Rude Pundit on Ohio

Not one issue arises that the Republicans do not try to politicize or blame the Democrats in some way, even if Republicans are responsible. The GOP has become a "blame first" party with a list of grievances a mile long, and only an inch deep. I'd be embarrassed to call myself a Republican these days.

It Pisses Them Off That We Were Right About Regulations and That We Actually Do Give a Shit About East Palestine

by The Rude Pundit

Two things can be true at once. We can believe that the people in East Palestine, Ohio, are a bunch of fucking idiots who vote against their own interests repeatedly, electing horrible motherfuckers who don't give a happy monkey fuck about their health or safety, but, man, they sure hate Black people and migrants, so they got your vote. And we can also believe that they should get all the help they desperately need to recover from the toxic chemicals that were spilled and burned when a Norfolk Southern train derailed in their town. 

You can hear the nematodes of the right spout off about how Democrats and the "left" ignored the disaster because, as Fox "news" Tucker "You can tell I'm lying because I'm breathing" Carlson put it on February 15, "East Palestine is a poor, white town that voted for Trump. So honestly, who cares? No one in the Biden administration did care and that's an atrocity." And you can wonder, "The fuck are they talking about?" It's a fucking lie. The train derailed on February 3. By February 4, the National Transportation Safety Board was already investigating it. By early morning on February 4, the Environmental Protection Agency was already there to monitor air and water and help where it could. (Seriously: the derailment happened at 9 p.m. on the 3rd. By 2 a.m., the EPA was there.) The Department of Transportation was there, and FEMA was in contact with Ohio officials about what it could offer. 

Now, I'm no big-time professional con artist pretending to be a journalist, but I'm pretty sure that both the NTSB and the EPA are part of the Biden administration. I'm pretty sure the DOT and FEMA are, too. I'm pretty sure that means the Biden administration did care and that no atrocity occurred. No, President Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg didn't rush there, but that's not really an accurate measure of the care the area received.

And if the motherfuckers in conservative media and in politics want to racialize this, let's fuckin' go.  You know what Tucker Carlson didn't berate the government about? The Flint water crisis, but Black people were the main victims, so fuck 'em, right? You know what they don't talk about on Fox "news" or, indeed, much of anywhere? The continuing effects of toxic chemicals in places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana, which is such a fucking tragedy of high cancer rates in a region of primarily Black Americans that the United Nations has declared it "environmental racism." 

Or how about this: In November 2019,  there was a huge explosion at a petrochemical plant in Port Neches, Texas. It was one of several such events at chemical plants in the area in 2019. This one caused an evacuation of a half-mile radius and the force of the explosion blew out windows on residences, with others downwind of the place told to shelter in place (and close their windows, if they still had windows). It was one week after the Trump administration had shitcanned a rule on warning people when there were toxic chemicals being stored near them. The rollbacks of a bunch of regulations almost immediately affected the health of people living near these facilities, especially in Texas. Not a fucking peep out of right-wing media because it was all Black and brown people who were affected. 

What? You want train derailments? How about the one near Barstow, Georgia, in 2019, where hydrochloric acid was spilled? It's a majority Black town and needed evacuating, but no one demanded that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao or President Trump visit to comfort people. 

Yeah, so, sure, please racialize these things.

Let's acknowledge a few things, too. The Obama administration could have supported tougher rules on what's labeled as hazardous on trains. The Trump administration shouldn't have repealed an Obama-era regulation on updating brake systems on trains carrying hazardous materials. In fact, the East Palestine fucking over might have been averted only if both of those sentences were in effect because the train wasn't labeled "hazardous," so it didn't need the updated brakes. Even as the pathetic hate junkies of the right try to spin political gold out of this environmental disaster hay, they are being cornered into admitting that maybe some fucking regulations are necessary.

