same saxon for tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. no new nukes at least temporarily the nuclear regulatory commission announced it's putting a freeze on issuing new licenses for nuclear power plants in america so what prompted this decision and does the ongoing crisis that fukushima have anything to do with it also right now there are almost fifty million americans living in poverty a number of never before seen in this country are the social safety nets that were put in place to help the poor enough to keep up with such a high demand and forget weak gun laws one of the biggest reasons gun violence is

so prevalent in america is because corporations are allowed to write our laws how can we stop the corporate takeover of the legislative process and stop the epidemic of gun violence in the process. right so here's something that people living in florida should know your governor rick scott the national rifle association and the koch brothers funded american legislative exchange council are all working together to make your streets more dangerous restrict your first amendment rights and waste a ton of your taxpayer money and here's how they're doing it last year governor scott signed into law the firearm owners privacy act which bans doctors from asking their patients about gun ownership. that law was written by the n.r.a. and has since been introduced as model legislation by the american legislative

exchange council it's also a law that was struck down by a federal judge back in july since it clearly violates the first amendment rights of doctors to provide medical guidance to patients so now governor scott is using taxpayer dollars to defend this law just like he's using taxpayer dollars to defend laws he signed to force welfare recipients to take drug tests to sell public prisons off the for profit corporations and to restrict voting rights all of which have been struck down in court and all of which were handwritten by corporations belonging to the american legislative exchange council also known as alec so to recap corporations interest groups write legislation to boost their profits governor rick scott obliges and signs that legislation into law which is then struck down in court as unconstitutional so governor scott uses taxpayer money to fight analysts losing court battles to defend those same corporate written laws. and when it comes to gun legislation like stand your ground laws written by alec

and the n.r.a. we know the real life consequences of putting corporate profits ahead of public safety and also why the heck are corporations even writing our laws in the first place well joining me now is josh horwitz executive director of the coalition to stop gun violence and neil mccabe conserve excuse me neil mccabe conservative commentator and editor of the guns and patriots column at human events on line welcome gentlemen thanks a lot you're going to go have a suggestion what do americans need to know about gun laws in the country right now like stand your ground in this docs versus glocks law when corporate about corporations working behind the scene it's really it's really quite amazing and i was sort of privilege i guess to go to the alec conference this year and you were thrown out i well i you know i just tried to maintain my dignity and my profile but when you go there what's amazing is you see these legislators who have come for one hundred dollars they get a scholarship all that pays one hundred bucks is this beautiful hotel in utah and

you know these corporations paying twenty five thousand dollars now they get in the same room and they vote on policies right so the n.r.a. was has been one of these corporations they pay twenty five thousand dollars and they get in the they push through stand your ground the you know the prohibition on doctors talking about firearms and other things they've pushed through assault weapons. things against assault weapons and so you have this unbelievable you know confluence of corporate interests working with the legislators of course legislators are wined and dined they go back and introduce legislation the corporations want them to it's quite an amazing process there is no problem when corporations are writing legislation that benefit profits rather than public safety . i'm not convinced it is i'm not convinced that corporations are necessarily right again i mean they're they're allowed to participate in the process and i don't know if it's being definitive a lot of these ideas a been around for over two hundred years so it's not like so i feel like exxon

decided we need gun rights i mean that i guess been around for a long time it's actually that's is out the way it works corporations get in the room and they have the same types of votes as the legislators do so it might be on a on a panel that the look the corporations actually outnumber the legislators but i mean i'm not a corporation and i came up with these ideas myself there's a lot of americans who came up with these ideas themselves it's that they get taken from alex right into the legislature so i work in the virginia legislature sure and you see all these our bills and they're they're sort of not you know they're hidden that they come up to some other legislators idea but the reality is that the person that's introducing them has basically been bought and paid and got this grand vacation from alec years and they are pro their anti gun legislators in virginia who would be voting against guns who are now voting in favor of gun rights because of alec these are they change their mind about like you they don't even know what the legislation at the time that the legislation is in fact some legislation they haven't read it carefully enough and still has the alley the label on it they've been reading in here you know we can't deny that corporations have

a much louder voice when it comes to advocating for certain pieces of legislation especially in the post citizens united era when they can basically threaten the legislature and the legislator and say if you don't vote for this i'm going to drop a million time warner corporations like the new york times corporations like. me to go to alan undiscriminating here and when you go to alec and you have a place like virginia where they can pay for the vacation they give unlimited corporate you know on them in advance of money you know you have legislators the problem carol all about this stuff but they they just got paid off to do it and they're going to go ahead and go ahead and do these things and you see it's not just guns right it's coal it's tobacco in fact there's a panic there was ok with every idea i think you know we. had these. shootings recently and never are there any legist never is legislation brought up to address them and i think one reason why is because you have this huge powerful corporate force that's preventing it and if you have a human constitution now it has

