and i'm going to sit right here i've a feeling people are already starting to forget just how serious this nuclear situation in japan is and just how volatile nuclear power is in general and if we do forget it what we've got up to three mile island is that like we forgot after chernobyl about to happen again. coming up polygamy the so-called taboo marriage lifestyle never fails to grab national attention and the two thousand a polygamous raid in texas to the reality show sister wives the rotation of the t.l.c. network after the break an inside look at this mormon tradition. you

know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here so you saw the part of it and realized everything you saw. on tarp was a big. one go back to the big picture i'm sorry hartman coming up in this half hour the obama administration does a major shift from supporting medical marijuana to cracking down on state governors who allow marijuana pharmacies and clinics that's behind

a sudden flip flop plus if you ever wondered about the life of a polygamist will speak with an author who devoted part of his life and wrote an entire book about the once. and there's an infectious plague crippling the nation's middle class we're trying to find a cure. is the obama administration having a change of heart about pot that in two thousand and nine attorney general eric holder reversed a policy of george w. bush and promised he would not use the f.b.i. to bust up medical marijuana dispensaries in states that had legalized medicinal marijuana earlier this month the department of justice started singing a different tune sending a letter to the governor of washington threatening to prosecute any state employee or business involved in the unlawful marketing and sale of marijuana that prompted

the governor christine gregoire to veto that state's medicinal marijuana law other governors around the country are now having second thoughts about legalizing medicinal marijuana as well so why is the white house suddenly targeting medicinal marijuana and what's the future of marijuana legalization in america allen st here joins me now is the executive director of normal a national organization for the reform of marijuana laws allen welcome thank you great to have you with us what's behind this letter from the department of justice is this just some bureaucrat who's just been running on autopilot left over from the bush administration or is there an actual change of policy that's happening under holder. there has definitely been a positive change from the reformist point of view with the election of obama they've done a lot of positive things but a rubicon seemed to have been crossed a few months ago in oakland where the city was going to seed for plots of land that were going to grow two hundred thousand square feet of marijuana and i think in one of the greatest acts of see why

a so i don't have to describe what that means the city attorney i think wrote to the federal attorney saying can you give me some instruction whether i can sign off on this and until the federal laws change really every state that allows the sale in production in taxation of marijuana for any reason is violation of federal law well yeah of course and and so for the city attorney or any state attorney for that matter to ask any federal attorney to say yeah go ahead you know that's not going to happen is never going to happen the obama administration up to this point. i miss i'm assuming the guy never got a response or got a negative response and so the the thing stopped what it was was the called the hard ha ha memo it kind of counters the our good memo you just mentioned a moment ago and what it did was it seems to point to the zenith of medical marijuana from the obama administration as he moves towards the election and he seems to be getting to the middle in this discussion so that suddenly the light

goes off twenty two of this happening. so they're just there genuinely has been a change of policy or and it wasn't provoked by exogamous events but by you know what's going on in berkeley or something like that well what we see now is not the swell not the swat routine that was used during the bush administration where they came in violently and raided these clubs today i call it the al capone effect where now they're just getting a soft little certified letter from the i.r.s. and now we're at the juncture of whether or not courts are going to determine whether these are legitimate businesses or not right and as long as federal law against it they're not they're not technical enough at all levels and if this one of the supreme court they'd simply say there's a federal law there's but as you indicate there are fifteen states in the district of columbia that have changed the laws there are six states that have taxation and regulation right rhode island vermont washington colorado all of those states and this week it received those letters from the federal government so the easy

solution is to change the federal law because there is there any movement that direction we've since one thousand nine hundred seventy two so it's a law and smaug that is the ultimate way to fix this cannabis conundrum well and i you know i don't see that coming out of john boehner republican house of representatives but the democrats control the senate there are you know boss told a lot of democrats representatives. is is the failure of democrats at the federal level to take this odd a reflection of a genuine public say dislike for the legalization of pot or the door of the decriminalization medicinal marijuana or is it political cowardice or is it just low on their priority list here so numbers that are important seventy five percent of the pro border warrants medical access to marijuana that's huge numbers about the same percentage want to decriminalize what vexes me the most as an activist is

