Tag: california
Rep. Michelle Steel

GOP Rep. Steel Got Pregnant With IVF -- Then Sponsored A Bill To Ban It

It's been a really rough week for Republicans who hate reproductive rights, and Republican Rep. Michelle Steel of California is no exception.

"As someone who struggled to get pregnant, I believe all life is a gift. IVF allowed me, as it has so many others, to start my family," she tweeted Thursday. "I believe there is nothing more pro-life than helping families have children, and I do not support federal restrictions on IVF."

Great! Just one teeny tiny little problem with that, as Inside Elections editor Jacob Rubashkin noted: Steel actually does support federal restrictions. Steel is one of the co-sponsors of the Life at Conception Act, a House bill that "declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual comes into being."

And as Rubashkin points out, there is no carveout in the bill for in vitro fertilization. Oops!

Ever since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that "unborn children"—including frozen embryos created for IVF—"are children," and multiple hospitals and clinics have announced they are pausing IVF treatment because of it, Republicans like Steel have been scrambling to figure out how to respond.

It's a real problem for the GOP, and it's only going to get worse. On the one hand, they've spent years pushing legislation, like the bill Steel cosponsored, to declare that life begins at conception, every sperm is sacred, and an embryo is the exact same thing—and entitled to the exact same legal rights—as a live human being with a name and a Social Security number.

On the other hand, the ruling out of Alabama is absolutely batshit insane, and even Republicans know it, which is why they're now trying to pretend this isn't the direct consequence of their actions and rhetoric to convince everyone—or at least conservatives in the judiciary—that, as the Republican-controlled Alabama Supreme Court held, "unborn children are children."

The problem is that IVF is popular because, as Steel notes, it has helped so many people to be able to start their families. And starting families is supposed to be a Republican value.

But darn the luck, it's a slippery slope from "unborn children are children" to "frozen embryos are the exact same thing as children" to double oops, sorry, you can't use IVF to start your families anymore. As Republicans are now learning the hard way.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Gavin Newsom

Democratic Governors Plan To Stockpile Abortion Medications

Following the unprecedented decision by a federal judge in Texas to stay the Food and Drug Administration's approval two decades ago of the abortion medication mifepristone, officials in Democratic-led states are now stockpiling both that medicine and a second one used in abortions, misoprostol, to ensure that they remain accessible to patients.

So far, Democratic officials in Washington, California, New York, and Massachusetts have announced measures to purchase and store large quantities of the drugs in their states.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Tuesday that the state would purchase 150,000 mifepristone pills.

During a Planned Parenthood conference, Hochul said: "I'm proud to announce that New York State will create a stockpile of misoprostol, another form of medication abortion. … Extremists, judges have made it clear that they won't stop at any one particular drug or service. So it's going to ensure that New Yorkers will continue to have access to medication abortion no matter what."

Connecticut has not yet begun storing mifepristone, but that state's Attorney General William Tong says his office has been proactively notifying pharmacies to confirm that the drug remains legal in the state and to offer support should a Republican attorney general in another state try to convince them otherwise.

On Monday Tong said: "(I'm) obviously deeply disappointed that my colleagues have taken that action. … We're pushing back on that. We're in communication with all the big pharmacy chains, advising them of their rights and obligations here in Connecticut."

According to Bloomberg, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey announced her state would reserve 15,000 doses of mifepristone. She also issued an executive order both to safeguard the availability of the medication and to protect physicians who perform abortion procedures in her state, the Guardian reports.

In early April, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced his state would invest in a three-year supply of mifepristone. In a statement, Inslee said that his office had "directed the state Department of Corrections, using its existing pharmacy license, to purchase the medication last month. The full shipment was delivered on March 31."

Inslee tweeted on Monday: "After we announced our actions last week to protect access to mifepristone, it's heartening to see other states doing the same. To be clear: no matter the outcome of the TX case, WA's laws ensure we will be able to sell and distribute this medication."

Mifepristone and misoprostol are used in a two-drug procedure to terminate a pregnancy through 10 weeks' gestation. The drugs are used in over half the abortions carried out in the U.S.

Misoprostol can be used on its own and is effective for abortions, but the two-drug combo has fewer side effects, and both drugs are commonly used in treating cases of miscarriage.

On Friday, after the ruling by Texas U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordering a stay of the FDA's 23-year-old approval of mifepristone, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the state has already collected 250,000 doses of misoprostol, with nearly two million more pills coming.

