so this is stronger. ja, ja. mmm, it' schmeckt sehr gut. mmm, besser. and you can buy it by the wheel, wedge, or a wafer-thin slice to take with you on a hike. danke shon. wiedersehen! wiedersehen! bye-bye! >> i, barack hussein obama, do solemnly swear -- >> this week, the sec inauguration of barack obama. >> we reject that america must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in a generation that will build its future. >> where does he go from here? the benghazi hearings. hillary clinton on the carpet. >> had i been present at the time, i would have excuse you from your post. >> it is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, senator. >> lifting the ban on women in combat. >> i think america's daughters are just as capable as defending freedom as their sons are. >> you do not want to miss with mary jo. mary joe does not intimidate easily. >> the second obama administration began with an 19- minute 2114-word address that senate minority leader mitch mcconnell described as an unabashedly left-of-center speech that brought back memories of the democratic party of ages past. >> our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the immigrants who still see america as a land of opportunity, until bright young students and engineers are lifted in our work force rather than expelled in our country. . our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of detroit to the hills of appalachia to the lanes of the town know that they are cared for. and cherished. and always safe from harm. >> immigration and gun-control. at his comments on the need to preserve medicare, medicaid, and social security, and you have a good picture of where you want to take the country. how would you grade the president's speech a to f? >> i thought it was a lot better than the first speech. the crowd had a blast. it was a speech that does represent his overall view of governing. >> colby, a to f? >> strong b, not so much on the eloquence, but on laying out his agenda and what he wants to accomplish. historic in a way as well. he is the first president to use the word "gay" in an inaugural address, and i think that is where the country is heading. he laid down a marker for this when he talked abut equality. >> mark? >> establishing my grading system at the outset, i give a's second,ln, roosevelt's and kennedy paused only. i would give obama a b, a bb- plus. he was far more surefooted than had been in the past. since the member 6 he has shown a far clearer sense of what he wants to do. i think this was a communitarian address, a lot more than the individualism and we have heard in recent past. >> charles? >> i will buck the tide of grade inflation that has infected the panel. if you are a liberal, this was an a plus, a declaration of a liberal future. declaration that 30 years of conservative ascendancy that began with a ragged's inaugural where he stated in a minute and a half, government is not the solution, but is the problem, this was an overturning of that. this is a way of saying we are in a new era which he will initiate. from that perspective, i give him credit for honesty, open this, boldness about who he is and what he wants to do. i was just amazed that so many in the media heard were so shocked to discover that we have that twice elected a man of the left. where have they been for these four years? and i would add, 699 speeches, tell prompted speeches that he has given. >> how many did ronald reagan give? with a teleprompter. >> six or seven. [laughter] >> i was lucky enough to be there for all of them. >> the president spoke about selma, civil rights, seneca falls, stonewalled, where the modern gay rights movement was born. the couple of things happen. congress will have an impact on the administration. harry reid and mitch mcconnell of reaching an agreement on the filibuster, nothing profound, but that they will raise the debt ceiling to may 18. how will this impact the presidency? >> what the house did is a sign of what is ahead of us. they have not gone over the defeat from november. they have no leverage. they discovered they have the leverage and now have to wait to back down. this is a face-saving device to kick it down the road until may. the president is in a much stronger position in dealing with the republicans in the house. >> do you agree with that? >> i always respect colby's opinion, but the president, like any reelected president, essentially, absent a national event where he becomes a dramatic figure, watches his popularity be rationed out day- by-day. he is strong now. it is hard to believe that he will be as strong a year from now. what we are facing is not simply the debt ceiling. what we are facing is the sequestration, the automatic cuts of a trillion dollars over 10 years, which many republicans are seeing a willingness, expressing willingness to let set in at the end of march, and that will mean another fight and struggle. >> all this will unfold in probably six months. i think he is in a good position to fight for the next six months. >> there was an interesting and little noticed thing this week. economic members in britain came out, where they have had a very tough austerity program. now they are possibly entering into a triple dip recession. it is an example, perhaps, of too much austerity. france may be an example of too much non-austerity. but if we go through sequester, people will see what those cuts mean. i think there would be a rebellion over it. >> you could hardly accuse the united states of indulging too much in austerity. we have added $5 trillion in debt. >> i am not saying that. i am saying that what we have at this moment is a decision of how much to cut and where. the democrats are recalcitrant about entitlements. republicans are almost foolish about the willingness to make enormous cuts. >> with reference to the inaugural address, charles, you write -- fascinating. >> since i'm not a plagiarist, i must say, this come from the president of the czech republic, an economist, and he is stating a truism. when the labor party came into office in britain, it nationalized left and right in the name of the working class. today, if you want to control the energy in the united states, you want cap and