Category Archives: ProPublica

Breaking: Planned Parenthood Stops Taking Money for Fetal Tissue Donation

by Leona19Cnqta Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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A handful of Planned Parenthood clinics across the country allow patients to donate their fetal tissue following an abortion, a practice that is legal in the United States and has contributed to medical research breakthroughs like the polio vaccine. And as part of their fetal tissue donations programs, Planned Parenthood typically gets reimbursed for the cost of getting the donation to researchers—about $60 per case.

But that will soon change: in a move announced Tuesday, Planned Parenthood president announced that the organization will no longer accept reimbursement to cover the cost of fetal tissue donations and will instead pay out of pocket for all donations going forward.

The change, announced in a letter to the National Institutes of Health, comes following the onslaught of conservative attempts to completely de-fund and attack the women’s health care organization on the basis of its fetal tissue donation programs.

In the letter, Richards writes that the policy change is intended to “completely debunk the disingenuous argument that our opponents have been using,” against abortion and fetal tissue donation. She continues:

Planned Parenthood’s policies on fetal tissue donation already exceed the legal requirements. Now we’re going even further in order to take away any basis for attacking Planned Parenthood to advance an anti-abortion political agenda…Our decision not to take any reimbursement for expenses should not be interpreted as a suggestion that anyone else should not take reimbursement or that the law in this area isn’t strong. Our decision is first and foremost about preserving the ability of our patients to donate tissue, and to expose our opponents’ false charges about this limited but important work.

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Breaking: Planned Parenthood Stops Taking Money for Fetal Tissue Donation

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McDonald’s Spams Schools With Infomerical on the Virtues of Fast Food

by Laura Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Robust health requires nothing more than a little exercise and a daily dose or three of fast food. That’s the message of the new 20-minute video 540 Meals: Choices Make the Difference (viewable here, short teaser above), being promoted in high schools and middle schools by McDonald’s and uncovered by the superb school-food blogger Bettina Elias Siegel.

The video focuses on the dietary and exercise regimen of John Cisna, who identifies himself as an “Iowa HS high school Science Teacher who lost over 50 lbs eating only McDonald’s,” who “now travels across the country sharing my message about food choice.” Cisna gained notoriety when he mimicked the self-experiment of documentarian Morgan Spurlock, director/subject of the famed Super-Size Me (2004), and took his meals exclusively at McDonald’s for six months straight. Unlike Spurlock, who saw his weight rise and his health falter, Cisna claims his weight plunged and health improved. One key difference: whereas Spurlock famously assented to any plea by a McDonald’s employee to “super-size” his orders, Cisna stuck rigorously to a limit of 2,000 calories per day.

Apparently still haunted by the specter of Super-Size Me a decade since its release, McDonald’s embraced Cisna, taking him on as a paid “brand ambassador” and now pushing his message to school kids, both through the 540 Meals film and through appearances at schools, documented on Cisna’s Twitter feed. Siegel uncovered this McDonald’s-produced “teachers discussion guide” to 540 Meals. It recommends using the film “as a supplemental video to current food and nutritional curriculum,” particularly in “plans that incorporate Morgan Spurlock’s Super-Size Me.” She also points to this August press release from McDonald’s franchisees in the New York Tri-State Area, flogging 540 Meals to “high school educators looking for information to demonstrate the importance of balanced food choices.”

As Siegel shows in this handy list of quotes from the film, it brims with agit-prop for the famous burger-and-fries purveyor, including such wisdom as “through careful planning and mindful choices, you can still enjoy your favorite McDonald’s items.”

So what’s wrong with pushing Cisna’s message to school kids? Plenty, writes Siegel in her post, which is well worth reading in its entirety. Here’s a sample:

First, neither 540 Meals nor the discussion guide ever offer young viewers the critically important disclaimer that “Your calorie needs may be significantly lower than John Cisna’s,” nor do they even discuss how one might go about calculating one’s daily caloric requirements. Instead, students are left with the vague but reassuring message that “choice and balance,” along with a 45-minute walk (which might burn off about 1/5 of a Big Mac) will allow them to eat whatever they want at McDonald’s on a regular basis.

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McDonald’s Spams Schools With Infomerical on the Virtues of Fast Food

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6 Years Ago, New York Banned the Shackling of Pregnant Inmates. So Why Are These Women Still Being Restrained?

by LelaSandoval Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Maria Caraballo delivered her daughter in 2010, she was handcuffed to the hospital bed.

