once. this happens to her all the time. she was denied. she had to exhaust her 401(k) and savings while on appeal. eventually she was appealed but we are denying people like that. >> michael astrue former social security commissioner, thank you. that is all for this evening. "the rachel maddow show" starts now. good. >> good evening, chris. you made it through the week. how do you feel? >> great. it is friday night and i don't have to wake up tomorrow. >> your first weekend off in a long time. >> it. >> you know how we said we would figure out a way to get people jumping over car niece the show. >> did you do it? >> stand by. >> we will go watch. >> thanks you for joining us. happy friday. first thing you need to know this friday is there is such a thing as competitive lock picking. right here one are looking at the winning entry in the 2009 kp lock picking competition. kp stands for key picking.

which i guess is a particular kind of lock picking. we are within is here a highly skilled human being getting the better of a very strong lock. at least that sort of what it seems to indicate on the caption on this youtube video. our champion here is triumphing over a lock with a close six mushroom driver pin set up of which two are serrated as well. this guy loves both minnesota hocking and competitive lock picking. you can can see from his shirt. he is solving a lk that has five pins. three serrated regular drivers and two serrated spool hybrids. that sort of thing apparently takes a while. this is very skilled work even if the ethic of this particular sport is that you do not show your face while doing it. >> this guy, claims that he just started lock picking. we are witnessing day one of his competitive lock picking career. he doesn't really seem ready for

competition yet. certainly not for a pair of serrated spool hybrids. but as you can see, sort of getting there. now behold, there was also a close cousin to competitive lock picking, which is escaping from handcuffs for fun. the escaping from handcuff sport starts kind of like competitive lock picking but then get weird in a hurry. like, you know, a lot of the -- the shirtless thing. put on a third, man. this is youtube. we can see you. we are all very impressed by your skills. we are impressed by your pecs. now these two are on a stage, with an emcee. racing to get out of your lock picks. this is pseudo magic.

pick the lock. it is a showman thing that people have done for a very long time. modern innovations in the field of things you are not supposed to get out of have led to other can kinds of escapology skills as well. you can find on-line a bunch of how-tos for how to get yourself out of new fangled zip tie handcuffs, used particularly for crowd control. particular videos of guys showing off how fast they can get out of their plastic zip ties. this is one of my favorite corners of the internet. i don't know how to do these things but i love watching people do it. i love this stuff. one thing that does not happen because there is a college of lock picking, one of the things that does not happen because we know there are humans o out there who can do these cool human tricks. even though this stuff exists and we can prove it by watching people do this stuff on-line, nobody, as a result of that, says, well, we shouldn't use handcuffs any more in our

country. we should not lock doors any more. we shouldn't have door locks any more, because after false sense of security. because clearly there are people who can defeat these things called locks. skbrust becau just because we live in a society with a few guys who can pick locks doesn't mean we are in a don't lock your door age. and people jump over cars. people jump over moving cars. this is a thing. and please, please do not try this at home. the fact that this is a thing, this a thing that exists has not led to us as a country saying clearly we shouldn't have cross walks because now people jump over cars. yes. some people jump over cars but not everybody can jump over cars and not everybody does jump over cars. so yes, cross walks are still a bright idea. there is something to be said for respecting the exceptional as exceptional.

for refusing to tailor policy for everybody because of the margins. i mean, arguing from those margins are fundamental against the case of gun reform always but particularly this year, you have heard it a million times. this argument we shouldn't have new laws about guns because criminals do not care about our laws. criminals will break those laws and therefore we should not have them. >> most crimes are committed nearly 90% of crimes are committed with guns that are bought illegally. criminals do crime. they don't pay attention to our laws. >> criminals will never go through a background check. >> no. people committing gun crimes and murpderring people with guns are not getting them under the law anyway. >> we want to tell our citizens, oh, no, no, no,er with going to limit your ability to protect yourself and your family. you're law-abiding.

