All In with Chris Hayes, Transcript 08/12/15

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN -- BOB SCHIEFFER, CBS NEWS: Do you really think you could beat Hillary Clinton? SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (D-VT), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: OK, great question. The answer is yes. HAYES: Hillary Clinton is officially feeling the burn, as Bernie takes the lead on Hillary in New Hampshire. Tonight, Nate Silver on what to make of all the early polling. Plus, Matt Taibbi on 2016 as a reality show. DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: The Bible! HAYES: The first Republican finally drops an attack ad on Donald Trump. TRUMP: The economy does better under the Democrats. HAYES: Then, Planned Parenthood gets some love from the Republican front-runner. TRUMP: I cherish women. HAYES: Plus, "Vanity Fair" in the Twitter fit over Tinder. Tonight, the raging vote over the hottest dating app. And California`s revolutionary approach to water conservation -- behold shade balls. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Three, two, one, shade balls go! HAYES: ALL IN starts right now. (END VIDEOTAPE) HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. For the first time ever, Hillary Clinton is trailing in a poll on the Democratic presidential primary, and almost as remarkable, is just who is beating her. One Bernard Bernie Sanders. In a new poll of Democratic voters in New Hampshire, Sanders leads Clinton -- leads Clinton 44 percent to 37 percent, comfortable 7-point edge, well outside the margin of error. While Sanders, of course, does hail from New Hampshire`s next door neighbor at the west of Vermont, the last time this very same poll was conducted back in March, he got just 8 percent compared to Clinton at 47. As of now, this is just one poll, very early in the cycle, but it comes as Bernie Sanders has been drawing biggest crowds of the campaign on either side so far, nearly 28,000 people in L.A. on a Monday night, and even more than that, the night before in Portland. It also comes as questions about the private e-mail system Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state are back in the news with Clinton now agreeing to turn over her server to the FBI. NBC`s Andrea Mitchell spoke on the phone with Bernie Sanders earlier today, and he passed on an opportunity to attack Clinton over those e- mails. (BEGIN AUDIO CLIP) ANDREA MITCHELL, NBC NEWS: Do you think that the decline -- her decline in the polls has any -- has any effect, does it reflect the e-mail controversy? Trust? SANDERS: All I can tell you -- all I can tell you is we have been focusing on our issues, which is to create an economy that works for the middle class of this country and not a handful of billionaires. That`s what I`ve been focused on. MITCHELL: You may be the only candidate running for president not wanting to jump all over her on this. Is that a deliberate strategy? SANDERS: Well, I`ll tell you. You know, I honestly believe that the American people are tired of old-fashioned politics where you`re supposed to be beating up on all your opponents. I like Hillary Clinton, I respect Hillary Clinton, I disagree with Hillary Clinton on many issues and that`s what I`ll be talking about. (END AUDIO CLIP) HAYES: Joining me now, Jesse McIntosh, spokesperson for Emily`s List, and Cornell Belcher, Democratic pollster who worked on both of Barack Obama`s presidential campaigns. Cornell, let me start with you. So, one part of me says, oh, my God. I am genuinely shocked. I mean, I am. I am surprised that Bernie Sanders is 7 points up in a poll in New Hampshire of Democratic primary voters, a scientific poll, with a perfectly good sampling size. The side of me is like, well, it`s August, it`s super early and, you know, go back and look at it in 2011 or 2007 and Rudy Giuliani is the president of the United States. As a pollster, what`s your reaction to this? CORNELL BELCHER, DEMOCRATIC POLLSTER: I`d say curb your enthusiasm just a little bit. It is awfully early. You still have an electorate that`s awfully fluid. I mean, I was looking at the number in, in some of the polling from I think CNN that was out. You have two-thirds of the caucus electorate or the primary electorate who is still searching, not certain of their vote. And this poll could be an outlier. I mean, there are things that happen when you get polled that`s an outlier, that, you know, if you look at the trend here, Hillary has been running comfortably ahead in almost every place. This poll could be an outlier, but also it could be in fact what you see is Bernie sort of catching on. Do I think he is going to surge ahead of Clinton in all these places? No, because I think most voters still don`t know him, and that`s what campaigns are about. Sort of him building his name identification, defining who he is and defining a contrast, a strong contrast with Clinton. I think it was real smart from that interview, but he didn`t take debate and attack Hillary. A lot of candidates aren`t disciplined. Clearly, Bernie -- Senator Sanders is disciplined. HAYES: He is -- BELCHER: They know not to attack Hillary Clinton. That`s not who he is. That`s not how they`re going to beat Hillary Clinton. HAYES: I mean, Bernie Sanders is one of the most disciplined on message individuals on the face of the earth. I mean, Bernie, what did you have for breakfast? I had a middle class -- (LAUGHTER) HAYES: I`m not saying -- I mean, I`m saying this with admiration. Like this is -- it`s not a stunt. It`s not something he just, you know, put out in the field and poll-tested. He`s been saying this for 40 years, because every single fiber and cell of his body believes it, right? So, this is -- you know, it`s not hard to give that message. Jesse, the question I have is, what do you think the Clinton campaign does with Bernie Sanders? I think they`re inclined to basically ignore him. Run their race. Roll out the policy proposals. Get up in the air with positive ads when they need to as we get closer. And the Sanders thing will go away. At a certain point, they may not be able to do that. JESSE MCINTOSH, EMILY`S LIST: I think, I take them at their word, they