“They didn’t even remove my cuffs for me to hold my baby,” says Caraballo, who at the time was serving a prison sentence in New York. “I had to hold my baby with one hand for two to three seconds. They didn’t take my handcuffs off until after I was stitched up and in the prison ward, and I didn’t see my baby until the next day.”

Caraballo gave birth to her daughter a year after it became illegal to shackle incarcerated women during childbirth in New York. But her experience wasn’t necessarily unique: New evidence published earlier this year suggests many women continue to be shackled in violation of the law. And now, six years after restraining pregnant inmates was first restricted in the state, an anti-shackling bill is once again headed to the governor’s desk.

Handcuffs, waist chains, and ankle shackles are commonly used to restrain inmates who are transported out of prison, whether it’s for a trial, facility transfer, or medical attention. And though it’s hard to imagine someone making a break for it during labor, shackles are routinely used to restrain women inmates during childbirth, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has called the practice “inhumane.” It’s “almost never justified by the need for safety and security for medical staff, the public or correctional officers,” the ACLU has said.

The medical community agrees. “Physical restraints have interfered with the ability of physicians to safely practice medicine by reducing their ability to assess and evaluate the physical condition of the mother and fetus, and have similarly made the labor and delivery process more difficult than it needs to be,” wrote the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in a 2007 statement, “overall putting the health and lives of the women and unborn children at risk.”

The American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and the American College of Nurse Midwives also oppose shackling during childbirth, as do the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and the American Correctional Association, two of the country’s primary prison accreditation organizations.

In the last decade, more states have passed laws restricting the use of shackling on inmates during childbirth. New York became the sixth state to ban restraints during birth when in 2009 then-Gov. David Paterson signed the Anti-Shackling Bill, which prohibited shackling during labor, delivery, and recovery. And since the passage of New York’s ban, at least 15 states followed suit.

But a study published earlier this year by the Correctional Association of New York (CA), a nonprofit organization with the authority to inspect prisons, found that 23 of the 27 women inmates interviewed who’d given birth while incarcerated had been shackled in violation of the law. There are an estimated 30 births each year under the supervision of state and local corrections, according to the correctional association.

“The 2009 law did seem to curtail the practice of shackling during delivery in the hospital” says Tamar Kraft-Stolar, director of the association’s Women in Prison project. “But we found that many women experienced shackling during labor, and many experienced it right after they gave birth and on the way back to the prison.”

Kraft-Stolar attributes the continued shackling of these women to a lack of education. Some correctional officers may not know about the law, and without oversight, there’s no way to enforce it. That’s why Kraft-Stolar and other criminal justice reform advocates are hopeful that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will sign Assembly Bill 6430, an update to the 2009 law that would ban the use of restraints on pregnant inmates at any point during their pregnancy and until eight weeks after childbirth.

Passed by both chambers of the state legislature in June and now waiting for the governor’s signature, the bill would also require that every pregnant inmate be notified of her right to not be shackled. It would allow shackling in extraordinary circumstances—with the approval of both the superintendent and chief medical officer and only when a woman is threatening to hurt herself or someone else. However, each incident would have to be reported to the state.

The legislation has a long list of backers, including New York’s correctional officers’ union, which recently expressed its support.

“While it is our duty to monitor all inmates at all times, there are better uses of limited resources than to continue a practice that applies to several dozen pregnant inmates in our prisons who do not pose an immediate threat to the safety and security of our officers and our facilities,” the union said in a statement earlier this month.

And Kraft-Stolar says the legislation can only do so much. “The best solution to the problem of shackling is to not lock women up in the first place,” she says. “Prisons are breeding grounds for human rights violations, and the best way to avoid those violations is to keep people out of prison.”

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6 Years Ago, New York Banned the Shackling of Pregnant Inmates. So Why Are These Women Still Being Restrained?

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Why No One Really Knows a Better Way to Train Cops

by JaysonMuirden Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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After a year in which killings of unarmed suspects by the police have become a major national issue, activists, law enforcement experts, and political leaders have all stressed the importance of introducing more and better training for officers. Police departments across the country have begun to re-evaluate how they teach cops to use physical force, defuse tension with suspects, approach the mentally ill, and check their own unconscious biases. But what do we really know about police training as a solution? Will it be effective? Here are some of the key questions:

What specific steps have police departments taken? A recent survey by the DC-based Police Executive Research Forum revealed that the majority of an officer’s training on use of force consisted of firearms and defensive tactics. “We spend much less time discussing the importance of deescalation techniques and crisis intervention strategies,” Chuck Wexler, the group’s executive director, wrote in August. The Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing, formed in response to Ferguson and other controversial police shootings, urged that “the need for expanded and more effective training has become critical.” Its top recommendations to law enforcement agencies include making classes on crisis intervention mandatory for basic recruits and officers in the field, and forming “training innovation hubs” between universities and police academies.

