Karen Handel Pushed Onto Her Sword

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Karen Handel, the Fetus Person probably at the center of Komen for the Fail’s recent catastrophe, has resigned from (i.e., been forced out) of her job at Komen. Word is she has refused a severance package, which probably would have required her to keep her mouth shut. So she’s gonna blab. Should be fun.

Her resignation letter oozes with what the witty folks at Balloon Juice are calling “Handel’s Messiah Complex.”

We can all agree that this is a challenging and deeply unsettling situation for all involved in the fight against breast cancer. However, Komen’s decision to change its granting strategy and exit the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood and its grants was fully vetted by every appropriate level within the organization. At the November Board meeting, the Board received a detailed review of the new model and related criteria. As you will recall, the Board specifically discussed various issues, including the need to protect our mission by ensuring we were not distracted or negatively affected by any other organization’s real or perceived challenges. No objections were made to moving forward.

I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it. I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve. However, the decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology. Rather, both were based on Komen’s mission and how to better serve women, as well as a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy. I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for how and to whom it grants.

What was a thoughtful and thoroughly reviewed decision – one that would have indeed enabled Komen to deliver even greater community impact – has unfortunately been turned into something about politics. This is entirely untrue. This development should sadden us all greatly.

Poor baby. Not a clue.

IMO some sacrifice was necessary for Komen to hang on to any of its corporate sponsors. The people disillusioned by Komen’s bleep-up were not going to trust it again with their time and donations as long as Handel was still in place. Komen’s prestige will still suffer long-term damage, but this may earn enough forgiveness to enable it to continue some of its merchandising deals.

On the other hand, Art Caplan, a Ph.D. bioethicist, says Handel’s departure is too little, too late.

There is one last step that can be taken to save the mighty Komen from running aground permanently. The entire executive leadership and board must resign. Now. Anything less means that the prominence that Komen achieved will become simply one more in a long list of worthy causes that Americans may or may not choose to support.

What’s especially sad about this is that Komen CEO Nancy Brinker should have known better. Per Soonergrunt, in 2010 Komen turned down money from Curves because it came with a condition to cut off Planned Parenthood. Yeah, the guy who owns Curves is a five-alarm fundy and convicted deadbeat dad who thinks women are cows. Anyway, Brinker wrote,

“The grants in question supplied breast health counseling, screening, and treatment to rural women, poor women, Native American women, many women of color who were underserved—if served at all—in areas where Planned Parenthood facilities were often the only infrastructure available. Though it meant losing corporate money from Curves, we were not about to turn our backs on these women.”

A shame for Komen, but as I said, they knew better.

Update: The folks at LifeNews still don’t have a clue what just happened:

Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life expressed the sentiment of many pro-life advocates responding to the decision, by saying Handel resigned because of Planned Parenthood’s aggressive attacks on Komen after its initial decision.

“Karen Handel was sick and tired of being held hostage by the largest pro-abortion lobby in the country when she and the Komen Foundation were supposed to be focused on saving women’s lives, not endangering them,” she told LifeNews. “They held the Komen Foundation, and the millions of women they serve, hostage until they got their way, pocketing merely a drop in the bucket when it comes to their extensive funding.”

No, what happened is that a whole lot of women and men all around the country spontaneously took to Twitter and Facebook and raised hell. Planned Parenthood by itself doesn’t have the clout to hold anybody hostage. What smacked down Komen was a roar of public opinion.

Are you paying attention, Congress?

Komen for the Fail: Post Mortem

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Struggling to answer the eternal question, “What the bleep just happened?,” Komen for the Fail staff seem to think they were outgunned by that political powerhouse called Planned Parenthood. Laura Bassett writes,

The backlash against Komen was intense, including threats of violence, angry letters from members of Congress and public rebukes from political figures such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The charity struggled to deal with the pressure, especially in a face-off against Planned Parenthood, an organization whose fine-tuned political team has experience in these high-pitched, high-stakes debates.