What really pisses them off is that the Biden administration, and, indeed, most Democrats and people on the left do give a fuck about the people of East Palestine. It's like they can't comprehend that idea that we might fucking hate their politics but still not want them to be poisoned to death. Left-wing media (real left-wing media, not what the right bullshits about being liberal) has been all over the story, including Mother Jones and Democracy Now!. The right-wing nutzoids can't get their tiny little brains to believe that the federal government might actually be doing what it's supposed to do because it's being led by a Democrat and thus must be degraded no matter how competent it might be. Are there people on the left being total dicks about this (and not just semi-dicks, like me)? Sure. There always will be.

What also complicates shit is that the Republican governor of Ohio and man who looks like he's spent too much time staring through a hole in the guest shower at the mansion, Mike DeWine, as well as all the Republican officials in the state, are declaringthat the air and water are fine, just like the EPA. But I suppose they'll just be called "RINOs" or some such shit because they don't toe the Tucker line.

Here's the thing, though, fellow aghast and amused libs. We should do our best to welcome the right-wingers who have newly discovered that we need, you know, government to protect people when it comes to shit like this. Welcome to the party, motherfuckers.

By the way, about a third of the people in Columbiana County, where East Palestine is, are on Medicaid, including a bunch on there because Ohio accepted the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, you know, Obamacare. 

If you're in the area and feeling sick and getting medical attention that you need because you're covered, thank a Democrat, not Tucker Carlson.

(Note: I'm gonna bet they almost all vote for Trump or DeSantis or whoever in 2024, no matter if the Biden administration gets them all new houses, new jobs, and all the pussy or dick they could want.)

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on Gavin Newsome

I'd bet that Gavin Newsome, the current Democratic Governor of California, is going to run for president. Maybe not in 2024, but he's young enough to wait it out till 2028. I think he would be perfect for the job.

from HuffPost

Opinion

Gavin Newsom Was Right 19 Years Ago — And Conservatives Just Keep Being Wrong

The Republican Party once argued that same-sex marriage was "unnatural." Thankfully, the then-San Francisco mayor didn't see it that way.

Nineteen years ago, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom sanctioned same-sex marriages. As mayor of San Francisco — both a city and a county — he had the authority to perform marriages, though not same-sex ones. That didn’t matter.

“We didn’t have the formal authority,” he once told me in an interview several years ago, “but I felt we had a moral authority to challenge the law.”

Back then, same-sex marriage was illegal across the country except in Massachusetts. It would become legal in California that June. Newsom’s move ignited legal challenges, ballot propositions and a national debate intended to settle the issue once and for all.

Many criticized Newsom both for the marriages he sanctioned in San Francisco and for his brazen 2008 prediction that same-sex marriage was “gonna happen, whether ya like it or not.” His actions galvanized opponents and became an effective fear-mongering tic for Proposition 8, California’s anti-gay marriage initiative.

But in the end, Newsom was right: same-sex marriage won, eventually becoming legal in all 50 states.

And conservatives were wrong. Unlike Newsom, their spasmodic predictions never came to pass. Traditional marriage survived, and continues to thrive. Society didn’t collapse into Roman Empire-like debauchery. No one started marrying farm animals. Sadly, no one ever tracks down the naysayers to ask why their fear-mongering predictions failed to materialize. But then, fear-mongering is often the last bastion for those with no facts to back up their claims.

Consider the marriage arguments:

1. It’s “unnatural.”
2. It’s contrary to God’s will.
3. It’s about illicit sex, not committed relationships.
4. The majority of Americans oppose such marriages.

Sound familiar? They should. They were the arguments posited in 1948 when Andrea Perez, a Mexican American woman, and Sylvester Davis, an African American man, challenged California’s interracial marriage ban in the state Supreme Court. The arguments reappeared when miscegenation went to the U.S. Supreme Court 19 years later in Loving v. Virginia.

In each case, the plaintiffs won, just as same-sex marriage eventually won.

This pattern repeats throughout American history: Cultural shifts emerge that expand individual freedoms, conservatives vigorously and even violently oppose such changes, but their opposition ultimately fails. Their intemperate arguments prove wrong, their melodramatic fears are unwarranted, and their panic-laden predictions are downright laughable.

