Trump's Ass Backwards Approach to Stopping the HIV Epidemic

In addition to the scandal of allowing Gilead raking in billions of dollars and imposing astronomical prices for PrEP, a totally government and charity developed drug, the Trump/Pence regime is moving to slash funding to family planning clinics that provide free HIV testing to the poor, including poor women who increasingly make up those being diagnosed with the virus.  The Trump/Pence motivation is simple: attack family planning clinics to please the anti-abortion Christofascists who remain the regime's most loyal base of support.  Never mind that abortion services/referrals are offered by only a small percentage of such clinics which often provide the only means of medical treatment for the poor - a group that Trump despises, especially those who are non-white. Such ass backward actions reveal the disingenuous nature of Trump's claim he wants to end the HIV epidemic by 2030.  A piece in Politico looks at the damage the Trump/Pence approach will do to stopping the rate of HIV infections (which is the worse in the South/Bible Belt).  Here are excerpts:

Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report detailing the state of the HIV epidemic in the United States. One finding stood out: Nearly 40 percent of new HIV transmissions come from a relatively small group of people who don’t know they have the virus.

In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump announced an initiative to end the HIV epidemic in our country by 2030. . . . . There’s just one problem: The Trump administration is also cutting funding to many of the safety net medical clinics that do a significant number of these tests.

One reason that some Americans don’t know they have HIV is that they lack access to routine health care. While millions of people have gained access to health care through Obamacare or the expansion of Medicaid that accompanied it, there remains a significant coverage gap in states that decided not to expand Medicaid, and it’s those states, many of them in the South, which have the highest rates of HIV infection.

For the more than 2.5 million poor, uninsured Americans who cannot get Medicaid or any financial support to purchase Obamacare, one of the only remaining places they can get health care, including low-cost or free HIV testing, is at so-called Title X clinics.

The Title X Family Planning Program was enacted by Congress in 1970 and it is the only federal grant program dedicated solely to providing all individuals, regardless of their ability to pay, with family planning and related preventive health services including HIV testing. In establishing Title X, Congress made clear that its major goal was to “decrease adverse health and financial effects on children, women, and their families of inadequately spaced childbearing” by providing information, access to birth control and preventative health services. For nearly 50 years, this government-funded program has greatly improved access to vital medical care for millions of low-income, uninsured people.

Currently, there are nearly 4,000 Title X-funded family planning clinics across the U.S., and they serve approximately 4 million people each year. In addition to providing family planning services like low-cost or free birth control, Title X clinics also provide low-income men and women with services such as free testing for HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and breast and cervical cancer screening.

[N]early half a million men also receive care in these clinics each year, mostly driven by their need for testing services. In 2017 alone, Title X clinics performed 1,192,119 confidential HIV tests, resulting in 2,195 new HIV diagnoses.

Another key component of Trump’s plan is to focus on geographic HIV hotspots. The Southern U.S. is the current epicenter of the national HIV epidemic; Southern states account for over half of new HIV diagnoses despite having only 37 percent of the population. This is particularly true for women; of all U.S. women recently diagnosed with HIV, 56 percent were living in the South. In fact, my home state of Georgia has the highest rate of new HIV diagnoses in the country.

In states like Georgia that did not expand Medicaid, Title X clinics serve as the sole source of heath care for the majority of their female clients.

Sadly though, the administration announced in February changes to Title X that will result in cutting funding to a sizable portion of family planning clinics. The motivation for these cuts is purely political, with the singular goal of removing Planned Parenthood and other medical clinics that provide abortions or refer patients for abortions out of the Title X network within the coming months. As it happens, only 13 percent of all Title X clinics are operated by Planned Parenthood, and an additional 26 percent are nonprofit, community-based family planning clinics, many of which may be in jeopardy of losing funding as well.

Title X funds have never been allowed to pay for abortions, but the new rule will cut funding to family planning clinics solely because they provide or refer patients elsewhere for abortions. Due to the loss of federal funds, some of these vital safety net clinics may close, others will have to lay off staff and reduce hours, and many may have to reduce services—like HIV testing—in order to offset costs.

Rather than dismantling Title X clinics, the Trump administration should leverage and expand on the important role that this network of family planning clinics has always played in providing HIV testing to the 4 million people they serve each year.

I]t’s time to increase funding to family planning clinics to expand HIV testing, not decrease access to HIV testing through politically motivated efforts that may result in the closing of vital safety net clinics.

As always, actions speak louder than words and Trump's actions send a message to the poorest Americans: just get sick and die.

