lou dobbs

"Vulnerable Democrats are begging donors for cash -- $2,400 at a time, while their colleagues are sitting on millions of dollars they could unleash with a pen stroke." So wrote Erica Payne of the Agenda Project, pointing out that the control of the entire House could be in the hands of a few Democrats in safe seats.That's just one of the problems with a severely dysfunctional election system overly dependent on private cash, notes Chris Hayes of The Nation, who joins Payne and Laura for a discussion of the campaign season thus far, and the potential for a little bit of money to go a long way in the right place. According to Stephen F. Cohen, half of Russia looks back to Josef Stalin as a great leader and the other half as a genocidal murderer. This disconnect, and a longing for a stronger, secure state, can be seen in public debate over a memorial to the victims of the gulags, where more people died than in Hitler's death camps. Cohen tells the story of the victims and their struggle to reenter society in his new book, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin. Born of more than 30 years of research and personal experience, the book is a memoir as well as a history, and Cohen joins Laura in studio to discuss it, and the ongoing struggle to reconcile that period in Russian history. Last week, The Nation uncovered evidence that Lou Dobbs, famed immigrant basher, had in fact employed undocumented immigrants on his estates. Dobbs' daughter is a championship equestrian, and Isabel Macdonald, the reporter for the magazine, spoke to several men who said they cared for horses owned by Dobbs while they were working in the country without authorization. Betsy Reed, executive editor of The Nation, stopped by the GRITtv studio to give us her thoughts on the controversy.