state austerity has taken an absolute hammer to the budgets of these institutions and they are raising tuition. from "huffington post," thank you so much. great reporting. that is all in for this evening. the ra chel "the rachel maddow show" starts now. good evening, rachel. >> thank you very much. thank you for staying with us the next hour. today, minnesota took a big step in the country to recognize marriage equality for same sex couples. the bill passed the house by 16 votes and now heads to the senate. two states down the mississippi river, today was a very different day. the republican controlled house in missouri, all at once, all in a rush, passed a whole slew of bills last night, banning sharia law, outlawing the nefarious black helicopter conspiracy agenda 21 and passed a law that would ban all federal gun laws in missouri, no, you can't really do that but they passed a law that would do it and passed

a bill that said if you are a teacher in missouri schools and you are told to bring a gun to school with you, you can be fired if you the teacher do not show up with that gun. so, wow, yeah, how do you do, missouri republicans, it's been a big 24 hours. there was a new heist exposed by federal prosecutors today, a heist in which hackers figured out how to hack into bank atm networks and made off with millions of dollars in cash, big backpacks full of cash and simultaneously emptied dozens of atms on the same day, hit more than two dozen countries at once, $45 million stolen in cash. today, president obama went to texas. he gave two big speeches on the economy. we'll have a little more on that in a second. today, the republican u.s. senate candidate in massachusetts denied he was ever part of the swift boating group that attacked president obama over the killing of osama bin laden. gabriel gomez is the candidate. he told reporters today, i was

never associated with the group. i was not part of the group. he was in fact the national spokesman for the group in public and on tv and everything. but now he is trying to convince all the reporters in massachusetts that isn't true. don't believe your lying eyes. mistake mistaken identity or something? i don't know. that massachusetts senate race is getting weird. the latest polls out today showed that the democrat in the race, ed markey, is out way ahead. there's lots going on in today's news. we have to start tonight in montana at the headquarters of an organization that likes to think of itself as america's think tank for the white nationalist movement. they don't like to say white supreme sis, say white national list. think it sounds better. you can judge for yourself. >> who stands for us? >> have you ever wondered, why isn't there an organization that works for us?

from african-americans to illegal immigrants, lesbians to left-handers, every ethnic and interest group has its own lobby or cultural foundation. the exception, of course, is white americans. our country's historic majority and founding population, the people that bears the unique heritage of europe, christianity, cultural excellence and the scientific awakening. there also are peculiar folk ways, holidays, traditions and customs that make us both uniquely european and uniquely american. only we are who we are. so, again, why isn't there an organization that has our interests at heart? >> our. this is the white supremacist supremacist -- sorry, the white nationalist think tank group. they call themselves the national policy institute. their slogan at the top there, for our people, our culture, our future.

when they say "our" they are being really really specific about who they mean. >> as long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession. this is our challenge. this is our calling. won't you join us? >> so if you poke around on the website of the nationalist think tank, you can kind of see how they're trying to update the whole racist image. some of them are still kind of skinhead looking guys. they wear suits and some of them have hair. this is an old school kind of thing. no interbreeding, protect the sanctity of whiteness from the inferior races. it is exactly what you think it is with some what improved haircuts. if you dig into the fine prints in their online web presence,

you'll find they're not just an online group and too hold physical conferences and events and things and maintain a p.o. box in whitefish, montana. turns out that is the exact same address and exact same p.o. box for this online racist forum. i saw a bunch of links to this and thought maybe it was down, no, it's all still there. it is called the alternative right. an online racist forum, describes itself as being founded by the won't you join us white power guy you just saw in the think tank video. it says it is dedicated to her ret call perspectives, particularly those with a nationalist outlook. still around. this is their post on holocaust remembrance day this past january. they call it holocaust amnesia day under a picture of a pile of dead bodies from the holocaust that says, i can't believe it's crept up on me again. today i discover today is holocaust memorial day and i'm

fresh out of onions. and goes on to talk about his mixed feelings of commemorating a historical event and leave aside for the moment whether or not this whole holocaust thing actually happened. this is the real deal. this is alternative right. which lives in the same white fish, monongahela montana p.o. box. he wrote there last november and set people's minds at ease about a condoleezza rice presidency, that didn't happen but wrote about pinatas, burritos and forget the alamo meaning every penny spent on the party called hispandering. this corner of the internet is front and center of mainstream politics.