Trump and Male Christofascists War on Poor Women

Although the Trump/Pence regime has rankled its Christofascist supporters with the alleged effort to decriminalize homosexuality across the globe - personally, I think it is a ruse - it has not failed to thrill the GOP's religious extremist base when it comes to abortion and depriving poor women of access to birth control and basic medical access. Now, in a rule released last week, a prohibition has been put in place that prohibits Title X, a federal family-planning program that serves around four million low-income women, from funding organizations that also provide abortions.  Planned Parenthood is the principal target.  That the organization is the sole source of medical access to many poor women isn't even on Trump or Christofascists' radar. To me, it's a further demonstration of the far right's attitude that poor people simply need to die and disappear even as the "godly folk" park their wide, hypocrisy filled asses in church pews. A column in the New York Times looks at this latest attack on poor women and their right to control their own bodies.  Here are excerpts (for the record, I am not pro-abortion per se, but I believe in medical access for all and that medical decision should not be in the hands of those who cling to Bronze Age myths):

In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s ever-resonant tale of misogynist dystopia, Christian fascism has a sordid, perverse underbelly. On the surface, the Republic of Gilead, Atwood’s imaginary successor to America, is a place of totalitarian religious austerity. But as the book’s enslaved narrator discovers, the society’s leaders also maintain a brothel, Jezebel’s, full of women who couldn’t fit into the new order. It’s the inevitable flip side of a regime that dehumanizes women, reducing them to their reproductive organs.

Donald Trump’s administration turns the Gilead model upside down. Its public image is louche and decadent, with tabloid scandal swirling around the president and many of his associates. This can make it hard to focus on the unprecedented lengths the administration is going to curtail American women’s reproductive rights and enrich the anti-abortion movement.

On Friday, the Trump administration escalated its war on Planned Parenthood and the women who use it. It released a rule prohibiting Title X, a federal family-planning program that serves around four million low-income women, from funding organizations that also provide abortions. Further, the administration instituted an American version of the global gag rule, barring doctors and nurses receiving Title X funds from making abortion referrals to their patients except in certain emergency situations.

The rule is meant to cut Planned Parenthood, which serves 41 percent of Title X recipients, out of the program. But for many women who rely on Title X, there are no alternatives. Planned Parenthood’s president, Dr. Leana Wen, told me that in Wisconsin, as of 2017, Planned Parenthood served 80 percent of Title X patients and was the only Title X provider in seven counties. In Ohio, Planned Parenthood was the only Title X provider in nine counties. “We know that when patients cannot access their provider of choice, they delay care,” or they end up forgoing care altogether, she said.

The new regulation jettisons a requirement that Title X clinics provide “medically approved” family planning services. That means that funds that once went to Planned Parenthood could flow instead to anti-abortion groups that promote so-called natural family planning. Unless the courts halt the new policy, struggling women who need refills on their birth control pills could get federally funded lectures on the rhythm method instead.

This move to turn a lifesaving women’s health program into pork for the religious right should be major news. Instead, it’s been overshadowed by a series of scandals, each offering telling glimpses of the sexual ethics of Trumpworld’s golf-shirted Commanders.

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors working under former Miami U.S. attorney Alex Acosta, now Trump’s secretary of labor, broke the law in the process of making an inexplicably lenient plea deal with the financier Jeffrey Epstein, who’d been accused of sexually abusing underage girls.

Then, on Friday, news broke that the billionaire Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a close friend of and donor to Trump, was being charged with soliciting prostitution, part of a wide-ranging Florida sex-trafficking investigation. One of the 100 richest men in the country, Kraft was allegedly a patron of a strip-mall massage parlor staffed by women who, according to police, were virtual prisoners, forced to service up to 1,000 men a year. It’s hard to imagine why a man with Kraft’s resources would visit such a place unless the squalor, and the women’s evident powerlessness, were part of the point. (Kraft has denied the allegations; the police reportedly have video evidence.)

 The cruelty and moral bankruptcy of Trump and his Christofascist supporters is stunning.

The Year The Religious Right Moved Into The White House

Donald Trump has kept few of his promises to average Americans.  Indeed, it often seems that only the wealthy and large corporations have benefited from the slashing of safety and health regulations and the Trump tax bill scheduled to clear Congress today supported solely by Republican votes.  But one other group has been showered with access and policy moves that threaten the religious freedom and civil rights of a majority of Americans: Religious Right extremists, those I call the Christofascists.    Trump and his minions have basically declared war on LGBT Americans, seek to shutter the doors of Planned Parenthood , 97% of whose operations are for health services to the poor and uninsured (abortion services are only 3%), and attacks on public education, including protections for LGBT students and students with disabilities.  And the Christofascists have cheered as all of this has transpired.  A piece in Right Wing Watch looks at the frightening influence that the Christofascists now have under  Trumpenführer.  Here are highlights (I have omitted numerous measures listed in the article):

[O]nce it became clear that Trump was going to win the GOP nomination, he started aggressively courting the evangelical Right, including holding a massive meeting for Religious Right leaders in New York that many cite as a turning point for their support.

