NEW YORK TIMES
By KATE ZERNIKE
SEARCHLIGHT, Nev. — Several thousand people converged on this small town on Saturday for what was billed as a showdown with its most famous native, and one of the highest ranking Democrats in Congress, Senator Harry Reid.
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The show put on by a group called the Tea Party Express included Tea Party country songs and Tea Party rappers, but the biggest draw for many in the crowd was Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential candidate, who held the crowd rapt despite a desert dust storm.
Waving her “poor man’s teleprompter” as she called her hand, she hit all the Tea Party high notes about the need to bring the government back in line with the Constitution, as well as some of her now-standard punch lines. (“How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for you?” and, “We need a commander in chief, not a professor of constitutional law giving us a lecture.”)
“We’re saying the big government, big debt, Obama-Pelosi-Reid spending spree is over, you’re fired!” she told the crowd. “We’re not going to sit down and shut up.”
The four-hour rally was the kickoff to a planned three-week tour by the Tea Party Express, a three-bus caravan that will hold events across the country as it winds its way to Washington for the Tea Party rally on tax day. The group brought in a small fleet of bulldozers and dump trucks a few days before the rally to regrade about 20 acres of land just outside the town’s main street, expecting that 10,000 people would show.
Mr. Reid, the Senate majority leader, was hardly the crowd’s only target. “Liar, Thug, Traitor, Commie Usurper,” read one woman’s homemade poster, next to a picture of President Obama as the devil. Many signs decried the health care legislation passed last week. “This is America, how dare they ignore us?” read one. “The 219 Yes Voters’ Names Go Down in History and in Shame,” read another.
Speaker after speaker denounced Democrats for portraying Tea Party members as angry and violent, saying they did not believe members had been behind the bricks thrown at some Democrats’ windows after passage of the health care bill. One speaker doubted Representative John Lewis’s account that he had been spat on by a protester at a Tea Party rally on the Capitol, challenging him to a $10,000 bet to produce proof or take a lie detector test. Debbie Landis, the leader of Anger Is Brewing, a Nevada Tea Party group and local sponsor of the event, noted that her group held candidate forums and legislative action alerts: “not one of those activities involves a brick,” she said.
Mr. Reid was in Las Vegas, about 60 miles away, for the opening of a new shooting park with Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association at his side. There, Mr. Reid recalled fondly his small-town upbringing and his first gun, as well as his long friendship with Mr. LaPierre.
The majority leader, a former lightweight boxer, was not one to completely back away from the showdown: he had set up a “hospitality tent” tent in Searchlight at the Nugget casino, the size of a small rest stop and perhaps the largest building in town. There, workers served tea and doughnut holes — herbal tea, because, a spokesman said, the Tea Party crowd did not seem to need more caffeine. The snacks were a nod to the gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage known as the doughnut hole, which the health care bill seeks to close.
“I’m happy so many people came to see my hometown of Searchlight and spend their out-of-state money, especially in these tough economic times,” Mr. Reid said in a statement. “Ultimately, though, this election will be decided by Nevadans, not people from other states who parachute in for one day to have a tea party.”
Tea Party members shouted out their home states: Illinois! Idaho! Indiana! Many others came from Arizona and California.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
House Approves Health Overhaul, Sending Landmark Bill to Obama
NEW YORK TIMES
By ROBERT PEAR and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
WASHINGTON — House Democrats approved a far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s health system on Sunday, voting over unanimous Republican opposition to provide medical coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans after an epic political battle that could define the differences between the parties for years.
With the 219-to-212 vote, the House gave final approval to legislation passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve. Thirty-four Democrats joined Republicans in voting against the bill. The vote sent the measure to President Obama, whose yearlong push for the legislation has been the centerpiece of his agenda and a test of his political power.
On a sun-splashed day outside the Capitol, protesters, urged on by House Republicans, chanted “Kill the bill” and waved yellow flags declaring “Don’t Tread on Me.” They carried signs saying “Doctors, Not Dictators.” Inside, Democrats hailed the votes as a historic advance in social justice, comparable to the establishment of Medicare and Social Security. They said the bill would also put pressure on rising health care costs and rein in federal budget deficits.
After a year of combat and weeks of legislative brinksmanship, House Democrats and the White House clinched their victory only hours before the voting started on Sunday. They agreed to a deal with opponents of abortion rights within their party to reiterate in an executive order that federal money provided by the bill could not be used for abortions, securing for Democrats the final handful of votes they needed to assure passage.
