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Why You Still Shouldn’t Trust Susan G. Komen, Even After Their Reversal

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If there is one thing every human being knows, it’s the idea of trust. And when that trust is broken, it’s hard to rebuild it. Perhaps in a marriage, over time, trust can be restored, hopefully. But in a relationship with an organization, that trust has to be based both on actions and on research. And the bottom line with the new Susan G. Komen For The Cure organization is that the people who were once part of the organization that was known since its founding as The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation is that it’s an entirely different organization than America once knew, and trusted. Frankly, their name change proves their desire to move from being a cancer non-profit to a political organization.

It’s like when your local neighborhood bank gets bought out by a huge international financial conglomerate. “Union Trust” becomes Bank of America. Everything changes. Oh, they promise it won’t, but you and I know it always does. New policies, new practices, new people.

And it’s these new people at Komen that have changed a once non-political non-profit breast cancer fighting organization into a political profiteering organization with an agenda, beholden to the radical right.

Yes, Komen today reversed course and possibly reinstated funding to Planned Parenthood, but the fact remains that their bylaws have not changed — this is a temporary move, with no guarantee that they will fund Planned Parenthood in the future, or not restrict their funding either.

In fact, as The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent reports, it’s unclear Komen will fund Planned Parenthood in the future at all:

As some were quick to point out, the statement put out by Komen doesn’t really clarify whether Planned Parenthood will actually continue to get money from the group. The original rationale for barring Planned Parenthood was that it was under investigation (a witch-hunt probe undertaken by GOP Rep Cliff Stearns). Komen said today that the group would “amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political.”

Does that mean Planned Parenthood will get Komen grants in the future?

I asked Komen board member John Raffaelli to respond to those who are now saying that the announcement doesn’t necessarily constitute a reversal until Planned Parenthood actually sees more funding. He insisted it would be unfair to expect the group to commit to future grants.

“It would be highly unfair to ask us to commit to any organization that doesn’t go through a grant process that shows that the money we raise is used to carry out our mission,” Raffaelli told me. “We’re a humaniatrian organization. We have a mission. Tell me you can help carry out our mission and we will sit down at the table.”

News reports yesterday confirmed that Komen lost several long-time senior executives who resigned upon losing the battle to keep funding Planned Parenthood. And as we already know, newly-hired Komen Vice President Karen Handel is the catalyst behind the defunding of Planned Parenthood.

Dropping funding for Planned Parenthood was Handle’s top agenda — long before she found a way to do it from the inside.

Just nine months ago, Handel secured a position at Komen as their Senior Vice President of Public Policy, and immediately went to work on her plan to defund Planned Parenthood. Ultimately, by convincing the Board of Directors that a change to the organization’s by-laws that prohibited them from funding groups under congressional investigation would protect the Dallas, Texas based group, Handel found her way to defund Planned Parenthood, a huge win for the woman who had run for Georgia Governor on a platform that included defunding Planned Parenthood at the state level.

Yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic confirmed all this, writing that “three sources with direct knowledge of the Komen decision-making process told me that the rule was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut off Planned Parenthood. (Komen gives out grants to roughly 2,000 organizations, and the new ‘no investigations’ rule applies to only one so far.) The decision to create a rule that would cut funding to Planned Parenthood, according to these sources, was driven by the organization’s new senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, a former gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who is staunchly anti-abortion and who has said that since she is ‘pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.’ (The Komen grants to Planned Parenthood did not pay for abortion or contraception services, only cancer detection, according to all parties involved.)”

But if you’re still not convinced about the tenure and trustworthiness of Karen Handel, a few more bits of information.

One, Handel was a member of the Georgia Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group, yet denied it during her gubernatorial campaign and even claimed to be against gay rights, including marriage. Handel was endorsed by the Log Cabin Republicans in 2002 and 2003.