a second a medal this is my question yes where it's always consciously focused on the rights of gun owners gun owners yes isn't there a right for non gun owners to be able to go to the shopping mall or go to the movies and not have to worry about someone with a clip that has thirty bullets in it or so you know machine in fact is there anything that is going on in the sense it's against the law to shoot people. i know but it's already against the law so i mean i don't know what new laws you need were ok so you're i mean still people have what we what we have done is we've struck the balance the wrong way we need to get back to what i think most people want which is a more more of a balance towards public safety and that's really what the constitution is about some of those lines like for domestic tranquility people drafted the constitution because the states at that time were too violent and so what we've got now is this we morphed into this into a federal view of what the constitution was and you get laws like stand your ground in you get get rid of assault weapons bans what we need is to get back to what the framers meant in the constitution which was public safety was

a very high value and what we've got is that we've got the dissenters now have come back and said well that you know we the second amendment that he's talking about is really the dissenters view right george washington james madison they wanted a federal government they could protect public safety very in the second amendment was written with muskets were guns we know we now have different types of guns so i would under consideration in that role i'm. really afraid all they know is that you're going to hear that you would accept regulation of any gun that requires a truck to tow it well i think what a gallon you go so you can actually get when guns are even considered machine guns they're completely legal right so i think that's sort of the problem we have right now is that we have people advocating for weapons that should be on the battlefield in movie theaters in public spaces these weapons for instance the shooting shooter in aurora used have no place in our communities right why not because these are the type that can accept a hundred round magazine they have a pistol grip they are meant to kill people their personal weapons they're meant to

kill a lot of people i don't see any way second to get the final word here no it's in the constitution and we should be very careful about taking away rights or assault weapons the conduit for troops in our homes either drug. thanks alan that. the role of the american legislative. strange council plays in passing dangerous program legislation like standard ground laws was blown wide open after the trayvon martin tragedy earlier this year in florida and here is tom explaining what's really going on here. alec brings together mostly republican state lawmakers and corporate lobbyists giving each side equal vote on model legislation that is approved at semiannual alec conferences and then sent off to state legislatures to be passed in other words corporations and lobbying groups meet with elected lawmakers to write and pass laws the more money a corporation or lobbyist gives alec the more power they have to write was in two thousand and five alec passed what was called the castle doctrine act and as one

allegan member michael ho said in a radio interview back in two thousand and eight the castle doctrine was passed by alec with the help of the national rifle association the lobbying arm of the american gun manufacturing industry we are a very pro second amendment organization in fact last session some of the i'll get off topic here real quick but some of the things that we were pushing in states was the castle doctrine we worked with the n.r.a. on that that's one of our model bills that we have states a introduce and so what exactly is the castle doctrine well it's a virtual carbon copy of florida's stand your ground law which was passed just a few months after alec approved the castle doctrine. here are the two bills. side by side nearly identical other than this one minor difference that basically actually makes the build even more expansive coordination reporter john nichols alec wrote this law for lobbyists from the n.r.a.

and wal-mart the nation's largest retailer of guns and republicans in the florida state legislature introduced it and republican governor jeb bush signed it into law and now hundreds of justifiable homicides later homicides were nickels as wal-mart can no longer be sued for sellers liability because they're justifiable the african-american community is outraged in the city is sanford florida is about to explode but the n.r.a. and wal-mart both long time funders of alec according to nichols got what they wanted free rein for gun owners to shoot first since alec approved the law in two thousand and five sixteen states have passed it creating a breeding ground for more senseless racially motivated violence so how many more kids have to die in the name of justifiable homicides so walmart can avoid liability losses how many more teenagers have to be murdered and how many more communities have to be up ended by the violence so the national rifle association and the koch brothers funded american legislative exchange council to make sure the

gun manufacturers and retailers like wal-mart can sell more of their products alec represents the corporatocracy in the us is not interested in the public good but rather corporate profit whatever maximizes profits and immunizes them from lawsuits no matter how many trayvon martin's are murdered in the process it's what they want and the founders wrote we the people is the first three words of our constitution they did not mean we the corporations no matter what john roberts clarence thomas and antonin scalia say this is no way to run a country and one of the many reasons why the right wing takeover of this country that started with reagan needs to be reversed and we all need to come back to our senses. after the break today nearly fifty million. kings live in poverty the most ever recorded in our nation's history so why is bill clinton to blame for all this and what needs to be done to fix it.

pepper spray that just burns your eyes right right i mean it's like a derivative of actual pepper it's a food product essentially. this is much stronger than anything it's used by a lot of sort of loses thousands of times we're stronger than any kind of the body of ever put you know. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture. into that only military mechanisms that do the work to bring justice or

accountability. i have every right to know what my government should do if you want to know why i pay taxes. but i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism. now i'm learning mr.

