good evening i'm losing half an hour into thom hartmann here in washington d.c. here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture after weeks of casting a dark dark shadow across america the winner is finally gone the democratic congressman announced his resignation today can we as a country finally put this whole wiener must behind us we're going to bring you that especially in just a bit and riots continue on the streets of athens with protesters furious over the government's austerity measures so could that financial armrest actually spread and what's next for greece.

right well you need to know this the scandal that has mesmerized washington as well as of course cable news channels is finally coming to a close and new york congressman anthony weiner today gave in to mounting pressure mostly from his own party and the president's about and announced resignation from office now if you're interested i guess i might be able to continue the work that the citizens of my district elected me to do to fight for the middle class you know struggling to make it unfortunately the distraction i have created has made that impossible. so today i'm announcing my resignation from congress. all right well if you happen to be one of the five people in this country who hasn't heard of this scandal then the story is so one of the democrat who was crazy

for girls crazy for twitter things that probably don't exactly mix when we're talking about elected politicians who are married and who seem to enjoy sending photos of their junk to friends on the internet so how do the saga finally come to a close and will the loss of winner leave the democratic party shriveled up for some answers let's turn to democratic strategist erica community and towards well it is a washington correspondent for the takeaway on public radio international i think they ran out of every single pundit you can probably hear not terribly successfully taught to start with you know i mean i want to preface this by saying that it kind of pains me to do this story i feel like there are so many more important issues that we really could be talking about today but the old school journalist in me i guess would say that finally we had an actual developments he stepped down there's something to talk about here let's take a look at what what's next on the agenda you've been on the hill all day today you sure talk to members and seen sort of the agenda behind the scenes how much pressure was there behind closed doors for him to step down i mean was this in the

coming the pressure was mounting on anthony weiner he was defiant up until really the weekend three day weekend in fact this is according to his democratic colleagues even democratic aides on the hill telling reporters that anthony weiner was calling around apologizing his for his behavior but at the same time citing poll numbers in his district showing that most people in his district wanted him to stay so he thought he could wait it out saying i realize what i've done was wrong i realize it's terrible i apologize for distraction because by the way democrats were getting traction on some key issues that they thought would finally be a real winner for them in the election if they didn't drop the ball but saying look my constituents want me to stay i have put poll numbers to prove it there was a picnic of members of congress over at the white house with injured. the last twenty four thirty six hours that i was right. there it's me and it won't be any congressional picnic where finally anthony weiner got on the telephone with steve

israel the chairman of the democratic congressional campaign committee and finally said that he was ready to resign in fact just to make sure that that was the case steve israel passed the phone to nancy pelosi the democratic leader so that she could hear from anthony weiner himself and at that point that was last night the die was finally cast and then we was ready to announce to the public early this morning it was leaked and then he had his press conference and then he did the negotiations as we heard it was reported there was this meeting today behind closed doors to figure out what to do that's correct one other thing that he was trying to preempt was it was a planned meeting of the democratic leadership in the democratic caucus the reported purpose of that meeting was to talk about stripping anthony weiner of his committee assignments especially his position on the energy and commerce committee one of the most powerful committees in congress to basically kick him off of that committee now they put that story out what is that that's a pressure tactic to let him know very publicly that if he chooses to stay he's

staying in a very hostile environment where whatever power he had at least in the halls of congress would be completely stripped of him so that he needs to think very seriously about this notion that his constituents want him to stay maybe they do not have his colleagues in washington go home and erica what do you think i mean was it was that the right move should they have waited for this to blow over or something that i know absolutely at this point i mean the bear problem here is that yes he can work on getting veterans benefits and help constituents navigate through federal agencies as he should you as a member of congress but the other thing you're supposed to do to serve your constituents is to be able to make deals and push legislation that you need you know as part of their agenda and if you have a live party leadership and this is the one thing that separates out anthony weiner from you know kind of scandals in the past is that he lied to us. because colleagues and said that he did not release this photo that he was hacked and so they were put in a very awkward position how are they supposed to trust him in proposing legislation a negotiating bills going forward when he's lied so publicly put them in the

