kind of thing unfold and it is really shocking. we want to go now on the phone. we have neil livingston who s an expert on terrorism. mr. livingston, can you hear me? i can. we were talking about what it would take in terms of planning and coordination to pull off an attack like this with so many prongs, aet least two attacks here in new york city, one in washington, d.c. we don t know if the crash of that plane outside pittsburgh is related, but give me an idea of how many groups in the country would be capable of something like this. there are very few groups in the world capable of this kind of action. you have to remember also that we have the people who hijacked these plane were going to a certain death as well. they were suicide bombers in effect. that suggests that it s not something like the cartels who has the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to carry out the coordinated attacks. i think obviously the finger of suspicion and we re also very conscious of pointing in that particular direction but we have to look to the middle east, we have to look to osama bin laden, some palestinian groups right now. but even in the past when we were talking about osama bin laden and his group, there had been intelligence experts who picked up conversations to give some kind of indication, even if we didn t understand them until after the attack, is it unusual with so many prongs to an attack that there wouldn t have been some type of warning through intelligence sources? it s a myth that we always know these things are. going down. part of the problem and we just had a warn gog out to our embassies and military bases in the far east, that could have been a diversion. we ve had so many warnings. . people tend to fade into the background noise. unless we have specific information we generally don t take action. these groups are focussed with bonds of kinship and focused for years. it doesn t surprise me that we didn t know this was coming. all right. mr. livingston, thank you very much. we appreciate it. benjamin levy is at the scene near the world trade center. actually he s going to tell us precisely where he is and what he saw. can you hear me? caller: hello. it s katie couric. can you tell us what you ve seen? right now i m in lower manhattan. i work at the federal building behind city hall. we were sitting at our desks. at about 9 chn 30 we heard an explosion and then we saw the plan hit the second building and we re evacuated. as we turned to walk away. 15 minutes after we left the building the second tower just disappeared from sight. i ll tell you i never have seen anything more horrible in my entire life. did you see any casualties, mr. leavy? we bumped into a guy from tower one who said he had a chance to get out of the building after the plane hit the first one. he had to get out of the second one. he said that people were jumping out of the windows to get away from the fire. where are you now, benjamin? i m in a hair salon in lower manhattan talking to you guys. and was the whole federal building evacuated, mr. leavy? yeah. we started running out of fwilding as soon as we saw the second explosion. and then i work on the 22nd floor. as soon as we were down at the bottom, they sounded the alarm and then they announced evacuation, but most of us were already out. how far are you physically actually from the world trade center? right now or when i worked? when it happened. about six blocks away. and you were able to get out pretty easily and there were no electrical problems in your building as a result of the impact of fire or something? no, we got out pretty good, thank god. the whole area down there, city hall, world federal building and all the other buildings have been evacuated as well? oh, yeah. as we were living the police were telling shop owners to shut their buildings and go home. that must be what was enveloped. that covered the entire lower end of manhattan which is a considerably large area, not only considerably but in terms of the financial network, the commerce and residential areas. you could smell the smoke. you could smell it but we were walking away from it. benjamin levy. thanks for talking with us. i m so glad you re safe. katie, we ve got information about what s going on around the country. the state department has been moved to training center in arlington, virginia. in minneapolis, st. paul, minneapolis shut down. georgia, hart field. they re tightening security throughout the state. that s the home of andrews air force base. home to the largest base has been under complete security and philadelphia international airport has been closed and liberty bell. all national monuments. california has been put on the highest alert. they re on tactical alert. the complex in oakland, tennessee, put on heightened security. it us now comi it now coming. just a quick note from one of the hospitals from downtown in new york city where they say that hundreds of people have been burned from head to toe. this is from dr. steven stern at st. vincent s hospital. the entire entrance to the emergency room was lined with stretchers covered with white sheets. the doctor said most of the victims had burns. they re being treat at a number of hospitals including st. vincent, nyu, downtown is five minutes away. as a spokesperson told us earlier, they ve had a lot of experience after the terrorist bonling of the world trade center in 1993 and they have obviously all been mobilized and the emergency crews are working feverishly outside the world trade center. you are looking at a live picture of lower manhattan at 11:00 east coast time on a day of tragedy and terror in the united states. you re looking what remains of the world trade center in lower manhattan. earlier this mooring just before 9:00 and just after 9:00, two planes in individual attacks struck each tower of the world trade center causing gaping holes in both towers. you re looking at a tape now after the first impact and there is the second impact of a large jet flown we now believe deliberately into the second tower. it was a short time after that that the towers collapsed. and then there was an attack in washington, d.c. we now have confirmed reports that the plane crashed into the pentagon. we have no reports of confirmed injuries or death, however, it s clear officials all across the country are now saying this is a deliberate terrorist attack on the united states. as tom has put it so far this morni morning, this is a declaration of war against the united states. of course, we should mention, by the way, tom, before we talk about terrorism, that another large plane crashed as well just north of somerset county airport 80 miles southeast of pittsburgh, pennsylvania. it was a both 767 that crashed around 10:00 this morning and it is unclear whether the crash was related to the other crashes that took place this morning. president bush is en route back to washington. the state didn t has been evacuated. the there has been an attack on the pentagon. that building has been evacuated. the white house has been evacuated. this is the most serious attack on the united states since pearl harbor. there has never been a terrorist attack in this magnitude, in fact, on any country in the world so far as we can tell. the untold loss of life in new york alone. we only know there have been hundreds of burn victims have been brought to area hospitals. wi don t know the number of casualties at the pentagon and we don t know the number of death in the plane that went down as katie pointed out north of pittsburgh. we know for a fact that one of these planes that was crashed into the world trade center was hijacked from boston this morning. it was american airlines flight 11 in flight from boston to los angeles. we had reports it was diverted to jfk and later perhaps while feigning landing at jfk it diverted and flew into the world trade center. all airports have been stopped. they have been stopped in terrells of planes departing or planes en route. it s unclear if their plans have been changed. the state didn t has been evacuated. the white house. the cia. many, many buildings in lower manhattan is has been evacuated as well. and they re being diverted to canada. still no claim of responsibility that is verifiable orab. yasser arafat has said it s shocking and appalling. in 1993 was the when the bomb went off in the garage of the world trade center, killing six people and injuring a thousand people. that, of course, was an unbelievable scene, but compared to this this is what they intinlded to do back then. let s go back to bob hager who has some information for us. bob? as you comment about the various plains involved, the ones we know about so far because it s confirmed by american airlines, flight 11 that was scheduled from boston logan airport to los angeles, flight 11 was hijacked this morning and it was presumed that may have been one of planes that went into one of the towers at the world trade center. there were at least two more planes involved in this because the other building was hit. there were eyewitnesss that say plane went into the pentagon. so far we don t know the source of the plains, whether they were commercial, hijacked, whether they had been hijacked at all. i would point out that the plane that crashed, the faa has not confirmed that crash. faa is confirming faa is now confirming. this adds to the rumors. there are several airplanes unaccounted for. there are rumors there might have been other planes hijacked that we didn t yet know the outcome of it and the faa is confirming there are several, the world i heard, several planes that are unaccounted for that were evidently hijacked and have not come to kuhn collusion yet. bob, we d like you to get the list of as many of those as you can. we re going to replay a tape of the second attack on the world trade centers in slow mo. there is the plane. as you can see a large airlines-type plane. and now the collision. flown deliberately into the second one. and they say, several, bob do. they give you any indication of what they re talking about? reporter: well, the description that i had and that was just passed on to me a moment ago so i wasn t talking personally to the faa person, but several is the count i had. bob, american airlines, flight 11 out of boston, do we know exactly what kind of plane that was and perhaps how many people were on board? reporter: we do not yet but i think we re going to get additional information from american. they were supposed to be adding comment to it from dulles airport here in a few moments so we might learn a little bit more about that. right now it s very important to worry about rumors. i d like to hear more confirmation on the plane that crashed in pennsylvania. i think we need to hear more from that. we have a report here that osama bin lad whon s often identified as the world s leading terrorist warned three weeks ago that he and his followers would carry out an unprecedented attack for their support of israel. it was said a fundamental list was certainly behind the attack of the world trade center in new york. quote, it s most likely the work of fun damon stall lists. osama bin laden warned three weeks ago he would be involved in an unprecedented attack, a very big one. he has interviewed osama bin lad and he s maintained his contact. that s the first report that he may have been responsible. obvious lit was a very sophisticated organization, carefully coordinated. louie free, the fbi director as he left office said his continuing great concern with a number of terrorist cells that exist in america, not just in some shadowy enclave of afghanistan, they ve taken route in this country because it s so easy to get here. let s talk a little bit about osama bin laden because he was associated with it. why don t we talk about him and what he has done here in the united states, tom, to give the people a little bit of back ground. he s from saudi arabia originally, wealthy, very sophisticated in terms of using the new technology. we believe he s being harbored in afghanistan. no one knows for sure. a number of people have been successful in getting to him. they believe he s behind a number of bombings in kenya as well. he is obviously a zealot of great dark passion and mostly a the united states. brian remains on the phone. brian, tell us a little bit more about osama bin laden and if you think he might, in fact, have carried out this kind of well orchestrated horrific attack on the united states. well, certainly he would have to be included in any very, very short list of suspects, but it is premature to be able to say with any confidence who might be responsible. in something like this, we know what has ha happened, where it has happened, who and why, it takes a bit longer to figure out. i have no doubt that we will ultimately be able to tied fie who s responsible but until that time we can only speculate. but, brian, in an attack of this magnitude that is so carefully coordinated and executed with such cold-blooded efficiency, it obviously had to be a very sophisticated organization. clearly this took organization and while organization in terrorism in recent years has become more fluid, that, is we re not dealing with the identifiable terrorist organization that we dealt with in the 1970s and 1980s, terrorism in the last decade has been a lot more fluid and from these universes of like-minded fanatics, people have been able to put together these ad hoc conspiracies. nonetheless the magnitude and the coordination does indicate a considerable amount of planning and organization. mr. jenkins, if you ll hold for a second, i want go back to bob hager of nbc. apparently we don t have bob. let s go to jim kallstrom, former director of the fbi s new york office. jim, we talked about sooner or later we ll know who did this but where does law enforcement start? in several cases we talk about the plane as the weapon but when do we start to track who s responsible? well, matt, i think someone said out there this is unprecedented. law enforcement will start from the base of intelligence that they hopefully have and hopefully have always hat. that s the result of it. we have a short memory in the united states. maybe that s good, maybe that s bad. that s why we need effective law enforcement. although as pointed out it s very, very difficult to stop things like this. the first goal would have been to stop this horrific, horrific convenient and the second goal is to save as many people as we can and to find out who did it. and thirdly and most importantly not let something like this happen again. jim, if you were starting the investigation tomorrow morning where would you begin with man who hijacked the american airlines flight? i d probably have a hundred courses of action taken simultaneously. i m sure that s what s going on. it s a bit of chaos. i look at the twa tragedy and whee we responded the way we did. we were at a high threat for terrorism and it certainly looked like terrorism and this is so much bigger than. it s chaotic but law enforcement is trying to make sense out of it. they re trying to obviously not let something happen in the next ten minutes, next ten hours, next two hours. and, of course, a long range plan to see what we can do about stopping this. we live in a free society. people come and go. we see that talked about on the news every night, not so much from a terrorism standpoint but from a work standpoint. but people landed on major airports every day undocumented. so it s extremely difficult as brian point outer ler, these terror cells are very insulated from each other. it s not like the mafia where you put in a wire tap and you know everything that s going on. that s not the case here. we know about this tremendous hatred. we talked about this within law enforcement for the last decade. they tried to bring the world trade center down. they ve blown up many, many other government symbols. jim, i m sorry to interrupt. it s katie couric. we want to go down to the trade center. pat talking with an official. pat? reporter: forgive me. we re trying to get obviously gorks ahead. put the microphone on there. as you can imagine, this is a very, very difficult situation here. we re here with a couple of guests who can give us at least some insight into what s going on here. this is chief william hall, the port authority police of new york. as we told you, they have jurisdiction over the trade center and also allen rice, director of the trade center. do we have any idea how many are in there? we have no idea. it was rush hour time that this took place this morning so the numbers we don t know yet. we tried to get almost everybody out there that we could early on. after the first two crashes when the planes hit the building, there was roughly about, i would say, an hour, an hour and 15 minutes between where the south tower collapsed. give or take. how many people were you able to get out, do you know? we don t know. we tried to do a floor-by-floor search to do the best we could to get everybody out. as you know there were people coming out still after the building came down. do you have any idea how many people would normally be at the billing? possibly 10,000 people in each tower. 10,000 people in each tower would tippicably in there on a normal business day and we get another 5,000 visitors during the course of the day. so by 8:30, 9:00 the billing should have been full. so in other words by 8:30, 9:00 the building would have been fill kag passty with workers so we re talking roughly 10,000 people. per tower. per tower. now at this point you have a situation of these towers having collapse thad is bordering on chaotic. what s the first challenge? what are you doing at this moment? i see emergency workers try to go in there after the first couple of crashes and come running back out. what do you do now? i guess the next step between me and my chief and staff, we re going to determine whether it s safe enough to look into the building to continue looking and evacuating people. are there any emergency workers in there now? we don t know that. we don t know. if they are, they would have been trapped. it s possible. from what wi saw happen here, yeah, very much so. we were trapped ourselves in the building in the basement. the building collapsed and we came out of it. you were in the basement of the south tower. no, we were in the building of building five? six. and i was in building five. we had to dig our way out. you had to dig your way out. what was that like? scary. but i was a volunteer fireman for years so you learn not to panic. one last thing. what do you do right now to try to get to those people? how long before you get to the people. we have to wait and get the building safe. we have our engineers here to make the building safe and we have rescue teams. we re breaking the men and women up into rescue teams and they re ready to go once the building is safe, what s left. when are you going do it? right now and i hope soon. is any part of the building standing? i can t see. i don t even know. you don t know how much of the building is left. we re going to assess the situation. we understand you have an emergency situation. we appreciate you taking the time out. the lastist report we have at this point from those who are in charge of that. is speaking to the director of the world trade center and the port authority chief. they re as they said trying to put together a plan to assess the damage. the sequence of extraordinary tragedies, catastrophes, really. first the two crashes and then in sequence, one tower of the building coming down, another tower of the building coming down. obviously the first order of business is to try to organize themselves and go back in there that doesn t endanger more emergency workers because i can tell you from what i ve seen there were a number put in harm s way. they d have to to be. we ll three it back to you, tom. those are the first number. they think there were about 20,000 people in the two buildings to say nothing of the untold people in the streets. who could have also suffered injuries or worse when the buildings did come down. this is tanlt mount to war. there is plane that attacked the pent gone and a report that plane went down outside of pittsburgh. robert hager has more information for us. robert? reporter: there s more c confirmati confirmation, flight 11. took off from boston, was to go to lachlkts american airlines confirmed it was hijacked and we have some first numbers how many on board. 58 passengers and a crew of 11. 69 people on that flight. that s presumed to be one of the towers in trld wo trade center, the other planes that we know of, the plane at the world crash center and the plane that crashed into the pentagon area, those are unknown flights. the pennsylvania crash which is still not the faa but it s local authorities saying it. our affiliatiifiliate in pittsbs it was a flight that originated in chicago and was headed to cleveland but i caution that sort of information coming off radio scan irs is very, very sketchy and so unreliable. bob, an fbi spokesman is quoted as saying there were four flights hijacked all together. we know about american 11. are you getting any kind of detail like that at the faa? no. the faa is not getting into that kind of detail and a moment ago i said there were several planes still in the air. that report was coming to me while was on the air. i m getting it second hand. now i understand what they re saying. flights that were unaccounted for. so that could mean in addition to american airlines flight 11, does not mean others did. dan has shut all is airports down but will leave the airports open to allow incoming planes inbound for the u.s. and allowing them to die vertz into canada. otherwise they re not taking any other inbound flights. now we get word from american airlines, bob, that it had two aircraft in this. 18 passengers, nine flight attendants and two pilots. flight 77, a boeing 757 operating from washington dulles, 58 passengers, four flight attendants and two pilot. that s one of our guys in the dlal area from american airlines. yes. so now we know the identity of two of the flights involved in today s incidents, that leaves at least one more and if the report of the crash at pittsburgh is accurate, that leaves two more that we don t have identified yet but it gives us those two that you messaged. both of these planes could have been into the twin trade towers because plainly they were two airliners that went into the twin trade towers that went up in here. are you listening to me? they say there was a bomb in the school i was told by firefighters. pat dawson, let s go to you in lower manhattan. you report of another bomb? we re being evac yatd. we ve been told by firefighters there s a bomb that has been reported in this building. it s a high school. as you can see, they re moving everyone way interest fwiling. they say there s a bomb in the building. they re moving us to the north. that s according to firefighterings on the scene, we re going to move out of here right now just to keep ourselves safe. we re going to walk north ourselves. there were reported of a bomb at stieverson school. these are the even the ambulances which were down there are being moved north. the firefighters are being moved north. everybody is being moved north. we re being asked by police to go north and get out of the way. it s the report of a secondary disease possibly in the area of the school so they re going to move everybody back. secondary meaning a bomb. possibly. where did it come from? over our radios, from the advisers on down. and they re evacuated. they re all evacuated. the school has been evacuated? i don t think there was anyone in the school this morning. at this point i think everybody was evacuated early this morning just because of the fact it s so close to the world trade center. i would imagine i never saw any kid fwos into the school this morning so i presume they wouldn t allow them to go into the building and anyone who was here by 8:45 were probably moved out within moments after the crash took place because it literally is only ten blonls north of here. the big story obviously that s still to be resolve. there are reports of four. the twin towers, pittsburgh, another kachbd of plaind of pla the pentagon. we don t know what flights that are or where they re headed. we can only tell you american 11 and 77 have been identified