welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour it seems like arizona's legislature churns out crazy legislation on a daily basis so their newest piece of wackiness really shouldn't surprise you also americans will do just about anything to get a good night's rest a look at the history of our ancestors tell us about the proper way to catch some seeds and incidents daily take the republican spin machine strikes again how can we stop the misinformation and get back to work on the real problems facing this

country. and the best of the us the news the state that brought you the radical anti immigration papers please law banned the teaching of hispanic american history and created an official state and gun just months after their congresswoman was shot in the head is at it again republicans in the arizona state senate are bringing the war against women to the grand canyon state legislation was just passed out of the senate committee that would require women to turn over their medical records to employers why let's just say it has something to do with that icici debate about contraceptives i debate republicans started to distract voters from an improving economy and it's a debate that continues in arizona much to the chagrin of the american people it's hard. what's going on with governor jan brewer's backward state legislature i'm

joined by amanda beetle reporter with think progress now to welcome back good to be here great to have you here with us what is this new legislation that they're they're considering basically they're going to let your employer decide if you can have contraception that they're setting it up so that if they if a woman wants to have insurance coverage for birth control she would have to show her medical records to her employer to prove that she is not using it for the purpose of preventing pregnant think that she has some medical reason to need it and if the employer doesn't think she is there or the air she doesn't have a medical reason that she was using it to prevent pregnancy then if the employer had a moral objection to it the employer could deny her insurance coverage and not only that that arizona is at will employment state so then she could be fired for purely one birth control because this is a right to work for us that yes. that's incredible so literally an employee you know some some guy in. you know ready jeans and a t.

shirt. and a cigar is sitting there saying to his employees i want to see all your medical records all the way back to when you were a little don't you have to i mean this is and then he's the medical authority about whether or not she actually needs to take care of our mental therapy and you can hear huge numbers of reasons why women need birth control one of which is to prevent pregnancy but this is a fourteen percent women need to just. prevent medical problems yes but this one then put the decision into the employer's hand because if the employer disagreed it could be the woman would have to pay out of pocket why isn't anybody pushing back using shari'a law these guys are so hysterical about it and and basically what the republicans are doing is they're saying if the employer is muslim and believes in shari'a law because it's moral objections very broad and shari'a what would fall within their rubric what if there were. this really means is that the republicans

in arizona just voted to allow employers to impose sharia law on their employees when they're saying they're doing it for the for the sake of freedom of religion for the employers like should we allow but then there were those supreme court case twenty years ago that already decided that laws like that are do not fall under that category that if a law allows that it's not in pain and impugning guinea one's freedom of religion to allow someone to control and the important thing to keep in mind is we're not talking about abortion which is the story this is where your birth control pills or for that matter conceivably whether your insurance would pay for condoms or a tire for him are you do use or pretty much. or or tubal ligation. if a man wants to have a vasectomy does he have to show his medical records to the employer i'm not sure that covers that but they have been in other states they flipped on its head and you know i have been introducing bills mocking the anti-abortion bill thing that if a man wants to get a bag or that he has to have a heart exam or he had

a prostate exam and across the state and one state requires a note from the partner thing but i think if there is an actual need provide. it for being on site in some ways i think those are hysterical and i would love to see some of those a bloomberg poll shows seventy seven percent of americans don't think that the issue of contraception should be part of the political debate in america yet republicans keep making this i mean it's like it's like the an engine going on the tracks without a without a conductor. aren't they destroying themselves all i can think is that they're not within their constituents very close because they did that they continued it several presidents candidates republican presidential candidates have come out in favor of the blunt amendment which would have on a national level i'm done the same here that as bill is doing syncro first they flip the stars on their logo upside down so it's not it's just such antics are instead of the american flag story now i mean what's up with. i don't get. he has

no answer there is an answer amanda thanks so much for being with us today i appreciate it a wall street journal n.b.c. news poll released last week asked women who they'd like to see controlling congress at the beginning of next year fifty one percent said democrats only thirty six percent percent said republicans so republicans want to continue their war on women and they do so at their own political peril. moving on moving on from the war on women to the war on free speech free speech has come under attack at occupy encampments from coast to coast we've seen states like georgia and wisconsin try to restrict it here either banning union picketing or requiring a permit to hold demonstrations for or face arrest now this war on one of our most fundamental rights is coming to a high school on march first students at northwestern high school just up the road hyattsville maryland try to organize a walkout in support of increasing teacher pay and improving the quality of education at the school also wanted an apology issued to filipino teachers who lose their jobs because of expired visas however when the students try to walk out the

