Texas (And Georgia) Won't Investigate Deaths Due To Their Abortion Ban

The following is part of an article by Susan Rinkunas at MSNBC.com:

Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision two and a half years ago, state abortion bans have restricted pregnant women’s access to emergency medical care. And as the predictable harms — up to and including death — come to light, some states are acting as if they want to hide them from the public.

Last week, ProPublica reported on Porsha Ngumezi, the third known Texas woman to have died under that state’s abortion ban. In June 2023, Ngumezi lost so much blood from miscarrying at 11 weeks that she needed two transfusions. The hospital delayed providing a procedure called dilation and curettage to clear the uterus, with doctors instead giving her a drug to stop the bleeding. She died of hemorrhaging three hours later. More than a dozen doctors who reviewed a summary of her case told ProPublica that Ngumezi’s death could have been averted with a D&C.

The very next day, The Washington Post reported that Texas’ Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC) wouldn’t examine any pregnancy-related deaths from 2022 and 2023, citing a backlog of cases on top of the two-year delay that is typical of such committees. That means Texas won’t investigate any deaths from the past two years that are potentially linked to abortion bans, like Ngumezi’s. . . .

Maternal mortality committees review women’s deaths not to publicize individual cases but to make recommendations to prevent future harm. This refusal to review pregnancy-related deaths from the first post-Dobbs years means we may never have a full picture of the harm caused by an abortion ban in the second-most-populous state — one that has a long-standing crisis of women dying from pregnancy. An analysis published in September by the Gender Equity Policy Institute found that, from 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal deaths in Texas increased by 56%, compared with 11% nationwide. But rather than investigate, the state is essentially admitting that the bodies are piling up faster than the state can address them. Its solution is not to dedicate more time and effort — like, perhaps, increasing the size of the 23-member committee — but to simply brush these women’s lives under the rug and skip ahead to 2024.

Texas isn’t the only state engaging in this sordid interference. ProPublica has found at least five women who’ve died under abortion bans: three in Texas and two in Georgia. After the outlet reported that Georgia’s MMRC had determined the two deaths were preventable, state officials responded by firing all of its 32 members. The commissioner of Georgia’s Public Health Department wrote in a letter to members that because the department wasn’t able to figure out who shared confidential information with ProPublica, it was dismissing the whole committee and would seek applications for replacements. This ruthless move will undoubtedly delay the work of the committee, but it seems leaks to the media are more important than urgent investigations of these women’s deaths. . . .

Unfortunately, things could get worse before they get better. Lawmakers in Texas and other states are threatening to copy a Louisiana controlled substances law that makes it harder to dispense medications used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging because the drugs are also used for abortions. The law targets the medication the hospital gave to Ngumezi instead of a D&C, and experts warn it could kill even more women in childbirth. 

Hearing On Atlanta D.A. Highlights Trump's Desperation

 

Donald Trump faces 91 criminal indictments in four different venues. And many of those charges could actually result in his imprisonment if convicted.

Trump has tried every trick in the book to rid himself of these charges. He has declared that he is immune to many of these charges because he was president. That was shot down by the D.C. Court of Criminal Appeals. That court found Trump was just as subject to being charged for criminal activity as any other American citizen. 

Trump has also tried to delay the trials he faces by filing appeal after appeal in many courts, including the Supreme Court. His hope is to delay any trials until after the November election. If elected president again, he thinks he would be immune to facing trials, and maybe even able to pardon himself.

Some of the most dangerous (to him) charges he faces are those brought against him by the District Attorney in Atlanta. There, he faces a RICO charges for actively trying to illegally overturn the legitimate election results in Georgia.

And he is trying a dirty trick to rid himself of the Atlanta charges. His attorneys learned of a romantic relationship between the Atlanta D.A. and one of the prosecutors she appointed to help with Trump's case. Trump's attorneys have charged that the D.A. appointed the prosecutor so he could get payments from government contracts and she would receive illegal kickbacks. Those charges have resulted in a hearing.

In the hearing, Trump's lawyers have tried to drag the D.A. through the mud -- questioning the prosecutor, the D.A., and even her father about the sexual relationship. But outside of trying to smear the D.A. with lurid sexual questions, Trump's lawyers have been unable to establish any illegalities.