one thousand nine hundred six president bill clinton ended welfare as we know it this mantling the last remnants of lyndon johnson's great society legislation passed in the one nine hundred sixty s. it was responsible for cutting poverty in america in half that decade and clinton replaced it with something called temporary assistance for needy families which for the first time in sixty years no longer guaranteed federal assistance to impoverished americans instead under clinton's welfare reform benefits for the poor were kept and contingent upon someone finding work today with nearly fifty million americans living in poverty the most ever recorded we now know clinton's welfare reform was a bad idea consider these numbers in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine eighty two percent of impoverished families with children received federal assistance but in one thousand nine hundred six after clinton's welfare reform that number dropped down to sixty eight percent immediately and by two thousand and ten only twenty

seven percent of families living in poverty with children were eligible for assistance the rest of the seventy three percent of impoverished families with children in america. who can't catch a lifeline well there are screwed. president obama is now looking to reform clinton's welfare reform by calling on states to find better ways to administer the program to give more relief to more people and this prompted mitt romney to release this ad attacking the president take a look. in one nine hundred ninety six president clinton and a bipartisan congress helped and will fare as we know it by requiring welfare but on july twelfth president obama quietly announced a plan to go for reform by dropping more requirements under obama's plan you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job they just send you your welfare check and welfare to work goes back to being plain old welfare mitt romney will restore the work requirement because it works

i'm mitt romney and i approve this message first off that ad is a lie the president's overhaul plan specifically includes the same work requirement that clinton created a second off that ad is coming from the same guy who said this. i've been in this race because i care about americans i'm not concerned about the very poor or good sure we're both very poor and that's for anyone who still thinks that quarter billionaire mitt romney best knows how to help the poor in america but this debate raises an important question and that is are our social safety nets still adequate especially during times of economic crisis here nancy that is horse cooper conservative commentator and senior fellow at the national center for public policy and richard fowler democratic strategist and host of the richard thaler show welcome to you both guys thanks for coming on again so start with you we've got fifty million people in living in poverty the most ever recorded we've got seventy

three percent of impoverished families with children not getting the sort of federal assistance that they used to get. are in our social safety nets broken and how do we fix them well our social safety nets are broken but it's precisely because they've been overwhelmed just this past week the federal government reported that there are nearly one. hundred and seven million out of the three hundred million americans that are receiving government assistance of some form and that is a number we have never reached before and if we continue down that direction we're headed down toward the european model where most people rely on benefits and a few of the people are pulling the wizard about the european model that all have better standards of life better health care and everything like that they don't all have better standards of life that's not true they do have better signs of life and they have a lower infant for more tally rate than we do in the united states actually we are when it comes to developed countries we have the highest infant mortality rate in the world and the do when it in terms of cargo beyond that goes back and of the

early picking the statistics when you asked it's all true and i will add to the lifestyle that if you were to have the as a lifestyle what other countries do they point out is a lifestyle or. mortality is an indicator of quality of life in a country are little babies that living i mean what's not a more quiet what's not what's not well it's not it's also. the welsh and you will as well go into that and having the government has taken over those programs come take over those decisions that go into those consequences have consequences that cascade into other areas it's the reason why in europe they don't have the savings level that we do and we don't we have an abysmally poor what is the reason why they don't have the real estate assets they're going to i want to get this debate between us and europe but you just mentioned that something like i'm not sure you got the numbers from but we'll just leave it at that something like hundred million americans are getting some sort of federal assistance we're also in one of the worst economies we've seen since the great depression but there are still seventy three percent of impoverished families with children not getting the sort of

benefits that they used to get is that a problem it's a problem because there are no alternatives like opportunities in the workforce when this president has set up policies they penalize employers penalize investment or even wise risk there is no surprise that people are trapped that's a fact. you know you don't listen i don't talk of let's talk about facts of the president a president opposed the american jobs act in the american jobs act there's a provision that would create work writing he wrote in two thousand and nine. when we wrote on the heat of this downturn although i mean repass it when he had a supermajority in the house and the senate he had us and majority in the senate for just a little over what sixty days maybe even in two thousand and nine the president passed the stimulus package which wasn't nearly big enough because he tried to get republicans on board by making a third of the tax cuts you probably need a two trillion dollars stimulus package we've got a problem when it comes down to about a six hundred billion dollars he set the terms he does not set yes he did he said that on the street he accepted those people who criticize people who just lost it