school had police and administrators walk the doors students were shot to hit and chaos attack dogs were waiting in the school parking lot for any students who may have escaped and gone outside joining me now to discuss the school's attack on their freedom of speech are actually pender and aaron james students at northwestern high school who are part of the planned walkout and welcome to both of you actually and aaron rather ok great great to have you with us so tell us what happened ashley. on march first like you said we had a walkout it's pretty much because we don't like the school food it's not nutritional the class was there's forty kids in the class x. we're not learning. the filipino teachers like you said their visa expired so they had to go all the way back to the philippines to get a new one can pretty much stuff like that so this was this was basic quality of life quality budget. protests there and how do they respond to you. based response

very immaturely they put canines outside spending for people who weren't even involved. shane ricardo william for thoughtcrime in. sighting violence even though they weren't even a part of the rock you know one of the people suspended with the brothers. but was he charged with and so yes. apparently it is something when you think about doing a crime and try to get people to do it with you as we can so last evening again. that's incredible. i understand that your principal was actually you know he was like admonishing you guys saying hey be activist it's a good thing and then and then this happened actually what he was what's the sequence of events here and why did he seem like he is so down for what we're doing but then like the public people board of education and stuff come around he's like

showing us for doing it later on but then as soon as they're alibi he's like well all help you all pretty much taping like he said on the newspaper that their tax dollars and supper just there because they were training we never have attack dogs there anything we have police occasionally but they were like all locking the doors and stuff i don't think that's training this country to be in a principal and you know caring about the kids in the school on the one hand and then having some some crackpots on the school board rationally have you're thirty to thirty on the other i think he's just trying to appeal to who he's talking to at the time like so when he's talking for the board he's saying oh well yeah that is a bad thing we did wrong but then when he talks to us he's appealing to us saying yeah we did very well there and what is. it is an app to this group for students. what we do is we discuss issues in the world internationally. we discuss

things like the dream act. we just try to get together in just. school. sorry. and we have we just talk about things that go wrong and things that we try to help with and what role did that group play in this walkout and is there any thought as a consequence none of us planned the walkout we just all of our school we just handed out facts about things that we wanted to change about our school like the lunches you wanted to a party an apology from filipino teachers and things like that and then people got the idea for a walkout and all of the students i don't press during this i would do it was just focus on. actually were do you think this is going to go. i think we're clearing to do more like we're trying to broaden where we set our goals and stuff like we're going to make bigger goals and see if like other schools would like to do what we're doing well so if we have other schools then i'm just going to say oh it's

just northwestern it's going to be a big population so they're going to have to hear us even more we're going to come out ten times stronger and if you guys made some some social media stuff some you tube is about their facebook page and like the facebook page i've read or we've talked to a washington post has an article article. because that and we've done interviews with c.t.v. and things like that so we've been getting our message out there how to how do people find your facebook. well they can just look up what's the name of the room you can look up. was a still. no cease c.m. vo and just type it in you'll find it it should be like the first one made me see a yes and you're into the into the facebook search engine or just enter any search engine you know the facebook search engine those books are here and you come up with a high honor your activism and your your courage both in what you did there and for

coming here on television with us thank you so much both of you it's an honor to be with young. after this the future of america thank you. our nation needs more kids like ashley and we need more of america's youth getting involved in political activism with their help hopefully we can work to create the strong and lasting change that this country desperately needs. coming up after the break ever wonder why you wake up in the middle of the night you answer my lie was some of our old was systems.