trade, you want to shut down the coal industry, suppress the new fracking technique, which has produced a bonanza and gas and oil, then you do it in the name of the planet, global warming. so it allows a political class of experts, central government to control economic labors in a way that was done in the past in the name of the working class. >> but i hear from people who know about this stuff that tell us we're headed towards energy independence. >> unless the epa stops us. >> charles wants to replace the national anthem with the international. this is not as bad as all of that. >> that is a nice tune. >> he does talk about climate change. >> he talks about the stuff thl us we're science of climate change. i am talking about the president. it is good that he is the inaugural address to signal, we have to do with this. it is important to begin on the subject. you could argue about how it is done, but it will be addressed. >> science seems to be overwhelmingly moving in the direction that the president is going, so far as i can tell. >> a little history, if we could. the cap and trade was a republican idea. one. prior to that, the great conservationist movement in this country, which is what climate is about, which is but the environment was about what led by who? teddy roosevelt. it was embraced by men like russell train, great republicans. it was a terrific republican sense of leadership. nelson that, the rockefeller. >> richard nixon? >> clean air act. i mean, the man that took the lead out of the air. richard nixon. the man who saved the waters of this country, richard nixon. the last great liberal president this country had. i would just like to see as rise above this pattern -- petty partisan bickering that i hear in this panel. >> this speech laid out the thing that we have to deal with. the things the government has to be involved in. the air, the water goes from state to state, city to city. one place cannot do it. it has to be the business -- the regulation of how you protect with all of that has to be the business of the federal government. >> could i get half a minute of the bottle? cap and trade worked well for acid rain. acid rain stays in our country. i am not against regulated carbon. if you can get china and india to do something. if they do not, we are spinning in the wind. we are dismantling our economy to do absolutely nothing for the global climate. if you have china and india do what we are doing, intending to do, you would actually make a change that would make a difference. otherwise, what we're doing is dismantling our industry and essentially exporting it to china and india, where all of the carbon pollution is coming from. >> dealing with china and india is the job of the state department. hillary clinton. >> we were misled and there were protests and that the assault sprang out of that. >> with all due respect, we have four dead americans because of a protest or was it guys out for a walk that decided they would kill americans? what difference, at this point, does it make? it is our job to figure out what happened and figure out -- do everything we can to prevent it from happening again. >> the issue was the attack on our consulate in benghazi, took four lives, and with reference from we just heard, susan rice's comments on tv. one member of congress said clinton had allowed the consulate to become a death trap. what have we learned from these hearings? >> demagoguery is alive and well on capitol hill. what did they expect, that she would go up on the hill and say the state department and obama administration was engaged in mendacity and this was a cover- up and we were tried to mislead the american people? of course not. it was not true. very disappointed that she did not come up there and list the things that they wanted to church. there is no substance of what they're trying to suggest. >> people who take on hillary clinton do so at their own risk. then these hearings, as they proved -- >> what about the charge of the people who are criticizing the state department to the effect that the ambassador had asked for more help, more protection, more security? >> the consequences of that, people had been fired, dismissed because of that. but secretary clinton was right about one thing. hundreds of thousands of cables for into the state department every day. there are all addressed to the secretary of state but also that siphoned off to other people. there were people in the department responsible for responding to those requests. they did not respond in a timely fashion and there are consequences to that. not enough to make up for the loss of four lives, but it is not as though they ignore the situation. >> would you focus on the part of the world first? >> first of all, congress does not appropriate amount of money that the state department asked for. secondly, there were mistakes. that is what the commission -- accurately set up -- that was set to investigate. we do not know what was in the classified part of the document. she kept urging members of congress to read that part of the document. and lastly, this is the first round of 2016, and it was obvious >> colby talking about demagoguery. that clip is the ultimate in demagoguery. at the end she says, our job is to find out what happened. well, to find out what happened, you have to know whether this was a spontaneous, 1-off demonstration gone awry, or was in the leading edge of a resurgence of al qaeda in north africa, which would later impact mali and create dead americans and others in algeria. that is the essence of finding out what happened. yet, in the have second before she says, what difference does it make if it was a spontaneous demonstration or something else? that is a complete contradiction. there is not anybody that pointed it out. the essence of what happened is, is this a resurgence of al qaeda, and why is it that the administration went weeks and weeks with attending it had to do with a video, when there was no demonstration in the first place? >> if i am not mistaken, the president, the next day, did say it was an act of terror. >> he did not. >> he said it in the rose garden the very next day. we would check the teleprompter, ok? everybody who watched