On the day of that meeting, Trump announced the formation of an evangelical advisory board that included Religious Right leaders including James Dobson and Michele Bachmann. Trump’s selection of Mike Pence as his running mate sealed the deal for many on the Religious Right. Trump’s “amen corner” of prosperity gospel preachers and domininionists eventually expanded to include the large share of Religious Right leaders, who offered various theological explanations for their embrace of a morally flawed candidate.

Once he was elected—with 80 percent of the white evangelical vote—Trump kept his evangelical advisory board intact and promised to give it unprecedented access to the White House. He stacked his Cabinet with friends of the Religious Right, including Tom Price at Health and Human Services, Betsy DeVos at Education and Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development. Far-right pastor Ralph Drollinger worked with Trump’s transition team to set up weekly Bible studies for Trump’s Cabinet members. The conservative Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society vetted potential judicial nominees.

The White House continues to hold weekly calls with evangelical advisory board members. Conservative leaders also receive a weekly email from the White House compiling “highlights for—and requests for action from—the conservative world.”

The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins [who has documented white supremacist ties] said in August, “I’ve been to the White House I don’t know how many more times in the first six months this year than I was during the entire Bush administration.” The Susan B. Anthony List’s Marjorie Dannenfelser said she visited the White House seven times in Trump’s first 100 days in office. Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America said in September, “I’m told from people before me that even under George W. Bush, we didn’t have this kind of access. It certainly is unprecedented and we’re very grateful.” Land gushed about evangelicals having “unprecedented access” to the White House, adding that there “are more evangelicals in this administration as personnel than any administration in my lifetime.”

This was the year the Religious Right moved into the White House. Below is a timeline of visits of Religious Right leaders to the White House, administration officials’ appearances at major Religious Right events, and policy decisions that were driven by or appeared to be gifts to the Religious Right. The list is, of course, incomplete. Because the White House is keeping its visitor logs secret, we could only track meetings that participants posted about on social media or which were made public to the press. There are also surely many more meetings, events and decisions that we have missed.

January 27: Trump sits down for an interview with David Brody, a political correspondent with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, which has joined Fox News as a functional propaganda arm of the administration.

January 31: Trump nominates Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins is in attendance. The Religious Right is thrilled.

February 23: The departments of justice and education withdraw protections for transgender students in public schools that had been implemented by the Obama administration. Religious Right groups express their gratitude.

March 13: HHS announces its intention to eliminate “questions seeking to identify gay, lesbian and bisexual elders in a U.S. health survey.” The plan is later dropped.

March 24: ProPublica reports that the Trump administration has “quietly appointed” former Heritage Foundation official Roger Severino to head the HHS Office for Civil Rights.

April 13: Trump, flanked by Dannenfelser and Nance, signs a bill allowing states to withhold federal funds from Planned Parenthood clinics. The bill was passed thanks to a tiebreaking vote from Pence.

April 14: The Justice Department drops a lawsuit against North Carolina over its discriminatory anti-trans “bathroom bill.”

April 22: In a lengthy profile of Carson, New York magazine’s Alec MacGillis reports on HUD leaders’ “strong hang-up about all matters transgender-related,” including pulling back various efforts on LGBT homelessness and housing discrimination.

May 2:  HHS confirms that former Family Research Council and National Right to Life Committee staffer Teresa Manning will take charge of its Title X family planning program.

May 3: Trump invites the members of his faith advisory board to a pre-National Day of Prayer dinner at the White House. Attendees include Jeffress, White, Graham, Jim Garlow, Metaxas, Land, Rodriguez, Dobson, former congresswoman and “pastor to the United Nations” Michele Bachmann, Mark Burns, Ralph Reed and others.

May 23: Trump releases a budget proposal that aims to slash spending on public education while pouring $1.4 billion into charter schools, private & religious school vouchers and other “school choice” programs.

May 25: Former anti-choice congresswoman Renee Ellmers takes over HHS’ Atlanta regional office. Politico reports that former Colorado lieutenant governor and Planned Parenthood opponent Jane Norton will be heading up the agency’s office of intergovernmental and external affairs while former Family Research Council chief of staff Shannon Royce will head the center for faith-based and neighborhood partnerships.

