– Greetings, and thanks for joining us for this PJTV special, The Top Under-reported Stories of the Year. I'm your host, John Phillips. Joining me here, in studio, is PJTV contributor, and stand-up comic, Stephen Kruiser, and, right next to him, is the very fair minded, civil rights defense attorney, Leo Terrell. Today we're talking about our picks for the top under-reported stories of the year, and Kruiser is up first. – Sadly, my pick for the top under-reported story of the year, is Boco Haram, which did get reported a lot at the beginning of the year, and, somehow, the rest of the year went off the rails so badly, that they got lost in the mix. With the stuff that's going on in Syria, with the Paris attacks, with the problems with Russia, here and there. They got pushed to the back burner, but they've continued unabated. They first gained notoriety because they kidnapped all of those girls. They've continued the kidnapping, the murdering, the burning of villages. They haven't slowed down one little bit, but, because the rest of the world has become such a cesspool of violence and terrorism, they're pushed behind ISIS, right now. It's kinda sad that we're in that position. – This is gonna sound really twisted, but I think it is true. I think we've become so desensitized to crime, that you have to be so creative with the way you kill people, to get attention, that if you just kill people by shooting them, or stabbing them, if you don't do it in huge numbers, then it just kinda

bleeds in with everything else. – You are absolutely correct. It depends on geographical location, if it's a Western power. This situation here does not carry the legs of a news story. A lot of people seem so far removed from it. I think that's the problem. Nothing's changed. Kruiser's absolutely correct. But, the formula that you mentioned, as to how we become desensitized, I think you're 100% correct. – You know who understands this, is ISIS. Because, they change it up. They'll put someone in a cage, and drown them. They'll chop heads off, and they'll put the video online. So, they always get the headlines, because they know how to generate attention. – I hate to use the word, "creative", but that's what they're being, creative in getting the attention, and that's a sad way to talk about these disastrous events. – One of the saddest things about this being under-reported, is I went back, and I did some research, when I was thinking this might be my story. The information is still being put out there every day about what they're doing, it's just not making it to the news, anymore. It's on news sites still, it's on the internet. I Googled them, right away, and they had just razed a village six hours earlier, and killed everyone in it. And that keeps happening. It's there, but none of the major new sources are grabbing it, and going, "Oh, look what Boco Haram did today". – Alright Leo, you're up next. – Well, hey, my pick for the top under-reported story of the year goes to the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine. Fighting has intensified between the government troops and rebels, who Russia supports with weapons. Ukraine has declared Russia to be the aggressor nation. This is a war going on right now, and the so called NATO Alliance can do nothing. Russia has, basically, invaded Ukraine, taking over areas of their territory, and no one can do anything. We're not gonna go to war against Russia, and Russia knows this. And yet, a war is going on, and like the story that you just mentioned, has been dropped to the back of the news cycle, because of the fact that, people have gotten conditioned to it. – There's no question to me that Putin wants to put the USSR back together. – Yes. – Yes. – What happened in Crimea, you look at what's going in the Ukraine. They were just testing the Turks, by flying over a no-fly zone, and got the plane shot out of the sky, just to see how far they could push things. Russia is an aggressor. Russia is looking to expand. And Russia needs to know that the West is gonna put them in check, and right now, that hasn't happened. – And, along the same lines as what we were talking about with ISIS changing things up, this is Putin's eight things ago, this year. He keeps changing, he keeps moving on to new things, and that's one of the reasons that this has gotten pushed so far back. It was like, "Oh, yeah, we did that. "But that was so last spring." He's the same way, because he's so aggressive right now, and in so many theaters, it's difficult to sit there and focus on what he was doing eight months ago. – In light of the current situation involving ISIS, the Western nations, NATO, France, they need Putin, and they'll ignore the situation in the Ukraine, because they need his support to defeat ISIS. So, hey, he wins! – No question. My pick for the top under-reported story of the year is a curve ball. It's Sheldon Silver going down for corruption charges in the state of New York. Silver is a former speaker of the New York State Assembly, who was found guilty on federal corruption charges. The democrat was convicted of honest services fraud, extortion, and money laundering. This, stemming from schemes in which he obtained four million dollars, in exchange for using his position to help benefit a cancer researcher, and two real estate developers. He had held his Assembly seat for, get this, 40 years. Here's why I picked this story. We focus on national politics a lot. We focus on all the guys and gals running for president, all the people in Congress. Sometimes, we'll talk about governors, if they do something particularly egregious. But, the reality of the situation is this. The real power in many states, is in the legislature. Because, governors come and go, but the leaders of these legislatures are there, sometimes, for 40 years, like Sheldon Silver. This guy was essentially able to run a criminal organization, a criminal enterprise, from that most powerful position in New York politics. If you saw the movie about Whitey Bulger that just came out, his brother, Billy Bulger, was the most powerful politician in the state of Massachusetts, and ran interference for one of the most brutal mobsters the city of Boston has ever seen. Because that guy had power. These people are totally anonymous, nobody knows who they are, and they're the real power players. We had a guy in California, here, who was gun-running, Leland Yee. – While proposing anti-gun legislation. – Yeah! They're dangerous. – You're absolutely correct, because the media wants the top executives, the governors. They let these guys run rough-shot, and no one pays any attention. This guy, for 40 years, was running, basically, a syndicate. And someone dropped a dime on him. – And, you're looking at the states of California and New York, the heavily populated states, that's a lot of money that they're — They are powerful people that you just don't get to hear of, outside of those states, as you say. That's a lot of money going through the New York legislature every — A lot of money going through the California legislature, every year. They're very powerful people that — In California is so heavily populated, most Californians don't know the names of the people who are the power players in the California legislature. – Did you mention that those are both heavily republican states? New York and California? I'm just kidding. (laughing) – I'll tell you what. There are a lot of problems with term limits, – Yes. – but I totally understand why people want term limits, when you see someone like this, in office for 40 years, doing all these dirty deeds. – So true. – Never let anybody hold the same office for more than three terms in a row. They can come back later, if they go do something else. That's the best solution I've ever heard, for that, yet. – No question. Alright, that's gonna do it for today's show. We wanna know what you think about our picks for the top under-reported stories of the year. Be sure to leave your comments, in the comment section below. I'm John Phillips. For Stephen Kruiser and Leo Terrell, thanks, so much, for watching.