we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old i couldn't tell the truth liz. i'm a contestant will get a sense that i love robin because he's a person. he was kind of yesterday. i'm very proud of the role that out since you know it's a place. look look. look . you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then he glimpse something else you hear see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you don't i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

is there as day so let's get heat in today's society we do just about anything we can to get our eight hours of sleep from drinking warm milk before bed to take the natural substances like melatonin the using prescription drugs like ambien however a large amount of evidence collected over the years from scientists and historians suggests that the recommended eight hours of continuous sleep may be on natural and the early eighteen nineteen psychiatry's thomas where ran an experiment with a group of people were left in total darkness for fourteen hours a day for a month while it took time for the individual sleep cycles to regulate by the close of the experimental test subjects and settled into a sleeping bag. of four hours sleeping waking up for two hours and then sleeping a second four hours and two thousand one historian rod rodger. published a paper filled with historical evidence showing humans used to sleep in two

distinct pieces like where's test subjects did sleep was broken down into a first sleep starting around dusk waking period of about an hour or two and then a second sleep during that waking period individuals did everything from smoking tobacco to visiting neighbors to having sex however most people have stayed would have stayed in bed either reading or writing or sometimes praying in fact many prayer manuals from the fifteenth century contain specific prayers just for the hours in between these two sleep periods a doctor's manual from the sixteenth century france suggested that couples try to conceive children quote after the first sleep or coat during the waking period because that was when quote they could have more enjoyment and do it better and quote their perches research shows that references to the first and second sleep began to be wiped from our historical record store in the late seventeenth century and within two hundred years the idea of sleeping in chunks was totally removed from our social consciousness was all one he argues that this was probably due to

improvements in street lighting in western society greater uses of domestic lighting and an increase in coffee houses where people could sit up all night and talk so while today we may feel the need to get that eight hours of beauty sleep just remember the next time you wake up in the middle the night it's because throughout most of human history you were supposed to. it's just. it's the good the bad and the very very thorough ran throw push asli ugly the good the new hampshire legislature yesterday the new hampshire house of representatives defeated the so-called license to discriminate bill the bill would have allowed state businesses to openly discriminate against same sex marriage couples on the

basis of the company's religious freedom in fact the bill was so poorly worded that it would also have allowed for discrimination against interracial married couples and married couples of different faiths all across the country individual rights are under attack it's nice to see the new hampshire as is holding strong against this wave of hatred and bigotry that is sweeping the nation the bad rick santorum campaign in puerto rico this weekend santorum was asked by local paper el will sell at all if he supported puerto ricans right to self-determination when it comes to becoming a state santorum told the paper he did not support a state in which english was not the primary language saying why can't other state there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law however constitution does not designating glitches the official language of the u.s. nor does it say that its territory must adopt english as its primary language to become a state thing so many running for president would know

a little more about the sprint world land but then again it is rick santorum which are just googled and the very very ugly arizona state republicans just when you thought arizona republicans couldn't create any more ridiculous pieces of legislation they got to get state republicans are working on yet another birth or bill which is the latest attempt by arizona republicans to try to prove. that president obama is and says america's economy is in a mess our health care systems are broken americans everywhere are just trying to get by and rather than trying to solve america's pressing issues arizona's republicans are wasting valuable time on a mythical witch hunt that's already under investigation by donald trump and his team of crackpot investigators and all of that it's very clear.

if you watch fox so-called news this morning you learn the president obama is stronger board boortz record stands but you didn't learn though was basic economics it was the fox and friends gang's morning mocking a new ad by the u.s. department of agriculture to raise awareness about food stamps for senior citizens and kids is the government now pushing for senior citizens to take more handouts enough they want food stamps. well as our nation faces a trip oh you think this is funny stuart varney our nation is facing a truly sick can we afford it we ask you because you can also afford it out of course you cannot afford food stamps for the poor but you sure can't afford tax cuts for the rich writes by the way did you notice the giant who's ruining the economy graphic over there what's better than watching a bunch of media millionaires yak it up on

a comfy couch and demonize the poorest of the poor in america including children who haven't had enough food to eat each day unless the government steps in to help them forty seven percent of all food stamp recipients america are under the age of eighteen anyway back to the argument talking heads are saying that with a trillion dollar deficit we can't afford to give food stamps to more struggling americans. well here's a little econ one hundred one lesson for you we're in debt so we can either spend more money to stimulate the economy to increase tax revenues and get us out of debt or we can cut everything like food stamps and unemployment insurance what they call austerity to bring spending levels down austerity is what greece is doing and this is what's happening in greece it's what the u.k. is doing and their economy hasn't seen any real growth in over a year and they too have had rights i think is when you cut spending you're essentially taking money out of working people's pockets meaning that they have

