2024. hamid karzai said he doesn t want to accept a deal unless it s contingent upon a variety of factors. the release of guantanamo prisoners and things of that nature. as a war veteran and studies the policy closely, what is the play showing an increasing reluctance to want to deal with that entity that keeps him in power? luckily karzai is going to be out as president in the next several months. i m looking forward to that day. i met him personally as a member of congress and i don t trust him personally. i m looking forward to a new generation of leaders in afghanistan. hopefully we can work with them. our troops have done the job in afghanistan and took out bin laden and it s time to bring them home and nation build here
well, my response to that is this. as you all know, the president promised that everyone would be able to keep their health insurance that they already had. what has happened in congress is that senator grassley and others as a poison pill to the affordable care act put a provision in that treated federal employees differently than 85% of everyone else who was covered by employer insurance. capped the amount of money that could be paid through the federal health exchanges and really created this class of older employees who would not benefit in the ways that so many americans are going to benefit. it s a poison pill that is disadvantaged congressional staff in an effort to retaliate against those of us who really believe that the affordable care act is going to benefit the 40 million people who have found themselves without employer
has a critical role in american politics. but if money was a determining factor, we d have a very different shape of congress and in the white house. i mean the reality is the republicans geared up to try to spend an enormous amount of money to defeat the president. he didn t get defeated, obviously. and so i think the challenge here is how do you reform the system that you re not preverting the process. right now you have individuals through shadow groups who can give tens of millions if not more and pretend they re not influencing politics, that is not good for the country and not good for democracy. clearly both on the republican and democrat side we should focus on what is best and what is best is candidates making their message, not third party groups defining it for him. we ll have to leave it there, kristen and chris, thank you both. thank you. checking the news feed, again this morning for you, new details about a secret program nicknamed penny lane that turned guantanamo
this is unfortunate. i m curious what you think he would say. i think my brother is right about that. he also would have been sympathetic to the dilemma that obama faces with a republican-controlled congress. setting out to absolutely abolish anything he did. this was the same dilemma that bill clinton faces in the 1990s. he was more pragmatic. at the same time that he urged as a democrat, you can t allow republicans and talk about all about balanced budgets and no spending and all this kind of stuff, at the same time he understood since he had been in the white house, the reality of american politics. if there was a republican he admired most, what did you learn
actually don t think a small deal is easier to get to than a large deal because you still have the same fights between the two parties that you always have. are we going to have any revenues, are we going to really do reform entitlements. those fights remain, big deal or small deal. i think what they re going to try to do is avoid both those two issues and take what s left of the low-hanging fruit in the budget, which is a package of small user fees and maybe some things with government pension contributions. use that to offset a little bit of the sequester, which both parties know isn t the right policy and isn t the right way to get savings over the long term because it s blunt and not targeted. it doesn t pick and choose where we should be saving and where we shouldn t be saving. so you ll get a little deal there and i guess i mean i guess if you want to look at the bride bright side of this, it is important that we show that they can govern, that they can get something done becau