June 6: The Hill reports that abstinence-only sex-ed activist Valerie Huber has been appointed to a high-ranking position at HHS.

July 10: Conservative evangelical leaders, attending a day-long “listening session” at the White House, are invited to the Oval Office to meet with and pray over Trump. Some of the regulars are there—White, Jeffress, Reed, Bachmann, Harry Jackson, Gary Bauer, Garlow, Jack Graham, Land—and they’re also joined by Florida pastor and bizarre conspiracy theorist Rodney Howard-Browne. At the meeting, Tony Perkins reportedly broaches “the topic of banning transgender people from the military.”

July 14: The Center for Investigative Reporting reports that HHS “has quietly axed $213.6 million in teen pregnancy prevention programs and research at more than 80 institutions around the country.”

July 26: Trump announces on Twitter that the military will cease to allow “transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military.” FRC’s Perkins later says he had been “working with the White House” on the rollback, as well as on upcoming Justice Department “religious liberty” guidance.

July 26: The Justice Department goes “out of its way to file a friend-of-the court brief in a case to argue that federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in employment does not prohibit bias based on sexual orientation.”

September 7: Trump nominates Matthew Kacsmaryk, an attorney at the Religious Right legal group First Liberty Institute, and his former First Liberty colleague Jeff Mateer to federal judgeships in Texas. The White House is later forced to withdraw Mateer’s nomination after video surfaces of various controversial remarks, including calling transgender kids part of “Satan’s plan.”

September 7: The Justice Department files a brief in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, on the side of Alliance Defending Freedom and Religious Right groups that argue that certain private businesses should be allowed to refuse service to LGBTQ people.

September 28: Trump nominates Kyle Duncan, a former attorney for the Religious Right legal group Becket Fund and attorney for Hobby Lobby to a federal appeals court judgeship.

October 5: Sessions reverses “a federal government policy that said transgender workers were protected from discrimination under a 1964 civil rights law.”

December 7: Trump announces that he will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, a move long advocated by the Religious Right.

The Trump and Pence Shit Show

Having staked his campaign on rally angry whites who are terrified of losing their white privilege and/or the ability to inflict their right wing religious beliefs on all Americans, Donald Trump has cynically picked Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running mate.  Other than experience in Congress where he voted for some things Trump claims to oppose, the only real value Pence brings is the fact that he is a white Christofascist's dream candidate given his stand on abortion which he would outlaw in all cases and his animus towards the LGBT community.   The New York Times looks at Pence's selection in a main editorial.  Here are excerpts:

The suspicions that Mr. Trump stirs among evangelicals made Mr. Pence, who was one of the most socially conservative members of the House in his six terms there, the most strategic pick among the uninspiring politicians on Mr. Trump’s shortlist. He is a better bet than the thrice-married, ethically compromised Newt Gingrich, or the unpopular, politically damaged Chris Christie. Unassuming and affable — until his Twitter account exploded with Hillary Clinton attacks this week — Mr. Pence knows how Washington works. And unlike the talkative and bewildering Sarah Palin, who never made it to the shortlist or to the convention speaker lineup, he won’t hog the spotlight or embarrass the boss.

Above all, Mr. Trump’s choice of Mr. Pence is a gesture to Republicans whose money he needs to win, and a move to pacify any conservatives who were scheming to derail his nomination at the convention until they were thwarted by party officials this week. But having the Indiana governor on the ticket does little to convince a struggling middle class that Mr. Trump aims to force the party into its corner.

Mr. Trump does not offer any real policies for creating jobs, and he has been faulted for his treatment of his own employees, but he does at least talk about the pain people are feeling. That’s more than can be said for Mr. Pence. Take the Carrier heating equipment factory in Mr. Pence’s own state. When it announced this year that it would move to Mexico and cut 1,400 Indiana jobs, Mr. Trump predicted that if he were president, Carrier would call “within 24 hours,” to say, “‘Sir, we’ve decided to stay in the United States.’”

What was Mr. Pence doing while workers in his state were worrying about their futures? He and the State Legislature were busy waging battle against same-sex marriage and passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, seen as a means for businesses to deny services to same-sex couples. The law was amended within days, after a national uproar and a corporate boycott that tourism officials estimated cost Indiana’s economy at least $60 million in lost convention business.