welcome him into the race and they`re glad that they`ve got him. I think that this is a good thing for the Democratic Party. And it`s a good thing for Hillary Clinton because of that. I hear a lot of comparisons that I totally disagree with between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, because they both seem like unlikely long shots who are capturing enthusiasm. HAYES: Right. MCINTOSH: Sanders is talking about issues that people want to be front and center, that Hillary Clinton frankly wants to be front and center. The fact that he is able to focus this race around economic populism is a fantastic thing and I think, frankly, the dialogue going back and forth between him and black lives matter is only a good thing for the Democratic Party going forward. I mean, isn`t it kind of fun to be watching Democratic primary that is issues-focused? That is actually about a contrast between us and the Republicans, even before we get to the general, and then take a look on the other side of the aisle? Like this whole thing is making me proud of our candidates and happy to be a Democrat this year. HAYES: Well, so here`s -- one important thing. The thing -- the thing that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have most in common is the way they pronounce the word that is spelled H-U-G-E -- MCINTOSH: Fair. HAYES: Which is pronounced huge. Look it up. It`s huge. They both pronounce it huge. I think you`re right about the speciousness of that comparison. But, Cornell, here`s the internals. And again, like, I think there is an anticipation I think in a -- a lot of the media has a vested interest in competition and would love nothing more than to see Hillary Clinton in a neck in neck race. Like just a -- if there is a rooting interest in the media, the rooting interest is uncertainty, surprises, competition, right? So I am wary of that bias. That said, there is in this polling what you might call an enthusiasm gap, right? Excited about Hillary Clinton`s candidacy, 35 percent. Could support her but not enthusiastic, 51 percent. We have seen kind enthusiasm gaps before in Democratic primaries, one recalls Howard Dean versus John Kerry and enthusiasm doesn`t get that you far it turns out in the end. But is that -- is there something there that`s being measured? BELCHER: Well, you always -- energy is always good. Particularly energy is good when you`re going into caucus. Most Americans don`t understand caucuses because they are a weird, crazy thing that only some people do in weird crazy places. But caucuses, you have to really be for a candidate to go through a caucus process, because it is not hike you`re going to the voting booth and just push a button and then walk away. So, enthusiasm and energy of a base group is really good and helpful in caucuses, but so is organization. I think when you look at the energy behind Bernie -- Senator Sanders. I think it is a good thing. But I think he`s got a long way to go in sort of defining himself and drawing a strong contrast that puts him on one side and Hillary on another side, where he can really pull through. One of the things that -- in a way that`s not a hard negative in this attack, because Hillary does very well when people attack her. I mean, she can take a punch. One of the things the Obamacare campaign was able to do in 2007, 2008, was put a hard contrast in a way that wasn`t a negative or really sort of hard negative. And part of that was experience, where they put experience on top of the messaging pyramid. The Obama campaign turned that on its head and said this kind of experience led us to Iraq, and I think he`s got to find his hard contrast where he can put Hillary on one side without going hard negative after her. HAYES: All right. Jesse McIntosh, Cornell Belcher, thank you both. MCINTOSH: Thanks. HAYES: At Donald Trump`s campaign stop in Michigan last night, his first since the Republican debate, the candidate shared some of his reading habits after noticing someone holding his book, "The Art of the Deal". (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: Hold that book up, please. OK, one of the greatest. That`s my second favorite book of all time. Do you know what my first is? The Bible! (APPLAUSE) Nothing beats the Bible. Nothing beats the Bible. Not even "The Art of the Deal". Not even close. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Not even close. That, ladies and gentlemen, is your Republican front-runner. New polling out today suggests he may actually be consolidating his lead in Iowa, home to the presidential nominating contest. Trump is now at 22 percent, well ahead of the runner up, Ben Carson at 14 percent. Although, let`s just pause for a moment that Ben Carson is number two right now. Followed by Scott Walker at 9 and Ted Cruz at 8. It`s perfect time for the Donald to travel to Des Moines this weekend to attend the Iowa state fair. In every presidential cycle, "Rolling Stone" reporter Mike Taibbi heads to Iowa to chronicle the carnival-like insanity leading up to the caucus, all the town halls and the cookouts with the candidates, the voters trying to get their opinions heard, and the media frenzy surrounding it all. This year, with Trump leading the race, things are even more insane than usual. Taibbi writes in this issue of "Rolling Stone", "The thing is when you think about it, it is not funny. Given what`s at stake, it is more like the opposite. Like the first sign of the collapse of the U.S. as a global superpower. Twenty years from now when we`re all living in prehistory, as prehistory hominids and hunting rats with sticks, we`ll probably look back at this moment as the beginning of the end." Matt Taibbi back from that trip joins me now. Matt, whenever I see you, I`ve got to point thumbs up like the bible. I like the piece. So, here`s what I want to know. You go every year. Well, every four. MATT TAIBBI, ROLLING STONE: Every four years. HAYES: You go every four. There`s a certain -- there is a kind of pomp and circumstance to the whole thing. And I`ve been out on the campaign trail. There is something great about how accessible a lot of people are. I mean, you talk to voters, you talk to the candidates, they`re