as american airlines as two of the airplanes invofrmed in the incident. and the high jk the hijackings occurred far from each other. we re going to go down to nbc s tim russert who s standing by with more information. tim? tim? apparently tim can t hear us. tim do, you hear us? i can hear you now. kl owe. police given us your information. i ve been speaking to porter goss. we re trying to continue our conversation on the air. he told me he was on the phone with house speaker has earth about the situation when a cold red was declared on the hill, that the speaker has moved to a severe place because he s in line of kmabld with our national leadership. he also said that this extremely well coordinated attack could only be done by a very few people, very few organizations and that because of the magnitude of it, it will be relatively, easy, to, quote, see their finger prints and then we as a nation are going to have to make a diseasive evaluation of who it was. mr. doss hasn t seen anything like this. as it plays out, perhaps more to come. he ll be joining us on the telephone so we can hear his words directly. he ll be believed throughout the day because of his position. obviously president bush is on his way back to the nation s capitol. is it your understanding that he s arrived yet or do you know his whereabouts at this point. i do not know that. there are people in the white house doing their jobs and so with the pentagon in the nerve center of both of those facilities. our highest ranking officials are monitoring the situation, making a daerlgs how wide spread this attack may be and trying very, very hard to get a handle on exactly who did it and just how we respond. tim wrks very secured areas in case of a nuclear attack in the past and the mountains of virginia not too far via a helicopter ride. any indication the president will have to go to with unof those facilities? i vchbhaven t heard that. they said wrks re not going there. obviously they re on the highest state of alert. they understand the magnitude of this. they understand the people are going to be waiting for a response from washington other than what the president gave from florida. as you might expect even our most sophisticated communications 2001 era, it s hard to get any information. cell phones are down. hard lines are down. but i ve been assured by people at the white house and pentagon that they have it under control the best they can. but like all of us, they simply don t know who did this. tim organization talked about porter goss. obviously the capitol was evacuated along with other major government buildings and monument monuments. where is congress right now? what are they doing and where are they? they said a prayer and recessed. many of the mens headed home. they were obviously lacking for fit. i academy told congressman porter goss is on the phone. can you hear me? congressmans go, can you hear me? we ll continue to effort that frmgs most have returned to their homes here in washington because the building itself has been evacuated. the leadership of the congress as i mention speaker hazert is in a secure place. he s the third person in the hierarchy. tim, thanks very much. when you get him oob the phone, we ll get back to you. we re going back down with people who were inside the billings. ashleig ashleigh. i m just about five and ten blocks north of where the two towers have come down. we re son russly having a bit of trouble right now mine taning our location because we just heard one more explosion. that s about the fourth one. the police are telling us that they re car bombs or its overheated. every time it happens there s more activity. i don t know if you can shoot pad me. at the time we were there when the first trade tower came down my producer and i were overcome by the cloud of debris and smoke that came at us so rapidly we had to break down a window to an apartment building we had to break the window and go into the second door inside to breekts. we were followed by a accomplish and security guard from the world trade center area. i want to show you something if i can. i m using a cell phone so i can hear you because there are no cell lines coming in. see if you can zero in on this right here. this is the kind of debris all over the ground. if you can see the address, one world trade center. obviously we re having some technical problems with ashleigh banfield who s on the ground at the world trade center. here s the first confirmation from american airlines. near pittsburgh. flight 93, a boeing 767. from newark bound for san francisco. no information how many were on board. a 757 carries a lot of o folks. anyone flying from newark to san francisco know that most of those flights carry a full load. this brings to three the number of confirmed flights that have been involved in this tragic day. american airlines flight 11 from boston to los angeles, flight 77 from washington dulles errant to los angeles with 58 passengers on board and now the unite flight, tom, you just mentioned and you can say that number of passengers was relatively low on those first flights and we can only hope this was not a full flight, this united flight. you know there was a collapse not just of intelligence but airport security that that many planes were hijacked almost simultaneously. although, tom, these days as we know from the twa tragedy, oftentimes some of these devices are absolutely it s impossible to see them in our kind of security x-ray machines at airports. some are made of palalastiques. we re going to go to bob bazell. obviously we re very concerned about the people in the world trade center when the planes crashed. katie, the wounded are starting to come in with great regularity. almost every 30 seconds an balance pulled up. cardinal egan, the head of the catholic archdiocese is standing out on the streetses giving last rites saying god help us many time over. that there s call for giving blood. people are lined up around the block. everybody wants to help in some way. new york has become surreal is tick because of all the subways and commuter lines and bridges and tunnels are shut down. in the hospitals there s so many uninjurju injured. it s been an enormous amount of work for all the staff. people who were off have come in. calls have come on for your specialists. it s going to be a very grueling several days ahead. bob, the other thing ahead i don t know if you the tell about manhattan and the rest. are the ambulances able to get through? we re in a tomb here in the studio in midtown. reporter: tom, i had trouble hearing you just that time. there s a system in place here where they re triaging people in lower manhattan. they re putting sometimes tags around their neck to people you see wandering up from lower manhattan who have slight injuries have been cleared. others have been severely injured. every hospital in the area has been involved in plan to take in some kind of patients. this one where i m at, st. vincent s is one of the closest but every hospital is on alert. every hospital is taking what has become a sea of patients. all right. nbc s robert bazell. bob, thanks very much. let s go back to washington and tim russert who has a guest on the phone. congressmans go. you re exactly right. are you there? i am. as the official of the intelligence committee, what do you think about what you ve witnessed? i m horrified. it s never 100% sure. with got the wakeup call again today. it s unbelievable that anybody would do an act like this, basically using innocent victims on commercial airlines against other innocent victims in our buildings in new york, legislative and executive buildings here in washington. when people are watching this at home, congressman, they re saying how could this happen at the united states of america, a complete breakdown in our airport security, a complete break down in the skurt. over the pentagon, the center of military command. how can this be? we re a free open democrat image society and we take great pride and we pay a great price for it. you fly right over the pentagon. many times we have commented how vulnerable that building is. that building was vulnerable today. commercial planes flying near there, they obviously fly near the trade towers tochl say our airport security is 100%. you know that s not true. youancean youancean you answer a few questions and get on the plane. tragically some kind of an organization somewhere has orchestrated all this in an eventsive fax. we have a great abilities out there who keep us on constant alert of these types of reports. i knew of no specific reporting on this day with these targets, but i can tell you we re scrambling all the time. as you know, we ve seen our military installation subject to attack and others subject to attack before. we stop a lot of it, but obviously we don t get it all. and we re just gouge to have to rethink how we do business in today s world and deal with these kinds of threats. based on your experience as an honored cia agent and now as a highly respected chairman of the house intelligence committee, how many terrorist organizations in the world are capable of pulling off such a coordinated massive attack? i would say there s only a handful if we re not talking about state-sponsored terrorism. if you re talked state-sponsored, it could be more but i don t think we re dealing with state-sponsored. i think we re dealing with a loose net whork who have the same goal. they ve found a way to get together, a network, and pull this thick othings off. one of the hall marks of terrorism is confusion. the hopes is there ll be lots of confusion in the united states and there ll be rumors of other things happening and that will upset how we go about our business and our behavior and how law enforce meant to deal with. the president alluded we will respond. the question is against whom. we want to make absolutely sure when we re dealing with asim t asymmetrical war that we respond appropriately and not provoke any incidents that aret not warranted in the world. in that regard, good information and we re trying to do that. it s going to take some time to do that and get the fingerprints and launch a retaliation. that s certainly true and one of the hallmarks is patience these days. we thank you very much. we ll be contacting you throughout the day and we very much appreciate you joining us this morning. thank you. my prayers to others. back to you. thank you very much. tom, you ve gotten a phone number for people concerned about passengers on those flights. american airlines has confirmed that two of its flights wither hijack and for people who want to know, the number is 1-800-245, -0999. the headquarters 1-800-775-5538. american has said two of o its planes were involved in the hijackings today. apparent employ an american airlines was involved. i said that, in pittsburgh. right. from newark on route. ron insana is here. nope. ashleigh banfield. we re giving out emergency numbers over the airways. i just wanted to ask you for emergency personnel. police or medical. do you know about those explosions. i have no, ma am. are you told we have to move out of this area. i m not aware of that. are they looking for bombs in sewers? all nonessential personnel. they re moving people out of that area. ron insana is here with us in studio. ron, you were downtown at some point because we see you have basically soot and debris on your hair and on your jacket. what happens? one of the msnbc cam aremen and wior trying to get down the street, having driven down. as we were going across the street and we re not terribly far from the world trade center. as we were cutting across in quarantine zone the buildings zbak to disintegrate. we heard it and looked up and started to see the elements on the ground. honor usually it was like a scene from independence day. everything rained down. it was pitch black as the winds were whipping around. i detectived around the corner and got into a car that was open and it was nighttime before several things cleared up. was this the first tow their collapsed? i believe it was. as it was coming down, what that looks like there is mild compared to being at the center. it with was pitch black. smoke and dust? and piece os testify billing. obviously we re concerned about the triage unit set up there to help people get out of the build, ron, to help people who had been carried out of the building and who were being treated medically. were you close enough to survey the scene? i was within a half a block of the building as it started to come down. can you tell us? it was fairly clear. there were areas with blood and debr debris. there were no longer people in area except reporters and police officers. once it began to clear out after several seconds of pitch dark, what did you see? deep smoke. the kind of thing you see in the movies with ash all over the ground, on tops of cars, police cars, windows. i made my way into a building under the one light i could see and stayed there until a couple of other police officers and people inside the building were able to get inside a vehicle. we picked up a few people with injuries and took them to the hospital. what were the injuries? one police officer had a deep gash on his head. he was okay but in shock and a woman had a piece of deep shrapnel in her arm. don t know if it was glass or another part of the building. when that billing came down, one would only imagine all the pieces of steel and concrete that came cascading down as well and hit other places. i imagine the collateral damage was enormous, but we were probably i d say two or three blocks away in a billing where we hold up for a time until we felt it was safe to come out. it was truly the most intense and frightening experience i ever had in my life. it was literally pitch black on the streets and people were, you know, obviously inhale gragt deal of this material as well. so people were having difficulty breathing and wearing face masks as well. we re glad you re all right. united airlines confirms the plane from boston to los angeles is down. no details yet. it s confirmed that flight 93, we believe from newark to san francisco is down. no details. that s the one we thing went down in the pittsburgh area. i wish we could be more sps specific. there have been at least four airlines that have been hijacked. there s going to be a lot of security at boston logan airline because it s believed two flights were there and somehow someone managed to get on these planes and hijack them. this is an event where, ron, we re happy to see you. thank you. you have no idea how happy i am to be here? and then you think about the experiences of thousands of other people down there in the epicenter of all that and when it occurred. our hearts go out to them. and you hear about cardinal eagan delivering last reitz. the magnitude will go on for some time. this is not just a national tragedy but a national security event of an untold magnitude that the country is going to have to deal with. the president s coming back. we are at war. this country has suffered a devastating attack that will cost us in a sense in the loss of life and also cost us in term os our psychological security we have in this country. we re going to have to revisit a lot of our freedoms as a result of this attack and then there s the whole retaliation, who s responsible and what do we do. this is an upsetting wire that came across the trance some. it said thousands of palestinian ys celebrated tuesday s. chanting god is great and delivering candy. yaer is arafat said he was horrified. the u.s. government has become increasingly unpopular in the west bank gaza strip in the last year, fighting with many palestinians, accusing washington of siding with israel. for those of you who think events in far off places like the middle east or afghanistan or the sub continue incandescent or in places in shay have no effect on us, this is the answer today. this place remains an enormous target in the eyes of a lot of people because of the things that make us so great, our freedoms and our sense of security that we have. but america has been changed today by all this. we want to go and find out more about what s being done for those who were injured in these attacks. leslie van sanzandt is with the american red cross kc. can you hear me, leslie? yes, i can, matt. our chapters are local volunteers. they re, of course, the first ones on the scene. unfortunately some are probably also victimized by the event. we re transferring blood as needed. we re taking guidance from emergency management personnel on what assistance we can provide to them to make this, you know, response go smoothly. is there anything i know it s terrell after this has happened but is there anything people might be able to help you out with in terms of donating certain things? you mentioned blood and those things. we re asking people who are in other parts of the country who are blood donors or maybe not blood donors, maybe they can call and schedule an appoint millionaire. our disaster volunteers, mental health volunteers are respo responding. as tom mentioned earlier, this is going to be a long, long response. the emotional trauma, impact is going to be felt, weeks, months, even years. so we re going to be working very hard at this for a long time. thanks very much. thank you. let s go to kathy with new york hospital, fine minutes away from the world trade center where many of the victims have been brought. contact leerngs i know we spoke with you about an hour or so ago. can you tell us what s going on now? apparently we re having problems with kakts lean. i m sure it s as chaotic as it was at st. vin sents with bob bazell where cardinal ee begin was outside delivering last rites to the dead outside the hospital. we ll touch base with kathleen in just a moment. but first we want to go to andrea mitchell in washington. andrea? i ve been told the state department evacuation was precautionary only. there was no car bomb at leeftz reported or rumored not official. there are some officials being redeployed to another location in virginia. the cia is still operational. intelligence officials are still meeting at laj ngley, but those officials have also evacuated the nonofficial employees. the working thee as you have been reporting and speculating is there is only one terror organization in this world that could coordinate this kind of event than would be something operated by osama bin laden. intelligence officials say he is in afghanistan where he s been protected by the taliban. and as you know they ve warned them if there were any attack in the united states, they would hold afghanistan responsible. we will most likely respect military retaliation, but i think right now the full focus of the u.s. government is on finding out how many other possible targets there might be, how many vulnerabilities there might be, making sure there is no chemical or biological element out there. i spoke to former secretary of defense bill cowan and others, and they say those are the first lines of defense to make sure there s not some other event unexpected as this obviously was that could make americans vulnerable. obviously this is the largest intelligence failure since pearl harbor. andrea mitchell, thank you. we re going the check in with kathleen zee chi of new york university hospital. tell us what it s like at your hospital. we re at n with you in lower manhattan and we ve had a steady stream of patients come through the door since the first explosion hours ago. we have information on three-plus fatalities plus there may be additional fatalities that i ve about not yet been informed of. we have had a severe burn case, one individual a amputee, near real surgical injury, full range of injuries from both debris, smoke, and inhalation, smoke, and respiratory issues to smoke and debris from the collapse of the two buildings. so how many medical personnel, kathleen, do you have working there at nyu hospital? we have a medical staff of 500-plus physicians. the entire medical staff has been mobilized as are the nursing staff and they re working as hard as it s possible to to work. tell me again. i know it s hard to estimate how many people you have seen so far? it s in the hundreds. our entire cafeteria has been transformed to a triage area and it is wall to wall people at the present time. thank you very much. let s go to nbc s bob haeger and it s important that we recount. we were talking about four planes unaccounted for. we know what happened to all those four planes? that s it. there is no plane that we know of that is unaccounted for. ntsb is able to match the flights to the accidents or acts of terrorism. the two planes that hit the world trade center were both take offs from boston. one american airlines and it was bound for los angeles. the other belonging to united airlines bound for los angeles. those are the two planes. the american airliner first and then united plane that went into the world trade center. the one that went into the pentagon was an american airlines flight from washington s dulles airplanes to los angeles and the plane that is down southeast of pittsburgh is a united flight. it was bound from newark to san francisco. i heard one report that it was newark via washington national, but i m not sure of that. i can tell you the flight numbers. boston take offense were american airlines flight 10 with 92 aboard. that s one of the ones that hit the world trade center. we have been reporting that it was american airlines flight 11. i am mace taken. it s flight 11. thank you very much. with 92 aboard. then the united airlines that left from boston and hit the other world trade center tower was united 175. i don t have a figure of how many on board it. the flight that went into the pentagon was american airlines flight 77 bound washington dulles to los angeles. 64 people aboard it. the united airlines flight that went down south of pittsburgh was united flight 93 and there was no number on the number of passengers on it. you have four flights known to have been hijacked and known to have crashed. no flights at the moment that are out standing that we know of. that crash that you mentioned near pittsburgh, i want to say that is a united flight from newark to san francisco, is that accurate? that s what i have. i heard it two ways. newark to san francisco and i heard there was a stop to make at washington s reagan s national, but it s not confirmed. united is confirming that. we have a report from cleveland. a boeing 767 out of boston made an emergency landing at cleveland hopkins because of concerns it may have a bomb on board, but no confirmation. we also have because i have a personal friend flying from kennedy to los angeles this morning that that plane was diverted to kansas city. apparently many planes en route to certain locations have made special emergency landings in the wake of this because of concerns that there may be more problems aboard the airplanes. what happens unfortunately is the terrorists themselves don t call to say there is a on board. you have the twisted minds of others what call in. it is chaos in the skies for the flights that were in the air. other flights have been grounded. this country has been immobilized in terms of where the attention is focused on new york city and washington, d.c. the tragedies in pittsburgh as well. no air travel and financial markets. all national monuments are being evacuated. the president has been rushed back to washington, d.c. the pentagon has been attacked by an airliner in effect and capitol hill, code red. the third in mine succession to the president of the united states. we have been saying we are in a state of war with terrorists. they placed a threat on delta. armed personnel will be guarding u.s. installationed not only here in the united states, but the world. you are looking at the southern tip of manhattan island and for so many years we are accustomed to seeing the world trade center standing there behind the empire state building in the foreground. those two towers no longer stand after a terrorist attack this