position of publicly defending him and how they had on their face so i mean that's that's close very much more so for filling the needs of your constituents is your ability to work with your colleagues. when very far with his colleagues who i went very far with the media you know of course you're watching as you know you see once people smell a wire there the media knows lies you've been purported in the dozens in this case they're not going to let it rest until every single got to be has been answered for for details but i will say something about it the winner with his colleagues the line was serious i think the distraction was more serious in this case and here's why to be honest about anthony weiner he doesn't push a lot of legislation he's not much of a legislator i'm not you know people make their judgments about if he's a good member of congress he's a message guy well i mean that's on the radio he's a good message guy you have a legislator but that's the point is that what anthony weiner has done is that he has propelled himself into this position of being a spokes person he's out of his ways and he's brought a lot of feathers you know made some sort of comments at some numbers felt was were

inappropriate on the house floor when he railed out with the children's book and stuff and some people found me more effective but either way he made himself a lightning rod i mean could that have contributed to this environment of sort of leadership sort of closing him out and pushing him out not just the possibly and i scandal possibly i think the other big thing here is that anthony weiner is the one that released the information on him eliot spitzer gave it to. sanford roosevelt kennedy none of the people who have ever have an extramarital issues have been the ones that released the information it was anthony weiner that did it using a public social media for on twitter so it's more so that he was the one that lack the discipline and he's going to be the message guy and he's using twitter which was his instruments to message to for the party and that's exact same vehicle that he was. to contact them and so it's it's more so than just a guy who. number on a list of mad at somebody that was using the same path he was using to be. on that

note i mean kind of kind of that you can question i mean we had mark foley instant messaging underage pages we had who was a christian shirtless congressman on craigslist i mean we're going to see legislation coming out to ban these guys from meeting using technology they're obviously not handling it you're not you you have twitter first was available to members of congress and the rest of us there were some struggles in the house of representatives especially about how twitter qualified under the rules with which members of congress communicate with their constituents that part of their. work blackberry versus personal blackberry can you do it on the floor can you can you advocate for your political positions or you just have to say hi lucy i'm here members of congress i'm here they struggle with those much they struggled with those issues the they mostly so if you're not going to see any legislation what you are going to see is a lot more members using social media a lot more carefully most members of congress do not tweet personally some do very few treat tweeted with these sort of personal kind of access that and then we

didn't talk about his public intentional tweets he was he was joking on twitter he was funny he would tweet about the peace ball game he was watching you know most members of congress don't do that i think you'd see if you were members of congress do that i think a lot of people are also wondering i have no information but how many other nadi photos of how many other american politicians are out in the world and when we. maybe but maybe some of them camp you've already been i mean first we've already seen that usage of twitter by members have dropped off in the last couple of weeks and i think that you made a really quick point about you know using some of the staff how they don't go out and make speeches or send out statements without you know clearing out their staff and working with their staff and using kind of professional communications people twitter should be treated the same way because it is a public forum and there's a lot of the. you know when i was in the senate working with members on can you really convey your policy position in one hundred forty characters and so the kind of the car and the ability to really mess things up is is it's

a lot easier and can you really actually does it is the risk worth the more i think it can be as journalists would say yes we'd like you to be doing that really can be but there's a it goes back to kind of you know kind of the discipline of it is that you know when you're communicating as a member and you're putting yourself out there to do it seriously to do it deliberately and to do it in a manner that's productive at the end of the day i think no matter what restrictions there are technology lawmakers and elected officials people of power are going to lie they're going to make mistakes and they're going to do dumb things will be lots of stuff for us collectively to cover but do we have any sense of what's next for the democratic party and whether you know what's going to happen in april for to see for example there's going to be a special election for his say any new york's kind of an odd political state where the governor has the absolute ability to determine if there's even a special election at all so if you remember governor paterson after eric massa had kind of a tickling incident and he left the soldier he left the he left the seat open for about eight months now i think after chris lee there was

