All right. Lets get a check on the day ahead. Former Florida Governor will hit the trail to campaign for Current Governor rick scott. Scott faces his predecessor Charlie Crist coming up this november. President bush will return to the white house on sunday. President obama heads back to the vineyard on tuesday. That is going to do it for a friday edition of way too early. Good show, everybody good week. It would be better if it were payday friday. It is not morning joe starts right now. i grew up here and this is my community and my home. Therefore, it means a lot to me personal that we break this cycle of violence and diffuse the tension and build trust showing the utmost respect for every interaction with every
citizen. I understand the anger and fear that the citizens of ferguson are feeling and our Police Officers will respect both of those. Good morning. Its friday, august 15th. Its good to have you with us. We have got a huge show today. Willie, i mean, this is night of a thousand stars. Remember that back in the 70s . You would have William Shatner singing Strawberry Fields forever. This is what we are going to have here except different. No trapeze and instead of William Shatner, we have al sharpton, right . We have the governor of missouri on. This is big. We got katty kay here washington anchor for bbc and Mike Barnicle and host of msnbc politics nation, and president of the National Action network, lets introduce the hardest working man in show business, reverend al sharpton. In d. C. , the New York Times reporter jeremy peters. He keeps going. He really does. On Marthas Vineyard, julie pace. Get to our thousand guests in one second. What a day yesterday. Did you see this ice bucket thing . It was, like, look at this. Look look they keep coming Louis Bergdorf comes in, this is all for als and because a lot of people around here just apparently dont like me. There is Mike Barnicle coming with yet another it was unbelievable bobby jindal did this all for a good cause, lou gehrigs disease, als. Its just not fun. Thats a lot of eyes. Its a lot of pentup stuff. There is. So thats a release for young louis. Kate and jackson and everybody getting into it. I love the way kate did one extra bucket after everyone else had finished. Unbelievable. We were challenged by bobby
jindal and mika and i have given are contributing to a really worthy cause. We challenged carole king and lyle lovett. Lyle lovett, his answer to the call. I accept your challenge, a guy that moves fast. He got dunked as well. There is also another good tweet yesterday, willie. I like to get in more trouble before 6 02 a. M. In the morning than most people get in trouble all day. I talked about the two reporters that the Police Officers didnt think were moving fast enough. One of them tweeted this out and somebody sent this to me. Tweeted this out a couple of hours later. Shaking his head when he was younger and said, i thought we were cool, man. Were cool its a tight cut you got there. I know. My tweeted response was, no, there was absolutely nothing cool about my haircut. That was just absolutely awful. Ryan reilly, the post reporter. I told him he could dump water on my head and maybe my pennant for being dumb, every time im dumb. You better move. Some people have a jet to see and you will have an ice bucket. All for a good cause, exactly. And lyle lovett is now challenging other people. A lot to get to, willie. Lets hope some good news overnight in missouri. It looks like officials there finally doing the right thing. They actually have people walking with demonstrators instead of firing or aiming at the demonstrators. This is just crazy. It got way out of hand. Yeah. Change in leadership in the police and now a change in tone. Last night in ferguson, missouri, there is hope that days of violent protests over the Deadly Police shooting of an unarmed teen may be coming to an end. The first time in five nights
police were not involved in heated clashes with demonstrators. Protesters instead drove through the streets honking their car horns and others shared music and no reports of violence. The change came after democratic governor jay nixon put the Highway Patrol in control of security there. The governor vowed the change would bring a different tone after the unrest. What has gone over here the last few days is not what missouri or ferguson is about. This is a place people go to work and raise their families and go to church. A missouri community, a Diverse Community but lately looking like a war zone and that is unacceptable. To change that course we need to join hands and amend what is broken and help this community regain its confidence and stability literally the eyes of our nation and world are on us. There is state Highway Patrol ron johnson who walked with protesters in the streets and stopping to embrace many of them
to hear their concerns. President obama spoke publicly for the first time about the death of 18yearold Michael Brown and the violence that ensued. The president saying there is no excuse for violence by or against Police Officers urging the community to come together. Lets remember that we are all part of one american family. We are united in common values and that includes belief in equality under the law. A basic respect for public order, and the right to peaceful public protests. So now is the time for healing. Now is the time for peace and calm on the streets of ferguson. Now is the time for an open and transparent process to see that justice is done. Reverend al, the president said all of the right things yesterday. He said there is no excuse for looting and there is no excuse for violence, there is no excuse for a lot of the bad actions that have taken place, but there is also no excuse for what we have seen from the
