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This Is Why Sanders Can Stay in the Race Until the Bitter End

by LavonRoyston Posted on April 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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The delegate math is daunting for Bernie Sanders. As numbers-cruncher Nate Silver explained last week, the democratic socialist senator from Vermont has to win handily big states—most notably New York and California—in order to close his gap with Hillary Clinton in the pledged delegate count, and then he must convince hundreds of superdelegates to back him.

But Sanders will be able to fight to the very end, for one simple reason: He has a lot of money. Each month this year, the Sanders campaign has raised more money than the last. In January, he hauled in $20 million; in February, $43.5 million; and in March, $44 million. (Clinton raised $29.5 million in March.) And while Sanders is spending that money at a fast clip, he is collecting enough to sustain the high burn rate. The campaign spent $50 million in February yet ended the month with more cash in the bank ($17.2 million) than at the beginning of the month ($14.7 million). There is no complete data available yet for March.

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This Is Why Sanders Can Stay in the Race Until the Bitter End

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Climate activists gear up to protest new oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

by LacyC35223213562 Posted on March 21, 2016

Climate activists gear up to protest new oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

By on 21 Mar 2016commentsShare

Louisiana’s Superdome has been a controversial setting for climate emergencies in the past, serving as the refuge for 30,000 people who were washed out of their homes during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Now, it’s about to become a site for a battle between activists and a leading climate culprit: the oil and gas industry.

Federal regulators will be auctioning off 43 million acres of offshore oil and gas leases in the central and eastern Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday. The proposed sale includes 7,919 federally owned oil and gas drilling tracts located three to 230 miles offshore, some of them at depths of more than 11,000 feet.

Several national environmental organizations, including the Rainforest Action Network and 350.org, community members, and indigenous rights groups plan a rally outside the site this Wednesday to oppose new leases for offshore drilling leases. Inside the arena, the real action will be happening: The reserves, which activists say contain the eighth-largest carbon reserve on Earth, could be snapped up by oil and gas companies looking to tap into the Gulf’s still-vast fossil fuel resources.

“We want the administration to stop treating the Gulf like an energy sacrifice zone,” Marissa Knodel, a climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth who was en route to New Orleans to lead the rally, told Grist. “Louisiana is already seeing the devastating impacts from changing climate, with relocation efforts already underway.”

In his final year in office, President Barack Obama has charged forward with sweeping environmental policies, including a moratorium on new coal leases and, just last week, a five-year plan that closes the door the on fossil fuel drilling off the Atlantic coast for the next five years. Drilling opponents hope that the late-term pro-climate president will continue his streak by reversing his plan to offer 10 new leases in the Gulf. He was the president who acknowledged that the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf was the “worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.”

The rich deposits lying untapped under thousands of feet of ocean in the Gulf of Mexico are a driller’s dream: The Gulf’s 8,000 seeps, or natural springs where oil and gas leak out of the seafloor. Scientists estimate that the Gulf may contain as many as 42 billion barrels of crude oil, even with the drilling that began in the area in 1954.

There’s a large reserve in the Gulf that already contains infrastructure needed for drilling, like dozens of refineries located close by. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimated last September that the new leases could lead to the production of as many as 894 million barrels of oil and as much as 3.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Unlike Atlantic drilling, which faced relatively large opposition because offshore drilling had never taken hold in the area, the battle to closing drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is a bigger challenge, requiring the Gulf to turn away from a lucrative industry that has kept it afloat for decades. But given the effects of rapid climate change and rising sea levels in Gulf states, turning to renewables may be the only way they stay afloat, in a much more literal sense.

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Climate activists gear up to protest new oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

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Here’s Who’s Looking Strong in Today’s "Super Saturday" Contests

by NevilleLocke2 Posted on March 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Voters headed to the polls in five states today as Donald Trump looked to continue his march to the GOP nominating convention and Republican party leaders scrambled for ways to stop him. On the Republican side, 155 delegates were at stake in Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Maine; candidates need 1,237 delegates to wrap up the nomination. Donald Trump, who began the day with 329 delegates according to the Associated Press, was looking to extend his lead over Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who have 231 and 110 delegates respectively. Ohio Gov. John Kasich—who has won only 25 delegates so far—has begun angling for a contested convention in Cleveland while Ben Carson all but dropped out on Wednesday.