"In response to this extremist ban on a medication abortion drug, our state has secured a stockpile of an alternative medication abortion drug to ensure that Californians continue to have access to safe reproductive health treatments," Newsom said in a statement Monday. "We will not cave to extremists who are trying to outlaw these critical abortion services. Medication abortion remains legal in California."

The office of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has launched a new website offering facts and information on abortion care.

In a statement following Kacsmaryk's ruling, Shapiro said, "Your rights and freedoms here in Pennsylvania have not changed — you can get a safe, legal medication abortion using mifepristone in our Commonwealth." He added, "As your Governor, I believe decisions on reproductive care are to be made between women and their doctors, not extremist politicians or radical court rulings."

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

California Announces Plan To Make Its Own Insulin For Patients At Low Cost

California Announces Plan To Make Its Own Insulin For Patients At Low Cost

The state of California is entering the pharmaceutical industry. Specifically, it will start manufacturing insulin to ensure an affordable supply of the essential drug for the state’s patients living with diabetes. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom made the announcement late last week..


Newsom announced that $100 million from the 2022-23 state budget would be allocated to “contract and make our own insulin at a cheaper price, close to at cost, and to make it available to all.” Half of that funding would go toward the development of a “low-cost” insulin and the remaining $50 million would go toward building a facility to manufacture insulin that would “provide new, high-paying jobs and a stronger supply chain for the drug.”

“Nothing epitomizes market failures more than the cost of insulin,” Newsom said. “Many Americans experience out-of-pocket costs anywhere from $300 to $500 per month for this lifesaving drug. California is now taking matters into our own hands.”


This comes as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is vowing to put a bipartisan bill cooked up by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Susan Collins (R-ME) on the floor “very soon” after the Senate returns to work next week.“There should be nothing remotely partisan about making sure Americans don’t go broke trying to manage their diabetes,” Schumer said. “At least one in four insulin users report rationing their use because they can’t afford it, putting their health and lives at risk in the process.”

But of course there’s something partisan there. Republicans don’t want to give Democrats a win. Since Collins was involved in this, you wouldn’t be wrong to smell a rat. Last winter, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) introduced a straightforward bill to cap insulin prices, requiring insurers to cap insulin costs to their customers at $35 a month. Warnock has made that legislation a big part of his reelection campaign, since he’s up this cycle. Republicans didn’t want to give him a political win, so enter Susan Collins and the usual “bipartisan” diverting ruse.

Entirely predictably, five of the Republicans most likely to help Collins get the 10 she needed to break a filibuster (were she really trying to get this passed) are raising objections over the bill, and demanding hearings. Republican Sens. Pat Toomey (PA), John Barrasso (WY), Steve Daines (MT), Rob Portman (OH), and Ben Sasse (NE), who all sit on the Senate Finance Committee, are opposing a vote before having hearings. Which means they wouldn’t vote for it on the floor without hearings (or probably even with them).

That’s not the worst thing: It’s also not a great bill. It sets up a complicated insurance process that would ultimately result in higher premium costs for people on private insurance as well as for Medicare, and would discourage future price competition among manufacturers.

The California answer is ultimately a better one: public manufacture and distribution of the life-saving drug. If a consortium of states—toss in Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, for example—could be created, then real competition that could drive costs down would exist.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Is Golden State A Leaden Disaster? Debunking Right-Wing Mythology

Is Golden State A Leaden Disaster? Debunking Right-Wing Mythology

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for decades, you’ve probably noticed that conservatives hate California. It’s an obsession.

Donald Trump’s disdain for the state is well known. But conservative anti-California hatred goes far beyond the ex-occupant of the Oval Office.

The enduring sources of these fusillades are conservative thought leaders. And as they portray it, California is a failing Banana Republic.

In their jaundiced view, the Golden State is a violent, poverty-stricken homeless dystopia that is overrun by thieves.

The facts show that California attracts more capital, creates more wealth, generates jobs with better pay, suffers lower rates of work-related fatalities and has safer streets and longer lives.

Short on facts, they’ve even stooped to posting a doctored video in an attempt to show that Black gang members were so fed up with crime that they stopped looters in Long Beach, a city of a half-million people. And they assert that California is run by street gangs and misled by incompetent criminal-coddling politicians whose radical, immigrant-loving, left-wing agenda is horrible for businesses, which supposedly are leaving the state in droves.

Yet some states beloved by the right are far more dangerous, data on reported crimes show.