a very quick move on governor on the part to kind of get the seat resolving the seat belongs to the district so you know the people of queens have a seat there are people that are there to take their phone calls they have two senators so they're still going to be able to be served but they don't have a vote in the house right now and so i think that there will be a move to us quickly as possible interest saying joe crowley is the county chair so he probably has the most power right now and that he will be able to kind of dictate who becomes the nominee for the democrats ok and todd thirty seconds or less is this a big loss for the democratic party it depends on where that district goes the night just a good new york is going to be redrawn it will probably remain democratic most likely has been trending republican in the last few years but it's still about a ten point spread their likely to lose it most voters probably won't vote on any winners behavior they'll vote are going to candidates are should say technical no. there had to be or has not technically resigned yet his letter has not risen is not a right to the speaker's office it will not be read on the house floor before monday when the house goes back so that's still anthony weiner's until monday

unfortunately i guess the puns will have to continue to be made thank you both so much for your time i really do appreciate it which camera we turning to am now that's it for wiener gate now thankfully the whole mess is finally coming to a close and i hope that we can collectively move on to bigger more impressive issues. it's crazy alert san francisco is known by most people to be a little bit more free spirited and liberal than the rest of the nation but a convention that slated to kick kick off tomorrow in that city really takes the cake at least as far as sexual orientation goes now a couple of hundred people are suspected to gather together to draw attention to a new sexual orientation that's right it's called eco sexual and don't be disappointed if you haven't heard of that term it's fairly new what we know about this convention is that there is apparently enough people out there who are ready to come out of the closet to share their love for the environment and apparently they're willing to do absolutely everything by showing off fashions above and

beyond the typical tree hugger here take a look i think we have the picture there we go beautiful now one of the organizers of this event is a former porn star turned art professor and she claims that even sexual zur actually married to the planets in a recent interview she said even sexual is realize that they're part of nature and that nature is in itself sensual and erotic and if you could make love in a field or do a little tree hugging i know that some people who are very turned on watching the camp fire well it's only a matter of time i think before some outreach conservative here on the hill launches a war on the eco sexual movement to preserve the traditional marriage and ban folks from ruining a marriage between a man and a woman by marrying a man. well coming up it could be it could be euro debt crisis in. greece for shadow of disasters meltdown for the u.s. economy. twenty four seven live streaming news times what to do about the ongoing financial

hardship unlimited free high quality videos for download. and stories you'll never find. the. post you are. the one.

i will for the third time this year greece has a rubbed it into chaos cops clash with more than twenty thousand protesters yesterday who threw rocks fire bombs even more during a massive rally against that government spending cuts or demonstrators around the parliament building where lawmakers were scrambling to put together an austerity package the government has to make cuts in order to avoid a default and in order to satisfy the terms of the next eurozone bailout so what will the tunnel in greece mean for the rest of europe that's which as a whole is trying to also avoid a debt crisis from sweeping across the entire confidence and where the i am up in euro zone austerity measures a good idea in the first place but for some of those answers let's turn now to nomi prins journalist and senior fellow with demos. she's also the author of the book it takes a pillage behind bonuses bailouts and backroom deals from washington to wall street now we thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us i want to start off

by asking how do you see this crisis playing out in the coming weeks i mean are they going to be able to push through this package or could we actually see the collapse of the government. i think the government's trying to scramble around to figure out how it can keep itself intact but the package itself or any kind of austerity package as we've seen from the last one the last one hundred fifty seven billion dollars worth of bailout there what we called it was really a bank bailout for greece from the i.m.f. in the sea basically did not obviously help the greek people nor was it designed to help the population the austerity measures were designed to raise taxes to lower benefits they increased unemployment. creased the general destruction of the greek economy for for everyone else so they were a success another set of bailout versus austerity combination will not be a success and it's really a question of whether the people of greece can continue the really bad nissen types

