With us senior political analyst Mark Halperin. I was going to do a three thumb fight but willie wasnt up for it. Ill beat you that on any day. Msnbc analyst and visiting professor harold ford junior. Good morning. It was funny stuff last night. It was funny except its not fun funny. I guess he had to address all of David Lettermans jokes. I interviewed Chris Christie for my book coming up in may very seriously about his weight and about how much those jokes hurt him. I guess he felt he had to do that to sort of, you know, break the ice with letterman. What do you mean those jokes hurt him . They hurt his feelings. I want to see another clip and see how hurt he is . He handles it very well. Do you have family members who are also heavy . No. Im the guy. You are the guy. Im the guy. How is your health sxwlmpt if you went to a doctor today, what would the doctor say . Startlingly good. How is your cholesterol . My cholesterol is normal, believe it or not. Thats pretty good. What about your blood sugar . Blood sugar, also normal. Im basically the healthiest fat guy youve ever seen in your life. Crazy. Theres your Campaign Poster right there. Its good stuff. Well done. So youre saying its like the tears . Tears of a clown. No, stop it. My god, i cant believe you. No, hes addressing obviously an issue everybody jokes about with him but its a very he works out with a trainer four times a week. Hes on a diet, he works with a nutritionist. Ill say, one of the things he says for the book is do you really think this is about discipline . Because its not. Because im doing everything i can. I dont know what to do. Do you think i want to look like this . Do you think i want people mocking me night and day about my weight. Sorry. Thats fine. Sorry. No. Im good. Im good. Exactly. You are. Talking to him he had to do that, i guess. Do you think he recognizes the impact his weight could have on his political future, not just his own health, has he come to terms with the fact he needs to lose a lot of weight if he wants to be president . I think he will. My opinion save the rest of what he says for may. I think hes extremely approachable and relatable because much of america is overweight as well and dealing with this problem as well. I think it will be i dont want to say a positive force in his campaign but makes him relatable. Thats not bad. Hes dealing with something millions of americans are dealing with, obesity. Do you think having a relatively easier election makes it likely he will lose weight or less likely. He says he loses weight when things are going really well for him. He gains weight when things are going really well for him. I said, things must be really good. Haveing a great year. He has a high Approval Rating and normal cholesterol. Harold and i can both answer that. I dont know about you, campaigns, you lose in campaigns. Not me, man, i drive through the wendys. I eat on the run. I gain weight in every campaign. I do. I never stop moving. I eat the wendys an popeyes an kfc, i dont stop moving. Im like a grizzly bear about to move into hydration. I get nervous and gain 400 pounds, win the election and then sleep through. Like Homer Simpson with both hands. Exactly. I just saw yesterday this alabama story, on the front of usa today, this 5yearold kid was freed from a bunker. I wasnt following that really closely . What happened . For the kid, its the best case scenario. So this man about a week ago boarded a bus outside dothan, alabama, southeast alabama, demanded that the driver give him a couple of the kids and the driver said no way. This man allegedly shot and killed the bus driver, snatched two kids, one got away, one didnt. The 5yearold has a mild form of ah thames, maybes asbergers and autism, this guy built a bunker on his property had him down there almost a week. I guess it came to a head yesterday. The fbi, somehow, through a pipe, sneaked a camera in there, so they were watching what was going on this whole time. They thought the guy started to become erratic, took out a gun and the fbi went in yesterday afternoon, threw a couple flash bombs. The man was killed. We dont know how exactly but the kid was rescued and hes safe. Man, thats great news. Man. What a story. The front page of the New York Times, the u. S. Is going to sue s p for the ratings on these loans. Whats going on there . Can americans get money from that . Its unclear. It sounds as if the u. S. Does win, is successful, there would likely be some compensation or some monetary award. Explain this quickly. Theyre suing s p for giving high ratings, high marks to these companies that were on shaky ground, to say the least. Theyre suing theyre likely going to sue, according to the story of s p, because s p rated certain securities and certain packages of things that these Financial Firms had, gave them high ratings. Gave the federals actual instrume instruments the high ratings. Didnt deserve those ratings. As a result, Companies Either kept them on their books and they went out and tried to sell them. So the Justice Department is going to sue s p, going to get all this money, this pot of money youre jumping two or three sets ahead. Thats their hope. Who will get the money at the end . From the stories, i cant tell, likely go to the government and the government would disperse some of those dollars. One of the things i hope that happens is s p is forced and these ratings agencies are forced to be more transparent. Theyve been more transparent since the crisis and hope will be more so and hope we have standards in place if we have these kinds of challenges or problems there are easy remedies we understand that s p or any Rating Agency standard would be held to. Can i catch up with willie, everybody talking about the last pass, interference, holding this is a great segue. Im curious, were about to go to drones next. Like popping popcorn. I saw that. It