i'm sam sacks in for tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. while super pacs have been made out to be the bogeyman this election other shadowy corporate front groups have actually been causing a lot more damage i'll explain what they are and why the i.r.s. may actually be our only hope at this point to bring some much needed transparency to our elections also president obama has shown little mercy to people who use marijuana for both medicinal and recreational purposes but now he's saying that if he is reelected americans can look forward to more sensible drug reforms is he

telling the truth or is this just political pandering and what happened seconds after the big bang that event that caused the birth of our universe scientists in europe may have the answer how can a press conference tomorrow change science as we know it. and we start tonight with money in politics president obama is out with a new campaign ad this week targeting mitt romney for outsourcing jobs while romney was at bain capital take a look. what a president believes matters mitt romney's companies were twenty years in outsourcing the u.s. jobs to low wage countries he supports tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas president obama believes in insourcing he fought to save the u.s. auto industry and favors tax cuts for companies that bring jobs home outsourcing

versus insourcing. iraq obama and i approve this message. all right did you notice at the end of that ad you hear the president say i'm barack obama and i approve this message that means that ad was paid for by the campaign by donors giving at most that most twenty five hundred dollars in contributions to president barack obama but the majority of political ads you'll see this year won't have that tagline at the end from either candidate instead the majority will be aired by nonprofit groups or as they like to call themselves charity organizations that can spend unlimited amounts of money conceal all their donors and not pay one dime in taxes and i'm not talking about super pacs super pacs actually have to disclose their donors i'm talking about five zero one c four groups which are specially dead designated by the i.r.s. for tax exempt status and can keep their donors secret just as long as they promise

to be social welfare groups or charity organizations airing advocacy ads about issues like poverty a hunger in africa but not spending a majority of their money on specific political ads attacking specific politicians republican operatives like karl rove and the koch brothers have set up these five a one c four groups with names like crossroads g.p.s. and americans for prosperity giving them free rein to collect unlimited donations from secret donors could be saudi princes could be chinese business tycoons convicted felons whoever they are then using that money to run ads to defeat president obama and rove in the kosar promising to spend more than a billion dollars in this effort a billion dollars of undisclosed money since as they're promising the i.r.s. they are just a charity group and not a political organization. but take a look at this ad aired by one of these five hundred one c four is run by karl rove

and you be the judge on whether it's a political ad or not. why isn't the economy stronger in the seconds it takes to watch this our national debt will increase one point four million in two thousand and eight barack obama said we can't mortgage our children's future on a mountain of debt now he's getting four billion in debt every day borrowing from china for his spending every second growing our debt faster than our economy to stop the spending support the new majority agenda new majority agenda dork. seems awfully political to me and it seems awfully political to democratic congressman chris van hollen who are the i.r.s. to reexamine the tax exempt status of these groups as van hollen told reuters quote the i.r.s. has a responsibility to make sure that these groups are not defrauding taxpayers that they are not abusing the charitable organizations status pursuing political

purposes and quote now here's the kicker ninety one percent of all the political ads coming from outside groups this election season are coming from these very same five a one c. fours not super pacs but so-called nonprofit charity groups that means with ninety one percent of the ads paid for by outside spending groups that americans are watching today will never know just who is paying for them just who is pulling the strings. but that might not last much longer the i.r.s. is now catching on to what's going on in listening to congressman van hollen and checking to see if these so-called charity groups really are what karl rove claims they are charity groups as reuters reports quote the internal revenue service is signaling that it will increase its scrutiny of tax exempt organizations which are becoming a force in elections by raising tens of millions of dollars from undisclosed donors the i.r.s.

is preparing questions to ask them as part of efforts to determine whether their fund raising or advertising work runs afoul of tax law so is it possible that the majority of advertising we see this election season is actually illegal and how might not i.r.s. investigation change how money is spent in politics here to answer that is that giuliani reporter republik report and communications an outreach coordinator with united republic said welcome to show thanks for having me thanks for coming on so we have these two groups we've got super pacs which are getting all the fame getting all the attention and those are the things that were kind of created out of the citizens united ruling that gave corporations and rich people free rein to spend as much money as they wanted all the way up until the election and then we have these five a one c four groups which have always existed i mean citizens united didn't create these five a one c four groups. but post citizens united it's these five one c four groups that seem to be exploding why do you think that is all

