Progressive One

Democrats need abortion foes
Making the issue a litmus test is a mistake for the national party.
By Janet Robert
T he Democratic Party is in serious trouble . It has lost more than 900 state legislative seats, 12 governors, 69 House seats and 13 Senate seats over the last decade, and a recent poll indicates that it has a lower approval rating than President Trump.
To right this political ship, it must recapture pro-life liberals such as my mother, who was a loyal Democrat until 1996, when President Clinton vetoed the bill banning partial-birth abortions.
The party lost her. And though it never lost me, it sure has done its best to push me out along with all the other pro-life Democrats in the United States, some 20 million in number.
Abortion activists claim that the fetus is just a mass of tissue, and that women are too weak to succeed without abortion. Not only do pro-life Democrats accept the settled science that shows the prenatal child is a human organism, we know that with the right support, women are more than up to the challenge of difficult or unplanned pregnancies.
We also support a living wage, Medicare, paid family leave, affordable childcare and worker protections provided by strong unions. And we strongly resist a small-government Republican Party that refuses to support women and mothers.
Yet because of our views on abortion, many of us are intimidated into silence. Indeed, we get stronger pushback from Democratic leadership than from Republicans.
I first saw this dynamic in 1990, when I moved to Minnesota and pro-lifers were shouted down at the first Democratic caucus I attended. But I felt it most acutely when I ran for Congress in 2002. Planned Parenthood’s executive director spread falsehoods about my position on government funding for contraceptives. Party activists I had worked with only months before explained that they couldn’t vote for me or donate to my campaign. Even my Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee team hid my pro-life stance.
As a result, the following year, I joined Democrats for Life of America. I’ve since learned that a large number of Democratic legislators hide their pro-life positions in order to get endorsed and raise money. Many others are under tremendous pressure to stay silent, including Muslims, women of color and, yes, members of the white working class.
The party’s leadership, located largely in pro-choice bubbles on the coasts, claims that support for abortion is a political winner. This is simply not true, especially given that 7 in 10 Americans want to ban abortion in most cases after week 12 of pregnancy. Tellingly, women support restrictions on late-term abortion at higher rates than men .
Democratic politicians shouldn’t make sweeping statements about what “the country” believes without paying careful attention to regions . While polls consistently show that Americans are pretty evenly divided on abortion, opposition in the Midwest is 27% higher than the national average. In the South, it’s 35% higher.
If the Democratic Party is to become a truly national party — one that can win consistently outside of urban, coastal America — it has no choice but to welcome people with different views on abortion. The number of voters who cite abortion as their single-most-important issue is the highest in the history of Gallup’s poll . This group is dominated by pro-lifers.
Thankfully, after the Trump election, Democratic leaders seem to understand that they have a crisis on their hands. Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez has undertaken a “unity tour” with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), with both party leaders acknowledging that any political math for a “50-state strategy” must include pro-life Democrats. And although NARAL and other pro-choice inquisitors pounced on Perez and got him to retract his position, a principle of openness to pro-lifers has been reiterated by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco ) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).
During the 2016 campaign, Sanders rightly pointed out that Planned Parenthood belongs to “the establishment,” implying that a litmus test on abortion would not be required by the new, exciting, growing edge of the party. There is a legitimate debate about abortion to have within the party, but the progressive Sanders wing is wise to separate the toxicity of that argument from the party’s central goals.
If the Democratic Party needs a litmus test, it should be economic justice and civil rights for all. The pro-life Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey said it best: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”
Janet Robert is a founder of Progressive Talk Radio AM 950 Minneapolis and president of Democrats for Life of America .

saltwind 78 Loc: Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

rob mull, Many Jewish people became different shades of socialist in the early days of their migration from Russia and Poland began to increase in the 1880s. It didn't take long for the second generation of Jews to discover capitalism. Industries like the garment center in New York City became a home for the Jewish businessman. The third generation saw an increase in the professions for Jews coming of age. My generation became medical doctors, lawyers, accounts and teachers. This generation of Jewish kids coming out of colleges today have chosen careers in IT, and related fields. It's all about what fields offer the best chances for making a good living, and advancement.
Marxism is the religion of those that are offered no opportunity. Jews have always known that given opportunity and willingness to study and work hard, anything is possible in a country like America. Of course this is only the ideal that Jews have about this blessed country. Many are still working in business as salesmen and other kinds occupations as everybody else that are not Jewish. As an example, I have given you a short history of my family. My grandparents arrived in America in 1911. They came from Poland and were a tailor and dressmaker. Their children became builders, government workers, real estate developers and investors. I became a teacher. My children are doing much better than I did. My son is a manager at Amazon and my daughter is in human resources for an IT company.

