https://www.npr.org/2019/05/31/728566814/as-missouris-last-clinic-nears-deadline-neighboring-abortion-providers-prepare

Providers such as King in neighboring states say they're watching the situation and expect to take additional patients from Missouri.

"[This] is happening much more quickly than any of us anticipated, so we're really scrambling" to communicate with patients and open up additional appointments for abortions in the coming days, King said.

Michele Landeau of Gateway Women's Access Fund, which helps Missouri women pay for abortions, said her organization is looking at ways to connect patients with clinics outside the state and help arrange for transportation, childcare and other needs.

"People are confused, and they're scared, and it's pretty chaotic-feeling right now," Landeau said.

Abortion providers in other neighboring states said they're expecting additional patients from Missouri and are planning accordingly.

"We will do our very best to serve any women from Missouri that need to see us," said Rebecca Terrell of CHOICES health center in Memphis, Tenn. "It may be that we have to add hours; we may have to open on a Saturday; we may have to make some changes, but we will make sure that everybody gets seen."

In Wichita, Kan., Julie Burkhart of the Trust Women clinic said she would expect to see more patients from central, southern and western Missouri if the St. Louis facility stops providing abortions. She said her facility might look at expanding its hours, but it would take time to hire, train and license new staff members.

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Police in Hingham are warning recent high school graduates, promgoers and college students on summer break to exercise caution after a teenager was found passed out drunk in the middle of a street in the town early Friday morning.

A motorist traveling up a blind hill found the underage college student sleeping in the road around 4:30 a.m., according to the Hingham Police Department.

Police say the teenager was “extremely drunk.” Fortunately, he was not injured.

“Tragedy avoided,” the department said in a tweet.



Hingham Police
✔
@HinghamPolice
Teens/Parents: Tragedy avoided. Recently, a driver at 4:30am was paying attention and stopped to protect a person in the road on a blind hill. The teen, an underage college student, was extremely drunk and had passed out on the road. It’s graduation, prom & school break season.
https://whdh.com/news/police-underage-college-student-found-passed-out-drunk-in-middle-of-hingham-street/

The legislative session kicked off under the cloud of an attack on voting rights. In January, newly appointed Secretary of State David Whitley, a longtime aide to Abbott, initiated a statewide purge of voter rolls, claiming they contained nearly 100,000 potential noncitizens, more than half of whom had actually cast ballots. While the GOP noise machine, up to and including President Trump, cranked up its voter-fraud sirens, it turned out that Whitley's list was deeply flawed, with many of the voters in question being naturalized citizens. Three lawsuits were filed against Whitley and other state officials over what was seen as a discriminatory maneuver meant to intimidate minority voters in what has become a Texas tradition. Throughout the session, Abbott's nomination of Whitley as SoS awaited confirmation by the Senate, which required a two-thirds majority that would have to include some Democrats, all 12 of whom stood united to block Whitley's path. In the end, the nomination never made it to the floor of the full Senate, and the embattled SoS resigned his post in the final hours of the session.

Meanwhile, voting rights advocates shifted their attention to another attack – SB 9, again from Bryan Hughes – which would have criminalized innocuous mistakes on voter forms as state jail felonies with prison time and fines of up to $10,000. This "election integrity" measure would also have added barriers to assisting elderly or disabled voters at the polls and given Attor­ney General Ken Paxton, himself under felony indictment, direct access to state voter rolls. Civil rights groups slammed SB 9 as one of the harshest voter suppression bills in the country; more than 200 citizens signed up to testify against it at the House Elections Com­mit­tee, with nearly 8,000 signing a petition against it. The overwhelming opposition and organizing paid off, as SB 9 died before making it to the House floor.

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2019-05-31/whitley-sinks-voting-rights-dont/

https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/Using-Broadest-Reading-of-Law-Georgia-Continues-to-Strip-Felons-of-Voting-Rights.html


Leon Brown is trusted enough to drive a tractor-trailer inside one of the nation's busiest seaports more than six years after being released from prison. But he's not allowed to vote in Georgia because of a law rooted in the years after the Civil War, when whites sought to keep blacks from the ballot box.