For the Democrats, 109 delegates were up for grabs in Louisiana, Kansas, and Nebraska. Clinton headed into these states with 1,066 delegates, the Associated Press reported, nearly half of the 2,383 needed to wrap up the Democratic nomination. (Clinton’s count includes 458 superdelegates, who may vote for any candidate, as the New York Times reports.) Sen. Bernie Sanders started the day with 432 delegates and was hoping to make a strong showing in Nebraska and Kansas: The Huffington Post reported that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook sent a memo to staffers saying Clinton could lose in those states.

We’ll be here with updates as the results come in.

UPDATE 9, March 5, 8:50 p.m. PT: Speaking to supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump called for Rubio to drop out of the race after losing all but one of the 19 Republican contests so far. “I think it’s time for Marco to clean the deck,” he said. “I would love to take on Ted one on one. That would be so much fun…That would be easy.”

After commenting that he would order military personnel to torture terror suspects and then backpedaling on Friday, telling the Wall Street Journal that he would be “bound by laws,” Trump returned Saturday to the subject of torture. “I am totally in favor of waterboarding, and if we can, I’d like to do much more than that,” he said. “I will try to get the laws extended, broadened…so we can better compete with a vicious group of animals.”

One journalist brought up Thursday’s Fox News debate, in which Rubio made a jab at Trump’s “small hands”—and Trump reassured voters that “there’s no problem.”

“Marco just made it up, because he’s a politician, and politicians lie,” Trump said Saturday night. For those worried about the tone of a presidential campaign in which the front-runner reassured voters about the size of his manhood, Trump also had an answer: “I will be the most presidential candidate in history.”

UPDATE 8, March 5, 7:55 p.m. PT: The final race of the night has wrapped up. Trump won Kentucky with 35.1 percent of the vote, followed closely by Cruz with 31.4 percent, networks are reporting. Eighty-four percent of results have been counted.

UPDATE 7, March 5, 7:07 p.m. PT: Sanders, who tonight adds victories in Kansas and Nebraska to his wins in Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma, told the Associated Press that his campaign is bearing out its promise of a “political revolution.” In the coming months, Democratic candidates will turn their sights on New York, California, Oregon and Washington state. “I think in all of those states, we’ve got a shot to win it,” Sanders said, adding that wins in those states could convince some of Clinton’s superdelegates to switch their allegiance to his campaign.

UPDATE 6, March 5: 6:53 p.m. PT: Trump has won the Louisiana primary with 45.7 percent of the vote, networks are reporting, with 16 percent of results in. Forty-six delegates are up for grabs in the state. Cruz is in second with 29 percent of the vote, with Rubio trailing at 15.8 percent.

UPDATE 5, March 5: 6:23 p.m. PT: Networks quickly projected a Clinton win after polls closed in Louisiana, which, with its prize of 51 delegates, is the most important Democratic contest of the night. With just 8 percent of results in, Clinton had won 71.1 percent of the vote. Sanders trailed at 21.4 percent.

UPDATE 4, March 5: 6:10 p.m. PT: Sanders appears to be edging out Clinton in Nebraska, earning 54.8 percent of the Democratic vote to Clinton’s 45.2 percent, announced Vince Powers, the state Democratic Party chair. Seventy-five percent of polling locations are reporting, and the results are not final yet, Powers said.

UPDATE 3, March 5, 5:55 p.m. PT: Cruz picked up his second win of the night, earning 45.8 percent of the vote and 12 delegates in Maine, state GOP party chairman Rick Bennett announced in a speech in Lewiston, Maine. In second, Trump gained nine delegates and 32.5 percent of the vote, while Kasich picked up two delegates and 12.2 percent. Rubio failed to gain any delegates in the state, trailing at just 8 percent in the polls.

UPDATE 2, March 5, 5:30 p.m. PT: The Kansas Democratic Party has called Kansas for Sanders, with 90 percent of the vote in, CNN is reporting.