While in Congress, Mr. Pence endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other trade pacts that Mr. Trump rails about. He voted for the Iraq war, which Mr. Trump says he opposed. A staunch anti-abortion conservative, in 2011 Mr. Pence led House Republicans’ efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, which helped convince many Americans that Congress would rather engage in partisan brinkmanship than work on solving the country’s problems.

A poll last week found that only 12 percent of voters said Mr. Pence’s name on the ticket would make them more likely to cast a ballot for Mr. Trump. Among Republican voters 22 percent said it would.

For Mr. Pence’s audition in Indianapolis this week, he made a speech introducing Mr. Trump as a man who has “never forgotten or forsaken the people who work with their hands.” That’s surprising, since Mr. Trump’s record of forsaking working people is rather long. With Mr. Pence on the ticket, it gets only longer.

As for the Trump/Pence logo, some are having a field day about it standing for toilet paper and insinuated other hysterical things about the insertion of the "T" into the "P."  

The Financial Costs of GOP/Christofascists' Culture Wars are Skyrocketing

Time and time again we see legislators - almost always Republicans - using the culture was to turn out the spittle flecked, knuckle dragging elements of their party's base on election day.  Other times, the approach may be  to avoid primary challenges by the truly unhinged by embracing one of the three pillars of "family values" organizations: gay bashing, anti-abortion efforts, racism and disenfranchising non-white voters.  In nearby Gloucester County, Virginia, we see anti-transgender bigotry playing out and litigation costs soaring simply because school board members lack the spines to stand up to the always hate-filled "godly folk."  As a piece in the Washington Post notes, the costs of such sleazy behavior is sky rocketing.  Here are excerpts:

The culture wars are getting very, very expensive.

Once upon a time, politicians could use wedge issues to score cheap political points, emphasis on “cheap.” Put a gay rights issue on the ballot, or pass an antiabortion bill, and you could turn out the base at bargain-basement prices.

Even better, with minimal risk to the public fisc, you might be able to distract voters from other, thornier problems.

Facing a public education crisis? Take a page from North Carolina, and pass a law regulating where and when people can pee.

Is your state so broke it’s shaving days off the school year? Copy Kansas, and implement some draconian antiabortion legislation.

Have the highest uninsured population of any state? Look to Texas, and pass even more draconian antiabortion legislation.

Are your constituents unhappy with declining economic opportunities? Check out Indiana, Arkansas and Georgia, among others, and introduce legislation to make it easier to discriminate against gay men and lesbians.

Has your state’s credit been downgraded nine times? Is your governor facing a sex scandal? Have you become the nation’s tragicomic punchline?

Find role models in New Jersey, Alabama and Florida, respectively, and join the crusade against Planned Parenthood.

It all sounds relatively inexpensive. Lately, though, the ammo required in these culture wars has proved costlier than politicians, or their constituents, may have counted on.

In North Carolina, legislators last week voted to transfer $500,000 from the state’s emergency response and disaster relief fund to pay for litigation of the so-called bathroom bill. Good thing there are never any hurricanes in the Tar Heel State, and there’s no chance of a Zika crisis in its mosquito-dense coastal tourism areas.

Legal fees are likewise mounting in states that have attempted to bar Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds (which often turns out to violate federal Medicaid law), to implement constitutionally dicey restrictions on abortion access, or both.

And of course in some cases, such legal expenses are peanuts compared with the broader economic costs of these culture-war laws.

After North Carolina passed its so-called bathroom bill, high-profile musicians such as Bruce Springsteen canceled concerts, companies such as PayPal and Deutsche Bank withdrew plans to expand in the state, and events and trade shows were called off .
politicians ought to be transparent about what they’re sticking taxpayers with when they choose to wage such culture wars.

Economic impact estimates are often more art than science, but minimum litigation costs at least are easier to estimate. Particularly when a state is considering a policy that has already come under serious legal challenge elsewhere. And especially when a state is considering a measure that courts have already repeatedly struck down, as with attempts to drug-test welfare recipients, or to bar patients from seeing the qualified and willing Medicaid provider of their choice if that provider is Planned Parenthood.