The Virginia trial judge who upheld the 1958 conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving wrote that their interracial marriage, a violation of Virginia state law, was also a violation of God’s law.

“Almighty God created the races,” he wrote, “and he placed them on separate continents ... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Talk about a facepalm moment.

The arc of American history has always gravitated toward liberalism. Not in the political sense, but in the broader moral code that has always stood for expanding individual rights, social equity and equality under the law.

Pick the conflict. Abolition, suffrage, desegregation, immigrant hoards from Europe reviled by nativists, worker’s rights, women’s rights, equal rights, interracial marriage and gay marriage. The walls to all of them have crumbled over time or will completely crumble in due time. GOP pollster Jan van Lohuizen perfectly illustrated the futility of conservative resistance with a prescient warning to Republicans in a 2012 memo: Evolve on same-sex marriage or risk marginalizing into irrelevance.

It’s a lesson conservatives seem unwilling to learn, let alone admit, despite how many times it has happened. They defended the institution of slavery, ignited a Civil War, opposed Reconstruction, founded the Ku Klux Klan, imposed segregation and Jim Crow laws, and assailed the advancement of civil rights in the 1950s and 60s.

This needs some clarification. You’ll often hear today’s Republicans and conservatives claim it was the Democratic Party advocating such policies and practices. That is correct. Democrats of the 19th century did indeed defend slavery, secession, the Civil War and so forth.

But what today’s Republicans, conservative pundits, and even some historians fail to point out is that the Democrats of that period were the conservatives of the day. So don’t be fooled by titles. Their label might’ve said “Democrats,” but their political ideology was conservative, and those conservatives were on the wrong side of history.

By contrast, the Republicans of the Civil War era were the liberals of their day, which explains why they opposed slavery and segregation and supported Reconstruction. They wrote, passed, and ratified the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments that abolished slavery, granted black men citizenship, and gave them the right to vote.

Liberals did that. They just happened to be called Republicans at the time. Conservatives did not do that. They just happened to be called Democrats back then.

The Southern Manifesto of 1956 was a full-throated outburst against the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 60s. Over 100 members of Congress, all from states that had once comprised the Confederacy, signed the document. All save one were Democrats, but all were ideological conservatives and, as you might have guessed, proponents of segregation. They lashed out at the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, which declared that segregated schools were inherently unequal. The Manifesto attacked Brown as an abuse of judicial power and a violation of states’ rights. It called upon Southerners to exhaust all “lawful means” to resist the “chaos and confusion” that school desegregation would cause.

Sound familiar? Take out segregation and replace it with same-sex marriage, or today, gender identity, and the conservative pearl-clutching sounds exactly the same.

Know what else is familiar? The conservatives lost.

They might not have lost, however, if the legislation hadn’t the backing of so-called Rockefeller Republicans. Those Republicans, which included figures like Dwight Eisenhower and George Romney (Mitt Romney’s father), held moderate-to-liberal views on social policies. They supported a social safety net and FDR’s New Deal programs (though they sought to run those programs more efficiently than Democrats).

Again, what mattered was their ideology, not the name they went under.

So, what happened to all those conservatives who called themselves Democrats? Salvation! When Barry Goldwater, the GOP presidential nominee in 1964, came out against the Civil Rights Act, Democratic segregationists realized the Republican Party could be their new home. A safe space, even.

The Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon, which won him the presidency in 1968, moved the GOP immutably to the right. After Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory in 1980, there was no going back. The party continued down a path toward the divisive conservative extremism we see today.

This is a salient point. Conservatism isn’t the problem, but we no longer have conservatism. What we have now is conservative extremism. In the past, that visceral extremism would rear up against changes in social and cultural norms. Now, it’s 24/7 outrage. Like those faux celebrities famous for being famous, now it’s angry for being angry. It taints all forms of reasonable, relevant conservatism whose denizens now, sheepishly, shamelessly, show no backbone to stand up to the lunatic fringe. (Liz Cheney, a notable exception.)