of protests that they have embarked upon between unions and individuals and people throughout the streets throughout the months that they can really get through to the governor and say look enough we don't want more stereo and more sturdy doesn't help us all it does is allow us to have more debt against our country that we have to basically be penalized for without helping us so if prosperity cuts are bad if these measures are not helping the country helping the people then why why push them through why are those the conditions on these loans. well i mean there's a bigger political issue going on it's also financial bank issue the political issue is that. germany france is sort of a lead of your plan to continue to have the euro intact and that means ensuring that every every country that's part of that euro somehow remains a part of that euro and as such when greece had problems with repaying some of its

debts that were incurred because of a lot of the international banks that were doing transactions with the greek banks that's when that's when problems started to happen and it was decided it still decided that the euro must be preserved at all costs meaning at all cost to the individual populations of the countries that are most in trouble so that's that's the political side on the financial side the banks the international banks the larger was are pushing for a bailout with austerity measures because they want to make sure that greece can continue to repay bondholders and banks who have exposure to greece and that includes united states banks that have exposure to greece which have a forty one billion dollars worth of exposure a lot of that through credit derivatives and esoteric types of securities but a lot of countries and a lot of banks in those countries have exposure to greece and they want their debts repaid they want to bailout to happen through greece to them that makes the bank of the bondholders whole and they don't care what that extracts from the individuals

in the populations of greece and other countries throughout europe so that's the problem you've got banks and politicians on one side and you have the individual economies and populations on the other side well then what's the alternative i mean if we have people on the street is that going to be enough to what could work in greece do whatever the what are the options there do you pull out of the euro zone but i personally think that either falling out of the or even even creating sort of temporarily fall out of the euro actually restructuring or yeah defaulting on some of that debt not paying back some of the egregious. bailout that has been given to them that has been attached to austerity measures which has weakened their population has weakened their future has weakened their economy and really get out and say you know what we're actually we don't want more of a bailout in fact we're not even going to repay a portion of the belt that we receive because we just can't hack it from an economic standpoint for

a population that governments don't like to do that it's not clear the greek government will get to that position despite what they've been seeing has been continuous. evoked in their population in the streets and it's not clear that will happen but that is certainly what the population is pushing for because they shouldn't have to bear the economic brunt of bad financial decisions and extracting from their own personal economies and futures to pay back banks and bondholders throughout the world and do you see this this movement spreading to neighboring countries even perhaps the united states of course the conditions are so different here sort of this realization it's a very different obviously there's a lot of. protesting in spain a lot of organized protests in throughout different different cities in spain so not just in one location where where it started just just in the possibility that austerity measures will be requested from them i think portugal's of potential ireland certainly is having continued problems belts haven't been helping them

because again they've been decreasing the economy of the country's increasing employment the united states is a little bit different because the united states doesn't have that kind of groups of centralized bodies and unions and supporting people in congress together and really ask for different types of measures from the government it's sort of a lot quieter here but i do see it continuing in new york because the economic situation isn't getting better the debt situation isn't getting better bailouts for banks don't help the population austerity measures don't help the population and that situation is only going to continue to get worse throughout the weaker economies in europe well this is. we should make continue to get worse but hopefully both in europe and here in the united states folks will wake up to the fact that you know what it's the banker gangsters that are getting away with this for years and perhaps now that the people are on to them some changes will be made who knows snow may thank you so much for this for your time. right well the anti austerity movement isn't limited to greece it's also going down right here in the

united states thanks to an organization called us on cut and instead of focusing on spending cuts for targeting working that target working family is us on cloud argues that we need to be going after corporate tax dodgers their bankruptcy in the united states government now in their absolute leaders campaign the group is targeting the cayman islands where as you know bankers and corporate c.e.o.'s have been stashing away their cash in order to avoid paying taxes now as u.s. uncut founder carl gibson said if our tax dollars are being held hostage in the cayman islands then there should be a ragtag group of taxpaying citizens ready to swoop in and bring it home and that's exactly what we plan to do but even though us uncut is looking out for ninety nine percent of us to do not have those millions stashed away off shore the hard road they have a hard road ahead of them is as you'll see them see the mainstream press doesn't much care for the story and that's exactly what tom had to say about this issue. we've let me just set this up first of all. on network television we have