and these animals, these wolves at the door, who don't play by the rules, they don't have rules. there are no rules. >> why is this the argument for gun laws when it is it not the argument for any other kind of law? nobody says, well, why bother having laws against murderer robbery since murderers and robbery ris won't respect the laws. once they are broken, what good are they? now, though, that some part of the country are deciding that ats dumb argument. now that some parts of the country can make the argument but you won't win with that argument and we will enact new gun laws anyway and the anti-gun argument is evolving. evolving among the criminals will break laws argument and they are getting into hair harry

li harry houdini argument. >> his mother was a legal gun owner. how do you know this person would not have obeyed the law, and then adam lanza, would have been limited to ten rounds instead of 30. >> there is no evidence that anything would have changed. >> what the nra guy is arguing there, from t.o. a very good question from a host on fox news, is not that we should not put limits. because reloading magazines is no problem. it makes no difference if you have 10 round or 30 rounds because people have skills to swap in new magazines so fast, it only takes a second. makes no difference. you should see these guys swapping magazines out and he is right. there are people who competitively reload firearms.

that's a sport in the way that competitive lock picking is a sport. look how fast can i reload my gun. google it. it is a sport. actually, an million people. it is a specific sport that some people do. but some people do it. should laws apply to everybody in the country. this is the unusual and special can skills of the half dozen guys who do this thing with fast reloading. or should our laws reflect what happens in real life? the shooter who opened fire in tucson when he tried to kill congressman g gabby giffords. he shot 31 rounds. he was stopped only when he tried to reload. the size of his magazine determined how many bullets co-fire before he was stopped. he had 30 plus the one in chamber and that was it for him. the shooter who opened fire in sandy hook did so with high capacity magazines.

firing 154 bullets in less than five minutes. the use of high capacity magazines that allow somebody to fire that many bull net so short a time has been central to the sandy hook parents argument for why we ought to change the law. >> we have learned that in the time it took him to reload in one of the classrooms, 11 children were able to escape. we asked ourselves everyday, every minute, if those magazines had held ten round, forcing the shooter to reload at least six more times, would our children be alive today. >> o would our children be alive today? parents in newtown have been asking that question, making that argument really. since the massacre at sandy hook elementary school, four states have passed new regulations on guns. new york state, connecticut, and maryland. each passed a ban on assault weapons and a limit on the size of ammunition magazines. colorado did 7b ban assault weapons but even colorado went there in the size of magazines.

colorado set a magazine size limit of 15 bullet. and as a policy matter, you can see what aim is here. in colorado, in the aurora massacre, the gunman there, used a huge 100 bullet capacity drum magazine. a magazine he bought legally. the tucson shooter, again in the gabby giffords aassassination used a clip that he bought legally. the newtown shooter used magazines that his mother bought legally. had this law expired in 2004, none of those magazines would have been purchased easily and legally. yes, maybe they could be found illegally or on the in-the-know gun enthusiasts. and maybe for some the size of the magazine doesn't matter at all because they are magazine quick can-change artist that show off on the youtube. but likely not. banning expanded clips make it

harder to get. your tucson, aurora, newtown shooter is less likely to have them. so when they find that they cannot reload fast enough to stop someone from stopping them. so four states now have taken action to go back to the kinds of limits on extended magazines that used to be in place for a decade until 2004 when george w. bush and republican led congress let the assault weapons ban expire. limits on magazines, are happening. limits are magazines are becoming real. four states already. and that apparently is freaking out the nra. if they have to rely on harry houdini argument now about this guy being the kind of guy we should think of as a typical gun user in america. rely on the harry houdini arguments to get out of the bind of their own making, you can tell, you know they are running out 6 arguments. joining me now is elizabeth estes. she is is the congresswoman

representing newtown, connecticut. thanks for your time. >> thanks, rachel. glad to be here. >> we spoke before the connecticut state legislature moved to pass new gun laws in your state. now your governor signed those new laws into effect. are you satisfied with what your state has done? do you think this is the right package of reforms? >> i do think it is a great package of reforms and one of the things that is so heartening about it, can which ch is here in connecticut, and you have talked about it, this is a big gun state. the home of arms manufacturing in united states. part of our history. my district in particular is full of hunters, sportsmen and in this state we got bipartisan cooperation to pass a very strong gun safety law that has the elements i would like to see in washington. banning of assault weapons, banning of high capacity magazines, vigorous mental health program and really looking at what we can do across

