abuse. why is that and you being the person from the health care industry, what can you suggest to change that as well as improve the health care for all of the people in the common wealth of pennsylvania? yeah, thanks kelly for that question. first of all, it s not an opioid ep dimmic, it s a drug overdoes, it s fentanil and affecting folks very differently. our governor is treating this solely as clinical issue. clinical issue, part of it is overprescription. we don t have an integrated database and they started to address this. it s also a big social issue. our people here are suffering from diseases of despair, it is a big social issue. they have lost hope because we are losing jobs and losing our children, our young college
with the cops defensesquens consequences of policies they had vow indicatedadvocated previously. and they have to flip their positions to match where the public is headed. and if you step back even further, potlitics are spreading rapidly rapidly. rand paul we just talked about, republicans struggling for the right message. the budget debate that will come up in washington you have a republican budget that cuts funding for a lot of these urban programs. and you ll have republicans having to defend that at a time that they re increasing defense spending. and so baltimore is a big issue, a big national issue, a big social issue. it s now a big political issue. all right. jim, thank you very much. up next we ll return to baltimore where city council mapman brandon scott is standing by. weed killers are overzealous. they even destroy your lawn. ortho weed b gon kills weeds.
suit might be a preferable way to go. but that s a legal question. i m not really qualified to speak of it. two things struck me about the past few days and the court. one this is an epic, big, cultural debate that s supposed to be happening. and yet it was a short, sometimes weirdly comic sort of shallow debate. did you find it that way? i mean, i was really struck that they were not talking with about big issues but sort of dumb stuff that you talk about in college dorms. forgive me. no, no. or is this the norm of the court? i would say this was not despite the efforts by lawyers on both sides not, in terms of the justices, a fundamental discussion about, shall we have sa same-sex marriage or shall we not? is it a good thing for the country or isn t it? the court just for whatever reason doesn t want to go there at this point. now, to be clear, there are certainly some conservatives who are prepared to uphold prop 8 and some of the court s liberals
being tried now we ll see how it goes. this is a story that is haunting about the implications of decisions made by courts. the abortion issue will not go away if you think it is the taking of a human life, and so it s going to stay there and get itself worked through in the courts again and again. it does seem there is a strategy now that republican governors and legislators are basically trying to push the supreme court to retake up the issue. i think peggy is right that abortion won t go away the way gay marriage i think will go away in a few years and we ll get past immigration. the best we ever get to on abortion is a truce. the country is what s the new truce? well, we re in one of those periods where maybe the sort of truce line people are trying to move it one way or the other. ultimately people who are opposed to abortion because they believe it s murder, it s very hard to compromise on that.
evolving on the issue. are you evolving, to use her word, on this issue? i believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman. i still hold to the traditional definition of marriage. is this something that you thought are you thinking abo about? could you imagine changing your position before you left the u.s. senate? i can t. i tell you, in the past i supported repealing don t ask/don t tell. i supported the nondiscrimination act a as well. but i hold to the traditional definition of marriage. all right. senator jeff flake, i will leave it there. thank you, senator, for coming on. coming up, reaction to what you just heard from the two senators on immigration and guns in particular plus sorting out the poll 0 particulars of all of the ocean issues on guns. is time running out for the president? could he see his democratic majority, by the way, in the senate slip away in 2014 meaning he can t get anything done after