welcome back to the big picture i'm tom arvin coming up in this half hour the hoover institute recently published an article saying that california's public universities are trying to create a nation of liberal activists that's really going on a golden state or is this just part of the right wing agenda also autism spectrum disorders affect one in every eighty eight children in america but until recently their causes have been a mystery with this new research reveal about a link between pregnant mothers and the rise of autism and some people say terrorists and dictators could be funding mitt romney's campaign by laundering their money through karl rove's super pac but the american public will never know who they are tell you why and that's really taking. it as the rest of the news republican congressman allen west turned some heads last

week when he said this about democratic members of congress. it. was later said he was referring to the members of the house progressive caucus which had recently introduced the budget for all to end our wars create a public option and modestly raise taxes on the super rich the romney rich in america exactly the primary policy positions of today's communist party as far as i know. comments did draw a reaction however from the communist party usa vice chairman libro della piano told politico i don't know that being a communist in congress was off limits or out of bounds there aren't any now and if there were in the future does that mean that the voters don't have a say can't choose a communist to be in congress so what does congressman west need to know about

communism and more importantly what do the american people need to know about the communist party joining me now is liberal odell a piano liberal welcome good evening tom how are you great a fine thanks so much for joining us i suppose i don't need to use the old the you know made famous by joe mccarthy are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party but because the answer is yes what is the platform of the communist party usa well our immediate platform is for. a program for jobs for education for rebuilding the infrastructure in this country to help put people back to work and to shift the begin to shift the huge inequality that puts our country in the benefit of the one percent instead of the ninety nine do you agree with marx and engels the private property should be ended.

well we think that private property is not an absolute right and that you know as you mentioned before the break when you take private property and you. day a fire it suddenly private property becomes speech and it becomes a right to vote. you know so our feeling is that you know this system is really set up in a way to benefit the the mega rich at the expense of everybody else so is the solution of the communist party usa to do old fashion marx and engels communism from each according to his means to each according to his needs and to have the you know elimination of. capitalism i guess replace it with a centrally run government. are long term goal is definitely a socialist usa which to us is is taking our existing democratic

rights and really expanding them to include economic and social rights to. address mounting inequality by as you said socialism is is from each according to their. to each according to their need and from each according to their work and communism is a system much further down the line where everyone's needs are met there is and i think that that's an important distinction ok is there anyone in congress who we know we represents the communist party platform. well as i said you know we have a long term program a vision of socialism and then we have a short term program which is based on what are our political realities now. you know what do we need today for working people and there isn't i think

a lot of people in congress that we could agree with on on various short term reforms. you know whether it's the buffett rule which was voted down today or filibuster in the senate or it's around expanding infrastructure in this country do you do you realize that if you indorse any policies you're going to. hand a huge a hammer to the people who oppose those but i mean if you genuinely for example a lot of the buffett rule and you endorse it you're just handing to the right wingers oh the communists want this well you know i think this is gets back to allen west you know he was attempting to smear congressional democrats by saying you know they're secret communists they have a hidden agenda but you know i don't think that works the way it did in one thousand nine hundred eighty four when mccarthy tried it i think you know the

rasmussen poll a few years ago showed about twenty percent of americans favor socialism to capitalism the gallup poll in two thousand and ten showed thirty eight percent of americans have a favorable view of socialism. and even something like seventy percent of republicans so you know i think most americans they look at those statements and they say you know that's that's just ridiculous and whether we support a program or a policy or not. i think that americans can figure out whether something is good or bad just very very quickly were completely out of time but just one very quick question i'd ask how many members do you have. well we have a about two three thousand members were small party but you know thank you we were struggling got it. delap iana thank you so much for being with us thank you tom.