this arian nations supremacists of the nations crock is directly linked to the legislation that finally started getting its big mark-up in the united states estimate after months of build-up, the legislation if it passes will be as big a deal as health reform actually probably bigger. starting immediately after the presidential election there was all this talk the republican party were finally going to help see into law reform of our nation's royally screwed up immigration system. the writing was on the law after losing the presidency again and losing seats in the house and losing seats in the senate, the writing was on the wall, the republican party had to get right with latinos at least. the way it was going to do it was by supporting immigration reform finally. the day after the election conservative hosts on the fox news channel and conservative radio began announcing their conversion. fine, we'll support immigration

after years of saying it, now they're all on board. as of today, that legislation has now finally been introduced and started its progress through the senate. democrats support it. the only question whether or not republicans will let it pass. even though the beltway narrative is republicans see the light and support this it is not clear enough republicans do support it will pass. jeffrey sessions from alabama introduce ed introduced 79 amendments to the bill today not because he's trying to help it along. and senator chuck grassley introduced 77 amendments to the bill, not because he likes it because a lot of republicans are doing everything they can to stop immigration from happening. they have a lot of cover and those who were against it have softened their language but no real effort and no effort to

consolidate despite the rhetoric and the most conservative think tank in the country is really really against it. the heritage foundation is leading anything to stop it from getting done. this is where the white supremacist party comes in. dillon looked up the credentials for those who wrote the study for the heritage and found out one did his doctoral on immigration policy and how we should shape our immigration policy to account for the fact latinos are so dumb as a race. i'm only barely paraphrasing describing immigrants as having an iq substantially lower than the white population. immigrants living in the u.s. today don't have the same level

of cognitive ability as natives. no one knows whether hispanics will ever reach iq parity with whites but that they will have low iq children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against. not only are latinos intellectually inferior to white whitebut they proceed. disgusting. after that was reported the heritage foundation run by former senator republican jim demint, tried to distance themselves from this guy they had write the report and la meanted they were focusing on the dissertation an not this study. it does not reflect the positions of the heritage foundation or conclusions of our study. they further dismissed the guy that wrote the latino dumb thing and said he did not shape the methodology or policy recommendations in the heritage

policy paper he provided quantitative support for the lead author. basically, he was just a temp, good with a calculator, all we hired him for. >> yesterday, you put out a statement, one of the authors of this study, jason ridgewine has now been found to have written some rather explosive anti-hispanic statements. in your statement, you basically just said he provides the numbers. is that right? >> he's the number cruncher. >> let me just finish, if i could -- that's fine -- so you're telling me that you're using the numbers from a man who has written that hispanics have a low iq and will have a low iq for generations. what makes you think -- unless you agree with that premise, what makes you think his numbers are sufficiently good in order for them to be included in your study. will i be able to answer?

>> go for it. >> he did his dissertation at harvard before he got here. >> that was not my question, right. my question was if he did the numbers and his premise is that hispanics have low iq what makes you confident his numbers in your study you just cited are actual good numbers. >> he -- listen, what he studied at harvard, his dissertation has nothing to do -- >> are you standing by his premise that hispanics have low iq? >> no. that's not our position. that's not my position obviously. >> why is he an author in your study? >> he did the number crunching, as i said. >> so you have someone who is a racist, obviously, right? who is part of your study, you're accepting his work, therefore you're accepting his intellectual framework, right? >> we did not accept the work he did before arriving here. >> are you going to fire him or standing by him? >> i don't want to comment on that.