that about forty six percent want it legalized so there's a thirty percent gap there for the soft reforms versus the much more difficult legalization or if you're a politician you should be following that tip o'neill school here and realize this is what the people want. and in but the but they're not moving in that direction no any is there is there any evidence at all do you have any legislative champions yes party frank jerde polis ron paul do you know rohrbacher to name the republicans even yes libertarian leaning to be sure so from our point of view can a pox on both houses that they haven't addressed what is really now a seventy five year appropriation or oh well good luck allen st pierre thanks so much for being with us thank you for shit nice to see the war on drugs a complete failure and prison populations soaring now doesn't seem to be the right time to be taking a step back from a responsible drug policy in america let's call america out for what it is an

effective medicine and not too bad for recreational drug users. republicans that are likely to jump into the race for president mitt romney and jon huntsman ave both the mormons the leading priest literally of the hard right wing is glenn beck another mormon and one of the leading tenants of mormonism has historically been polygamy joseph smith the guy who wrote the book of mormon and founded the church of latter day saints at well over forty wives many of them under eighteen years of age some as young as fourteen and even though the mormon religion is outlawed polygamy it's still a regular practice in some sects around america take a look at the case of warren jeffs the new tories polygamist who was the head of the f.l.s. l.d.s. church at twenty wives found himself on the f.b.i.'s most wanted most wanted list back in two thousand and six right next to bin ladin are estimated to be around six

million mormons in america it's the fastest growing religion in the country and as many as thirty thousand people practicing polygamy in fact a polygamist lifestyle has been back in the headlines in recent months after t.l.c.'s popular reality show sister wives gave us all you need to look into the polygamist lifestyle. cody and i met this young and loud here in april we would take another wife for a ride since the family i just fell in love to know my film love a journey to know i fell in love again this is cody's thirteenth child she's a sister from the same mr and he's a brother from another mother some people think how do you feel when he's half with another woman and you know they're having sex will clash darn it they better. so what is the real story behind this phenomena in america you can find a place in the white house you know too distant future joining me now is a man who spent considerable time studying the mormon religion and polygamy and

just finished a book about. bhattacharya filmmaker and author of the book secrets and wives the hidden world of mormon polygamy so as you walk into the program thanks is is mormon polygamy anything like what was portrayed in that little clip that we saw the preview the t.v. show. you can't really get your reality from reality t.v. let's be honest but one of the things that not only not only sister wives but big love has done very successfully is humanize a group of people that had been prejudiced against had been misunderstood and been the subject of some very lou reed headlines and pretty much nothing else so you know i applaud them i applaud the show sister wives i think it's great entertainment but the reality of polygamy is it's at once a lot stranger and

a lot darker interesting what provoked you to write this book. well the subject kind of sucked me in bit by bit you can probably tell i'm not your cookie cutter mormon i'm not a mormon saw i don't have any personal connection to this but. in two thousand and three round about warren jeffs was kind of going nuts he was banning music and laughter and different colors of the rainbow and the f.b.i. was after him you know as you said and while all of this was going on i was relatively new to the to america i just moved there i've been here for a couple of years and the revelation that there was this enormous population for me like thirty to forty thousand people who were living outside the law it struck me as a tremendously exciting thing that had to be explored and so that's how it began back

in two thousand and three and you lived with some of these people for weeks and months you were not as yasser yeah we had thought of july we there were various different kinds of groups. some groups were very hospitable they let me and it took a lot of persuading but once they let me in they literally gave me the keys to their neighborhood so i had them over for dinner it was all very friendly i went to church and you know i spent a lot of time there. i found some fundamentalists actually drink unlike the vanilla mormons so we have something in common. and there's a there was another group that i stayed with inhabit an enormous rock there's no other way to describe it it's a it's a big rock and it's out in the desert near moab and it's powered by solar panels it's you can really make it up but they were very nice i stayed there for a few weeks. you know to happy still rigs all polygamists with are happy to see me