part of the reason is that citizens united do one thing for five one c four is that all of the existing sort of political advocacy groups that allow corporations to begin spending directly from their treasuries and to all these groups so you can have let's say eggs on secretly finding the chamber of congress and the chamber of commerce to start running ads against candidates and we'll never know the exxon funded it because the chamber of congress acts as sort of a silo for corporations but their money into that will never actually know any of their finders unless they openly disclose them so citizens united did have a powerful impact not only allowing the super pac say this but also empowering contending to empower five one c four and other independent expenditure groups to spend huge in the election as you noted they're spending much more the super pacs are and we have no idea who their donors are unlike the super pacs exactly and i think the interesting thing is they're starting to get a little into trouble they're drawing just because their ads are overtly political which they're not really allowed to be in the interesting thing is with the super pac if they want to run a they can both run unlimited both spend money super pacs and five zero and see

force was super pacs they're allowed to be political with five zero and they're not really allowed to be political but it seems like republicans right i mean conservatives right now are still using these five one c four is because they can keep their donor secret it's like secrecy is tantamount to all this is that you see that i mean that's absolutely true i mean i think that's why twenty times as much spending through the month of april in this election season has gone to those five a one c four is another outside nonprofit groups you know quote unquote nonprofit groups i mean karl rove was on fox news recently and he was asked about this investigation of the i.r.s. about democrats who are calling for an investigation of a group he said where a social welfare organization you're trying to intimidate us to try to intimidate our donors you know a lot of this secrecy goes back to the old south in the one nine hundred fifty s. the nine hundred sixty s. and there were a lot of court cases and basically they ruled that the reason that we don't disclose the donors of groups like this. it's because groups like the and if you knew who donated them then they may face lynchings or racism mobs things like that

but the difference is that now we're having credibly powerful corporations spending directly or they treasuries anonymously into these groups and honestly if they're willing to spend that much money and they are public entities i do think they should be willing to also publicly disclose their campaign funding and they like total funding there's actually a lot of shareholders at these corporations who during the shareholder meetings are raising resolutions demanding that the corporations disclose their political spending because honestly if you're a shareholder for microsoft or for exxon or for nike or wal-mart you probably want to know where the money that you know should be going to invest or should be going to employees is that going to go find you know a front group attacking senator x. or congressman y. so if the i.r.s. is going to be at best they say they're going to rescue them what can they do to these groups if they determine that they are actually operating illegally well this would be pretty radical action i don't necessarily expect this and i think it's i don't know how often it's been done but they can strip them of their tax stripped them of five one c four status which is what they used to run these very

politically motivated ads of course they never say they endorse anyone because that would be illegal where they're basically telling you to vote one way or the other or they can start them in their five a one c three status which isn't usually used to run ads but you know think tanks use them to put out policy papers to do other advocacy work in lobbying and that can also be stripped from them if they're what they were violated we have to reveal their donors at that point yet exactly i mean this is that is allows them to shield their donors and then the law and that goes way back but yeah they would have to reveal their donors and they'd have to be just like a super pac we just have to reveal it so as right now it's just the last fifteen seconds on the chance that this might happen before the election or are we pretty much stuck with this through november you know it's anyone's call the i.r.s. actually steps up to certainly hasn't in the past decade or two a campaign finance a gun completely out of hand. thanks for coming on. every step of the way republicans have fought back against disclosure in our election spending and recently tom gave his take on why that is. it's a pretty simple premise if i'm a billionaire like shelly adelson or a wall street guy who are in

a billion dollars a year and there are a bunch of them who literally bring home that much money every year and i know that if mitt romney and the republicans win i'm going to get a twelve percent tax cut. why would i invest in there cause a twelve percent tax cut on a billion dollars is one hundred twenty million dollars that you get to keep in your pocket. that he's willing to invest one hundred million dollars on getting romney and the republicans elected so if his investment works out and his income next year is a billion dollars each show a net profit of twenty million dollars on his investment in romney and the republicans and eight also is actually worth around twenty five billion so you may well end up profiting a whole lot more what citizens united is turn our politics into a gambling ring where the super rich can pick out a candidate or a resource to invest or bet huge amounts of money into making sure that their racehorse wins knowing that if they if they invest wisely of the about wisely that

they're going to tax break it's even bigger than their initial investment and in the case of their rodney collect a nice fat tax break on that horse too as for working americans who are facing tax increases thanks to paul ryan and can't afford to buy a politician like paul ryan or mitch mcconnell the only way we can fight back. it's to overturn citizens united it's crazy supreme court decision and get money out of politics put an end to the billionaires gambling ring that's been taken over by our this taken over our democracy go to move to amend to work to get it all. coming up after the break despite campaign promises to the contrary president obama has aggressively continued america's failed war on drugs but now the president is promising to create major drug reform policies in the country if he gets a second term so should americans trust him.

more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations rule today.