>> why not? >> to be clear, this guy with the thesis that white people are naturally smarter, he isn't some temp the heritage foundation just bumped into and turns out he has this embarrassing past, he has a titled position, a senior publicist at the heritage foundation and as they tried to disavow his dissertation, that's in his student past, one problem with him, we found thanks to digging at yahoo! news, this guys whole record of public output is this same kind of stuff. this is march 2010, model minority question mark, kind of rhetorical question, hispanics are in fact substantially more likely than whites to commit serious crimes. these findings are not due to age differences or immigration violations or other statistical artifacts, the reality of hispanic crimes should be one of the many factors we consider when setting immigration policy.

that's not from dissertation somebody had to dig out of the harvard library. that's on the online machine at the alternative right.com. the place they're cutting up onions to make fake cries over the fake holocaust where republicans are becoming the parties of misspelled burritos and living with this guy and the author of he the heritage immigration study is focusing on the criminality of these brown people we ought to keep out of the country. and when the heritage foundation, the conservative think tank was considering hiring him, the thing he was doing online when heritage hired him was writing about the racial inferiority and criminality of latinos as a group. this is where the heritage foundation went to find an author for their study of immigration reform. turns out their study concludes it is a terrible idea to reform immigration because these immigration immigrants and you know who we mean, they and their

bloodline are low feeding parasites that will feed on the population and not at all fiscally responsible. we learned all of this today about the character of the opposition to reform in this country, learned who is leading the republican charge of immigration reform on the day immigration reform finally gets introduced in the senate. what do those revelations tell us about what happens next on this important issue? >> joining us now is antonio, lived in the u.s. since he was 12 years old. he did not know he was here without documentation until he tried to get a driver's license as a teenager and when he found out he was undocumented. after winning a pulitzer prize he came out about his immigration status and in "time" magazine. he testified in front of the judiciary committee in february, great to have you here.

>> thanks for having me. >> sorry to unload the creep. >> you know, i'm trying to look at this as an opportunity. i'm trying to look at it as an opportunity where every conservative and every republican in this country will say we do not agree with that. we do not stand by that report. we want an actual fair common sense solution to a problem. i actually hope the heritage foundation keeps him. i hope they keep him and hope every republican and conservative person says that does not represent me. >> do you think the heritage foundation has been playing an actual leading role in the opposition to reform? they've been trying to. >> they've been trying to. numbers hide as much as they reveal. i'm all for people having their opinion. this is america, that's wonderful. you are not entitled to your own facts. i read $6.3 trillion. not in that report ways the immigration policy center right here that said people like me paid $11.2 billion in state and

local taxes in 2010. >> it does not include the idea there's any economic contribution from immigrants at all. they don't put that part of the ledger into the equation. no >> again, this is a time for an honest constructive conversation on this issue, not for distractions, not for hateful racist distractions. this is exactly what this is. >> one of the reasons i wanted to talk to you about this, you have been traveling around the country, written -- you're a very eloquent writer. >> thank you. >> one of the things you've written about is coming up against the counter argument and a lot of racist arguments in the counter argument against immigration. do you feel like this is breaking in a high profile way because it's the heritage foundation because of the timing but this strain has always run through the other side of this issue? >> it has and feeds this idea immigration is the most fundamentally misunderstood issue.

i've been to albany three times in the past year and half where jeff sessions is from. the first time i was there on your show 2011. it was interesting having people tell me, so, so you're not mexican. >> but you're an immigrant, how can you not be mexican? >> i'm from the philippines. >> oh. but you speak english so good. i would like to think as a product of the public education system of this country i thank my teachers for teach meg english and speaking it very well. there's this narrative not only are we low iq people, we're just taking, taking and taking. not bringing to mind not only the billions of dollars we bring economically but also the cultural contributions we bring to this country. what we have here is a sideshow distraction that has gone mainstream and time for every conservative and every republican person in this country to say we do not stand

with that. >> do you think it can be clarifying. you're saying you see it as an opportunity maybe it could happen, the heritage foundation analysis we're not going that direction now we see the tree from which this poison fruit has fallen. i know you hope that will happen. do you think that will happen? >> i don't know. i don't think so. here's the thing. i've been to the heritage foundation and spoke there in 2008 when i was a "washington post" reporter. i would love to go back to the heritage foundation. i think the heritage foundation owes undocumented people like me a platform. we should go to the heritage foundation and talk to them about immigration. >> i like it. >> i think that's what we should do. >> i'd cover it if it happens. >> jim demint, i would love to come. >> he never returns my calls but if i see him, i will hook you up. >> pulitzer prize winning journalist, jose vargas. thank you. the next new thing you can own today and fly around and impression everybody.