More MoJo coverage on policing:


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Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


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A Mentally Ill Woman’s “Sudden Death” at the Hands of Cleveland Police

In 2012, Washington state’s police academy introduced cadets to a new curriculum that emphasized trainings in crisis intervention, building social skills, and critical thinking—a shift from its previous boot camp approach. The NYPD is currently retraining its officers on de-escalation, communication, and minimizing use of force. In early September, Cleveland introduced plans to ramp up training that teaches officers how to respond to suspects who may have mental illnesses—a change prompted by the city’s recent settlement with the US Department of Justice following a federal investigation into the Cleveland PD.

After the fatal police shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Pasco, Washington, the DoJ announced in May that it would train Pasco officers for a year in order to “enhance trust and communication between the community and the police department.” And following a record number of officer-involved shootings in 2010, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department overhauled its training curriculum, which now includes instruction on implicit bias and “reality-based trainings” focused on appropriate use of force.

How do we know whether these kinds of reforms will help reduce officer-involved shootings? Some departments that have introduced training reforms, such as those in Las Vegas and Maryland’s Montgomery County, say the changes have lowered problematic use-of-force incidents. Yet researchers have little data on potential impacts with regard to use of force, mental-health crisis intervention, and building community trust. “We know virtually nothing about the short- or long-term effects associated with police training of any type,” Northwestern University political scientist Wesley Skogan wrote in a 2014 paper published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology.

In a report commissioned by the National Research Council in 2004, Skogan and others found that while it had long been assumed “that more and better police training leads to improved officer performance,” there were “scarcely more than a handful of studies on the effects of training,” and that “research on the effects of training content, timing, instructor qualifications, pedagogical methods, dosage, and long-term effects is virtually nonexistent.” In the decade since, Skogan says, “there has not been much progress.”

The lack of rigorous scientific assessments on police training programs means that in areas like crisis intervention or hostage negotiations, “we’re flying by the seat of our pants,” says Dave Klinger, a former officer and a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. That can be dangerous for both the officers and the communities they serve, he adds.

Why isn’t there more research available on these kinds of training programs? The argument that policing should be rooted in science is nothing new, but translating academic research into practice on the streets is complicated territory. As researchers at the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy explained in a 2012 paper, what works at one department may not work in another. Scientists and police departments might also disagree, they said, on how to measure an agency’s effectiveness or define what “good policing” looks like. “The worlds of the practitioner and the scientist operate on vastly different timelines,” they wrote, “with police chiefs believing that they need quick solutions, and academics believing that without adequate deliberation, the quality of the science might be compromised.”

What does all of this cost? Officers spend hundreds of hours training both in the academy and out in the field, costing an average of $1.3 million per academy, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Municipal police agencies, for example, spent an average of $2.2 million on academy training in 2006, with basic recruit training taking up an average of 883 hours in the classroom and 575 hours in the field, according to the latest available data. Certified state training academies spent an average of $3.6 million per academy in the same year.

Why don’t we know more about what training works? Part of the answer is that ultimately it’s hard to know whether an officer’s behavior during any given scenario was directly affected by training that he or she received. There have also been some “serious methodological limitations” in past research on training, Skogan found in his 2004 report. It’s also hard to isolate the effect of training from other factors that could influence an officer, such as his or her workload, stress, or other factors influencing the operations of a police department and its personnel.

Lorie Fridell, a criminologist at the University of South Florida, says she has been thinking about how to better measure racial or other implicit bias in policing since 1999, when she wrote a book on the subject. She says it’s been “incredibly challenging” to come up with effective approaches. Fridell runs a training program that teaches officers to recognize and check their implicit bias, and she plans to conduct a controlled study on the effects of the training to determine how an officer’s attitude and skills may have changed as a result. But the study won’t be able to show how the training affected an officer’s behavior on the streets, she explains, because measuring bias in that setting would require pinpointing the motive behind an officer’s actions in any given situation.

