have more stories from pennsylvania. how in the world can you cut $1 billion out of school budgets and expect families in america to have their kids get the proper education in this great country? "the rachel maddow show" starts right now. good evening, rachel. >> good evening, ed. thank you. and thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. the pulitzer prize-winning author of "ghost wars," steve kall is going to be here tonight for the interview. i'm really looking forward to that. he has just put out something totally ground breaking and totally amazing. and in the process of explaining what that thing is, we're also going to explain what the heck this thing is. this is a new thing on our earth that never existed before, but now it does. that's coming up later tonight in the interview. we also tonight have an update on whether or not republicans are going to allow armed protests at their republican convention this year. armed, as in, people with loaded weapons. that's all ahead this hour. but we start tonight with an exclusive story about the whole purpose of politics in the first place.

the reason to seek public office, the reason to get elected in the first place, what your job is if you win an election, is that you get to make policy. and the whole point of making policy is supposedly to address problems in our country. here's a sample problem. mississippi, the great state of mississippi, has health trouble. heart disease is the number one cause of death in the united states. well, the highest rate of health disease death in the country is in mississippi. diabetes also a massive american health problem. alabama and mississippi, it turns out, are neck and neck on being the worst for diabetes. the most recent nationwide stats put alabama at 50 out of 50 states, and mississippi at 49th. the really astonishing number, though, in mississippi, is infant mortality. for every thousand kids born in the united states, how many of those kids do not live to their first birthday? overall, this is the rate in the country for infant mortality. here's what it is in mississippi.

hmm. mississippi has the worst infant death rate in the country. not only is mississippi the worst in the country, if mississippi were a country, it would rank below sri lanka and below botswana. it would be 83rd in the world in terms of infant mortality. and if you look internally at what's going on in mississippi, what explains that problem, you end up very quickly realizing that the issue is in racial disparity. these are mississippi's own numbers. these are infant mortality for white mothers in mississippi. that's if infant mortality rate in mississippi over time. and this is the infant mortality rate, that red line there, for african-american mothers in mississippi. so white mothers in mississippi, they have roughly the same rate as the rest of the country. but the reason mississippi is the worst in the country, the reason mississippi has worst than botswana's infant mortality rate, is because african-american women have more than doubled the infant mortality rate of white women there. and it makes the state the worst in the country. this is a real problem. this is a life-and-death problem and it has been bad in mississippi for a long time.

now, to mississippi's credit, they have decided to make this a priority. they are working on this. the state health department has elevated the issue, so that the state can work on it in a concentrated way. the state epidemiologist, the chief nurse of the state, the office of health data in the state, the health state officer, they're all putting together reports, specifically on this problem, reports to the state legislature, so the policy makers and the state legislature can try to fix this the problem. the most recent report shows that they believe they brought their horrible infant mortality rate down. they say they've got it down below 10. it's still awful. it's still one of the worst in the country, but when the next nationwide stats come out, mississippi may no longer be the worst in the country anymore, because they're working on it. but they still need to keep working on it. and lucky for mississippi, on their state board of health, which decides policy direction for the state on health issues, it's the board that appoints that state health officer, that appoints the state's overall health plan, that approves the state's overall health plan for its overall health policies.

luckily, on that board, mississippi is lucky enough to have somebody uniquely qualified to understand and help the state address this issue, that the state really, really wants to address. his name is carl reddix. he grew up in biloxi, mississippi, he went to the northeast for his education, he got his medical agree at tufts, he went to harvard to get his masters in public health. he also went to johns hopkins, to the johns hopkins, did his residency there as a ob/gynob/gyn, and then after all of that, this perfectly well qualified, harvard and johns hopkins trained son of mississippi ob/gyn, he decided to go home and practice in his home state. he could have practiced anywhere in the country. he would have been a star wherever he went with that kind of a background. he decided to go home and practice in jackson, mississippi. and then, yes, the state's republican governor, haley barbour, last year appointed