the board with universal criminal background can checks. really the foundation of what we must have the at national level. >> on that issue of extended magazines, because i highlighted that in the introduction and because we are seeing the nra's arguments on the issue sort of deinvolve i think as more states act to limit high capacity magazines, how do you think connecticut is able to get bipartisan agreement on that? i mean, obviously connecticut democrats will move forward without republicans at all. they have the advantage in both houses of the state legislature and there is a democratic governor. they were able to get governors on board with bipartisan support. is that due olymp is that duplicable? >> i think a number of republicanes who voted for this bill knew some of the families in newtown and how can they look

these people in the eye? as you mentioned in your introduction, 11 children escaped out of that classroom when adam lanza was changing magazines. 11 lives were saved by the real life example of what happens when you run out of bullets in a magazine and in a chamber. it has real-life consequencees. how could legislators look them in the eye and say, i'm not doing everything i possibly can so save another family, another community from this sort of heartache. >> the clip i played of the one newtown mom in the introduction there, one of the things she said yesterday at the bill signing is that she feels like the families who have chosen to be advocates on this, and not all of them have, but families that have chosen to ask for public policy reform in response to what happened for them, they feel they have been treated with respect. they feel like they have been heard. they feel like they have been

listened to. it is hartening to hear that. for a can country tied up with the families and what they have gone through. when you work with the newtown survivors and people in that town which you represent, do you feel like that's broadly held? like people feel they are being heard and respected, in connecticut and nationally? >> i think, again, when you get people to think back to core principles, how can can we protect our children? when you look at 30,000 people lost every year, over half of them sue sides, there's almost no one in this country who didn't know someone killed by a gun. and when you get people into a problem-solving mode, think, what can you do? what can can we do? what can we, as americans do together to protect our children? to protect our communities? then we stop the demonizing. i've been able to engage gun owners in my district who are

highly supportive, particularly around universal criminal background checks for all sales and around federal felonies for trafficking and purchasing. they know they are essential tools for law enforcement. and face it, rachel, if we are going to keep guns out of hands of the criminals, we have to ask who they are when they buy guns. it just makes sense. >> you did not know this would be such a focus of your time in congress, i'm sure. but have you taken this up with as much as anyone could have expected. thank you for keeping us apprised of what you are doing. >> thank you. and thank you for your commit many to continuing to bring this issue in front of the american people. it really helps. >> thank you. all right. good news tonight for all of you separation of church and state fans out there in cable tv land. less good news for family planning sex ed crowd. but if you like the establishment clause, we have a story for you. please, stay tuned.

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sngs this is sort of, especially for viewers in arkansas. if you live in arkansas, there is for you. if you know anyone who lives in arkansas, give them a call, tell them it tune in. this might be helpful if you live in arkansas. okay, ready? all right. the fifth most profitable corporation in the entire country right now, the fifth most profitable, number five, is the ford motor company.

ford is back and they are back in a big way. number five. number four, on the most profitable companies in the country list is microsoft. seriously. this is an list from 1998. i promise. this is the most recent fortune 500 list. microsoft cracked the top five. they are number four. number three is apple. that sort of makes sense, right? apple is just an absolute juggernaut right now. number two, second most profitable corporation in the country. a little mom and pop operation called chevron. giant oil company pulled in $26 billion in profit last year alone. not bad, right? as you can see, the top four most profitable corporations in the country are all within a few billion dollars of each other. all clustered together. but none of those companies, none of them comes anywhere close to matching the undisputed king of corporate america. top dog. single most profitable corporation in the entire country is -- boeing? wow.