They were hoping if they could smear the D.A. badly enough, she would be removed from the case. The case would then be given to another jurisdiction -- maybe even one that would dismiss the case, or at least not pursue it aggressively. That should NOT happen!

Trump has claimed innocence. If he's innocent, then he should go to court and let his lawyers prove it. 

Trump's attempts to smear the D.A. are despicable. Her love life is none of his business - especially since he has such a poor sexual history himself (proven sex abuse, obvious misogyny, and multiple divorces). This smear attempt is over the line - and he knows it! He is just desperate, and running scared.

Most Approve Of The Indictment Of Trump In Georgia

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll --  done between August 19th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 1,500 adults (including 1,309 registered voters). The margin of error for adults is 3.2 points, and for registered voters is 3.1 points.

Trump And 18 Allies Are Indicted By Georgia Grand Jury

The Georgia Grand Jury has indicted Donald Trump for 13 crimes. That makes a total of 91 crimes that he has been indicted for between four different Grand Juries. Georgia also indicted 18 of Trump's allies (co-conspirators) for helping Trump try to subvert Georgia law after the 2020 election.

Here, from The New York Times, are the 19 people indicted: 

Five Takeaways From The Georgia Senate Race

The following is from the op-ed by Blake Hounshell on the Georgia Senate race in The New York Times:

Here are five takeaways from the most expensive and bitterly fought Senate race of 2022:

1. Republicans chose a deeply flawed candidate.

The Warnock campaign wanted to make the race a contrast between a reverend and a running back, not a referendum on national Democrats or the Biden administration.

In Mr. Walker, the senator’s team had the perfect foil. Lurid allegations about his personal conduct drove national news: previously undisclosed children he had fathered, accusations of domestic violence, exaggerations about his business affairs, questions about his residency in Georgia.

Facing incessant doubts about his fitness for office, Mr. Walker tried self-abasement. “I’m not that smart,” he said at one point. It was a deft strategy for lowering expectations ahead of his lone debate with Mr. Warnock. But in voicing the very concerns many Republicans held, he might have helped to crystallize them.

Mr. Walker’s problems were especially acute in metropolitan Atlanta, where voters tend to be wealthier and more educated. During the general election in Fulton County, for instance, he lagged the vote total of Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican, by a larger margin than his entire statewide gap with Mr. Warnock.

But Mr. Walker made little attempt to lure back those wayward Kemp voters, and kept serving up red meat instead. “I don’t even know what the heck is a pronoun,” he said at one rally. At another, he said that “Jesus may not recognize” transgender people if they seek to enter heaven. In much of the state, he lost ground between Nov. 8 and the runoff by several percentage points.

Other comments became fodder for Mr. Warnock’s attack ads. Mr. Walker extolled the virtues of “gas-guzzling cars” in a state that has aggressively tried to become a hub of electric-vehicle manufacturing. And, in comments that made him the butt of late-night jokes, he embarked on a lengthy tangent about werewolves and vampires.

2. Walker’s loss turns up the heat on Trump.

It will be hard — though not impossible — for Mr. Trump to wriggle his way out of this one. Mr. Walker had explored running for office long before 2022. But Mr. Trump, who had known Mr. Walker since the 1980s, when he owned the New Jersey Generals football team in the short-lived U.S.F.L., almost single-handedly made Mr. Walker’s candidacy a reality.

“Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the legendary Herschel Walker ran for the United States Senate in Georgia?” Mr. Trump said in March 2021. “He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the NFL. He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!”

Run Mr. Walker did, jumping into the primary even after four Republican candidates had already announced their campaigns, including Gary Black, the agriculture commissioner and establishment favorite. Mr. Black warned that Mr. Walker’s “baggage” would hurt him.

Yet none of Mr. Walker’s rivals could match his celebrity wattage. He barely broke a sweat in the primary, winning with 68 percent of the vote.

“Once people realized it was baked in,” lamented Seth Weathers, a Republican consultant, “they just rallied around Herschel.”

During the runoff, Republicans made clear that they wanted Mr. Trump to stay away. Instead of one of his signature MAGA rallies in Georgia, the former president was reduced to holding a conference call to support Mr. Walker that was closed to the news media.

Many Republicans, previously mindful of the former president’s capacity for survival, are now shedding their caution. “If Georgia Republicans want to keep laying in the mud with Donald Trump,” said Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, “it’s going to be a purple state.”. . .

