Why You Still Shouldn’t Trust Susan G. Komen, Even After Their Reversal
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.â€
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.â€
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.
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Image: Karen Handel’s Twitter account, via Yfrog.
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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.
Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”
“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”
In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”
He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”
“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”
“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”
“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.
“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”
Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”
Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.
Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026
President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.
“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”
The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”
Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”
TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”
Critics blasted Trump.
“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.
One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”
Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”
The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.
According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.
Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”
“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”
Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.
Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.
The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.
“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.
The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.
“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”
Image via Reuters
Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation
Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs
One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won
Inside the Group Helping MAGA Voters Walk Away — And What Finally Pushed Them