Any philosophy or ideology taken to an extreme simply is not useful, whether liberal or conservative. Society works best when the liberal drive toward progress needs to be tempered by conservative caution. Rather than obstinate and ultimately fractious opposition, it’s more like tapping the brakes.

That conservatism is far different from the hateful intransigence of conservatives who have collapsed into apoplexy throughout America’s history of social and cultural paradigm shifts, and who now dominate the Republican Party. You can trace the thread from the Civil War through the civil rights movement to the explosion of the Tea Party reacting to Barack Obama’s election as the nation’s first Black president. Each faux-outrage was an attack on egalitarianism in defense of privilege and hierarchy.

Some have argued that conservative outbursts are a reaction to liberal passions moving too fast. Critics viewed Newsom’s past actions as too much too soon, boldness in the worst sense of the liberal imperative for social change.

Often, though, matters of equity have to be challenged in the courts or with civil disobedience to begin the long grind toward legal resolution. Think of the Black college students who sat at that Woolworth lunch counter, or Rosa Parks sitting in the front of a bus. They were breaking segregation laws and local ordinances. People could, and probably did, use the same argument: Why are these people pushing this on us?

But Newsom was right, and we look back now, wondering what all the fuss was about while laughing at the ones who made all the fuss.

Future generations will probably wonder the same thing when looking back at today’s shrill, shrieking Republican hyperbolists, and the current convulsions over “wokeness,” transgender people and public school curriculum will be just another chapter of also-rans in the lens of history.

The increasingly common experience of living in a world of previously marginalized and denigrated people eventually outweighed the fear-mongering, and will do so again and again.

In such matters, familiarity breeds acceptance, not contempt, whether ya like it or not. And if you don’t like it, history won’t care. It will move along just fine without you.

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Biden succeeding

It's always nice to find some "good news" out there amidst the constant doom-and-gloom that much of the media spews out. 

Biden is succeeding in building the economy from 'bottom up, middle out'

by Jennifer Rubin

Washington Post

February 15, 2023

You’ve probably heard President Biden say that he wants to build the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out.” Since he’s been elected, he used that phrase more than 150 times in public appearances. In the past week alone, he repeated it not only in his State of the Union address, but also in speeches in DeForest, Wis., and in Tampa.

There’s ample evidence that it’s happening. Last August, the Dallas Federal Reserve found that over calendar year 2021, “nominal earnings grew 7.7 percent [for low-earners], compared with 4.8 percent for mid-earning workers and 3.6 percent for high-earning workers.” While lower-wage workers were disproportionately affected when covid-19 shut down the economy, when it started to reopen, the job market was tight, so employers had to pay more to attract workers. Lower-income workers benefited the most.

As Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, tells me, “When the economy sniffles, folks at the bottom catch pneumonia.” Now, he says, the opposite is happening: Those at the bottom are getting an extra boost.

It didn’t happen by accident. Biden’s American Rescue Plan kept businesses from going under and prevented families from being evicted or going hungry. That meant employers were ready to hire when, thanks to the coronavirus vaccination program, people felt safe returning to work.

Disproportionate gains for lower-income workers continued throughout 2022. And at the end of the year, the Wall Street Journal reported, the median weekly earnings for all workers were 7.4 percent higher than they were compared to a year before. Wage growth outpaced the year-to-year inflation rate by the end of 2022.

Moreover, the Journal reports, “For some workers, the gains were even larger. The median raise for Black Americans employed full time was 11.3%, compared with the prior year. … The bottom 10th of wage earners — those that make about $570 a week — saw their pay increase by nearly 10%.”

Likewise, the Atlanta Fed’s wage growth tracker shows over the past year, the largest increases in median wages were among workers in the lowest and second-lowest quartiles of earners, at 7.2 and 7.3 percent respectively. For those in two higher quartiles, wages grew at 5.9 and 5.0 percent.

This occurred before the full impact of Biden’s major legislative achievements, specifically the infrastructure program and the Chips Act, had been felt. In keeping with Biden’s outlook, these programs are structured to continue helping lower- and middle-income workers.