It was speculated that Komen founder Nancy Brinker hired her friend Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for President George W. Bush, to help her handle the crisis. But Fleischer told HuffPost that he had no part in guiding Komen’s strategy on this issue except to recommend an outside crisis management firm.

“It’s just sad for everybody concerned,” he said on Friday. “Komen is a great group, but politically speaking, they’re no match for Planned Parenthood.”

The Komen insider agreed with Fleischer’s assessment.

“Komen’s not equipped to spend its days fighting political battles,” the source said. “Abortion is not our issue, and I think [leadership] tried to finesse a way out of it, and this investigation criteria was the solution. And it blew up in their faces. They were just naive in the face of [the] incredibly sophisticated Planned Parenthood operation.”

If this description of Planned Parenthood as some invincible political juggernaut has you scratching your head, you are not alone. I do think there’s truth in the argument that Planned Parenthood has a lot more experience with bad PR than does Komen, which mostly has just basked in public love and good will until recently. But if Komen thinks the backlash was entirely orchestrated by Planned Parenthood, this tells me Komen doesn’t yet know what bit it.

BTW, Bassett writes that an unnamed source within Komen confirms that Karen Handel was the main driver of the decision to defund Planned Parenthood.

Stunned by the fallout, Komen leadership decided within three days to reverse the Planned Parenthood decision and apologize. But the Komen insider said Handel was furious about the cave and fought against it up until the point that it was announced Friday morning.

“It became clear Thursday night that something had to give,” the source said. “Nancy Brinker, Liz Thompson, the board, and leadership were saying, ‘We’re really worried about Komen’s mission if we don’t figure this out.’ But Karen was still arguing against it as of Friday morning — she was horrified that we were caving, she said. She’s politically tone-deaf.”

In light of the political damage and the abrupt reversal of the Planned Parenthood funding decision, pressure has mounted inside Komen for Handel to resign.

“Everybody in the organization wishes she would do the right thing,” the Komen insider said.

Handel no doubt considers herself to be the innocent victim of left-wing terrorism. Soonergrunt writes,

As long as SGK can delude itself into thinking that they were mau-mau’ed by a very effective Planned Parenthood, they will continue this behavior, as will any other organization that learns that particular “lesson.” They are, along with their partners and friends in the conservative blogosphere, and apparently at the Huffington Post, working very hard to change the narrative of the story to one of bravely standing up to a shake down by a bunch of baby killers, only to have the rug pulled out from under them by those same baby killers rallying their baby-killing-loving supporters. Now perhaps, being a bear of very little brain, and liking honey too much, I didn’t notice the huge PR push by Planned Parenthood. I thought it looked like a huge number of women reacting to the betrayal by a charity that claimed to be all about women’s health, taking a huge shit all over another organization that is primarily about women’s health. But that is because I don’t suffer from the siege mentality that conservatives live under.

Speaking of a seige mentality, you must read Roy Edroso’s analysis of the rightie blogosphere on the Komen Fail in The Village Voice. It’s a hilarious but unsettling look into the bottomless abyss that is the right-wing brain.

As I discussed yesterday, polls going back several years show us that a majority of Americans think abortion should be legal. They may want some restrictions, such as gestational limits, to elective abortion, but I doubt very much of the electorate at large would put ip with a ban on all elective abortions, including first trimester abortions.

But more than that, Americans are not going to put up with any restrictions on birth control. And I hope that the Komen incident woke up some who have been complacent, that if we don’t start pushing back, pretty soon birth control as well as abortion may be driven underground, or put out of reach for some of us.

Wingnuts cannot, will not, understand this. They cannot accept that their ideas are in the minority. They think that if there is a backlash to their positions, it must be coming from some powerful elite left-wing fringe, not “real Americans.” That’s why they so badly miscalculated the Komen debacle, and why they will continue to miscalculate.

Does Hoekstra’s Ad Even Make Sense?