president obama was in texas today. he was in austin, texas, where he spoke at the manner new tech high school. he spoke on his jobs agenda. he said we have cleared away the rubble of the worst economic crisis in our lifetime. when the president arrived in texas, he was greeted on the tarmac by the governor of texas, governor rick perry. always nice to see members of opposing parties physically inter interacting with one

another and also awful since it was not that long ago governor perry was trying to take president obama's job for himself. governor perry's term trying to run for president did not last long and did not go well. everyone thought he would be a formidable candidate. on paper he was a formidable candidate but in the flesh not so much. >> i will tell you three agencies when i get there are gone. commerce, education, the -- the -- what's the third one there? let's see. five. okay. commerce, education and the -- >> epa? >> epa. there you go. >> rick perry never did remember that third agency during that debate even though he definitely would have gotten rid of it as president whatever it was. turns out he wasn't talking about epa but the person hopefully suggesting to him the epa was mitt romney who as the republican nominee did go on to

run for president on an i hate the epa platform. >> i think the epa has gotten completely out of control for a very simple reason. it is a tool in the hands of the president to crush the private enterprise system. >> luckily for us this president is terrible at crushing the private enterprise system. he sucks at it. the dow jones industry average closed at above 15,000 for the 30 straight day. it had never been above 15,000 before and now we've been there all week. president obama sucks at crushing the private enterprise system. still the point is his tool for doing the crushing is the dreaded environmental protection agency. republicans just hate the epa. sure, maybe it was created by a republican but still, regardless, now, they hate it. one of the ways to demonstrate hatred for that agency to try to get rid of it is try to elect somebody president running on the platform that the epa is a horrible tool to crush private enterprise and tried it with mitt romney and he lost so that did not work.

you might try denouncing the epa as the gust stop poe hoping language like that cause the people to rise up demanding it be abolished that. was what the whip tom delay used before he was sentenced for money laundering. it's one of the major claw hooks that the government maintains on the backs of our constituents. run somebody for president who could get rid of the epa if he's elected, have your congressional leadership call it the gustapo or do what republicans did. the new nominee to run is gina mccarthy, the top ranking official for four years -- a top ranking official, i should say. today, we learned their new strategy to stop that nomination is to question it to death. the senate gets to ask all the questions it likes, right, when it does its due diligence

assessing presidential nominees. ask questions out loud in confirmation hearings and in writing and nominees write back their answers. particularly when it's a contentious agency or contentious nomination, senators tend to ask a lot of questions to try to gum up the works. when george w. bush nominated michael leavitt and steven johnson to run the epa, michael levitt had to wade through 22 written questions and levitt, 49. and lisa jackson set the all-time record, she had to answer 118 questions. that was the record. it's daunting, right, submitting written answers to 118 different written questions all from senators looking to find a word wrong somewhere, to try to scuttle your nomination. the last nominee, lisa jackson had too answer 118 questions. guess how many questions the republicans have submitted to the new nominee? 1,079 questions.

then there's sub-questions within those questions. if you include the sub-questions, more than 600 of the questions to gina mccarthy have come from one senator from louisiana senator david vitter. this is the 123 page questionnaire exchange between senator vitter and the epa nominee. 123 pages of questions and answers. she has answered all of his more than 600 written questions. in response today, republican senators refused to even show up for the vote on her nomination because they say she has been unresponsive. they say she has not answered enough questions. the eight republican senators on the environment committee led by senator vitter boycotted the vote to protest how unresponsive gina mccarthy was to the more than 1,000 questions they have asked her. which she has answered. they consider that unresponsive. what do you think the odds are

we get to 2,000 questions? maybe we can get to 3,000 questions. advice and consent?