so did you know the drug enforcement agency organizes drugs in america into five categories depending how hard on how harmful they are and how addictive it how addictive they are and what the medicinal benefit benefits of each are excuse me the da calls these categories quote unquote schedules with schedule five referring to the least dangerous drugs with widely accepted medical use drugs like cough suppressants and and tie dye reels and schedule one referring to the most dangerous drugs with absolutely no medical value drugs like heroin l.s.d. and ecstasy in between within schedules two three and four you'll find other drugs like cocaine codine steroids opium methadone amphetamines all the which are dangerous yet have redeeming medical value that keeps them out of the most dangerous classification of schedule one drugs and then there's marijuana. a drug that has never killed anyone a drug that study after study has shown to treat numerous medical ailments and

a drug that's proven not to be physically addictive so what schedule do you think the da has put marijuana in well it's not schedules two three four five alongside drugs like cocaine p.c.p. and morphine no the da considers marijuana to be more dangerous than all of those drugs and is classified it as a schedule one drug alongside ecstasy and heroine drugs that again have no business medicinal value and have a high potential for abuse and addiction if you think that's a wild over exaggeration of how harmful marijuana is and that the da doesn't seem to know what the hell it's talking about then you're not alone congressman jared polis agrees and here he was earlier this month month asking d.a. administrator a few questions is. crack worse for

person than marijuana i believe all illegal drugs are bad is the method that i mean worse for somebody sell marijuana. i don't think any illegal to it is going to heroin worse for someone's help than marijuana and yeah and i mean you do you know i don't know i mean if you don't know you can look this up you should know this is the chief administrator for the drug enforcement agency i'm asking you a very straightforward question is heroin worse for someone's health than marijuana . our regal drugs are bad as we know you don't know heroin. so that was last month in june and those answers shouldn't be too surprising coming from a presidential administration that is the clear to full out war on marijuana president obama's justice department is conducting nearly two hundred raids on marijuana facilities roughly the same amount conducted during george w.

bush's eight years in office and those raids have occurred in nine of the sixteen states plus the district of columbia that have passed medical marijuana laws leading to sixty one federal indictments all since october of two thousand and nine the president has not been a friend of drug reform despite previous statements. in terms of legalization of drugs. the war on drugs has been a little bit off. the wall. but now there's some evidence that drug reform or obama may actually return next year mark and binder with g.q. just published a piece this week suggesting that president obama will have a change of heart in his second term should he get a second term and will work to reform america's failed drug war as i am bound to rights quote according to ongoing discussions with obama aides and associates if

the president wins a second term he plans to tackle another american war that has so far been successful only in perpetuating more misery the four decades of the drug war and quote. so what does that mean can we really trust the president when it comes to drug reform or is this or is this just pandering to fool the very same people who the president would be a drug reform or to begin with your answer that question is marc harrold libertarian commentator attorney and author of the book observations of white noise an acid test for the first amendment marc welcome welcome back to the show thank you good to see you good to see you so are you convinced by this g.q. article is obama going to suddenly changes to marijuana now basically on this issue and say you know hope hope for change and then you suppose we hope and change and we've got hope but no change and now he's trying to get hope again going in the second term do i think he has some feelings about this the president i think he probably does what he said was probably how he feels but he hasn't acted on it during his administration i think this is a pretty soft piece of the g.q.

piece and it's a pretty soft piece but most indicative is the source the piece he talks about the aides of the president the associates of the president but we don't have anything about what the president says and i think the people if they're going to base their vote and not in full probably but in part on a hope that he's going to pivot towards this issue i think the president really needs to come out and say something him self not what i consider to be kind of floating trial balloons out there with aides and associates yeah i mean the article really all the substance was in that first paragraph in which is are saying this and the rest of the article was about how his past beliefs on drug reform and what he's done here is an inspiration so it does seem like this is a little bit of pandering to try and maybe do boaters in to say hey look vote for me then we'll do some drug reform some reasonable trog reform. as far as. marijuana being classified as a schedule one drug how do you reconcile what the da thinks of marijuana versus what study after study test after test shown about marijuana i really can't impose

on both prongs of the highly addictive nature of marijuana i don't think that's present i'm not a drug expert in so far as how drugs work how cannabis works and. t.h.c. works in all that but the it's like a common sense is yeah i think and that's why i think this is a very surprising why the d.n.a. chief didn't just say yeah it is there's worse and there's better i mean you had for speeding and you enforce murder it doesn't mean you have to condone either one of them but if you're asking as a very top official of a law enforcement agency and this is the d.a. this is what they do they're experts in it why she couldn't just say you know one is worse than the other but we're still going to force the laws on the books against both i don't understand why that's a bad answer right after she's asked three or four times i would have just said you know you're right and just answer the question i don't know as far as your original question you know highly addictive it doesn't seem and there's indication that it's highly addictive there's no medical use for it that seems to be contrary to a lot of what's out there if a doctor is prescribing it some doctors feel experts feel it has medicinal value and states of followed suit the states through their legislation have determined