UPDATE 1, March 5, 2:45 p.m. PT: With just more than half the vote in, the Associated Press has called Kansas for Cruz, with 51 percent of the vote. Forty delegates are up for grabs in the state.

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Here’s Who’s Looking Strong in Today’s "Super Saturday" Contests

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Bernie Sanders’ secret weapon on Super Tuesday

by MerryCalloway Posted on March 2, 2016

Bernie Sanders’ secret weapon on Super Tuesday

By on 2 Mar 2016 12:44 pmcommentsShare

Bernie Sanders won four out of 13 Super Tuesday contests last night — his home state of Vermont, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Colorado. Sanders knew the last three states, as well as Massachusetts (which he lost narrowly) were critical to remaining competitive with Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. He had a natural advantage in these states, given that he polls better among white and blue-collar voters. But he had another secret weapon that gave him an additional edge: In battleground primaries, Sanders emphasized his firm position against hydraulic fracturing to drive a wedge between Clinton and Democratic voters.

Sanders staked out an early position against fracking, a controversial drilling process that extracts oil or natural gas from deep underground. Yet he didn’t do much to highlight this position before last month, in an effort to distinguish himself from Clinton’s environmental platform.  “I do not support fracking,” Sanders said in a statement a week ago. “I don’t need money from hedge fund managers and I don’t want money from those who profit off of the destruction of our planet.” Days before Super Tuesday, Bernie Sanders launched an ad campaign in Minnesota and Colorado highlighting his opposition to fracking. If elected, Sanders would be limited in how much he could do to ban fracking outright, but my colleague Ben Adler outlined some of what he could do to reform it.

It’s no coincidence that fracking and its associated operations is controversial in three of the four states he won in. Oil production has doubled and tripled in Oklahoma and Colorado, respectively, since 2009. Besides local concerns over its impact on water quality, there’s also been a corresponding boom in minor earthquakes near fracking sites. Scientists are growing more and more certain the quakes are linked to the wastewater injected in the ground after drilling:

USGS

Minnesota, meanwhile, is a popular source for silica sand, or “frac sand,” a sediment needed to drill in nearby fracking hotbeds. Industry groups say these operations in Wisconsin and Minnesota have more than doubled over the past decade to 75 million metric tons, primarily driven by the oil and gas industry’s demand for frac sand. Silica dust is a carcinogen that causes lung problems.

Sanders emphasized more than just fracking in Minnesota. He drew attention to his opposition to two pipelines that would ship Canada tar sand crude oil across the border. Sanders emphasized his opposition to these pipelines, Enbridge’s Sandpiper and Alberta Clipper, which would ship 1.4 million barrels of oil a day, in a stump speech on Monday. He’d follow the same precedent set by the Keystone XL pipeline rejection, saying those “are exactly the same standards that we need to apply to the Alberta Clipper and the Sandpiper, and that is what I would do as president of the United States of America.”

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Now, Sanders didn’t win big in all major fracking territories. Texas, after all, went to Clinton, by 65 percent.

Tuesday night, Clinton might have unintentionally helped reinforce the contrast Sanders hopes to draw in her victory speech from a city that’s drowning from sea level rise — Miami, Fla. As Clinton now turns her attention to the general election, her Miami speech was light on climate change and environmental issues. Though there was one exception. Clinton adopted Flint’s lead-poisoned water crisis in her stump speech weeks ago, and took time at the end of her remarks to discuss it again. Flint is “a story of a community that’s been knocked down but refused to be knocked out. It is hundreds of union plumbers coming from across the country to help install new water fixtures. It is students raising funds for hundreds of deliveries of bottled water,” ” Clinton closed her speech with. “They’re not about to quit now.”

So, Clinton is championing clean water and Flint, while Sanders’ focus is on clean water and fracking. Expect both to hit on these issues again as we head into primaries in Michigan, North Carolina, and Louisiana, and western states.

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Bernie Sanders’ secret weapon on Super Tuesday

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This Court Ruling Brings Another State Down to One Abortion Clinic

by CandidaEasterbr Posted on February 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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The US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Wednesday upheld a Texas-style law requiring all abortion providers in Louisiana to have admitting privileges with local hospitals.