all sort of around. What`s different this time around? TAIBBI: So, normally, at this time in the campaign, the candidates are sort of trying stuff out and they`re being very, very conservative. You know, they will do, they don`t do anything to try to raise a lot of ripples in the media. HAYES: It`s the opposite, right? It`s like I am -- it`s like previews for a Broadway play, right? TAIBBI: Exactly. HAYES: You`re just, you don`t want the press to come because you`re ironing out the kinks. TAIBBI: Right. When I was a student I used to go to comedy clubs in New York when they were trying stuff out in the afternoons. You know, it`s very much like that in the campaign trail normally at this time of the race. What`s happening with Trump in the race is that -- and the fact there are so many candidates, is that all these people feel a tremendous pressure to get into the media and so they`re saying, you know, things that they know are extremely outlandish in a desperate attempt to create media headlines. Why was Huckabee doing this crazy thing about maybe sending troops or the FBI to close abortion clinics, or, you know, Lindsey Graham going back to Iraq. All of these things. HAYES: OK. What`s changed that dynamic in the four years since you were there last? TAIBBI: Trump. HAYES: It`s Trump? TAIBBI: Yes. I mean, I think what`s happening now is that, in the old days, candidates were very, very afraid of having high negatives, about doing anything that would sour voters on you. But Trump is completely flipping that script on its head. What he`s proving is that name recognition, media recognition, you know, hits on the internet. All of these things are more important than whether people feel positively or negatively. HAYES: Isn`t that fools gold? I mean, these people have lots of money behind them, because they`ve all got some sort of, you know, there is some private equity guy in the background who`s going to write a $10 million check, right? TAIBBI: Right. HAYES: Yes, there are grown-up consultants saying, this may get you a bump in August. But you will have to live with your oven doors comment, former Governor Huckabee. That won`t be helpful down the road. It is fools gold. Don`t go for it. TAIBBI: Maybe, or maybe this is a new paradigm and this is a new electorate. Maybe what`s going on with Trump is a real, genuine revolt against exactly that kind of politics you`re talking about, where the hedge fund guy is behind the candidate, like Marionette telling him what to say. Trump represents a rebellion against that. And that`s why people are supporting him. He is crazy and you wouldn`t want him anywhere near the nuclear briefcase, but, you know, he is not scripted. And that`s what voters are responding to. HAYES: The shtick, the Trump shtick that I like the most is the donor class trader Trump shtick. TAIBBI: Right. HAYES: Donor class trader Trump shtick is, I used to be a donor. He said I wrote everybody checks. They want to play golf with me, right? And, basically, like, your system is bought and paid for. Let me tell you because I used to be the one doing the purchasing. He loves that line. TAIBBI: Yes, yes. That went over extremely well I thought in the debate, the whole thing about Hillary coming to his wedding and all of that. I mean, it was lifting the veil on the process in a way we don`t see happen. HAYES: He`s got this response, this feud with Rand Paul. We`re going to play the ad a little bit later in the program. But he`s got this back and forth about, you know, basically like, every time someone attacks him, he is like this person wanted to go play golf with me. TAIBBI: Right, right, yes. HAYES: Lindsey Graham, unless his views have changed, you know, unless you`re a young yielding granite, which is a hilarious phrase. "Recently, Rand Paul called me and asked me to play golf. I easily beat him on the golf course and I will even more easily beat him now in the world in the politics." (LAUGHTER) TAIBBI: I mean, he is like the Stalin of modern day politics. He`s like the greatest everything in the world, the greatest golfer, probably the greatest baseball player, you know? I mean, he`s a piece of art. (CROSSTALK) TAIBBI: Yes, exactly, exactly. HAYES: Yes, the big -- the real sort of like concept you`ll bed rock to me here is, there is this old political science thesis, a book called "The Party Decides", which is all about the fact that parties, party establishments choose nominees, right? And there is a question about whether that is breaking down. And every time we sort of get it, and it`s like, Bob Dole and then it`s McCain and Romney. And the question is, is it breaking down now? TAIBBI: See, that`s the big question. There have been a few moments where we thought in the past that it was breaking down. Howard Dean was a moment. HAYES: Right, it snapped right back. TAIBBI: It snapped right back. This is the book most serious threat that we`ve seen to this process yet, because whoever those people are who are controlling the party apparatus, they are completely out to sea with this Trump thing. They don`t have a backchannel way to get in touch with him. And I think, you know, what`s happening is that especially you see Carson is rising to the polls, too, and Fiorina. That`s a massive rejection of the party structure, and it`s a really interesting, genuinely interesting phenomenon. HAYES: Matt Taibbi, thank you very much. Welcome back. TAIBBI: Thank you. HAYES: Up next, a quick reminder, the true 2016 battles haven`t even started yet. FiveThirtyEight`s Nate Silver on why the campaigns are just beginning. And later, a negative "Vanity Fair" profile question, "Love in the age of Tinder". We will debate the social experiment of dating apps, ahead. Plus, how Donald Trump slides to the left that some of his fellow Republican candidates as defender of Planned Parenthood. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: I`ve had many Republican conservative women come up and say, Planned Parenthood serves a good function other than that one aspect. (END VIDEO CLIP) (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: Today, former President Jimmy Carter revealed he has cancer and will go undergo treatment. The 39th president in a statement, quote, "Recent liver surgery revealed that I have cancer that is now in other parts of my body. I will be rearranging my schedule as necessary so I can undergo treatment by physicians at Emory Healthcare. More complete public statement will be made when facts are known, possibly next week." President Carter, who is 90 years old, had an elective procedure to remove a small mass from his liver on August 3rd. According to the Carter Center, it was evidently this procedure which led to the detection of cancer. Carter has had an active post-presidency, with a long list of achievements include monitoring the elections of troubled nations, aiding and vastly expanding the Habitat for Humanity housing organization, and writing more than two dozen books. Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts. He has lived longer than any other U.S. president after leaving the White House. And we, of course, sincerely wish him well and we`ll keep you posted on his health. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: When you go back, I mean, it just seems the economy does better under the Democrats. INTERVIEWER: Healthcare? TRUMP: Liberal on health care. We have to take care of people that are sick. INTERVIEWER: Universal health coverage? TRUMP: I love universal. Hillary Clinton I think is a terrific woman. I mean, I`m a little biased because I`ve known her for years. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Rand Paul today released a new online ad attacking Donald Trump by spotlighting many of the less than conservative things Trump has said in the past. And it`s the sort of thing you can expect to see a lot more of if he stays in the race much longer. It may be hard to imagine seeing as we`re already into presidential debate season, but the general election is 453 days away and the Iowa caucuses are still 172 days away. That is a long time. In fact, right now, the candidates and super PACs backing them are largely focused on raising money, money they can spend to tear down opponents when the time comes and they will. In 2012, about $1.92 billion was spent on TV ads alone. A big portion of them negative. Think about it this way -- right now, the candidates are drawing battle lines, amassing their troops and ammo, but no one has really even begun to fire a single shot. The artillery remains unspent. And when they do, it will have a huge impact on the race. You can just ask sitting Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill who today somewhat strangely revealed that in a 2012 race when she was a long shot for re-election, she spent $1.7 to engineer victory in the Republican primary for far right conservative Todd Akin, whose track record, McCaskill wrote, made him her ideal opponent. McCaskill put out an ad that look like an attack on Akin but was actually an attempt to boost him in the primary while disqualifying him with independent voters. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) AD NARRATOR: The most conservative congressman in Missouri as our senator? Todd Akin, a crusader against bigger government, Akin would completely eliminate the Departments of Education and Energy and privatize Social Security. Todd`s pro-family agenda would outlaw many forms of contraception. And Akin alone says President Obama is a complete menace to our civilization. Todd Akin, Missouri`s true conservative is just too conservative. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Amazing. Akin would, of course, go on to win the GOP primary, thanks in large part to that ad and then lose the general after suggesting the victims of, quote, "legitimate rape" rarely get pregnant. McCaskill kept the Senate seat that almost no one thought she would hang on to. Joining me now, Nate Silver, editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight, who`s been chastising the media for overemphasizing polls this early in the election cycle. Why you got to be such a bummer, dude? NATE SILVER, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT.COM: It`s August. Not August the election year but the year before the election. We`ve never seen anything like this before, there were so much focus on polls so early in the campaign. As much as we would like to see the drama play itself out, the fact is you can`t overcome the calendar. We`re half a year until New Hampshire and Iowa. If you look back in August of past years, who was winning in this point in time, it was Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton in 2007. HAYES: Right. SILVER: Joe Lieberman, you know, Fred Thompson. HAYES: OK, let me sort of argue for a second a little bit. One is that, I do think a lot of rules have been changing. There is a sort of -- you know, there`s a sort of sense that the future will look like the past and these are the kinds of rules are. We are not quite -- there is a lot of things about this that are unprecedented, right? The number of people on the field, the full flowering of the post-Citizens United primary with super PACs kind of fully mobilized very early on, meaning that the kind of money game is very different than it used to be in terms of how things get decided and whether the money dries up too quickly. So, there are a lot of ways in which the rules have changed. SILVER: Well, the fact that there`s 17 candidates in the race is irrefutable new and unexplored territory, right? If you look at FiveThirtyEight, I`m really skeptical about Donald Trump`s chances of winning the nomination, but the fact is there is a likelihood they might have a very long drawn out nomination process. Trump we think is probably for now topped out in the polls. But the people gaining are not the establishment candidates. It`s not Walker, it`s not Bush, maybe Rubio a bit. But it`s Ben Carson. HAYES: And Fiorina. SILVER: Fiorina who is on the fringe of being an establishment or anti-establishment candidate. But, you know, when the highest a candidate in a GOP field at 10 percent in the polls, then they have a long way to sort it out what their nominee is going to be. HAYES: A big thing to bring it back to ads, I think most people have a sense, don`t have a real sense, that almost all of what a modern