1983, i was 10 years old, it was a formative thing, matt threw broderick and ali sheedy in war games. >> shall we play a game? >> i think it missed him. >> weird, isn't it? love to.

how about global thermal nuclear war? >> it's a good game of chess? >> later. let's play global thermonuclear war. >> fine. >> all right! >> if there's one lesson that we learned from the 1983 movie "war games" the lesson was never disguise your launch codes as games like chess and checkers where unwitting hackers might bump into them and unwittingly start global nuclear war. we learned that in 1983 and turns out there's a whole amount of mistakes that could happen. ♪ i'm your venus [ female announcer ] what does beauty feel like? find out with venus embrace. every five-bladed stroke gives you 360 degrees of smooth

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for goddess skin you can feel and feel. ♪ i'm your venus as soon as you feelon it, try miralax. it works differently than other laxatives. it draws water into your colon to unblock your system naturally. don't wait to feel great. miralax. >> a 2-year-old boy died last night after accidentally shooting himself in the head in his home in north texas. the boy found a handgun inside a bedroom at the home. his father was in another room at the time and he was transferred the hospital and later died. a 5-year-old boy who accidentally shot his 7-year-old brother with a rifle. that happened in huston, texas, the two boys were taking a bath, the 5-year-old got out of the tub and found the rifle and shot his brother. the mother said it happened when

she stepped away at the moment. the 7-year-old shot was not killed, wounded, recovering. child protective services said the 5-year-old who did the shooting has been sent away from home to live with his uncle. in tampa, florida, a 2-year-old, found a gun in a backpack and shot himself and died. his uncle bought the gun at a gun shop and left it in a backpack he shared with the boys and arrested and he was arrested and charged with culpable negligence and does own a weapons permit and owned the gun legally. this week, a 16-year-old girl shot in the chest by her 13-year-old brother. at home alone when they found a handgun and treating that shooting as accidental. last year, a 5-year-old boy in kentucky playing with a rifle he had been given as a gift.

5 years old. is gun was loaded and he shot and killed his 5-year-old sister. >> the nra line guns don't kill people, people kill people. the implication, guns aren't the problem. bad people who are the problem. it's hard to see how that applies when the shooter is 5 years old in kentucky or texas or when the shooter is 3 years old in florida. the answer to this cannot be that this is a bad person with a gun who needs to be stopped by a good person with a gun. these slogans do not help us here. it's actually surprisingly hard to tell if these last few days, these headlines over these last few days represent a lot of gun violence involving american kids relatively speaking. is this an unusually large number of incidents like this? it is hard to chase the numbers and figure it out, if this rash of headlines is unusual or if this is normal for us now. it is possible this is normal and the only reason these headlines seem like a lot is because we are paying more attention than we usually do and

if it is we are paying more attention than we usually do, we are because of newtown. the newtown elementary shooting was in december and part of the reason it means we are paying more attention to gun crimes and the relationship between kids and gun crimes because the families of newtown are not letting us stop. francine wheeler who lost her 6-year-old son in newtown delivering the president's weekly address pleading and grieving publicly for the senate to pass reforms. mark barden lost his 7-year-old son daniel in newtown introducing president obama when they lost the battle for background checks. it was lost to a republican filibuster. the people who led that battle are still leading and they're the ones who are making it so clear right now that really was the first battle and this is not done. joining us for tonight for the interview is mark varied den. his 7 -year-old son is one of

the 26 lost there and he is now a member of the sandy hook promise. mark barden, thank you for being here. >> thank you for having me, rachel. >> i know you were involved in the connecticut reforms. we all saw you pledging not to give up at the federal level. you were in delaware yesterday. where else have you been working? what has it been like to be talking to legislators about such a personal loss? >> it's interesting to find they're just people like us, just regular folks, their moms and dads and grandparents. they understand this. they know what happened here. i find it just -- i scratch my head where they can say no to these common sense solutions. i say common sense, this is just about firearm responsibility and safety, it's not infringing on

any's second amendment rights. if you think it does, then you haven't read the bill. >> you said with such eloquence and drama, actually, after the senate made that first -- after the background checks bill fell to the senate filibuster this is not over, this is just the beginning, you're not going anywhere. how does that manifest? >> if we have to go state by state we will. we were in delaware and new jersey and connecticut. we go on our own free will. we go because we think we can make a difference, we can put a face on this tragedy. if our support and encouragement can help get some of these responsible legislation across the finish line, that's what we will do. we're not going to give up at the federal level either. >> you say we go on our own free will. some politicians have criticized newtown families for doing this work, calling you pawns or puppets, saying you're being