The debate on the legislation set up a bitter midterm campaign season, with Republicans promising an effort to repeal the legislation, challenge its constitutionality or block its provisions in the states.
The health care bill would require most Americans to have health insurance, would add 16 million people to the Medicaid rolls and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people, at a cost to the government of $938 billion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office said.
The bill would require many employers to offer coverage to employees or pay a penalty. Each state would set up a marketplace, or exchange, where consumers without such coverage could shop for insurance meeting federal standards.
The budget office estimates that the bill would provide coverage to 32 million uninsured people, but still leave 23 million uninsured in 2019. One-third of those remaining uninsured would be illegal immigrants.
The new costs, according to the budget office, would be more than offset by savings in Medicare and by new taxes and fees, including a tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health plans and a tax on the investment income of the most affluent Americans. Cost estimates by the budget office, showing that the bill would reduce federal budget deficits by $143 billion in the next 10 years, persuaded some fiscally conservative Democrats to vote for the bill.
Democrats said Americans would embrace the bill when they saw its benefits, including some provisions that take effect later this year. Health insurers, for example, could not deny coverage to children with medical problems or suddenly drop coverage for people who become ill. Insurers must allow children to stay on their parents’ policies until they turn 26. Small businesses could obtain tax credits to help them buy insurance.
The campaign for a health care overhaul began as a way to help the uninsured. But it gained momentum when middle-class families with health insurance flooded Congress with their grievances. They complained of soaring premiums. They said their insurance had been canceled when they got sick.
“It’s not just the uninsured,” said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “We also have to worry about people with insurance who find, for crazy reasons, that they are somehow going to be denied coverage.”
In the end, groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business tried to stop the bill, saying it would increase the cost of doing business. But other groups, including the American Medical Association and AARP, backed it, as did the pharmaceutical industry.
By ROBERT PEAR and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
WASHINGTON — House Democrats approved a far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s health system on Sunday, voting over unanimous Republican opposition to provide medical coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans after an epic political battle that could define the differences between the parties for years.
With the 219-to-212 vote, the House gave final approval to legislation passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve. Thirty-four Democrats joined Republicans in voting against the bill. The vote sent the measure to President Obama, whose yearlong push for the legislation has been the centerpiece of his agenda and a test of his political power.
On a sun-splashed day outside the Capitol, protesters, urged on by House Republicans, chanted “Kill the bill” and waved yellow flags declaring “Don’t Tread on Me.” They carried signs saying “Doctors, Not Dictators.” Inside, Democrats hailed the votes as a historic advance in social justice, comparable to the establishment of Medicare and Social Security. They said the bill would also put pressure on rising health care costs and rein in federal budget deficits.
After a year of combat and weeks of legislative brinksmanship, House Democrats and the White House clinched their victory only hours before the voting started on Sunday. They agreed to a deal with opponents of abortion rights within their party to reiterate in an executive order that federal money provided by the bill could not be used for abortions, securing for Democrats the final handful of votes they needed to assure passage.
The debate on the legislation set up a bitter midterm campaign season, with Republicans promising an effort to repeal the legislation, challenge its constitutionality or block its provisions in the states.
The health care bill would require most Americans to have health insurance, would add 16 million people to the Medicaid rolls and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people, at a cost to the government of $938 billion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office said.
The bill would require many employers to offer coverage to employees or pay a penalty. Each state would set up a marketplace, or exchange, where consumers without such coverage could shop for insurance meeting federal standards.
The budget office estimates that the bill would provide coverage to 32 million uninsured people, but still leave 23 million uninsured in 2019. One-third of those remaining uninsured would be illegal immigrants.
The new costs, according to the budget office, would be more than offset by savings in Medicare and by new taxes and fees, including a tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health plans and a tax on the investment income of the most affluent Americans. Cost estimates by the budget office, showing that the bill would reduce federal budget deficits by $143 billion in the next 10 years, persuaded some fiscally conservative Democrats to vote for the bill.
Democrats said Americans would embrace the bill when they saw its benefits, including some provisions that take effect later this year. Health insurers, for example, could not deny coverage to children with medical problems or suddenly drop coverage for people who become ill. Insurers must allow children to stay on their parents’ policies until they turn 26. Small businesses could obtain tax credits to help them buy insurance.
The campaign for a health care overhaul began as a way to help the uninsured. But it gained momentum when middle-class families with health insurance flooded Congress with their grievances. They complained of soaring premiums. They said their insurance had been canceled when they got sick.
“It’s not just the uninsured,” said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “We also have to worry about people with insurance who find, for crazy reasons, that they are somehow going to be denied coverage.”