For the haters, California is the quintessence of liberalism’s—or socialism’s—failure. All of the state’s problems, in the view of these self-proclaimed conservatives, are always the direct fault of its “far-left” policies. Always.

In a broadcast called “The slow, painful death of California,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson asserted: “The policies that destroyed America’s largest and most economically important state are heading your way.” Significantly, Carlson got out of a lawsuit after Carlson’s lawyers argued that you can’t believe what he says.

Never one to resist attacking California, The Wall Street Journal editorial board ran an editorial titled “California’s Covid Woes.” It obsessed over overcrowded hospitals and long wait times, which it blamed on MediCal, the state’s medical care program for the poor. It is another favorite target of Journal editorial disdain.

Curiously, the WSJ’s attack, which compared California’s Covid record unfavorably with Texas’, never mentioned a crucial fact: California’s Covid mortality rate was 30% below that of Texas and 36% below the nation as a whole.

Of course, there’s little wonder why the Journal editorial board omitted that statistic: including it would vitiate their argument. After all, it’s pretty hard to portray California’s response to the pandemic as a horror when its death rate from this pernicious virus is well below the rest of America.

That omission illustrates what’s missing from conservative jeremiads. It’s their tell.

Here’s what you won’t read in their screeds, starting with what arguably is the biggest lie about California:

Business and Investment

While California is home to 12% of the U.S. population, it attracted 47% of the most sought-after investment dollars deployed nationwide last year, according to National Venture Capital Association data.

The $156 billion of venture capital invested in California firms in 2021 was a 79% increase over its 2020 haul. And the 2020 sum was a 29% increase over 2019.

Far from a state in economic decline, California attracted more capital last year than at any point in the NVCA’s data set going back to 2005.

California is the most populous state so those total figures could suggest the state fell short in these investments when examined per person. But no. California got nearly four times its share per capital of all such investments in America.

Productivity

California is the fifth most productive population in the country, federal Bureau of Economic Analysis data posted at Statista.com show.

In 2019, California’s economic output per person was $79,000, almost 22% above the national average of $65,000, (Editor’s note: adjusted the data to 2019 dollars.)

Income, Wealth and Poverty

The typical California household took home more than 45 other states; 22% more than American households overall. The nearly $15,000 in extra income has not, however, deflated the state’s poverty rate. It is persistently high at 11.8%, yet still below such darlings of conservatives as Mississippi (19.5%), Louisiana (18.8%), Arkansas (16%), Alabama (15.6%) and Oklahoma (15.1%), federal data show.

A state study in 2019 found that while California is 12% of the American population, its residents own 17% of American wealth despite its high taxes and environmental protections. Of course it’s hard to get rich in states that don’t provide the commonwealth benefits that foster wealth creation and high-paying jobs with benefits such as quality research universities that Californians have long supported.

Crime

You were more likely to get killed in 27 other states than in California, the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported for 2020. Interestingly, you were far more likely to get killed in Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky than the Golden State. The highest rates were in Louisiana and Mississippi, more than triple the California rate, while the rates in Arkansas and Missouri were more than double the California rate.

Workplace Deaths

In 2019, California employees were less likely to die on the job than in 43 other states, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The California rate was 2.5 deaths per 100,000 workers compared with double that or slightly more in Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia; more than three times more in Alaska and four times more in Wyoming.

Longevity

CDC data show that Californians live longer than the residents of all but one state – Hawaii, another state conservatives love to bash. Life expectancy in California is 80.8 years, more than six years longer than in bottom-ranked Mississippi and West Virginia, both beloved of conservatives. Hawaii bests California by about two months of extra life.

These are among many inconvenient facts for conservatives about how California, with its high taxes and environmental protections, outperforms America overall and the Southern, Midwest and Rocky Mountain states where conservatives have the most sway.

There’s a reason the right omits the facts in their commentaries, columns, editorials and cable television rants attacking California, its voters and their elected leaders.

California’s successes defy conservative cosmology, which holds that taxes, unions, workplace safety rules, environmental protections and immigrants repel capital, kill economies, hurt families and denigrate life itself.

The facts show that California attracts more capital, creates more wealth, generates jobs with better pay, suffers lower rates of work-related fatalities and has safer streets and longer lives.

Those successes flatly contradict what GOP orthodoxy predicts. But rather than confronting reality, conservatives are trying to re-write it by leaving out salient facts and as a result producing political fiction.

Reprinted with permission from DC Report