used by democrats or the president. what's your reaction to that? >> my reaction for that is do you not think i have my own reasons for doing this? here, let me show you. is that not reason enough? senator jim inhofe said that we have no business engaging in the debate. i called his office and i asked to speak with him. he's too busy to speak with me. i said, here's my cell phone. call me. i'm still waiting for him to call me. rand paul, i think, has the same notion. if he wants to ask me what my motives are for advocating for a safer culture, he can call me, too. >> do you feel like if you could talk to jim inhofe you could change his mind? >> i'd like to ask him, just like to ask him, what are you thinking? why wouldn't i want to do this? >> in temps of going back to the background checks legislation, specifically at the federal level, the way that joe manchin

has talk about it, he will be on the last word with lawrence later tonight and i was with him in washington a couple weeks ago and he was wearing the sandy hook promise pin and i asked him how do you see this a different result than what just happened? >> he said we had majority support and only had to move a few senators and have them vote yes. what do you think is the kind of argument to move senators who filibustered to not do that again? what's convincing? >> i'm trying to find what that is. i don't understand why it needs to be -- why they need to be convinced unless there's -- i don't know -- some other force at play. maybe they haven't read the bill, maybe they just don't know. i hear things like this wouldn't have stopped newtown. we're not trying to stop newtown. we can't stop newtown. if we can help other families, if we can help reduce gun violence in this nation by all of these means, not just that, not just this, it's everything. safer gun legislation, mental health, it's family values, it's

community, connectivity, school safety, just all of that. >> can i ask how you and your family are doing these many weeks and month out and how it's -- how you're coping, changing over time? >> you know, rachel, we -- my wife, jackie and i still -- we cry together everyday. we still try to come to terms with is this really possible that this actually happened? to us and to this community of newtown? and, man, if that's not evidence that it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. it can happen anywhere any day. >> mark barden, sandy hook promise. i want to mention that sandy hook promise, mother's day online card that's at the website right now. can you explain what that is?

>> sandy hook promise grassroots advocacy group came together from community members of sandy hook hook. they are posting on the sandy hook promise website a mother's day card to honor the mothers who have lost a child, whose children won't be able to wish their mommy as happy mother's day this year. we're asking folks to please go to the sandy hook promise site and sign the card. >> mark barden, this is very difficult. thanks. we'll be right back. >> thank you. rregular heartbea. the usual, bob? not today. [ male announcer ] bob has afib: atrial fibrillation not caused by a heart valve problem, a condition that puts him at greater risk for a stroke. [ gps ] turn left. i don't think so. [ male announcer ] for years, bob took warfarin,

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it describes itself as one of the best kept secrets in the air force. best kept secret because it is in the middle of nowhere. i don't mean that in a bad way, in the middle of nowhere for a good reason. it has the job of housing lots of our nuclear warheads in the bunkers of north dakota and the job of men and women on that command to essentially baby-sit missiles and hundreds of smaller warheads.

they guard and maintain nuclear missiles seven days a week and in charge of launching in some cases if we decide to do that. on august 29th, 2007, one of the weapons handling teams was tasked with transporting some soon-to-be decommissioned cruise missiles to barksdale air force base in louisiana. the mission was to fly the missiles to louisiana, and possibly, these were not supposed to be live nuclear missiles. they were going to take off the warheads, replace them with dummy weights for balance and send them away. however, instead of retrieving the missiles with the dummy weights attached, the air force crew accidentally loaded on to the plane six cruise missiles that had live nuclear warheads on them. they loaded them on to a b-52 bomber and sent it to louisiana. the pilots had no idea. six nukes with roughly the

capacity to cause hiroshima times ten were taken on a cross-country flight. that bomber, i'm not kidding you was named "doom 99" ask departed on schedule and for the first time in years a nuclear armed bomber crossed u.s. air space without clearance. upon landing, they sat unguarded on the runway at barksdale for nine hours. until the ground crew there finally realized with a resounding o-m-g they had accidentally acquired six live nuclear weapons they weren't expecting and they had left them sitting around unguarded for nine hours. after that debacle at minot, defense secretary bob gates gave the boot to the secretary of the air force and put into place a new system to do what we can as a nation to prevent our nuclear weapons from going missing again. whether or not you think it makes sense as a military mission to have these 5,000 nuclear weapons that we have, whether you can imagine 5,000