In the end, groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business tried to stop the bill, saying it would increase the cost of doing business. But other groups, including the American Medical Association and AARP, backed it, as did the pharmaceutical industry.
Monday, March 22, 2010
School Suspensions Lead to Legal Challenge
NEW YORK TIMES
By ERIK ECKHOLM
CHOCOWINITY, N.C. — As school let out one day in January 2008, students from rival towns faced off. Two girls flailed away for several seconds and clusters of boys pummeled each other until teachers pulled them apart. The fistfights at Southside High School involved no weapons and no serious injuries, and in some ways seemed as old-fashioned as the country roads here in eastern North Carolina. But the punishment was strictly up-to-date: Sheriff’s deputies handcuffed and briefly arrested a dozen students. The school suspended seven of them for a short period and six others from the melee, including the two girls, for the entire semester. As extra punishment, the girls were told they could not attend Beaufort County’s alternative school for troubled students and were denied aid to study at home.
Their punishment was typical of the get-tough, “zero tolerance” discipline policies that swept the nation over the last two decades, resulting in an increase in suspensions that are disproportionate among black students. School officials here say they acted to preserve a “safe and orderly environment.”
But whether banishing children from schools really makes them safer or serves the community well is increasingly questioned by social scientists and educators. And now the punishment is before the courts in what has become a stark legal test of the approach. Lawyers for the girls — who are black — say that denying them a semester’s schooling was an unjustified violation of their constitutional right to an education.
A growing body of research, scholars say, suggests that heavy use of suspensions does less to pacify schools than to push already troubled students toward academic failure and dropping out — and sometimes into what critics have called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
A rising number of districts are already reversing course and trying new approaches, including behavioral counseling and mediation, to reduce conflict and create safer, quieter schools while ejecting only the worst offenders.
“These students were treated like criminals and abandoned by the school system for doing something that students have done forever — fighting in the schoolyard,” said Erwin Byrd, a lawyer with Legal Aid of North Carolina, which brought the suit with lawyers from the Duke University School of Law. The school district says it must retain discretion over punishments.
Some 15 percent of the nation’s black students in grades K-12 are suspended at least briefly each year, compared with 4.8 percent of white students, according to federal data from 2006, the latest available. Expulsions are meted out to one in 200 black students versus one in 1,000 white students.
Zero tolerance and the quick resort to suspensions have been politically popular, but education leaders are having second thoughts. “If our primary obligation is to educate kids, then to punish them by excluding them doesn’t make sense,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.
Over the last several years, many cities including Denver, Baltimore and Cleveland have moved away from zero tolerance, said Jim Freeman, a lawyer with the Advancement Project, a civil rights group in Washington. Among the methods shown to help, Mr. Freeman said, are anti-bullying programs, positive-behavior feedback and training of students and teachers in conflict resolution.
Here in Beaufort County, officials will not explain exactly why the two suspended girls, Viktoria King and Jessica Hardy, both sophomores then, were denied access to the alternative school. Robert Belcher, chairman of the school board, said in an interview that the principal had placed them among the “most egregious” violators and that he would not second-guess that judgment.
The mother of Viktoria King, a cheerleader with good grades, eventually paid for a home tutor. “The suspension put me behind a lot,” Ms. King said. “I couldn’t take honors and A.P. classes, and had to repeat a math class.” She is the exception among those suspended and still expects to attend college next year. Jessica Hardy received no schooling that semester. She later entered a degree program at the alternative school and recently had a baby.
Another suspended boy dropped out and has been arrested on theft charges.
Mr. Belcher said that the district would be happy to offer more preventive services as alternatives to suspension if it could afford to, but that it faced severe budget cuts. “Are you going to take money from teaching in order to pay for home schooling and conflict resolution because of a child’s misbehavior?” he said. “That’s a philosophical debate.”
By ERIK ECKHOLM
CHOCOWINITY, N.C. — As school let out one day in January 2008, students from rival towns faced off. Two girls flailed away for several seconds and clusters of boys pummeled each other until teachers pulled them apart. The fistfights at Southside High School involved no weapons and no serious injuries, and in some ways seemed as old-fashioned as the country roads here in eastern North Carolina. But the punishment was strictly up-to-date: Sheriff’s deputies handcuffed and briefly arrested a dozen students. The school suspended seven of them for a short period and six others from the melee, including the two girls, for the entire semester. As extra punishment, the girls were told they could not attend Beaufort County’s alternative school for troubled students and were denied aid to study at home.