by adding the terms are set by the gang of six six senators six moderates that are set the terms of the debate for the stimulus package back to the hope bipartisan backing saying back to the whole idea about welfare because that's the topic of the reason for the reason why we're here right so when it comes to welfare what the program does and what the program is the program is the economic toll it grows the economy pumping money into giving the i worked on capitol hill when the program was being designed by bill clinton and the republican congress who they have basically a cycle or it was a quite a successful program it is now being overwhelmed because we have an economic environment i don't have the president of the bush we have an economic environment is created by deregulation of wall street i just don't know where the absolutely not you can believe is what i part of an agreement that people should have played out in how it is that we are talking about the actions that because of you down to your mixing i wonder what is the question that we're asking ourselves is why are

there so many people on welfare right now the reason that i don't see where on welfare is because we have a jobs crisis in this country the job crisis in this country is due to the fact that wall street gambled on the american people and they lost the band and now the american about us once again see the point where we're always going to have people out of work i mean that's the system that we have there are going to happen if there aren't. let me finish there are winners and losers that's what capitalism produces what do we do with the losers in this is our to do we say as as clinton did we're only going to give you help if you go out and try and find a job in a market where there's four people looking for every one single job opening the successes that the you know success it's like rolling rock up a hill and watching it fall down as if it had a slightly false it turns out giving people incentives to get back in the work place is a way to equip those individuals so that they can be competitive when you took away that incentive when that incentive didn't exist in the past what it did was perpetuate a lifestyle of dependency people were miserable they were trapped their children

were trapped their grandchildren were trapped the whole reason for this transformation was to give people hope and opportunity and made would if we did not have a president who was poorly managing the economy and creating an environment where people cannot get worse so you think it's better that it let's assume we have a single mother raising a child. rather than giving her benefits so that she can stay home and try to raise the child we're going to make her go and try and find work sixty hours a week and let the child be raised on t.v. is that a better alternative for her to the matter is that there were millions of people who found themselves in difficult circumstances after the one thousand nine hundred six landmark law and within four to five years those people were no longer sitting there they had received training they had entered into the workforce and they began the transition waters lord of the fold in question is the question is right so they receive work they receive job workforce training why is it the republicans in congress right now are blocking bills that would give workforce training the no use

of the last year you are locked why who are you because we cannot afford it but we christian it is not some of the others revolution if you can afford the question is who can afford a little oil company that we do not have on women the nine hundred ninety six really act contemplated that states take on this responsibility you big government types don't believe anything ever happened on the world unless the fans are doing to us and said this is so this is so is the two there's two different americas there's mitt romney's in there and horses america were rich and the wealthy continue to succeed because you have the greed and they can see you doing poor people suffer or there's an america where we look out for the least of these you look up for the poor they want to know they're going to care about the poor on their own more of the minimum they don't care about the america that will look like this has looked for the last three years when big government known as i am and all that i've ever been this is a moment of silence and seventeen is not smaller government has taken on more debt crowded out more opportunities out your government big bad justice souter's government how have people are employed and how i'm going stuff like that it's their loss or as are there other measurements of government scope as well the truth

of the matter is that george w. bush was the one who ran this debt up let's just be real here to pay two for two wars that were paid for a prescription drug bill that was on paid for and now obama said you know how do you know anyone on generally when i'm going to residents of course i do there is no it is do they just live high off the hog on it or what i mean what percentage of. people are welfare queens in your opinion what are they should have people are well over seventy yet i keep saying on the other says i know a lot of people this is the wrong government and since this is not the power to ask away yes it would seem to us that us as it is today aren't easy it's just like if you want to conason claims you can and florida announce that they were going to do a drug testing effort to make sure that people who are welfare are actually the ones that are trying and striving and i wonder who or not you guys come out and oppose it no no no i don't hate way what we think it will do you oppose it because you're going to waste money that could go to people who need it and instead of going to people who are reading we oppose that because one percent of the

population tested positive whereas in a regular poll of people it's six percent of the population that has one of the warm feelings were sent were at a time for a contract in time horse richard thank you for coming. it's a bird it's a plane no it's just a fish a fish falling from the sky imagine walking in your backyard looking up at a tree and seeing not a bird but a fish in it well according to jan bailey that's exactly what happened to her earlier this week in vancouver bailey was walking in her new backyard when she saw a reddish orange fish covered in pine needles but alive in one of her trees she told her husband who got out an old aquarium filled it with water and retrieve

the fish from the tree turns out the fish now named lucky is a chick lit a type of fish that is native to central and south america. those who think this bizarre find may signal doomsday should rest assured bailey her husband and her friends think lucky may have been a pond fish that an eagle took for lunch but then ended up dropping somewhere but when frogs start falling from the sky then you should definitely head for your underground bunkers. coming up the federal government is saying no new nuclear reactors at least until they find viable ways to store nuclear waste should the big challenge of finding nuclear waste storage sites be all the reason the government needs to say no to more nuclear power period.

the capital account of my lawyer mr. speaker. just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old and just you know a little truth. i confess and i am a total get of friends that i love traveling hip hop music and pretty. much it was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the world without you.