be investing more in apprentice programs, invest in a long-term solution, but for now the priority really has to be access and affordability to higher education. we don't have a system that can get people jobs. >> i love the idea of scott walker going to night school on the campaign and just showing up saying, actually i got it. actually it's over. thank you boit. thank you both. that is all for this reasoning. the rachel maddow show starts now. >> the print on newspapers used to be a lot smaller than it is now. this is the front page of the "new york times" on april 30 1903. makes you feel old, doesn't it? stephan collins what looks to be thousands of words in each column just on the front page. even the big stories, tiny tiny tiny headlines. the lead story, front page above the right-hand column april 30

1903 was about a disaster in canada. it happened in a town called frank in alberta, canada and it was the deadliest landslide ever in the history of that country. it was a little town in the foot of a mountain basically, and for some as yet unexplained reason in the middle of the night in april 1903, the top of that mountain decided to slide down that mountain and bury the town at the base. there apparently had not been any warning signs. this was a reconstruction that was done years later to explain what it might have been like. obviously, this isn't footage of what happened. but the people in that poor town they did not have any warning signs, they did not have any idea this was going to happen. the whole town overnight basically got buried while they slept in their beds. this is one of the worst natural disasters in canadian history. and today that mountaintop is still sitting at the foot of that mountain where the town used to be and it makes for

sort of an eerie moon light landscape, right? that town lives in what used to be the valley. it still looks weird more than 100 years later. that title looks particularly weird right this second because there has just been a giant train crash at that exact site. where that rail line crosses the hundred-year-old rubble from that old famous deadly landslide in canada there was a derailment at that exact spot. look at the landscape there. it's on the rubble site. that's where there was a train derailment this weekend on saturday. this is in alberta, canada the site of the town formerly known as frank. it's in oil country. the train that derailed was carrying rail cars full of crude oil from the alberta oil fields. 12 of those oil tanker cars derailed at that site including a couple of them flipping over. miraculously, none of those rail cars full of oil blew up in that crash on saturday.

not to worry, though. on that same day, there was another oil train derailment elsewhere in canada where the oil tankers did blow up. that one was in northern ontario. those rail cars, again, full of alberta tar sands oil headed east through canada and in ontario there was another derailment, and seven of those rail cars full of oil did blow up and they blew up in a way oil cars do such that they gave you a cinematic display of what the end of the world will probably look like. both of those oil train crashes, including the seven oil cars full of oil that did blow up most of those crashes happened this weekend on valentine's day. then, two days later, which is yesterday, this was the scene in west virginia. about 30 miles outside the state capital of charleston west virginia. now, this oil train was 109 cars long and it was carrying black and crude oil in west virginia

on its way to yorktown virginia where that oil was going to be loaded on barges. they have a lot of trains now traveling this route through towns large and small, and yesterday, for reasons still unexplained, on that 109-car-long train, car number 3, 4, 5, 6 all the way back to 28 came off the rails. the cars that derailed did not blow up but 19 of the cars that derailed did blow up. 19 cars full of oil, one after the other. miraculously, only one person was hurt in this conflagration yesterday. he was the one who had the misfortune of being home when the explosion happened. it set his house on fire and destroyed this man's house. sent him to the hospital. it is a miracle he was not killed, it is a miracle nobody else was injured. more than 2,000 people were evacuated from the local area. power lines melted in this huge

blast. telephone poles caught fire. hundreds of people are still without power tonight, people in multiple communities in west virginia have been without running water now for more than 24 hours, including a local hospital and nursing homes and schools. the local water company says they think they'll be able to draw clean water from that river where the crash happened but even if people do start to get water running through their taps locally, everybody is being advised to still boil any water they might consume because nobody knows yet if it's going to be safe. when we first reported on this derailment and this huge fire and these explosions on last night's show we had taken all -- we had all this footage was taken over the course of a day, mostly by local residents showing what it had been like when the derailment happened when those cars started to blow up one by one. we talked on the phone to a local resident in boomer west virginia right across the river from where this explosion happened. he had been home with his wife

who is disabled when the explosion happened. he told us what it sounded like what it looked like. he said it was so loud and the explosion was so big that he and his wife were convinced a full size jetliner it crashed to the ground across the river from their house in boomer west virginia. he said he only learned when his wife got through to 911 that it had actually been a train derailment. we then went to a local reporter. this was 9:00 p.m. local time. the first thing that reporter told me when i got on the air with him was, oh, by the way that fire is still burning. we had been showing all this footage of the fire through the course of the day. i had no idea. i should have known, seeing how big and explosive the fires were yesterday. this happened at 1:00 yesterday afternoon. by the time we were on the phone talking to those guys at 9:30 those fires were still burning when we were covering it on the air. as of tonight?