The now-active law will shutter three of the four clinics left in Louisiana. This means that for many women, the closest option will be the clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, which is the only clinic remaining in Mississippi, where strict abortion regulations took the number of clinics from 14 in 1981 to just 1 in 2012.

The Louisiana law, which was signed by Gov. Bobby Jindal in 2014, requires physicians who perform abortions to have “active admitting privileges at a hospital that is located not further than thirty miles from the location at which the abortion in performed.” Texas’ omnibus anti-abortion law from 2013, which is getting a hearing in front of the Supreme Court next week, included a similar provision. And the 2013 admitting privileges law in Mississippi was responsible for closing all but one clinic in the state.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, along with Louisiana women’s health care providers, announced their intent to fight Wednesday’s court decision, which overturned a lower court ruling to block the law, by appealing to the Supreme Court.

“Today’s ruling thrusts Louisiana into a reproductive health care crisis, where women will face limited safe and legal options when they’ve made the decision to end a pregnancy,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “We will immediately seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court so these clinics are able to reopen and continue serving the women of Louisiana.”

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This Court Ruling Brings Another State Down to One Abortion Clinic

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Prostitution Scandals, Police Chases, and an Alleged Love Child: Welcome to the Louisiana Governor’s Race

by AlanStarling Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, Louisiana voters will elect a new governor—Republican Sen. David Vitter or Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards. They’ll also celebrate the end of one of the strangest campaigns in recent history. It has included prostitutes, an alleged love child, a coffee-shop spying scandal, a low-speed foot chase, an IHOP affidavit, the FBI, Santa Claus, and a fake terrorism scare.

Edwards is leading in most polls by double digits in the deep-red state—a testament to the supreme unpopularity of the current Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, and to Vitter’s own shortcomings. In some ways, they’re not so different. The Democratic challenger is, like Vitter, anti-abortion and pro-gun, and he asked President Barack Obama to halve the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Louisiana. (The Pelican State has thus far accepted 14.)

But Edwards has also backed accepting federal money to expand Medicaid with no strings attached. (Vitter has said he would not take expansion “off the table” but did not want to create an incentive for people to stop working.) Democrats hoping for off-year electoral successes suffered a major blow when Obamacare critic Matt Bevin was elected governor of Kentucky earlier in November. In Louisiana, they have a chance to quietly offset that loss and put a lot more folks on the Medicaid rolls. That’s a big deal.

But the race is memorable for less substantive reasons. These are all real things that have happened over the final month of the campaign:

One week before the October election—Saturday’s runoff vote between the top two October finishers was triggered because no candidate received majority support—a Louisiana blogger named Jason Berry published a video interview on his website, American Zombie, with a former prostitute who alleged that Vitter paid her $5,000 a month for three years, gave her jewelry, got her pregnant, and told her to get an abortion. The former prostitute, Wendy Ellis, told Berry she was coming forward because she was dying of lupus and wanted a clean conscience.
Berry would not reveal exactly how he found Ellis but admitted he’d gotten in touch with her through a professional political researcher.
On the eve of the first election, a private investigator employed by a law firm paid by the Vitter campaign was caught secretly filming a group of Edwards supporters, including Jefferson Parish sheriff Newell Normand, during a regular coffee meeting at the Royal Blend cafe in Old Metairie.
When a member of the group took a photo of the P.I., he fled on foot through a succession of vacant properties. The Edwards supporters pursued the P.I. through the neighborhood, and found him hiding behind an air-conditioning unit. He was arrested and charged with criminal mischief.
The private investigator told sheriff deputies that he was not spying on the sheriff, but rather “on an assignment to conduct surveillance on a subject with a white beard.”
The “subject with a white beard” revealed himself to be a New Orleans lawyer and Edwards supporter named John Cummings, who told the Baton Rouge Advocate, “The stupid son of a bitch was supposed to find Santa Claus in the cafe; that’s the guy with the white beard.”
Cummings added, “You can tell David Vitter that he doesn’t get anything for Christmas. He’s been naughty.”
The deputies found a LexisNexis dossier inside the private investigator’s car about Berry, the American Zombie blogger who published the story about Vitter and his alleged love child.
Berry told reporters that he had seen the private investigator outside his own house two days earlier. “I don’t know whether it was incompetence, whether he’s like Inspector Clouseau, or whether the guy actually wanted me to see him, but it was pretty clear what was going on when I made eye contact with him and he smiled at me,” he told WWL-TV.
Unbeknownst to Vitter’s P.I., the opposition researcher who helped Berry track down Ellis was also at the Royal Blend. The investigator, Danny Denoux, told the Advocate that he had been retained by an anonymous businessman.
Edwards’ first ad of the runoff election, aired during a Louisiana State University football game, stated, “David Vitter chose prostitutes over patriots. Now, the choice is yours.”