militarization of this community and we talked about it yesterday on the show. How can it be you can have a Police Officer that is disproportionately overwhelmingly white representing a community as diverse as ferguson . I think that is really a part of the issue that we really, really have to capture here. When the grandfather of Michael Brown called us last week and i talked to him and i agreed to go down, i went down right after the day of looting and we called for peace. The family went out. We had the first big rally and it built up and we were able to get people calm for one night. Then the militarize of police force made it worse. You went down and called for calm and peace. There is peace, there is calm. Tuesday night, yes. What if, at that point you had other officials in that state following your lead and do exactly what the governor did yesterday and actually having somebody from the Community Like ron johnson. Listen. Its not that tough. No, its not. We are not talking about wats 1965. We are talking about ferguson, missouri. It seems like these Police Officers and these state officials had to bend over backwards to make a bad situation much, much worse. Much, much worse. And what stunned me when i was leaving the church going back to the hotel, calm in the streets. And these police were like all over the place. I mean, i felt like we were in a war zone. This was tuesday night when there was no problems. It got even worse wednesday. But what i hasten to remind everyone is that when the reporters got arrested and everyone got upset, i dont want
people to forget the issue here is an unarmed young man that was killed, not just reporters arrested. I respect the reporters, one of them, i know, a great reporter, but lets not act like we solved the problem, because we now had the cop marching with the marchers. We still have an unarmed young man that was killed and the issue of that cant be lost in all of this. How can it be another thing we were talking about a lot about yesterday was wouldnt the people of ferguson feel better . Wouldnt we all feel better if cops wore cameras . I talked to bill bratton about that. If every cop in america wore a camera we would know what happened in that altercation. It seems to me we said yesterday the only people who were hurt, because good cops arent hurt by wearing cameras. The only good people i mean, the only people that are hurt by that policy are bad cops. I heard you say it in the
mornings and i think youre right, because the only ones that should object to that are bad cops and criminals. Because now the criminal has no excuse and the bad cop has no excuse. I dont think most cops are bad like i dont think people in our communities are bad. We got to get rid of the bad ones on both sides. Theres a couple of other things going on here that we really should think about as a country for quite sometime. One is cultural and the other is political. The cultural thing there is something deeply wrong with the culture where the vast majority of americans know more about the death of Robin Williams than they do about the death of Michael Brown. I mean, that young mans body was on the street for 10 to 15 minutes uncovered, unattended to. The Public Works Department takes dogs off the street after they get it by cars faster. The other aspect of it is speaking about the military 6 00 of Police Departments, there were many, many members of the
ferguson, missouri, Police Department who were on the streets wearing better armament than young men who were sent to iraq in 2003. Thats a fact. There is an incredible piece in the daily beast of a veteran of iraq talking about walking outside the wire in iraq more lightly armed a than what he saw on the streets in ferguson. He wasnt saying it to be cute or clever. He said im looking at what they are wearing and they have more heavy armament for nonviolent protests than they do in iraq. What have we learned from a policing standpoint . It strikes me watching this that things only escalated from this police presence. Yes, they had to come out the first night. You cant tolerate looting and violence. Looting is wrong. Absolutely. If you treat people like criminals in some ways youll have a confrontation. If youre shooting tear gas at people, they will respond. If they do that in any of our neighborhoods. Of course. The first day, in the first day, i would go out and say get
the hell off of my street. Youre right, joe, but dont forget if youre treating people like that that are grieving a young unarmed guy they knew that is dead. This is a kid supposed to go to college this month. I think what we are missing i want the governor to understand we are not out of this yet. We havent even had the funeral. What happened when these kids see their friend laying in the casket . Ive been through this more than one time. We are not out of the emotions because all of a sudden we had one good night of marching. What happens when that town has to look at the kid laying in the casket and say why is he dead . We have not approached how we stop this kind of use of Excessive Force if that is, in fact, what happened. We havent even learned the name of the policeman yet. Reverend, how many of these fergusons are there around the country . I dont think its something every day but i think its a lot