him, appointed dr. reddix to be on that state board of health. given the problems that mississippi is facing and given what they are trying to fix in terms of policy, somebody like dr. reddix has to be seen by the state of mississippi as just a godsend. you'd think, right? the new republican administration in mississippi has just fired him. he had been serving mississippi on that health board since last july, but the new republican lieutenant governor in mississippi has now blocked his senate confirmation process and insisted that he be taken off this state board. the lieutenant governor, who you see there on the right, says he wants the state to instead pick a, quote, qualified doctor to help guide state health policy. because being a born-and-bred mississippian, harvard and johns honkins trained ob/gyn with a harvard masters in health means you're not qualified? not in republican politics today. at least not in this iteration

of republican politics today. the reason mississippi has taken this doctor out of the health policy process, that rather desperately needs him in mississippi, is because one of the consultants that dr. reddix has is with the jackson women's health organization. dr. reddix does not perform abortions. he is not paid by the jackson women's health organization. but if a woman is having an abortion or any other kind of procedure at that clinic and there is a complication and something goes wrong and that woman needs to be admitted to the hospital, dr. reddix has agreed to take over care of that woman when she gets to the hospital. dr. reddix says this almost never happens. but what this means in practical terms, if there ever is a complication, a woman doesn't just get dumped do a emergency room at a local hospital, she gets put into the care of this highly trained physician. that's the scandal. and mississippi's governor and lieutenant governor have decided that because of that, he cannot be on the board of health.

he cannot participate in health policy. his public service is not wanted by the state of mississippi. he has been fired. and now on the state board of health in mississippi, which has the worst infant mortality rate in the country among its men other problems, which is a huge racial disparity specifically in its horrible infant mortality problem, now in the state of mississippi, thanks to this year's garden variety anti-abortion republican politics, there is now african-american medical doctor and there is no ob/gyn on the state board of health. and for the record, that one remaining clinic that provides abortion services in the state of mississippi is in danger of being shut down, thanks to a new law signed by the state's republican governor, targeting that clinic with new regulations that do not apply to any other clinic in the state and that are designed specifically to shut that clinic down. this is new. this is new. and nobody in the country has been able to explain why this brand-new thing is happening. it's not that the republican party or even the whole state of

mississippi was not conservative on these issues before. i mean, haley barbour was a radically anti-abortion politician. he always has been. but even he did not take it so far as to take a well-qualified doctor who doesn't do abortions and kick him out of public service in mississippi. what happened in republican politics between last year and this year to put anti-abortion ideological fervency among that? there has been a drastic right-ward lurch just in this last election cycle. which as with we have been reports on it if last year, has yet to be explained to me by anybody. and the partisan divide on this is that democrats are starting to ask, why is this happening on the republican side? why is it that the republicans have lurched so suddenly and so far on women's issues? democrats are starting to ask that. and on the republican side, in republican politics, i think the

reason why we haven't had an answer, we haven't had an explanation is because republicans are still in the mode of denying that it is happening. here's how that looked in presidential politics today. notice anything interesting about this picture? mitt romney, the republican presidential candidate, speaking today in chantilly, virginia, in what was stage managed to look like an all-female event, blessed art thou among women, mr. romney. mr. romney also taking to doing many of his national media availabilities now while seated next to his wife, as if she is his running mate. the campaign plainly trying to create a stylistic image of mitt romney who is comfortable around persons of the female persuasion. but even as they are taking such great pains to bend over backwards to put mitt romney on camera in the company of women, to show him as being a person who is around females, even as they recognize plainly that they need to be doing this, even as they recognize that they need to be doing this, they are still

not working on policy. they are still not working on policy. they are still, even as they focus on issues relating to women and the economy, they are, for example, refusing to say whether or not mitt romney would have signed the lily ledbetter fair pay act. they're refusing to say whether or not he would have signed the paycheck fairness act. that's another bill aimed at trying to ensure that women get equal pay for equal work. it was blocked the last time it came up in the senate by the republicans filibustering it. mr. romney's campaign apparently feeling no pressure at all to say whether he supports that measure. they don't feel any pressure. it's just policy, after all. that's not what this is about. this year after decades of totally noncontroversial bipartisan support, 31 male republican senators voted against the violence against women act, and it now faces an uncertain future in the republican-controlled house. and they keep going after abortion rights and reproductive rights, specifically. last week, even in the midst of pounding the podium, literally, john boehner pounding the podium, saying that the idea