With a criminal history dating back decades, 53-year-old Brown has more than three years left on probation after serving behind bars for theft and credit-card fraud. Enough time has passed that he qualifies for a federal government credential to deliver cargo to and from the Port of Savannah, but Brown can't take part in elections.

"I would like to vote," Brown said. "I go off and do the time, come back out and they hold me hostage again because I'm on probation."

Brown and tens of thousands of other Georgia residents are cut off from voting due to a vaguely worded law that state election officials interpret in the strictest possible manner.

Georgia strips voting rights from people convicted of all felonies, from murder to drug possession, even though a straightforward reading of the law suggests not all felons deserve such punishment.

View Full Story From AP/ABC

Felons seeking to restore their voting rights must not only finish their prison sentences, but also any parole or probation, as well as pay any outstanding court fines. That has a big effect in Georgia, which has more people on probation than any other state.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld laws like Georgia's, which is not the nation's most severe. Kentucky and Iowa bar all felons from voting for life. So did Florida until voters last year approved a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to those who serve their time. Nine other U.S. states permanently rescind voting rights for some felony convictions.

Just weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the Trump administration can add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, new evidence emerged Thursday suggesting the question was crafted specifically to give an electoral advantage to white Republicans.

The evidence was found in the files of the prominent Republican redistricting strategist Thomas Hofeller after his death in August. It reveals that Hofeller “played a significant role in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Decennial Census in order to create a structural electoral advantage for, in his own words, ‘Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,’ ” and that Trump administration officials purposely obscured Hofeller’s role in court proceedings, lawyers for plaintiffs challenging the question wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman. Furman was one of three federal judges who ruled against the question this year.

The letter drew on new information discovered on hard drives belonging to Hofeller, which were found accidentally by Hofeller’s estranged daughter. Stephanie Hofeller Lizon then shared them with the organization Common Cause for a gerrymandering lawsuit it is pursuing in North Carolina.

The files show that Hofeller concluded in a 2015 study that adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” in redistricting, and then pushed the idea with the Trump administration in 2017, according to the letter to Furman.

The evidence, which was first reported by The New York Times, contradicts sworn testimony by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s expert adviser A. Mark Neuman and senior Justice Department official John Gore, as well as other testimony by defendants, the letter said.

The Commerce and Justice departments did not respond to questions about the new information.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/despite-trump-administration-denials-new-evidence-suggests-census-citizenship-question-was-crafted-to-benefit-white-republicans/2019/05/30/ca188dea-82eb-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html?utm_term=.3c4668a8e250

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reed-hastings-netflix-abortion-ban-donation-missouri_n_5cee97fde4b0975ccf5eb002

Netflix CEO Donated To Missouri GOP Lawmakers Who Backed Abortion Ban
Though the streaming giant came out against Georgia’s abortion law, CEO Reed Hastings contributed to lawmakers who voted for a similar law in Missouri.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/30/politics/uss-john-mccain-japan-white-house-navy-trump/index.html

https://wreg.com/2019/05/28/mississippi-campground-manager-fired-after-gun-incident-with-african-american-couple/

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JACKSON, Miss. — A white manager of a Mississippi campground has been fired after video showed her holding a gun while telling an African American couple to leave because they did not have a reservation.

Kampgrounds of America spokesman Mike Gast said Tuesday that the unidentified manager had been fired from the KOA in Starkville.

A video posted Sunday to a Facebook page apparently belonging to Macon, Mississippi, resident Jessica Richardson shows a woman in a KOA shirt holding a gun as Richardson and her husband tell her they didn’t know they needed a reservation.

Richardson did not immediately respond to messages an Associated Press reporter left through Facebook and at the nail salon where she works.

Gast says KOA “does not condone the use of a firearm in any manner” on its properties or franchises.