As a growing number of states pass laws banning abortion, it’s worth remembering that Roe v. Wade was decided less than 50 years ago. Like so many other milestones in the fight for equality, legal abortion is a relatively recent occurrence, meaning your mother and grandmother grew up in a world with far fewer legal protections than exist today.

This month marks just a century since the Senate passed the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote (which they’d rejected twice before). It would take another year to ratify, but the suffrage movement had finally prevailed after nearly 50 years of organizing, protesting, and educating the general public on the importance of equal rights to vote in a democracy.

Over the next 100 years, women’s rights have been expanded–however, not to the point where they have complete constitutional equality. In 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment (aka the ERA) was introduced in Congress to give women all the other rights in the Constitution such as property, employment, and education.

It wouldn’t even be sent to states for ratification until 1972, where it fell three states short. Four years later, the Supreme Court declared that “women were covered by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and ultimately that distinctions by sex had to be justified by an important state interest,” according to a report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The campaign to ratify continues today.

Fast Company

FCC Chair Ajit Pai must "explain the extent to which CSRIC may be corrupted by corporate influence," the Democratic senator says.

A panel that provides policy advice to the Federal Communications Commission is "stacked with corporate insiders," Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said Monday. She cited a blog post by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), which showed more than half of all Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) members are direct employees of private companies or of industry trade groups.

This could lead to allegations that rather than working for American consumers, the FCC is working for "giant telecom companies", Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, tweeted Monday.

"This is the definition of corruption: industry members writing the rules to benefit themselves & their rich friends," she added in another tweet. Sen. Warren has called on FCC Chair Ajit Pai to "explain the extent to which CSRIC may be corrupted by corporate influence."

CNET

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris' office violated defendants' rights by hiding damaging information about a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings, a judge declared Thursday.

Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo stopped short of granting a request by more than 40 drug defendants that their cases be dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct, saying that decision must be left up to the judges hearing their cases.

But in a scathing ruling, the judge concluded that prosecutors had failed to fulfill their constitutional duty to tell defense attorneys about problems surrounding Deborah Madden, the now-retired technician at the heart of the cocaine-skimming scandal that led police to shut down the drug analysis section of their crime lab.

SF Gate

Police and prosecutors framed a father of four in a 2007 murder case with local and national political implications.

After a jury convicted Jamal Trulove, then 25, of first degree murder in February 2010, then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris praised the “brave witness who stepped forward from the crowd.” Harris was then running for attorney general of California and in her campaign bragged about her high conviction rates as the San Francisco DA. Harris echoed what her deputy prosecutor Linda Allen said repeatedly to the jury: Priscilla Lualemaga, the only eyewitness to testify at trial about the July 2007 homicide of Seu Kuka, did so at great risk of retaliation. “She’ll never get her life back,” Allen said, adding that Lualemaga testified knowing that “maybe [she’ll] get killed over being a witness because she saw someone else kill someone.”

Lualemaga’s identification of Trulove as the shooter who killed Kuka on a sidewalk in San Francisco’s Sunnydale housing project was the critical evidence against him. For prosecutors to win, the jury had to believe Lualemaga’s claim that just before 11 p.m. on July 23, 2007 she saw the shooting from a second-floor window when the street below was shrouded in darkness.

The jury also had to believe Lualemaga saw the shooter despite a poor vantage point of the crime scene; her failure to pick Trulove from a photo wall she had viewed with police for hours; her evolving memory of the shooting over time; and the benefits the prosecution provided to Lualemaga and her family that would eventually total over $60,000 in living expenses. Yet the prosecution argued that Lualemaga’s testimony was credible because it came at profound personal risk.

But there was no evidence corroborating the prosecutor’s suggestion that, as a court of appeal later described it, there were “assassins lurking on defendant’s behalf.”

The Appeal

Ex-reality show contestant convicted of murder

A San Francisco jury convicted a 29-year-old one-time reality TV contestant of first-degree murder Tuesday for gunning down a man in 2007 at the Sunnydale housing projects. In another case, three men were acquitted in slayings in the same area.

Jamal Trulove put his head down and wept after the jury returned the verdict of murder and of being a felon with a firearm in the July 23, 2007, slaying of Seu Kuka, 28, in the city's Visitacion Valley neighborhood.

Trulove's conviction was based on the testimony of an eyewitness, whom The Chronicle is not naming at the request of prosecutors. She said she was "100 percent" sure Trulove was the gunman. Three months after the murder, she was surprised to see Trulove on the VH-1 series "I Love New York 2" as a potential suitor of reality TV veteran Tiffany "New York" Pollard.

SF Chronicle

As Kamala Harris begins her presidential run, her move to block gender affirming surgery for an incarcerated transgender woman deserves scrutiny, especially as new cases highlighting the struggle for the rights of imprisoned trans women emerge.

When Kamala Harris announced her run for president on Jan. 21, a reporter asked her about the 2015 case of Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, a trans woman incarcerated in California’s prison system who petitioned prison officials to grant her request for gender affirming surgery. In 2015, Harris was California’s attorney general and her office filed a request in federal court to halt a court ruling that ordered Norsworthy’s surgery, arguing that “there is no evidence that irreversible treatment is immediately necessary before this appeal can be heard.” Nearly four years later, Harris didn’t answer the question about Norsworthy. In response to the reporter, Harris replied “it was an office with a lot of people … and do I wish that sometimes they would have personally consulted me before they wrote the things that they wrote? Yes, I do.” Harris then added that she “worked behind the scenes to ensure that the Department of Corrections would allow transitioning inmates to receive the medical attention that they required, they needed and deserved.”