costs of fighting wildfires like this one in southern california. and keep the news out of ka lee coming. the red carpet awards that willy night in nbc. your host this year, the very talented seth meyers. that s going to do it for way too early. morning joe starts right now. i was under the impression. i thought bruce said he didn t want his music played at you re vents because he didn t believe in your politics. no, you re wrong about that. bruce has never asked me to do that. i saw bruce about a week and a half ago, and he had every opportunity to tell me not to. he didn t and he never has told me not to do it. i m pretty sure i know him and you re wrong. you re now expressing your politics. you re now expressing your politics and your objection, that s fine. don t put it in mr. springsteen s mouth. put it in yours. if you have an objection to it, you object. you have every right to object to it. i know bruce and i ve spoken to bruce and you re wrong. speak your mind. be angry or not, it doesn t matter to me. i have a job to do and i m going to do my job the best way i know how to do it. if you object to it, that s okay. the question i thought i heard what you have to say. we ve got the idea. seriously, when you start off by mischaracterizing. i didn t make it up. i m sure you re pretty sure. you have no place else to go with the story except to stick with the story you got. how about the story about the disabled. if you want to debate, run for governor and i ll debate you. i m not debating you now. that went on and on and on. i kept waiting for it he s back! good morning everyone. it s wednesday, august 20th. welcome to morning joe. that s a good sign because donny is over there that s terrible, he s such a bully. i m sitting there going he s doing really great. okay. onset, we have donny deutsch. you thought that was good? i thought that was great. we ll talk about that in a second. you know what i think is great, also. letting mika introduce people without interrupting her. we have a code on this show. we do? what s the code? don t interrupt. i didn t know about that code seven years in. msnbc political analyst and former chairman of the republican national committee michael steele. in washington, roll call s editor in chief christina bellantoni. good to have you on board as well this morning. also coming up, they did the mugshot of rick perry. what a stupid speaking of governors. did he smile? he had a nice smile. look at him. he s a good looking guy. it s not exactly anything you know what? he looks good and has every reason to be happy right now. the democrats have over reached. from texas to virginia, bob mcdonnell on trial. we ll have report on that as well. that is that s a tough one. let me ask you about mr. springsteen and mr. christie. what did you think? i think the debate might have gone on a little long but i m used to people going on long. maybe that s why i related to it. you kept asking questions and as a reporter, she decided she was going to get into a debate, she had her springsteen information wrong and she started moving on to other questions, and he s right. if they want to hear the reporter, the reporter should hold a town hall meeting. they re there to hear chris christie. was that a reporter or constituent? i think it was a town hall it was a constituent. same with a constituent. sf they want to debate, the constituent can hold her own town hall meeting. i would much rather this happen than having him cowering in the corner going i m sorry. there s somewhere in between. i m not saying he should cower. he comes across as an obnoxious puj listic bully. i m looking as a human being, he looks like an unappealing, nasty human being. no, he doesn t. he looks like a guy there s a way to push back and move on. we ve seen thousands of politicians say that s unacceptable. next question. no disrespect to these two people who i know personally and like personally. but in the age of hillary clinton and jeb bush, a lot of people want to see that. in an age where washington, d.c. is stuck in the mud and everybody has canned responses and nobody shows their real emotions and everything you say is market tested and poll driven, that breaks through, and that s why chris christie worked before, and i think that s why, if the investigations all go what i said from the get-go, he definitely broke away from the mold. he put himself out there in every way in a very honest way, a way that seemed extremely authentic. willie is in jersey the authentic aspect is what resonates with people. it s authentic, but obnoxious. i go out to the hamptons in my $100 million mansion every week end, maybe it comes out that way. i thought you weren t going to it s your house. you have to pay it. he tortures me weekend and week out in the hamptons and he said i might be out there this weekend, can i come hang? we re doing this because sweet little lewis is getting married and having an engagement party. i m going to stay at gatsby s mansion. is it mick that lives there? i m like mick. i ll go there and watch you do all this profane stuff and sit there. then i go back he ll be in awe. i go back to the west end. you should see the green light. and joe will be dancing. really quickly, you re a jersey boy. when they want to know what the kids are thinking on the streets of jersey, they ask willie geist. what do you think? it s an odd topic, whether or not bruce springsteen likes you. i don t think it s as unanimously good as you might think it is in new jersey. i ve talked to people, they like the honesty, they like that kind of stuff. beneath that stuff, when they look at some of the other things he does, they doesn t always love it. the numbers are good for a guy who has been through a scandal, whether you think it s a big deal or not. i think what s important, if he has big aspirations is whether or not that plays outside of new jersey. we ve got a lot of news to cover. isis continues to be a dark cloud that covers the middle east. i can t even show the front of the new york post. but the daily news has a shot of they are absolute savages. i don t know what they think they re proving, but all they re doing is, they re just setting themselves up to be killed, all of them. everybody that acts that way, it never ends well for them when you do that to the united states. it just doesn t. it s not jingoism. where is osama bin laden now? i hope he enjoyed his day in the son. where is saddam hussein right now? i hope he enjoyed it. it s not going to end well for isis. i will say this again thank you president obama for going against your base. this is a scourge that needs to be wiped out from the middle east. i say that with great trepidation after supporting the gulf war, great trepidation after supporting the first gulf war, like about 70% of americans. that was, we found out later, an optional war. this fight against isis, there s nothing operational about it. they are a scourge that will continue to spread and find its way to america s doorstep. the reason i said we should get out of afghanistan four years ago is because the taliban didn t want to blow up buildings in the united states. these people, they want to kill us all, and if they stay in iraq and they stay get in control of an oil field and get money and get weapons, they will come to us and they will kill as many of us as quickly as they can. this is something the president can t ignore. i would like the republicans to salute them for stepping forward and doing what he s done over the past week or two. we can all go back and criticize what he s done i think democrats criticize what we republicans have done. and then we get nowhere. going against the base is something that some pol politician haves a lot of fear about. so that s commendable for you to say. the big story here in the united states, attorney general eric holder will be in ferguson, missouri, in just a few hours, 11 days after the deadly shooting of an unarmed black teenager by police. tense moments overnight between police and demonstrators after calm for most of the day. peaceful protesters could be heard screaming not tonight as water and glass bottle ts were thrown at police. state highway patrol captain ron johnson is hopeful the violence may be declining. i think that was made by the clergy, the activists, volunteers, men and women of law enforcement partnered together to make a difference, but also those citizens took heed to what we talked about last night, not allowing criminals to mask themselves in a peaceful protests. they protested early and went home early and allowed us to have a better look at those criminals and and staters roaming the streets for their own agenda. captain ron johnson. can you show the end of that clip again? i m just going to say it. got to work around the clock because of this. you have one african-american police captain and i see white faces back there. only 3 out of 50 it shouldn t be about race. guess what? it s about race. this is about race. i don t know. that speaks to the problem that that community has. that s the problem in ferguson, exactly. let s go to ferguson. nbc news correspondent craig melvin has been on the ground for several days. it s good to see you. we hear a relatively good night last night but we heard that before so we re leery of celebrating that. what is the mood on the ground and what you think now that you ve been there for a couple days breaks this and brings the peace. that s a good question, willie. everyone seems to be in pretty much universal agreement that the one thing that would probably empty these streets fairly quickly is if there was some sort of indictments, charges brought against that officer. as you know, the grand jury convening about 9:00 this morning to start hearing some evidence, it was very interesting, as you just heard there, 47 arrests last night, no molotov cocktails, no shooting, no teargas used. there was pepper spray used. you can see that in one of the clips played there. but it was calmer. the crowd itself, i can tell you, was smaller last night than it had been. there also seemed to be a shift in police strategy. captain johnson told me earlier in the day that we might see this and we did, in fact, see it last night. in previous nights you saw those officers in riot gear wearing helmets, shields out. shoulder to shoulder. sort of a very offensive position. last night you did not see that. you saw smaller groups of officers and they were mingling, so to speak, in some cases with these smaller groups of protesters as well that once again were being forced to make that lap around the main drag here in ferguson. we also saw those military-style vehicles. in previous nights, they had been right smack in the middle of the street again in sort of an offensive position. nonetheless, an intimidating position. last night those vehicles were not in the middle of the street. they were on the side as well. so there are a number of folks who have said said to me last night, that little things like that did, in fact, make a difference. of course, as you know, captain johnson urged the peaceful protesters not to come out last night and do their protesting in the day. by all accounts it looks like a lot of those protesters did just that. all right. speaking with msnbc s tamron hall, ferguson mayor james knowles looked to downplay suggestions of racial tensions within the community. take a look. there s not a racial divide in the city of ferguson. according to who? is that your perspective or do you believe that s the perspective of african-americans in your city? that s the perspective of all residents in our city. there are people, with all due respect, there are people on air on any network, even if you don t watch this one, who disagree and live there. i m asking, with all due respect, are you listening to them? absolutely. there s 22,000 residents in our community. this has affected about a half mile strip of street in our community. the rest of our community, the rest of the african-americans in our community are going through out their daily lives, going to businesses, walking their dog. kind of like saying after 9/11, look at new york. new york is fine. what s wrong with new york. that s perfect. what are you talking about? nothing has happened in new york. it s a small strip of buildings at the island down there. the guy is clueless right there. he is absolutely clueless. for days people have been asking where is the political leadership in this town. they hadn t seen mayors or members of the city council. he comes out and he s clueless. you understand why folks in that community will pissed off right now. he looks like he just came back from vacation and has no idea what s going on. there s three out of 53 members of the police force, his police force, right? right. that are black. not only that, mika. out of 53 in a city that s 70% african-american. how can you let that happen when you re hiring and trying to figure out a force that represents the community. i know how you let that happen. you don t think there s a problem. then to make matters worse, you say there s not a problem. you think because you say it that that means it s the rule of law because you are clueless and you re not self aware. i don t know if this guy knows, willie, even the egyptian government is chastising for what s going on in ferguson. if the generals in egypt are criticizing you for your human rights record. the ayatollah in iran is tweeting about ferguson, missouri. there are things that happened in the moments after this young man was killed that have traumatized that area of town, that whole town. he was left lying in the streets for hours. he was not covered up. and there were children there were people so stunned at what they were seeing, they were videotaping it because they didn t know what else to do. they were traumatized that they saw this young man get gunned down and he laid there in the middle of the street, not surrounded, not covered. they didn t put they said they didn t want to tamper with the scene. my god, they certainly didn t tamper with the scene. they left the scene there for everyone to see to be traumatized for hours. it s the same thing in the trayvon case. the parents weren t even notified that he was in the morgue for a couple of days. again, the game we always play around this set is what if a republican president did this and in these cases you have to ask what if it was a white 18-year-old kid shot in the middle of a suburban neighborhood? it s the same questions i asked every day during hurricane katrina. if this has happened in an exclusive suburb of dallas, texas, would the president be looking down from 30,000 feet or walking around shaking hands? it s the same thing here. if this happened in a white neighborhood. it continues to stress the black community in particular in these areas that are suddenly thrust into this reality again. for them it s every day. this is an everyday occurrence. this frustration has been going on for a long time. for the mayor to sit there and act like it isn t craig melvin, thank you very much. still ahead on morning joe, how a grand jury investigation into the death of choke hold victim eric garner play out in a staten island courtroom? we ll about to find out. plus we deal in the unique, the unusual, barely legal, and we always get the deal. this is barely legal pawn. just a few days away from this year s emmy awards, we have this reminder of how brilliant the cast of breaking bad was. up next from vice presidential candidate to intellectual leader of the republican party, paul ryan is standing by. i thought that was me. no, joe, it s paul. you took my mantle. i trademark that. he still looks like a sweet young man. you know who doesn t look like a sweet young man? bill karins. pretty amazetion stuff in arizona. we got trenched. it only happens a couple times every year. the flooding was pretty epic. north of phoenix they picked up about four inches of rain in a short period of time. horses being rescued, running in the water, numerous accidents. and 17 was closed at one point. when it rainses that water goes wherever it wants. that s over and done. the story now is the heat and humidity. the dew points measure how much moisture in the air. this is the most humid and hottest we ve been across the country, especially in the southern half. heat warning in st. louis and heat advisories from memphis into southern illinois. how hot will it be? not record shattering, when you add the humidity into this, it will feel like 105 today in st. louis. that continues all week. that s the thing about this. this is going to be a long duration, definitely as we go throughout the weekend and even into next week. look at memphis, tennessee, near 100 all weekend long. the heat is with us and it figures it would arrive at the end of summer. as we go into next week, we could be watching something in the tropics heading for areas like the gulf of mexico. it s going to be a feeling of summer and the tropical season in the week ahead. we leave you with a nice, warm, beautiful shot of the capital in washington, d.c. we ll have more coming up here on morning joe. you know what he said that s why i put this on. he said they were getting itchy. vernon jordan, seriously, every time i see him in the airport, he chases me down. and he s like, son, wear a tie. stop looking like that. he would know, joe. disgraceful. if i looked as good as vernon jordan every time i put on a coat and tie, i d wear a coat and tie. i assumed when i saw that, that s what you put on when you got out of bed. that s a faulty assumes. that s what i wore to bed. the night is still continuing. with us onset, not only the house budget chairman, but also the guy that puts out the list of the worst dressed man in america, congressman paul ryan. of wisconsin. out with the way forward: renewing the american idea. good to see you. how are you doing? doing well. how is the family. sn. great. cross country practice began the other day. all three doing it. the young guy on nye knee, the first year of eligibility. who is fastest? oh, my daughter. a great hurdler, too. were you a runner? distance. slow, not fast. slow and steady gets it done. what were you? i was fast and short. on my football team i ran the fastest, like eight yards. out of the gates i still surprise my son and his friends, i explode very quickly. after about eight yards, i have to smoke a cigarette. i m joking kids. daddy doesn t smoke. paul, a lot to talk about here. i want to get to as much as we can. we certainly want to talk about the book. first let s talk about ferguson which sfeeds right into the book. we were having a conversation yesterday about the frustration of covering ferguson and everybody is covering what happened in the past week. these people have been left behind. they ve been abandoned. let s try to pass this program, let s try to pass this program and we re not guilty anymore of the lives that they live. they re abandoned. isolated. i try not to inject my personal policy preferences on to a tragedy. i think just of respect for the brown family, the community, it s important as policymakers to see look what s happening and do what i think should be done. i think it s important not to do that. having said all that, i talk about it in this book and i put out a plan a number of weeks ago, we have got to reengage with the poor in america. we are in the 50th anniversary on the war on poverty and poverty is winning. let s think about how to measure success instead of on input, how many dollars we spend, but helping people out of poverty. how do we engage when americans are hearing republicans saying let s cut this program, let s cut that program? one of the reasons i wrote this book, if you don t like the governing philosophy prevailing in washington, what would we do differently? i think the country is on the wrong track. a lot of people agree with me. not everybody. here is the kind of governing philosop philosophy, the community agenda and the solutions necessary for renewing the american idea which is basically the condition of your birth doesn t determine the outcome of your life. my question is, does that require a slashing of spending for the type of programs that keep a lot of people that we re seeing on tv alive, the food on the table? the entire premise of that question presupposes that these programs are great. i don t presuppose that. but i know we can t tomorrow pass a budget that s going to cut aid off to the truly disadvantaged. you voted for welfare reform in 1996 that did more to reduce child poverty than any reform in the modern era. what i m saying is let s rethink it like that, take the other welfare programs that have not been reformed and cuz tommize them to a person s individual specific needs so we can work on fighting poverty, soul to soul, eye to eye and back up a community. one of the problems i think of the war on poverty, we ve had this federal government intervention that has told the common taxpayer, this is government s responsibility, it s not ours. we ve isolated people in our communities. i think we need to reengage that. let s reform the welfare program so that we re getting able-bodied people in the workforce. we talk about high tax rate. the highest arguably is the single mom making $20,000 to $40,000 who ends up making a decision going to work and faces these high marginal tax rates. there s a lot of room for reform. congressman, you know the cartoon version of you put out by critics and democrats, all you want to do is cut, cut, cut. you want to throw old people and poor people out on the street. how do you answer that in the context of this conversation? what would you do specifically besides cutting to help disadvantaged people? first i d say read my book, not just a shameless plug. i talk about a different governing philosophy to reconnect people with the american idea who don t think it s there for them in their communities. i ve proposed a number of things here, rethinking the way we fight poverty and reintegrating civil society, communities with federal resources to focus on getting able bodied people to work and having a safety net that s resilient for those who can t help themselves. one of the problems in america, we re going bankrupt. we have a debt crisis on the horizon. that puts the safety net in jeopardy. the or problem is we re not having the economic growth and opportunity. a lot of reforms there. with specific focus on poverty, there are people in america who are doing amazing things over coming poverty, helping people do so. i talk about a lot of them in my book. i talk about an agenda that helps fwhak up so we can do more of those things. we need another. we have to do lightning round. we brought christina in from washington. christina from roll call? she hates you. for 30 minutes, i m going to trash him. the only reason i m here. we told her to hold back. how do you expect the issue will be resolved with the border spending bill? you guys passed something before you left. it s going to be the first issue confronting you when you come back september 8th. you also have talk that there could be a supplemental request coming from the white house. could those two issues end up being merged? i think that s quite possible. as you know, the supplemental we carried in our budget was higher than what the administration asked for. i think there will be a reconciliation there. we re waiting to see what the senate will do on the border bill since the house acted to deal with the humanitarian crisis on the border. if there s an additional supplemental request from the white house on iraq, that s something we ll have to deal with basically in a week or so. mike? to pick up on what you have in your book, let s take the landscape where the republicans take the senate in november. now you have the house and the senate. how do we govern with president obama 2015 to 2016? we should define ourselves with our actions and pass the policies we believe and show what we can do if we can get them into law. put some things on president obama s desk to have hick maim decisions. be prudent in trying to get the incremental gains to get things moving. like the budget deal patty murray and i did last year, do something like that again, to get modest down payments on our debt situation. candidly, i don t think we re going to fix these big problems with this president. get things done on an incremental basis and also show what we would do if we could. on an incremental basis and not impeaching the president. that comes from wackos on the left. this is a hold on, hold on. here we go. we re going to get this on tape. should the president be impeached? no. we got it on tape. there we go. we got it on tape. i don t do that with everybody. i agree with you. they ll find one crackpot. out of 435 i was always a crackpot with what i had to say thank you, paul. sometime in washington in the fall, run around the wall, your kids against mine. i have runners. me and willie will do eight-yard sprints. the book is the way forward. congressman paul ryan, thank you so much. up next, guaranteed skol ships you guys can t say oh, impeach he s the intellectual leader of the party. very, very smart. smart young man. plus the right to target tourists. taking matters into their own hands? the morning papers are next. 