Their punishment was typical of the get-tough, “zero tolerance” discipline policies that swept the nation over the last two decades, resulting in an increase in suspensions that are disproportionate among black students. School officials here say they acted to preserve a “safe and orderly environment.”
But whether banishing children from schools really makes them safer or serves the community well is increasingly questioned by social scientists and educators. And now the punishment is before the courts in what has become a stark legal test of the approach. Lawyers for the girls — who are black — say that denying them a semester’s schooling was an unjustified violation of their constitutional right to an education.
A growing body of research, scholars say, suggests that heavy use of suspensions does less to pacify schools than to push already troubled students toward academic failure and dropping out — and sometimes into what critics have called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
A rising number of districts are already reversing course and trying new approaches, including behavioral counseling and mediation, to reduce conflict and create safer, quieter schools while ejecting only the worst offenders.
“These students were treated like criminals and abandoned by the school system for doing something that students have done forever — fighting in the schoolyard,” said Erwin Byrd, a lawyer with Legal Aid of North Carolina, which brought the suit with lawyers from the Duke University School of Law. The school district says it must retain discretion over punishments.
Some 15 percent of the nation’s black students in grades K-12 are suspended at least briefly each year, compared with 4.8 percent of white students, according to federal data from 2006, the latest available. Expulsions are meted out to one in 200 black students versus one in 1,000 white students.
Zero tolerance and the quick resort to suspensions have been politically popular, but education leaders are having second thoughts. “If our primary obligation is to educate kids, then to punish them by excluding them doesn’t make sense,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.
Over the last several years, many cities including Denver, Baltimore and Cleveland have moved away from zero tolerance, said Jim Freeman, a lawyer with the Advancement Project, a civil rights group in Washington. Among the methods shown to help, Mr. Freeman said, are anti-bullying programs, positive-behavior feedback and training of students and teachers in conflict resolution.
Here in Beaufort County, officials will not explain exactly why the two suspended girls, Viktoria King and Jessica Hardy, both sophomores then, were denied access to the alternative school. Robert Belcher, chairman of the school board, said in an interview that the principal had placed them among the “most egregious” violators and that he would not second-guess that judgment.
The mother of Viktoria King, a cheerleader with good grades, eventually paid for a home tutor. “The suspension put me behind a lot,” Ms. King said. “I couldn’t take honors and A.P. classes, and had to repeat a math class.” She is the exception among those suspended and still expects to attend college next year. Jessica Hardy received no schooling that semester. She later entered a degree program at the alternative school and recently had a baby.
Another suspended boy dropped out and has been arrested on theft charges.
Mr. Belcher said that the district would be happy to offer more preventive services as alternatives to suspension if it could afford to, but that it faced severe budget cuts. “Are you going to take money from teaching in order to pay for home schooling and conflict resolution because of a child’s misbehavior?” he said. “That’s a philosophical debate.”
Monday, March 8, 2010
Supreme Court Still Divided on Guns
NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON — At least five justices appeared poised to expand the scope of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to bear arms on Tuesday, judging from comments at an unusually intense Supreme Court argument.
By its conclusion, it seemed plain that the court would extend a 2008 decision that first identified an individual right to own guns to strike down Chicago’s gun control law, widely considered the most restrictive in the nation.
While such a ruling would represent an enormous symbolic victory for supporters of gun rights, its short-term practical impact would almost certainly be limited. Just how much strength the Second Amendment has in places that regulate but do not ban guns outright will be worked out in additional cases.
The new case, McDonald v. Chicago, No. 08-1521, was a sequel to the 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which placed limits on what the federal government may do to regulate guns. The issue before the court in the new case was whether the Second Amendment also applied to state and local laws. It appeared that at least the justices in the Heller majority would say yes without reservation because they considered the rights protected in the Second Amendment as basic as those in other provisions of the Bill of Rights.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote a dissent in Heller, suggested Tuesday that important questions remain unresolved. “I’m asking you what is the scope of the right to own a gun?” he said. “Is it just the right to have it at home, or is the right to parade around the streets with guns?”
Heller itself struck down parts of the gun control law in the District of Columbia, then the strictest in the nation. But the majority opinion, by Justice Antonin Scalia, suggested that all sorts of restrictions on gun ownership might pass Second Amendment muster.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who also wrote a dissent in Heller, peppered the lawyers with questions about how the court might apply the Second Amendment to the states in a limited way. The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Drawing on the first clause of the amendment, Justice Breyer said that a right tied to state militias might be worthy of protection, while the right to bear arms “to shoot burglars” might not be.
