RSN: Obama Says Trump 'Exploiting' Anger, Fear Among 'Blue-Collar Men', Edward Snowden: Clinton's Call for a 'Manhattan-Like Project' Is Terrifying, Nursing Home Workers Share Explicit Photos of Residents on Snapchat

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Edward Snowden: Clinton's Call for a 'Manhattan-Like Project' Is Terrifying 
 
Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone 
Dickinson writes: "Clinton's Big Brotherish proposal was as troubling as it was vague. And it seemed stubbornly resistant to the reality that America's tech firms have shifted to powerful encryption - precisely in the wake of Snowden's revelations - as a way to reassure consumers around the globe that they are not tools of the American surveillance state." 
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Obama Says Trump 'Exploiting' Anger, Fear Among 'Blue-Collar Men' 
Jessica Taylor, NPR 
Taylor writes: "The president told NPR's Steve Inskeep in an interview late last week that economic and demographic changes in the country have left a void that Trump is 'exploiting.'" 
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Nursing Home Workers Share Explicit Photos of Residents on Snapchat 
Charles Ornstein, ProPublica 
Ornstein writes: "Nursing home workers across the country are posting embarrassing and dehumanizing photos of elderly residents on social media networks such as Snapchat, violating their privacy, dignity and, sometimes, the law." 
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Black Lives Do Not Matter 
Charles R. Larson, CounterPunch 
Larson writes: "Black lives do not matter. If they did, the expression would not be necessary." 
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8 of the Worst - And Weirdest - Ways Politicians Tried to Limit Access to Abortion in 2015 
Alex Zielinski, Think Progress 
Zielinski writes: "2015 wasn't a great year for reproductive rights. Federal and state lawmakers introduced more than 400 bills and enacted 47 new laws intended to restrict access to reproductive health care - the most in any recent year." 
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The Rise of Podemos in Spain's Election Shows How Much Trouble the Establishment Is In 
Erica Sagrans, In These Times 
Sagrans writes: "Sunday night, Spain's insurgent left party Podemos made history, breaking the country's two-party control for the first time since the fall of the Franco dictatorship by winning 20.7 percent of the seats in the Spanish parliament." 
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Mark Ruffalo | The Renewable Energy Race Is On 
Mark Ruffalo, EcoWatch 
Ruffalo writes: "The climate agreement reached in Paris is provoking a flurry of caveats, criticisms and cautions. Many of those criticisms are warranted and there's a lot of work ahead to make sure countries live up to their promises. But we should not miss a chance to celebrate a historic turning point." 
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The Return of Back-Alley Abortions & Fatal Consequences

When others seek to impose their beliefs on others in their War Against Women there are fatal consequences. 

The article below was saved because of its significance. 

Out-lawing abortions will not prevent abortions, it will merely impose life-threatening consequences on those women who lack the financial resources to travel elsewhere. 

The Return of Back-Alley Abortions

In states across the country, women are being arrested for the crime of ending their own pregnancies—though they have a constitutional right to do so in a doctor’s office. Michelle Goldberg on a worrisome new trend.

US Women Who Have Stillbirths Face Murder Charges

ARTICLE

06.03.11

The Return of Back-Alley Abortions

In states across the country, women are being arrested for the crime of ending their own pregnancies—though they have a constitutional right to do so in a doctor’s office. Michelle Goldberg on a worrisome new trend.

Underground abortions have returned to the United States, just as pro-choice activists have warned for years. And women have started going to jail for the crime of ending their own pregnancies, or trying to.

This week Jennie L. McCormack, a 32-year-old mother of three from eastern Idaho, was arrested for self-inducing an abortion. According to the Associated Press, McCormack couldn’t afford a legal procedure, and so took pills that her sister had ordered online. For some reason, she kept the fetus, which police found after they were called by a disapproving acquaintance. She now faces up to five years in prison, as well as a $5,000 fine.

Idaho recently banned abortions after 20 weeks, and McCormack’s fetus was reportedly between five and six months old. But according to Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, under Idaho law, McCormack could have been arrested even if she’d been in her first trimester because self-induced abortion is illegal in all circumstances. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an 8- or 10- or 12-week abortion,” says Kolbi-Molinas. “If you do what you could get lawfully in a doctor’s office—what you have a constitutional right to access in a doctor’s office—they can throw you in jail and make you a convicted felon.”

While horrific, McCormack’s case is not unique. In recent years, several women have been arrested on suspicion of causing their own abortions, or attempting to. Most have come from conservative rural states with few clinics and numerous restrictions on abortion. In America’s urban centers and liberal enclaves, the idea of women being prosecuted for taking desperate measures to end their pregnancies might seem inconceivable, a never-again remnant of the era before Roe v. Wade. In fact, it’s a slowly encroaching reality.

Even more, these cases demonstrate that criminalizing abortion means turning women who have abortions into criminals.