at least when we got on the air six minutes ago, it's till burning now. this thing burned all day long yesterday, all night long last night, all day long today. it's still burning. these rail cars full of 30,000 gallons of oil have been going off like bombs one after the other. first responders couldn't even get to those fires, let alone put them out. this was the headline in the wall street journal about it today. "fires from derailed csx train allowed to burn." allowed to? that is rather generous. allowing it to burn implies that you had a choice that you could not allow it to burn if you wanted not to. how many options did the local fire crews along the kanawa river in west virginia how many options did they actually have for trying to put something like this out? the same thing happened just down the line in lynchburg, virginia last year when the exact same kind of train with the exact same kind of rail cars following the exact same route

taking the exact same oil on its way to the exact same terminal in yorktown virginia last year that was lynchburg, virginia when that train blew up. all through a populated area. this is not the middle of nowhere. when those train cars went up in lynchburg, virginia last year in these mushroom clouds of flame, local firefighters there, too, just had no choice. they just let that guy burn out. what else are you going to do? that kind of risk the fact these oil trains travel through very populated places the fact this is on the increase that we're experiencing right now, between 2008 and five years later, 2013. this is the kind of increase we're experiencing right now in terms of the amount of oil being shipped by rail the multiple thousand percent increase in the last five to seven years. that combined with what it looks

like when these things blow up and as helpless we are as humans before the magnitude of this kind of disaster when it happens, how few options we have to contain this kind of damage or even put out the fires when it happens, you combine all those things and yeah this is becoming a real source of concern. >> a lot of this stuff is moved through our state. do changes need to be made? >> you know i think that's something the national transportation board and the federal agencies do regulate. railroads should be in here later today and could probably better answer that question. obviously we want to ensure that when trains move through the state, they can go through the other states. >> earl tomblin from west virginia today answering questions from reporters. the governor appeared with executives from the railroad from csx. to their credit they did make

themselves available for questions today about this oil train disaster but that doesn't mean they had very many answers. for example, quote, we try to run a safe railroad. obviously something has gone wrong there in west virginia. you think something has gone wrong? that's the basic truth here though. right? stuff does go wrong. in west virginia yesterday. two days before that it was two different oil trains in two different parts of canada on the same day. remember the huge derailment and oil train explosion in castleton, south dakota that huge one where this footage is from? that was december 13 but you know what it happened in castleton less than a year later. it happened again in castleton just this past november. this time they didn't have to evacuate the whole town this time they got lucky because the rail cars that flipped over and crashed again in the second castleton oil train wreck, the train cars this time happened to be empty. lucky, lucky, castleton, north

dakota. the train was going the other direction this time when it crashed. before castleton, it was the virginia crash they just had to let burn out. before that it was the one in alabama. before that, the one in quebec canada. it happens. oil trains derail and crash and blow up in huge apocalyptic fire balls that sometimes kill people. part of the way to lessen it is to not let the trains derail. that's the ongoing fight what the standard should be for the kind of cars the oil goes into. the other fighter, at least what seems to be the other fight is over what is allowed to go into those train cars in the first place before they take off across the country. last year after the quebec disaster, the one that killed 47 people, after the quebec disaster and then the castleton giant explosion and the lynchburg crash and the giant

explosion there, after all those happened in such quick succession, it suddenly became a national news story that north dakota? north dakota specifically was pumping oil onto trains and setting them across the country. they were putting oil in trains that were particularly dangerous to put on trains. here's what i mean. when oil is produced in texas like at the eagleford shale in texas, oil producers there use a big piece of equipment called a stabilizer to basically take out of the oil what they call the light ends the super flammable -- basically they're natural gas components otherwise mixed in with their crude oil, and that catch fire and explode really easily. they use these big stabilizer machines to remove the super compounds out of the oil before they transport the oil anybody else. this is texas. not exactly the owner of safety regulations, right? but texas does that with the oil they pump before they transport