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[ whirring ] [ train whistle blows ] she makes trains that are friends with trees. my mom works at ge. it s time to take a look at the morning papers. we ll start with the baltimore sun. the university of maryland announced a new program that will guarantee so-called lifetime scholarships to student athletes until they graduate. it means athletes will be able to finish their studies regardless of injuries or how they perform. that s a great idea. i think that s fantastic. the new program will go into effect this november. from the staten island advanced, grand jury will decide if charges should be filed in the choke hold death of eric garner. this next month the grand jury will review all evidence in the case and doesn t need a unanimous agreement to decide whether to indict. earlier this month the city examiner ruled the death a homicide caused by a choke hold and compression of his chest during the arrest. the washington post, top obama strategist is heading to silicon valley. david plouffe, presidential adviser is joining uber as senior vice president of policy and strategy. the car service is looking to use plouffe s campaign skills to gain entry into more cities, many of which have a powerful taxi lobby and strict regulations through which the company will have to maneuver. i thought he was going to be chief of staff? he s going into the private sector. the new york post. dozens of costume characters in new york city s times square held a rally on tuesday. oh, good lord. to fight for the ability to collect tips from tourists. the rally comes as police stop police continue to crack down following reports of aggressive i m sorry. it is kind of funny. numerous characters have also been arrested for alleged assault harassment or groping. why don t we all say that s why they re laughing. you see people put on these dirty outfits and you think they re creeps. some of them are nice people. but when i saw all those i would never let my kids like in the middle of that. they re groping? it s a little hard, with due respect to take them seriously when minnie mouse is holding a press conference, shaking her fist at the cameras. charlottesville daily progress a stoner in unionville, new jersey, has been arrested for allegedly selling weed. his name, paul scott stoner. mr. stoner was growing marijuana and selling it to minors. you can t do that. charged with manufacturing weed and possession of a firearm. further charges are still pending. i didn t understand when you said stoner was arrested for selling weed. okay. still ahead, congress may be in recess, but we now know how one of the senate s most respected members sends his downtime. senator mccain getting loose. that s not mccain. are you kidding me? i think she tried to kill us. no, it s only 15 calories. with reddi wip, fruit never sounded more delicious, with 15 calories per serving and real cream, the sound of reddi wip is the sound of joy. nobody ever stomped their foot and asked for less. there s a reason it s called an all you can eat buffet. and not a have just a little buffet. because what we all really want is more. now get our best ever pricing with the more everything plan. 1 gb of bonus data per month per line. verizon smart rewards to rack up points for the things you really want. and 50% off all new smartphones, like the htc one m8 for windows & android. built to inspire envy. come get your more with verizon. 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[ male announcer ] that s why there s ocuvite to help replenish key eye nutrients. ocuvite has a unique formula not found in your multivitamin to help protect your eye health. ocuvite. help protect your eye health. we re changing the way we do business, with startup ny. ocuvite. we ve created tax free zones throughout the state. and startup ny companies will be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in jobs and infrastructure. thanks to startup ny, businesses can operate tax free for 10 years. no property tax. no business tax. and no sales tax. which means more growth for your business, and more jobs. it s not just business as usual. see how new york can help your business grow, at startup.ny.gov 44 past. there are brand new polls for governor andrew quom mow and the investigation into his decision to shut down an ethics commission. 51% have read or heard about it. 45% are unaware. 77% say the decision was a political deal. overall, a combined 83% say government corruption is a serious problem in new york. 48% say cuomo is part of the problem. cuomo s ahead of republican rob affidavit reno, essentially the same as in may. it doesn t seem to have affected race. donny, no impact there? no. you may like or dislike andrew cuomo. he has done by most measures a very effective job in new york. he s not getting unseated. i think people are somewhat an northwest sized, government is a little corrupt. unless it s something interestingly enough like the christie bridge thing, where people can understand whether that happened or not. that s funny. here you have a guy that shut down an ethics commission compared to two lanes being shut down and you re like shutting down two lanes. joe can i finish. you are a funny it s the people s inability to understand the scandal. the bridge thing, oh, he closed down lanes. that same poll, if you asked people what are you talking about, they would have no idea. with your rich left wing friends. there are rich right wing people, too. a lot of hedge fund guys. mainly left wing. christina, it looks like andrew cuomo could do basically anything and still win this race. it s the governor s race, is it going to be fast governor s race that dannel malloy down seven points. this is what happens in a national tie because democrats are starting to really feel the pain in a lot of places, and roll call has a story that went up about illinois and governor pat quinn there, extremely unpopular. he only won three counties when he won his race in 2010. now he s not even doing well in those. they re fearing that house democrats could be dragged down along with him. they re already in tight races. some of them are among the more vulnerable members of the house this year. in some of these marginal places, this could end up being a tie that takes people up and down the ticket. that s what we saw in 2010, that tide started to turn and swept in new state legislatures and governors. we ll look for that piece, christina bellantoni, thank you so much. we ll be checking out the top stories in roll call this morning, first thing after morning joe. should super bowl half-time performers pay to play? if the nfl has its way, that will be happening. okay. morning joe will be right back. ups is a global company, but most of our employees live in the same communities that we serve. people here know that our operations have an impact locally. we re using more natural gas vehicles than ever before. the trucks are reliable, that s good for business. but they also reduce emissions, and that s good for everyone. it makes me feel very good about the future of our company. the summer that summers from here on will be compared to. so get out there, and get the best price guaranteed. find it for less and we ll match it and give you $50 toward your next trip. expedia. find yours. it s the yoplait greek taste-off and we are asking the music city which 100-calorie strawberry greek yogurt is the next big thing. i m a random lady with a 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half-time gig. donny, you said it makes sense. obviously if it s known that they pay, it takes away from having said that, any of these artists would pay because the reality of getting in front of a billion people, that audience, bruno mars last year exploded even more. it is the stage of the year. i don t think it will ever be public, but if they work out some behind the scenes do they usually get paid? no. but the exposure. it s the best exposure of the year. for the first time ever, a little leaguer has made the national cover of sports illustrated. no way! s.i. cover girl, 13-year-old pitching sensation monet davis who plays for philadelphia s tan any dragons. girls play? she throws some heat. the eighth grader first grabbed national attention for throwing a shutout that sent her team to the world series. then she followed that up by becoming the first girl to throw a shutout in world series history after a 4-0 win over nashville. also the sixth girl ever to record a hit at the little league world series. monet davis says her dream is to play basketball for the university of connecticut. how cool is that. we introduce add new segment, scarborough horoscope. his horoscope is keep your ideas simple today because the more complicated your plans get, the more likely you ll end in failure. you really don t need to do anything out of the ordinary at the moment. just be yourself. that s more than enough. that s today s scarborough horoscope. simple plans for a simple mind. be yourself. i don t know how that s different than what he does every day. that will be on every day at 6:52. coming up the top of the hour, protesters and police. we ll explore both sides of the standoff in ferguson, missouri and the issues raised because of the violence there. from county court to ice cream cones. we ll break down what turned out to be an eventful day for texas governor rick perry. paul rudd gets a superhero makeover. hollyweird is straight ahead. we ll be right back. in new 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states. here at timbuk2, we make more than 70,000 custom bags a year, right here in san francisco. we knew we needed to grow internationally, we also knew that it was much more complicated to deal with. i can t imagine having executed what we ve executed without having citi side by side with us. their global expertise was critical to our international expansion into asia, into europe and into canada. so today, a customer can walk into our store in singapore, will design a custom bag and that customer will have that american made bag within a few days in singapore. citi has helped us expand our manufacturing facility; the company has doubled in size since 2007. if it can be done here in san francisco, it can be done anywhere in america. welcome back to morning joe. donny was hanging out with elite company over the weekend. hamptons for the apollo raising money for the apollo theater. big event. i ve never seen a room like this, from jack nickel son, barbra streisand, christie and mccain, jamie foxx. it was ridiculous. bon jovi played and sting played and pharrell played. of course, there was mccain and christie dancing on stage. jamie foxx was on stage, called up governor christie. let s give some props here to senator john mccain doing the robot. the arizona center showed he can get down a little bit. oh, my goodness. i think it s fantastic. he dives in. let s give him credit for that. he shows up. jamie foxx said he was impressed by senator mccain s robot. good stuff. wow. if you re going to take vienna, take vienna. he s taking vienna right there. fantastic. on monday night the team from rhode island at the little league world series was a little low after being eliminated. the manager david bell isle gave his teary-yeed team an inspirational speech they re sure to remember. everybody, heads up high. let s talk for a moment here. i got to see your eyes, guys. there s no disappointment in your effort in the whole tournament, the whole season. it s been an incredible journey. look at the score. 8-7. 12-10 in hits. came to the last out, we didn t quit. that s us. boys, that s us. the only reason why i ll probably end up shedding a tear is because this is the last time i m going to end up coaching you guys. but i m going to bring back with me and the coaching staff and you guys will bring back something that no other team can provide but you guys, that s pride, pride. i love the smile. pride, we got each other. what a great message. i m going to cry. all right. that was beautiful. the next hour of morning joe starts right now. when i was a u.s. attorney privately to our staff, i hear a politician make some comments about a case they thought we were working on or whatever, i d say i hate when these guys that don t know anything act like they know everything. now that i m in public office, i don t want to be guilty of the same thing i used to criticize them for. until i know more, i ll give the police the benefit of the doubt here in new jersey and as for missouri, let s let those guys work it out an learn whatever lessons we need to learn from what happened when we get all the facts. welcome back to morning joe. donny deutsch, michael steele with us. an ominous view of new york city with the national in the background, look at that. we have political columnist for time magazine i would love a picture of that. joe klein joins us today. we re so blessed actually to be here every morning. jo klein, good to have you. in washington, chief white house correspondent for the new york times peter baker and president of the benard center for women politics and public policy michelle bernard joins us as well. good to have you on the show this morning. good morning. a lot to get to. attorney general eric holder will be in ferguson, missouri, in just a few hours. 11 days after the deadly shooting of an unarmed black teenager by police. there were tense moments again overnight between police and demonstrators after palm for most of the day. peaceful protesters could be heard screaming not tonight as water and glass bottles were thrown at police. 47 people were arrested. state highway patrol captain ron johnson is hopeful the violence may be declining. i think that turning point was made by the clergy, the activists, the volunteers, the men and women of law enforcement who partnered together to make a difference. also those citizens took heed to what we talked about last night, not allowing criminals to mask themselves in a peaceful protests. they protested early and went home early and allowed a better visual, a look at those criminals and and staters roaming the streets for their own agenda. earlier in the day there was another police-involved shooting just two miles from ferguson. st. louis, police, shot and killed a man armed with a knife. just hours before his visit, attorney general holder is making a pledge to the residents of ferguson in an open letter he vows there will be a full, fair and independent investigation meanwhile a funeral will be held for 18-year-old michael brown whose death earlier led to the widespread protests. mayor james knowles had a heated back and forth with msnbc s tamron hall over whether there is a racial divide in ferguson. there s not a racial divide in ferguson. is that your perspective or do you believe that s the perspective of african-americans in your community? that is a perspective of all residents in our city, absolutely. have you been watching the news? please w all due respect, there are people on air, on any net work even if you don t watch this one who disagree who live there. with all due respect, are you listening to them? absolutely. there s 22,000 residents in our community. this has affected about a half-mile strip of street in our community. the rest of our community, the rest of the african-americans in our community are going about their daily lives, going to our businesses, walking their dog, going to our neighborhood watch meetings. that s like saying after 9/11, the upper side the restaurant is really good this time of year. put him on a milk car tochb. you understand why ferguson is having the problems it s having on the police force. it has 50 white officers and three african-americans and a mayor who says there s no racial problems in ferguson. are you kidding me? it s as if the community were cry logically frozen in the era before the voting rights act passed. this is a melanin-deprived government in a 60% black town. the lack of political leadership throughout, including the governor jay nixon, has been just appalling. where has he been? why haven t there been town meeting there is to talk about this? leadership is such an x factor. you go down the list. i was talking to my former chief of staff during katrina. he said you know what? this is what happens when politics gets into checking the box. are they pro life or pro choice? are they for guns or against guns? then you get to the x factor of leadership. i talk about jeb because i saw him up close. i ve never seen anyone take command more powerfully but also with a light touch when he needed it. bill clinton, obviously, a guy you kronkaled has the x factor of leadership in times of crisis. it s missing here. on all sides. all levels. there isn t the quality of black leadership that the country used to have. let s go to peter baker here, your front page article in the new york times today. obviously a vacuum at local leadership. eric holder stepping in. fascinating piece on the differences between these two men, eric holder, a son of the civil rights movement. barack obama, obviously much more complicated background which doesn t connect him quite as viscerally as eric holder. talk about the two men who share the same vision but have different approaches and at the end of the day will have a big impact on what happens in ferguson. you do see these two men, the first african-american president, the first african-american attorney general. they share a vision but approach from different points of view. sometimes you hear disappointment on the part of some of president obama s supporters, that he s not more outspoken on issues like this, that he s not as assertive as attorney general holder seems to be. the backgrounds, where they come from, what their personal experiences are, and the roles they play. president obama is not a very he s a reserved person to begin with. he wants to find a balance, be the president for all people. he doesn t want to influence a case that s very active. they make a distinction between this and his personal comments after the trayvon martin case which came after the courts had already acted. in this case he s holding back trying to calm a situation without inflaming it, whereas attorney general holder will be on the ground today in ferguson personally taking charge of the investigation there to some extent. michelle, it s donny. let s say you re the czar put in charge of turning this thing around and you have a playbook at this point going forward. what happens to not put this behind us, but to take this and elevate it and put it on the right track? sf i were running this, one of the things i would do quite frankly is appeal to the president. i understand his role. he s in a very difficult situation. we know he s being briefed daily. he is intimately aware of what s happening. i think this is one of those times where we need leadership from the absolute very top of the nation. one of the best speeches i believe president obama ever gave was when he spoke with then senator obama right after the whole controversy with reverend wright. he talked about things happening in the black community and black people themselves being responsible for our lives. when we talk about the racial divide that we re seeing, i ll tell you, i have seen some of the nastiest hate mail i have ever seen in my entire life in dealing with public policy issues, and the divide is so clear. we need someone like the president to come in and say, look, as a member of the african-american community, i understand what ills the community and what we need to do, ourselves as a community to take responsibility for our lives. however that doesn t mean that the government can be a co-conspirator in what looks like the execution of a young black men. the lives of black males are just as valuable and just as important as others. mukal, we talked earlier. it s so important we come together. i was wondering, the trayvon case. i caught a lot of you know what, a lot of crap for talking about how offensive it was things that went on down there: i see for the first time a break in the dam of republican silence. i m not saying republicans are racist or insensitive. my party, though, usually shuts up when things like this happen. rand paul come out and say there are two americas when it comes to justice. he s exactly right. you have erick erickson, another conservative guy, a good friend of mine saying, hey, guys, we really shouldn t wait for this to happen to a white kid before we get offended. let s get offended now. even ted cruz talked about the heavy handedness of it. that s to me a really good sign. if we re going to have a real conversation about race, we need both sides engaged in this. you do need both sides engaged and to take it out of the realm of the political. at the end of the day, this is how white america views black america and how black america responds to that. that s the conversation we re not having. we dance around it. we gloss over it and say we re in a post racial america because we have a black president in the white house, a black attorney general. at the end of the day, young black males are being arrested, killed and harassed in their communities. as the economy suffers, it gets worse. combination of the criminal justice system, the economy, all these factors playing out in these communities. the problem is we re not addressing them. it builds up like any pressure system. it s important to hear rand paul on the right and folks on the left talk about this or begin to break this open. at the end of the day, if we don t deal with it, it festers i want to come from the left f from an unexpected point of view. obviously this is a tragedy. i want to liken this to a medical situation, where on a daily basis there are tens of thousands of operations going on in this country, life and death. sometimes there s malpractice, the doctor screws up. before we talk about black america, white america and this tremendous divide, isn t there just basically an ar rith mattic certainty that out of hundreds of thousands of daily interactions between law enforcement and suspects, whatever you want to that this is going to donny, i know where you re going, donny. here is the deal. we have made great, great over the past 50, 60 years we ve made great strides. but in this area, the criminal justice system. if your kid gets busted for weed, african-american kid gets busted for weed. your kid is off. the african-american, he could be in jail for five there is an uneven application of crime and punishment in america based on the color of skin. right wing bloggers, you can be pissed off with me if you want to, it s just numbers it really is. you can look numerically joe klein at the numbers and black males, they re so much worse in the system. and this, even if we don t look at who has the money, to have the lawyers. you ve got to look at reality, too. this is a very complicated situation. first of all, there are two competing stories about what actually happened. part of the problem we have in having a conversation about this in this country i ve done a lot of reporting in neighborhoods like this when african-americans look in a situation, they see a metaphoric truth of 400 years of white people vamping on blacks. but that s not good enough you also have to look at the facts of the case. by the way, i said that. i m not even talking about this case. i m talking about in general, the criminal justice system in general, blacks represent 13% of the population and 50% of the people convicted for murder. 