that there's a war on women is a fabrication, even as that was happening, more than 60 republicans in the house were introducing another federal anti-abortion bill. another one! republicans have also introduced a new 24-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions nationwide. they've also introduced a new time restriction on when you are allowed to get an abortion in washington, d.c., over which congress has some jurisdiction. they also introduced a national forced ultrasound bill. so like the one in virginia that made bob mcdonnell famous, except this time house republicans want it for the whole country. they tried to block medical schools from being able to teach how to perform an abortion to doctors in training. they threatened to shut down the whole government over trying to defund planned parenthood. hr-3, the third thing they deal, their third bill. it was repeal obama care, then something else, then hr-3, the third thing they introduced when day took over the house was an

anti-abortion bill. it's policy. policy, policy, policy. it is not style. it's not personnel. it's not chromosomes. it's policy. republicans have always been conservatives on this issue, but this fervency is new. this pushing it to the top of the agenda is new, and as yet, unexplained. even in mississippi, in deeply, deeply conservative republican mississippi, being against abortion rights is nothing new. but being so fervently and urgently and desperately against abortion rights that you would stretch that idea into blackballing a well-qualified doctor's public service to his state, this is new. why is this happening now? what is pushing this to happen now. joining us now is dr. carl reddix, thank you very much for being here tonight. i really appreciate your time, sir. >> thank you for having me. >> you were appointed to the state board of health by

governor haley barbour. can i ask how you found out that the new governor, governor bryant and the new lieutenant governor were having you removed from that board? >> i had found out at the 11th hour, late tuesday afternoon, a week ago, while calling to try to ascertain when my confirmation hearing was going to be. i'd been asked for over a month, such that i can schedule and make sure that my time was available, and i was not out of town, such that i would be available to present myself in front of our state senate and sit for confirmation. unfortunately, no one knew when that confirmation hearing was going to be. they told me that, historically, they did it the last week of our legislative session, which is this current week. so last tuesday, i was really trying hard to try and figure out when this hearing was going

this past tuesday and he was told that my confirmation hearing was pulled. johnson, state representative from natchez, informed me that he had talked with the senate chairman and that my confirmation was being pulled at the 11th hour by the lieutenant governor. he had every -- he, the senate chairman, had every intention on having the confirmation hear this past tuesday and he was

told that my confirmation hearing was pulled. and so while on the phone with representative johnson, i got a call from the associated press reporter, asking me why my nomination had been pulled. so, obviously, you're dismayed and outraged at the prospect of a major governmental institution not having enough decorum to allow a fairly simple process to move forward. so it was strictly the -- really, i got more information from the reporter, because she had already interviewed folks in the lieutenant governor's office and the governor's office and from her investigation, it seemed to have come from the 11th hour and by the lieutenant governor and not by our governor.

>> as, obviously, you were appointed to this post by the previous governor of mississippi, by governor haley barbour, himself a republican, somebody who is not in favor of abortion rights, as a politician. this was your -- your association with this clinic in mississippi was not an issue for haley barbour, but it became an issue all of a sudden for the current administration in this state. as a born and bred mississippian, as someone as an ob/gyn and as someone who has seen these politics firsthand, have you seen anything that you feel explains this sort of sudden change, this newfound militancy in stake politics on this issue, that seems to have cost you this seat on this board >> well, i've never had the opportunity to sit for confirmation, so i can't honestly answer that question. although, i can say that the -- you know, obviously, we've got new statewide elected officers, both in all the top five state offices. so you would think that part of it is just because it's new to them, and our lieutenant governor has not spent anytime in the senate. he was not -- his previous office was state treasurer. so, you know, the issue is, you know, how much control that one person has. if the state senator that's charged with the committee of oversight for confirmation, my background had already been checked by the state legislature. so everything was cleared and for the lieutenant governor to

