The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) — who came under fire after asserting that “legitimate rapes” don’t often result in pregnancy — was arrested multiple times in the 1980s for protesting outside of abortion clinics in St. Louis. Between 1985 and 1987, Akin worked with other anti-choice activists to physically block women’s access to reproductive health clinics in the city, during what RH Reality Check describes as a “hotbed of anti-choice violence and harassment” in St. Louis. At that time, Akin went by his given first name, William, rather than the middle name he currently uses.

Anti-abortion harassment has not certainly not faded away since Akin’s days as a participant. Incidents of violent harassment have been on the rise, prompting some cities like New York to implement clinic escort programs to safely accompany women into health clinics, and an anti-abortion harassment resulted in a stabbing incident in Oregon just yesterday.

Despite the outrage that Akin’s comments about women’s reproductive systems sparked — such as the long list of his Republican colleagues who called for him to drop out of the Missouri Senate race, although Akin did not heed their advice — a number of right-wing groups continue to financially back his campaign.

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee are threatening to subpoena the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over the Obama Administration’s use of public relations contracts to advertise their landmark health care reform law, even though the Bush Administration spent even more money on campaigns to publicize its Medicare program.

Republicans are implying that the Administration’s efforts to raise awareness about core Obamacare provisions is a politically-motivated misuse of public funds. As the Hill reports, GOP members claim that previous requests to HHS for documentation regarding the public relations campaign have gone unanswered, and say that they will be forced to issue subpoenas barring a response by the end of the month:

Ways and Means Republicans previously requested documents about the PR work, but said the administration failed to respond.

“Either the Department is unable to keep track of the work products it buys with taxpayer dollars or the Department is trying to delay any response until after this year’s election,” the lawmakers wrote. “Neither explanation is acceptable.”

They threatened to issue subpoenas if HHS doesn’t respond by Oct. 31. The letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was signed by Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany (R-La.).

Since an overhaul of Obamacare’s magnitude typically requires some form of public education to prevent confusion, HHS signed a $20 million contract to set aside funds for PR campaigns to explain the new consumer benefits under the reform law, as well as an additional $3.1 million contract to inform consumers about state-level health insurance exchanges. Some states, such as California, have used federal grants to promote their state’s own health exchanges.

And federal PR campaigns about major government programs are nothing new. After President Bush’s successful effort to pass the Medicare prescription drug benefit (Medicare Part D), the Bush Administration undertook a significantly larger campaign to inform seniors about their new benefits — also with money specifically set aside by the reform law.

Unlike the current Obamacare PR efforts, however, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Bush Administration broke several federal laws by distributing videos that made their narrators appear to be impartial reporters instead of spokesmen hired by the Bush HHS. GAO also found a two-page flier about Medicare Part D that the Bush Administration sent out to 36 million households to not be “totally free of political content” and contain “notable omissions and other weaknesses.”

This week, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously endorsed Propisition 37, a ballot initiative that would require companies to label food made from genetically modified plants or animals and prevent them from advertising that food as “natural,” joining a long list of other supporters of the proposed measure. Council member Paul Koretz, the resolution’s author, called it “a no-brainer” and said the Council was “proud to be a part of this true grassroots campaign in our struggle against the biggest pesticide and junk food companies in the world.”

If voters pass the ballot initiative this November, California will become the first state to require labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The point, which over 90 percent of Americans support, is to simply let consumers know what is in their food. Over 60 countries — including China and the EU — already require this kind of GMO transparency.

However, a handful of powerful multi-national corporations — the leading donors of which are not based in California, or even within the United States — are spending millions of dollars to defeat the GMO labeling initiative. The opposition is bankrolled by corporate giants like Monsanto, Coca Cola, and Nestle and, after spending more than $41 million on advertisements against Prop 37, their negative ads appear to be having an effect. A poll conducted in late September found 76.8 percent of likely voters supported Prop 37, but a Los Angeles Times poll released October 24 showed just 44 percent of voters in support.

When considering the campaign supporting the measure has raised just $6.7 million, the fight over Prop 37 has reached David vs. Goliath proportions. Still, the political director of the Prop 37 campaign told the Examiner that he was “thrilled” with the City Council’s endorsement. “The Council joins millions of moms, dads, family farmers, doctors, scientists, and grocery store owners in saying, very simply, that we have the right to know what’s in our food,” he said.