it. north dakota does not do that. we're experiencing this great energy renaissance in this country, right, the north dakota oil fields have transformed the united states of america into a net energy-producing nation right? it is a legit oil rush in north dakota. people are making their fortunes. they have man camps in north dakota man camps to house all the people that are coming into that state to produce all that oil. but even texas is taking more care for the safety of their oil they're shipping out of their oil fields than north dakota is. why doesn't north dakota have to do that too? here is the story for you. this is incredible. in september, north dakota held hearings about whether or not they, too, should start doing that. whether they too, should start stabilizing their oil before they put them onto bong trains and ship them next to your kids' elementary school. they were fairly intense for

north dakota. people who were concerned on the safety side showed up to make the safety case. a lot of oil industry people showed up to make the oil industry not safety case. in the end, north dakota decided to flip the baby sort of. they decided to kind of sort of gesture to doing something to make shipping oil more safe. the state of north dakota decided late last year after this fate of terrible explosions and terrible publicity about how irresponsible they're being, they decided to require not the kind of stabilizers they make in texas to make the oil more stable, they decided instead to have oil producers in north dakota do something with the existing equipment they had on hand. they would have them do something called conditioning the oil. so conditioning the oil is not the same as stabilizing it. it's not the same as what they're doing in texas. it's not as safe as what happens

to oil in other parts of the country. but at least -- at least north dakota decided late last year to require oil producers to do some prophecying of the oil to make it at least a little bit more safe before that stuff gets put into the rail cars and shipped to your town. those new regulations in north dakota were agreed on in december, announced in december. they have made this plan. they announced in december we're going to make the oil that we put on those long trains a little more safe. they agreed to do it in december. that regulation goes into effect april 1st. so that means after this. for the hundreds of people who live in these little towns in west virginia who have been evacuated, who don't have power, who don't have water, who don't know when they're going to get water. for everybody who counts on that river as a source of their drinking water. for the guy who is in the hospital tonight after his house

was quite literally bloenwn up by an apocalyptic fireball. would it have made any difference if north dakota had acted six weeks faster? those regulations that are going into effect literally on april 1st would they have kept the little towns from catching fire? would they have kept that part of west virginia safe? are we actually doing anything that will make it safer in a material way and are we doing it fast enough? joining us now is russell gold. he is senior writer for the wall street journal. he's author of the book "the boom, how the oil revolution changed the world." as they start to investigate what happened here in west virginia, do we know anything about the crude that was on those rail cars in terms of its combustibility combustibility, safety, anything else? >> what we know is the bark in north dakota they find that it

is come bus i believebustcombustible and vol tile -- volatile when they test it. we were looking at these enormous fireballs coming out of these trains and asking ourselves, wait a second. this isn't the crude we know. this isn't crude we've grown used to. crude doesn't explode like that. so we started asking, what is going on? the answer we found is that up in north dakota there is very little infrastructure, and instead of removing these propanes and shipping them off elsewhere, they were putting them into the crude and trying to get them out to the coastal refineries to be processed straight through west virginia virginia philadelphia chicago, portland oregon, et cetera et cetera. >> the towns along the way have to be thinking about who -- not just who gets to make the decision but what's likely to affect the decision of these oil

producers about how safe this stuff is going to be that gets pumped through their towns. is it honestly prohibitively expensive for oil company producers to separate this stuff out? i would have no reason to doubt their case that it is prohibitively expensive except for the fact that in texas they think it's okay to do. >> the equipment is not prohibitively expensive. it will add a few cents to the cost but you can take a step above what they do right now, which is basically heating it up to separate it. you can go one step beyond to really stabilize it. the problem is once you've removed it what do you do with it? the north dakota oil field has grown so quickly they don't have crude oil pipelines, they don't have enough gas pipelines and they certainly don't have enough pipelines to move these gas liquids anywhere. so in the rush to produce oil, to go from producing 1 million barrels of oil a day to 1.2

billion barrels of oil a day, they simply don't have the structure. if they had the pipeline in place, this would an easy fix. but they built the oil fields first and now they're building the pipeline and infrastructure that require them to have safe operations. >> so they're pumping oil plus other stuff and they're pumping the oil and selling the oil because they can and there is a market for that. they've never bothered to create any sort of systems for dealing with the other stuff, whether it's these highly flammable compounds that they can deal with other oil fields or the other kinds of waste they haven't figured out how to process like the radioactive filter stocks they don't know what to do with and waste water disposal all this other stuff that comes with oil drilling they just never had to get their ducks in a row before they started bringing this stuff to market. >> essentially they pump first and now they're trying to figure out how to deal with this. you make a big point. they are building saltwater disposal wells quick as they can