So here’s an idea: Any time legislators pass a law already facing a major legal challenge in another state, they should have to set aside funding for its defense. It’s time to remind voters that in the constitutionally fraught culture wars — as in everything else — there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

GOP Anti-Sex Lunacy

Ever since the Christofascists hijacked the GOP base, the Republican Party has become obsessed with all things sexual and wants to regulate women's wombs and relations between same sex couples.  Meanwhile, of course, the Bible Belt has the highest divorce rate and the most unwed teen pregnancies.  Perhaps these "godly folk" need to spend less time monitoring the sex lives of others and pay more attention to their own screwed up lives.  A piece in Salon looks at the Christofascist sexual obsession and dysfunction that has overtaken the GOP and the delicious surprise in the effort to indict Planned Parenthood that resulted in the indictment of its detractors/slanderers instead.  Here are highlights:

It was a moment of justice so delicious that we need a new German word for it, as schadenfreude isn’t impactful enough. A Houston area grand jury was convened, under the orders of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, to investigate allegations that Planned Parenthood was running a black market for-profit fetal tissue trafficking ring. After perusing the evidence, the grand jury exonerated Planned Parenthood, but then turned around and indicted David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, two of the people that helped create the hoax videos that took this lurid right-wing urban legend out of the world of email forwards and into the mainstream media.

The entire episode, however, is a stunning illustration of how far the Republicans have gone when it comes to embracing even the most ridiculous and fringe right wing causes.

That Daleiden and Merritt are facing criminal charges is, in itself, no surprise. The videos they made under the auspices of the Center for Medical Progress used heavy editing to make it seem like Planned Parenthood employees were saying things they clearly didn’t say.  Most notably, they made it seem like they are profiting off fetal tissue when they explicitly say in the unedited footage that Planned Parenthood does not profit off fetal tissue. That people who are willing to do something so deeply deceptive and unethical are also willing to cut legal corners is the least surprising thing in the world, . . . Their lies have also been implicated in the deaths of three people who were murdered by a self-proclaimed anti-choice warrior who cited the hoax videos as cause for shooting up a clinic.

What should be surprising is that Lt. Gov. Patrick, with the full support of Gov. Greg Abbott, were stupid enough to force this investigation in the first place. From the get-go, it was self-evident that the accusations against Planned Parenthood were false. 

It’s not just the red states that have gone all in on this ridiculous conspiracy theory. It’s become mandatory for every Republican candidate to pretend to believe that these discredited videos are some great expose, and Carly Fiorina got so excited about this that she just started making stuff up about what she saw in the videos. They’re lying about lies now, a veritable vortex of right wing bullshit.

This absurd situation perhaps became inevitable, however, when mainstream Republicans decided to embrace what used to be a fringe right wing campaign against Planned Parenthood.

 Anti-choice activists have long hated Planned Parenthood, believing that its sex-positive vibe and mission to make sex education and contraception easy to get was going to turn this country into a biblical Babylon.

This isn’t the only evidence that the anti-contraception fringe is calling the shots now. Republicans have used the fact that Obamacare requires insurance companies to cover contraception without a copay as a pretense to throw a nationwide fit, making wild accusations that they’re being forced to pay for playtime for a bunch of sluts.  

Just a few years ago, the idea that someone would use her insurance to pay for birth control was non-controversial for Republicans, just as it was non-controversial for the government to give money to Planned Parenthood so they can offer low cost Pap smears and birth control pills. But all it took to demonize a service that nearly all women, including conservative women, use was to declare that it’s “liberal” and link it to Obama.

If you want to know how politicians who want to shut down the IRS or ban Muslims from traveling into our country became mainstream Republican presidential candidates, look no further than this. If a bunch of wackos who want to shut down access to contraception, a service used by nearly all women, can get make their agenda a priority, any fringe belief has a shot.

Grand Jury Investigating Planned Parenthood Indicts Makers Of Doctored Videos

Indicted liar David Daleiden

As has been noted many timers on this blog, literally no one lies more than the "godly Christian" crowd.  Indeed, if a lie furthers their effort to force their ignorance embracing beliefs on all of society, these people lie without blinking an eye.  Their, hypocrisy, of course, is off the charts as they claim to worship the Bible and the Ten Commandments out of one side of their mouths while they ignore their precepts and lie through their teeth.  In an interesting twist of events, a grand jury in Texas seemingly recognized this reality and rather than indict Planned Parenthood which it had been assemble to investigate instead indicted two of the leaders of the extremist Christian - using the term Christian very loosely, of course - for the fraudulent videos they concocted to smear Planned Parenthood.  As I have said before, decent moral people need to shun the self-anointed godly folk and the tawdry whores in the Republican Party who prostitute themselves to these vile people.  The New Civil Rights Movement looks at this delicious turn of events.  Here are article highlights:

A Texas grand jury that was investigating Planned Parenthood just opted to not indict the women's reproductive health care provider. Instead, it has handed down indictments for two of the makers of the controversial videos.