background had already been checked by the state legislature. so everything was cleared and for the lieutenant governor to independently just pull, you know, do a pocket veto on my nomination, i'm not sure that if it has happened before or not. certainly no one that i knew had ever gone through that. and as i was preparing to be at

a hearing this week to find out that it had been pulled, a week with ago, and nobody from the state capitol or the governor's office have made any contact with me to offer any explanation for why this has happened and so it is total dismay and outrage on my part. at the process. >> dr. carl reddix, member of the mississippi state board of health, being ousted now by the republican governor there. thank you for joining us tonight. i feel like it has run its course, but to the extent that this continues in the state, i hope you'll stay in touch with us and let us know how this pans out, sir. thank you very much for your time tonight. >> thank you for the opportunity. >> all right. okay. do you know this game? this is an -- you know -- i believe in arcade parlance, this is called, the claw. i'm really, really bad at this. i can never get anything. this person doing this is is obviously very good at it.

you know who else is very good at a version of the claw? oil companies. exxonmobil, for example, could totally get that pink pig, no problem, even though i couldn't. why do oil companies love the claw, and what does that have to do with spilling millions of barrels of oil into the ocean? that's coming up next.

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just after midnight, in the early morning hours of march 24th, 1989, a giant oil tanker, a 200,000-ton oil tanker found itself in just about the worst kind of trouble that an oil tanker can possibly find itself. it had just set sail from its home port. it was on its way to its destination, and then, boom, this giant tanker hit a reef in the open water and started spewing crude oil uncontrollably, all over the place. the tanker had only made it about 25 miles from where it left from, a tiny port city called valdez, alaska. the "exxon valdez" oil spill was at the time the worst oil spill in u.s. history. in all, about 11 million gallons of crude oil released into prince william sound. well, when it came to cleaning up all that oil, something very telling happened. the president at the time, george h.w. bush, poppy bush, sent the commandant of the coast guard up to alaska to run that cleanup effort. and in the course of running that cleanup effort, he told exxon that he would need 5,000 workers to help clean up the beaches up there. exxon said, 5,000 workers? no way. exxon told the highest ranking

member of the united states coast guard, no. now, the commandant of the coast guard, knowing that he had been sent up there by the white house told exxon that maybe they would have to take it up with the white house. exxon said, well, that's no problem. and a short time later, after receiving a call from exxon, the white house informed the commandant of the coast guard that actually, yeah, he was not getting those 5,000 cleanup workers that he had requested. fast forward to 2001. the state-owned oil company of india wants in on a giant oil drilling project happening off the coast of russia there's a little problem, the company that's operating the problem is

exxonmobil. in a meeting at the white house that year, india's prime minister tries to lobby then president george w. bush, bush the jr., to push exxon along on this issue. saying, why don't you just tell them what to do. president bush's response, quote, nobody tells those guys what to do. for exxonmobil, one of the largest corporations in the whole world, pleasing a u.s. president, whether it's george w. bush or george h.w. bush or any other president, has just never been necessary. exxon will be around a lot longer than any u.s. president, than any indian prime minister, than any lowly u.s. coast guard commandant. as the author and journalist steve coll puts it in his new book about exxonmobil which is called "private empire," "the time horizons for exxon's investments stretched out longer than those of almost any exxon could afford to carry themselves with this type of bravado because as steve coll writes, "exxon was america's energy policy. certainly, there was no governmental policy of comparable coherence." exxon has been able to maintain that sort of staying power, not just because of its multiple presidential administrations long-time horizons on its money-making plans, but also because of its single mindedness, on its single-minded focus. the oil industry is the most profitable venture that human kind has ever known. exxonmobil can think of itself as its own country. in practical terms, it is its own country. exxon has a bigger economic footprint than about 150 countries. so if you're a giant oil company like exxon, what exactly do you country, what was new and

while the profits may allow a single company to be, say, wealthier than 150 separate countries, the cost of pursuing those profits, well, that very often ends up being public. we are the ones who pay for that. you know, us and the otters. we pay for that, even if our own president appears to be taking orders sometimes not from us, but from the only person more powerful than an american president, an oil company ceo. joining us next for the interview is pulitzer prize-winning author steve coll, who just wrote the book, really, the only book ever, on exxon, and the amazing ways in which they wield their private empire of power. stay with us.