The lead plaintiff in the case, Otis McDonald, has said he wants to keep a handgun in his home for protection from drug gangs. Justice Breyer asked Alan Gura, a lawyer for residents of Chicago challenging its gun control law, whether the city should remain free to ban guns if it could show that hundreds of lives would be saved. Mr. Gura said no. Justice Scalia objected to the inquiry. A constitutional right, he said, cannot be overcome because it may have negative consequences.
James A. Feldman, a lawyer for the City of Chicago, urged the justices to treat the Second Amendment differently from its cousins because it concerns a lethal product. “Firearms, unlike anything else that is the subject of a provision of the Bill of Rights, are designed to injure and kill,” Mr. Feldman said.
WASHINGTON — At least five justices appeared poised to expand the scope of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to bear arms on Tuesday, judging from comments at an unusually intense Supreme Court argument.
By its conclusion, it seemed plain that the court would extend a 2008 decision that first identified an individual right to own guns to strike down Chicago’s gun control law, widely considered the most restrictive in the nation.
While such a ruling would represent an enormous symbolic victory for supporters of gun rights, its short-term practical impact would almost certainly be limited. Just how much strength the Second Amendment has in places that regulate but do not ban guns outright will be worked out in additional cases.
The new case, McDonald v. Chicago, No. 08-1521, was a sequel to the 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which placed limits on what the federal government may do to regulate guns. The issue before the court in the new case was whether the Second Amendment also applied to state and local laws. It appeared that at least the justices in the Heller majority would say yes without reservation because they considered the rights protected in the Second Amendment as basic as those in other provisions of the Bill of Rights.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote a dissent in Heller, suggested Tuesday that important questions remain unresolved. “I’m asking you what is the scope of the right to own a gun?” he said. “Is it just the right to have it at home, or is the right to parade around the streets with guns?”
Heller itself struck down parts of the gun control law in the District of Columbia, then the strictest in the nation. But the majority opinion, by Justice Antonin Scalia, suggested that all sorts of restrictions on gun ownership might pass Second Amendment muster.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who also wrote a dissent in Heller, peppered the lawyers with questions about how the court might apply the Second Amendment to the states in a limited way. The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Drawing on the first clause of the amendment, Justice Breyer said that a right tied to state militias might be worthy of protection, while the right to bear arms “to shoot burglars” might not be.
The lead plaintiff in the case, Otis McDonald, has said he wants to keep a handgun in his home for protection from drug gangs. Justice Breyer asked Alan Gura, a lawyer for residents of Chicago challenging its gun control law, whether the city should remain free to ban guns if it could show that hundreds of lives would be saved. Mr. Gura said no. Justice Scalia objected to the inquiry. A constitutional right, he said, cannot be overcome because it may have negative consequences.
James A. Feldman, a lawyer for the City of Chicago, urged the justices to treat the Second Amendment differently from its cousins because it concerns a lethal product. “Firearms, unlike anything else that is the subject of a provision of the Bill of Rights, are designed to injure and kill,” Mr. Feldman said.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
To Court Blacks, Foes of Abortion Make Racial Case
NEW YORK TIMES
ATLANTA — For years the largely white staff of Georgia Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, tried to tackle the disproportionately high number of black women who undergo abortions. But, staff members said, they found it difficult to make inroads with black audiences. So in 2009, the group took money that it normally used for advertising a pregnancy hot line and hired a black woman, Catherine Davis, to be its minority outreach coordinator.
Ms. Davis traveled to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks. The idea resonated, said Nancy Smith, the executive director. “We were shocked when we spent less money and had more phone calls” to the hot line, Ms. Smith said.
This month, the group expanded its reach, making national news with 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, “Black children are an endangered species,” and a Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com. Across the country, the anti-abortion movement, long viewed as almost exclusively white and Republican, is turning its attention to African-Americans and encouraging black abortion opponents across the country to become more active.
A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Tex., meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organizations. Black abortion opponents, who sometimes refer to abortions as “womb lynchings,” have mounted a sustained attack on the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, spurred by a sting operation by young white conservatives who taped Planned Parenthood employees welcoming donations specifically for aborting black children. “What’s giving it momentum is blacks are finally figuring out what’s going down,” said Johnny M. Hunter, a black pastor and longtime abortion opponent in Fayetteville, N.C. “The game changes when blacks get involved. And in the pro-life movement, a lot of the groups that have been ignored for years, they’re now getting galvanized.”