The Transportation Department, for example, notes that a majority of the jobs created by the infrastructure bill will not require a college degree, which would include “historically disadvantaged workers” and “workers in distressed areas.”

The same is true for the new jobs created by the Chips Act. The New York Times reports, “Already, unions in Ohio are ramping up training and apprenticeship programs that are explicitly favored by the federal semiconductor legislation, the CHIPS and Science Act, and reaching out to women, teenagers, veterans and other workers who have traditionally been outside the organized labor movement to prepare for the semiconductor work.” Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, tells the Times, “There are going to be significant numbers of noncollege jobs and a real opportunity for the economic inclusion of noncollege workers.”

The administration’s challenge going forward will be to maintain job and wage gains by implementing the agenda already passed and keeping downward pressure on prices. The administration is all too aware that inflation can eat into wage growth and that the economy could slip into a recession. But media outlets are finally acknowledging that a “soft landing” is doable. As a Times headline puts it: “What Recession? Some Economists See Chances of a Growth Rebound.”

The available data suggests Biden actually is making good on his “bottom up, middle out” vision. According to the monthly employment survey numbers, of the 11.5 million private-sector jobs created under Biden, 9.3 million — or 81 percent — were blue-collar manufacturing jobs or nonsupervisory service jobs.

It was telling that in her response to Biden’s State of the Union address, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders ranted about hot button cultural issues with few words devoted to Republicans’ economic agenda. She mentioned “jobs” once: “Republicans believe in an America where strong families thrive in safe communities, where jobs are abundant, and paychecks are rising.”

Under Biden, then, they should be happy.

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$2 billion

It's about damn time some investigation is underway of Jared Kushner and that $2 billion "gift" from the Saudis. Here, Jared, manage my $2 billion. No strings!  Uh huh.

What did Jared Kushner do to get $2 billion in Saudi money?

Steve Schmidt

February 14, 2023

There is a story of great importance that is just now percolating after months of dormancy, despite the shocking revelations around the Saudi Arabian government’s decision to invest $2,000,000,000 into Jared Kushner’s investment fund, revealed by TheNew York Times in April 2022.

The corruption of the Trump family is staggering and unprecedented.

‘Unprecedented’ is a frequently used word in the Trump era because there are no examples of any behaviors preceding Trump’s conduct that are comparable. He shattered every convention and tradition that requires dignity and integrity, while obliterating the law, duty, responsibility and obligation. Donald Trump was given the greatest honor that could be bestowed in this country, and lacked the emotional cognizance to understand the awesome burdens of his duty. He perversely believed his temporary power was a license to take, steal, smash, punish, destroy and avenge. The result was a catastrophe that weakened America and emboldened global adversaries and domestic extremists. 

Along the way, hundreds of thousands of Americans were killed unnecessarily by COVID because of the incompetence, indifference and political gamesmanship of Donald Trump and Jared Kushner. The decision to forgo a national response strategy in the early days of COVID was casually made in the White House by Jared Kushner, who believed that “blue state governors would be blamed, and that would be an effective political strategy,” and therefore Trump would be exculpated from his idiocy and erratic response.

Jared Kushner has been an abhorrent contributor to American decline, decay division and extremism over the last eight years. He is a sinister and corrupt figure who perfectly represents the fantastical levels of corruption that engulfed Washington, DC, during the Trump years. It has since metastasized into a cesspool of dirty transactions where foreign influence, corporate power and media incitements have created a thick blanket of distrust, faithlessness, anger, cynicism and apathy among the American people. The only person in American history who has exceeded Jared Kushner’s corruption is Donald Trump, and the only person who could be considered a worthy peer atop his ignominious perch is his wife Ivanka Trump. She was as exceedingly unqualified for a position of public responsibility as Kushner, while also being his equal in vapidity, grift, arrogance, entitlement, delusion and contrived plasticity.