broad strokes, big picture. if you had to say what the 1990s were about, economically and in terms of the grand big picture changes in american priorities and outlook, what we were focused on, what changed us as a country, what was new and important about that decade, for the '90s, you might say, tech? technology, right? the internet. the '80s ended with the end of the cold war, the end of the bipolar superpower universe and that sort of division of labor and division of power and priorities in the country and in the universe, right? the '90s ended up after that being about tech. then after the '90s, the 2000s ended up being about non-nation state powers, about terrorism, about war. the 2010s, where we are now, sort of still to be determined, right? but if i had to bet on something

here, if i had to bet on one big idea that's ultimately in retrospect going to define this decade, i'd bet on energy. joining us now for the interview is steve coll, pulitzer prize-winning journalist, author of the new book "private empire: exxonmobil, an american power," which in my opinion is the defining book so far about power and energy and the future. steve, congratulations on this. >> thank you. >> you date a lot of the important changes not just in energy, but in power, and in the division between companies and countries to 1989, to the collapse of the soviet union. that's sort of an important frame of reference for you in talking about why exxonmobil is so important in the world. did the rise of corporate power of the you document here become possible because of the collapse of the superpowers? >> yes, it did. globalization meant that corporations like exxonmobil call work in so many more places than before.

so their sense of themselves changed. during the cold war, they were part of a national system that was fighting an existential contest against another system. and so companies were much more rooted in their own states, in their own countries. and after the cold war, one of the things that happened was that these corporations, especially oil corporations, became dispersed, all over the world. and they became more sovereign unto themselves and less tethered to their home countries. lee raymond, who you quote saying, we see governments come and go. he also said at one point, i'm not a u.s. company. i have to think about my shareholders and my breadth across 180 different countries. so i do think that was an important moment. the other thing that happened, and your terrific piece points this out, was that they got driven, more and more, into risky frontiers, geopolitical frontiers and technological frontiers. during the 60s and 70s, during the cold war, they were able to own all kinds of gas in big pools of it in the middle east.

they had a chunk of saudi arabia, they had a chunk of iraq, they had a chunk of iran. and after nationalism rose in the middle east and all these corporations got thrown out, they were driven basically to two places. to weak states that were too weak to do it themselves, so chad, equatorial new guinea or angola, or to new technological frontiers where the risks were so great that only the very richest corporations could afford to develop technologies to drill in deep water or under the ice or in those types of places. >> in terms of that last point about technological advancement and risk, did you feel like -- one of the things that's very interesting is defining the presidents of the company, the people that are running the companies in the way their personality and overall approach to things defines a way a huge company like this operates. lee raymond himself becomes such a fascinating character in this. but do you feel like institutionally, when you're dealing with oil companies with which much money and this much power and the kind of time horizons that they've got, there is any way that, you know, small factors like the united states

government, say, little players, compared to them, can get them to take risk more seriously? to invest more in disaster preparedness and in making things safer as their economic imperative pushes them to drill deeper and faster and riskier all the time. >> you know, the record isn't very encouraging about that. and it was really exposed in the deepwater horizon disaster, where, obviously, it was a bp platform that blue up, but all of the oil companies including exxonmobil has been required by the department of energy to file detail plans about how they were prepared to meet a disaster of that type. this was two plus decades after the valdez, when you think these lessons would have been inculcated. all the corporations filed the exact same plan, they had the same consultant. they talked about remediating mammals that had never lived in the gulf for eons. in exxonmobil's case, they had a 48 page annex about how to deal with the media. >> one of their cited experts had been dead quite for some