targets for things we might reasonably want to one day nuke, as long as we have 5,000 nuclear weapons lying around, one of our responsibilities is to not lose them or drop them or whatever. one measure the air force instituted to prevent another debacle was to implement no warning inspections at air force bases that house nuclear warheads. and in march of this year, one of those inspections took place at minot, thus giving the minot missiles a chance to redeem themselves after a great embarrassment. here are some photos. officials posting these photos on their official website afterwards. everything seems to be going along fine. everybody is kind of smiley or kpeeft competent looking. officials publicly declared the inspection was a success. no more problems at minot. no nuclear oopsees. but what we have now learned, thanks so some great reporting from the a.p., that inspection in march was actually not that big a success.

not only did the base earn the equivalent of a "d" letter grade when it came to their missile launch operations, but look at the big a.p. headline here. air force sidelines, 17 nuke officers. after that inspection in march, the air force quietly removed 17 officers from the highly sensitive duty of standing 24-hour watch over the air force's most powerful nuclear missiles. the most extensive sidelining ever of launch crew members. so despite publicly asserting the inspection was a success, the a.p. obtained an internal e-mail from one of the deputy commanders who wrote, quote, we are, in fact, in a crisis right now. he described the cause of the crisis as wrought in the crew force. a problem of motivation, essentially. he explained. those 17 officers will be sidelined for a couple months but it does not end with them. in addition to the 17 people who were taken off missile duty, possible disciplinary action, this is amazing, is possible against one other officer at

minot who investigators found had purposely broken a safety rule in an unpetitions filed act that could have compromised the secret codes that enable the launching of the missiles. oh, how desperately i want to know what that unspecified act was. the air force initially tried to deal with this whole thing quietly but shuffling guys off the sidelines for a couple months and declaring victory. but the a.p. is reporting this week has broken this back open and chuck hagel is demanding answers from the air force about exactly what is going on in our nation's nuclear mission. should probably be noted, chuck hagel's previous life, life before becoming defense secretary, included his membership in a group called global zero, a nuclear policy organization that advocates for a world without nuclear weapons. chuck hagel himself signed on to a report that called for getting rid of the air force's entire intercontinental ballistic missile all together. the one we fired for

incompetencies and whose leaders say is in crisis. how chuck hagel deals with this is going to be amazing to watch. watch this space.

okay of the best new thing in the world today. i need one. all right, you ready? this is a mcdonald douglas dc-9. the tail number, if you care, is 73-1681. in 1975, this dc-9 was assigned to the 89th airlift wing of the united states air force. that is the combat-ready force responsible for shuttling government officials around the world. this particular dc-9 when it was in service was configured as sort of a short-haul flying machine, not necessarily long-haul flying machine. when it was used, it was used by the white house to fly all over the u.s. and central and south america. its passengers included on occasion the actual president of the united states.

and that means that this dc-9 at some point was air force-freaking one. air force one isn't just one specific plane. air force one is what you call whatever air force plane the president happens to be on at that moment. so when a president was on this plane, and a president was sometimes on this plane, this was, technically, air force one. and the big news here, the big good news here, is that this sometimes air force one plane right now is for sale. it's for sale. you can buy air force one, the government is auctioning off air force one for a $50 how,000 bidding deposit. for the pictures online, it's got a cockpit with a lot of dials. also a card table set up, maybe. plenty of room for friends and it has a weird blue kitcheny storage area. 30 years of presidential aviation history could be yours. ever seen a decommissioned cop car driving around and you slow down and you realize it's a regular guy driving it, now it's

just a crown vic. buying air force one would be like that but with a plane. everybody slow down. best thing on in the world today. the "first look" is up next. good morning. right now on "first look requests. the man at the center of the horror in cleveland could face thousands of charges and death. his mother spoke to reporters. >> i have a very sick son who has done something very serious. i'm suffering a lot. >> and a massive bank heist. details are fascinating. plus a famed gold medalist dies in san francisco bay. prince harry makes waves a the white house and beyond. kobe bryant gives his mom a mother's day gift she'll never forget, a