90% of blacks who are killed are killed by other blacks. this is a cultural problem in that community which may well have roots in all of the historic crap we ve laid on t m them, but it las to be expressed with a certain amount of subtlety and complexity. joe, i just wanted to add quickly. when we talk about problems within the african-american community and talk about criminal justice, i think we have to talk about prescriptions, i think the most important prescription everyone needs to be having at the national level is education. african-americans and other people who find themselves ignored and living in low income neighborhoods are almost relegated to being a permanent underclass because your education is based on zip code. we all know that you escape poverty with a good education. if you can t get a good education, we re going to continue to see what we re seeing in ferguson and we re going to continue to see some people in the commit community believe that black people are lesser. that s why a lot of us around this table, i will put politics into it, are offended when poor african-american children in harlem are not allowed to have the same choices on what school they want to go to as rich white people. that s right. by the way, when you stand i will say this. when you stand in the doorway of allowing a poor african-american child in harlem to be able to go to a good school for political purposes a charter school. a charter school. a public charter school, you are no better than george wallace standing in the door of the university of alabama and not letting african-americans go in the kids in the charter schools in harlem are scoring the same on aptitude tests as the rich kids in westchester county. with all their tutors. exactly. joe klein, thank you so much. michelle bernard, thank you as well. peter stay with us. we have other stories to get to you on. still ahead on moenl morning joe, the two sides of maureen mcdomd as told by the other maureen mcdonnell, bob mcdonnell s sister. they share the same name as his wife testifies in the couple s corruption trial. we have all the details. we ll also get the latest from alaska s important senate primary, the republican primary there. up next, #ferguson, how twitter played a major role in thrusting the missouri story into the national spotlight. the new york times david carr joins us with how social media is break news in a new and compelling way. you re watching morning joe. we ll be right back. who s more excited about back to school savings at staples? the moms? or the dads? with guaranteed low prices on sharpies, it s definitely the dads. staples. make more happen for less. dovisit tripadvisor new york. with millions of reviews, tripadvisor makes any destination better. u.s. intelligence officials are analyzing a video that appears to show islamic militants murdering an american journalist. it appears to show them be heading james foley. the militants say it is retaliation for u.s. air strikes against isis in iraq. they are threatening to to kill another journalist held captive there. peter baker, i goes most americans are waking up this morning and seeing the i ll say it, the sheer evil in isis, a lot of these militants. i think it s been fascinating what s been happening with the white house over the past several days. the president saying it s a humanitarian mission and then we announce that we re going to help the kurds. then he announces he s going to bomb. it continues to grow. it continues to expand. is there an increasing understanding inside the white house of just how dangerous isis is, not only that region but to the world? well, i think if they didn t know before, certainly that video yesterday reinforced it. it was grisly. it s brutal. assuming it s verified by the intelligence agencies, it s a great tragedy for the family of james foley who only went there to record what was happening and tell people around the world. obviously this is a white house that doesn t want to find itself in mission creep. it doesn t want to get dragged back into a war that s not, in their view, america s. there a sense that isis representing a greater threat than we ve seen in a while. with this new government in bagdad, designated prime minister abadie, their hope is they can work with the government in the way they haven t been able to with maliki s government before, to counter the isis threat. you do see a little more robust action on the part of the americans beyond simply the immediate humanitarian crisis we were talking about in mount sinjar last week. peter baker, thank you very much. here with us now, david carr who wrote over the weekend about social media s role in the ferguson story. he wrote in part this, the web crackled with one story and one story only. it wasn t long before cable news made adjustments and a huge story, a militarized response to a mostly non-violent exercise in free speech took center stage. for that you can thank twitter which is often derided as a platform for realities, but has become much more than that in the age of always-on information. nothing good was happening in ferguson until it became a hash tag. david carr, thank you for being here. we always love having you on. we ve heard stories going back to 2004 in ukraine, the orange revolution, about how texting got people together and now we re hearing it happening, i guess iran 2009. what happened here in ferguson, when that hash tag got in front of ferguson, you say the bag things that were happening at least started to slow down a bit. i think part of the reason it was a big story on twitter is the people were trying to do their job, as we do, with cameras and crews who were getting pushed out. it fell on the people with phones in their hand to make it happen. it s a story it s a deep and complicated story, right? when you see people in militarized clothing pointing sniper rifles at american civilians, that s really all you sort of need to know about what s going on in terms of how big of a deal it is, right? that s why twitter was a good place for it. talk about how social media in general has grown over the past for things like this, where it actually bends the arc of the story. i think what happens is, when you look at twitter, there s people represented on twitter that aren t represented in your average network audience. twitter index is in the black community in the way that mainstream television doesn t, so it offers a visibility and window into that community. the other thing is it has a bias toward media. we re all, of course, talking to each other and sending notes to each other. that thunder dome, that echo tends to making stories mushroom very, very quickly. there s always an underbelly with every technology. the way traditional media uses twitter almost defeats democratization of it. you read the post they highlight six tweets. they may not be representative. there s an irony that there s still this basically hom mojization or certainly editing. we thought there would be a thousand flowers, but it s still the same oak trees standing there. i think a lot of other media tends to take a redakive approach to twitter. on wednesday night i know you and probably joe, mika, you just sat there and watched the waterfall come in. news is these days a list oftentimes. people talk about watching things on twitter because things were moving so quickly. a lot of it was carrying images. it was the best place to see what was going on. yes in the morning there was a distill asian of it and people have applied editorial practices to it. but in realtime it was quite something to behold. and different emotions and points of view fell into that waterfall in a way that in the mainstream media sometimes you get more of a canned look. it s weird, isn t it, that some something 140 characters and it can have that much emotional content. david carr, thank you so much. i love david carr. you can read his latest peeft on new yorktimes.com. coming up, mark begich finally has an opponent to face off. is it that joe miller guy? we ll find out. if a picture is worth 1,000 words, you won t want to miss what we have to say about rick prry s mug shot. they did a mug got. we ll be right back. vo: this is the summer. the summer of this. the summer that summers from here on will be compared to. where memories will be forged into the sand. and then hung on a wall for years to come. get out there, with over 50,000 hotels at $150 dollars or less. expedia. find yours. from safety. to fuel economy. to quality. today s chevrolet has it all. and the time to buy is now. it s the chevy labor day sale! and 0% financing for 72 months is back! plus, no monthly payments for 90 days. 0% financing for 72 months plus no monthly 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him? they did everything they could do to put themselves in a position to win back the senate. it doesn t mean they ll win the senate. is this another tea party loss? would this be considered a tea party loss? why am i asking you. kasie hunt is here. so is this another would this be considered by the alaskan tea party as another loss for the tea party? in some ways, yes. in some ways this has just become a very, very personal thing for joe miller. it s a little bit about the tea party and a lot about the fact that he felt completely abandoned by republicans who backed murkowski when he won the nomination. thhe personally knows karl re which is why his group has gone so much into him. he worked for condi rice at the state department. they got so into him because they were worried about a joe miller can you queue up the theme song for the empire strikes. astounding what the republican establishment has done this year. i don t know what s going to happen in the senate, but in the republican party, they have owned this election cycle. just by not being stupid. they basically got engaged, figure out who is the most electable candidate. spent money early, were really aggressive. you act as if just not being stupid is not a huge achievement for our republican party. we would be walking around in pajamas and slippers in renault. stupid in 2010 and got it right in 2012. the iowa camp explained that. the question i have about the fall, in this process, in this march of the empire striking back, joe, do you see that base staying with the party? have they come with the conclusion it is better to win with as opposed to win with principle? you understand this better than anyone because of the positions you ve had. it s not like these guys are squishy moderates. they re really, really conservative people. better at getting really conservative people that can be backed by the establishment. we re not talking about the rise of moderates. talking about the rise of super, duper two other stories. governor rick perry is speaking out after spending time at an austin courthouse where he was booked on a pair of felony corruption charges. i m going to fight this injustice with every fiber of my being and we will prevail. the actions that i took were lawful, they were legal and they were proper. this indictment is fundamentally a political act that seeks to achieve at the courthouse what could not be achieved at the ballot box. i ll tell you what, unless there s something by the way, that is a good looking man. i m serious. i could pay annie liebowitz to take my picture and rick perry s courthouse shot is better than mine. on the cover of time magazine. it s great stuff. jim vandehei, unless i m missing something, this is one of the greatest abuses of power on the national level i have seen. this is not on rick perry s part. not on rick perry s part. this office in austin, texas, that does this. they did it to tom delay and now doing it to rick perry. tom delay i don t know. that shag carpet is deep. i don t know what s in that shag carpet. but kay bailey hutchison, that was a scam. this rick perry indictment is a scam. as i said before, ronald reagan, according to the prosecutor in austin, texas, ronald reagan throwing the budget down and say if you i will veto this bill. that s like a criminal offense. can i ask who is going to indict this guy who is indicting other people for political reasons? who is going to investigate this? this is a runaway beer truck in the austin prosecutor s office. it s disgraceful in my opinion. when you have the new york times editorial board going to the defense of rick perry, you know something is up. it makes perry bigger when i don t think he s a legitimate contender for 2016. he gets way too much coverage, more than he deserves. there s parts of his campaign last time around that were really laughable. i think he s a lot better this year than he was you already have republicans saying john mccain saying this indictment is going to help rick perry because it s going to motivate people who are angry because they think he s politically targeted. the strategy is so interesting. they decided he s going to take this head on. mika, what s really troubling is the fact, we talked to paul ryan about impeachment. some republicans talk about impeaching barack obama, a small number, but they re stupid when they do. that s taking politics to a bad level. the next level would be, you know, this, where you re actually talking about putting somebody in jail for up to 99 years for not a veto, for a public veto threat. you talk about a kangaroo court in austin, texas, this is disgraceful. nobody enjoys a mugshot more than this guy, rick perry. when you take a look at that picture, keep in mind he really did enjoy it. right after the mugshot he went and got ice cream. not joking. good for him. good for him. listen, we have been around this table, mika, and we have been tougher on rick perry around this table than probably anybody in american media. i m guilty. very tough. the very mention of my name, there were news reports made his wife gasp. very upset with you. no, she s not. we re okay now. but this is a disgray. this comes from a guy that beat him up more than anybody else three years ago. i hope it helps him. all right. speaking of 2016, hillary clinton heads to iowa to speak at the annual state fry next month. what is a steak fry? do they fry their steaks? lots of butter. i m sure it s delicious. i love butter and it s good for you, too. i m sure if i went to a steak fry, i wouldn t have done so without serious damage. i don t grill a lot, there s a lot of butter. okay. stop. the event is becoming a must-visit for democratic presidential hopefuls. hillary heads to the caucus state in a weaker position. derrick hits has the numbers in the mojo poling place. some political pundits continue to act as if hillary clinton is a lock as our next commander in chief should she decide to run, a look at the polls shows her image has significantly been damaged since leaving the state department. whether the change in numbers were different by comments that she and bill were dead broke after leaving the white house or that she s racked up millions in speaking fees or something in between. one thing is certain, every major national poll show america s views of hillary clinton heading in the wrong direction. the nbc wall street journal shows a net negative 24-point swing in voters positive to negative view of her. with quinnipiac showing a similar swing of 22 points in the wrong direction. cnn, orc, 17 points and gallop, 14: of the likely 2016 presidential campaigns, hillary clinton s remains the most promisi promising. if there s one thing these trends remind us, there s no such thing as a sure thing in politics. guys, back to you. thank you, derrick. she could afford to lose 24 points. she cannot afford to lose another 24, that s correct. are you surprised at how badly she s managed the past three months during the book tour? i am and i m not. i think the expectations were high that we d see a different hillary. we re seeing the same hillary in the same hillary operation. i think when she broke with the president in that interview, it s going to hurt her. i think it plays to what everyone dislikes about the clintons, that everything is political, everything is calculation. she won t get the benefit of breaking with the president. she s always going to look cold and calculating. she ll have to wrestle with that when she s in iowa because she s undoubtedly running. kasie hunt, thank you very much. jim stay with us. up next, can bob mcdonnell be saved? his sister maureen is making the case against his wife. family feud here. it s getting ugly. this is unbelievable what s going on in the courthouse. this family is tearing each other apart. all that and much more straight ahead on morning joe. wouldn t it be great if hiring plumbers, carpenters 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[ male announcer ] if you want to hear how their day went, serve manwich. and wait til they come up for air. [ laughs ] [ male announcer ] hold on. it s manwich. former governor bob mcdonnell is leaning on his family in an unusual did you see he s leaning on his family? yes. in a positive or negative way? it depends on what member of the family you re talking about. it s unbelievable, isn t it? jim vandehei, it s crazy. a fantastic story. you say fantastic. in a sick way. like the harlequin romance noveling. leaning on his family to avoid conviction in a federal corruption trial. the governor s sister who shares the same name as his wife testified the former first lady could be manipulative, deceptive and a bully. she said in court, there are two sides to mauer lean. you re not sure which one you re going to get. which one will show up. the governor s sister also tried to help the couple s case by reenforcing their narrative, trying to demonstrate that the marriage was in such tatters, the couple couldn t have conspire for gifts and loans. she gave example of how the govern governor out of the loop on a $50,000 check from donny williams. when she called her brother to discuss it, she said she could hear the first lady in the background angry that she called him about it. another witness testified the former first lady was so difficult, her staff once threatened to quit en masse, like all of them at once, leave. here with us from washington, columnist for the washington post, bob mccartney who has been following the case since the beginning. bob, this is some ugly stuff, if you re having to watch day in and day out. it certainly does paint a picture, the testimony, the stories we ve heard have to paint a picture of a husband with a wife that seemed to be completely out of control. what do you think is really going on here? i think maureen mcdonnell is a bit unstable, and i think a bit. a bit unstable, a bit manipulative, a bit deceptive. she initiated most of this, most of the bad stuff that they re in trouble for, but i think that bob mcdonnell went along with a lot of it based on the evidence that we know by the end, and that s why he s in trouble. the strategy clearly of the defense is to demonize maureen mcdonnell, the first lady, using, in part, the testimony of maureen mcdonnell, the governor s sister and basically put it all on her and portrayed bob mcdonnell as innocent, honest guy trying to do the right thing and the wife was doing all this stuff behind his back. a fair amount of it was done behind his back, but we know for sure that he was involved in some of the negotiations over the loans, and that certainly he knew about the vacations that he went on that johnny williams, the businessman, paid for. the parts he did know about, his wife being interested in leaving and having an affair with johnny williams. this is boys behaving badly. the governor of virginia behaving badly, johnny williams behaving badly. this is woman versus woman now. do you think johnny williams was adopting them because he wanted to? he was buying access. i don t see that the governor was an active participant? when he held up the row lex and smiled at the camera? this is from my husband that i got for my 40th birthday. when the governor held up his rolex i don t know. let s get back to the case at hand here. bob, let me ask you, though, as we talk about this, let s talk about the watch, the daughter s wedding. the governor had to know that there were funds coming in from johnny williams. they were using this guy like an atm machine and there was no real deal on the back end to pay it back. the governor definitely knew about the $15,000 to pay for the catering for his daughter s wedding. now, the defense argument is that that was a gift to the kid a gift to the young happy couple and not to the governor. but the governor was very much involved with it. the checks actually went at least one of the checks went to maureen, maureen the first lady, not maureen the sister. there s some confusion about whether he knew, bob mcdonnell knew that the money for the rolex came from johnny williams, senior. real quickly, a very important point to clear up. we said from the very beginning, it looks sleazy. it s legal in the state of virginia. as far as the federal charges go, does it have to be a quid pro quo that s proven? yes. you have to prove when bob mcdonnell took the money from johnny williams, that he had the intent to do something for him, to do something for johnny williams, and they did do stuff for johnny williams, senior. there s a question about whether they did more than they normally would have done for any businessman who was trying to promote his products in virginia. let me say, mika, that is a high, high bar ha the prosecutor has to meet. in there, i don t know how the prosecutor will meet that. but that intent for pay back, because if they had a payment schedule to pay back those loans works that set the dynamic up properly to prove that the governor had intent to pay him back and was not going give some favor for the cash? again, this just blows my mind that anybody would do this, but as far as virginia law goes, they don t have to pay back. they have to prove that quid pro quo. you helped my daughter so in return i m going to help you get your vitamins or whatever. and i just think it s getting murkier and murkier. it s going to be very hard for the prosecutor. at the end of the day, bob mcdonnell is broke because of it. we ll tell you about the time julia louis-dreyfus walked into a pawn shop to find the stars of breaking bad. and things are getting hollyweird. that s ahead on morning joe. t. and minus our expenses. perfect timing. we re offering our best-ever pricing on mobile plans for business. run the numbers on that. well, unlimited talk and text, and ten gigs of data for the five of you would be. one-seventy-five a month. good calculating kyle. good job kyle. you just made partner. our best-ever pricing on mobile share value plans for business. now with a $100 bill credit for every business line you add. hey pal? 