but congressman west was wrong and there are no communists in congress republicans still might argue that they're a communist or not a california public universities it's based on this claim that rick santorum recently made this statement about california's public schools public interest just read something last night that from the state of california and at the california universities there there it's several i think it's seven or eight of the of the california system of universities don't even teach an american history course it's not even available to me taht just to tell you how bad it scott in this country where we're trying to disconnect the american people from the roots of who we are so they have an understanding of what america should be. that was a lie every single one of california's public universities teach american history with one exception san francisco campus which happens to be a medical school and even that campus offers

a history of american medicine so where did rick santorum get his information from the wall street journal which published an article alleging that activists professors and university administrators in california are wrote in curriculums and pushing a partisan agenda in the classroom so is that really what's going on here or is there a right wing agenda at work here for more on this i'm joined by the author of that article and hoover institute senior fellow professor peter berkowitz professor berkowitz welcome good to be here to have you with us this first of all the study wasn't done by the hoover institution it was done by the california branch of the national association of scholars this is the study of national so solution scholars is a group that is funded by the ski foundation among others are largely and they claim to be a membership organization but they have the number. i read this yes and i can't find anywhere in here and i brought it out to ask you can you show me anywhere in here where it actually qualifies how i mean there's all these anecdotes

and all the and a lot of commentary and rhetoric but i found no actual quantitative analysis here's proof that the school outcomes are getting worse here's here's a connection between that and professors being liberal can you show me well please as you can imagine i haven't got a command of every page from preacher if you turn to page two sixty three sixty five of this you'll find many studies to. demonstrate that the quality of education of the kind i think if you turn to rahm page twenty one or twenty two you'll find pages with graphs which show the number of around twenty twenty one you will see that. in the professional schools at the university of. that's not exactly the crowd there you go you were asking for days there someday please tell your viewers yeah that what i've seen is the is the number of the margins between left

and right faculty you know he's as politics become you know a little bit of a department that was you got more leftist teaching social scientists and you just he just kept data you were asking right moreover if i go there to know how does how does this tie into the outcomes yes i'd be happy to tell you for it so there is no reason why a democrat a man a woman up the left or a conservative man or woman of the right couldn't. in the classroom set aside his or her political concerns or biases but a company in this leftward tilt in the representation it's a commitment to a new doctrine and so you quoted in this study is the u.c.l.a. institute of higher education research said more than half of professors in higher education today now believe it's more important to advocate that their student to teach their students to advocate social change than it is to teach isn't us it's of i don't eat of those nation. and that i find it very interesting because

a to your right away and i am i'm not disagreeing with you because the the the history of western western civilization is the history of social change i mean you know there is socrates in the revolution of the four hundred the revolution of the forty thought find they have the heat so you get a history of the of the roman revolution the history of greek democracy the history of the revolution because i think history of yet abolition and you suffered these are all revolution yes these are all social change why wouldn't a professor say yes and yes it's important to teach social change that is the core of western so because just because surely surely you recognize that what the professors are really saying is we need to change we need to cultivate in students their convictions about change in our society in a particular way today if the professors were teaching. socrates views on this matter thomas aquinas his views robespierre's views the french revolution is used for and against i would enthusiastically support that you're absolutely right

social change is important part of western civilization it should be taught it's not being taught it wait a minute just a minute ago you said it that's always been taught me that's the most no i said what's being taught is advocacy for a particular policies today i deny that's what so regularly is socrates views thomas aquinas his views this is piers this argument has been made through my entire life i mean you know for a long long time that college is for leftists and there are a lot of studies that show that the more educated you are the more left you are right could be that facts are left it what are left facts facts are left this yes it could be it's highly unlikely to tell you this but those were the those those countries like in europe that have left us by our definitions quality of life is better things work better. well you know the quality of life in the united states and throughout the western world improved very dramatically beginning in the one nine hundred eighty s. and one nine hundred ninety s.

with the presidency of ronald reagan and the prime minister and the prime ministership of margaret thatcher. and it all fall apart but if we're going to have that or we're going to have to leave it at that i'm all right i'm very sorry good to talk with you nice to meet you good talking to you professor peter bergen's thank you prepublication is a central pillar on which this nation was built net includes public university education let's try to preserve it we'll be right back. mother nation and free public education free transfer charges free. maintenance free subscription still child free motherlode free blogs just plug in video for your media projects

for free media and on to our teton tom. murray. plug plug plug. if. any piece of. the pieces. are live such a success. so