Vitter told reporters he sent documents to the FBI and the local US Attorney’s office accusing Cummings (“the guy with the white beard”) of paying a witness to make false statements against him. (Cummings has denied this.)
The next day, Normand, the Jefferson Parish sheriff who chased Vitter’s P.I. through the streets of Metairie, held a press conference to announce that he had recovered video footage from the private investigator’s phone, depicting a 30-minute interview at an IHOP with an acquaintance of the prostitute. The investigator on the tape was attempting to persuade Ellis’ friend, an unidentified woman, to sign an affidavit discrediting Ellis’ claims. Norman read aloud several excerpts from the meeting. “I’d like you to say Jason Berry made payment to several witnesses,” the investigator told the woman. “If I could show then Jason Berry paying people off, that would kind of kill this story.” Normand told reporters he was going to turn the tapes over to the FBI. (Berry has denied paying sources for material.)
Vitter returned to the scene of the crime, holding a private meeting with donors at—of all places—the Royal Blend cafe in Metairie, where his P.I. had filmed Normand’s coffee meeting.
After Vitter took umbrage at the ad about the prostitutes during their debate, Edwards told Vitter, “If it’s a low blow, it’s only be­cause that’s where you live, senator—it’s 100 percent truthful”:

Citing “those extracurricular activities that you don’t want to admit to,” the Democrat continued, “You’re a liar and you’re a cheater and you’re a stealer and I don’t tolerate that.” (Vitter has denied being a liar and a stealer.)
Trailing in the polls by double digits, Vitter wrote an open letter to Obama warning him that a Syrian refugee who had resettled in Louisiana had gone “missing.” The Louisiana GOP picked up Vitter’s talking point and emailed supporters, “There is an unmonitored Syrian refugee who is walking around freely, and no one knows where he is.”
There was no missing Syrian refugee.
Normand, who can’t not comment about these things, told the Gambit that “somebody’s going to get killed” as a result of Vitter’s misinformation.

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Prostitution Scandals, Police Chases, and an Alleged Love Child: Welcome to the Louisiana Governor’s Race

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A Federal Judge Just Gave an Epic Defense of Planned Parenthood That Everyone Should Read

by DannielleLay Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a blistering opinion, a federal judge blocked Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s attempt to defund Planned Parenthood in the state, saying the move would cause “irreparable harm” to the 5,200 women who depend on the organization for health care.

In July, Jindal ordered an investigation into the group following the release of a series of highly edited videos that show Planned Parenthood officials discussing fetal tissue donation. He also ordered the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) to cancel Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast’s (PPGC) Medicaid contract, which it did in August, effectively defunding the organization in the state. Neither of the two Planned Parenthood clinics in Louisiana offer abortions. Planned Parenthood took the DHH to court later that month.

US District Judge John W. deGravelles issued a restraining order against the DHH’s move late Sunday. The order will remain in place for at least two weeks while the judge makes a final ruling on the case. However, in his opinion, deGravelles was outspoken in his support of Planned Parenthood. He wrote that the DHH attack on the organization was baseless:

The uncontradicted evidence in the record at this time is that PPGC does not perform abortions in Louisiana, is not involved in the sale of fetal tissue and none of the conduct in question occurred at the PPGC’s two Louisiana facilities. Based on the record before it, it appears likely that Plaintiff will be able to prove that the attempted termination against it are motived and driven, at least in large part, by reasons unrelated to its competence and unique to it.