has medicinal value i have no idea why marijuana is a schedule one drug yet ended seemed by her answers it didn't seem like the d.a. had ever considered how were dickless this classification was it was like they were just caught surprised by congressman paul says questions on that maybe that would be a moment where they might rethink this classification i mean i don't know how it will the cat was going to be out of the bag on this thing if she would have just said you have marijuana is not as bad as some of those other drugs and schedule one and they would have moved right on i mean she created that moment so. you're a libertarian a progressive and we agree on this issue what does it say about both political parties out there that we really can't find either of them to push this issue to push drug reform in a lot of ways i can't figure out from anyone's perspective if you're a conservative you know a republican conservative you have an easy out here you just say we're going to leave medicinal marijuana up to the states that we're federalist leave it up to the states if you're a progressive or libertarian you want you know more privacy rights you want more

choice in these areas i don't really understand what the political will is i don't know if the polling is bad or if there's a real loud minority on this issue i can't quite figure out why politic. i don't go ahead and do this i don't really see what the political fallout would be to you know legalizing marijuana you always hear that i think we're talking about decriminalizing marijuana we're not talking about eight year olds being able to get it or airline pilots being able to toke up before they fly you know what about decriminalizing the drug and so i really can't quite figure out who this is a loser issue for unless there's numbers i'm not saying well maybe it has something to do with the private correctional score peroration you know with police unions. alcohol and tobacco companies i mean do you think that they're funneling huge amounts of money to defeat any efforts just we have just thirty seconds left to try and decriminalize marijuana i absolutely do it comes back to alec it comes back to police unions wanting certain types of grants when the war on drugs came out the grants followed and right now the police department wants money it's to

enforce drug laws if they change the sub's of the grants they can still get the money for doing other things to police unions will follow suit so yeah like everything else this comes back to the money mark boal said hopefully some people get some common sense like the rest of americans who more than fifty percent believe in decriminalized believe in legalizing i can see what happens thanks to what happens next marc harrold with perhaps some pushing for vice president biden the president took a step forward embracing marriage equality earlier this year recently tom experience how the president can take another step forward on the medical marijuana issue take a look. so by endorsing marriage equality the president grabbed a lot of new voters who probably otherwise would have voted either for the republican or the libertarian candidate it was a brilliant move politically speaking. so here's another opportunity to reach out to barry goldwater's new generation the libertarians that will help our economy will help and even save the lives of millions of americans over the next generation

and will solidly nail down president obama's election in two thousand and twelve by grabbing virtually all of the young ron paul voters and that's for the president to come out in favor of ending all federal laws that prohibit medical marijuana in the states just like with gay weddings medical marijuana will stimulate local economies all over the country it's a new industry after all and since pot roast you know it's a weed it goes pretty much fine anywhere in america it's an industry that mitt romney can't outsource to cheap labor countries if medical marijuana was taxed it would represent a significant source of federal state and local revenues and there's no shortage of good science showing that it would help millions of americans with conditions ranging from emmaus to high blood pressure to cancer and by any in a good sized chunk of nixon's failed war on drugs and moving marijuana from the category of criminal over to met medical activity we'd save a fortune on cops courts and jail cells and the last acts revenue the vanishes wouldn't otherwise productive person gets thrown in the slammer when the president

came out for marriage equality he was preceded by the vice president who put the administration's toe in the water the response was overwhelmingly positive nationwide other than a among the you know the normal usual paranoid suspects and so the president stepped into that space and started what will be the end of generations of bad laws and created a renaissance in personal rights and freedom here in the united states now is the time just like joe biden opening the possibility that conversation another national figure seriously began this conversation yesterday newark mayor cory booker who's always been well known but was really catapulted to national prominence by his gaffe on last sunday's right wing t.v. show face the nation has come out in support of barry goldwater's. position on medical marijuana booker tweeted i'm with you on medical marijuana and new jersey should do more to make a real for those who need it and interestingly the same percentage of americans who favor marriage equality also favor legalizing medical marijuana so president obama

we need your leadership again under issue that is hitting millions of americans really hard there are literally lives in the balance and there's a tremendous upside to you taking this bold step to bring millions of young people who think their libertarians over to your side please use the bully pulpit of the white house to call for an end nixon's failed war on drugs and to push for the very real medicine of marijuana to be used as nature intended as a medicine oh and vice president biden if you want to step into this and blurt out some words in defense of medical marijuana now would be a great time. coming up five hundred feet underground in europe scientists are trying to discover the origins of life at the end of our universe and tomorrow they could change our understanding of science forever.

thank.

you.