David Daleiden (photo), the founder of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), an anti-choice group that worked with Republican members of Congress for over a year to create the videos and create a marketing plan to release them, and another activist, have been indicted.

"Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record and a misdemeanor count of related to purchasing human organs. Another activist was also indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record," the Associated Press just reported.

The second person indicted is Sandra Merritt, also of the CMP. Merritt is also "the founder and CEO of BioMax, the sham tissue procurement company created by the Center to gain entry into abortion clinics and medical conferences," the Dallas Morning News adds.

Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson "said the grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing."

The videos are highly and selectively edited, and have been used as "evidence" by anti-abortion activists and anti-choice conservatives to fraudulently claim "Planned Parenthood sells aborted baby parts."

Every state that has investigated Planned Parenthood in response to the videos has found no evidence of wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood.

"If convicted of the top charge, Daleiden and Merritt could face up to 20 years behind bars," Buzzfeed reports.

Things are truly to a point where I have no desire to identify myself as a Christian.   Indeed, when I meet someone who starts telling me about their deep religious faith, I now assume that they are either (i) a truly horrible person, and/or (ii) a complete idiot and mental midget.   These folks are killing the Christian "brand" which is a positive development for mankind.

Planned Parenthood Gunman Admits Religious Motive

While the couple who waged the attack on the San Bernadino social services office never left clear clues of their motive in the terror attack, Robert Lewis Dear, the gunman at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility more or less confirmed that he is a Christian terrorist - something the talking heads on the right and Republican politicians continue to refuse to admit exists.  More specifically, he exclaimed that he was a "warrior for the babies" - a phrase that correlates with the Christofascist manta that abortion is the murder of babies.  Not, of course, that the same godly folk give a damn for children once that are no longer in the womb as evidenced by their support for GOP policies that throw poor children off of assistance programs and that would deprive poor children of access to health care.  KKTV-11 has details on Dear's confession of sorts.  Here are details:

Family members of UCCS Officer Garrett Swasey and Iraq veteran Ke'arre Stewart were in the courtroom as Dear learned what charges he would face for allegedly killing their loved ones.

Dear made multiple outbursts during the court session--our reporter counted nearly 20--including declaring he was a "warrior for the babies" and accusing his own public defender of wanting to drug him.

Though investigators have not publicly released a motive, Dear heavily eluded to one with frequent references to abortion.  "Protect babies!" he exclaimed once.

"Can you add the babies that had been aborted that day, can you add that to the list?" he yelled another time while lawyers and the judge deliberated whether a list of victims' names should be made public.

Dear claimed his public defender was in cahoots with Planned Parenthood, suggesting that by trying to seal documents, the lawyer was trying to hide what Dear saw inside the building to protect the clinic.

Robert Dear faces 179 counts for allegedly storming a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood on a snowy Black Friday afternoon and gunning down 12 people.

Dear is accused of killing three and injuring nine in the shooting rampage. More than 300 people were locked down in the nearby shopping center as the suspect--who police believe was Dear--engaged in a fire fight with officers for four terrifying hours.

Dear and the San Bernadino shooters share one thing in common.  If Republicans want Muslims to have to register, they should similarly require that far right Christians register with authorities so that Christian terrorism can be controlled.

Colorado Shooter an "End of Times Christian"?

Image via Joe My God - Dear and those he murdered

Many on the right and among Christofascists circles have fervently been hoping that Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Lewis Dear not be proved to be a right wing Christian.   While much still remains unknown about the man, by all accounts he is a train wreck and a crazy one at that.  His second wife (he was married 3 times) had this account of Dear in divorce papers according to the Post and Courier:

His second wife, Mescher, described Dear in divorce papers filed in 1993 as a controlling, abusive, womanizing man who liked to gamble but was tight with his cash when it came to supporting his family. She stated that he threw her around the room by her hair during one argument and beat her head on the floor. She also said in a sworn affidavit that Dear “erupts into fury in a matter of seconds,” and she “lived in fear and dread of his emotional and physical abuse.” 

“He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic, but does not follow the Bible in his actions,” Mescher stated in the affidavit. “He says that as long as he believes he will be saved, he can do whatever he pleases. He is obsessed with the world coming to an end.” 

It will be interesting to see if this story line holds up.  If it does, Dear's behavior and mindset will mirror that of many of the "godly folk" who view "being saved" as providing them a free pass and giving them license to do all kinds of things inconsistent with the Ten Commandments - constant and vicious lying being one of them.   Obviously, I hope the story line holds up because it underscores a reality too many refuse to want to believe: religion, especially fundamentalist religion, is an evil and not a positive force in the world. 