was uncatchable. It landed out of bounds. No way, even if the guy had an unobstructed path, right . It looked uncatchable. He grabbed his jersey with two hands and held on. Maybe the determination was made that it was uncatchable but the ref didnt go like that. That wasnt what he was saying, im not going to make that call to decide the super bowl. Youre shaking your head, halpern. Theres contact both way, you have to catch the ball in the super bowl. Its kind of hard when the ref gets duct tape out and wraps it around your arms. The fact they never ruled that in four downs seems crazy. John harbaugh said his brother made the right play call on all four of those. Naturally. He won the super bowl. He said, we were blitzing them and they couldnt have run against us, they had to throw. He could have rolled out. Little harbaugh has nobody to blame but himself. Those were four stupid plays. I dont like just throwing it up there, give yourself some options. Roll it out. When will we get to the news . We get to eric cantor and, gosh, you talked so much, we probably wont get to the story about the white house not putting out a budget. That would be a shame. Conspiracy. You go blah blah blah about everything, super bowl and why dont we start, reshuffle, we can start with the white house not getting the budget out. Thats my third story. Well see if we get there. I challenge you. This are new revelations this morning involving the u. S. Drones strike program, in a six page memo obtained by nbc news the Justice Department makes the legal case for the killing of american citizens if they are believed to be senior operational leaders of al qaeda or associated force even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the u. S. Joining us now, nbc neuews National Justice correspondent Michael Isikoff, who broke the story last night after obtaining a copy of the memo. Take us through the significance of this memo. Of course. This memo sheds light on one of the most controversial and secretive policies of the Obama Administration, not just the secretive drone strike but using the right to use it against american citizens. This came up in 2007 when a drone strike killed awlaki and kahne, both u. S. Citizens and neither charged with a crime. And we have extra judicial killings by the u. S. Government without any judicial review and any right of the citizen to argue his or her case in court. These are very sticky issues. The legal basis for these strikes has been kept a secret by the Obama Administration. You may remember we had huge fights back in the bush era about the legal memos for enhanced interrogation tactics, the socalled torture memos. Ultimately they became public. This is viewed by some as an analogy for that, secret memos upon which huge u. S. Government policies, with grave consequences are being made. We got a copy of this memo, which is not the olc memo, the office of Legal Council memo but a white paper, 16 page white paper that mirrors and tracks it and gives us much more detail about what the legal basis for these strikes are. You draw a great analogy with the Bush Administration except for the fact there you may have been giving somebody intense in t tergation of picking it up off the field. Here, you have a situation where the u. S. Government is killing americans without judicial review, without any crimes being charged against them. As you said, without them having the right to defend themselves. And even without a right to have any specific actionable intelligen intelligence. Its hard to say how many stop signs were blown thawing here. But for those that were shocked at the Bush Administration quote torture memos, they must be really stunned by this. Americans can be killed, again, not charged with any crimes, no judicial review, no actionable intelligence, nothing, just suspicion. Right. Well, what the administration will say is more than suspicion, theyll say hard intelligence. We all know hard intelligence can be hard or it can be awfully squishy and horribly wrong. Like wmds in iraq. Excellent point. If you read the document. We posted it only, on msnbc news. Com now, you see that some of the definitions they lay out in this memo are open to fairly wide interpretation. Ill give you an example. The most exhow stiff Public Accounting of this was given by attorney general holder last year and gave a three part test when these sorts of killings can be lawful. The first one is when there is an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, when the u. S. Has the intelligence of such. You read the memo and see that imminent threat is subject to a some what broad interpretation. In fact, they use the phrase broader concept of eminence. It does not mean, the memo explicitly says, that theres active intelligence of an ongoing plot. It may mean they have active intelligence of what the memo calls recent activities involve ing violent plots, but no ongoing plot, no active plot against the United States. And then, it says here also, that, quote, there is no evidence suggesting he has renounced or abandoned such activities. Right. Almost as though the burden is on the target. Right. To prove that theyve renoun renounced what they might have advocated or been involved in, in the past. They have to renounce something that there may be no acti actionable intelligence on. This is this is an absolute mess, michael. Thank you so much for bringing this us to us. Great work. Michael, thank you. This is so frightening. What it shows, democrats and liberals very critical and even called for extreme action to be taken against the Bush Administration, were now obviously seeing some decisions the Obama Administration may argue differently. Let me make clear, i support what the Obama Administration is doing here but it goes to show how difficult and messy, when the Bush Administration would make the point, those Senior Leaders