to get some of this water that comes up. they're trying to figure out what to do with these stops that get materials. they are coming up with solutions as they go. >> they are coming up with solutions, or not, and the rest of the company is paying a price for it while they decide where they can pump this stuff to. i'm glad you wrote a book on it because i feel this is a story that needs told at length. thank you. >> thank you. appreciate it. there is a lot ahead tonight, including hillary clinton and elizabeth warren meeting in the same room with each other, and the sky somehow refusing to fall. i know. please stay with us. p aid plus the 12 hour strength of aleve. ♪ okay, you ready to go? i gotta go dad! okay! let's go go, go, go... woah! go right, go left, go left stop! now go... (shouting) let's go!! i gotta go!

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hey matt, what's up? i'm just looking over the company bills. is that what we pay for internet? yup. dsl is about 90 bucks a month. that's funny, for that price with comcast business, i think you get like 50 megabits. wow, that's fast. personally, i prefer a slow internet. there is something about the sweet meditative glow of a loading website. don't listen to the naysayer. switch to comcast business today and get 50 megabits per second for $89.95. comcast business. built for business. >> i usually would finish a report like this by saying watch this space. in this case really watch this space. this really feels like an outbreak of shenanigans. that was thursday night. i had a sneaking sense shenanigans were on the way.

now tonight those shenanigans have arrived. and that story is next. they debated. could he do it again? so, he showed them. 79!

and they didn't debate how fast their network... you've gotta post that, man. could show everyone else. if you're not on the largest most reliable network, what are you giving up? verizon. so there was an unexpected oh, no, what just happened kind of moment this morning when our brand new secretary of defense ash carter pulled up outside the pentagon for his first day of work. washington, d.c. is very very icy right now. a lot of things have been shut down a couple days in d.c. because of the weather, but the icy conditions were not enough to put off ash carter's swearing-in ceremony at the white house today and then his trip to the pentagon for his first day at work as our nation's secretary of defense. so the car pulled up at the

pentagon in our very icy washington d.c. ash carter got out of the car, he greeted some people he turned around and then -- well, then something went down. and it went down i have to tell you, just off camera. but still, watch. >> whoa whoa what happened? what happened is that ashton carter's wife, steph snee cartanie carter stepped out of that car and onto the icy road and she flipped. she fell down. it's a real blessing she was not hurt when she fell down. i also think it was a small and significant blessing that the cameras actually did not capture the fall itself so she never has to see that on film right? she got up, she was a champ about the whole thing. she joked about it as she headed up the stairs with her husband. it ended up okay.

it happens to everyone. also so does this. at least, this happens to pretty much everyone who meets vice president joe biden. during a white house ceremony there was a moment when vice president biden was trying to get mrs. carter to stay on the stage. he was basically trying to keep her from shying away from the attention and the camera shots on her husband's big day as he spoke in ceremony but he gave her a quick shoulder massage, sort of whispered something in her ear -- yeah. she was a champ about that too. and somewhere between the fall and the shoulder rub, we did get a brand new defense secretary. ash carter was sworn in officially. he got his first day on the job, including a meeting with the president. he's sworn in as of today. president obama's defense secretary. he announced ash carter as defense secretary in december of last year. he sailed through his confirmation hearings. the vote on the senate was 93-5.

he was an uncontroversial highly qualified nominee who did really well during his confirmation hearings. that was ash carter. that was also loretta lynch, a prosecutor, long established career. no one who is in a position to know has published anything but admiration and respect for her and her record. she did great during her confirmation hearing. nobody laid a glove on her. to the point of it actually getting a little weird because senators decided since they couldn't lay a glove on her, instead they would just ask her questions about other people get her to face up like this. >> you're not eric holder are you? >> no i'm not, sir. >> so no one is suggesting that you are, but, of course, attorney general holder's record is heavy on our minds now. >> loretta lynch was nominated for her job a month before ash carter was nominated for his