He also disputed a common Republican argument (which former Mother Jones reporter Molly Redden debunked last month) that closing Planned Parenthood won’t burden its patients, who would have access to other reproductive health providers in the area. According to deGravelles, defunding Planned Parenthood would leave thousands of women without options:

The Court turns to the uncontested and unquestioned facts—PPGC serves 5,200 poor and needy women, and PPGC has repeatedly been deemed a ‘competent’ provider by DHH—and honors the public interest in affording these women access to their provider of choice…For decades, PPGC has served numerous at-risk individuals and helped DHH combat a host of diseases, and, in the process, become the regular provider of over 5,000 women.

Several other states, including Arkansas, Utah, and Alabama, have cut funding for Planned Parenthood by canceling Medicaid contracts. In August, the Obama administration notified Alabama and Louisiana that cutting Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding may violate federal law.

For its part, Jindal’s office said on Monday that the governor would “continue to fight to ensure Planned Parenthood no longer receives taxpayer funding.”

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A Federal Judge Just Gave an Epic Defense of Planned Parenthood That Everyone Should Read

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Women in Texas May Have to Wait an Extra 20 Days for an Abortion

by RoseannSchaeffer Posted on October 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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New research from the University of Texas—Austin has found that women seeking abortions in cities such as Dallas, Forth Worth, and Austin face staggering wait times of up to 20 days before they can get the procedure. The data, which researchers working for the Texas Policy Evaluation Project released Monday, provides a startling look at the effects of abortion clinic closures in Texas just as the Supreme Court is deciding whether or not to hear a case that could slash the number of remaining clinics by half.

Wait times at abortion clinics in Austin, Texas.

Researchers documented wait times for clinics in Forth Worth, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston from November 2014 to September 2015. In Austin, the average wait over the course of those 11 months was 10 days. In Dallas and Fort Worth, the annual average was 5 days. They also calculated the average monthly wait times and the range of wait times in a given month and found that average wait times within a single month reached up to 20 days in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—where there are five abortion clinics—and wait times for individual patients could reach up to 23 days.

The escalating wait times are a result of successful efforts to close more than half of Texas’s abortion clinics. Most of those clinics were closed by HB 2, a 2013 anti-abortion law that many consider to be the harshest in the nation. Its provisions included a requirement that clinics must have admitting privileges with a hospital no more than 30 miles away. Before the measure, Texas had 41 clinics; four months after it took effect, there were only 22. Today, there are 19.

A final provision of the law, which may be the subject of a Supreme Court battle later this year, would close all but 10 clinics if it goes into effect. That measure requires abortion clinics to be regulated similarly to hospitals, which makes it dramatically more expensive to operate an abortion clinic. Leading medical organizations, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, maintain this level of medical infrastructure is not necessary to safely perform most abortions. Whole Woman’s Health, a chain of abortion clinics with several providers in Texas, sued in federal court and succeeded in having the Supreme Court temporarily block the law. The court could make a decision to hear the full case as soon as this month.

A wait time of almost three weeks has serious consequences for women seeking abortions, ranging from her ability to afford an abortion, which becomes more expensive as the pregnancy progresses, to intensity of the procedure. In the second trimester, the cost of an abortion may go up by a hundred dollars every week. The researchers found that if the Supreme Court were to allow all but 10 clinics to close, it would almost double the number of second-trimester procedures in Texas—from 6,600 in 2013 to 12,400.

The researchers also predicted that if the Supreme Court upheld HB 2, the 10 clinics that would remain open would not have the capacity to meet demand. Those clinics today provide only one-fifth of abortions in Texas. If they were the only clinics in Texas, they would probably experience consistent wait times of around three weeks. For instance, the Houston area saw an average wait time of less than five days. But Houston has six clinics. If the law were fully in place, it would only have two clinics. And as clinics closed around the state, the number of abortions taking place in Houston would rise from 3,900 in 2013 to more than 11,000.

Clinics in states bordering Texas are already feeling the crush. Kathaleen Pittman, an official with Hope Medical Group of Shreveport, Louisiana, said in an interview that the proportion of Texans going to Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport, Louisiana, has leapt from 15 percent of patients in 2011 to 23 percent in 2014.