exxon. exxonmobil leaves everybody else in the dust. all of those company, when they go to sleep at night, they dream about becoming exxonmobil when they grow up. big numbers are hard to get your head around but to see how rich exxonmobil is, consider this. wal-mart, google, mcdonald's, american express and goldman sachs, you have to put them all together to equal one exxonmobil. yeah, combined. exxonmobil is doing fine. who is not fine is those who live above exxon's pegasus pipeline. residents are still evacuated from their homes. one of the incredible things we learned is that many of the residents who live over the pipeline did not know the pipeline was there until it burst. >> supposed to be a 20-inch

pipeline run from illinois to texas. >> knowing nothing of the pipeline. >> i had no idea. and i'm the fourth or fifth house from it. >> now they know. a bad way to find outity's there, right? we also know about previous safety violationes as it relates to that specific exxon pipeline. in 2010 the federal government fined exxon for failing to inspect a different portion of that same pipeline as frequently as is required by law. sounds bad, right? not only did they not do it because bu they got caught and the federal government nailed them for it. you want to know what fine was for that? the fine was, $26,000. okay just for some perspective, so exxon made $44 billion in profit last year. that breaks down to with, per day profit of $122 million a day. that's what they make in profit in one day. that's $26,000 fine on that pipeline that burst in arkansas, the day that fine was assessed by the federal government, that

represented this much of their profit that day. look at ratio of the two dots there. barely a blip. that's just for one day's profit. you think that motivates a company like this to do the right thing? after the deep horizon disaster in the gulf of mexico in 2010 president obama signed a law it strengthen the fines that can be levied against oil can companies when they do something wrong. the law doubled the maximum civilian penalty for a pipeline violation. doubled it. it had been $100,000. now it is $200,000. oh, because that will scare them. exxon's last big oil spill before this one in arkansas, was when one of their pipelines burst under the yellow stone river in montana in 2011. a year before that disaster, federal officials told exxon that that particular pipeline was suggest to a number of probable violations of the law. among the regulations that exxon was in apparent violation of

were emergency response training and rules governing the potential corrosion of pipes and having out of date maps and records for that specific pipeline. and then of course that pipeline burst, flooding the yellow stone river with oil and exxon was hit with a proposed fine for those violations and a few others. the proposed fine was, $1.7 billion. again, just for context sake in terms of the day that fine was levied. here is how that fine relates to the profits that exxon made in that single day. exxon made that day about $122 million in profit and here is that giant $1.7 million fine they were slapped with. not even a nat bite into their profits for that one can day. in terms of the latest spill in arkansas, arkansas's attorney general has been so far pretty much all over this. we had him on the show earlier this week. he las behas been touring the ad

area. he said his head hurt all day yesterday from being exposed to the fumes in may flower for a couple of hours. he is can demanding a trove of documents from exxon including inspection reports for the pipeline. there is news today a number of residents of mayflower, arkansas affect had by spilt have filed the first class action lawsuit against exxon for what happened there. again, to our viewers in arkansas, to anybody affected by this spill, here is the thing to know about fighting exxon. there is something to know about fighting exxon over this thing that they just did to your and your state. there is nothing that exxon fears from the federal government. they have so captured the parts of the government that are supposed to punish them when they thing happens that the pain that that sort of punishment could cause them goes down to them essential not at all. if exxon or any other oil company is deterred from this behavior, is not because of the government holds them to it. it'll be because the individuals o or state who have been

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use less. with the small but powerful picker upper, bounty select-a-size. i'm up next, but now i'm singing the heartburn blues. hold on, prilosec isn't for fast relief. cue up alka-seltzer. it stops heartburn fast. ♪ oh what a relief it is! today after causing a few hours of rather widespread panic, the federal aviation administration relented and announced it would not be shutting down air traffic control towers in 38 states. even though the sequester is forcing the faa to cut more than $600 million out of its budget the faa announced after a few hours of upset today they will not find that money by taking away air traffic can control towers from small and medium sized airports in 38 states. because that would be crazy, right? so we are not going to do that.

