Progressive Democrats Sonoma County

As we reflect on the great milestones the black community has reached, we cannot forget the drug war that continues to hold many back.

On Fox & Friends Saturday, Fox News host Mike Huckabee repeated the right-wing talking point that Planned Parenthood is "primarily an abortion provider." Huckabee said that "it's tragic that the Planned Parenthood organization" tries to present itself "as primarily a health organization when they are primarily an abortion provider." He added: "They provide some services. I will grant you that. But they are maybe on the fringes -- are external portion of what they are primarily all about."

In fact, abortion services made up just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's medical services in 2010.

From Planned Parenthood's 2009-2010 Annual Report:

The big win here is that an anti-choice power play failed in the court of public opinion.

When it comes to a spate of new technologies, our privacy protections are wildly outdated.

Prosecutors like Eric Schneiderman need cops on the beat to put financial crooks behind bars. But thanks to Bush, these cops are missing in action.

Some of America's wealthiest Republicans flew into Palm Springs last weekend to update their stealthy political strategy for 2012.

The Keystone campaign was a great success, but environmental advocates must still convince the public that they care about jobs.

DC is the most liberal region of the country, but until now all the talk on the radio dial skewed right.

Republicans—to protect and expand their gains from 2010— are diluting the minority vote in swing districts held by white Democrats.

For starters, the energy and environmental impacts of tar sands production are not limited to within the borders of Canada. But the trouble doesn't end there.

Commercial TV and radio lobby tries to thwart disclosure of income from political ads.

Since 2008, the gun lobby and right-wing media have been pushing various theories suggesting Barack Obama was secretly plotting against the Second Amendment. The National Rifle Association set up www.gunbanobama.com as Glenn Beck warned Obama was working to "take away your gun." Three years after Obama's election the purported plans to enact sweeping gun bans and confiscation haven't materialized, but according to gun lobby chief Larry Keane, Rupert Murdoch's media empire is now engaging in "corporate gun control."

Last week online reports indicated that FOX Sports Media Group had told the Ultimate Fighting Championship's parent company that gun-related sponsorships would no longer be permitted for their events. Fox and the Ultimate Fighting Championship recently signed a 7-year broadcast agreement. On Wednesday the gun lobby trade association National Shooting Sports Foundation announced they had confirmed the sponsorship ban.

Speaking on the NSSF's blog and in the Daily Caller's gun lobby propaganda aggregator Guns and Gear NSSF head Keane called out Fox:

FOX's decision to ban advertisements for lawful products owned by more than 80 million Americans is nothing more than corporate gun control.  We expect better from FOX.  So should you.

The Gun Store and ammotogo.com are among the UFC sponsors who would be affected by this ban. If no sponsorships in a single sport doesn't sound like a big deal to you, then you probably aren't working to contrive controversies in a gun lobby press shop.

Eric Bolling's gun antics at Fox Sports' corporate cousins apparently won't stop the gun lobby, which apparently wants fighters sporting monikers like "Natural Born Killer" and "American Psycho" to be allowed to be sponsored by gun retailers. What part of the Second Amendment doesn't Fox understand?

Earlier today the Susan G. Komen Foundation released a statement "apologizing" for their decision earlier this week to cease grants to Planned Parenthood to pay for breast cancer screenings. Komen says it will "continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood," though what will happen in the future seems a bit murky.

Regardless, the same conservatives who cheered Komen's decision earlier in the week are now upset at the breast cancer awareness charity's apparent reversal of course. National Review's Daniel Foster this morning called the backlash to Komen "disgusting" and lashed out at Planned Parenthood and "the Left" for their "gangsterism":

In the NROHQ kitchen just now, Charlie Cooke wondered aloud, and here I paraphrase: "Does anyone on the Left even ask the basic question of whether a private charitable organization has the right to dispose of its money as it sees fit?" But in fact, that anyone thinks there is a question here is a sign we've already lost.

The Komen Foundation is a private organization. Planned Parenthood is ostensibly a private organization as well, but one with the highest of public profiles, a maximally polarizing mission, and a conduit of taxpayer dollars. If either of the two should be wary of politicizing its decision-making process, it should be PP, no? And yet Komen is getting hammered for a practical organizational decision (for the zillionth time: PP does not provide mammography) while pro-choice auxiliaries are gleefully fomenting the rage.

Will Wilkinson, who is pro legal abortion and probably the libertarian with whom I agree least often, gets it exactly right on this score, observing that there is more than a little gangsterism in the response from the PP set.

There are a couple of things to point out here. First, to look at the Komen situation and see Planned Parenthood as the bad-faith actor requires an astonishing amount of willful obtuseness. Komen's executives and PR team have spent the better part of the last three days dissembling their way through various media debacles claiming that they didn't alter their grant-making rules specifically to target Planned Parenthood (The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg obtained quotes from Komen insiders and uncovered internal documents showing this to be false).