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Beyond the aura of racism/xenophobia, does Pete Hoekstra’s ad even make sense? Former Michigan congressman Hoekstra is running for Senate against incumbent Debbie Stabenow, and the ad tries to argue that Sen. Stabenow’s votes on spending bills are sending jobs to China. (Rather than what’s really sending jobs to China — good ol’ “free market” capitalism.)

Douthat’s Propaganda

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If you go to Pollingreport.com and click on the “abortion” link, you can look at poll results on abortion going back years. You see that several of them break opinion into four categories, such as these from an ABC News/Washington Post poll from July 2011 (responding to the question “Do you think abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in most cases, or illegal in all cases?”):

  • Legal in all cases 19%
  • Legal in most cases 35%
  • Illegal in most cases 30%
  • Illegal in all cases 15%

What this says to me is that 54 percent of those polled are mostly opposed to criminalizing abortion, and 45 percent are mostly in favor of criminalization. A whopping 65 percent are not absolutists one way or another. And note that I’d probably put myself in the 65 percent, because I favor a clear gestational limit on elective abortion, per Roe v. Wade guidelines. That puts me in the “legal in most cases” category.

If we scroll down a little further, we find a Gallup poll from May 5-8, 2011 asking the question, “Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?” According to that poll, the breakdown is:

  • Always legal 27%
  • Sometimes legal 50%
  • Always illegal 22%

Here, both groups of “mostlys,” both mostly legal and mostly illegal, are dumped into a middle ground. Gallup’s polls are, apparently, very popular with Fetus People, because they can be used to argue that all those people in the middle are on their side. However we see in other polls that more than half of the mostlys are “mostly legal,” not “mostly illegal.”

This is the game Douthat is playing in his most recent column, which blames “the media” for the recent Komen for the Cure flap. His basic argument is that nearly all Americans want abortion criminalized, and Komen’s crisis wouldn’t have happened had “the media” not stirred it up.

The real story, of course, is that it wasn’t professional news media that slammed down Komen’s decisions, but vast numbers of people who took to Twitter and Facebook and howled bloody murder about it. Komen’s own affiliate chapters were denouncing the decision, for pity’s sake. One suspects a majority of women who care deeply about women’s health issues are pro-choice, since the Fetus People mostly don’t care if women are dropping dead in the streets as long as they aren’t getting abortions.

DougJarvus Green-Ellis argues that Douthat’s whining is typical of someone who has just been spanked. He also says —

The Chunky one cites some poll numbers about how many Americans identify as pro-life, but that’s neither here nor there: reproductive rights has been a great issue for Republicans for 30 years even though polls show that the country has been split, tending slightly towards pro-choice, during that time. The reason is that pro-lifers think that if Republicans wink at them and say “Dred Scott”, they’ll over-rule Roe v. Wade, whereas pro-choicers think that Roe v. Wade will never be overturned (they’re probably right) and, if they have money, that they or their daughter can go to Mexico or Canada if need be (they’re probably right here too)…so pro-lifers vote the issue and pro-choicers don’t.

For this reason, conservatives like Douthat think that all talk of reproductive rights helps their cause, no matter what the MSM says. They’re wrong. Republicans have found a sweet spot on the issue, where their side is fired up and the other side is complacent. But that’s only on abortion. As soon as the debate expands to include access to contraceptives or cancer screenings, the terrain shifts, and probably not to a place that is as favorable for them as the current terrain.

My suspicions are that the “sweet spot” will work only as long as the Fetus People don’t actually get their wish. As long as middle-class American women have access to legal abortions, even if they have to drive to another state, people will more or less put up with the status quo and tolerate the shenanigans of the anti-reproductive rights crowd. As it is, a lot of poor women in states like Mississippi must effectively be cut off from legal abortions, although we’re not hearing much about it.

But, IMO, if middle-class women ever thought they’d lose access to legal abortions entirely, the game would be over, and the Fetus People would find themselves swiftly and eternally cast into political purgatory. What was done to Komen was just a preview.