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Why No One Really Knows a Better Way to Train Cops

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Recap: "The Good Wife" Would Like You to Stop Selling Photos of Your Naked Children

by MichaleMargarot Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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RECAP: The Good Wife, Season 7, Episode 2: “Innocents.”

The episode opens and the good wife is in bond court and she meets a kid who has been arrested for vandalizing some stupid photo exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Art and this kid, see, this kid just doesn’t know how to help himself. “I did it,” he says over and over despite the good wife’s pleas that he ixnay the whole confession-ay. The bond judge grants the dumb kid bail and as he’s being led away he says to Alicia, “it’s me…in the photo i defaced. It’s me.”

Eli visits Governor Bad Wife to apologize for saying some mean things during last week’s episode. Peter is all, “great, thanks, apology accepted, Alan Cumming, but you still can’t work in the campaign.” Eli is like “I hear you, buddy. Live long and prosper.”

Can we talk about this whole thing for a second? The entire idea that Peter would fire Eli for Margo Martindale is insane. Peter owes everything to Eli and up until last week’s episode has been acutely aware of that. I get they just needed to set up a fight for Eli to have but it really just makes Peter seem even worse than he already is.

And, look—OK, this is turning into a rant—but Peter, the bad husband, has never been portrayed as an actually evil or nefarious person. Deeply flawed, yes, but never villainous. The whole throwing Eli under the bus thing is really annoying me. But I digress.

Eli bumps into Margo Martindale as he’s leaving Peter’s office and she threatens to kill Eli if he comes near “her candidate again.” Eli asks her if she’s seen It Follows. Like me, she has not. Unlike me, she hasn’t even read the Wikipedia summary.

Back to the kid who hates the art. The photo is of him as a child when he was naked. His mom is a famous photographer. His mom is played by Amy Irving! I love Amy Irving. Amy Irving and my dad were in a movie once called The Competition where they played competing pianists who fall in love. The art vandal in this episode is basically my brother.

Alicia needs an investigator because Kalinda is gone so she interviews a few of them. One is this guy who is clearly really good. He’s played by a famous actor whose name I can’t remember, but he was in Watchmen and various other things. He is too famous not be the one she ends up with but also his character is too rich for Alicia’s blood. He costs $5 more than another investigator so Alicia goes with the cheaper one…for now.

Cary and Howard are fighting about something and I don’t know or care what.

Mamie Gummer is back guest starring as Amy Irving’s lawyer. The good wife feels for Amy Irving’s son because he’s clearly a screwed up twentysomething and it’s probably because of all these naked photos of him running around. She is going to try to get the Chicago Museum not to show the photos.

Eli calls the good wife and lets her know that Peter won’t let her hire him as her chief of staff. The good wife is like, “no way, José” and goes to visit her husband and is like “LET ME HIRE ELI OR I WILL DESTROY YOU BY TELLING THE PRESS HOW OUR MARRIAGE IS A SHAM” and Peter is like, “ok ok ok ok.”

Amy Irving and the son she photographed nude as a child meet and he is like, “mom, please don’t put these photos in the museum” and his mom is like, “I’m an artist, kiddo.” Amy Irving is really good at playing a hippy artist here.

Alicia’s case against Amy Irving has to do with whether her son ever gave consent to be photographed nude. Mamie Gummer says Amy Irving gave consent because she is the child’s mom.

Margo Martidale dispatches a spy to be Eli’s assistant and report back to her all his activities because she finally realizes that he isn’t giving up without a fight.

Amy Irving’s son takes the stand and explains how ever since the photographs of him naked where made public he has received emails from pedophiles. “After the book was published I’d come out of school and these…men…would be waiting for me.” Gross.

Cary and Howard are still fighting. I don’t want to bother trying to explain this storyline but one of Howard’s throw away lines is: “I can some up the Cubs turnaround in one word: Jews.”

The investigator Alicia hired screws up a bunch because she is utterly incompetent and Alicia is like “damn i should have hired that famous actor who was far too famous to only appear in one scene of this TV show.”

Amy Irving takes the stand and is all, “look, back off, ok? I am an artist and lots of artists use their children as subjects and if I were a man you’d be throwing me a fucking parade” and then the bond attorney who is now Alicia’s second chair is like, “I’m not in the business of throwing parades for people who take photos of naked children.”