The factors fueling the focus on black women — an abortion rate far higher than that of other races and the ties between the effort to legalize and popularize birth control and eugenics — are, at heart, old news. But they have been given exaggerated new life by the Internet, slick repackaging, high production values and money, like the more than $20,000 that Georgia Right to Life invested in the billboards.
Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that black women get almost 40 percent of the country’s abortions, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Nearly 40 percent of black pregnancies end in induced abortion, a rate far higher than for white or Hispanic women. Day Gardner, now the president of the National Black Pro-Life Union in Washington, said those figures shocked her at first. “I just really assumed that white people aborted more than anyone else, and black people would not do this because we’re culturally a religious people, we have large families,” Ms. Gardner said.
Abortion opponents say the number is so high because abortion clinics are deliberately located in black neighborhoods and prey upon black women. The evidence, they say, is everywhere: Planned Parenthood’s response to the anti-abortion ad that aired during the Super Bowl featured two black athletes, they note, and several women’s clinics offered free services — including abortions — to evacuees after Hurricane Katrina.
But those who support abortion rights dispute the conspiracy theory, saying it portrays black women as dupes and victims. The reason black women have so many abortions is simple, they say: too many unwanted pregnancies. “It’s a perfect storm,” said Loretta Ross, the executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, listing a lack of access to birth control, lack of education, and even a high rate of sexual violence. “There’s an assumption that every time a girl is pregnant it’s because of voluntary activity, and it’s so not the case,” Ms. Ross said.
ATLANTA — For years the largely white staff of Georgia Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, tried to tackle the disproportionately high number of black women who undergo abortions. But, staff members said, they found it difficult to make inroads with black audiences. So in 2009, the group took money that it normally used for advertising a pregnancy hot line and hired a black woman, Catherine Davis, to be its minority outreach coordinator.
Ms. Davis traveled to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks. The idea resonated, said Nancy Smith, the executive director. “We were shocked when we spent less money and had more phone calls” to the hot line, Ms. Smith said.
This month, the group expanded its reach, making national news with 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, “Black children are an endangered species,” and a Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com. Across the country, the anti-abortion movement, long viewed as almost exclusively white and Republican, is turning its attention to African-Americans and encouraging black abortion opponents across the country to become more active.
A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Tex., meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organizations. Black abortion opponents, who sometimes refer to abortions as “womb lynchings,” have mounted a sustained attack on the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, spurred by a sting operation by young white conservatives who taped Planned Parenthood employees welcoming donations specifically for aborting black children. “What’s giving it momentum is blacks are finally figuring out what’s going down,” said Johnny M. Hunter, a black pastor and longtime abortion opponent in Fayetteville, N.C. “The game changes when blacks get involved. And in the pro-life movement, a lot of the groups that have been ignored for years, they’re now getting galvanized.”
The factors fueling the focus on black women — an abortion rate far higher than that of other races and the ties between the effort to legalize and popularize birth control and eugenics — are, at heart, old news. But they have been given exaggerated new life by the Internet, slick repackaging, high production values and money, like the more than $20,000 that Georgia Right to Life invested in the billboards.
Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that black women get almost 40 percent of the country’s abortions, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Nearly 40 percent of black pregnancies end in induced abortion, a rate far higher than for white or Hispanic women. Day Gardner, now the president of the National Black Pro-Life Union in Washington, said those figures shocked her at first. “I just really assumed that white people aborted more than anyone else, and black people would not do this because we’re culturally a religious people, we have large families,” Ms. Gardner said.
Abortion opponents say the number is so high because abortion clinics are deliberately located in black neighborhoods and prey upon black women. The evidence, they say, is everywhere: Planned Parenthood’s response to the anti-abortion ad that aired during the Super Bowl featured two black athletes, they note, and several women’s clinics offered free services — including abortions — to evacuees after Hurricane Katrina.
But those who support abortion rights dispute the conspiracy theory, saying it portrays black women as dupes and victims. The reason black women have so many abortions is simple, they say: too many unwanted pregnancies. “It’s a perfect storm,” said Loretta Ross, the executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, listing a lack of access to birth control, lack of education, and even a high rate of sexual violence. “There’s an assumption that every time a girl is pregnant it’s because of voluntary activity, and it’s so not the case,” Ms. Ross said.
Monday, March 1, 2010
8.8 Earthquake Rocks Chile
NEW YORK TIMES
LIMA, Peru — The ground underneath Chile continued shaking on Sunday as jittery residents took stock of the devastating magnitude 8.8 earthquake that flattened homes, toppled bridges and took more than 700 lives over the weekend.