GOP Dismiss Own Responsibility for Anti-Abortion Extremism; Cruz: Shooter Was a "Transgender Leftist Activist"

Carly Fiorina - who has made the worse false statements against Planned Parenthood

Overheated rhetoric and fabricated and false "facts" - outright lies might be an more apt description - often set the stage for violent acts.   And no one disseminates more deliberate lies and falsehoods than the "godly Christian" crowd be it about Planned Parenthood or LGBT citizens.  Yet when violence results from such efforts these same hate merchants feign shock, surprise and denial over their own the consequences of their handiwork.  The same holds true to political whores within the Republican Party, who parrot the same lies and dangerous rhetoric as they prostitute themselves to the ugliest elements of the party base.  An example of this phenomenon was on display as a number of the GOP presidential candidates condemned the murders at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility out of one side of their mouths even as they dismissed any responsibility for repeating false and inflammatory religious extremist propaganda.  The Washington Post looks at this disgusting behavior as does Think Progress.  Here are highlights from the Post:

Several Republican presidential candidates on Sunday condemned the attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs but stopped short of agreeing with liberal critics who say that fiery antiabortion rhetoric contributed to the shooting.

“It’s obviously a tragedy. Nothing justifies this,” former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Any protesters should always be peaceful. Whether it’s Black Lives Matter or pro-life protesters.”

Calls to defund Planned Parenthood through congressional action have escalated in recent months amid a protracted national debate about the ethics of collecting fetal tissue for research.

That dialogue was cast in a grim light after reports that the suspected Colorado gunman is said to have used the phrase “no more baby parts’’ while discussing his motives for the attack, as reported by The Washington Post on Saturday. Liberal critics of antiabortion activism have linked escalating rhetoric on the right with Friday’s attack, including Vicki Cowart, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.

“We’ve seen an alarming increase in hateful rhetoric and smear campaigns against abortion providers and patients over the last few months,” Cowart said in a statement. “That environment breeds acts of violence.”

Fiorina took a particularly hard line against Planned Parenthood during the second Republican presidential debate, held in September. In one instance, she described “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

That characterization struck an emotional chord with voters but was ultimately proven to be an inaccurate representation. Though no video showing what she described was found to exist, Fiorina has held that her depiction was accurate.

Carson did not directly address antiabortion rhetoric but did warn of increasing political divisions in the country.    “If we can get rid of the rhetoric from either side and actually talk about the facts, I think that's when we begin to make progress,” he said. “And, you know, a lot of people, when they don't have facts, when they don't have a good backup, that's when the rhetoric starts.

Ben Carson's remark about facts is ridiculous since he is the one with no facts to back up his batshitery.  The most dis gusting of all, however is Ted Cruz who described Planned Parenthood shooter as  a "transgendered leftist activist."   Here are excerpts from Think Progress:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is the latest presidential candidate trying to downplay the role anti-abortion rhetoric may have played in motivating the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs Friday afternoon. When a reporter asked him at an Iowa campaign stop Sunday evening about suspect Robert Lewis Dear saying he was motivated by “no more baby parts,” Cruz countered that he’s also been reported to be a “transgendered [sic] leftist activist.”

Cruz explained, “We know that he was a man registered to vote as a woman.” This discrepancy on Dear’s voter registration was first reported by The Gateway Pundit, a self-described “right-of-center news website,” under the claim that he “identifies as [a] woman.” Conservatives have since run with the claim that Dear is transgender.

There is actually no evidence to suggest that he is transgender, nor a “leftist,” nor any kind of activist. In fact, all of the available information suggests he was none of those things.

But since before the shooting was even resolved on Friday, conservatives have been clinging to such discrepancies in an attempt to suggest that it had little to do with the issue of abortion. When a witness called MSNBC Friday afternoon and indicated that the shooting had come from the direction of the Chase bank, a building that was between her location and the Planned Parenthood, conservatives invented an entirely new narrative claiming that the incident was a bank robbery gone wrong and that the shooter had simply hidden in the Planned Parenthood when he was unable to get away. Colorado Springs police debunked this story before the situation was over, clarifying that he had not entered any other buildings at any point.

Dear’s reference to “baby parts” clearly refers to deceptively edited videos suggesting that Planned Parenthood was selling parts of aborted fetuses for a profit. The claims were quickly debunked; in fact, the cut footage from one of the surreptitiously recorded videos even shows the targeted doctor saying, “Nobody should be ‘selling’ tissue. That’s just not the goal here.” The myth, nevertheless, has persisted.