Secondly, as Georgia Secretary of State, Handel was behind notorious so-called voter registration laws and so-called citizenship verification efforts that serve only to intimidate voters and make it especially challenging for minorities and the poor to register and vote. So extreme and indefensible were these actions that the U.S. Department of Justice ordered Georgia to cease citizenship verification under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Lastly, while inconsequential, the screen shot above of Karen Handle’s Twitter account says a great deal about who Handel is as a person and about her state of mind, not to mention her ability to actually be the senior vice president of public policy for a major non-profit. Handel retweeted a tweet from radical conservative Jade Morey that read, “Just like a pro-abortion group to turn a cancer orgs decision into a political bomb to throw. Cry me a freaking river.”

Typical insensitivity from the radical right.

Lastly, there’s this, via an email I just received from the Institute for Southern Studies:

In 2002, Southern Exposure — the magazine of the nonprofit Institute for Southern Studies, which publishes Facing South — ran a landmark investigation by Mary Ann Swissler looking at the foundation’s opposition to health care reform.

The story also critically examined Komen’s refusal to look at the environmental causes of cancer — perhaps not surprising given the group’s corporate funders.

Any questions? Can Komen For The Cure ever be trusted again? When you hire people like Karen Handel, I find it hard to come up with any way to say yes.

 

Image: Karen Handel’s Twitter account, via Yfrog.

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‘Disgraceful’: ICE Slammed After Allegedly Pepper-Spraying US Congresswoman

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U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) is accusing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents of pepper-spraying her in her face while she was at a local Tucson, Arizona restaurant.

Rep. Grijalva in a video on social media said she saw about 40 mostly-masked ICE agents at a restaurant she frequents weekly.

The agents were “in several vehicles that the community had stopped right here, right in the middle of the street, because they were afraid that they were taking people without due process, without any kind of notice.”

READ MORE: Warning Signs Flash as Trump Slump Raises Fears of 2018 Blue Wave Rerun: Conservative

She said that the community was “protecting their people” when she was “sprayed in the face by a very aggressive agent,” and “pushed around by others when I literally was not being aggressive.”

“I was asking for clarification, which is my right as a member of Congress,” she continued. “So, once I introduced myself, once I did, I assumed that it would be a little calmer, but there was literally only one person that was trying to speak to me in any kind of civil tone, and everyone else was being rude and disrespectful, and I just can only imagine if they’re going to treat me like that, how they’re treating everybody else.”

Congresswoman Grijalva said she saw “people directly sprayed,” including “members of our press” and staff members.

She blasted President Donald Trump, saying that he “has no regard for any due process, the rule of law, the Constitution — they’re literally disappearing people from the streets.”

Critics slammed the agents’ action.

READ MORE: Trump: Democrats Are Plotting ‘Total Obliteration’ of Supreme Court

U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) wrote that Rep. Grijalva “was doing her job, standing up for her community.”

“Pepper-spraying a sitting member of Congress is disgraceful, unacceptable, and absolutely not what we voted for. Period,” he added.

“This is unacceptable and outrageous,” observed Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes. “Enforcing the rule [of] law does not mean pepper spraying a member of Congress for simply asking questions. Effective law enforcement requires restraint and accountability, not unchecked aggression.”

The Bulwark’s Sam Stein noted, “quite the beginning for Grijalva, who wasn’t seated for weeks, [cast] the decisive vote to get the Epstein files, and now has apparently been pepper sprayed in the face by immigration agents.”

Also calling the action “outrageous,” U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) wrote: “We are Members of Congress with oversight authority of ICE. Rep Grijalva was completely within her rights to stand up for her constituents. ICE is completely lawless.”

“First they tackle a sitting Senator,” noted U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY). “Now they’re pepper spraying a Representative. It’s clear ICE is spinning out of control. We will hold the agency accountable.”

READ MORE: Trump’s Ballroom Seen as ‘Key Evidence’ He’s Out of Touch as Cost of Living Spikes

 

Image via Reuters 

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Warning Signs Flash as Trump Slump Raises Fears of 2018 Blue Wave Rerun: Conservative

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A well-known conservative commentator has a warning for the Republican Party: take action now or face a repeat of the 2018 midterms when the GOP lost 41 House seats in a landslide. And this time, he says, the Senate could go to the Democrats as well.