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who cares? look where you get to stay! booking.com booking.yeah! who s more excited about back to school savthe ladies?ples? these guys? or these guys? when you get guaranteed low prices on everything you buy the most, everybody gets excited! staples. make more happen for less. no justice, no peace. we want the world to see that st. louis knows how to take care of business. now community leaders are stepping in to try to persuade the most radicalized elements to leave the streets. this is our city. we take control of our community. what will bring peace to the streets of ferguson. justice. hands up. don t shoot. an army that has put the islamic state to flight. today a sign they can be defeated. awful tragic news from overseas, it s about an american journalist named james foley. executed. beheaded by isis. terrorists go on to threaten the life of another american if president obama doesn t end u.s. air strikes in iraq. perry, perry, perry. i reported to the county authorities a few minutes ago. texas governor rick perry was fingerprinted, photographed and booked on two felony charges of abusing power. he made it clear he sees the charges against him as a political vendetta. i m going to fight this injustice with every fiber of my being, and we will prevail. i thought i heard that bruce asked that none of his music was played at your events because he didn t believe in your politics. no, never did that. i know him and you re wrong. and i understand you re expressing your politics. don t put it in mr. springsteen s mouth, put it in yours. welcome back to morning joe. it s 8:00 a.m. on the east coast, 5:00 a.m. on the west coast. back on set we have donny deutsch, michael steele and in washington christina bellantoni. they did the mug shot of rick perry. speaking of governors. did he smile? he takes a good mug shot. he had a nice smile. look at him. he s a didngood-looking guy. all right. let me ask you about mr. springsteen and mr. christie. what did you think? i think the debate might have gone on a little long but i m used to people who go on long. it s no problem. maybe that s why i related to him so well. but she kept asking questions and as a reporter, she decided she was going to get into a debate. she had her springsteen information wrong. then she started moving on to other questions and he s right. if they want to hear the reporter, then the reporter should hold a town hall meeting and we ll see how many people go to that town hall meeting. they re there to hear chris christ christie. was that a reporter or constituent? i think it was a constituent. same with the constituent. if they want a debate, the constituent can hold her own town hall meeting. yeah. listen, i would much rather this happen than have them cowering in the corner. but there s something in between. he just comes across as an obnoxious pugilistic bully. you know what he looks like there s a way to push back and move on. we ve seen thousands of politicians say that s not acceptable, next question. i ve got to say no disrespect to these two people who i know personally and like personally, but in the age of hillary clinton and jeb bush, a lot of people want to see this. in an age where washington, d.c., is stuck in the mud and everybody has canned responses and nobody shows their real emotions and everything you say is market tested and poll driven, that breaks through. and that s why chris christie worked before and i think that s why if the investigations all go all right for him, i think that s i think that s why we liked him from the get-go is that he definitely broke away from the mold. kind of put a real and not all of it was pretty but he put himself out there in every way, in a very honest way, in a way that seemed authentic. willie is the authentic aspect is what resonates with people. but we want to get to the left wing, i d go out to the hamptons in my $100 million mansion kind of guy, maybe that s not appealing. i thought you wanted to come out? i am! it s your house, you ve got to pat. i can ride in your wake. he tortures me wake in and week out about the hamptons. then hey, man, i m going to be out there this weekend. you know why we re doing this because sweet little louis is getting married i m going to stay at gatsby s mansion. but is it mick that lives in the side house? i m like mick. i ll go there and watch you do all of this profane stuff and just sit there. and then i go back to my shack. you ll be in awe. you should see the green light. it s like a disco strobe. and joe will be dancing. techno music. going like this. it s not what gatsby looked like at the end of the buchanans. doc, you re a jersey boy. when they want to know what kids are thinking on the streets of new jersey, they ask willie geist. what do you think? first of all, i think it s an odd topic to have a public debate about. whether or not bruce springsteen likes you. to pick that fight is weird. i don t think it s as unanimously good as you think it is in new jersey. if you talk to people, they like the honesty and that kind of stuff, but when they look at some of the other things he does, they don t always love it. but that said, his numbers are pretty good for a guy who s been through a scandal, whether you think it s a big deal or not. i think what s important is whether or not that plays outside new jersey. i can t even we ve got a lot of news to cover. isis continues to just be a dark cloud that covers the middle east. i can t even show please don t. i can t even show the front of the new york post, but the daily news has a shot of just these they are absolute savages. i don t know what they think they re proving, but all they re doing is they re just they re just setting themselves up to be killed, all of them. i mean you know what, everybody that acts that way, it never ends well for them when you do that to the united states. it just doesn t. you can ask. where s osama bin laden right now? i hope he enjoyed his day in the sun. where s saddam hussein right now? i hope he enjoyed it. it never ends well. it s not going to end well for isis. and you know what, i will say this again, thank you, president obama, for going against your base. this is a scourge that needs to be wiped out of the middle east. i say that with great trepidation after supporting the first gulf war, like about 70% of americans. that was, we found out later, an optional war. this, this fight against isis, there s nothing option a.m. about it. there s no option. because they are a scourge that will continue to spread and they will find their way to america s doorstep. the reason i said we should get out of afghanistan four years ago is because the taliban didn t want to blow up buildings in the united states. these people, they want to kill us all. and if they stay in iraq and they get in control of oil field and they get money and they get weapons, they will come to us and kill as many of us as quickly as they can. this is something that the president can t ignore and i would like the republicans to salute him for stepping forward and doing what he s done over the past week or two. we can all go back and criticize what he s done and then democrats can criticize what we republicans have done and we get nowhere. and i think going against the base is something that some politicians have a lot of fear about, and so that s commendable for you to say. all right, the big story here in the united states, attorney general eric holder will be in ferguson, missouri, 11 days after the shooting of a black teenager. there were tense moments overnight after calm for most of the day. peaceful protesters could be heard screaming not tonight, as water and glass bottles were thrown at police. 47 people were arrested, but state highway patrol captain ron johnson is hopeful the violence may be declining. i think that turning point was made by the clergy, the activists, the volunteers and the men and women of law enforcement partner together to make a difference. but also those citizens who took heed to what we talked about last night, not allowing criminals to mass themselves in a peaceful protest. they protested early and went home early and allowed us a better visual look of those criminals and agitators that are roaming the streets for their own agenda. can you say the end of that clip again. he s got to work around the clock. you ve got one african-american, police captain, i see white faces back there. only three out of 53 officers. i know. i m just saying now, again, it shouldn t be about race but guess what, it s about race. this is about race. i may be i just i don t know. but that speaks to the problem that that community has. the problem in ferguson, exactly. all right. let s go to ferguson. nbc news correspondent craig melvin has been on the ground for several days now. craig, good morning. it s good to see you. we hear, i guess, a relatively good night last night but we ve heard that before so we re a little leery of celebrating that. what is the mood on the ground there and what do you think now that you ve been there a couple of days breaks this and gets people out of the streets and brings the peace? reporter: you know, that s a good question, willie. everyone seems to be in pretty much universal agreement that the one thing that would probably empty these streets fairly quickly is if there was some sort of indictment, some charges brought against that officer. of course as you know the grand jury convening at 9:00 this morning to start hearing some evidence. it was very interesting, as you just heard there. 47 arrests last night, no molotov cocktails, no shooting, no tear gas used. there was some pepper spray used. i think you could see that in one of the clips played there, but it was calmer. the crowd itself, i can tell you, was smaller last night than it had been. there was also there also seemed to be a shift in police strategy. captain johnson told me earlier in the day that we might see this and we did in fact see it last night. in previous nights you saw those officers in riot gear wearing helmets, shields out, shoulder to shoulder, short of a very offensive position. last night you did not see that, you saw smaller groups of officers and they were mingering with these smaller groups of protesters that were being forced to make that lap around the main drag here in ferguson. we also saw those military-style vehicles. in previous nights they had been right smack in the middle of the street in sort of an offensive position. they would say a defensive position, but nonetheless an intimidating position. last night those vehicles were not in the middle of the street, they were on the side as well. so there are a number of folks who have said to me last night that little things like that did in fact make a difference. of course as you know captain johnson urged the peaceful protesters not to come out last night, to do their protesting in the day. and by all accounts it looks like a lot of those protesters did just that. all right. speaking with msnbc s tamron hall, ferguson mayor james knowles looked to downplay suggestions of racial tension within the community. take a look. there is not a racial divide in the city of ferguson. according to who? is that your perspective or do you believe that is the perspective of african-americans in your community? that is the perspective of all residents in our city, absolutely. have you been watching the news? because there are people, sir, and please with all due respect, there are people on air on any network, even if you don t watch this one, who disagree who love there. so i m asking, and again with all due respect, are you listening to them? absolutely. there s 22,000 residents in our community. this has affected about a half mile strip of street in our community. the rest of our community, the rest of the african-americans in our community are going about their daily lives, going to our businesses, walking their dog, going to our neighborhood watch meetings. that s kind of saying like 9/11 taking cameras to the upper east side or the upper west side. look at new york, new york is fine. what s wrong with new york? my god, that s perfect. yes. what are you talking about? it s just a small group of buildings down at the tip of the island. the guy is clueless right there. for days he is absolutely clueless. for days people have been asking where is the political leadership because they hadn t seen the mayor and heard members of the city council. he comes out on air and says that? not only is he clueless, he s not credible. you understand more fundamentally why folks in that community are pissed off right now because he s totally out of touch with what s going on. he looks like he just came back from vacation and has no idea what s going on. there s three out of 53 members of the police force, his police force, right, that are black. not only that, mika, out of 53 in a city that s 70% african-american. how do you let that happen when you re hiring and you re trying to figure out a force that really represents the community? i know how you let that happen. you re racially insensitive and that creates a racial divide. and you don t think there s a problem. and then to make matters worse, you say there s not a problem. right. and you think because you say it that that means it s the rule of law because you are clueless. that s right. and you re not self aware. so i don t know if this guy knows, willie, but even the egyptian government is chastising him for what s going on in ferguson. if the generals in egypt are criticizing you, you have a problem. the ayatollah in iran are tweeting about ferguson, missouri. it s not a good position to be in. there are things that happened in the moments after this young man was killed that have traumatized that area of town, that whole town. he was left lying in the streets for hours. he was not covered up. and there were children there were people so stunned at what they were seeing, they were videotaping it because they didn t know what else to do and they were traumatized that they saw this young man get gunned down and then he laid there in the middle of the street, not surrounded, not covered. they didn t put cars they said they didn t want to tamper with the scene? well, my god, they certainly didn t tamper with the scene. they left the scene there for everyone to see to be traumatized for hours. it s the same thing in the trayvon case. the parents weren t even notified that he was in the morgue for a couple of days. again, the game around this set is what if a republican president did this? in these cases, you just have to ask, what if it was a white 18-year-old kid shot in the middle of a suburban neighborhood. they would cover it up, they would surround it. it s the same questions i asked every day during hurricane katrina. you know, if this had happened in an exclusive suburb of dallas, texas, would the president be looking down from 30,000 feet or walking around shaking hands? it s the same thing here. it s like if this had happened in a white neighborhood. and it continues to stress the black community in particular in these areas that are suddenly thrust into this reality again. for them it s every day. this is an everyday occurrence. for the mayor to sit there and act like there s no problem, it s amazing. still ahead on morning joe, the breaking bad boys reunite as we take a trip to hollyweird. plus pat o brien will join us. pat o brien is coming back. we will discuss the highs and lows of a remarkable career and how he overcame several stints in rehab. also, we ll have more with congressman paul ryan. up next, a scary scene in california when a car chase involving a buick sedan comes to a crashing halt. but first, bill karins with a check on the forecast. speaking of car wrecks, right? well, good morning, everyone. we watched epic rains in arizona yesterday and now we move on to this heat wave. it s moving from the west coast to the middle of the nation and soon to the southeast. along with it, we talk about humidity, because that s what s really going to be oppressive as we go throughout the week. when you add that to the temperature, the heat index will feel like 100 to 110 in many areas of the country. when you have dew points in the 60s, a little uncomfortable. when it s in the 70s, it s oppressive. that s what we have from dallas all the way through atlanta and florida. already in the 80s. soon it will be into the 90s with that heat index going over 100. heat warning in effect for the st. louis area the next couple of days, possibly into the weekend. heat advisories all the way down through memphis. in memphis this weekend it will be very hot, near 99 degrees. so it s hot across the country. the cooler spots, the great lakes are still beautiful in the northeast. going into next week the first item to watch in the tropics for a while, we re going to be watching a tropical disturbance heading over the caribbean the next couple of days and a week from now heading into the gulf of mexico. the million dollar question is will it develop? will we be dealing with a tropical storm or hurricane heading for the u.s.? it s all a possibility and we ll watch that closely in the days ahead. we leave you with a really nice shot of washington, d.c. some beams of sunlight coming down to the surface. you re watching morning joe. we ll be right back. hey! i found a happy space somewhere to call our own a happy little place and it all starts with you whoa-oh-oh-oh, all this goodness. after-school snacking should be fun and nutritious which is why we put whole grains first in every general mills big g cereal what matters most should always come first general mills. look for the g, it means goodness first. take a look at the morning papers. the arizona republic heavy rains triggered massive flooding in phoenix. over 5 inches of rain has fallen in areas north of the city, shutting down roads and highways, rising waters and crippling neighborhoods, washing through mobile homes, trapping rez dments cars. look at that. there s more rain on the way later this week. so far no life threatening injuries have been reported. this from the sacramento bee. there s a wildfire burning near yosemite in california. so far the fire has scorched nearly 3300 acres and destroyed eight structures. officials are saying the blaze is 35% contained and more than 1,000 people have been cleared to get back to their homes. the fire began on monday, the 16th, miles from a park distance. the guardian, a study says readers absorb less reading on ereaders such as a kindle or ipad. do you find that? i do. this is so interesting. according to research out of norway, those reading a paperback retained more aspects of the story when tested on plot points and character comprehension. scientists say, i believe this, holding an actual book means the reader is able to chart their progress as they physically turn pages while holding an e-reader can be less gratifying. i think we were just working with my daughter yesterday on study skills and she finds that writing notes down as opposed to typing, and i do as well. i think the same applies to reading. you ve got to hold the book. i ve got a pretty good memory but as far as studying goes with things i didn t want to absorb, i just had to sit there and write it. i d read it, i d write it, i d tear it apart. that makes sense. there s some less of a connection there. the san francisco chronicle, surveillance footage emerged showing the terrifying moments when a car crashed in sausalito, yesterday. the driver was being pursued following a domestic violence incident. while trying to elude police, he lost control of the car, hopped a car and crashed into a cafe where people were eating outside. the suspect attempted to flee on foot but was chased down and arrested. three people were treated for nonlife-threatening injuries. 50 years after lbj launched this nation s war on poverty and congre congressman paul ryan says poverty is winning now. more from our fascinating conversation with the wisconsin republican as he tries to set the way forward. that s his new book. plus the great pat o brien is here and we ll get his take on our important hollyweird report. yes, pat will chime in on that. he s got a great book we are going to talk about. 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[ male announcer ] during the cadillac summer s best event, lease this 2014 ats for around $299 a month. hurry in this exceptional offer ends soon. hurry in this exceptional offer ends soon. funtil to keep growing, theys hneeded a new factory,, but where? fortunately, they get financing from ge capital. we re part of ge, a company that s built hundreds of factories. so we can bring in experts to help them evaluate costs, incentives, and zoning to make a decision that would make their founder proud. if you just need a loan, just call a bank. at ge capital, we re builders. and what we know, can help you grow. so ally bank really has no hidden fethat s right. accounts? it s just that i m worried about you know hidden things. ok, why s that? no hidden fees, from the bank where no branches equals great rates. 30 past. congressman paul ryan is putting a face on his push to overhaul the nation s regulations and he says it s america s poor who can benefit the most from new policies. we spoke to the budget chairman just a short time ago on morning joe. we ve got a lot to talk about here and i want to get to as much as we can and certainly want to talk about the book. but first let s talk about ferguson, which actually feeds right into your book. we were having a conversation yesterday about the frustration of covering ferguson and everybody is just covering what happened the past week. we have got to look at what s happened the past 50 years. these people have been left behind. they have been abandoned. people have let s just try to pass this program, let s just try to pass that program and we re not guilty anymore of the lives that they live. they are like abandoned. that s right. isolated. they re on an island. i try not to inject my personal policy preferences onto a tragedy. so i think just out of respect for the brown family, for the community, it s important as policy makers not to say look at what s happening, therefore, do what i think should be done. i think it s important out of respect not to do that. having said all of that, i talk about in this book and i put out a plan a number of weeks ago, we have got to re-engage with the poor in america. we are in the 50th anniversary on the war on poverty and poverty is winning. and so let s think about how to measure success instead of on inputs, how many dollars are we spending, but how are we getting people out of poverty. how do we engage when americans hear the republicans say let s cut this program or let s cut that program. one of the reasons why i wrote this book, if you don t like the direction policy is heading right now, if you don t like the governing philosophy, what would we do differently? i think the country is on the wrong track. a lot of people agree with me. not everybody, but a lot do. so i wrote this to say here is the governing philosophy and the solutions for renewing the american idea which is basically the condition of your birth doesn t determine the outcome of your life. back to my question, does that require a slashing of spending for the type of programs that keep a lot of these people that we re seeing on tv alive? keep food on their kids table? the entire premise of that question presupposes that these programs are all just great and it s just a matter of doing more of the same or not. no, i don t presuppose that but i also know that we can t just tomorrow pass a budget that s going to cut aid off no, that s right. for the disadvantaged. but you voted for a bipartisan bill in 1996, welfare reform, that did more to reduce child poverty than any reform in the modern era. what i m saying is let s rethink it like that. let s take the other welfare programs that have not been reformed and customize them to a person s individual specific needs so that we can work on fighting poverty, eye to eye, and back up the community. one of the problems in the war on poverty is we ve had this federal government intervention that has told the common taxpayer this is government s responsibility, it s not yours, and we ve isolated the poor. we ve isolated people in our communities. i think we need to re-engage that. number one. number two, let s reform our welfare program so they re always pointed toward getting able-bodied people into the workforce. we talk about high tax rates in america. the highest arguably is the single mom making $20,000 to $40,000 who makes a decision to go to work and ends up losing more benefits than what she gets getting a paycheck and facing high marginal tax rates. so there s a lot of room for reform and clearly dialogue. congressman, you know the cartoon version of you that s put out by your critics, by democrats, by many progressives that all you want to do is cut, cut, cut, you want to throw old people out on the street, you want to throw poor people out on the street. how do you answer that? what would you do specifically to help disadvantaged people. first of all, i d say read my book. honestly i talk about a different type of governing philosophy and a different agenda to reconnect people with the american idea, especially those who have fallen away from it, who don t think it s there for them in their communities. what i proposed in a number of things are rethinking the way we fight poverty and reintegrating civil society, local communities and charities along with federal resources to get aid that s customized to focus on getting able-bodied people to work and having a safety net that s resilient for those who cannot help themselves. one of the problems we have in america is we are going bankrupt. we have a debt crisis that s on the horizon and that puts the safety net in jeopardy. other problem is we re not having the economic growth and economic opportunity. we don t have the healthy economy we need to get people back to work so a lot of reforms there. but with specific focus on poverty, there are people in america who are doing amazing things overcoming poverty, helping people do so. i talk about a lot of them in my book but i also talk about an agenda that backs that up so we can do more of those things. part of our conversation this morning with congressman paul ryan. see the full discussion on our website, mojoe.msnbc.com. his book was called the way forward. it s time for reques busine before the bell with brian sullivan. how are the markets looking, brian? they have been looking strong. a lot of viewers are not day traders but they might have a 401(k) or pension plan. things have been pretty doggone good. the s&p is less than half a percent off its all-time high. i tweeted this out yesterday, joe. apple s market cap is nearly $600 billion. that is the value of every nfl, nhl, cable team combined six times over. mika, you think you may be going back to an iphone? you ve tried to get away from it. do you think you may be going back? come back. i was one of the latest adapters and i m a happy guy. you re happy? you moved from it? from a blackberry to it. you took a while. i m a late adapter. when are you leaving the 8 track? i just want to make sure everything is okay. i let the other 200 million people graze first. i m old school. by the way, speaking of old school and music, this is completely unrelated and unplanned, but did you know vinyl album sales are up like 600% over the last five years? people are going back to vinyl. i use lps the ahome. the sound quality is much deeper. i know, joe, you re a musician. there s notes in there you forget you don t hear on mp3s. john heilemann, of course, is an audio file and listens to nothing but records. while walking down the street he listens to records. it s amazing. it s kind of crazy. i just picture him eating cheetos in his underwear just playing the lps. that s your problem. please don t thrust your problems on the rest of us, donny. so let s talk about really quickly snap chat. i snap chat with my daughter. please snap chat me, amelia. you say ads and news are coming? 