this, as i did, came to one conclusion. hillary clinton was the grown- up. she was being yelled at by a group of adolescents. i will say this about ron paul. in 30 years of congress, he was never boarish. his son, in two years established a new level of force this, rand paul. ron johnson, from wisconsin, they were carping, petty, and she was a grown-up. i think there is no question about that. >> greenlight for women in combat roles. >> we were taking fire from everywhere. i could remember hearing the bullets going by me hitting the ground beside me. i shot one guy, saw him fall. >> the first woman since world war two to receive and the combat of the other metal. this does not mean that they will be serving in the infantry right away? >> recommended unanimously by the joint chiefs of staff. there have been 280,000 women that have served in theater in afghanistan and iraq over the past decade, but there are fundamental questions about infantry, where one of the tests historically that has been given is that firemen kerry, that you can lift and carry on your soldiers 200 pounds back to safety. that is a test for male and female. i think that will be at least a hurdle. >> could you have carried somebody who was 200 pounds? you could have. in the heyday. this was long and coming. women are getting wounded, killed, they are not getting paid the same amount, not being able to serve in combat blocks them from progressing in the ranks of the way that men do. do i think women will be in the marines in the same number that men are at the front lines? no, it will be led fire departments. there will bare very few fire women, because it takes great physical strength. >> should the standard fee changed? >> they need to come up with a bonafide occupational standard. once the standards are set, you have to meet them. >> situps, bolts, etc. >> clearly, there are a lot of women that can do better than i could. i was in the general's corps we had 15 casualties in the vietnam war. a file cabinet fell over and hurt one person and the rest of us died laughing. >> was this an experiment in social experimentation? >> this was about one in the gates of a quality. we all agree, as long as the standards are not changed, it should be open to men and women, understanding that there will be a much smaller of women who will meet the standards, simply because the physiology of women is different from men. in the olympics you have the men's boxing and women's boxing. they are separate. you have the men's the catalog and women's. you have men and women in all other categories. we respect -- respect -- expected in sporting lives. we expect differences in strength and endurance and speed. they have to be separated. otherwise, if the women are with the men in the 100 meter dash, they would always lose. as long as the standard is maintained, everyone will agree, this is the way it should be. >> president obama said a decade of war is now ending. anyone want to bet? >> not if you live in syria, mali, algeria, afghanistan, and a lot of other places. he said america will no longer be as involved, but the question is what will we do? the threat has not disappeared. al qaeda central has been dealt a serious blow. they are now active in north africa. the french are in the lead. how much will we help them? >> the french are in the lead in mali, not in nigeria. this is a french-speaking country. they are concerned, about francophone countries. it is because of economic interests they have in this francophone countries. the idea that france is stepping into a vacuum, they are not doing that. >> since when is the french all for altruism? i do not give a damn what they are there. they are stopping the rebels in mali and no one else is. >> president obama chooses a former prosecutor >> she brought down john gotti, the head of the gambino crime syndicate and brought to justice the terrorists responsible for bombing the world trade center and embassies in africa. i would say that is a pretty good run. you do not want to mess with mary jo. >> mary jo white, the new selection for the head of the sec. president obama also nominated richard cordray to the head of the consumer protection financial bureau. >> this is a message consistent with what the president has said, this is who i am, these are the people who will best carry out policies in my judgment that i think is necessary to clean up this country and make sure that we do not go through it again. challenging the senate to act and accept or confirm richard cordray and mary jo white to do its constitutional duty. >> good choices, bad choices, colby, a senior banking experience? >> based on my experience as a friend who was a former prosecutor in new york and knows mary jo white, an excellent choice. she will faithfully fulfilled a lot. >> as far as i can tell, this woman may be sleeps 3 hours a night. she ran this huge prosecutor's office, why the respected, under both republican and democrats -- u.s. attorney for the southern district of new york. what we do not know about her is what kind of a regulator she is. we know she is a very tough and very sensible prosecutor. what we do not know is what kind of a regulator she is, and it is a big task, because they have to implement dodd-frank. >> no surprise, "the wall street journal" does not merely like either. >> i agree with my colleagues. can move onto something else? i do not know anything about him, but i know about her. i want somebody tough on wall street. i do not think it is a conservative position to be against enforcing the laws on maastricht. as tough on wall street and main street. if we passed the assault weapons ban, i would make an exception and allow her to carry one. >> that is still a big if, at this point. >> we past financial reform in the house and senate. but there has to implementation by the sec. it still is not fully implemented, by any means. very difficult and tricky to do. >> whatever is written about the obama administration, its prosecution of the malefactors great what on wall street has certainly not a sterling chapter. it to be written. i charge mr. cordray and miss white without responsibility of every riding. >> you get the last word. thanks. see you next week.