Back at Alicia’s house, Eli presents the good wife with a plan to make her “Saint Alicia” again. She needs to go the Democratic party chief who screwed her over last season. I don’t remember all the details of that but he was corrupt and forced Alicia to drop out of the State’s Attorney race even though she had totally won and not done anything wrong. He is a bad corrupt person. That is all we need to know.

The corrupt man asks Eli to let him and Alicia talk privately and is like “I want to put you on the election board. People like people on the election board! But here’s the thing, I need you to do me a corrupt favor. Vote No on the first vote. DON’T ASK ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT THE FIRST VOTE WILL BE BUT JUST VOTE NO, OK?” And the good wife says, “ok,” because the good wife is not a perfect human being.

Alicia fires her shitty investigator and calls the guy from Watchmen but he maybe is going to work for Cary. Cary can offer him a lot more money.

Anyway blah blah the case of the naked child continues and it isn’t going great for Alicia and Amy Irving’s kid but then P.I. Watchmen suggests she put a pedophile on the stand and the pedophile is like, “oh yeah I love looking at those photos of that kid naked! All the pedos love it!” It’s a darkly humorous scene.

The judge isn’t convinced that it’s kiddie porn though and is like “museum can open!” but then Alicia realizes she can go after Amy Irving for lost wages because the kid was a subject of the photo and was essentially working during the photo shoots. She is going to sue Amy Irving for a whole lot of money.

It seems like ol’ good wife has Amy Irving over a barrel but then the kid is like “mom, i don’t want your money I just want the photos so the pedophiles will leave me alone” and the good wife is like, “the photos are still on the internet, kid. You can’t unring the bell. But this money can help you start a new bell.” Amy Irving looks at the kid and reaches her hand across the table. The kid reaches his hand and joins his in hers. This is the end of the scene.

Peter tells Margo Martindale that Eli did a good thing by getting Alicia on the elections board and that she should call him and give him an attaboy. She is disturbed by this instruction.

Back at the good wife’s home we find out that she won the case on behalf of Amy Irving’s son and got a nice chunk of change so apparently that handshake meant Amy Irving was agreeing to pay her kid. The male investigator shows up and is all “knock knock, I have a really good offer. Can you beat it?” We know what the offer is but Alicia does not. Diane offered him $250 an hour. Alicia says, “what’s the offer I have to beat?” And Jeffrey Dean Morgan (thank god, I finally remembered his name) lies to her and says, “$90 an hour.” Alicia offers him $95 which is still way less than the $250 he was really offered but he says yes because he likessssssssss her.

The end.

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Recap: "The Good Wife" Would Like You to Stop Selling Photos of Your Naked Children

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No, Your Eco-Vacation Is Not Actually Doing Animals Any Favors

by ShelliHollars Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ecotourism—the practice of visiting natural places not just to observe wildlife, but to actively conserve it—has seen dramatic growth in recent years: 7 percent annually, says the International Ecotourism Society, making it the fastest growing segment of the travel market. It’s not hard to understand why when you consider the promise of fun and charitable rewards in equal measure: In one fell swoop, zip-line through the cloud forest and save the orangutans that swing through it, too.

But new research may give travelers pause before dusting off the binoculars or snorkels for their next ecotourism adventure.

A paper published Friday in Trends in Ecology and Evolution suggests that visitors to protected wildlife areas may be harming the local fauna, no matter how good their practices and intentions. In an analysis of 100 studies on animal behavior, researchers found evidence that animals let down their guard in environments where human activity makes predators scarce. Those behaviors could spill into interactions with poachers and natural predators—particularly at night or in the off-season, when the din of humanity abates—to potentially lethal effect.

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No, Your Eco-Vacation Is Not Actually Doing Animals Any Favors

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One State Finally Cracked Down on Deceptive Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers

by QWCJaydentx Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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California on Friday became the only state to target anti-abortion pregnancy centers with a law cracking down on deceptive practices some have used to prevent or dissuade women from having an abortion.

The new law, which forces some crisis pregnancy centers to offer information about public assistance for reproductive services and others to notify patients that there are no medical professionals on staff, passed the California state assembly with a large majority in late May. Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed the bill on Friday night.

It is the first time reproductive rights groups have succeeded in pushing regulations on crisis pregnancy centers across an entire state; only a handful of cities or counties have passed similar laws. Shortly before the act became law, Amy Everitt, the director of NARAL Pro-Choice California, a reproductive rights group that helped draft the bill, said in an interview, “There is more to come.”