would say its difficult for perhaps some to understand what were dealing with here when we talk about this level, all National Security decisions are serious, we talk about this kind of threat we have to make at times very messy and sometimes uncomfortable and oftentimes questionable decisions. My only point is democrats need to now think back how they conducted themselves and questions they raised about Bush Administration tactics. I didnt raise those questions as aggressively as some of my friends did and important everybody step back and take a breather here, particularly democrats. If this was happening and his name was bush, i think thered be a lot of criticism coming at this president. If george bush had done this, it would have been stopped. I think it would have been certainly a huge controversy that would have erupted. The question is how many questions will this administration face on this . I think it goes back to the point you made several years ago, when scarborough. When president obama becomes president , said when he becomes president and looks at classified documents things will change and he wont close gitmo and wont do certain things he is criticizing now and this is what will happen. That is what you said when he stepped in office. Noin the summer of 2008, he was running around george bush was going to change the constitution and he was going to close gitmo. And i laughed. And you had the roundtable i laughed, said, no, you wont. I think we should have a constitutional lawyer, not conservative but somebody down the middle. Get a group of people. Somebody who was very critical of the Bush Administration. Talk about how this sets new standards. Bush was talking about seizing a known terrorist like Khalid Shaikh mohammed, pulling them out and taking them to a black site. Here, were talking about dropping drones not just on one person, as we know, killing a lot of people around it, and killing americans, who have a constitutional right to have a jury of their peers, to kill americans who are not charged with crimes, have no judicial review, no actionable intelligence, and now in this me memo, that they have the burden, the burden is on them, before they are killed, to run out and yell, i am not a terrorist, i am not a treferrorist, as if they t out and yelled, i am not a terrorist, they wouldnt get a drone dropped on their head, too. This is just dangerous. For all the concerns about due process on guantanamo, i share a lot of those, people being held there for a decade without charge, this goes several steps further, this says, we can kill you without due process, we can kill you on suspicion youre a bad guy, were not going to bother to take you somewhere and offer possibility eventually there will be a trial, well just take you out of the game with a drone. At that point, i remember padilla reading the americans supposedly had the dirty bomb, i remember reading that, he had been locked up without a lawyer, i remember being shocked at that saying the guy has a right to a lawyer. Right. Here, they have a right to nothing, the right to be killed by an indiscriminate drone strike if somebodys suspicious in the u. S. Government. Michael isikoff mentioned the guy in yemen taken out, the american citizen who renounced his citizenship. A couple years later his 16yearold son was killed in a drone strike. At the time, the obama campaign, this was robert gibbs, when asked why this young man was killed, an underaged u. S. Citizen said quote he should have had a far more responsible father, talking about al awlakis father. Because of his suspicion of his father and where he was in yemen, he was killed with god knows how many people who should not have been killed. By the way, this happens, mark, if you are in forever you are in the company of somebody that the United States government suspects, and you are a young male, you are, in this world, now presumed guilty. You could be killed, again, for having quote the wrong father. This is so chilling. It is not being weak on the war on terror to not find this to be chilling and a real threat to our civil liberties. Theres some United States senators asking questions about it with no judicial review, i think its incumbent upon of senators with Michael Isikoff getting this memo, what else do we need to know about this program . The standard is brand new. It involves killing americans without any safeguards we suspected pre9 11. By the way, some people, and i think you said it, harold, was it john yoo. Yoo teaches at berkeley. Some people on the left owe an apology. The criticism ramped up thats what im saying, his torture memos, i was not fan of, didnt like a lot of conclusions they drew because they thought they were fog fagoing fast and in some cases, those things are childs play compared to what the federal government can do now and who they can kill without, again, let me say it again, no evidence, no judicial review, no ability to confront your peers. You want to pick a moderate to liberal, whomever, constitutional scholar who may have been against some of that. We are talking about people hanging out with terrorists. The question should be asked of the administration how Many Americans have been tashtd. If you happen to have a known terrorist on the cias Department Watch List in your living room, perhaps you have some issues, too. Dont get me wrong. No, you dont, harold. Did you go to law school . If youre an american, are you telling me if youre an american overseas and you happen to stumble into the wrong zip code, you could be killed because somebody is sitting in the living room of a guy who is a terrorist . Ive never had one in my living room. But you may not know the guy is a terrorist. Maybe you know him from the mosque youre going to. Maybe youre the only two americans. I dont know how to play this. All these questions have to be answered. Just because youre in