Among the dead were Lurde Margarita Arias Dias, 24, and her infant child, who were crushed as a wall toppled in their Santiago home. “I tried to save them,” Adan Noe Saavedra Rios, Lurde’s husband and a member of Chile’s Peruvian community, told local reporters. He described his frantic wife rushing from the house with their daughter in her arms after the ground started moving. Before he knew it, they were covered in rubble.
More than 2 million people have been displaced by the quake, according to the National Office of Emergency. Sunday morning’s aftershock was measured at a magnitude of 6.1, the strongest of about 60 to reverberate since the quake.
The death toll, raised to about 700 at a news conference at midday Sunday by President Michelle Bachelet, could increase further. In Concepción, Chile’s second-largest metropolitan area, which appeared to be especially hard hit, the mayor said Sunday morning that 100 people were trapped under the rubble of a building that had collapsed, according to Reuters.
Power and telecommunications networks were still largely out of operation, hampering search and rescue efforts. President Bachelet said the Chilean air force would be distributing good and basic goods to the affected regions, but lack of electricity was limiting communications.
Images from Chile of toppled buildings, upturned cars and bodies being hauled from rubble resembled those of Haiti just over a month ago. But because of better building standards and an epicenter farther from populated areas, the scale of the damage from Chile’s significantly more powerful earthquake was nowhere near the devastation that Haiti suffered.
Televised images from Concepción on Sunday showed looters being detained by police as they sprinted out of a damaged supermarket carrying armloads of merchandise. But authorities said that calmness prevailed in most of the country.
The earthquake hit during Chile’s summer vacation, and that left thousands of Chileans stranded overseas. There were frantic scenes at airports throughout the region as the closing of the damaged Santiago airport prompted airlines to cancel or reroute flights away from the Chilean capital.
In Concepción, which is roughly 70 miles from the quake’s center, cars lay mangled and upended on streets littered with telephone wires and power cables. A new 14-story apartment building fell, while an older, biochemical lab at the University of Concepción caught fire.
In the nearby port of Talcahuano, a giant wave flooded the main square before receding and leaving behind a large fishing boat on the city streets.
“It was terrible, terrible,” said Adela Galaz, a 59-year-old cosmetologist who said glasses and paintings fell to the floor of her 22nd-floor apartment in Santiago, 200 miles from the quake’s center. “We are grateful to be alive.”
President Bachelet, speaking at a news conference on Saturday night, called the quake “one of the worst tragedies in the last 50 years” and declared a “state of catastrophe.”
While this earthquake was far stronger than the 7.0-magnitude one that ravaged Haiti six weeks ago, the damage and death toll in Chile are likely to be far less extensive, in part because of strict building codes put in place after devastating earthquakes.
The quake Saturday, tied for the fifth largest in the world since 1900, set off tsunami waves that swamped some nearby islands before moving across the Pacific. Hawaii began evacuations before dawn, but by early afternoon there — more than 15 hours after the earthquake first struck 6,500 miles away — the fears of a destructive wave had passed..
Chileans were only just beginning to grapple with the devastation before them, even as more than two dozen significant aftershocks struck the country.
Paul E. Simons, the United States ambassador to Chile, said in a telephone interview from Santiago that people he spoke with at the embassy said those 90 seconds “felt like five minutes.” He added: “It was definitely an emotional experience.” Mr. Simons said that although the United States had offered aid, Chile’s government had not yet requested assistance. All international relief groups were on standby, and the International Federation of Red Crosses and Red Crescents said the Chilean Red Cross indicated that it did not need external assistance at this point.
President Obama spoke briefly outside the White House on Saturday afternoon, expressing concern for the country and saying the United States would offer aid in rescue and recovery efforts.
The most powerful earthquake ever recorded was also in Chile: a 9.5-magnitude quake struck in the spring of 1960 that struck near Concepción and set off a series of deadly tsunamis that killed people as far away as Hawaii and Japan.
But that earthquake, which killed nearly 2,000 people and left more than two million homeless at the time, prepared officials and residents in the region for future devastating effects. Shortly after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck in Valparaíso in 1985, the country established strict building codes, according to Andre Filiatrault, the director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at the University at Buffalo. “There is a lot of reinforced concrete in Chile, which is normal in Latin America,” Professor Filiatrault said. “The only issue in this, like any earthquakes, are the older buildings and residential construction that might not have been designed according to these codes.”