But the new law may represent the outer limit of what legislatures can do to regulate crisis pregnancy centers. The measure, called AB 775, almost certainly faces the same fraught legal battles that stalled similar regulations in cities including Baltimore, New York, and Austin. Those battles forced NARAL and its allies to be conservative in crafting the new regulations. For instance, the law cannot force unlicensed centers to inform women that the state health department encourages women to visit licensed medical providers for prenatal care. A new court fight could erode their options even further.

Reproductive rights advocates and public health officials have long sought to raise alarms about crisis pregnancy centers. Run by anti-abortion groups, crisis pregnancy centers sometimes provide pregnant women with misleading medical information in order to discourage them from ending their pregnancies. Others are ambiguous about whether they perform abortions or not in order to get women through the door. According to an investigation by NARAL, almost half of California’s crisis pregnancy centers promulgate the popular anti-abortion myth that terminating a pregnancy is linked to a patient’s chances of developing breast cancer. At the same time, NARAL claims, a majority of the state’s crisis pregnancy centers present themselves as neutral on the issue of abortion.

Abortion foes deny that crisis pregnancy centers engage in such subterfuge. “A woman knows her options,” says Sandra Palacios, a government relations executive with the California Catholic Conference, which opposed the law. “Women are smart. They know where they’re walking into—a safe place where they can get all the information about abortion alternatives.”

But as AB 775 was debated in the general assembly, many California medical professionals complained that crisis pregnancy centers offered their patients health care of dubious quality. In a letter to the legislature, Therese McCluskey, the perinatal services coordinator for the Alameda County Public Health Department, said many patients who transfer from crisis pregnancy centers to the clinics she oversees come without prenatal records, lab reports, or the pregnancy verification form that entitles them to pregnancy-related health care. Patients typically transfer at the point when they are too far along in their pregnancy to obtain an abortion.

At a Senate hearing on the bill, one OB-GYN testified that crisis pregnancy centers can pose a risk even for women who wanted to be pregnant and planned to carry their pregnancies full term. Sally Greenwald, of the University of California—San Francisco, is an OB-GYN and recalled taking over the care of a pregnant diabetic woman from a pro-life center. The crisis pregnancy center had failed to treat the woman’s alarming blood sugar levels. “The fetus was exposed to lifelong risks, such as cardiac malformations, brain anomalies, and spine deformations,” says Greenwald. “We could have lowered the sugar in her blood and we could have had better outcomes both for mom and for baby.”

There are nearly 170 crisis pregnancy centers in California. At least 40 percent of them are licensed by the state as medical providers. Unlicensed clinics are prohibited from providing medical advice. For instance, an unlicensed clinic could conduct an ultrasound for a woman, but it could not use the results to determine gestational age.

California’s new law places two types of restrictions on crisis pregnancy centers. It requires pregnancy-related service providers that are not medically licensed to disclose that fact to patients. For reproductive health clinics, including crisis pregnancy centers, that are licensed, the law requires that they provide patients with information about California’s financial assistance for family planning services, prenatal care, and abortion.

“This bill is sort of a lessons-learned bill from all the previous efforts,” says Everitt, of NARAL. As the group and its allies crafted the bill, she adds, they were “acutely aware” of how other bills to regulate crisis pregnancy centers—including some NARAL helped author—had failed in the past.

At the center of those past failures is a feud over whether abortion is a political or a health issue. Abortion foes claim that regulating crisis pregnancy centers is a violation of their right to express opposition to abortion. Reproductive rights advocates counter that the regulations are permissible because states have some latitude to regulate speech that is deceptive or coming from professionals licensed by the state. What is at stake is more than semantics: Supreme Court decisions have set a high bar for regulating political speech, but a low bar when it comes to individuals who are speaking as licensed professionals.

Regulating crisis pregnancy centers, even in blue states, has proved an elusive goal. Federal courts have struck down several laws forcing crisis pregnancy centers to make certain disclosures, such as informing women that they do not offer abortions, birth control, or referrals for those services.

Local officials in Baltimore, New York City, Austin, Maryland’s Montgomery County, and San Francisco have all attempted to regulate crisis pregnancy centers with mixed degrees of success. Federal courts are split over several laws forcing crisis pregnancy centers to disclose up front that they are not medically licensed or do not refer for abortion, and to specify which medical services they do or do not provide.

Attempting to avoid a similar outcome in California, Everitt says, NARAL enlisted the office of Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris. Harris’ office helped draft the bill from its inception with an eye toward eliminating openings for a First Amendment challenge—although a spokeswoman for Harris cautioned that the state’s involvement was no guarantee of success. Harris vocally backed the new law.