In 2005, Gabriela Flores, a 22-year-old Mexican migrant worker, was arrested in South Carolina. Like McCormack, she had three children and said she couldn’t afford a fourth, and so she turned to clandestinely acquired pills. (The drug she took, Misoprostol, is an ulcer medicine that also works as an abortifacient and is widely used in Latin American countries where abortion is illegal.) Initially facing two years in prison, she ended up being sentenced to 90 days.

In 2009, a 17-year-old Utah girl known in court filings as J.M.S. found herself pregnant by an older man who is now facing charges of using her in child pornography. J.M.S. lived in house without electricity or running water in a remote part of the state, several hours’ drive from the nearest clinic, which was in Salt Lake City. Getting there would have required not just a car—her area had no public transportation—but money for a hotel in order to comply with Utah’s 24-hour-waiting period, as well as for the cost of the abortion itself.

According to prosecutors, when J.M.S. was in her third trimester, she paid a man $150 to beat her in the hopes of inducing a miscarriage. The fetus survived, but she was charged with criminal solicitation to commit murder. When her case was thrown out on the grounds that her actions weren’t illegal under the state’s definition of abortion, legislators changed the law so they would be able to punish women like her in the future. Meanwhile, prosecutors have appealed J.M.S.’ case to the Supreme Court, and observers expect it to rule against her. She could still face a trial and prison time.

A woman doesn’t even have to be trying to abort to find herself under arrest. Last year, a pregnant 22-year-old in Iowa named Christine Taylor ended up in the hospital after falling down a flight of stairs. A mother of two, she told a nurse she’d tripped after an upsetting phone conversation with her estranged husband.

Though she’d gone to the hospital to make sure her fetus was OK, she confessed that she’d been ambivalent about the pregnancy and unsure whether she was ready to become a single mother of three.

Suspecting Taylor had hurled herself down the stairs on purpose, the nurse called a doctor, and at some point the police were brought in. Taylor was arrested on charges of attempted feticide. She spent two days in jail before the charges were dropped because she was in her second trimester, and Iowa’s feticide laws don’t kick in until the third.

These cases are a harbinger of what’s to come as abortion laws become increasingly strict and abortion clinics harder to access in the more conservative parts of the country. They demonstrate the lengths to which women will go to end unwanted pregnancies. But even more, they demonstrate that criminalizing abortion means turning women who have abortions into criminals.

The antiabortion movement likes to see itself as pro-woman. Most of its spokespeople talk about protecting women from abortion, insisting they’re not interested in seeing them punished. “It’s tragic that this young woman felt that this was her only way out,” National Right to Life President Carol Tobias said in a statement in response to questions about the McCormack case. “The pro-life movement has never supported jail sentences for women who are victims of the abortion culture and abortion industry.”

http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/51-51/6165-the-return-of-back-alley-abortions

RSN: For Every Dollar Michigan Spends on Energy-Saving Programs, Customers Save 3.75, Judge to Elections Officials: Reveal Sources of Campaign Spending

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Paige Winfield Cunningham | The Coming Wave of Anti-Abortion Laws

Paige Winfield Cunningham, Politico
Cunningham writes: "The big Republican gains in the November elections strengthened and enlarged the anti-abortion forces in the House and the Senate. But it's the GOP victories in the statehouses and governor's mansions that are priming the ground for another round of legal restrictions on abortion."
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Jedediah Purdy | The Hunger Games Economy
Jedediah Purdy, The Daily Beast
Purdy writes: "Katniss Everdeen has broken the Hunger Games and entered open war against the Capitol. But from Ferguson to Washington to Wall Street, we are still playing our own Hunger Games. We are still playing by rules that divide us."
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UN Investigators Urge Obama to Release CIA Torture Report
Robert Evans, Reuters
Evans writes: "United Nations human rights investigators called on President Barack Obama to live up to principles preached by the United States around the world and release a long completed report on CIA interrogation methods."
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Ferguson Protesters Surprise Black Friday Shoppers at Macy's in NYC
Sebastien Malo, Franchise Herald
Malo writes: "More than 200 people angered by a grand jury's decision not to indict a white police officer for killing an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, sought to disrupt Black Friday shopping in New York with a protest in front of Macy's flagship store."
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Fast Food Workers Announce Largest-Ever Strike in 150 Cities on December 4
Ned Resnikoff, Al Jazeera America
Resnikoff writes: "Fast food workers in at least 150 cities nationwide will walk off the job on Dec. 4, demanding an industry-wide base wage of $15 per hour and the right to form a union. Workers unanimously voted on the date for the new strike during a Nov. 25 conference call, held shortly before the second anniversary of the movement's first strike."
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Judge to Elections Officials: Reveal Sources of Campaign Spending
Joseph Tanfani, Los Angeles Times
Tanfani writes: "In a decision that could force disclosure of some of the secret money flooding into elections, a federal judge ruled Tuesday that groups that run election-related ads must reveal their donors."
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For Every Dollar Michigan Spends on Energy-Saving Programs, Customers Save 3.75
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Michigan regulators say residential and business customers are benefiting from a state law that requires utilities to implement energy-efficiency programs."
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