As to the "gangsterism" charge and the exasperated kitchen quotes about "the Left's" lack of respect for a private organization's private donating decisions, I'd point out that anti-abortion rights activists have been pressuring Komen for years to end their relationship with Planned Parenthood. When Komen's decision was announced on January 31, National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez celebrated the longstanding efforts by those activists:

This Komen-Planned Parenthood relationship has long been a target of pro-life activists and, media bias aside, this appears to be a remarkable turning point. Planned Parenthood may have trained the AP well -- and has been as American as apple pie to Republicans and Democrats alike for all too long -- but it has really seen itself exposed in new and deep ways since Lila Rose started her gutsy undercover work.

Scott Lemieux points out the obvious: the right of a private institution to dole out money in the ways they see fit does not exempt that institution from criticism. The anti-choice crusade against Komen's Planned Parenthood funding should be proof enough of that, and reason enough not to pop off about liberal "gangsterism" when things don't go your way.

Last fall, while television news outlets were largely ignoring the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act during their evening news and opinion programming, their parent companies were busy paying an army of lobbyists to influence Congress on the then-pending legislation.

For months, the networks deemed subjects like Tim Tebow and the British Royal Family to be more worthy of evening coverage. Following criticism for ignoring the growing outrage over the bills, television media eventually devoted considerably more coverage to the widespread protests, website blackouts, and eventual shelving of both bills.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, Comcast (which owns a controlling interest in NBC and MSNBC), News Corp. (Fox News), CBS Corporation (CBS), Time Warner (CNN), Disney (ABC), and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (a trade association that counts Comcast and NBC Universal as members, among others) hired 28 different lobbying firms to lobby Congress on SOPA and Protect IP.

Lots of conservative opinion makers expressed dismay at the sight of Republican front-runner Mitt Romney appearing in Las Vegas Thursday to receive the endorsement of reality TV host, and full-time birther, Donald Trump. Livid GOP boosters denounced the move as "unseemly" and a "fiasco" that represents the "biggest blunder" of Romney's candidacy. They openly mocked the Republican for his "moronic" campaign maneuver.

Message: Trump is a joke and Romney looked small and un-presidential glad-handing the developer on stage.

The slings may be directed Team Romney's way, but who's really to blame for Thursday's campaign "fiasco"? Fox News.

Let's not forget it was Fox News that nearly twelve months ago decided that golf course owner Donald Trump ought to be elevated to national status as a Republican kingmaker and Very Serious Person. It was Fox News, desperate for new anti-Obama content, that embraced Trump's farcical birther charade.

Celebrating Trump last year, Fox News covered the birther story with endless "news" segments, only to watch the tale crash in spectacular fashion when the White House released the president's long-form birth certificate. 

The original rise of Trump, not to mention his return this week, was bought and paid for by Roger Ailes and Fox News. They were the ones who couldn't stop pointing a camera at him last year when he went all birther. They were the ones who turned him into a GOP celebrity. (Sadly, other media outlets followed.) And Fox was the one that, yet again, moved to elevate celebrity above policy and common sense within the conservative movement.

Without Fox's incessant marketing last year, who would even care which candidate Trump is endorsing in this year's GOP primary? Likely nobody. But because Fox made the conscious decision to transform Trump into a right-wing celebrity, nominees-to-be like Mitt Romney now feel the need to embrace his "unseemly" and "moronic" endorsement.

Conservatives are shaking their heads. Maybe now they'll begin to understand how Fox News is destroying the Republican Party. 

Sean Hannity sought to bolster Newt Gingrich's assertion that "it will be a disaster" for the country if President Obama is re-elected, by misleading about the Congressional Budget Office's recent budget analysis. Hannity argued that CBO, which released its 10-year economic outlook on January 31, reported that if Obama wins a second term, "[t]axes will go up 30 percent."

But that's not at all what CBO reported. The budget office, working under the assumption that current laws will "remain unchanged," meaning that all sunset provisions currently in law go into effect (including the expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of the year) -- then revenues would increase by 30 percent.

As CBO explained:

Much of the projected decline in the deficit occurs because, under current law, revenues will rise considerably as a share of GDP -- from 16.3 percent in 2012 to 20.0 percent in 2014 and 21.0 percent in 2022. In particular, between 2012 and 2014, revenues in CBO's baseline shoot up by more than 30 percent, mostly because of the recent or scheduled expirations of tax provisions, such as those that lower income tax rates and limit the reach of the alternative minimum tax (AMT), and the imposition of new taxes, fees, and penalties that are scheduled to go into effect.

Hannity often uses misleading information to support various assertions about Obama, especially when it comes to the economy. On his Wednesday night show, for example, he claimed that one cannot "make the case" that the economy has improved during Obama's term -- when, in fact, plenty of evidence exists to make that case. But to Hannity, who has vowed that this is the "year to defeat Obama and save America," this is just another way of attacking Obama.

Even after the Commissioner told cops to follow the books on pot charges, small time weed arrests continued, breaking records for the past decade.

A new study on government employees' earnings has the Right buzzing -- and some progressive pundits repeating the myth that government workers are "overpaid."

A new study on government employees' earnings has the Right buzzing -- and some progressive pundits repeating the myth that government workers are "overpaid."

Here are some important movies and documentaries that try to make sense of the financial collapse.