Award-winning writer and journalist Bernard Goldberg reminded readers at The Hill that in 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term, “Republicans got walloped … and a good chunk of that had President Trump’s name written all over it.”

Trump’s “approval ratings were in the low 40s, and independents — the folks who usually decide elections — had seen enough. They broke hard for the Democrats,” Goldberg noted. “Now here we are, staring down 2026, and you can almost hear history clearing its throat, getting ready to repeat itself.”

READ MORE: Trump: Democrats Are Plotting ‘Total Obliteration’ of Supreme Court

Goldberg noted that Trump’s approval rating is currently the lowest it’s been this term.

“Among Republicans, his support dropped from 91 percent right after the 2024 election to 84 percent last month. Among independents, it cratered — from 42 percent to just 25 percent.”

“If the trend continues,” he warned, “Republicans could be headed for another blue wave — and this time, it could wash away not just the House majority, but control of the Senate too.”

Why?

“It’s the economy — still,” he wrote.

“Trump is out there saying the economy is humming. Biden said the same thing before him. But voters didn’t buy it then, and they’re not buying it now. Why? Because it’s not GDP numbers that matter. It’s affordability,” Goldberg noted.

READ MORE: Trump’s Ballroom Seen as ‘Key Evidence’ He’s Out of Touch as Cost of Living Spikes

That’s a word that President Trump continues to call a “con job,” while his own administration tries to claim he is focused on.

He pointed to a Karl Rove Wall Street Journal column and wrote: “The Republicans may have ‘avoided disaster’ in Tennessee, but the result should be a wake-up call for Republicans. He’s right.”

Goldberg asked: “will anyone in the Republican Party actually pick up the phone?”

“Because if Republicans don’t wake up — and fast — they’re going to find out the hard way what happens when you keep rerunning the same movie and expecting a different ending. To lose in 2026, all they have to do is nothing. And right now, that’s pretty much what they’re doing.”

READ MORE: Trump Urges Judge Aileen Cannon to Keep Jack Smith Report Secret

 

 

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Trump: Democrats Are Plotting ‘Total Obliteration’ of Supreme Court

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President Donald Trump is claiming that the top priority of Democrats is the “total obliteration” of the U.S. Supreme Court. His remarks came just hours after SCOTUS gave Republicans a 6-3 win along partisan lines, in the form of approving Texas’s redrawn mid-decade congressional maps that could help add five GOP-held seats to the U.S. House of Representatives. A lower court had ruled the redrawn Texas maps were likely racially biased.

Although there are different ways to measure, one study by Court Accountability this fall found that the Supreme Court has ruled in Trump’s favor 90% of the time.

“Most of these wins for the president came from the court’s ‘shadow docket’ slate of opinions — where the court has typically, in the past, only ruled on administrative measures,” according to Truthout. “However, in recent years, the Supreme Court has been making announcements on cases, issuing injunctions or allowances of actions to remain in place, that have the same effect, essentially, as a final decision.”

READ MORE: White House Touts Trump’s ‘Track Record’ on Affordability

On Friday, the president declared that the “Democrats number one policy push is the complete and total OBLITERATION of our great United States Supreme Court.”

“They will do this on their very first day in office, through the simple Termination of the Filibuster, SHOULD THEY WIN THE UPCOMING ELECTIONS,” he wrote.

Trump has strongly advocated for Republicans to eliminate the Senate filibuster.

“The Radical Left Democrats are looking at 21 Justices, with immediate ascension,” he wrote, claiming that Democrats would more than double the current size of the court.

“This would be terrible for our Country. Fear not, however, Republicans will not let it, or any of their other catastrophic policies, happen. Our Country is now in very good hands. MAGA!!!”

Some court reform advocates have suggested the Supreme Court be expanded to 13 justices, one for each of the thirteen U.S. Courts of Appeals.

READ MORE: Trump’s Ballroom Seen as ‘Key Evidence’ He’s Out of Touch as Cost of Living Spikes

 

Image via Reuters 

 

 

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