Newt Blows Off the NYC Vote

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The great gas-passing orifice erupts:

Speaking in Las Vegas ahead of the Nevada caucus, a contest he is sure to lose, Gingrich attacked “elites” in Manhattan who live in high rises and “ride the subway.”

Oh, I so hope Newt stays in the race until the very bitter end. Who else would say anything this stupid? Well, OK, Rick Santorum. And Mittens. But let’s go on …

It must be beyond perplexing to a native New Yorker that anyone would conflate elitism with subway riding. The truly elite don’t take the subways; they have chauffeurs. The exception is Mayor Bloomberg, who famously takes the subway to work to show that he’s a man of the people. However, according to Gothamist, Hizzoner is picked up at his Upper East Side townhome and rides 22 blocks in a chaffeur-driven Chevy Suburban to the 59th Street and Lexington station, and he catches the subway (I assume the downtown express train to Borough Hall) from there.

I think the real slam here is to paint all of New York City as somehow outside America (I guess 9/11 really is forgotten). It’s a mysterious, intimidating place where people use alien words like “bodega.” And except for the truly elite, the New York City subways may be one of the few places in America where people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and nearly all economic circumstances mingle together as equals. Is that what’s really bothering you, Newt?

What Can One Say But … Santorum

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Meanwhile, Little Rickie thinks that children whose parents can’t afford their medications should just die already. Because “We either believe in markets or we don’t.” From Rawstory:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told the mother of a child with a rare genetic disorder on Tuesday that she shouldn’t have a problem paying $1 million a year for drugs because Apple’s iPad can cost around $900.

video platform
video management
video solutions
video player

You might have heard that one of Santorum’s children also has a genetic disorder and recently had to be hospitalized. One assumes he has insurance.

Or, Maybe Not

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Greg Sargent points out that Komen’s reversal statement gives itself lots of wiggle room to cut Planned Parenthood in the future. Komen also has no intention of firing anyone for the debacle.

The anti-reproductive rights site LifeNews is telling its Fetus People readership that

Austin Ruse, the president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, who has been very closely following the Komen decision-making process, told LifeNews that the statement is not really a change in position but he says the sentence “We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities” is “troubling” for pro-life advocates.

“This represents nothing new. We have known and have reported that they are continuing five grants through 2012. This is a reference to that. The second clause about eligibility is certainly true. Any group can apply for anything. It does not mean they are going to get anything,” Ruse told LifeNews.

“What this is is an effort to get the mafia off of their backs. As James Taranto said in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, this is a classic shakedown operation. Give us money or we will destroy you. This is Komen’s attempt to save their organization, which we should know is in peril. Our side should know that nothing has changed.”

The above is via Google cache; LifeNews is offline at the moment.

Komen Reversal! Planned Parenthood Re-funded!

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Seconds ago — the Komen Foundation just announced it is reinstating funding to Planned Parenthood. Here is the statement Komen just released:

“We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.

The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.”

You know what happened — the CEOs of the corporations sponsoring Komen merchandising deals have been having words with Komen execs.

Update: Personally, I doubt Konen will ever get all the toothpaste back in the tube. This episode is likely to leave a sour taste in a lot of mouths.

Notice that a lot of the backlash came from Komen affiliates. Seriously, women who are activists on women’s health care issues are likely to be pro-choice. Duh, Komen Foundation.

Update: When I heard the news I had just finished reading this interview by Sarah Kliff of Americans United for Life President Charmaine Yoest, whom Kliff argues was a behind-the-scenes influence in the de-funding decision.

Behold the Fail:

Americans United for Life has, for the past year, aggressively pushed Congress to end Planned Parenthood’s federal funding. It has also drafted model legislation that states can use to bar abortion providers from receiving federal funds. Nine states have passed such laws, although the Obama administration has blocked their implementation.

Yoest hopes that the Komen decision is the beginning of a similar push, on the private side, to curtail Planned Parenthood’s funding, although she does not expect other funders to get on board overnight.