Their track record in federal court forced the drafters to leave what they saw as large holes in the new law. “We wish we could get crisis pregnancy centers to stop spreading scientifically unsound messages,” Everitt says, but such a law would likely be struck down in court.

Palacios said the California Catholic Conference intends to sue to block the law. A representative for a coalition of crisis pregnancy centers opposed to the bill did not respond to requests for an interview.

Everitt is confident the law would survive a court challenge. Her group was instrumental in drafting the San Francisco measure, passed in 2011, which has so far survived a legal onslaught. The law allowed the city to fine crisis pregnancy centers each time they falsely implied that they offered abortion services or referrals.

Just as she did in 2011, Everitt hopes the new law will become a national model, especially now that the umbrella organizations behind many crisis pregnancy centers push their affiliates to seek more medical licensing. Crisis pregnancy centers say it is a move to provide better care to women.

NARAL sees crisis pregnancy centers’ push for more licensing as a grab for legitimacy—and a tactical error. “The more there’s a relationship with the state, the more you have leeway to regulate crisis pregnancy centers,” says Rebecca Griffin, an assistant director for NARAL in California. “It’s an opportunity for us.”

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One State Finally Cracked Down on Deceptive Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers

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Here’s What Bernie Sanders Is Like as a Debater

by DebbraOXFM Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Forty-three years ago, moments before the final debate of his first ever political campaign, Bernie Sanders turned to one of his rivals for Vermont’s governorship, Fred Hackett, and made an unusual proposal: What if they switched outfits? The Republican could take off his tie, don Sanders’ ratty blazer, and mess up his hair. Bernie could borrow Hackett’s suit. “I tried to convince Fred that a great historical moment was at hand—that tens of thousands of people would turn on their TV sets and there, right before their uncomprehending eyes, would be a new Fred Hackett,” he recalled in an essay a few months later. “Fred didn’t take my advice—which is probably why he lost the election.” (Sanders, who was running on the third-party Liberty Union ticket, also lost the election.)

That scenario is unlikely to repeat itself on Tuesday, when Sanders faces off against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Democratic presidential field at the Wynn hotel and casino in Las Vegas. After four decades in politics, Sanders is as veteran a debater as they come—but is he any good at it?

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Here’s What Bernie Sanders Is Like as a Debater

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Country-Rocker Corb Lund Shows Off His Wit and High-Lonesome Voice

by RefugioBathurst Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Corb Lund
Things That Can’t Be Undone
New West

With his flexible, high-lonesome voice and witty songs, Corb Lund makes records that have real staying power. On Things That Can’t Be Undone, his first studio outing in three years, the Canadian country-rocker and his nimble supporting trio, the Hurtin’ Albertans, dispatch sizzling boogie rave-ups and heart-tugging ballads equally well, uncorking a batch of snappy tunes bigger names would be smart to cover. Among the high points: “Weight of the Gun,” a loping tale of regret in the spirit of vintage Johnny Cash, “Washed-Up Rock Star Factory Blues,” a hilarious unofficial sequel to Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” and the haunting war story “Sadr City.” Then again, there’s not a dull or false note to be found on this remarkable and rewarding album.

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Country-Rocker Corb Lund Shows Off His Wit and High-Lonesome Voice

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Outrage is Boiling Over the Outcome of New Probes Into the Police Shooting of a 12-year-old. Here Are 6 Takeaways.

by MariMacDonnell Posted on October 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update, 1:45 p.m. EDT: In the hours since two new investigations into the fatal police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice concluded that a Cleveland police officer’s actions were “reasonable,” outrage has spread on Twitter and protesters have taken to the streets. Some called on authorities to redefine what is legally “reasonable.”

Activists in Cleveland and elsewhere saw the reports as a sign that it’s unlikely Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann will face criminal charges for his actions. As demonstrations took place in cities such as Cleveland and Oakland, several high-profile figures weighed in:

Meanwhile, a police union attorney for Frank Garmback, the officer who drove the squad car near Rice before Loehmann opened fire, told Mother Jones Garmback has decided that he will not testify before the grand jury.

Garmback is still considering submitting a written statement to Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty, according to his lawyer Michael Maloney.

“While we are not facing a strict deadline at the moment, it is clear we have to advise the prosecutor of our intentions fairly soon,” he said. Maloney declined to comment further on questions about whether Loehmann will testify or submit a statement soon.