less to spend at the store i mean stores lose business and have to fire employees and ultimately the economy gets worse and since people are making less money and less paying fewer taxes the government gets starved of revenue as the debt problem gets worse that's why european nations that have chosen austerity are seeing their jet that debt to g.d.p. ratios skyrocket so when the gang of fox and friends says we're here at a forward food stamps pushing austerity and shoving us down the same path greece is on today got it. on the other hand. if you preserve and strengthen food stamps and other basic government spending programs you keep money in people's pockets they spend that money at the grocery store and other stores which in turn increases demand for farmers new products and the grocery store and other stores have to hire new workers to put new products on the shelves just a small government infusion of money into the economy provides

a lot of bang for the book in fact food stamps are the best bang for the buck when it comes to stimulus korda moody's not exactly a left wing bastion one dollar spent on food stamps generates a dollar seventy three in economic activity a dollar spent on unemployment insurance generates a dollar sixty four in economic activity on the other hand the stuff that the republicans and the gang of fox and friends are pushing doesn't really do jack in fact it makes the economy worse here's the actual numbers and dollar in capital gains tax cuts produces just thirty seven cents in economic activity a dollar in corporate tax cuts produces just thirty cents in economic activity and a dollar in the bush tax cuts produce just twenty nine cents an economic activity it's all going backwards this is basic economics but enough of all this reality based stuff let's get back to what they were saying over on fox or call these is this the administration on reach on food stamps actually buying votes through

questionable want you to oh sure it is of course that's what the obama reelection team is banking on trading food stamps for votes and i think missing from the fox and friends couch in the segment is a set of tinfoil hats because here's what they don't want you to know if a proliferation of food stamps is a reelection ploy and that explains a president george w. bush was reelected. despite what you might think when you hear newt gingrich do his racial dog whistles stuff by calling president obama the food stamp president bush was the real food stamp president as usa today reports we as the us department of agriculture's food nutrition service for month by month figures going back to january two thousand and one and they show that under president george w. bush the number of recipients rose by nearly fourteen point seven million nothing before comes close to that and under obama the increase of far has been fourteen point two million that's right more people went on food stamps under bush than any

president in history in fact in recent months the number of people on food stamps has been dropping as the economy improves creating more than two hundred thousand jobs each of the last three months and every one of those people who was on food stamps no longer is because they have a job but why lead packs care the way the war on the poor are really juicy conspiracy theory against president obama right the big picture here is this pot so-called news is the outlet for the super rich in america to convince average americans to vote for republicans who only do things to help the super rich the us is the place where millions of low information voters get their talking points a generous simple tax cuts for billionaires are talked about in a way that make working people think they're going to get something when they want or at the most again if your other books the death tax i call it the paris hilton tax it only hits three tenths of one percent of americans as talked about in ways that cause most tea partiers who will never have

a multi-million dollar estate that it wouldn't come close to it causes those tea partiers to totally freak out and fox promotes wild conspiracy theories and flawed economics to advance its agenda because it's a network owned by a billionaire run by and starring millionaires whose only purpose is to advance the interests of that economic class. meanwhile the economics of giving the rich everything they want and waiting for that wealth to trickle down to the rest of us has been proven time and time again to crash the economy one nine hundred twenty nine to two thousand and eight reagan came in and said we're going to have trickle down economics everything is going to be fine make the rich richer and all that money will eventually you know if we make a lot of yachts it's going to put a lot of people who work well except that we don't make it so much in the united states i mean if we make all bunch of jet airplane while they're doing that in brazil noni canada but just kind of ignore all that stuff i guess that's that's really the idea the reality is that

a nation running on trickle down economics produces nothing more than a nation philippians and beyond that there's a pretty simple concept that's ignored it folks and that's that in the richest planet the nation on the planet twenty million children shouldn't be hungry and by feeding them we actually stimulate the economy which will help us get out of this recession a recession the republicans in an election year with a democrat the white house very much want to keep going and keep americans and pain up until november that's the reality of what's going on so we all have to begin to take talking about talking back to the millionaires and billionaires propaganda outlets from limbaugh to fox so-called news and get to work on the real problems facing this country like hungry people and the corporate takeover of our democracy and our economy. that's it for the big picture tonight please remember our radio show is now live from three to six pm eastern on free speech t.v. and radio stations across the nation and around the world and don't forget the

mocker see begins when you show up when you participate when you get out there get out there and get active tag you're it occupies something you'll see them. he. will. be official. you on the phone called touch from the stops to.

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