LIMA, Peru — The ground underneath Chile continued shaking on Sunday as jittery residents took stock of the devastating magnitude 8.8 earthquake that flattened homes, toppled bridges and took more than 700 lives over the weekend.
Among the dead were Lurde Margarita Arias Dias, 24, and her infant child, who were crushed as a wall toppled in their Santiago home. “I tried to save them,” Adan Noe Saavedra Rios, Lurde’s husband and a member of Chile’s Peruvian community, told local reporters. He described his frantic wife rushing from the house with their daughter in her arms after the ground started moving. Before he knew it, they were covered in rubble.
More than 2 million people have been displaced by the quake, according to the National Office of Emergency. Sunday morning’s aftershock was measured at a magnitude of 6.1, the strongest of about 60 to reverberate since the quake.
The death toll, raised to about 700 at a news conference at midday Sunday by President Michelle Bachelet, could increase further. In Concepción, Chile’s second-largest metropolitan area, which appeared to be especially hard hit, the mayor said Sunday morning that 100 people were trapped under the rubble of a building that had collapsed, according to Reuters.
Power and telecommunications networks were still largely out of operation, hampering search and rescue efforts. President Bachelet said the Chilean air force would be distributing good and basic goods to the affected regions, but lack of electricity was limiting communications.
Images from Chile of toppled buildings, upturned cars and bodies being hauled from rubble resembled those of Haiti just over a month ago. But because of better building standards and an epicenter farther from populated areas, the scale of the damage from Chile’s significantly more powerful earthquake was nowhere near the devastation that Haiti suffered.
Televised images from Concepción on Sunday showed looters being detained by police as they sprinted out of a damaged supermarket carrying armloads of merchandise. But authorities said that calmness prevailed in most of the country.
The earthquake hit during Chile’s summer vacation, and that left thousands of Chileans stranded overseas. There were frantic scenes at airports throughout the region as the closing of the damaged Santiago airport prompted airlines to cancel or reroute flights away from the Chilean capital.
In Concepción, which is roughly 70 miles from the quake’s center, cars lay mangled and upended on streets littered with telephone wires and power cables. A new 14-story apartment building fell, while an older, biochemical lab at the University of Concepción caught fire.
In the nearby port of Talcahuano, a giant wave flooded the main square before receding and leaving behind a large fishing boat on the city streets.
“It was terrible, terrible,” said Adela Galaz, a 59-year-old cosmetologist who said glasses and paintings fell to the floor of her 22nd-floor apartment in Santiago, 200 miles from the quake’s center. “We are grateful to be alive.”
President Bachelet, speaking at a news conference on Saturday night, called the quake “one of the worst tragedies in the last 50 years” and declared a “state of catastrophe.”
While this earthquake was far stronger than the 7.0-magnitude one that ravaged Haiti six weeks ago, the damage and death toll in Chile are likely to be far less extensive, in part because of strict building codes put in place after devastating earthquakes.
The quake Saturday, tied for the fifth largest in the world since 1900, set off tsunami waves that swamped some nearby islands before moving across the Pacific. Hawaii began evacuations before dawn, but by early afternoon there — more than 15 hours after the earthquake first struck 6,500 miles away — the fears of a destructive wave had passed..
Chileans were only just beginning to grapple with the devastation before them, even as more than two dozen significant aftershocks struck the country.
Paul E. Simons, the United States ambassador to Chile, said in a telephone interview from Santiago that people he spoke with at the embassy said those 90 seconds “felt like five minutes.” He added: “It was definitely an emotional experience.” Mr. Simons said that although the United States had offered aid, Chile’s government had not yet requested assistance. All international relief groups were on standby, and the International Federation of Red Crosses and Red Crescents said the Chilean Red Cross indicated that it did not need external assistance at this point.
President Obama spoke briefly outside the White House on Saturday afternoon, expressing concern for the country and saying the United States would offer aid in rescue and recovery efforts.
The most powerful earthquake ever recorded was also in Chile: a 9.5-magnitude quake struck in the spring of 1960 that struck near Concepción and set off a series of deadly tsunamis that killed people as far away as Hawaii and Japan.
But that earthquake, which killed nearly 2,000 people and left more than two million homeless at the time, prepared officials and residents in the region for future devastating effects. Shortly after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck in Valparaíso in 1985, the country established strict building codes, according to Andre Filiatrault, the director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at the University at Buffalo. “There is a lot of reinforced concrete in Chile, which is normal in Latin America,” Professor Filiatrault said. “The only issue in this, like any earthquakes, are the older buildings and residential construction that might not have been designed according to these codes.”