we're not going to do that until june. and then we are going to do that. it's amazing, when you cut hundreds of billions of dollars out of what federal government spends on stuff, you find the stuff the federal government spends on is not just all waste and thingses a easy to make fun of. so suggesting this is a good start, a drop in the bucket, one of many more rounds 6 cuts, because of all of the twhaist is federal spending these cuts ever forcing things like cancer clinics turning away patients because they can't afford to treat them. patients get their treatment at clinics rather than hospitals. so elderly cancer patients are going without chemo. which must be a shock if all you have been told the government spends money on is stuff that's easy to make fun of, like shrimp

treadmills or whatever, right? the cancer drug story was first reported by sarah cliff who writes for the blog at the washington post. whether it is local news covering impact of the state by state of the sequester or wonkier than the usual blog of blogs, about cuts who aren't supposed to cut medicare patients hurt them anyway or the sinking in of the realization that if you cut head start by this much, that means that some places, like indiana, are going to start deciding whether or not american children can can go to preschool by lottery. that's their only chance at preschool in their whole lives forever, decided by lottery. whether it is micro level news or it shot kweez that self inflicted nonsense is it starting to put on the overall jobs picture in the economy. what tfr takes it feels like it sinking in. so why did the president just float a budget plan with more

austerity in it? with even cults to social security for pete's sake. all of the headline level coverage is about the political reception about how the republicans won't even say yes to the republican ideas that president is putting forward. about how the left is disgusted and says they will not stand for a democratic president attacking social security any more than they would stand for a republican president doing the same though with a republican you would have seen it coming. my question is less a political question than a policy question. at a time when the austerity we are going through is kicking us in the teeth economically and the president is among those railing against the bad impact of the austerity we are experiencing already, why is he proposing more? joining us now is the amazinges ezra klein. ezra, always great to see you. thanks for being with us tonight. >> thank you for having me. >> so the president's new, sort of, so my mind, shockingly us a

steer budget rejected by the republicans by speaker john boehner, is that sort after good thing for liberals that john boehner scoffed at it and said he wouldn't consider it. >> rejected we should say before it even comes out. it comes out next week. all we have are previews in the press right now. two things, one, it is not that new of a budget. the part that everybody is talking about. the part where he will chain cpi, a big cut to social security in exchange for tax increases, that part has been on the president's website for months now. under the heading sequester plan. and it is something that has got him really not much pick up but it has been there and the white house's view is why not just put that out if we have endorsed it, why not show we are really willing to do it. there is another part to the budget, another module, which will have a bunch of new investments and stimulus spending and things like prek and all these things that are pretty worthwhile. it doesn't seem to me that anybody expects to have a chance in congress. so it is not clear why they have

put that in a separate oddly enough as they call it a module. that will help the economy stuff in the budget. now it is a case of boehner over and over and again beginning in the 2011 debt ceiling negotiation answers continuing on until now. rejecting the budget before any real negotiations again. he can keeps saving liberales from president obama's desire to reach a bipartisan deal that would in fact cut medicare and social security. that way they have been united. >> we end up getting nothing because the republicans say no to anything the president puts forward. if the republicans are willing to say yes, liberals would be really mad because what the president is willing it say yes to is stuff that would actually be way more either austere or difficult for populations for people with social security than liberals are willing to see happen, right? >> there is a bit of that. the white house's argument would go this way, they would say, what they want to do is replace the sequester. the problem is that if front loads the can cuts. instead of growing over the next

ten years they happen as much this year as much next year as next year as the year after. that's the opposite of what you want to do. they want to replace it with a larger total amount of deficit reduction. it would be back loaded. a lot less in year one and than in year two and less in year three than year four. they think that is a better flied path for the recovery. in that, they are right. i have argued before, i don't mind the way the can cuts are organized in terms of having half in defense and half else. if you could give the president or somebody who had some smarts here, discretion over not just how to arrange them within the big buckets but how to glide them in over the time dimension of sequester, i would be fine. i think tdefense should be cut and i don't know why they think it is so much better to raise taxes and rich people giving money to charity than cut the defense spending. but big thing for them is time