time. >> yes. and the chairman testifying before congress having that pointed out said, yes, but his work lives on. >> so we can call him, using a ouija board. but on that point of the media appendix, i did not before i read about it in your book, about -- i knew all the companies had this boiler plate disaster response plan, including the walruses and the gulf and all of this stuff. i did not know that exxon's special sauce that they had added to the boiler plate was a 40-page long media annex. and i think you point out that it's a multiple of times longer, this annex, than it is their plan for dealing with cleaning up the oil. but why does a company, as big and as powerful, and as dominant as exxon, care about the media? can't they afford not to? >> they don't. they generally have a media reconciliations policy of saying no comment in about 50 different languages. and i do think that they feel

that they can succeed from a strategic posture of a defensive crouch and basically a high wall. they have a straight forward policy of really not cooperating with the media in the way that many other corporations do. and, you know, to go back to this sort of idea about risk and regulation, whether the u.s. government can hold a corporation of that scale accountable, it's sort of a paradox, because on the one hand, a company like exxonmobil is very conservative about the way it operates in the gulf, because the deeper water horizon proves, you're betting the company every day you're out there. and if you blow up, you're going to pay a very high price. so there's a bias towards, well, let's be very careful, let's be very careful. but as your piece pointed out, the actual business drives them more and more into risk. so there's this constant tension every day. and to some extent, the regulators are incidental to that struggle. the corporation that

investigated the gulf spill in 2010, a partisan, blue ribbon sort of commission. they concluded very emphatically that the industry has been underestimating the risks it takes every day in these kinds of waters. and they said the government also was so captured by industry that its regulations were patently, you know, inadequate. >> you describe it as a slothenly embrace, i think, between the regulated and the regulators in this case. steve coll, this is -- this is an encyclopedia work about a very big company, but also a about an institution that shapes the decisions that we think we are allowed to make that i think ends up being a total game changer in the ways we think about power in our country and in the world. this is great. thanks so much for being here. >> thank you. >> steve coll is a pulitzer prize-winning journalist, the new book is called "private empire." up next, newt gingrich bids a farewell.

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newt gingrich officially finally gets out of the race for the republican presidential nomination today. and in so doing, he told all

republicans to support mitt romney for president. of course, he'd spent the last few months viciously and harshly, even for politics, explaining why mr. romney was with categorically unsuited to be president. with that in mind, here's how mr. gingrich's stepping aside was reported today by the great sheppard smith of fox news channel. >> mitt romney has released a statement on the departure of newt gingrich from the campaign. it reads, in part, ann and i are proud to call newt and callista friends. we look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead. that from mitt romney. politics is weird and creepy and now i know lacks even the loosest attachment to anything like reality. >> shep smith, if you ever run for anything, i will quit what i am doing to go work for you. i will quit what i am doing to work for you, so you win whatever it is you want to win. i'm with you.

all right. debunktion junction, what's my function? first up, true or false? president obama finally admitted today that an important thing in his autobiography was made up. as reported in all caps with an ominous picture making it look like he lives in the gates of

hell and only peeps out when he needs to lie to the country about something, as you can see here, president obama's 1995 memoir, "dreams from my father," president obama has now admitted as you can see here on the drudge report, president obama has admitted making up a character in his memoir called his new york girlfriend. is that true or is that false? false. shocker, i know. even though it's on the drudge report and it's something bad about president obama, it turns out to be false. crazy, i know, right? well, today "vanity fair" magazine published an online excerpt of an upcoming biography of the president by david maranis. the book draws on sources that include diaries from a woman named genevieve cook. she is a person that president obama dated while he lived in new york as a young man and attended colombia university. the excerpt of the book notes that some of the events in president obama's memoir, "dreams from my father" which are described in the book as taking place with this character

he calls his new york girlfriend, some of those events, in fact, were not things in which genevieve cook took part. what's the explanation for that? well, according to a politico.com reporter today, it's obviously a scandal. the president made something up in his memoir. the president lied! "obama admits new york girlfriend was composite, a fact not noted in dreams from my father." and then that tweet links to a politico.com article making the same claim, president obama lied in his memoir. and that of course was picked right up by the drudge report, which gave the scandal the banner headline, obama admits fabricating girlfriend in memoir. this new york girlfriend in the book is actually multiple people, it's a composite, and he never says that in the book! except, uh, look at that, he does say that, right in the book. it's right there in the introduction of the book.