Harris’s move to block the surgery was unsuccessful: Norsworthy was the first incarcerated trans person in California (and the second in the U.S.) to win a court ruling that granted a request for surgery. But Harris’s motion to stay a judge’s mandatory preliminary injunction ordering prison officials to provide her with “sex reassignment surgery as promptly as possible” is representative of the way in which the carceral system acts as a site of gendered and sexual control. Prison officials frequently deny access to gender-affirming care including hormone therapy and gender surgeries in addition to gender-affirming clothing, cosmetics, and speech therapy. Transition-related medical care is often not understood as health-affirming and necessary despite demonstrable improvements to the quality of life of many trans people who desire it. As medical groups and government agencies—including the American Psychiatric Association and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—acknowledge the necessity of transition-related medical care, arguments made by the likes of Harris limiting access to it become even less defensible.

When not confronted with threats to their health in prisons and jails, trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming individuals face the prospect of life-threatening violence: A study of California prisons found that trans women housed in male facilities are more than 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than other prisoners. Too often, the response to such threats by prison and jail officials is to house LGBTQ people in solitary confinement “for their own safety.” But according to international human rights organizations, mental health professionals, and incarcerated people themselves, solitary confinement is torture and is often used as a means of retaliation by the state.

The Appeal

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is standing by her support for busing as an effective tool the federal government should use to help desegregate schools.

The 2020 presidential candidate doubled down on her busing comments Sunday in San Francisco after participating in the city’s Pride Parade, according to Bloomberg.

“I support busing,” she told reporters outside city hall. “Listen, the schools of America are as segregated, if not more segregated today than when I was in elementary school. And we need to put every effort, including busing, into play to desegregate the schools.”

NY Mag

Considering the number of Presidential hopefuls they were really good. I thought it was going to be bad. Simply too many people. Not the case. When looked at as a whole I think we need to call both nights a win. Again, I’m taking into account all of the things going against them. Size of field. Moderators. Night chosen.

There were highly competent and Presidential adults in the room delivering our message. Given the situation, they pulled off an excellent debate for Democrats.

Our field is strong. Our bench is deep. And we have some great people gaining name recognition who will be powerful assets to the eventual nominee.

Just a reminder.

It really took the first real one to see the potential consequences.

If any of our contenders unleash a real attack they will be met with the release of oppo research within the following days. The most difficult part, without a major error one will have no idea where the retaliation came from. It might even come from multiple places.

Lets take the Biden Harris dust up. So it wasn't that big of a deal but it was an opportunity for her competitors. In the following days the Intercept and AP came out with negative stories on her. They were then picked up by other outlets. We have now seen additional negative stories come out. Who benefits from Harris being attacked? Considering the original attack being against Biden I would say Warren and Sanders are the biggest beneficiaries. Interesting that the Intercept was one of the first out with the attacks on Harris.

In a field this large our people need to understand that direct attacks will be met with the release of oppo research in short order and we most likely won't have an idea of where the research was leaked from.

Party on. Fight the good fight. If you are going to throw poo please understand it is going to hit the fan and splat back all over you.

Massachusetts senator and 2020 presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren began the month of June polling around 7 percent, placing her in-a-respectable-but-certainly-second tier of candidates along with California senator Kamala Harris and South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg. But over the past several weeks, she earned a blizzard of media coverage and made inroads with primary voters thanks to her steady rollout of detailed policies, from wiping out student debt and taxing the uber-rich back to funding universal childcare and abolishing the Electoral College. Warren entered Wednesday's inaugural Democratic debate at 12.8 percent in RealClearPolitics's polling average, good for third overall; New Jersey senator Cory Booker and former Texas representative Beto O'Rourke, at 3.3 and 2.3 percent, respectively, were the only other participants on stage who managed to exceed one percent.

Of the candidates hoping to use the debate to boost their polling numbers, former Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro was probably the most successful. His invocation of the black and Hispanic victims of police violence—a talking point he uses to promote his police reform platform—drew enthusiastic applause from the crowd. The former San Antonio mayor also drew a sharp distinction between his desire to repeal Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which makes it a crime to illegally cross the border, and his fellow Texan O'Rourke's reluctance to vote to do so while in Congress. "I think that you should do your homework on this issue," Castro said, asserting that a separate federal law addresses O'Rourke's purported concerns about the implications of repeal for human trafficking. "If you did your homework on this issue, you would know that we should repeal this section."

For the most part, however, the stage belonged to Warren. She didn't monopolize the conversation in the traditional sense; according to FiveThirtyEight, the 1,637 words she spoke put her well behind the more loquacious Booker and O'Rourke, and on par with Castro (1,588 words), Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar (1,614 words), and NBC's Chuck Todd (1,633 words.) But her presence drove the debate at several critical junctures, as her policy positions forced competitors to measure their platforms directly against hers. In an early question to Booker, Savannah Guthrie asked why he criticized Warren's choice to call out by name companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook when she announced her plan to break up tech giants back in March. "I don't think I disagree," Booker replied, seemingly contradicting his earlier-expressed disagreement with Warren's approach. Eventually, he conceded: "I will single out companies like Halliburton or Amazon that pay nothing in taxes, and our need to change that."

GQ