As the runoff outcome became clear, Scott Jennings, a former aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, observed that “Georgia may be remembered as the state that broke Trump once and for all.”

3. Georgia will again be a key state on the presidential map in  2024.

Watching the explosive growth of metropolitan Atlanta over the last decades, and especially the surge in Asian American and Latino voters, Republicans began to worry that their grip on the state was eroding.

They watched in 2016 as Hillary Clinton flipped Cobb County, a fast-diversifying former Republican stronghold in the Atlanta suburbs, on her way to losing the state by just five percentage points. In 2018, when Stacey Abrams came within 1.4 points of beating Mr. Kemp in her first race for governor, she won Cobb by nearly 10.

But it’s simplistic to say that demographics is destiny. On Nov. 8, Republicans won every statewide office other than senator, including Mr. Kemp’s, by an average of about seven points.

That makes Mr. Warnock’s victory all the more remarkable. But it was by no means foreordained, and a stronger opponent might have beaten him. Had Mr. Warnock lost, many would now be questioning whether the Democrats’ victories in 2020 and 2021 were anomalies. After all, Mr. Biden won the state by fewer than 12,000 votes.

The president, in a sign of how centrally he views Georgia to his re-election hopes, has urged his party to add the state to the early presidential nominating calendar in 2024. There’s just one problem: Republican officials in Georgia will get to decide if that happens, and they’ve already poured cold water on the idea.

Either way, the path to 270 Electoral College votes looks much the same for Mr. Biden in 2024 as it did in 2020: Win every swing state in the Midwest plus Nevada and New Hampshire, and keep Arizona and Georgia blue just in case.

4. Democrats have built a turnout machine in Georgia.

Much has been made of the Democrats’ astonishingly durable coalition in Nevada, the core of which is unionized casino workers in Las Vegas. But Democrats have assembled a no less formidable turnout operation in Georgia, a much larger and more geographically complex state.

Although metropolitan Atlanta represents nearly 60 percent of the electorate, to win the big statewide races, Democrats needed to find pockets of new voters elsewhere, too. Black communities in places like Albany, in southwest Georgia, often went neglected. In 2017, Ms. Abrams made a statement by announcing her campaign there rather than in Atlanta.

“One of the things we’ve done better with is not running a metro-centric campaign, building organizing infrastructure across the state,” said Jonae Wartel, who directed the 2021 runoffs for Democrats.

Another secret to Democrats’ success in Georgia is patience. A core network of organizers has stuck around for years, building relationships across the state and prioritizing local roots. After the 2021 Senate races, the state Democratic Party immediately hired several of the top brains behind Mr. Warnock’s and Senator Jon Ossoff’s field teams, then asked them to write detailed reports on what they had learned.

“There’s a year-round organizing conversation in Georgia,” said Nse Ufot, the former chief executive of the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit that became an organizing hub for activists across the state. “It’s not transactional.”

5. Democrats overcame a restrictive new voting law.

If Georgia Republicans were hoping that making it harder to vote would help them win back the Senate seat they lost in 2021, they were wrong. And there are signs that the changes they put in place might have backfired in some respects.

The battle over voting rights kept Mr. Warnock’s base busy between elections. In 2021, when Republicans passed a major new voting law that Democrats and civil rights groups denounced as an attempt to suppress Black votes, the machine went to work. Mr. Warnock’s strategists adjusted their voter contact plans accordingly, while outside activists held protests, organized petition drives and basically kept their network buzzing all year.

“We don’t let it lay dormant,” Ms. Wartel said.

For Gerald Griggs, the president of the Georgia chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., the lesson is not that the outcry over the law was a false alarm, as Republicans have insisted.

Anticipating long lines at the polls, civil rights groups planned “parties to the polls” all over the state, featuring water and live entertainment, just beyond the minimum distance from polling locations mandated by the new rules. And the N.A.A.C.P. threatened to sue counties that allowed frivolous lawsuits under provisions of the voting law that allowed unlimited challenges to individual ballots.

“African Americans in this state know how to mobilize,” Mr. Griggs said. “But you shouldn’t have to out-organize voter suppression.”

Two New Polls Show Warnock Beating Walker In Georgia

This chart is from the Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between October 7th and 10th of 1,157 likely Georgia voters, with a 2.9 point margin of error.