the introduction, page xvii, which might be 17 or might be a communist code, how do we know? quote, for the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people i've known and some events appear out of precise chronology. he knows exactly what he did, no scandal. politico.com corrected their story. the drudge report, however, kept the headline up. they made it a little smaller but they didn't make it any less false. next up, guns. guns that the republicans national convention this summer, after a national outcry, or rather after a rare outcry of national laughter that not just squirt guns or sticks, real guns, loaded weapons, will be banned from the republican convention this summer. it's weird to not use something

as a weapon but not to ban actual weapons and they have decided to ban loaded firearms from the republican convention. is that true or is that false? true. governor of florida has asked for a temporary override of the florida state laws so tampa would be allowed to ban the carrying of guns during the convention. that happened. that is true. but then the governor of florida looked at the report and said no. like, you, i share the concerns and it's unclear how law abiding citizens and posed by those and must pro protected from government overreach and ban guns in downtown tampa during

the convention. governor rick scott said no. and you can feel safer now knowing that there might be guns all around you that you cannot see feel better?

[ heart beating, monitor beeping ] woman: what do you mean, homeowners insurance

doesn't cover floods? [ heart rate increases ] man: a few inches of water caused all this? [ heart rate increases ] woman #2: but i don't even live near the water. what you don't know about flood insurance may shock you -- including the fact that a preferred risk policy starts as low as $129 a year. for an agent, call the number that appears on your screen. the interview on this show was with krugman. i had a chart-based epiphany. two shows that track each other closely, the blue line is income and equality in the united states. you have a lot of very rich people and poor people but nobody in the middle. that means that your economic inequality is high. our economic inequality is high

and rising. that's the blue line there. but what goes up with income and equality, and this is kind of freaky, is the polarization in congress. that's the other line on this graph. that's the red line. as income and equality gets worse, the divide between the two sides in congress gets worse and worse, too. and in the case of our current politics, as income and equality gets worse, polarization in congress gets worse, specifically because the republican party goes further and further and further away from the center. they go further to the right. the democrats stay relatively still and the republicans sprint right as the rich get richer. it's crazy, right? we know that money and politics are linked but rarely do you get as clear an explanation of exactly how they are linked. the inclination is if you want to fix income and inequality, good luck doing this. and any hopelessness that you

may feel. watch this. chart imitates scott walker. facing off on june 5th, thanks to wisconsinites turning to the political life being and chris christie and thanks to being a quirk in the wisconsin election law, scott walker was able to raise unlimited money for most of this year. unlimited. he can raise any amount from anyone and in so doing he has raised gobs of money. he's also spent gobs of money from mid-january to mid-april trying to fend off the recall.

he spent 10,988,9010.68. in wisconsin, that's a huge, huge amount of money. so what did governor scott walker get for the campaign spending to try to save himself before the end of his first term in office? well, in january, half of wisconsin voters approved of the job that walker was doing. in january, 51% said they approved of him. now, after the walker campaign spent all of that money, the number of voters who disapprove of the job that governor walker is doing is 51%. that went in the wrong direction for him. also, back in january, half the voters in the state said they like governor walker. half. the portion who didn't like them back in january was 45%.

but now after $11 million spent, the giant unheard of for wisconsin, gazillion dollars in spending, the favorable dollars are down and unfavorable ratings are up 30 points. and so money and politics. in some ways, money renders politics mute. whoever has the money uses and there is one daddy warbucks and the rest of us are red-haired orphans. in some big picture ways, money renders politics almost pointless and just because it works like that doesn't mean it always does. in wisconsin, this is what $11 million in campaign spending has bought scott walker. it's bought him pretty much nothing.