campaign does is raise money on one side and buy ads on the other. That`s a massive amount of what -- SILVER: A Republican campaign, Democrats want a turnout operation like Obama did, or as GOP did in the Bush years. HAYES: Right. SILVER: But sometime, you see little bumps in the polls. So, John Kasich in New Hampshire had a little ad buy. And when you only need to go from 5 percent to 10 percent to be like second or third place in those polls, he is buying those ads probably to get a favorable buzz from people like us, I suppose, who say, look, Kasich has momentum now. You pace for itself down the road. HAYES: What do we know about the efficacy of ads? My sense is that, that effect is not very durable, it doesn`t last very long, but it can really -- I mean, they really can have an effect. When you start to dump serious buys into a place, you can really see numbers move. SILVER: It`s pretty short-lived, right? So, the half life, it deteriorates really fast, so usually you would conserve your money until the end. HAYES: This is the key, right? SILVER: But if you want to create buzz in a 17-cnadidate race and create momentum. Momentum is usually a fake term when journalists apply it. But when you want -- you have to make sure people want to volunteer for your campaign -- HAYES: Or give you money. SILVER: -- staff for your campaign, give you money, it helps to be on that primary debate stage and not the jayvee debate. HAYES: Right. And that`s also made this sort of -- that`s also a new rule, right? This sort of making this cut-off, the importance of national polling early on. But the key thing here is, the normal logic of political ad buys. I mean, we`re not thinking big multimillion-dollar buys. And we`re not seeing big negative buys, negative mailers. That will come. And that will come and that will have a big effect. SILVER: It will come, you know? People I think should rejoice and that`s part of the campaign where it is fun and free flowing. Whoever is the nominee is going to be a very negative campaign next year for the general election. But, you know, we`re very, very early here. I think there`s more of a case on the GOP side, we`re in new and fresh territory, than the Democratic side where, you know, this race looks a lot like 2000, where it was Bradley versus Al Gore. It`s really boring if you have a candidate seen as inevitable. HAYES: Right. SILVER: But, you know, Clinton has been endorsed by already half the Democratic Congress. She`s raised lots of money. She has a 30-point lead in national polls. Bernie Sanders could win New Hampshire, maybe Iowa. HAYES: Could win a few states, yes. SILVER: But the problem then, can he sustain that when you get into states with a larger minority population? HAYES: I still do think that there is -- there is a lot about this that is uncharted. I agree, it`s more uncharted on the GOP side, but I think it is broadly uncharted. I do think like a lot of the mechanisms of the past are breaking down in our midst. We saw that a little bit in 2008. Nate Silver, it`s always a pleasure, man. Great to see you. SILVER: Thanks, man. HAYES: FiveThirtyEight.com. Coming up, in facing the California historic drought, officials have gotten creative. We will introduce to you shade balls, ahead. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DONALD TRUMP, 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And then the women`s health issues, I am for that. I will be great on women`s health issues. I cherish women. And I will be great on women`s health issues. Believe me. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Policy details are possibly forthcoming but Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has now come out apparently as a robust defender of women`s health care. His declaration comes amidst the latest wave of right wing attacks on Planned Parenthood, a women`s health organization that has a higher net favorability rating than a number of hopefuls including Donald Trump. A series of undercover videos from an anti-abortion group, have once again made defunding Planned Parenthood a popular rallying cry among current batch of of Republican candidates and many Republican congress members, some advocating to shut down the entire federal government, the whole thing, like the shutdown they had before, rather than give federal funding to the organization. One person who held that position just days ago was one Donald Trump, but yesterday Trump reversed course suggesting he wouldn`t necessarily defund the organization. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: I would look at the good aspects of it, and I would also look -- as I`m sure they do some things properly and good and good for women. And I would look at that. And I would look at other aspects also. But we have to take care of women. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: All right, and then in front of a troubled Sean Hannity, Trump went to to defend the organization. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: Look, let`s say there are two Planned Parenthoods in a way. You have it as an abortion clinic, now that is actually a fairly small part of what they do but it is a brutal part and I`m totally against it. And I wouldn`t do that. They also, however, service women. We have to help women. A lot of women are helped. So, we have to look at the positives also for Planned Parenthood. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Planned Parenthood, for one, is thrilled it appears for the Trump support, telling Daily Beast Donald he says banning all abortions, shutting down the government and defunding Planned Parenthood are extreme positions that are way too far outside the mainstream for even for him to take. Just a reminder, this latest series of statements from Trump puts him to the left of the other candidates, the establishment main stream candidates, in the field on the question of whether the government should defund an organization that provides routine check-ups, cancer screenings and general health services to millions of women. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: OK. We`re going to show you something that happened yesterday in Los Angeles. I want you to take a moment, look at it and try to guess what is going on here. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two, one, shade balls away! (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: To really understand what is happening on the video, you need to understand the severity of California`s historic drought which is exactly what we tried to get our arms around when we reported extensively for a week from California for All In American water wars. The California`s four-year drought has massively depleted the state`s reservoirs, something we saw firsthand standing in front of Peter`s Canyon Reservoir in Orange County. And California officials realized they needed a way to preserve the state`s diminishing reservoirs, not simply because they provide drinking water and millions of residents, but because of places that used to be covered with water have literally turned to dust, and that dust can get into the air and have a significant impact on air quality. OK, so officials in Los Angeles decided to fight back with 96 million shade balls, that is what they are called, they are shade balls, the last 20,000 of which were released into the L.A. reservoir on Monday in that video you just saw. City officials say the little black plastic shade balls will reduce water evaporation by shielding the reservoir from the sun and protect the water from U.V. light which would help keep the city`s drinking water safe. Joining me now, Alice Walton, staff writer at The L.A. Times who has been covering this. I love when sophisticated adult engineering ideas sound like they were cooked up by a second grader, like it seems so improbable this is actually the solution. How did this come about? Whose idea was this? Has this been tried before? ALICE WALTON, L.A. TIMES: Right, who knew that you just needed a ball pit to get people to care about water quality. But this was actually dreamed up by a biologist for the DWP who was looking for a way to cover these reservoirs. And he actually took some notes from airports. He looked at the ponds near air fields and found that they typically had small plastic balls to keep the birds away. So he saw something similar and through, hey, we can do this for the reservoirs. HAYES: OK, so the idea here is this is going on reduce the amount of evaporation because it will absorb -- it will sort of protect the water from the sun, right? And it will also stop the, you don`t want to get down to the dust, because there is a real sort of public health risk there? WALTON: Well, so it does a couple of things. I mean, the biggest thing that these balls do is help the Department of Water and Power come into compliance with the EPA`s water quality rules. It will block the sun, it will stop the spread of algae, and you`re right, it will stop the evaporation from these reservoirs. The DWP estimates it will save something like 300 million gallons a year which is a resource that California really needs right now. HAYES: So everyone is looking at this and they are saying, I think the same thing which is, what are those made out of? Where were they manufactured? And is the chemical, the plastic that is in there, going to stay in there or is it going to leach into the drinking water? WALTON: That is question that people have. They Department of Water and Power says that the plastic here is fine. It is actually the same plastic that you would find in a one gallon jug of milk at the store. So when you buy milk, it comes in a plastic jug. It`s the same kind of plastic here. Now, these 96 million balls actually come from two different California based companies. But they do say that the plastic is safe and it`s fine to come into contact with drinking water. HAYES: Right, but I mean, the milk jug, I mean I guess I trust them. I don`t know. But the milk jug you use for a week and then you throw it away. You don`t leave it outside baking in the hot California sun for months, years at a time. WALTON: That`s right. And some people who have seen the coverage of it has likened it to saying, you know, you wouldn`t a water bottle out in the sun all day and then think it was safe to drink. And, you know, these balls will last in the reservoir for up to ten years. But again, the Department of Water and Power says it is safe. They go through all sorts of different filtrations and treatments. So, it is not like the water is going to come straight from the ball pit out into your faucet. HAYES: How much of a threat, when you say it brought into compliance with the water quality guidelines of the EPA, what does that mean? WALTON: So, this is something that actually the Department of Water and Power has been doing for several years, it just so happens that now we`re in a drought. But as far back as 2008, the DWP was unleashing these balls into reservoirs. They`re actually in three other places in Los Angeles. And so the EPA wants utilities to be covering their reservoirs, and this was actually a much more effective option. The Los Angeles reservoir is enormous. It has more than 3 billion gallons of water in it. And DWP says it actually too large to cover. Their option there would have been to bifurcate the reservoir and create two covers and that would have been about ten times the cost as these balls. So this was kind of seen as the cheaper option if they wanted to cover the reservoirs. HAYES: And can you explain to me why they are black? WALTON: Yes. So, they have carbon black in them to protect against the UV rays of the sun. So, it is related to the sunlight. Some people have asked, well won`t this just capture the sunlight and warm up the water? DWP says that it does not affect the temperature of the water, it doesn`t affect the temperature of the air, so that`s why they`re there. They`re there to protect against the UV rays. HAYES: There is something kind of like dystopian sci-fi visually about this that like in all the kind of coverage of the drought, and we were out there for a week and there are a lot of people who have this kind of weird kind of Schadenfreude about like the California experiment coming to an end, but there is something unnerving visually about this image. How has it gone over in L.A.? WALTON: Well, it