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CPCs

A CPC is a Crisis Pregnancy Center, a poorly-named deception designed to trick pregnant women into having their babies and not trying to have an abortion. This is yet another front in the GOP's war on women's reproductive health. 

The "Noble Lie" Lives On In Crisis Pregnancy Centers As They Rake In Millions

For the moment, the only defense women have against these noble liars is knowledge of what they are and how they work. Pass it on.

by Thom Hartmann

Plato (in The Republic) was the father of the “noble lie,” a tale told to people “for their own good and that of society” even though it was utterly untrue. Almost twenty-five-hundred years later, the noble lie lives on in some Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs).

A clear description of CPCs came from the Neeva.com AI-driven search engine:

“Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are anti-abortion clinics with a hidden agenda and part of an industry built on misleading pregnant people with scare tactics and lies. They are designed to look like real health centers, but their goal is to scare, shame, or pressure people out of getting an abortion and to spread lies about abortion, birth control, and sexual health. CPCs are dangerous, predatory organizations and a risk to public health.”

 

 And they and their affiliated groups are hauling in a boatload of money. Over $4 billion dollars a year according to the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy(NCRP) — much of it government money, millions taken out of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) funds — flows to CPCs.  One-fifth of our states, all under Republican control, now directly fund these organizations with taxpayer money.

Just the top ten groups running CPCs across the country raked in, NCRP says, over $2.2 billion last year, although how much of that went specifically to discourage women from getting abortions is uncertain.

Texas gave $200 million in taxpayer dollars to CPCs over the past two years. During his State of the State address last week, Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee proposed giving CPCs in his state $100 million. 

The noble lie trend is moving fast across Red states nationwide.

A database compiled by Reproaction found over 2600 CPCs across the country, many located next door to abortion clinics or Planned Parenthood clinics, where they attempt to fool and thus intercept women before they can enter the real clinics.

When Olivia Raisner, an investigative reporter with health education nonprofit Mayday, visited a CPC in Indianapolis for an article three months ago in MS Magazine, she noted how the waiting area and exam room were exactly what you’d expect when visiting a high-end doctor’s office.

Her urine test was positive because she’d smuggled in a bottle of a pregnant friend’s urine, so the first noble lie the faux clinician told her was: 

“The girls that get abortions do end up with high suicide rates.”

 

 Following that lie, she was told that if she got an abortion she’d experience depression for the rest of her life and that if she later has a child she “won’t be able to fully love him, because I’ll always be reminded that I took away his brother or sister.”

That lie was followed by the serial lies that abortion will scar her Fallopian tubes and that she’d risk bulimia, anorexia, and infertility.

None of those assertions are true.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, did a ten-year, 1000-patient study of women who got abortions and women who’d wanted or tried to get abortions but, for various reasons, were turned away. 

It was the first major study of its sort, and was turned into a 2021 book titled The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having - or Being Denied - an Abortion.

Their findings are sobering. As summarized on the UCSF’s ANSIRI website, women who were unwillingly forced to carry their pregnancies to term were, according to actual science and research:

—“More likely to experience serious complications from the end of pregnancy including eclampsia and death. 
—“More likely to stay tethered to abusive partners.
— “More likely to suffer anxiety and loss of self-esteem in the short term after being denied abortion.
— “Less likely to have aspirational life plans for the coming year.
— “More likely to experience poor physical health for years after the pregnancy, including chronic pain and gestational hypertension.”

They also determined that:

“[B]eing denied abortion has serious implications for the children born of unwanted pregnancy, as well as for the existing children in the family.” 

 

 And they found, supporting previous research, that women denied abortions were four times more likely to end up in poverty and, on the other hand:

“[W]omen who have an abortion are not more likely than those denied the procedure to have depression, anxiety, or suicidal ideation. We find that 95% of women report that having the abortion was the right decision for them over five years after the procedure.” [emphasis added]

 

Pro-Choice North Carolina compiled a list of the top ten noble lies CPCs in that state had told women who came looking for abortions. They were:

— Lie #1: Abortion causes breast cancer.