This chart is from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution / Georgia News Collaborative Poll -- done between September 25th and October 4th of 1,030 likely Georgia voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error. 

Georgia Races Are Turning Toward Democrats

The charts above are from the Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between June 23rd and 27th of a sample of 1,497 registered voters in Georgia, with a 2.5 point margin of error.

Warnock Holds Small Lead Over Walker In Georgia

 This chart reflects the results of the recent SurveyUSA Poll -- done between April 22nd and 27th of a statewide sample of 1,278 likely Georgia voters.

Warnock Has Small Lead Over 3 GOP Opponents In Georgia

In many articles in the media, it has been said that Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia is one of the Senate seats that's most likely to flip in the next election. That could happen, but it's not going to be easy for the Republicans -- especially if Democrats turn out in the same kind of numbers they did in 2020. This poll asked voters how he would do against three GOP opponents -- former Senator Kelly Loeffler, former NFL star Herschel Walker, and Gary Black. He tops all three by small margins.

The Public Policy Polling survey was conducted on August 4th and 5th of a sample of 622 Georgia voters (no moe was given).

Republicans Aren't Even Trying To Hide Their Racism Now

 

Last week, Georgia Republicans passed a law to suppress the vote of those they expect to vote for Democrats -- primarily voters of color. And the law was signed by the Republican governor in front of a painting of a slave plantation. They aren't even trying to hide their racism anymore. And it's not just in Georgia either -- as racist voter suppression laws have been introduced in many other states.

The post below is much of an op-ed by by Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Sometimes America’s legacy of white supremacy is hiding in plain sight, literally. When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a hastily passed voter suppression law that many are calling the new, new Jim Crow on Thursday night, surrounded by a half-dozen white men, he did so in front of a painting of a plantation where more than 100 Black people had been enslaved.

The fitting symbolism is somehow both shocking and unsurprising. In using the antebellum image of the notorious Callaway Plantation — in a region where enslaved Black people seeking freedom were hunted with hounds — in Wilkes County, Ga., as the backdrop for signing a bill that would make it a crime to hand water to a thirsty voter waiting on Georgia’s sometimes hours-long voter lines, the GOP governor was sending a clear message about race and human rights in the American South.

The portrait of the plantation was the starkest reminder of Georgia’s history of white racism that spans slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the rebirth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and today’s voter purges targeting Black and brown voters — but it wasn’t the only one. At the very moment that Kemp was signing the law with his all-white posse, a Black female Georgia lawmaker — Rep. Park Cannon — who’d knocked on the governor’s door in the hopes of watching the bill signing was instead dragged away and arrested by state troopers, in a scene that probably had the Deep South’s racist sheriffs of yesteryear like Bull Connor or Jim Clark smiling in whatever fiery hellhole they now inhabit.

Indeed, Twitter was on fire Thursday night with posters drawing the straight line from notorious past segregationists like George Wallace to the 2021 actions of Kemp and the GOP-led Georgia Legislature in passing — at great speed and with little debate — a lengthy bill that also limits easy-access drop boxes for ballots and places onerous voter-ID restrictions on voting by mail, and which the New York Times reports “will have an outsized effect on Black voters.”

On one level this new voter-suppression law — “voter integrity,” in the modern GOP’s Orwellian branding — is inspired by the current and possible future events of ex-President Donald Trump’s Big Lie about fraud in the 2020 election, the narrow upset wins in Georgia for President Biden and two new Democratic senators, and the threat that voting icon Stacey Abrams poses to Kemp in the 2022 election. But there’s also a powerful pull back to Georgia past. That link is made clear by the history hanging right behind Kemp on Thursday. . . .

In 2021, it’s tempting to call Kemp signing the bill in front of the plantation painting “ironic,” when in fact it’s all too fitting. Understanding the symbolism here helps us to understand what’s really important, that the voting law is the latest cruel iron link in an unbroken chain of white supremacy that extends all the way back to 1619, when the first slave ship arrived in North American soil. But familiarity shouldn’t deaden our sense of outrage.

If you grew up shocked and angered by the photos of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, of state troopers clubbing John Lewis near the Edmund Pettus Bridge or police torturing young Black marchers with fire hoses in the streets of Birmingham, whatever you would have done back then is what you are doing now to fight this new Jim Crow era today.