dimension. it is not the over the ten years but the amount that come in the next year and next two years. >> when you saw the job numbers come out today, did you feel that reflected what happened already with the sequester. would we see that this soon or is that likely explained by other things? >> i think if we blame them on any government policy, i'm not sure we should yet, it is the payroll tax hike a couple years ago. you saw retail jobs tank. i think we lost 24,000 of them last month. that's what we expect to see from payroll tax hike. i think we will see more in september. i think the numbers will be revise whed we have belter data. but if we have 88,000, which is not a good number, imagine the sequester on top of that. maybe it would be 20,000 or zero. see quester is expected to kill 750,000 jobs this year alone. in an economy where we only

create 88,000 some months, that's a brain dead idiotic thing for us to do. >> which is why it was designed that way in the first place, to be as brain dead and idiotic as possible so we wouldn't do it. then we did it. ezra, thanks very much. i appreciate you being here tonight. >> thank you. all right, great state of north carolina, cruising along, doing state stuff, reasonably well within the state stuff. ladies and gentlemen, north carolina changed its mind about how to behave. that's coming up. [ male announcer ] how can power consumption in china,

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update four on something we have been covering intensely on this show and which we have had a ton of feedback from you, our viewers wher viewers, whenever we cover it. it is about treatment of veterans. specifically the backlog of disability claims at the virginia. dennis mcdoneham and head of the v.a. did a press event with reporters today. that remarkable in itself. head of the v.a. never did national press event at all in his whole first four years on the job. but he is doing them now. and at today's press event they announced two big important things. first they want to boost the v.a. budget by $2.5 billion to

deal with the backlog problem and second white house chief of staff said that white house is considering forming a presidential commission to deal with this problem. now if that sounds fanl familiar to you it is because iraq and afghanistan -- asked to fix the problem and today we learned the white house is at least, maybe that maybe and extra funding neither of them is bottom line improvement yet for veterans but both things they announced at that press event and the existence of that press event at all those are signs of life. steps in the right direction. green chutes, as they say. we will stay on this. watch this space. [ male announcer ] how do you measure happiness? by the armful? by the barrelful?

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so happy friday. happy friday particularly to any theocrats watching tonight, because i know you theocrats. these legislators decided to cave. they decided to withdraw their legislation calling on the state of north carolina to establish a state religion. they are house joint resolution 494. that asserted south carolina is sovereign from the u.s. federal government and thus south carolina will not recognize any federal interference with the state quote, respecting an establishment of religion. the establishment of a state religion is quite literally the first thing that the bill of rights says you can't do. it's the first thing even before freedom of speech. but north carolina republicans are not buying that stupid constitution stuff. that stupid constitution thing does not apply in north carolina and they will establish a state religion if they want to.

the sponsors of this legislation are not just some random bowl of mixed nuts either. the guy with the circle around him, he's the republican majority leader in the north carolina house. and he was part of this group trying to do this along with 14 republican co-sponsored. until somebody finally backed them into a corner and showed them even though it might be disappointing, sadly north carolina is still part of the mean old united states of america that does not allow you to establish an official government religion. maybe you were thinking of saudi arabia? the north carolina legislature have been going on a real show this year. with a republican controlled governorship as well. in addition to the establishing a state religion thing, they're also cracking down on divorce. even if the reason you want to get divorced is, say, domestic violence, your spouse abusing

you, the republicans in the state legislature of north carolina want the state government to intervene in your marriage to block you from getting divorced. for two years. during which time they will mandate you attend state government classes and workshops that are designed to make you not get divorced from your abusive spouse for two years. because, you know, small government. speaking of small government, we are also waiting action now from alabama's governor robert bentley who says he will sign legislation that will use targeted unnecessary -- to shut down the state's abortion clinics. that has been passed by the republicans in the alabama state legislature and the republican governor of alabama is expected to sign it. republicans have already put the exact same law into effect and are using to try and shut down the last clinic in mississippi. republicans are also doing the same thing in north dakota. the republican governor signed it there too. to shut down the last clinic in

north dakota. republicans are working on the same approach to shut down on the clinics in texas now as well. and they are halfway there in the state of virginia. virginia isn't even a red state. but it is governed at the state level by republicans. so they are using state government regulations to shut down all the abortion clinics as well. that is what republicans do whenever they are in power now. that is republican governance. republicans are also flat out passing unconstitutional bans on abortion. as if roe versus wade didn't exist. just try and stop them. arkansas republicans are essentially in a frenzy this year. because in arkansas, republicans took control of both houses of the state legislature in this past election for the first time since '74. and i don't mean 1974. i mean 1874. since the reconstruction era after the end of the civil war.