— Lie #2: You’ll never have children if you have an abortion.

— Lie #3: Condoms don’t work.

— Lie #4: The abortion pill, or a 'chemical abortion,' is dangerous and not medically safe for women.

— Lie #5: Birth control and emergency contraception (i.e., the “morning-after pill” or “Plan B”) cause abortions.

— Lie #6: Abortion causes permanent psychological and mental damage, including “post-abortion syndrome”

— Lie #7: Abortions cost much more than carrying your baby to term.

— Lie #8: Surgical abortion can kill you.

— Lie #9: You have plenty of time to make a decision. One-third of all pregnancies end in miscarriages anyway. (This is intended to push women beyond the legal time limit for abortion.)

— Lie #10: Your baby can already smell and hear you.

CPCs are growing increasingly sophisticated in their targeting of women looking for abortion services. As Kylie Cheung wrote for Jezebel:

“Anti-abortion groups are already taking advantage of digital platforms to spy on people, from funding and partnering with fertility apps that track people’s periods to reportedly using mobile geo-fencing technology to bombard patients at or en route to abortion clinics with targeted, anti-abortion propaganda ads.”

 

 This week the Tech Transparency Project broke the news that Google, in apparent violation of their own policy against deceptive advertising, has been driving ads and links from CPCs to as many as 56% of women searching for abortion facilities near them. 

A typical CPC ad, The Guardian reported Tuesday, has the headline “Free Abortion Help – 100% Confidential.”

And it’s apparently not just Google. The investigative reporting website Revealreported last June:

“Facebook is collecting ultra-sensitive personal data about abortion seekers and enabling anti-abortion organizations to use that data as a tool to target and influence people online, in violation of its own policies and promises.”

 

 Just as alarming, what happens at CPCs doesn’t, it appears, stay at CPCs. Some of the various groups and networks (some are huge) share information among each other and, as Planned Parenthood Advocates of Iowa notes:

​​​​​​​“Because CPCs do not provide medical care, they do not have to adhere to any medical or ethical standards, including HIPAA, the national standard established to protect medical records and other personal health information. That means they are free to say whatever they want without consequence.”

 

 There’s also a widespread concern across the pro-choice movement that as states move to criminalize or put a bounty on the backs of women who travel out-of-state to obtain abortions (Texas was the first), information gathered by CPCs may be handed off or sold to law enforcement or bounty hunters to track down women who, after visiting a CPC, leave the state to get the care they’re seeking.

Even though CPCs aren’t licensed medical facilities, they do often perform procedures like ultrasounds that in many states are unregulated. Kentucky nurse Susan Rames, an actual healthcare professional with 20 years of hospital experience and “motivated by her Christian faith,” volunteered in good faith to work at a CPC in Louisville.

As Louisville’s arts and entertainment newspaper LEO Weekly reported:

“The center was using an expired disinfectant to sanitize an essential piece of equipment for early-pregnancy ultrasounds: the transvaginal probe. And that disinfectant, medical researchers have warned in recent years, doesn’t kill the human papillomavirus, a widespread and potentially deadly sexually transmitted infection responsible for more than 90% of cervical cancers, as well as cancers of the genitals and throat.”

 

 When Rames tried to get the clinic to upgrade to the right disinfectant her efforts were rebuffed: she even bought some of the right stuff on amazon.com and donated it to the CPC. Finally, frustrated, she filed a whistleblower complaint. But because CPCs aren’t regulated in Kentucky, her concerns were ignored by the state.

Pregnancy is the only health condition where noble lies are allowed. 

If a healthcare professional — and actual nurses work in some of these CPCs — were to intentionally tell you lies about treating cancer, broken bones, hypertension, diabetes, or any other condition they could end up both on the receiving end of a major civil lawsuit, losing their license, or even in jail.

But because CPCs are largely unregulated and don’t generally offer medical services (even though they pretend to), women who are taken in or even infected with HPV have no recourse.

For the moment, the only defense women have against these noble liars is knowledge of what they are and how they work. Pass it on.

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