Glaucon

You just can't seem to give up your obvious, dishonest attack on me. You say, "No hate here" Total delusion.

Progressive One

Where’s the Justice in Our Criminal Justice System?

By Sharon Kyle
Brian Banks (r) was wrongfully convicted of rape in 2002
I‘ve been listening to a podcast I wish I could have heard while in high school—I probably would have gone to law school earlier than I did. Listed by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the 10 podcasts everyone should follow, “Actual Innocence” was started by Brook Gittings, a social worker who—after watching the Netflix series “The Making of a Murderer”—realized how little she knew about our judicial system. Her desire to learn more led her into the world of wrongful convictions, which has now become the driving force behind her podcasts. Each episode tells the story of a person who has served time in the system for a crime they did not commit. Actual Innocence gives the uninitiated a view of our criminal justice system that won’t be found on CSI or Law & Order.
Like Gittings, most Americans have little to no direct contact with the judicial system. With the exception of minor traffic violations, divorce proceedings, or an occasional dispute in small claims court, what they think they know about the judicial system has come to them through the movies or television dramas. Nevertheless, if asked, the average Joe would probably say that our system is just and fair.
We are reared to believe that ours is a nation of laws. That the U.S. criminal justice system is blind to race, religion or station in life. Unless you are an attorney, a police officer, law student, or are in some other way associated with the law, you probably don’t know that one out of nine people on death row has been exonerated since the introduction of DNA evidence—or that the overwhelming majority of people serving time for a criminal offense in the United States never had a trial.criminal justice system
As much as 97% of federal criminal cases end with a plea bargain, which means the defendant and the prosecution struck a deal—a guilty plea in exchange for a lighter sentence. This business of having your day in court as depicted on TV and in the movies is largely fiction. Our criminal justice system today is almost exclusively a system of plea bargains—no trials, no juries, and no discovery with defense counsel and judges having little to no say.
What was designed to be one of the greatest assets of our criminal justice system—the discovery process with a trial by jury—is largely a relic of the past. And the system it was supposed to support has increasingly become a predatory one or, as famed defense attorney Bryan Stevenson says, “We have a system of justice that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.”
In fact, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia believed that actual innocence was not a strong enough reason to overturn a conviction, even in the face of a death sentence. He once said that the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually innocent’ is not a legal basis to overturn the conviction or, in other words, not enough reason to stop an execution. So, it appears we’ve come to the place where actual innocence can be treated as if it were irrelevant.
This jaw-dropping truth stands in sharp contrast to the protections most Americans believe are enshrined in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. Surely the Founding Fathers did not intend to create a system that results in tens of thousands of innocent people incarcerated annually and—in a few cases—being put to death.
Our system is so bloated and so prone to mistake and frankly, prosecutorial misconduct, that today there are enough people convicted of a crime who were later determined to be wrongfully convicted that they have an annual conference. In 2016, one such gathering, the Innocence Network Conference held in San Antonio, attracted 500 attendees.
In a piece published by Mother Jones magazine entitled, “How Many Innocent People Are in Prison?” writers Beth Schwartzapfel and Hannah Levintova admit that answering that question definitively is almost impossible. But they say,