sometimes you know it you know and sometimes you know it's you don't know and sometimes as the firesign theater says everything you know is wrong and i'm going to go with you here you're right. that's. right you're right. and you go what is wrong in the united states about one in every eighty eight children has either autism or part of an autism spectrum disorder and while autism is quickly becoming an epidemic in this country its causes largely remain

a mystery however new research suggests an alarming link between two other very common health problems in this country and their possible role in causing autism if you think that autism is still it is sort of the doctors and scientists know very little about that everything you know is wrong joining me now is dr herb hertz the church it showed. an environmental epidemiologist with a special children's art to thank you thank you very much for the specialty in autism and a professor in chief of the division of environmental and i patiently health within the department of public health sciences at the university of california davis dr walker tell us thank you for having thank you tell us about your study what did you set out to investigate we've been casting a very wide net in terms of trying to identify factors they're associated with and risk. they're not that specific with the genetic factors although we are also

looking at but the non-genetic ones the ones that may be amenable to change and in this particular study we began looking at mature know natural conditions in particular the senate conditions tremendous balance conditions including obesity diabetes and hypertension. what we found was that the women who had children are his and or an autism spectrum disorder we're more likely to get you know eastern pregnancy or at the start of pregnancy i should say originally had diabetes or hypertension now we don't know whether this is a cause of one or coincidental because something else happens to be associated both with the now balak conditions and with autism but we think it's intriguing and further investigation. i saw

a study last week that suggested there might be an association between consumption of high fructose corn syrup maternal consumption. pre and through before and during pregnancy and onset of autism in the child. are you familiar with that and b. there are there are also people who are suggesting that there's a link between high fructose corn syrup and an obesity could that is there a link there about and i guess c. to have from just corn syrup is metabolized really that of the sugars is that you know does that have any do. i don't know the answer to any of those though since i have not been studied very closely. i think it is true that the shippers that we been eating for were you know maybe a few hundred years compared to high fructose corn syrup are. they they do go through a different process in terms of having capitalized and you know that that may be

one of those kinds of things that need be abstaining from obesity and abstaining from autism in you know maybe it's not the obesity at all. but. as i said i don't i'm not familiar with that work at this point in time. we do know that hypertension diabetes obesity has certain consequences that could be very harmful for the developing brain and those include. this increase dysregulation of blood sugars so that you end up with spikes and the least and the tissues end up sometimes in the prior. oxygen essentially. and we also see chronic inflammation occurring with all of those conditions so these are the kinds of injuries and see the tissues in specially in the brain which can be very sensitive to small picture patients man it's and particularly during the

just say shell period when so many are events have to happen in order to firm the brain kind of range become a really efficient organ dr the charo thank you so much for being with us that. you're out and about everything you know about the triggers and potential causes of autism or at least some of them possibly is right. just for. the. it's the good the bad of the very very dextrose synastry realists li ugly the good of british columbia supreme court justice robert johnston johnston ace of justice with the british columbia supreme court struck down a portion of canada's medical marijuana laws he concluded that a restriction for the use of dried marijuana limited only to that in canada's merit

medical marijuana access regulations was unconstitutional the research through is up held medical marijuana users in canada will be able to possess marijuana in any form brownies i think it's time the american government followed on injustice johnson's footsteps and started to embrace marijuana as what it is medicine and a decent recreational drug the bad representative virginia foxx in a radio interview yesterday fox the house chairwoman of the subcommittee on higher education attacked people who are drowning in student loan debt after college. very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with going to panic and dollars or even a. beer because no reason for being here's a news flash for you congresswoman college tuition has increased five hundred percent in the last twenty five years pell grants now cover the lowest amount of college costs in their history thanks to republican austerity dance let's hope

young voters in your district have just as little tolerance for you and the very very ugly miami dade fire department captain brian pacman backman a captain with the miami dade fire department is under investigation for posting a racist rant about trayvon martin on his facebook page he wrote i and my coworkers could rewrite the book i'd rather our urban use are victims of races profiling are products of their failed to blank ignorant pathetic welfare dependent excuses for parents and quote actually both the trayvon martin's parents are hard working americans a full time jobs and they're not dependent on welfare i guess back then didn't care to look into that when you knowingly added more fuel to the fire and such a full direct words and it's very clear.

