A new report from the Center for Reproductive Rights reviews the losses of women’s rights throughout the states in the aftermath of health reform.

Written by Amie Newman for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

One hundred days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded creating the worst environmental disaster in the world’s history, those who live down along the Gulf coast in the areas that have been most impacted are standing strong and reminding the world that, while the well gushing oil may have been capped and while BP CEO Tony Hayward may be going to Siberia, the disaster is not over.

In spite of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s initial happy talk (Oil? What Oil? Press Should Stop Scaring Tourists), BP Oil finally and inevitably hits his state’s coastline. Now guess who’s crying for help?

Unless you’ve spent some time down here on the Gulf Coast, you’re unlikely to really understand the people that live down here. Hard scrabble is a way of life. Historically, we’ve had systemic attacks on our people, our culture and our environment. The hostility runs pretty deep down here because the history of maltreatment runs pretty deep. There are several historical events that you really need to understand to understand the people of Southeastern Louisiana and the surrounding areas

A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural Walthall county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county’s only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced.

While Congress remains deadlocked on health reform, some state legislators are working to make it more difficult for women to access health care and much easier for states to put them, and the people who help them, in jail.

Written by Lynn Paltrow and Farah Diaz-Tello for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

The answer to “why is there health care?” may seem obvious, but one reason conservatives are nonsensical on health care is that their answer to that question is, um, different.

A diary about the practice of electoral fusion, and why it’s an essential component of needed political reform.

Today Obama will be making an extremely short stop in New Orleans. Or what my favorite NOLA blogger calls a “tinkle-stop tour.” In New Orleans, he’ll be visiting a charter school and participating in a town hall meeting in the Lower 9th Ward.

In contrast, his next stop will be San Francisco, where he’ll be spending four times as much time–16 hours. This has caused Harry Shearer to say,

Total elapsed time in SF: sixteen hours. They must have experienced a hell of a federal disaster there. Four times worse, you figure?

I should be feeling better–after all, Obama did commemorate Katrina and the flood in his radio address this morning. To his credit he also brought up levees and coastal restoration. But only time will tell if these words will be backed up by action or be mere empty words.

I have been upset and feel as if I’m almost physically ill. I cannot help but flash back, see the scenes of rescues and of the afflicted at the Superdome and the Convention Center and think of how so many suffered during Katrina and the federal flood and are still suffering. And I can’t help but wonder if Obama really cares about New Orleans. Because when I remember what happened during the flood and Katrina which turned the lives of so many upside down and think about the fact that Obama won’t be going there (which he wasn’t going to do anyway even if Ted Kennedy hadn’t passed) I’m depressed.

And others are also turned off by the fact that Obama has paid so little attention to Louisiana and her problems and those of her neighbors in the Gulf Region–a wound which Obama’s absence from Katrina observances has rubbed salt into. More below the fold…