And the South isn’t the only region where clinic closures have sent a wave of patients looking for new providers. The problem is also pronounced in Ohio, where eight clinics have closed since 2011. Officials for Preterm, a clinic in Cleveland, say the number of patients traveling from a different part of Ohio has jumped 160 percent, and the number of patients from out of state has almost doubled.

As Mother Jones reported in a recent feature, a clinic called the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in southern New Jersey is seeing more and more patients from Virginia, because clinics in Maryland and Delaware are overbooked, and from the Midwest, because many clinics there have closed. An analysis by Mother Jones found that clinics are closing at a rate of 1.5 per week. If the trend keeps up, the new data from Texas may turn out to be a bellwether for the rest of the nation.

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Women in Texas May Have to Wait an Extra 20 Days for an Abortion

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Angry Obama Blasts Congress for Failing America on Guns

by HoracioBittner Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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At a press conference Thursday, President Barack Obama was visibly frustrated with a lack of action from Congress to prevent mass shootings like the one that happened today at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.

“It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun,” Obama said.

He recalled an interview in which he said that America is the only country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings regularly. Hours later, there were reports of a shooting at a Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater.

He continued: “We spend over $1 trillion on preventing terrorism…yet we have a Congress that prevents us from even collecting data on how to reduce gun deaths.”

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Angry Obama Blasts Congress for Failing America on Guns

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Investigations Prove the Planned Parenthood "Sting" Videos Were a Bust

by CharlesThrelfal Posted on August 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Since undercover videos that captured Planned Parenthood staff discussing fetal tissue donations were released last month, GOP officials in more than 10 states have clamored to launch investigations into the organization. On Tuesday, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley joined that group, ordering her state’s health department to review the policies and practices of all abortion clinics in the state, including the three operated by Planned Parenthood.

“These practices are not consistent with the laws or character of our state,” Haley wrote in her letter to the state agency tasked with regulating abortion clinics, adding that it “cannot allow an organization with broken internal oversight and a flawed corporate culture to behave the way Planned Parenthood has in other states.”

In the videos, recorded surreptitiously and released by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood officials talk frankly about the organization’s tissue donation program and the costs associated with donating fetal tissue from an abortion. Though fetal tissue donation is a long-standing and legal practice in the United States, and has contributed to medical advancements like the polio vaccine, conservatives have used the videos to attack the health care organization, saying they provide evidence that Planned Parenthood illegally profits from the sale of aborted fetuses. And they’ve pushed for investigations to unmask this purported criminal wrongdoing.

But so far, those investigations are falling flat. Completed probes in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, and South Dakota have spent thousands in taxpayer money but turned up no evidence that Planned Parenthood is trafficking in the sale of fetal tissue. And in most of the other states that have launched investigations—including Ohio, Arizona, Texas, and Kansas—Planned Parenthood affiliates don’t even have fetal tissue donation programs, making it hard to believe the states will find any illegal activity related to the practice. In Louisiana, where Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered an investigation in mid-July, Planned Parenthood does not even operate a single clinic.

“In every state where these investigations have concluded, officials have cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation, told the Huffington Post. “We’ve said all along that Planned Parenthood follows all laws and has very high medical standards, and that’s what every one of these investigations has found.”

Not every governor has taken the bait. Democratic governors in Minnesota and Virginia have rejected state legislators’ pleas to look into the group, saying they won’t waste time investigating programs that don’t exist in their states.

“As far as I’m concerned, there’s no basis for an investigation at taxpayer expense into a private nonprofit organization that has stated they don’t engage in those practices,” Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton told local reporters after he received a letter from GOP lawmakers asking him to take action.

Other states have taken another approach since the release of the videos: Governors in Alabama and Arkansas, along with Louisiana’s Jindal, have moved to block Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, which they may not be able to do under federal law. Meanwhile, public opinion of the organization remains high. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that despite weeks of bad news, Planned Parenthood is still more popular than every major 2016 presidential contender, the NRA, and the Supreme Court.

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Investigations Prove the Planned Parenthood "Sting" Videos Were a Bust

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