we're just now finding out that at the end of last year anonymous donor gave karl rove's crossroads super pac a ten million dollar donation to run ads against president obama and thanks to the supreme court's citizens united decision the wild west nature of political spending now that that ten million dollars donor will likely remain completely anonymous we probably won't know who it is ever during the two thousand and ten midterm elections there was another anonymous donor who also gave ten million dollars to rove so it might have been the same person for all we know one person dishing out twenty million bucks to karl rove to help like mitt romney and other republicans that donor could be a person like charles koch it could be a corporation like goldman sachs it could be a special interest group like multimillionaire lobbyist grover norquist with norquist americans for tax reform we just don't know but i'm hearing

a lot of things around town today as to what karl rove's donor might be let's just say some people are saying things course in real journalism you actually quote sources or you make statements of fact that's what real news does but there's this really neat technique to inserting opinion into news that most people don't realize is something no real news organization would ever do it's called the some people say technique here's an example. some people say that this late under by what the u.s. troops are doing there some people say some people say john kerry has some similarities to an earlier massachusetts politician and some people say in light of what's happened with the oil for food program so people say supported by iran some say i've heard a couple people say it some say that it's a sour grapes book some people say some people say some people say it's just too violent there's too much blood some people say some people say well some people say some people say some say it some people say some saying it's only will say there's some people who say something but major he's already half of those are now

so-called news isn't really a news organization so they can get away with this and this show isn't a news show it's my opinion so let me tell you what some people are saying here in washington d.c. some people are saying that karl rove's ten million dollar anonymous donation came from iran's mahmoud ahmadinejad a strong ways shia muslim who's president of one of the few machine iran states in the middle east some people are saying that ahmadinejad's a huge admirer of karl rove and a big supporter of the republican party after all george w. bush decided to bomb sunni iraq not shia iran giving shia ahmadinejad a lot more influence in the middle east and taking out sunni saddam hussein iran's biggest enemy against whom they fought a multi year war it cost them both billions of dollars and killed over a million people so some people are saying the potential in dollars if the road is payback from shia iran for all the great things rove and bush did for them against

the sunni muslims in addition some people are saying that the ten million dollar donation of karl rove has strings attached if romney wins the republicans take the senate then all those sanctions president obama put on shia iran would have immediately be lifted and we might even go after another sunni run country that iran doesn't like just like bush took out sunni run a rack and flipped it over to shia rule and some people are saying that all the aggressive talk coming from mitt romney. it's just a show and the behind closed doors and mahmud are best friends not only that i heard some people in washington d.c. say act within earshot is holding fundraisers for mitt romney and karl rove in iran and plans to send dozens of fat checks stateside to front groups like american corporations and american in coming weeks he's hoping he can get another sweet weapons deal from republicans like reagan gave her run during the iran contra affair some people say that i was in a john fund raising could be enough rope to buy romney our election so here we have

ten or even twenty million dollars anonymously handed over to karl rove to defeat president obama and the democrats is developer and beyond what some people are saying most likely will never know who gave that money or what strings are attached to it we want to know if it's a hedge fund billionaire who's demanding the republicans keep the romney rule capital gains tax loophole wide open we don't know if it's an oil baron who wants republicans to keep the tax payer or we'll subsidies to his industry slowing we won't know if it's a war profiteer to once republicans to keep the neverending war on terror going and keep up the high demand for christmas and we won't know if as some people are saying the donations are from row dictators who are making secret deals with the republican party like you did back in one thousand nine hundred eighty we just won't ever know and that's a critical flaw in our democracy created by by unelected hard right wing kings in black robes appointed by republicans to the supreme court it's time to put an end to this chaos in our elections and not let foreign or corporate millionaires and

billionaires speak louder in our democracy than actual american citizens with a vote it's time to overturn citizens united and corporate personhood and say explicitly that corporations are not people and that money is property not speech but a move to amend the word to get involved that's it for the big picture tonight don't forget them ocracy begins when you get out there and get active your first. i asked.

him to. eat.