what the strategy is and i hope the rest of his statement is involved in explaining what we re going to do after. i mean, annie, it s also we talk a lot about iraq, as we re having the conversation about iraq and to what degree syria is similar or dissimilar, having george bush pop up and talk about making mischief, the whole thing i think for people and both the president s base and the right wing, it s very uncomfortable place to be because there is a real sense of i won t even say battle fatigue. as george packard said, it s a giant wound making them afraid of making a mistake or being on the wrong side of history. we talk about certainty. in this day and anyone, because of institutional failure and of course what has happened in the middle east, i don t think anybody really truly believes in certainty anymore. like there is no such thing. for the president to be able to lay out a case even with the best intelligence, i m not sure you could sell that to the american public giv
0 nick kristof is right. a large swath died not because of chemical weapons but because of the assad regime. is that a compelling reason to send in troops? i don t know. i don t cover foreign policy or syria. this is a very complex issue. the scariest thing i read you cover the white house. the scariest thing i read was in the a.p. yesterday, they were talking about how little intelligence they actually had about where assad was stockpiling his weapons. there was a line in there to the effect that we could end up bombing syria, sort of blind and trigger a chemical weapons reaction because we hit the stockpile. that s how little intelligence we actually have about the situation right now. it should give people a lot of pause before we devote any resources into the country. one last thing. with respect to the military generals quoted in the post piece, we re seeing the residual effects of iraq still. i think there s so much antipathy toward using military action partly because they
before the late 70s, the two parties had to deal with each other because they both had liberals and conservatives in both parties and there were people in the senate and in the house who had an idea of the national interest. it was higher than their party s interest or their own re-election. obviously they were also selfish and narrow in their outlook and we had segregation and we had the southern bloc. but creative legislation got passed. and for a jen ration now there s been almost none of that because the capitol itself is so dysfunctional and blocked and because the two parties i think mainly the republican party and the democrats by response have entrenched themselves in positions that make it impossible to reach a compromise. which is the sad state that we are at today. it is. george packard, thank you very much. good to be with you. nice to have you here. you re looking at live pictures from the george zimmerman trial. when proceedings in sanford, florida commenced this
0 have differing perspectives on the problem, but we share an interest in reducing the violence, securing chemical weapons. translator: of course our opinions do not coincide but all of us have the intention to stop the violence in syria. biden to the rescue. the vice president trying to keep hope alive for tougher gun laws. we ll bring you his report this hour live from the white house. off to the races. senator claire mccaskill, one of obama s earliest supporters in 2008, now declares for hillary in 2016. but will hillary even decide to run? and presidential approval. jimmy fallon shares what s really behind obama s swing in the polls. based on how he s done so far, we can actually see what obama s future ratings will be and the reasons why they may go up or down. it is pretty incredible. let s take a look. next week his approval ratings will go up three points. why? obama makes it illegal for your friends to post photos of your talented people who are overseeing these acti
they said we are focused solely on job creation. they understand that s where they need to be. if you looked at the cbo director s testimony about sequestration, it would cost jobs. there is a did hes connect there. fundamentally, they believe the roots of jobs is tax cutting, and the other cbo report says there is no there is no they recognize they have to go somewhere. it s just the difficulty of figuring out the means to get there. what s clear, though, is looking at the story of wal-mart this week. in fact, you wonder about the middle class. it s the fragility of the american economy right now, and the sheer fragility of many households in terms of their spending hour, and the fact that simply the payroll tax increases could have had that much damage that quickly is very sobering when you think about what s at stake right now in terms of sequestration. that is seen that wal-mart and its total disaster of a reporting month in february is maybe seen as a bellweather for h