Rachel Maddow Show

Rachel Maddow plays a video of Rick Santorum speaking to a conservative website saying contraception is "not okay." She discusses the absurd fact that this point of view is the current norm amongst GOP candidates, not the obviously furthest right-wing view, as it has been in the past.

Rachel Maddow reports on a new abortion doctor database compiled by long-standing, anti- choice extremist group "Operation Rescue" and its implicit, terroristic threat of violence. Furthermore, all of the 2012 GOP candidates have expressed agreement with the "personhood" agenda, a position well to the right of most Americans.

Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, talks with Rachel Maddow about the unprecedented and hard to fathom conservative Republican opposition to birth control.

Wendell Pierce, actor and native New Orleaner, talks about the recovery in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and his new effort to bring supermarkets to the underserved population of the city in the hopes that rebuilding a community from the bottom-up may protect the unprotected, discriminated-against, and impoverished New Orleaners from disaster in the future.

On the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans and with the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, Melissa Harris-Perry points out that while America has learned some short-term lessons, the long-term lessons about the vulnerability of American institutions have gone largely unaddressed. 

Rachel Maddow discusses Gov. McDonnell's new "Emergency" TRAP regulations in Virginia: "This is where we are at. The supposed small government cut the red tape, anti-regulation Republican governors using deliberately intrusive, shut-them-down, punitive regulations to get the government's way on what happens to your pregnancy."

Rachel Maddow discusses the lack of congruency between the libertarian philosophy of Tea Party politics and the anti-abortion, pro-war philosophies of the Republicans calling themselves Tea Party politicians.