Donning glittery signs and Rosie the Riveter-esque head gear, more than a dozen pro-choice women — and a couple of men — took to the streets of Lafayette Saturday afternoon for a march against federal defunding of Planned Parenthood and other women’s health programs. [The] continuing resolution would cut by 10 percent the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers, and infants each month, and has been linked in studies to higher birth weight and lower infant mortality.
“In Louisiana, we already have limited resources for women,” said Lauren Vice, a UL visual arts student and one of the protest coordinators. “We want to introduce to the town that this exists, a group of people in a conservative area who believe in choice. We want our autonomy protected. It’s ridiculous that we have to walk around town carrying glittery signs to ask for adequate health care. But I do like glitter.”
The group decided against widely publicizing the local march beforehand — essentially because organizers weren’t sure of the kind of feedback they would face in their hometown.
“A lot of women who wanted to come couldn’t because they couldn’t find a baby sitter for their children,” Vice said. “They were afraid to bring their children because of the response [the protest] might bring.”
What started with a little more than 15 people grew slightly during their trek from Girard Park to downtown Parc Sans Souci, taking in two additional stragglers who joined the “Keep your Boehner off my body” signs along the way.
“Activism isn’t something we see here,” said Lauren Hebert, 27, an online student of library science at the University of Arizona. “It’s easy to feel isolated here.
ABC News reported on its website that Planned Parenthood already is banned from using federal dollars to fund abortions. The money the House voted to take away is used by Planned Parenthood for “family planning, birth control, medical and preventive services.”
The Planned Parenthood budget amendment is awaiting a vote in the Senate.
Read more on the Planned Parenthood funding cuts and other measures in the bill here.
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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Planned Parenthood, like Louisiana Family Forum, Family Research Council, etc., is a NON-GOVERNMENTAL Organization. None of those organizations should be funded with our public federal tax dollars.
With the current federal and state deficits, the U.S. Government and State of Louisiana should immediately end all appropriations of tax dollars to any NGO that has not been directly granted a government contract for its goods and services.
These groups already receive tax-exempt status. The taxpayers should not also be subsidizing their salaries and services. Tell them all to raise their own funding.