more than we want to face. We have the chokehold case in new york where a man 11 times on tape is saying i cant breathe and they keep an illegal chokehold on him. I think it must cause a real dialogue to sit down and deal with it and sometimes we going to say things that we are uncomfortable with each other, but Martin Luther king iii and Michael Brown family and i have a big rally in ferguson on sunday. Its great they demilitarized the police but that doesnt solve the problem and we will be back here again if we dont deal with it. I think the cops in Staten Island wore cameras that tragedy wouldnt have happened. We have been talking about how the situation in ferguson has really been focused on the militarization of local police and its brought together unlikely groups as diverse as
the aclu and warned about heavily armed Police Departments. Senator Elizabeth Warren compared the scene to a war zone. Senator rand paul wrote in eye Time Magazine that we must demillize the police and same thing Claire Mccaskill said in the Great Press Conference yesterday. If i had been told to get out of the street as a teenager there might be a distinct possibility i would have smarted off but i wouldnt expect to be shot. Democratic senator Claire Mccaskill went to ferguson and she urged restraint. My goal over the last 24 hours has been to demilitarize the response. After 9 11 and sometimes kneejerk fashion, we began equipping Police Departments with all kinds of tools that had not been typical of policing in this country and maybe its time to look at all of that and make a determination as to how effective is a show of what is
military force. Jeremy peters, i thought rand pauls oped yesterday was an important one. Of course, i do as a republican because it was actually republican who seemed to show a little bit of empathy for this community and say some things that republicans on the National Level unfortunately didnt say during the Trayvon Martin case, but now rand paul is saying. But the militarization of the local Police Across america, youve reported is causing some real concerns on both sides. I think what youre seeing here is a grappling inside the Republican Party with how to deal with this emerging strain of libertarianism. Remember, this is the pear, the law and order party that Richard Nixon ran in 1968 as tough on crime running against democrats who were soft on crime and that has pretty much been theRepublican Partys legacy for the last couple of generations and now you have libertarianminded candidates like rand paul out there saying, look, this is just too much. They see these militarized Police Forces and say this is everything that should make a conservative nervous about an overreaching state. And, of course, that is making a lot of people uneasy. Now what rand paul has done that is really interesting that you havent seen other republicans do is tie this into civil rights. What he said is, of course, africanamericans are going to feel like they are attacked by society when you look at what has happened in ferguson. So whether or not republicans can kind of make those connections and have black voters believe them, believe them that they are sincere i think is an open question but youre starting to hear them talking about it in a way that eve you havent heard. I wrote in politico its nice for once to have a republican express concerns about the
property rights of africanamericans as much as, lets say, a racist ranch owner in nevada. I think rand pauls column yesterday was a pretty important column, katty. You actually have the president and eric holder and rand paul and ted cruz came out yesterday also expressing concern about what going on there. A lot of people are actually starting to come together on this. Yeah. The speed with which people have come together from both sides of the aisle has been noticeable if you think about the Trayvon Martin case and that took a little bit longer. Lets go to julie pace up on Marthas Vineyard with the president. You were listening to what the president was saying yesterday and calling for peace. Clearly in the context of what he was saying, also him, too, pointing a large degree of responsibility and putting it on the shoulders of the police in ferguson. Yeah. If you listen to the president s
statement, for a while he was trying to talk to both sides of this. He said its, obviously, out of bounds for there to be looting and violence against police bus his most pointed comments were pointed to the police themselves basically saying there is no excuse for Excessive Force. He did have to be careful. There is a lot we dont know about Michael Browns death but what we do know about the fallout seems to be pretty clear that there are Police Officers that were using Excessive Force and when you talk to white house officials they say a couple of days this week, the president wanted to see if the local and state police that were involved in the situation could manage it themselves. It became clear to him Late Wednesday night that that was impossible and there was a real need on the white houses part to step in in some way, even if its just with a president ial statement but to basically put their stamp on this matter and say this is this has just gone too far. It really was, willie. Mike, we were looking at these still photos. Its insanity. Can we get one of those back up the one he is on top of you just showed. It looks like baghdad. I read somewhere yesterday and maybe, jeremy, you know more about this than me, but leaa lof this cape out of Homeland S