– Greg Noth

At Paul Ryan’s speech on poverty yesterday in Ohio, he intended to explain how the Republican party’s platform would help combat poverty in America. But he made it clear that those GOP-endorsed policies don’t involve ensuring that women have access to affordable preventative health care.

As Talking Points Memo flagged, the vice presidential candidate cited the popular Obamacare birth control mandate — which eliminates cost barriers to contraception by requiring employer-based insurance plans to provide contraceptive services without a co-pay — as an example of a “threat” to the poor Americans who rely on assistance from government safety nets and religious charities:

Nothing undermines the essential and honorable work these groups do quite like the abuse of government power. Take what happened this past January, when the Department of Health and Human Services issued new rules requiring Catholic hospitals, charities and universities to violate their deepest principles. Never mind your own conscience, they were basically told –- from now on you’re going to do things the government’s way.

This mandate isn’t just a threat to religious charities. It’s a threat to all those who turn to them in times of need. In the name of strengthening our safety net, this mandate and others will weaken it.

But rather than existing as a “threat” to the low-income women who may need to turn to religious charities “in times of need,” Obamacare actually guarantees that those women will not have to pay up to thousands of dollars each year for their preventative health care, correcting the previously existing gender imbalance in health care costs. And the contraception mandate does not actually require Catholic-affiliated institutions to directly provide their female employees with any birth control services they object to, since it includes a workaround that allows those religious organizations to shift the costs of contraception coverage onto insurance companies.

Studies predict that the health reform law’s birth control policy will almost certainly lower abortion rates, since removing the cost barriers to contraception encourages low-income women to choose longer-lasting, more effective forms of birth control that lower their risk for unintended pregnancy. And women themselves report that they value access to birth control because it helps them achieve economic autonomy for themselves — giving them the ability to finish a degree, keep a job, or support their family — when they know they cannot afford the cost of another child. In Paul Ryan’s mind, however, the social safety net is weakened by fewer abortions and enhanced economic mobility.

Mitt Romney’s plan for Medicaid actually comes in two distinct parts: One, block grant the program, thus turning administration of it completely over to state governments. Two, cut the program as a share of the economy by a third over the next decade, and keep cutting after that. The plan Paul Ryan laid out for Medicaid in the latest House GOP budget is essentially identical. Romney, Ryan, and their cohorts typically defend this scheme by claiming it will open up Medicaid to greater innovation at the state level.

But, as the Huffington Post’s Jeffrey Young noted yesterday, there is a bitter self-contradiction in this argument. Romney’s cuts to Medicaid would almost certainly stifle the very state-level innovations he’s praising:

“Arizona has always been operating in the current financing and entitlement structure of Medicaid. They’re not operating the structure that Mitt Romney wants to go to,” said Joan Alker, co-executive director of the Georgetown Center for Children and Families in Washington.

In recent years, Arizona has raised co-payments and frozen enrollment for poor adults — and is weighing a request for additional federal money to preserve coverage for about 150,000 people and reopen the program to new applicants. The state also put limits on coverage of organ transplants in 2010, but rescinded the policy the following year.

Rhode Island obtained a “waiver” from federal Medicaid rules in 2009 that enabled the state to establish a cap on its spending between 2009 and 2013. The Rhode Island initiative has been hailed by conservatives as a model for future block grant programs because the state has reduced its spending. But Rhode Island implemented its Medicaid reforms with extra federal money and the savings turned out not to be as large as originally believed, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that cites the findings of a report commissioned by Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee (I).

Ironically, the same could be true of the Massachusetts health care reform Romney himself passed into law as governor of that state. Romney negotiated an increase in the federal Medicaid funding going to Massachusetts. That money funded Commonwealth Care, a subsidized market of private coverage for people living under 300 percent of the poverty line — essentially, the Massachusetts version of Obamacare’s exchanges. John McDonough, one of the plan’s main designers, told the Boston Globe, “It would have been impossible for Massachusetts to do what it did without increased federal Medicaid support.”

Oregon is also running a reform experiment that relies on an increased contribution from the federal government. In a move hailed by conservatives, Florida is trying to expand a health care reform pilot program state-wide. An assessment by the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute determined the program was unlikely to save the state costs, suggesting a much lower level of federal funding would do the experiment no favors.

Of course, Republican lawmakers in Florida see the Romney-Ryan budgets as dovetailing with their state-level plans, which include shifting costs onto Medicaid enrollees through increased fees and reduced benefits. In the end, the state-level innovations most threatened by Romney and Ryan’s plans are the ones that don’t compute with conservatives’ pre-conceived policy preferences.