In Washington, it’s more imperative than even that the Senate ditch the filibuster to pass the two federal voting laws that could potentially block or roll back suppression efforts not just in Georgia but a number of other GOP-led states with bills in the hopper. As for Georgia, Major League Baseball needs to strip metro Atlanta of the 2021 All-Star Game immediately, and stronger steps — including a boycott — need to be on the table. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation to save democracy and end systemic racism. Brian Kemp has reminded us that — just like in Faulkner’s Mississippi — that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Trump's Election Lies Cost Georgia GOP Two Senate Seats

I must admit that I was mildly surprised by the Victories of Ossoff and Warnock in the Georgia Senate races. Both had trailed on Election Day, and if the turnout was the same for the runoff, the Republicans would be expected to win. 

But the turnout was not the same, and the Democrats did a better job of getting their voters to the polls than the Republicans did. What kept so many Republicans at home during the runoff? A pretty big factor was Donald Trump's insistence that there was voter fraud and the election in Georgia was stolen from him.

If that was true, then why should Republicans vote? It turns out that was the thinking of many white Republicans.

Here is part of an analysis of the Georgia runoff election from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Control of the U.S. Senate was on the line, but many Georgia Republicans — at least some deterred by Donald Trump’s loss — stayed home rather than cast ballots in January’s runoffs. 

Their absence at the polls helped swing Georgia and the Senate to the Democrats.

Over 752,000 Georgia voters who cast ballots in the presidential election didn’t show up again for the runoffs just two months later, according to a new analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of recently released voting records.

More than half of the no-shows were white, and many lived in rural areas, constituencies that lean toward Republican candidates.

Trump’s message that the election was stolendiscouraged voters such as Craig Roland, a 61-year-old Rome resident. Roland said he didn’t believe his vote would count.

“What good would it have done to vote? They have votes that got changed,” Roland said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever vote again.”

Meanwhile, 228,000 new voters cast ballots in the runoffs who hadn’t voted in the Nov. 3 election. They were more racially diverse and younger voters who tend to back Democrats. . . .

The AJC’s analysis found that the drop in turnout was most severe in northwest and South Georgia, areas where Trump held rallies, in Dalton and Valdosta, to bolster support for the state’s Republican senators. . . .

The numbers show that while overall turnout fell from 5 million in the presidential election to 4.5 million in the runoffs, the most precipitous declines occurred among Republican voters, Fraga said. . . .

Over three-quarters of Republican voters said they thought there was widespread voter fraud in the presidential election, compared with 4% of Democratic voters, according to a poll conducted for the AJC.

The Big Winners Of The Georgia Senate Elections

 The senate elections in Georgia are over, and I have to admit I was mildly surprised at the outcome. I expected Republicans to come out in droves in Georgia after losing the presidential election and make sure they re-elected their senators -- but that didn't happen. 

The people who came out in droves were the Democrats and Independents, who didn't want the two corrupt Republicans to represent them.Jon Offoff defeated Perdue by about 27,000 votes, and Rev. Warnock defeated Loeffler by even more -- over 64,000 votes. Both men had a larger winning margin than Biden did when he won the state.

We can't call Georgia a blue state yet, but it has turned a rather nice shade of purple.

But as happy as I am about the Warnock and Ossoff victories, I don't think they were the biggest winners in that election. They will be good senators, but perhaps the biggest winner of the night was Senator Chuck Schumer.

As Minority Leader in the Senate, Schumer has had very little power. He has had to watch as Mitch McConnell (the GOP Majority Leader) blocked hundreds of bills passed by the Democratic House -- refusing to bring them up for debate or a vote in the Senate.

That won't happen anymore. With the two Democratic victories, Senator Chuck Schumer now becomes the Majority Leader in the Senate. 

Democratic bills will at least be debated and voted on in the Senate now -- and that's a very good thing.

The other big winner was Stacey Abrams. When she vowed to do a voter registration effort to flip Georgia blue, most people appreciated the effort -- but didn't give her a great chance of success.

They were wrong. She not only got hundreds of thousands of voters registered, but she got them to the polls. And she is, in my opinion, primarily responsible for the statewide Georgia victories of Biden, Warnock, and Ossoff.

She is a rising star in the Democratic Party, and no one should ever underestimate her again. 

She doesn't just promises -- she delivers!