Four of Illinois’ last seven governors ended up in prison for corruption convictions ranging from bribery to racketeering.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg in the state ironically known as the Land of Lincoln.

I doubt people truly grasped the meaning of the “Chicago Way“ when they joked back in 2008 that Chicago politician Barack Obama took it with him to the White House.

But there are now plenty of examples of a lawless president who lets nothing stand between him and his agenda, which includes destroying political opponents and foes alike.

by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards has an editorial at CNN which claims that making the birth control pill available over the counter would “push women back to 1950s.”

  Compare this recent editorial to a Huffington Post piece written by Richards in 2013 where the FDA’s decision to make emergency contraception available over the counter for women of all ages (including teen girls) was described as “wonderful news” and meant that there would be “no barriers, no shame.”

One of the plot lines in a movie I watched over the weekend involved a pregnant mother. The film was set in the 1940s, and I thought how blissfully ignorant were the days before ultrasounds and prenatal diagnoses gave mothers carrying ill or handicapped children the choice to bear them when nature decided or kill them beforehand.

Had Texas state senator and gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis been pregnant back then she would not have imagined the late-term baby girl doing flips inside her was “suffering.” Rather, Davis would have put her hand on her belly and smiled. Instead, quoting from Davis’ upcoming book, Forgetting to be Afraid, via the AP:

As commenter Christina noted on Facebook (a line I stole on Twitter), “Let’s make abortion the central theme of a comedy, then pretend we’re not trivializing it and trying to make it funny.”

But that’s exactly what the star of a romantic comedy about abortion is trying to say.

Heartbroken by the events unfolding in #Ferguson?. A parent’s right to raise their child in love and safety, and to dream that their child will have every opportunity in the world to grow into a fiercely independent adult is a fundamental issue of reproductive justice. As a feminist, as an organizer, and most of all […]

I wrote on August 4 that a July 28 New York Times article about Planned Parenthood’s decision to abandon the term “pro-choice” had triggered a race war within the abortion movement.

This was because Planned Parenthood steered NYT journalist Jackie Calmes to seven white leaders of abortion groups for quotes but no women of color.

Plus, Planned Parenthood gave no credit to WOC groups for expanding on abortion advocacy to include other “reproductive justice” issues, a term WOC coined two decades ago. This July 31 tweet didn’t come out of nowhere…

In January 2013 came news that shocked both sides of the abortion debate: Planned Parenthood had determined the term “pro-choice” was no longer helpful and recommended abandoning it.

This news really was titanic. “Pro-choice” was the abortion movement’s self-chosen descriptive term for over 40 years. To abandon it was to abandon an identity, surely unnerving to activists on the street, who found cover and solace in the euphemism.

UPDATE 7/24, 5:20a: We got great news yesterday, that the abortion rate in Texas has dropped by 13% since November, when the new pro-life law began taking effect. This represents 9,200 babies saved from abortion!

7/23, 7:32a: On September 1 a new pro-life law will take effect in Texas that requires abortion clinics to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers, abortionists to have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of the clinic, and the abortion pill RU-486 to be dispensed per FDA protocol.

And on that day Planned Parenthood will seize control of the Texas abortion market, since it will at that point own six* of the eight remaining abortion clinics.