Previously:

Late on Saturday night, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office released conclusions from three additional investigations into the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed by a police officer at a Cleveland park last November.

Two of the reports, written by police use-of-force experts, determined that the actions of Cleveland officer Timothy Loehmann, who fatally wounded Rice within a few seconds of arriving at the scene on November 22, were “objectively reasonable” under federal case law and did not violate the Fourth Amendment. A third investigation reconstructed the shooting scene at the Cudell Recreation Center and examined how quickly the police car was moving when it pulled up to Rice.

Here are the key takeaways from the reports, and questions that remain almost a year since Rice’s death:

The fact that Rice was a kid, or that his gun turned out to be fake, are “irrelevant” in determining whether Loehmann’s actions were reasonable under federal law. According to use of force experts S. Lamar Sims and Kimberly Crawford, the available evidence shows Loehmann could not have known at the time of the shooting that Rice was a boy with a toy gun. Therefore Loehmann acted reasonably—as defined by previous US Supreme Court decisions—when he fired his weapon at Rice, Sims and Crawford concluded. And while key details in the 911 call—that Rice was “probably a juvenile” waving a gun that was “probably fake”—were not relayed to the officers, they “cannot be considered,” Crawford wrote.

Whether Loehmann and the officer who drove the squad car, Frank Garmback, used appropriate tactics also fell outside the scope of Sims and Crawford’s investigations, they said. Garmback pulled the police vehicle to within several feet of Rice, and Loehmann fired shots within two seconds.

“To suggest that Officer Garmback should have stopped the car at another location is to engage in exactly the kind of ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ the case law exhorts us to avoid,” Sims wrote. While it could be argued that the officers escalated the situation “by entering the park and stopping their vehicle so close to a potentially armed subject,” Crawford added, that speculation has “no place in determining the reasonableness of an officer’s use of force.”

The reports do not discuss the fact that Loehmann and Garmback did not administer first aid while Rice lay bleeding. Surveillance footage of the incident showed Loehmann and Garmback stood around for about four minutes without attempting to give any medical attention to Rice. When Rice’s sister approached, Garmback tackled her to the ground. Later, an FBI agent arrived and began to tend to Rice’s wound before an ambulance took him to a hospital. Rice died the next day.

A fundamental principle of policing is that once a threat has been eliminated and a scene secured, an officer’s first priority is to aid an injured person, Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina studying policing, told Mother Jones in May. “At that point, the officer and his medical kit might be the only thing between the suspect and death,” said Stoughton, who who previously served as a police officer in Florida for five years. “It’s not only an ethical requirement, but almost certainly a departmental imperative to do what they can to save the life of the suspect. The failure to do that is really disturbing.”

The officers still aren’t talking to investigators. Both Loehmann and Garmback have declined to give statements to investigators or the county prosecutor, under the advice of their lawyers. In June, their attorney Michael Maloney told Mother Jones that the officers “have not ruled out the possibility” of providing a written statement to the prosecutor. They have not decided whether they will testify before the grand jury.

It’s unclear whether Loehmann will face criminal charges. A total of four investigations have now been made public in the wake of Rice’s death, none of which are intended to draw conclusions about whether officer Loehmann should be charged. As county prosecutor Timothy McGinty explains, all reports will be reviewed by a grand jury, which will then determine whether Loehmann will face criminal charges.

The officer who drove the car may face scrutiny, too. Thus far, the investigation into Rice’s death has focused on Loehmann, and it remains unclear whether the actions of Garmback will warrant a separate criminal or departmental investigation.

Stoughton, the law enforcement expert, told Mother Jones, “It was a ludicrous way to approach a scene where you’ve been told that there is a person with a gun who has been aiming it at bystanders. I would expect the officers would park at a safe distance and walk up, using cover and concealment, and try to initiate communication at a distance. That’s the ‘three Cs’ of tactical response.”

It’s unclear when a grand jury will take up the case. The new documents, along with the initial probe into the shooting led by the county sheriff’s office, will be presented to a grand jury as it decides whether to indict Loehmann, McGinty said in Saturday’s press release. McGinty’s office declined to comment further on the grand jury process. It remains unclear whether a grand jury has been impaneled and when a hearing will take place.

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Outrage is Boiling Over the Outcome of New Probes Into the Police Shooting of a 12-year-old. Here Are 6 Takeaways.

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