come knocking on the door i have to say i can imagine you mention the dark side here has always seemed to me that the dark side of polygamy is the surplus boys what happens to the extra boys. well they either rebel lead an early age when when it becomes clear that they're not required or they get kicked out i mean this is this has been widely documented with the f l d s but my book focuses because the f l d s's attracted so much attention over the years my book focuses on a lot of the other groups but the same you see you see the same sort of currents where where boys are disenfranchised. this is too many of them in these kind of little bubble societies and and yes you're right that that that is a very dark side of of of of polygamy is these these redundant boys who are kind of

cast away. but also the error of their sisters as well you know the young girls who are kind of trapped to to a large extent. once you grow up in a culture like that and you don't know any different then it becomes very difficult to break away from your religion your family and to stand on your own two feet and so there are some very sad stories in the book of of girls who just thought they were doing things out of consent agreeing to marry certain people but. consent is a very elastic term when you're fourteen to fifteen years old and you've grown up in a very insular environment like that remarkable thank you so much for words. thank you you know cultural norms are just as subject to evolution as is everything else back when we had warrior societies men killed men and there were more women

and so polygamy evolved in response to that imbalance but in today's world at least in the developed western world ratio of men to women is about fifty fifty so polygamy really just doesn't work here anymore at least at the societal level but that didn't stop the diehard polygamists like mitt romney's great grandfathers who had five and twelve wives respectively strange times we live. crazy alert not worth the paper it's written on c.n.n. conducted a poll yesterday asking americans whether or not they think osama bin laden is in hell sixty one percent of respondents said yes they think he's in hell and only one of the people offered up a more reasonable answer saying they didn't have any and in five percent of those polled said they didn't believe in hell and you know what i'm going to leave the analysis of this hard hitting poll to the professionals. hard on the news

media you know they have a right to ask people you know what their opinions are our new c.n.n. poll shows sixty one percent of americans believe the al qaeda leader is in the right and. so my wealth so. well done john coming up america is suffering from what could be a terminal disease so what is it how do we fight it the answers and ideally take. notes.

let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right. i think. one well. whenever government says there's keep safe get ready because their freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then he glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture .

for. your world. and get. into it only. to go to pretty just what.

i have every right to know what my government should do if you want to know why i pay taxes. well i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism. coming out. now the good the bad and the same lee ugly the good. and the congressional progressive caucus leaders of the caucus in a letter to president obama yesterday calling for an end to the afghanistan war a letter read in the wake of osama bin laden's death now is the time to shift toward the swift see and responsible withdrawal of u.s. troops military contractors from afghanistan. by the way the progressive budget

from the progressive caucus their proposal does and our foreign wars and it also taxes millionaires these people a lot of problems the bad one back on his morning shows his radio show this morning beck attacked the president visiting ground zero. george w. bush said no i don't want the spotlight. basically what both of them are saying is this is a little crass and obscene and you go ahead. there and york and that's my opinion i don't know if anybody else feels this way but i think it's crass so after the president didn't speak out against the ground zero mosque back to attack him for insulting victims of nine eleven now that he's honoring the victims in a solemn ceremony didn't give a speech just showed up the president is being crass. this president could save eight kids from a burning building back would be the first to say it was what was the stuff you know just to boost his poll numbers. and the very very ugly steve doocy

criticizing the president's decision to not release the photos of bin laden to see argued we should be worried about reactions from those limbs what i think is important is that you have billions of muslims across the world who may be still struggling perfect stude like the u.s. . and that is going to hurt the. every light does not come on i just try. never going to life is like through a d.n.a. of muslims to hate america or specifically read in the qur'an to read it. that's what they do over a fox and friends i suppose phobia with your morning coffee and that's very very ugly. right now we are in the cancer stages of capitalism i should say the cancer stages