30 million snap chat users, mostly teens, it disappears, but in november something called snap chat discovery will roll out which will put ads and news in your feed. listen, mika, i know you ve got teenagers, joe, you do too she s snap chatting with one right now. what about snap chat, who s in your child s dorm room? you ve got to give the warning about snap chat, though. what s the warning, donny? there s ways you think you re sending something in picture that disappears. you can take a picture. so just be careful. you should have figured that out. the pictures are already out there. my attorney says you haven t heard the whole story yet. cease and desist. still ahead oh, boy. oh, boy. this guy is great. he s back. he s spelling it right! good god, i ve never seen that happen. he once lived a lavish lifestyle high rolling with celebrities and politicians. we ll talk about what happened next, when pat o brien joins us with his new memoir. morning joe we ll be right back. you owned your car for four years. you named it brad. you loved brad. and then you totaled him. you two had been through everything together. two boyfriends. three jobs. you re like nothing can replace brad! then liberty mutual calls. and you break into your happy dance. if you sign up for better car replacement, we ll pay for a car that s a model year newer with 15,000 fewer miles than your old one. see car insurance in a whole new light. liberty mutual insurance. hey, i heard you guys can help me with frog protection? 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(vo) ours is a world of the red-eyes. (daughter) i m really tired. (vo) the transfers. well, that s kid number three. (vo) the co-pilots. all sitting. .trusting. .waiting. .for a safe arrival. introducing the all-new subaru legacy. designed to help the driver in you. .care for the passenger in them. the subaru legacy. it s not just a sedan. it s a subaru. the summer that summers from here on will be compared to. so get out there, and get the best price guaranteed. find it for less and we ll match it and give you $50 toward your next trip. expedia. find yours. joining us now, famed sports and entertainment broadcaster pat o brien. also a former student of my father s. and he was a good teacher. oh, was he? some say he was a little scary. how smart do you have to be? what did you get? from him? i learned how to balance my checkbook. that s good. he didn t give you an a, did he? no. it was more about theory with him. but when i went to school for advanced and national studies, your father was there, henry kissinger would come in and talk and we had this incredible group of professors. it s great. we used to smoke hash in the library and do our finals. wolf blitzer was my classmate. so let s talk about your incredible life. you go through the book, extraordinary, i mean extraordinary arc from the dakotas to the center of hollywood and fame and stardom. and yet the last picture you show after showing pictures with mccartney and ringo and mick jagger, you lying on a carpet. you say it s a perfect metaphor for your life. your, quote, emotional suicide. that s what it was. i had a very big life, i still do and plan on still having one. but a very blessed life, especially from that side of the tracks. abe lincoln poor in south dakota. and to get out of there and come up through the ranks. but part of my alcoholism was that my life was so big, i started believing every lie i was telling myself, that i could drink like a normal person. who s drank with me here. you have, you have. do you remember drinking with me? i m joking. please don t tell me. did something happen? no, nothing happened. i had a very big life. and the alcoholism kind of set in when i was 55. and a disaster. but i m fine now. i ve done a lot when i was writing this book how do i address this panel. do i just say joe or mika? you just talk to whoever you want to talk to. mika, when i was writing this book that s the smart move. i couldn t believe how much i had done. this book should be called i am freaking tired. we ll get to whatever you want to get to but the book has a lot of great sports stories. i worked a lot with harvey milk back in the day in the gay and lesbian movement, it was just called the homosexual movement back then, i think. and lots of stuff in there,ing through scandal and all kinds of things. alcoholism at 55, that sounds surprising because i think the theory is, oh, somebody has had a drinking problem, but at that stage of life to either acknowledge or become explain how at 55 versus 47. well, you re predetermined as an alcoholic, it s a disease, it s a brain disease and it s an allergy. i thought i was fine, but at 55, and it had to do with where i was working too. i hated the people i was working with. i loathed the executive producer who was just a nightmare who would make me go stand next to my friends by the way, that s why mika and i are so sober. we love working. when heath ledger died, he was a friend of mine, go stand next to his coffin. but it was my fault. i was drinking too much. i was never drunk on the air. not that i can remember. i was drinking back then too. so this side of the table has had drinks with pat o brien. some people can drink and some people can t and i m one who can t. and now i ve got there s an app for this. 50,954 without a drug or a drink. that s fantastic, right? the great thing about our time intersecting, the thing about the b the insider is pat and lara were in new york and i was in l.a. most of the time you get this big roaring pitch from pat, like t.r., what have you got? then it would cut to me in l.a. pat and lara were in new york to give a more new york centric feel but so many people thought the world of pat o brien, salt of the earth kind of guy. obviously there was tension behind the scenes with some of the higher-ups. it was a tough environment, certainly one for me coming from a news environment i wasn t prepared for. but mistakes happen. it s all about the recovery. in this book you talk about your recovery. why after the fourth rehab attempt were you able to get it right? what do you think about that, four rehabs. i used to make fun of people who were in two. the first one was at promises and it was after that whatever you call that scandal that i had which is so benign now. and creepy to talk about. but i will. the second one was at betty ford where i got a nice suntan. a beautiful room. then i had the record at betty ford for relapsing and going back in and then i got sober at hazelton. when i got to hazelton, mika, i was almost dead. my last day of drinking, i drank 12 bottles of wine, 13 or 14, was found flat down on my beach near nantucket and was nearly dead. when i got there, they said to me you better listen this time because you re going to die. i was 130 125 pounds, take 40 pounds off this body. i finally realized like dorothy in the wizard of oz, i could go home. robin williams was a friend that grabbed me and said welcome home, papa, you re in a safe place now. the safe place is in these rooms of recovery. you hear other stories and you get support from other people. i hope you stay safe. i m safe now, aren t i? you look great. stay that way. you look great. thank you for coming on. this book looks amazing. you get incredible stories about celebrities and that lifestyle, but i think a lot of people could be helped by this book as well. you need to come back more and just hang with us. the road to recovery is not perfect. it s also the number one health problem in the country. pat o brien, stay with us because things are about to get weird, okay? not that they haven t already. really? hollyweird from paul rudd s makeover to cindy crawford s crusade and a breaking bad reunion. we ll be right back. and asked for less. there s a reason it s called an all you can eat buffet. and not a have just a little buffet. because what we all really want is more. now get our best ever pricing with the more everything plan. 1 gb of bonus data per month per line. verizon smart rewards to rack up points for the things you really want. and 50% off all new smartphones, like the htc one m8 for windows & android. built to inspire envy. come get your more with verizon. no question about that. but your erectile dysfunction - that could be a question of blood flow. cialis tadalafil for daily use helps you be ready anytime the moment s right. you can be more confident in your ability to be ready. and the same cialis is the only daily ed tablet approved to treat ed and symptoms of bph, like needing to go frequently or urgently. 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 term injury, get medical help right away for an erection lasting more than four hours. if you have any sudden decrease or loss in hearing or vision, or any allergic reactions like rash, hives, swelling of the lips, tongue or throat, or difficulty breathing or swallowing, stop taking cialis and get medical help right away. ask your doctor about cialis for daily use and a free 30-tablet trial. we ll start looking for an suv. fire by firenze sir? start your search online with over 35,000 carmax quality certified used cars. carmax. start here. it s time for a trip to hollyweird. louis. wait. what happened to louis? wait a minute. this is such a successful segment that i got rid of louis. oh, really? i just figured that was the way it works around here. if you look at your constitution, you re now in charge of hollyweird. so what are you going to say? let s take a trip to hollyweird. they have done studies, you know. 60% of the time it works every time. he s known for the loveable and quirky comedy role. now paul rudd is said to become the latest hollywood star to get a tough guy superhero makeover. marvel released this picture of rudd as a super hero with the ability to shrink and increase his strength. he saves the world in july 2015. and celebrities have problems just like you and me, even celebrities who send them to posh malibu day school. here s a local parent voicing her concern. and the cock is still there. let s test it and it needs to be removed, let s remove the caulk. that doesn t seem like rocket science. cindy crawford is talking about the school s window caulking, which could contain dangerous chemicals. two of the biggest names in television death is so final as life, life is full of possibilities. now the two tv stars are on demand on stage joining forces for the 19th century comedy, a month in the country, a show that debuts in january. stalked, threatened and called taylor swift. speaking of the biggest names in tv, in this promo for next monday night s primetime emmy awards, ryan cranston is back in business. there it is. barely legal pawn. check out what happens when julia louis-dreyfus is a client. i m here because i m wondering if you might be interested in purchasing this. look at that. it s a best supporting actress in a comedy. supporting, it would be better if it was a leading, you know. hey hey, hey now, supporting is a huge honor. thank you. it is. cindy crawford what was that? watch out for that caulk. it was caulk. watch out for what? the window caulking. caulking? billy bush, eat your heart out. i m coming for you next. it s caulking. i m really glad you didn t caulking. wait a second, so they were protesting the caulking in the windows. yes. because? well, she thought it should be tested. toxic caulk. dangerous chemicals. it s a dangerous conversation. why do you say hollyweird? something worries me about you washington we re new york now. i understand. when hollywood people come in here, you wear a tie, you get dressed up, you fawn not you no, i don t actually. people fawn all over them. look, do we look like fawners? we do not fawn over anybody. you re not fawners. he s not a fawner. i m talking about chris matthews, my good friend. you can t name names. i love chris. he loves that. no, i love chris. you know what, it s offensive that you call me like a washington insider. i m all nantucket, baby, you know that. we are nantucket. that s our bumper sticker. we are nantucket. hey, this is an amazing book. we ll talk about it more and would love for you to do what you did at the beginning of this show where you would just come and stay with us for an hour. we ll be back. thank you so much, pat o brien, great to see you. love pat o brien. that does it for us here on morning joe. craig melvin picks up coverage live from ferguson, missouri, after a short break. have a great day. i m meteorologist bill karins. the heat and humidity is the story. we re watching temperatures soaring into the 90s. that s not the big deal. it s the humidity added to it. that gives you a heat index of 100 to 110 all the way from texas, oklahoma, kansas, all the way down through florida and through the carolinas. some spots will be 110 to 115 in florida this afternoon. have a great day. and with the quicksilver card from capital one, you earn unlimited 1.5% cash back on everything you purchase. not just everything at the hardware store. not everything, until you hit your cash back limit. quicksilver can earn you unlimited 1.5% cash back on everything you could possibly imagine. say it with me everything. one more time, everything! and with that in mind. what s in your wallet? 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if you haven t visited us on the online show, come join us. there s the address on the bottom of the screen. and you can keep the computer on as greta goes on the record right now. new proof, isis has plannings to commit terrorism and the plans are global. fighters from at least 50 companies, the majority of them are for isis and the scariest part of them are right here in america. that means they have american passports, the state department released disturbing new numbers one day after an american was ski kill after fighting for isis in america. the number of how many americans are likely fighting for isis in syria and iraq. i don t know if it s a larger number, but do you have to say about that? if? war continues and isis continues to win and is seen as a conquering jihadist here row and the eyes of this disturbing fight around the world. president obama is derelict as commander in chief to get all of these american citize s who are going to jihad should be considered as terroists. i m going to. isis, i mean at the time they had taken falluja and falluja in 2004 was one of our biggest battles, but if he got it so wrong in january an the intel jems he was given was so wrong then, where s my confidence then that he was making the right decisions? isis didn t come got from a hurricane or a storm. his entire national security team said arm the syrian rebels that would align with us, he chose not to, isis came from iraq, when he drew a terrorist line from assad, and he allowed it to get worse. the commander in chief is derelict in his duty to protect the homeland and the goal should be to defeat these guys, not contain them. is there anything you can say to convince me that tonight that things that have very much changed, i hear what the pentagon said, but as a u.s. senator who s deepably involved in these international matters are you hearing that the pentagon is stepping up and looking at this very differently? this is one senator that was burned by senator obama. i went to the white house to speak to president obama and his assured us he was going to degrades assad and upgrade the syrian army, he took a walk from his chief of staff a few days later and i don t have any confidence at all that he understands the country and his indecision upon indecision is putting our homeland at risk. there s going to be 1400 if we don t start beating these guys. senator, thanks for joining us. and it s not just americans fighting for isis, fox news jennif jennifer griffin is life at the who is. reporter: u.s. intelligence officials have been watching the al qaeda link news front, this montage shows canadian, australian and british foreign fighters bragging about their role as jihad us tourists. 140 americans have gone to syria and iraq to fight. but one official tells me the official could be much higher they just don t know. u.s. intelligence telling me that an estimated 5,000 foreign fighters from across the middle east have joined isis. the state department said last week about 12,000 foreign fighters from at least 50 countries are fighting in skiera alone. these photoings were provided me who lift clues as to his intentions. his family expressed shock that he had gone to syria and in his last tweet he had announced that he had gone to seyria and was with his brothers now. before driving a truck laden with 16 tons of explosives used by seron forces. you can see why this phenom unanimous and european pass mort holders has u.s. intelligence officialings so very concerned. and the beheading of american james foley apparently by a british jihad it now putting pressure on britain. former british prime minister margaret thatcher. you re essentially saying this is it s a breeding ground for britain s jihadist. the british government says that at least 300 jihadists have fighting for isis. so this is a massive problem for the british government. it is also a major security issue for britain and the united states. these jihadists could return to the middle east and they could then return to the middle east. they really have to be dealt with in syria and on the groundin iraq. britain of course has been a very tolerant society that has been used by islamists, the islamists have used moskss for recruiting grounds for islamist terrorists. they have indoctrinated jihadists. britain has become a breeding ground for islamist terrorists. that now is changing and there are calling from many british politicians for far tougher measures to be taken, to be arrested eed detained. he s also mayor boris johnson is quoted as saying anyone who s traveling to syria or iraq should be proven guilty until before being presumed innocent. most people would agree with that assessment 689you re highl like to be when you return to syria, according to boris johnson, you should lose your citizenship. because after all, islamist terrorism is a direct threat to the united states as will. how do these brits or the british government, how do they look at president obama and his handling of the issues. a lot of builts they need britain loongeside, he needs to outline a clear coherent strategy with regard to defeating idefeat ing isis rather than defeating them. and the news about isis keeps getting grimmer. getting advanced news report on issis. what we know from this assessment is that it shows that there was definitely planning and prepositioning by isis. this was not a group that built this crisis on the sly. this is something that was laid down four years ago. he reformed the group if you will and decided to take specific aim at the iraqi security forces. he decided to intimidate them and to flush them out and once he created that vacuum, he was able to build on those gains. what makings it more disturbing, and i don t mean to keep pounding the president, but in january, he announced in the no,,er that this was a jp group. this rebooting for four years, where in the world is this intelligence community na we seem to have dropped the ball very painfully. what i have heard from intelligence officials that there was consistent and ample warning. they took specific aim at the security forces and then once they had pushed them aside, they retook the armament. these warnings were given to the administration. but what seems clear from my reporting that there was a failure to understanding the skb intelligence or a fail krur to act on it in a certain way. i don t understand how you can understand that as a grave concern. i think one element that was pointed out to me in my reporting today is that when we fail to get a status report agreement, we not only had to pull out or military when you re getting your own information from your own people and your own pool of informents that informs gets the more le leadersh leadership. i see it s a confluence of events, it not a single element that causes the c the crisis we seeing today. today he publicly thanked everyone mo worked to bring him home. i had no yvd when i was in prison that so much effort was being expended on my behalf. and know having found out, i m just overwhelmed by emotion. i m also overwhelmed by total strangers that are coming up to me and saying, we re just glad you re home, glad you re back, glad you re safe, great to see you. i suddenly remember how greet the american people are and the kindness they have in their heart and i say a huge thank you from the bottom of miss heart. curtis did not say anything about mihis captivity. begging the isis lead tore please release his son. since steven s capture, i have learned that islam believes that no individual should be hi held responsible for the sins of others. i have always learned that you can grant amnesty, i ask you to please release my child. there s growing controversy or whether the united states should pay ransom for hostages. listening to this mother, i mean having to beg for her son s life, it s just terrible, isn t it? it s horrifying and she s probably going through the worst time in her life. family members of hostages suffer in stress the same as hostages do. that unknowing part is just overwhe overwhelming. we saw that video, but that was just a week ago. now we to the question of ransom. does the united states pay ransom? the united states government zuchbt pay rang ransom. the government doesn t pay, now there have been times in the past when the government has allowed private entities to pay, those are under very straight circumstances and there are reasons for that but the u.s. government doesn t pay ransom. i think they wanted 132 million, which is way out of line, can the government stop you from paying a ransom to get your relative home? they really can t. and that s one of the problems whenever a country tries to district all ransom payments they have just made them do it through a backdoor or a back alley that doesn t bernefit anything. his mother did a wonderful job today, her job to make him see her as a human being. that s what i think would have an impact on you, have an impact on me, by people would behead, these are the most callo callous, evil barbaric people. i can t imagine that they would even care. you would have to understand the what their rules are. he talked about the fact that the profit mohammez. say that a cap chushed islamist would commit to convert. ask that a get out of jail card? a simple things such as recognizin recognizing - never pay by they their faith. it s everybody s test. and our next guest who is african-american says there s no such thing as black america. how does he say that. former assistance to george w. bush goes on the record next. also protesters outside. no matter where you want to be or what you want to do, chances are we re already there. 