“Extrapolating from the 281 known DNA exonerations in the US since the late 1980s, a conservative estimate is that 1 percent of the US prison population, approximately 20,000 people, are falsely convicted.”
Several studies by respected institutions support this estimation—some believe the number is higher. So the question is what can be done?
The bullets below are a small sample of suggestions I’ve found searching the web. Using sites like the Equal Justice Initiative, the Innocence Project, the Sentencing Project, and the Prison Policy Initiative I cobbled together a small sampling of actions average people can take:
•Get rid of the money bail system. The money bail system is used in just two countries—the United States and the Philippines. Every year thousands of people in the U.S. are jailed while they await their trial simply because they can’t afford to post bail. These people are technically innocent. Recent research found that, compared to people who are released sometime before their trail starts, people held in jail the whole time before their trial were four times more likely to be sentenced to jail and three times more likely to be sentenced to prison. There are alternatives to this system that have a proven track record of success.
•Support Alternatives-to-Arrest and Alternative-Incarceration Programs. Fifty years ago the U.S. incarceration rate in the United States was on par with similarly situated nations. Over the past four decades, changes in law and policy have resulted in the prison population ballooning by 500%. This growth has outpaced the crime rate and research suggests over the long term, that it has actually increased the crime rate.
•Support Laws That Reduce Overly Harsh Sentences. People are serving life sentences for non-violent drug offenses. The United States is unique among countries in the “civilized” world to handle these types of offenses this way. Clearly this method is not producing the desired outcome as is evidenced by our high recidivism rate. We should work on eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and cut back on excessively lengthy sentences by using an alternative to incarceration for these types of offenses.
•Hold Prosecutors and Police Responsible for Deliberate Misconduct. Police and prosecutors who deliberately engage in misconduct are rarely held accountable for their actions—actions like hiding or destroying evidence that could clear the accused of charges, or fabricating evidence to make a defendant appear guilty, or relying on testimony that is known to be false, or obtaining and then using coerced confessions. A policy of liability for deliberate misconduct could make those state actors think twice before they play fast and loose with people’s lives.
•Require All States to Provide Compensation to the Exonerated. Only 30 states, plus Washington D.C., have laws that provide compensation to the wrongly convicted. Some of these laws provide only token support to the exonerated, while 20 states provide no compensation at all. When the criminal justice system makes a grievous mistake by sending an innocent person to prison, the state has a moral and ethical responsibility to make amends by providing adequate financial support, counseling, educational and job training, and housing. If your state doesn’t have a law, ask your legislator to pass one.
•Reform or abolish Plea Bargaining. Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute has presented a strong argument in favor of abolishing the plea bargain system. He believes it is unconstitutional because the plea bargaining system encourages the government to pressure an individual to waive a Constitutional right and then punishes defendants who chose to exercise their Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury.
•End the Death Penalty. Judge Boyce F. Martin, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit called the death penalty “arbitrary, biased, and so fundamentally flawed at its very core that it is beyond repair.” The number of innocent people exonerated who were on death row continues to grow and, according to the American Bar Association, in 96% of states where there have been reviews of race and the death penalty there was a pattern of either race-of-victim or race-of-defendant discrimination, or both. Few countries continue this barbaric practice among them are the United States, China, North Korea and Pakistan.

Over the past 40 years we’ve witnessed a prison population explosion of unparalleled proportion in the U.S.. Social scientists and other scholars can give you a laundry list of reasons. Most striking is that missing on those lists is a need to increase public safety. Most experts agree that the U.S. locks up more of its citizens than any other nation at great expense with little impact on public safety.

Criminal Justice SystemOne contributing factor that doesn’t get discussed enough is the public’s naive belief in the fairness of our justice system. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that the United States has a legal system that dwarfs that of every other nation—but calling it a justice system seems to be a stretch.

If, at any point during the judicial process, actual innocence is deemed to be irrelevant, how the hell can we call what we have a justice system?

Sharon Kyle
Copyright 2017 LA Progressive

Bevos

I am DEFINITELY NOT worried about YOU, OR your ASS, whatever color it is!!! NOR do you OCCUPY my time MUCH. MAYBE 10 minutes at best, SOME days!!!

Progressive One

that's still too much time....try to reduce it to 0 minutes.....

Glaucon

I am happy to hear that you are so "NOT WORRIED AGOUT ME ' that you have to put it in caps in order to indicate how worried about me you are not. I am very happy to hear that you are devoting ten minutes a day to exposing yourself to learning something. If you continue to seek education, the next minutes you spend will probably be much less painful.

Glaucon

I am happy to hear that you are no longer fixated on other people's asses. I don't think that fixation is heathy.

Bevos

THANKS! I WILL!!! You are not worth mine!!

Glaucon

You seem to spend a lot of time commenting to and about someone who is "not worth your time," someone you "don't worry about." You might want to spend some time in self reflection. You don't seem to have any understanding of your own motivations.

son of witless

In Bram Stoker's famous novel Dracula, Vampires had no reflection in a mirror. It is strange for one who has never done any self reflection and is therefore Vampire like, to be telling others that they have need of spending time in self reflection.

Glaucon

Does anyone but you value your time as much as you do? Just asking.

Glaucon

The stuff you see in movies is make believe and it is important that you don't continue to confuse it with reality.

Glaucon

I think you have confused me with some other person on OPP.

Glaucon

You copy my words, so I know you are paying some attention .