multimillionaire commentators people multi-million dollar rich people would rather not pay taxes the all the networks are owned by billionaires and transnationals no them want to pay taxes and back in one thousand nine hundred three when ronald reagan was president if you're old enough to remember there was a period that was called the m. and a explosion stood for mergers and acquisitions and people like ivan boesky and all these good they were emanating artists and it was the hot new on whatever the i could emerge as an acquisitions all these companies started combining so that we see this graphic this is you know bad been bad victim documented this is the media of an awful lot that when the reagans started stopped in force in the sherman antitrust act and just allowed companies like crazy disturbed merging. fifty companies controlled more than ninety percent of everything american saw in news. magazines t.v. radio stations books music movies videos wire services and photo agencies fifty

companies own to ninety percent of our media now and since reagan's deregulation and these are the various iterations of ben's rewriting his book we're down to five companies now have companies own ninety percent of our media and i just ask yourself why is there not so much media coverage of us uncut could it be because those five companies are a large giant transnationals that frankly would rather not pay taxes. so why should they give coverage to a bunch of protesters who are out there saying big corporations players taxes. it just kind of makes sense but it's not going to happen you know so the word frankly falls on us we've got to tell each other we've got to uses the web we've got to use social media we've got to and to whatever extent you can help influence the media to cover these stories us uncut is actually a big story u.k. have got a big story it needs

a lot more coverage if it was the tea party it to be. so it's good to get some coverage for those. people coming up congressman peter king resumed his a witch hunt against muslims yesterday so what's really behind his latest crusade we'll ask our guests when they come back. it's twenty four seventh's live streaming news times what to do about the ongoing financial hurricane unlimited free high quality videos for download. and stories you never find on. the political. plus you aren't just. for.

and welcome back to the big picture i'm lucy now filling in for tom hartman coming up later in this half hour our american prison inmates for the biggest terror threat facing this country congressman peter king thinks seems to think so but only if they follow islam we're going to have a debate on that issue and is there a cyber war brewing across america acts against businesses banks even the cia pranks or a dangerous war on the web. while

homeland security committee chairman peter king wrong in the battle on the second round of his hearings on the radical islam yesterday the topic was muslim radicalization in u.s. presidents and democrats on hand wasted no opportunity to call out the chairman i guess is a witch hunts take a look. my point here today information is welcome condemnation is not so the focus of this hearing in the sense that we're looking you know what's wrong with the prison culture and how can we change and how can we improve and i think it's the right focus. to put it in the context of. i think the distractions but the continued discriminatory would i believe of one particular. on the basis of race or religion in law it should not be done in the house. and here's how the

congressman responded to those charges this morning on television take a look at you should be graded for the drivers there when you have a question about the standards for your version of the world for we should go as far as you were for when i see your critics try to go for you care when other groups attack and we've told you girl works for the nerves here. so are our prisons really a scary terrorist breeding ground or is it just another example of g.o.p. bogeyman politics here to offer their takes on this issue are all one hundred you tell government policy analysts with among muslim public affairs council and dr carol swain conservative commentator a dental vanderbilt university law professor and the author of the book be the people a call to reclaim america's space and promise both of you thank you so much for being fair and excited so i want to start off carol with you since there's really no way that an elected official much less a chairman of the house homeland security committee would waste the taxpayers their

precious time and resources this must really be a major major threat and there there must be thousands of a violent jihadi is being recruited in america's prisons can you maybe walk us through some of the evidence backing that up. i can certainly say bad for the last . i saw studies going back to i believe one thousand two thousand and two in two thousand and five we know that muslims have recruited many african americans that are poor and i'm prison have even had relatives that have been recruited to go into is a large and that i mean that's a fact and whether or not some percentage of these actually become dangerous you know to the population you know that remains to be seen but i think it's a worth the investigation the people have a right to know and if congressman king's constituents and i certainly know in nashville there's a big.