12 brands. more hotels than anyone else in the world. like super 8, where every destination is super. for a chance to win one million dollars, visit wyndhamrewards.com that s why i always choose the fastest intern.r slow. the fastest printer. the fastest lunch. turkey club. the fastest pencil sharpener. the fastest elevator. the fastest speed dial. the fastest office plant. so why wouldn t i choose the fastest wifi? i would. switch to comcast business internet and get the fastest wifi included. comcast business. built for business. president obama picking reverend al sharpton as his l liaison in ferguson. but is this the right choice to deal with issues already diedings our country. he says there s no such thing as dividing america. nig nice to see you sir. there s no such thing as black american. i would say i m a californian first, i m an american first. the greatest thing about this country is the diversity. when you have people like al sharpton, jesse jackson and the usual as i call race hustlers to seek the divide this country along ethnicity and race, it s does harm. how do we get beyond that, how do we stop that, and be decent to each other and not have any racism in this country or not throw it in someone s face. i think we need to based on the color of their skin. this is one instance i think the president missed a good opportunity to bring the country together. rather than hitting the links and rather than issuing statements from martha s vineyard, he should have been out there saying let s calm down, let s not rush to judgment. let s look at the facts of the indicates and not say was a racist black cop who shot a teenag teenager. the attorney germany what s supposed to be raced and color blind. we need to make sure that question have a vigorous prosecution, i think these folks are making a big mistake and making mouse polarized than ever. there was an article in the new york times that said that sharpton is the go to leader for the president of this administration and they re looking at him as one that for whatever reason has a lot of credibility with the black community. we re americans, we re citizens, not just to be judged on the color of our skin. if you look at this young man, michael bun s funeral. you saw sharpton, jackson, spike lee, people hoo are more interested in rabble roundsing for the cameras as opposed seeking calm and harmony. it s a disgrace. and i having? to say about president obama and reverend al sharpton. and get ready for another power grab, senator rand paul goes on the record next. so we gave her purina cat chow complete. it s great because it has the four cornerstones of nutrition. everything a cat needs for the first step to a healthy, happy life. purina cat chow complete. share your rescue story and join us in building better lives. one rescue at a time. . . is obama getting ready to bypass congress again? this time it s climate change. the obama administration working on brokering a climate change agreement with other nations, but without radification from congress. and that s not the only problem. the president s plan is based on the honor system. and senator rand paul joins us. nice to see you, sir. is this an abuse of power by the president? not only is it an abuse of power, i think it almost leads us to a constitutional crisis of sorts. it s one thing after another. you know, he says he has no choice but to act. he says he has a pen and a phone and he is going to act. that doesn t sound like our republic. we have checks and balances. he has done this with global warming. he has also done this with immigration. he has also done this with the war in libya. he doesn t seem to grasp the checks and balances. if we don t have checks and balances in this country, you know, that can lead to a real problem. i thought it was two things that were curious to me. one is for the first two years of his term of presidency, he had the house and senate. why didn t he do that? he could have gone through the constitutional process. i don t know if he could have gotten it ratified in the senate. the second thing is like the honor system that even if he does sign this, i don t get where with the teeth. the honor system when i was in fifth grade just meant everybody got as. cap and trade. the house rejected cap and trade. so now he is going around democracy. he is doing an end around congress. and you can t imagine that the american public would let him do this, or we would let him do it, frankly. i hope that we will see regulations and actual legal action. i support speaker boehner s legal fight to say the president can t just do what he wants. he is not a king. he has to really get approval from congress. but he doesn t even call congress. he is making this decision. but has he gone to the senate? we heard that he has gone to the leadership to say let s sit down and talk about this? no. i ve tried to communicate with him and i called him a couple of weeks ago to talk about repatriation, letting companies bring home their profit at a reduced rate so we can get money to come home there is $2 trillion sitting overseas that i say could come home and create jobs. and i called him and asked him for his help. but i really didn t get anywhere. i m going to get your trip in one second to guatemala where you were not senator, but dr. rand paul. on your trip, at least one time you re quoted as saying the former secretary of state hillary clinton, i think you referred to her as a warhawk. well, you know, they called the war in libya s hillary s war. and it s led to chaos. so i think we ought to think a little bit before we get involved in war. we now have an ambassador that has been assassinated. we have an embassy that had to flee overland. couldn t even leave by the airport. we had jihadist groups everywhere. and i think we re less safe as a country now with the chaos in libya than when were when gadhafi ruled the place. and that doesn t mean gadhafi was a great guy. he was an autocrat, a dictator, but we had some stability. we have less stability. i think the country has to ask themselves if hillary clinton is going to run for president, is that the kind of decision making that we can expect? is she going to create more chaos by getting involved in more wars in the middle east? and i don t think she fully grasps really the repercussions of what she created in libya. talk to dr. rand paul. now you were in guatemala. why did you go guatemala? for years i ve been seeing kids from guatemala there is a guatemalan neurosurgeon in my hometown of bowling green, kentucky. he has been bringing the kids up and we ve been operating on them for about 15 years. we went down with a team from the university of utah, and we did about 200 cataract surgeries, and i was able to visit with some of the kids that i had done surgery on 15 years ago. one of course was yulia estrada? she was exciting to seattle. she was a beautiful little girl. she is now a pretty young woman. i was able to straighten her eyes. when i went down we were able to get her glasses and she was able to see 20/20 with glasses. i was surprised when hernando lopez s wife left him and he went blind. his wife left him because of that? his was the most dramatic case. this man was ecstatic and overcome by emotion. he had gradually gone blind for three years. lost his job as a truck driver, lost his wife, lost his kids. lost 40 pounds. he was emaciated, and he was being taken care of by a young man from the church. and he got his vision back. and he was so excited and thought maybe i can get my job again. maybe i can get my wife back again. but it was really we were all overcome with emotion seeing his response. so cataracts to the point they were blind? yeah. some could see light perception only. they could tell light on or off, but not enough to walk around the village, not to do any work. definitely not enough to drive that was the majority of the cataracts. dense, white, mature cataracts. that s why the vision is so when you take off the patch the next day, the response is so dramatic. that must be really fun. don t you sort of miss that full-time? i do. it must be fun to give someone his vision back. there is no reward in a more dramatic than seeing someone sit up and say i can see that. is amazing. senator, nice to see you. welcome back to washington and obviously a very successful trip down in guatemala. thank you. and for more on president obama s next potential abuse of power, our political panel joins us. u.s. news and world report and steven, start with you. is this overreach to go beyond congress for this climate? politically it may be. legally, i think this is different than some of the other executive actions he has taken. this does not have the force of law. he has been explicit about that early, the white house in what they have told us so far and what they have told the new york times so far. it s basically, as they put it, a name and shame. it would create pressure for the u.s. to live up to obligations that it made previously and obligations in other words, its honor. and we have people like president bashir of sudan who kills people by droves. we think we re going to shame him into doing something? that s why it s probably not necessarily going to be successful. and it s not legally binding. it s an effort for him to basically get the u.s. to do what he wants the u.s. to do. but whether we do that or not is up to him and his administration. and eventually, up to law. betsy, i imagine the environmentalists aren t going to like this at all. he has given them an honor system. and they want something much more definitive. and on top of that, they re already irked that he has done so little. look, he had a chance in 2009 when the house passed cap and trade legislation. the senate didn t even take it up. the president has staked so much of his legacy on climate change. when he was running in 2008, he said it was a moral challenge and a national security risk. but he said is that on the va when he ran in 0. he was going to clean up the v.a. you don t think that distresses him? there have been so many reports that he wanted to make it the centerpiece of the second term. the fact that nothing has materialized, number one, that reflects poorly on him by the own standards he set. but number two, the democratic base can t be excited. david, is this a power grab or abuse of power or completely within his authority? i think it s power politics and something he cares about for his legacy. he talked about at the beginning of the year, he doesn t have a congress that he believes will work with him. but he tried. i understand his legacy. i understand what he is doing. but i have not seen any effort to go to capitol hill to get senator harry reid. he knows what is going to happen. you re in the middle of an election. he should at least look like he is trying, don t you think? trying to do it within the system? i think he tried to do it within the system during his first term, and he felt he got burned and burned from both sides and from the right. politics is hard. as stephen said, this is not a legally binding agreement. this is a politically binding agreement to try to but the environmentalists, they re going to be horrified, aren t they? i would separate this one out from the other executive actions he has taken. this is one where he does have the power to do what he is doing here. the other ones are major questions of law where he is actually trying to alter or change or i guess deal with enforcement of law. that s an entirely different situation. but david, go back to the environmentalists. he promised them something. then he is giving them a name and shame. this is more than nothing. the united states it s not binding, but when the united states acts, people pay attention to it. look, you need 67 senators to get this through the senate. what can you get 67 on anything? obama is saying i m going do what i can by myself. i m going to take the last word. i think he ought at least be appearing to try. but that s just me. panel, thank you. and man in the building business who says regulations are tearing him down. his story is 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putting them out of business. on the record investigating how too much red tape is choking capitalism. griff jenkins spoke with a kansas construction owner. we get up every day looking for projects that we can do to keep our men employed so that we can make money so that i can make a living. it seems like the federal government wakes up every day and says hmm, how can we slow that process down. reporter: slowing the process down, another small business owner accusing the government of making it too different to do business. meet carl harris, owner of carl harris construction. we re a small business. we ve been in business about 30 years. and hitting it hard every day, trying to keep track of stuff. this is a fema shelter. this is a tornado-safe room built for this school. we put the structural steel framing in that to be able to withstand tornadoes and a safe place for these kids to work. reporter: harris says the government is making it difficult to do that. my business is putting buildings together like, that not keeping track of regulations, griff. and every day we wake up, we read in the papers the federal government s trying to shove something else down us, additional recordkeeping, additional safety requirements, just a number of things. and it s really hard to keep track of that. a small business like myself and my family, because it s a family-owned business, it s all we can do to try to keep track of this. we are trying to bring somebody in, keep them schooled up on what that is all the time removes me from being competitive in the marketplace. reporter: for harris and his company, the regulations don t just slow things down, they actually prevent his business from expanding. we don t do new development because new development is hammered really hard by the regulatory agency. permits for epa, permits for this or that, those kinds of things. so we re not in the new development states. we ll wait until somebody gets that all taken there is way too much risk. reporter: harris doesn t oppose all regulations. he just wants the government to make sure they re actually benefitting people, something he says they re not doing. regulations that are good are okay. but they ve got to be quantifiably beneficial. and that s all we re asking for. reporter: and for businesses like carl harris construction, the many bad regulations are bad news for business. small businesses are the lifeblood of our time. and the more they stifle small business, the more they stifle the economy, the more they put guys like me out of business. and we want to take another look at our on the record investigation choking capitalism. all of our reports are posted. and if you have a business struggling because of these types of regulations, tweet on the record griff jenkins at griff jenkins. and it s not regulations putting a florida business owner out of business, it s his own neighbor. the young businessman is 12 years old. he runs a popular lemonade stand. but his neighbor is telling city hall to shut the stand down. tonight throwing that neighbor in the slammer. lemonade is $1. and i have pink lemonade, strawberry lemonade and regular lemonade. reporter: t.j. is making money. i buy my mom and i dinners. i pay for her cell phone bill, all different things. reporter: the 12-year-old running a lemonade stand in the tampa bay area, florida summers can be hot, and neighbors crave ice-cold lemonade, except one neighbor, 61-year-old doug wilkie, accusing the 12-year-old of running an illegal business, saying it s bringing down the value of his house, and even asking police and city hall to shut it down. the city responded and said it s not in the business of putting lemonade stands out of business. [ applause ] reporter: on the record tried calling wilkie, but his own disconnected. we re sorry. reporter: but t.j. gets loads of support from lemonade loving customers and neighbors, even a local radio station. they sent one of their co-host out to sell lemonade for t.j. until he got home from school. i got this for you. was this a nice surprise when you came home from school today? yes, it s a very nice surprise. reporter: the radio publicity brings hundreds of new customers to the stand, and t.j. making nearly a thousand dollars. i think it s cool that there are people that are backing him. anything i can do to help a 12-year-old that is as enterprising as him out, all the better. reporter: and this 12-year-old looking forward to his 14th birthday when he can legally apply to be a grocery bagger at a publix grocery store. i m showing that i work hard for my money, and that i m not just taking it from my parents. and doug wilkie is the only neighbor complaining about the lemonade stand. that s why we think he should go in the slammer. and inside and outside the california governor s mansion, many americans demanding mexico s president release sergeant andrew tamoressee. nobody ever stomped their foot and asked for less. there s a reason it s called an all you can eat buffet. and not a have just a little buffet. because what we all really want is more. that s why verizon is giving you even more. now, for a limited time, get more data! 1 gb of bonus data every month with every new smartphone or upgrade. our best ever pricing with the more everything plan and 50% off all new smartphones. like the htc one m8 for windows or android. built to inspire envy. come get your more with verizon. femaget three years interest-free financing and save up to $400 on beautyrest and posturepedic. even get three years interest-free financing on serta icomfort and tempur-pedic. but this special financing offer ends labor day at sleep train. that s why i always choose the fastest intern.r slow. the fastest printer. the fastest lunch. turkey club. the fastest pencil sharpener. the fastest elevator. the fastest speed dial. the fastest office plant. so why wouldn t i choose the fastest wifi? i would. switch to comcast business internet and get the fastest wifi included. comcast business. built for business. those are protesters at the california governor s mansion. they were taking their message to mexico s president, who was dining inside the mansion. the protesters demanding mexico release our imprisoned marine sergeant andrew tahmooressi. but some california lawmakers decide instead to actually attend the luncheon for the mexican president, thinking that would make a greater impact. assemblywoman melissa melendez was one of them. she joins us. good evening. good evening, greta. thank you so much for having me. all right. great to have you. now i know you have sent a letter to president obama. you sent a letter as well to the president of mexico about sergeant andrew tahmooressi. but take me inside what happened today at the lunch. be my eyes and ears. what happened? so there were several probably i think 300 people or possibly more at this luncheon from various different industries and walks of life. very crowded. there was a lot of security. but i chose to attend the luncheon rather than go to the protest because i felt that i stood a better chance of getting my message to the president of mexico by being there than him hearing my message if i were on the corner protesting. so we decided to take the message directly to him. they were very gracious about it. of course, they didn t give me an answer right there as to whether they would give us what we were asking for. but they were gracious about it. did you actually get up to the president of mexico or did you get intercepted by one of his aides? i spoke with his legislative aide i believe it was. they did offer i go up and give to it the president myself. it was in the middle of lunch. i thought that was a little inappropriate. and frankly, i was a little worried that the letter would get lost in the shuffle. i did give it to his aide and he assured me he would get it. did the aide indicator show he knew any sign about sergeant andrew tahmooressi or did you catch him off guard? he didn t. he didn t really indicate. he was very respectful and assured me the president would get my letter, asked where i was sitting in the chambers so perhaps if they had an opportunity to come back and speak with me, they would. but again, this was all about getting the message out about sergeant tahmooressi, because as my husband indicated to me when we were talking, he said, you know, maybe no one has asked him to intervene. maybe no one has asked him directly from the united states to get involved. and i thought okay. maybe you re right. and so i ll be happy to be the one to do that. and just before i go on, greta, i do want to say for your viewers and to you on behalf of all of the veterans and sergeant tahmooressi and his mother who i have spoken with, you have been really wonderful if getting the information out. i know you travelled to the border. just on behalf of all of us, we want to thank you for your efforts too. well, i really appreciate it. and the best thing that could happen is if that marine could come home and get treatment here in the united states. i know you are fighting for him and a lot of people are. before i let you go, you wrote a letter to president obama about this very issue on july 31st. have you gotten any reply from the white house that they have even do they acknowledge receiving your letter or have you just been ignored? strangely, no, no response. the president has taken the time to discuss what is going on with justin bieber and a host of other things that are pretty insignificant when you re talking about a marine jailed in mexico. no, no response, sadly. thank you very much for joining us. and good luck with your fight there in california. i know you have been introduced a resolution as well to fight for andrew tahmooressi. thank you very much for joining us. thank you, greta. and coming up, i m going talk to you off the record. i m going tell you what i think about president obama picking reverend al sharpton as his liaison in ferguson. that s next. many of my patients still clean their dentures with toothpaste. but they have to use special care in keeping the denture clean. dentures are very different to real teeth. they re about 10 times softer and may have surface pores where bacteria can multiply. polident is designed to clean dentures daily. its unique micro-clean formula kills 99.99% of odor causing bacteria and helps dissolve stains, cleaning in a better way than brushing with toothpaste. that s why i recommend using polident. [ male announcer ] polident. cleaner, fresher, brighter every day. let s go off the record. let s talk about president obama picking reverend al sharpton as his liaison in ferguson. now that s a political cause that says liaison. maureen of the new york times says president obama depth deputized sharpt on the, and from the tone of her column, she is skanl scandalized. sharpton has no interest in healing. he divides people. he just picks sides. let s not forget, he has done some really cockamamy things. hawk false rape accusation. that s hardly all. according to maureen dowd, sharpton whipped up anti-semitic feelings in new york in 1991 by denouncing jews, whipping up anti-semitic feelings is awful. it s stirring up hate. and did you know sharpton is a tax scofflaw? according to the new york post, sharpton and his organization owe $4.7 million in unpaid taxes, all this and more makes it perplexing that president obama uses sharpton as his go-to outreach guy. it s a rotten message to send to the nation. i don t get it. president obama has lots of choice. why didn t he pick someone well respected with a record of helping, not deciding? he could have picked cory booker. now a democratic senator who has a history of reaching across the political aisle. why not pick him to help? maybe president obama is afraid senator booker will show him up by having success. and that s my off the record comment tonight. thanks for being with us. we ll see you again tomorrow night right here at 7:00 p.m. eastern. just a reminder, if you re just getting home and tuning in