is sort of funny. As I mentioned, they`ve been doing this for seven years. So, in that sense it was not totally new and you`ve said, these were the last 20,000 balls of 96 million that went in there. But it just seems to have exploded on social media, on the web. And I think it is that visual, you know, there are all sorts of videos and pictures of the balls. And it does look very funny. It looks like almost like a ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese. And so this seem to be what DWP needed to do to get people to care about water quality and really pay attention to water conservation. HAYES: I think it is possible people like to say the phrase shade balls too. Alice Walton, thank you very much. WALTON: Thank you. HAYES: Still ahead, Tinder decidedly swiped left. (inaudible) profile about the dating app this week going on a Twitter tirade. If many of those words don`t make sense, that`s OK. We will explain it all coming up. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: Presidential candidate Jeb Bush and president candidate Hillary Clinton, perhaps in a state of wishful thinking about still being their party`s eventual standard bearers, took solid aim at each other on Twitter apparently with the help of their respective graphics departments and social media staff. Hillary Clinton recently unveiled a fairly well reviewed college education proposal that would make it possible for students to go to a public college and pay for tuition without incurring student debt, that is if all of it fell into line. And she posted this on her campaign`s official Twitter account indicating the massive amount that 40 million Americans students owe in student debt to which Jeb responded with this 100 percent the increase in student debt under this democratic White House. Oh, no you didn`t. Hillary camp came back with this. F, the grade given to Florida for college affordability under Jeb Bush`s leadership. The Jeb exclamation point campaign then sets its sights elsewhere by turning the increasingly ubiquitous Hillary Clinton logo into this. And those little words there are taxes, taxes, taxes, going up, up, up along with the note @HillaryClinton, fixed your logo for you. But that online fun and games is nothing compared to Tinder, yes Tinder, the online dating app that according to Vanity Fair is destroying the joys of dating as we once knew it. And that`s ahead. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) GEORGE LEWIS: There are countless places where strangers can meet via computer, all it takes is a hookup to the internet, or one of the online services. The big difference between meeting in person and meeting someone online is a level of security and anonymity. They might know your logon name and they might know your email address but they really don`t know you, and a word of caution, you don`t know them either. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: It was the 1990s, America didn`t quite know what to do with online dating. Strangers meeting on message boards and then sometimes in person. And in the decades since the advent of chat rooms, the country has mostly come to terms with the practice only to be confronted with a new way for people to connect smartphone dating apps, the most notorious of those being Tinder. Downloadable app. You can flip through pictures of dozens of people at a time, along with some basic bio information like name and age. And if you aren`t interested you simply swipe to the left, that banishes the person from your feed. Say you find the person attractive or something about the profile intriguing you can swipe right. If that person has also swiped right, it`s a match and you can start talking and maybe meet up. Now, if that sounds awesome or dystopic to you, the later, well a new article from Vanity Fair will confirm your worst fears. The piece pants the picture of a digital meat market where sex, intimacy and dating have all been destroyed. One young investment banker told a reporter, quote -- and this is by far the best quote in the piece -- it`s like ordering Seamless but you`re ordering a person. Romantic. A marketing executive confessed, quote, sex has become so easy. I can go on my phone right now and no doubt I can final someone I can have sex with this evening, probably before midnight. A young -- someone told the author, quote, they start out with send me nudes or they say something like I`m looking for something quick, within the next 10 or 20 minutes. Are you available? It`s straight efficiency. The folks at Tinder upon reading the article took to Twitter to defend themselves form what they felt was an unfair article in a series of increasingly unhinged tweets from their official account, ending with, quote, it`s not going to dissuade us from building something that is changing the world #GenerationTinder. The company later said they had overreacted which sometimes happens on Twitter or on Tinder. The bottom line is this, Tinder is part of an actual massive social experiment that we are running. It is now possible for people to use this device that you have with at all times right there burning a hole in your pocket to find romantic and sexual connections whenever, at any time, any place. And that is having a really profound effect on behavior. Some good, some bad. And we will debate what it means next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, if you`re single and having trouble finding a date, you may be looking, as the song says, in all the wrong places. These days thousands are cruising the internet hoping to find romance in cyberspace. Jennifer Toure (ph) is a dance instructor who lives in New York City. A few months ago she joined an internet dating service call Match.com. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When I first logged on, it was kind of exciting to think that maybe I could meet somebody on the internet. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Joining me now, Jesse Singal, he`s editor of New York Magazine`s Social Science website. Emily Witt, author of the forthcoming book "Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love." OK, I`m going to play the role of grandpa for the next few minutes here, OK? And tell all the kids to get off my lawn. Slightly tongue-in-cheek but actually a little bit. So, let`s just start with Tinder, OK. There`s a little moral panic in the Vanity Fair, whatever. But like can I just say that I`ve seen something deeply dehumanizing about the mechanism of swipe right and swipe right, like people are baseball cards that you`re just like tossing around and the fact that it`s in your phone it`s like a video game but there are people attached to it. Am I wrong to feel unnerved by that? EMILY WITT, AUTHOR: What would you do when you go to a party and you`re looking to meet somebody? Would you go -- you`re kind of doing the same process in your head. It`s not sort of... HAYES: You`re doing the same thing, right. WITT: Maybe more subconsciously than that. HAYES: Right, but can you imagine a world in which we evolved the social norms in which like you actually like make a finger swipe X like physically in front of people. WITT: It would be too traumatic. Nobody would use that app. HAYES: Right. OK. So, why is it that. I guess that`s part of the question here, right. Like ultimately, all of this is about matching, right? So, the question is, like if it is efficiently matching people, is that a good thing or a bad thing? JESSE SINGAL, NEW YORK MAGAZINE; Yeah. I think in her article Sales (ph) only looked at sort of hyperactive, hyper promiscuous users, like it seemed like she went out of her way to find frankly the douchiest people possible. And I think we all know people who use Tinder and grinder and these other sites in a lot of different ways. Like, I know people who are married from having met on these sites. HAYES: Right. But there is also this idea that there is, and this seem to me a deeper critique. Like, you`re working on a book about sort of the future of sex. WITT: Right. HAYES: And it does seem to me that like we are running a big social experiment in which the transaction costs have been dramatically reduced to use an economic term. So like it is just all there, constant. And I know people that use dating websites and say you can fall into this kind of like almost like video gameesque compulsive searching mentality, because the app is re- creating some kind of like mental circuitry that you have of like, playing Tetrus or something. Has that been your experience at all? WITT: I wouldn`t say that`s my experience. I mean I still think most people are looking for a connection. It can become a thing that you do when you`re bored like anything else on the internet. It becomes compulsive. But I still think most people are on it because they don`t want to be sitting at home by themselves looking at Tinder, they want to be out in the world having a conversation or meeting somebody that they might actually really like. HAYES: But do you think it is doing anything different than any other kind of technology, right. So you can say like when the telephone came along, people, you can imagine being like we`re not going -- no one writes love letters like they used to. And like love letters are this great art form and no one does it anymore. Now people just talk on the phone. Like, is that what`s happening? Or is there something distinct about the power of the technology? WITT: I think -- you know, I think part of thing that`s confusing about Tinder is they actually designed all of these sites so that they don`t, on Tinder you don`t have to declare what you`re looking for, you don`t have to declare you`re sexual orientation. So there`s a way in which people go in with certain expectations. When I was writing it, a lot of people would ask me what they were supposed to be using it for. So there is a way in which some people might read an article in Vanity Fair and say oh this is a hook-up app. HAYES: I see. Right, there was a little bit of an expectation this was actually just about sex or physical intimacy as opposed to some broader sense of like finding the one. WITT: Right. And what`s confusing is there aren`t rituals encoded in the technologies. When you go on a date, there is like this old-fashioned thing that you get to do. This, we haven`t figured out those ethics and those rituals and those habits. And that`s kind of what`s happening now and people are trying all kinds of things. HAYES: What do you mean by that? So there`s like norms and expectations that are set in the world of dating that have not been established yet here? WITT: Yeah. I mean, maybe if you talk to a 24-year-old Wall Street banker, he`ll be using it to rack up casual sex. HAYES: By midnight like Cinderella. WITT: Yeah apparently. And I mean, it`s funny, because these people are not known for their modesty or their honesty. And we never really heard anything from the people that they met up with. But you know, on the other hand, I mean, I have so many friends that use Tinder looking for something more meaningful. They have people in their life already that if they want to have casual sex, they can go meet those people. What they`re online to meet, you know, new people. Different people. HAYES: You write in the piece about the sort of idea of moral panic. And I was reading -- there is some data showing that actually teen sexual activity has declined recently? And there is some theory that like actually sexting, which is like the great scourge of news shows, is actually like an outlet that is actually reducing actual teen sexual activity. SINGAL: Yeah. I mean, whatever is going on, this isn`t a dating apocalypse, which is how she described it. Like, Millennials in general seem -- the number of sex partners is either stable or going down, that`s what all the best evidence says. This isn`t an Apocalypse. HAYES: Right, the actual sexual behavior of Millennials and teens is actually not -- promiscuity is not skyrocketing. In fact there is some evidence to suggest that actually the number of partners going down and teen pregnancy rates are going down. So maybe, you know, maybe smartphones will deliver us all to a bright future of loving monogamy. Jesse Singal and Emily Witt, thanks for being here. That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now. THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END