and when you have not had control of something since 1874 and you get control of it, i guess you just yee-haw let's ban abortion. who cares? also they made clear that arkansas rejects the equal rights amendment. this is a headline from this week. the equal rights amendment. you know, the equality of rights shall not be denied or abridged because of one's sex. maybe it's because it's got the word sex in it, but arkansas republicans took decisive action this week in 2013 to declare their state to be against that. republicans in arkansas and texas both introduced legislation in the past few weeks to block sex education. and education about preventing hiv and sexually transmitted diseases. yeah. what do we need that for? that's dirty. north dakota republicans this year tried and failed to block sex-ed for kids who are in foster care. that's night.

wrote a scathing letter demanding that your boss, your employer should be the one to decide whether or not you can get contraception through your health insurance. boss, can i talk to you about something? in texas this week, republicans introduced legislation to rescind all funding from anything gay-related and from all womens centers at all public colleges and universities in the whole state. this is what the republican party is working on around the country right now. the beltway press does not cover republican politics that way, but that is what they're doing. it's not what they're talking about. it's what they're doing. you don't even have to go far outside the beltway to see what they're doing. in richmond, virginia, this past week which is not far outside the beltway. in richmond the attorney general petitioned a federal government to let the state of virginia keep its sodomy law. you remember when the supreme court said sodomy laws were unconstitutional and they have to be struck down? virginia decided to keep theirs

anyway. a republican strait legislator at the time, he was part of the -- after the supreme court ruling because he still really liked the sodomy law. when he was running for attorney general in 2009 he explained his thinking on the subject and why he was against protecting gay people from discrimination telling a paper in 2009 quote, homosexual acts are wrong. and i think in a natural law country it is appropriate to have policies that reflect that. they don't comport with the natural law. i happen to think it represents behavior that is not healthy. and an aggregate is not healthy to society. and so keep the sodomy laws on the books. well, now, that state legislator is attorney general. and he's using taxpayer dollars to keep the sodomy law on the

books. now, in case sodomy is not a word in you're everyday parlance, it means sex between straight consenting married adults even, the state government of virginia bans you from putting your faces or genitals together in a way that is not approved by the state government. the petition to keep that on the books. since he is also the republican party's nomination to be the next governor of virginia, he would be succeeding governor ultrasound since he's not just some wing nut acting alone and is instead the republican's decision to lead the state. mother jones has now asked of the campaign to ask if he personally has ever violated the state sodomy law. ken with cuccinelli have you

ever went against the law. mother jones asked the campaign if he or anyone working for his campaign had engaged in the conduct prohibited by the state's ban on oral sex and anal sex between consenting adults. they also asked if he would fire anyone who's done so. no answer. i feel like mother jones will not get an answer to this. can you imagine if they did? the beltway version of the republican party is getting all sorts of unearned credit right now for supposedly trying to move the party past this stuff. reince priebus gets all sorts of credit for saying republicans should try to sound less old testamenty when they talk about social issues. but i say that the credit for moving the party past this stuff is unearned credit. because he, even reince priebus himself cannot hold himself back from this stuff. it's too alluring. can't give it up.

here's reince priebus saying two days ago if you support planned parenthood you support infanticide. not seriously but this is seriously his take on this. the beltway line on the republican party right now is social conservatism is over for the republican party. and kicking all the old school conservative issues to the side line. look at what they're doing. not what they're saying. dozens of republicans and republican senators have signed on to more investigations of planned parenthood. virginia is looking for sodomy laws. they are cracking down on the gay in every form of state government. the social conservatives have triumphed in the republican party. you could tell it not from what they say to t