tax on medical devices that was tucked into the law. but the vote was nonbinding and symbolic. much like the rest of the attempts to repeal obama care. wolf? jim acosta, with that let s dig a little bit deeper in our strategy session right now. joining us two cnn contributors the former obama special adviser van jones and former bush speechwriter david frum. here is what it would take to repeal obama care. you understand this completely. maybe they could do it in the house where the republicans have a majority but in the senate you would need 60 votes. even if they got 60 votes, the president would veto that legislation. you need two-thirds overrides in both houses to override a presidential veto. you would need 67 votes in the senate. and that s not happening. that s not happening. the republicans are motivated i think by two concerns. the first is this is a very narled statute heading toward a lot of trouble that the financing mechanisms are
transportation bills for vice president biden s february trip were posted on a government website. and biden and his staff, biden spent one night in each city, some of his staff obviously more, $585,000 for paris, and $459,000 for the hotel bill in london. now, that particular bill includes 136 rooms for multiple nights. that s an average of $568 per room per night. that s by our math, wolf. that s expensive, obviously, but it s the number of rooms they need for a vice president to visit a city like london, or paris for that matter, for one night, that really adds up. $500 in paris or london. you can kind of see that happening, especially at a nice hotel like this. we spoke with several people who handled these kinds of trips for previous administrations. some said, hey, this is just what it costs. but one person that i spoke with from the bush 43 administration
former chief of staff to powell. powell walked into my office and walked over to the window and said i wonder what ll happen when we put 500,000 troops into iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and find nothing. david, do you think the lessons about intelligence, what has been learned, that in today s landscape that insiders will be more prone to blow the whistle? one can only hope. they do that at their peril. they would lose their job. back when we were arguing about the war, about the invasion of iraq before the invasion, there were people inside the bureaucracy, the national security agencies, who knew the intelligence was iffy. on occasion they would give anonymous quotes to people in the media. they got sort of low bald and downplayed. but they didn t come forward because they d lose their job. we still, you know, there was plenty. this is what s tragic here. there was plenty of indications that the bush/cheney crowd were not telling the full truth and more i
we help you shine every day of the week. welcome black. the war in iraq began shock and awe. we all remember that. before it was over more than 4400 u.s. troops and 100,000 iraqis were killed in an effort to bring down saddam hussein. after months of the bush administration s hard sell to go in. simply stated there is no doubt saddam hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. the problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. we don t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud the days of iraq acting as an outlaw state are coming to an end. we d like to bring into our conversation today democratic congressman tammy duckworth of
president, joe biden, was chair of the senate foreign relations committee. we were begging him, i was with one of the former heads of the u.n. in iraq begging joe biden to call him as a witness to talk about the lack of wmds in iraq. they refused. so there are key members of this administration, the secretary of state, john kerry, the vice president, joe biden, who also have to answer for their role in this. people like wolfowitz, cheney, rumsfeld, should not be given any kind of honor in this society. they should be held accountable for the u.s. soldiers that were killed and i think it s many more than 100,000 iraqis that were killed. i m sure. mike, former bush speechwriter david frumm has written a column in which he reveals long conversations held in 2002 with dick cheney. according to frumm, the two men talked less about promoting democracy and how iraq might become a source of oil to the united states. mike, was cheap oil really at the heart of this invasion? you know, i woul