of reagan's capitalism it's lingered for thirty years and has now gone malignant in the united states republicans on capitol hill this week are calling for the privatization of medicare and the dismantling of critical social safety net programs as part of their efforts to make or to finish reagan's revolution started back in one thousand nine hundred one to make it complete today it was a revolution to try to render the greatest invention man has ever come up with a democratic self rule government into a nasty evil beast. government is not the solution to our problem government is the problem. all of us need to be reminded that the federal government did not create the states the states created the federal government the answer to a government that's too big is to stop feeling its groove an ancient chinese philosopher now truth to govern a great nation as you would cook

a small fish do not even after i leave office i would never stop campaigning for the tools needed to limit the insatiable fusco appetite of government well you may have stopped campaigning but his cult of reaganites never did and now that is because billionaire backers is not just about starving government so corporations can step in and take over and make money on what should be public functions like parking meters bridges health care education to take that kind of power the rich guys behind the reagan revolution had to bring in more than just the rich so they appeal to fundamentalist christians and massage mystic men. case in point yesterday republicans passed legislation the house to dismember this empower women by redefining rape and the symptom of reagan and his embrace of the so-called moral majority a marriage that's still going strong within the republican party today in the last

four months since republicans took power in state legislatures all around the nation and in the house of representatives here in washington d.c. we've seen their own them assure our nation into the final stages of this cancer after busting up a state employee unions in the name of ronald reagan governor scott walker's republicans in wisconsin are now telling college students they can't vote anymore just like reagan killed free public college education in california when he was governor there and there's a constitutional battle underway in michigan where the benton harbor city council rules of that governor rick snyder's financial manager or dictator brought in to break up the unions fire local elected officials and sell the city off to republicans and corporations or republican cronies is unconstitutional unfortunately their ruling isn't going to go very far since governor snyder has already stripped them of their powers and this cancer is also infecting new jersey georgia florida. pennsylvania maine south carolina kansas and arizona all

states where republicans are setting fire to government preprogrammed that heal us educate us and keep us safe in order to give away billions in tax cuts for millionaires billionaires and transnational corporations this was reagan's ideal vision a nation where the rich were swimming in cash the poor were on their own the government was neutered and ineffective women were marginalized working people screwed and democratic voters disenfranchised. this is what a nation that's on the verge of going terminal looks like twenty five million people on or under employed one in seven people on food stamps more than fifty two million people without health insurance one in six people living in poverty including one in three african-american children. all the while the rich have never been richer in the united states of america that's the result of reaganomics if republicans are successful in these final stages then by the end of this decade

america will completely different a look just thirty years ago will be a lot limping deteriorating nation ready to succumb to the reagan is an answer at sea to suffer from within but there's one problem for republicans in american people are tired of being sick and they're not ready to give up yet on the vision america had of itself for the first two hundred years before reagan came to power unlike the cheers reagan got thirty years ago take a look at how americans are responding over the last two weeks to these reagan republicans these political cancer cells led by paul ryan a town hall meetings across the nation. if you absolutely hammered by medicare calmly playing back or in there that you are al gore that they don't have not and that you're a guy that he said nothing in the campaign that i'm going to change medicare now you're here. for i am that will destroy.

the earth. at the very worst there have to. be really question today is will this public outrage last and help america cut out this cancer or will the millionaires and billionaires who view the cost of buying republican politicians as simple investments to get more corporate welfare and massive tax cuts will they be able to spend enough on political advertising and think tanks and right wing pundits at philcon be able to continue to convince americans to vote against their best interests will they convince us all to be just complicit in this illness. well we continue to lie cheat and steal the wind moral actions in the future this is the challenge in front of us and we organize and fight back nationally like people are

doing in wisconsin and michigan are we such succumb to the cancer i don't know about you but i'm going to keep fighting that's the big picture for tonight for more information the stories we covered visit our website at thom hartmann dot com and our team also check out our you tube pages at youtube dot com slash the big picture r.t. and slash and this entire show is available as a free cast on i tunes and don't forget in ocracy begins when you show up get out there and get active your it will see tomorrow.