job. and neither of them had a single hiccup in their confirmation or faced a single scandal or faced a single scurilous accusation. but ash carter is now defense secretary and she's waiting for a vote. there were no substantive objections to her nomination. for a while it seemed like she was going to get a vote. but then for some reason they hit pause. now loretta lynch reportedly doesn't have enough republican support to win confirmation as attorney general. republicans have cooled on her, whatever that means. and if you are con founded by these events it's because it's confounding, in part because of what job she's about to get, or what she's supposed to get, who she's supposed to replace. there is almost no one the current congress objects to than the current attorney general. it's no secret right? they don't try to disguise their

malevolence about attorney general eric holder. yet here they are with a highly qualified totally non-controversial nominee, and this is their chance to get rid of him, but instead of voting on her they've decided to keep eric holder around for a while. even eric holder seems genuinely perplexed by this. >> it's totally up to congress as to whether i actually leave office. you would think in some ways loretta's office would be fed up. be that as it may -- >> eric holder saying basically, congress, you hate me. i know you hate me. everybody knows you hate me. this is your opportunity to get rid of me. maybe the reason we can't have a new attorney general is republicans love hagtereighting eric

holder too much that they can't get rid of him. raising money off him or something, i don't know. or maybe it's taken about five minutes into this current congress for republicans to go all ted cruz on this subject. it was texas senator ted cruz back in the fall who said republicans should block all of president obama's nominees however qualified, until president obama changed his mind and reversed his decision on immigration policy. he said they shouldn't even worry about shutting down the government. that would be totally worth it as a tool of leverage to get president obama to change his mind on immigration and reverse his immigration policies. republicans in congress decided not to go ted cruz and shut down the government over president obama's immigration policy. they decided instead to do kind of a half ted cruz and just shut down the department of homeland security. shutting down the homeland security department will end next thursday if republicans and congress don't act to fund that

department. they said they won't act to fund that department unless president obama changes his immigration policy. the republican party also decided not to go a full ted cruz on blocking all qualified obama nominees. after all, they were happy to confirm ash carter but they apparently are going sort of a half ted cruz on that strategy as well. they're not blocking all of president obama's nominees but they are blocking loretta lynch apparently as some sort of protest on president obama's policy on immigration. so good for ted cruz. he's getting his way on holding up the government as a way of blocking the president's policy on immigration, as a way to not implement that policy. today that changed in a pretty big way because today a conservative federal judge blocked president obama's immigration order, anyway. the president said today his administration will appeal that ruling, but in the meantime, this whole policy the republicans hate so much it's on hold. it's not happening.

it's on hold -- it's not on hold because the republican party made threats and promised to shut down homeland security, it's not on hold because they said we can't have a new attorney general. the reason the policy is on hold is because it's getting held up in the courts at least temporarily. so now here's the big unanswered question. now that the conservative complaint about president obama's immigration policy are being handled in the courts now that the judiciary is on that does that mean that the country will please be allowed to have a homeland security department again? can we have homeland security department since immigration is blocked? and can we have a new attorney general? can we have a new one of those? or do you guys just want to keep eric holder around as attorney general forever?

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to the extent that political parties can be said to have souls or ins, senator elizabeth warren saul that andis all that and a bag of chips and a cookie for the democratic party. >> now, look you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea, god bless. keep a big hungk of it. but part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward to the next one who comes along. >> she gave that unscripted speech during her nomination in

2011. this year she says she's not running for president in 2016. but she has today quietly become a signal that something is going on in the race for 2016 that may be unprecedented in the field of politics. that story is next. please stay with us. for more than 145 years, pacific life has been helping families achieve life-long financial security with innovative tools and strategies. talk to a financial advisor to protect your family and plan today. pacific life. the power to help you succeed. pacific life proudly presents "humpback whales", a whale-sized movie for giant screen theaters. know that chasing performance can mean lower returns and fewer choices in retirement. know that proper allocation could help increase returns so you can enjoy that second home sooner. know the right financial planning can help you save for college and retirement.