“We’ll be looking at their other supporters,” she said. “Let’s be honest, they’ve been very fashionable amongst a certain philanthropic set. I hope that this is a beginning of people re-looking at associations with the nation’s largest abortion provider.”

Probably not, but it might cause people to keep Yoest at arm’s length.

Update: One of the comments coming from right-wingers is that Planned Parenthood doesn’t do mammograms, just referrals. According to a news story by the CBS Pittsburgh affiliate, the referrals also included vouchers to pay for the mammorgrams, and Komen was providing the money that Planned Parenthood was using for the vouchers. So cutting off Planned Parenthood really does amount of cutting off access to mammograms, even if the mammograms are not being done at Planned Parenthood.

The Komen Backlash Escalates

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This is turning into a first-rate watershed from which Komen cannot possibly survive in its current form.

It isn’t just the ties to right-wing whackjobs that’s a problem. In the past few hours the spotlight turned upon the Susan G. Komen Foundation has revealed it to be mostly a merchandising racket that has been spending much more money on executive salaries and self-promoting “awareness” events than on cancer research.

And Komen is going to lose its corporate sponsors, which means its done for. The big bucks haven’t been coming from individuals doing walk-a-thons, but through corporate merchandising deals. The walk-a-thons and other “awareness” events are less about raising money than about building the Komen brand to get the corporate sponsors on board. And I strongly suspect most of the women who have been supporting the walk-a-thons are middle- and upper-middle class ladies who may not be politically active, but they lean more liberal than conservative. DougJarvis Green-Ellis writes,

Right now, they get a lot of money from corporate sponsors—many of whom will drop them—and (I’m guessing here but I’m almost sure this is true) from affluent women in Westchester County, etc. That money is gone and it’s not coming back.

I was thinking of Westchester County women, too. The wealthier ones may be upper-class twits, but they are mostly progressive upper-class twits. Westchester has been voting Democratic since the 1990s, and Barack Obama got 63 percent of the Westchester vote in 2008. I’ll be very surprised if there is another Komen event here ever again. And without the support of that particular consumer demographic, the Komen brand won’t be worth much.

Yes, it can probably still do well with the Fox News and redneck crowd — older, less affluent — but the merchandising possibilities narrow considerably. A lot more women buy yogurt than attend gun shows.

The Yoplait Facebook page is running over with anti-Komen comments. But the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer page wants you to know it is completely unaffiliated with Komen. Komen is now officially radioactive.

Sarah Seltzer:

When the decision was announced over the Planned Parenthood email list (it had initially been broken a short while earlier), it felt like a crippling blow to women’s healthcare–and in some ways it still is. But the big story is actually how furious many Komen supporters are, how many have taken to the Internet, to petitions, and more to declare the end of their support and donations to Komen.

This is a big change, considering the fact that Komen was a beloved, celebrity-endorsed brand — and Planned Parenthood was increasingly under attack. But something shifted after this announcement: immediate analyses from social media in fact show that the number of angry comments against Komen and in favor Planned Parenthood vastly outnumbered the comments that applauded the decision — even as Komen began to frantically erase them on its Facebook page.

Marketing expert Kivi Leroux Miller calls Komen’s actions a “communications debacle unfolding before us,” writing, “At one point last night, I did a quick count and found the ratio of anti-Komen decisions to pro-Komen decisions to be about 80 to 1 on Twitter.” Miller has a blow-by-blow post on how the news broke and essentially how the Komen foundation utterly failed at every step to anticipate and properly deal with the outrage.

For all the noise they make, the Fetus People are a minority, and I strongly suspect most Americans would like them to crawl back under their rock.

Also — Komen’s excuse for defunding Planned Parenthood is that PP is under congressional investigation. Well, so is Penn State University, and Komen hasn’t cut off Penn State.

The big loser here may be breast cancer research. But a lot of articles written over the past few days have pointed out that throwing huge amounts of money at breast cancer hasn’t really done all that much to stop it.