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jack's heart attack didn't come with a warning. today, his doctor has him on a bayer aspirin regimen to help reduce the risk of another one. if you've had a heart attack be sure to talk to your doctor before your begin an aspirin regimen. the republican field of

presidents feels -- cluttered. they're all very nice people i'm sure but there are a lot of them. there's some clutter. the democratic field, however, not cluttered. spart spartan, aesthetic, even minimalist. there is the florida senator from the great state of virginia jordan web, saying he might run last year. he used this camera from 1987. despite this big launch, senator webb, may be changing his mind saying he might not have enough money to go through with campaigning for president. and martin oh'malley is apparently doing his campaigning now with his arm in a giant brace because he broke his elbow in a mysterious weight lifting accident that no one will explain. even with all that human interest intrigue, how does that happen, what does his injury

look like what does the brace look like? even with that human interest level we can't show him campaigning for president with an elbow brace on because nobody has taken pictures of him as he travels around the country. there's bernie sanders of vermont. he may be running. he's making noises to make it sound like he will run. i say this with no offense intended, and i like him a lot, but i think him running will probably be to get his ideas out there on a presidential platform more than anything else. there is a large and committed effort, you may know among the democratic party fateful to try to draft massachusetts senator elizabeth warren to run. it really seems, though that she's not going to. she's not doing any of the things you would typically be doing now if you were going to run for president. today there was a little jolt of excitement in democratic circles when the "new york times" reported on a one-on-one meeting

between senator warren and hillary clinton. it apparently happened at mrs. clinton's house in washington secretary clinton reaching out to senator warren to come over and talk one on one about policy. what's a tad unclear is exactly why this unnamed democrat briefed on the meeting is leaking this news to the "new york times" now. the meeting happened in december. one can only wonder about that. but what is clear is that senator elizabeth warren really does not seem to be running for president. that then forces the difficult question of who is left and what that means for the democratic chances in 2016. is hillary clinton going to run effectively unopposed. that would be almost unprecedented for an open run for the presidency. in 196, the8, the republican and democratic parties had binding parties and binding caucuses instead of just working things out at the convention.

since 1968 do you want to know how many incumbent nominees ran unopposed? zero. none. the closest example is 2000 when vice president al gore faced opposition in the form of u.s. senator bill bradley. this election though al gore won every single primary and every single caucus. he was also running as the sitting vice president at the time. and yes, there were a few years where there was one prohibitive front-runner front-runner, john kerriy, mitt romney. there was some pushing that front runner. that front runner did not get 50% of the delegate. hillary clinton running in an open seat? that would be something that has never happened before in american politics an unprecedented first, which means we can't predict from history exactly how it would turn out. i mean is an uncontested

nomination for hillary clinton a good thing? would she be able to essentially spit out the primary season? or would it be a bad thing for the democrats' chances of hoping to hold onto the presidency? if a primary toughens you up for the general election and she's not really going to have one, is there a plan in hillary clintonville to basically plan around that problem, to compensate for that difficulty that she oddly might have as the republicans fight it out amongst themselves to pick a nominee to compete against her and she just gets to walk to the general. joining us now is ann gerange, political correspondent to help hillary clinton and her campaign. ann, it's nice to see you. thanks for being here. >> thank you. glad to be here. >> let me ask you as a potential hillary clinton watcher at your job, am i asking the right question? is the way i just framed this the way they're approaching the prospect of her candidacy? >> yes and a little bit no.

is to on the yes front, certainly all of the many hillary clinton backers and hillary clinton insiders are delighted that at this point there isn't some giant primary problem that she has to overcome, anything on the order of barack obama in 2008. it makes things a whole lot easier in terms of assembling a campaign operation raising money, and as you alluded to in your intro, essentially coasting to what at this point looks like a nearly uncontested election. at the same time many democrats, including many who are close to her, know that that is in many ways, unorthodox and probably not a great idea in terms of having a battle-tested ready candidate for the general. you don't want all of the things that might come your way to hit you in the general election.

you want some of that to be worked out in the primary. at least, that's sort of the general theory of why primary opposition is good. and she won't at this point have much, or it certainly doesn't look like she will. >> is there any way they are thinking that they can plan around that? i think part of the reason people are so intrigued about this report today, about the meeting between hillary clinton and elizabeth warren is part of the reason people want elizabeth warren to run is to give hillary clinton somebody to run against in the democratic context. democratic ideas get flushed out and democratic fights happen before the general election. the idea of them talking, if not co colluding while one of them is obviously going to run and one isn't, i think some might think that's how the hillary clinton campaign might get around this stress they have as an unprecedented, no-contest

run-up. >> absolutely. and it was what they had today on that meeting, and you can only imagine what the conversation must have been like. and given it really does not look like at all that elizabeth warren is going to mount a campaign of her own, she's a very smart politician, and she's using her leverage in exactly, it seems to me the most effective way, which is to -- and in this case she was invited by hillary clinton to come and talk to her -- to keep clinton honest. to say, here is a -- you know here i represent a very large potent and important part of the party. certainly a big, important part particularly in the primary stages. and i am going to tell you, elizabeth warren i am going to tell you what that part of the party thinks. it's not as if hillary clinton doesn't know already, but here she has someone who kind of

personifies something hillary clinton is not, and that's an important thing in the primary phase. at this point it's the closest thing that clinton has to primary opposition an undeclared and extremely unlikely candidate embodying a thing that she is going to have to take on board and be able to reflect in order to get the kind of party support and enthusiasm that she needs. one thing that clinton supporters don't want to see is her coast to nomination and have the entire party be bored stiff by the entire process. >> right, exactly. it's one thing to consolidate the party behind you. it's another thing to make everybody forget it's happening because there's no politics on tv anymore. fascinating stuff. ann gear from the "washington post." thank you, ann. >> appreciate it. be right back. stay with us.

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governor of oregon in the state's history. he got elected to his first term in 1994 and then another term in 1998, then he took a few years off, then he came back and got elected again in 2010 and he just got elected again in 2014. he just got elected again this past november. but today is democratic governor john hopper's day in office as he steps down voluntarily but under a ton of pressure as government leaders skpoe fishlzand officials in the state called for him to do so, from the state commission from the state attorney general's office to the fbi. he leaves office under raging storm clouds of incrimination mostly about the girlfriend in his administration and alleged efforts for him to cover tracks as governor once her role started. oregon is a state that has had

far less of political scandal. for all accounts him leaving office under these terms, the scandal that got him to this point may have left the state a little more than shook up. which is a hard place to start if you are the new governor. but that's what oregon gets tomorrow when secretary of state kate brown is sworn in as oregon's 37th governor. oregon doesn't have a lieutenant governor, so as secretary of state, kate brown is next in line. becoming a new governor when you never expected to has got to be hard for anyone. taking the reins of a state government that is in chaos and shock is a challenge for the ages. good luck brand new governor kate brown, oregon's new governor as of 10:00 a.m. tomorrow. to ford service confidence. our expertise, technology, and high quality parts mean your peace of mind. now you can get the works, a multi-point inspection with a synthetic blend oil change tire rotation, brake inspection and more. $29.95 or less.

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$89.95. comcast business. built for business. we spend a lot of time on this show talking about people who give politics a bad name politicians who go bribe shopping like they're going to pick up a quart of milk politicians who are convicted felons politicians who have a hooker thing going on on the side. politicians who steal speeches from wikipedia or quarters from parking meeters. it's hard to think sometimes why anyone would want to go into politics when you look at people who go into politics. but today we have a kufrcure for that feeling and that story is next. >> dreen aandrea mitchell reports

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brand new mayor of charlotte, north carolina was arrested in an fbi sting for taking thousands of dollars in bribes. the city council chose a state senator is to fill his shoes. when that senator resigned to take over as mayor of charlotte, there was a vacancy for the senate seat. under the archaic rules of the democratic party, 49 people gathered in a charlotte church to choose the new senator for that now open seat. 49 people there were four candidates. the winner with a grand total of 25 votes was this guy. his name is jeff jackson. although really the biggest winner of the night was mr. jackson's stepson because mr. jackson promised if he won, he would get the kid a puppy. he served as a state prosecutor. you probably heard that snowy, icy weather has been pounding north carolina the last several days. senator jackson arrived for work this morning at the north carolina state capitol in the middle of a snowstorm and he

realized he was alone there. nobody else had shown up for work in the whole legislature. if we were in the north carolina state legislature, we would probably think, snow day! turn around and go home. but senator jackson didn't do that. instead he said from his facebook page i feel like i should hurry up and pass medicaid expansion. anything else while i've got the place to myself? a few minutes later, broad based economic development, check. north carolina is quickly becoming an international model for progress. about an hour in now receiving lots of calls from actual lobbyists. even the false appearance of power gets attention. later, i just defeated a filibuster because i needed a drink of water. that removes any opposition to

new child care in the end, senator jackson presided over a marathon five-hour, one-lawmaker totally >> i tried to take a snow day today in solidarity with the lazy members of the north carolina legislature, but the boss is here. >> if you ever need a note, just let me know. >> okay. thanks, rachel. the white house convened a meeting today on violent extremism. a texas judge stopped the implementation of president