Fire fighters respond to Wednesday's clinic fire. (Source: wsbtv.com)

Clinic workers believe the fire started on the third floor. They said two unknown men went upstairs and left shortly afterward, minutes before the fire was discovered.

“We have patients here. They’re under anesthesia. This could have been life-threatening,” employee Angela Buckner told Channel 2’s Ross Cavitt.

On Sunday, a fire was reported at another clinic in Gwinnett County. In addition to the recent fires, women’s health clinics reported break-ins and stolen computer equipment in March after the Georgia legislature approved a restrictive bill preventing abortions after 20 weeks. Clinic workers said the thefts were attempts to intimidate doctors who perform abortions and fought against the bill. “They’re treating us like terrorists,” Richard Zane, whose Atlanta Women’s Health Center was burglarized, told a local Patch site.

Gov. Nathan Deal signed the 20-week ban, which has no exemption for cases of rape or incest, into law earlier this month.

Georgia Dome

In the eyes of its inhabitants, though, the Georgia Dome is old, crumbling, and wholly inadequate, and if the Falcons and the city of Atlanta get their way, the Dome won’t stand much longer — even though it’s only 20 years old. According to new plans announced by the city of Atlanta and the Falcons yesterday, the Dome will soon be replaced by a $950-million, state-of-the-art facility with a retractable roof. The Georgia Dome — built a measly two decades ago — will be imploded, and taxpayers will be footing at least part of the bill, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

The new plan comes with a higher price. A GWCC-commissioned study released Wednesday put the cost of a new retractable-roof stadium at $947.7 million, up from the $700 million estimated last year for an open-air stadium. Under either plan the public-sector contribution would be an estimated $300 million from an extension of the hotel-motel occupancy tax, passed by the Georgia Legislature in 2010, according to Frank Poe, executive director of the GWCC Authority, the state agency that operates the Dome.

The hotel-motel occupancy tax was originally passed to help finance the construction of the Georgia Dome. It was supposed to expire in 2010, but when the owners of the Falcons threatened to pursue a new stadium in the Atlanta suburbs, the Georgia legislature rushed to extend it so as to keep the team downtown. The extension included an agreement that the Falcons could pursue a new stadium on the same site. Less than two years later, they’re doing exactly that.

The recession and a sluggish economic recovery, meanwhile, crunched Georgia’s state budget and forced deep cuts into areas like education. The state owes local school districts more than $5 billion collectively — Atlanta-area school districts are millions of dollars short. In 2011, the state cut $403 million from its education budget after taking cuts of $300 million and $275 million in the previous two years.

The Falcons want a new stadium because they feel they’re missing out on the riches that come with new skyboxes and luxury suites — amenities the Georgia Dome lacks compared to newer NFL facilities. Still, the team’s value has increased nearly $300 million since owner Arthur Blank bought it in 2002. If the Falcons want a new stadium, they should build one. They just shouldn’t come to taxpayers asking for help.

Ahead of this year’s Vidalia onion harvest, farmers are still seeing a shortage of workers a year later because of Georgia’s immigration law, so state officials are again sending inmates to help farmers despite the failure of last year’s plan:

The Corrections department has sent ten transitional inmates from Smith State Prison to work in a packing and grading facility run by an onion grower in Glennville, which is near Vidalia. Transitional inmates are in the process of completing their prison sentences.

Grower Wayne Durrance says he’s used transitional inmates, and says it’s been a success so far. Durrance says they’re motivated and work hard.

At best, however, this is a patch over a larger problem created by Georgia’s immigration law. State lawmakers approved a harmful immigration law that drove workers out of the state without having a plan in place to replace them. Now, as farmers report difficulties bringing in Hispanic workers through the guest worker visa program and other problems retaining workers, farmers are again on track to lose millions in unharvested crops because of the lawmakers’ failed policy.

For example, it cut off thousands of dollars to a small Colorado nonprofit that provides access to health care and other basic services for immigrants because the organization had joined “an immigrant rights coalition that had joined forces with a statewide gay and lesbian advocacy group.” And recently, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement saying that the Catholic Church should have a right to impose its values on fellow citizens “for the common good,” like cutting off funds to groups with which the church disagrees.

Now, it looks like a Baptist organization is doing the same. A Baptist health ministry in Georgia has withdrawn thousands in grant funding to a women’s health clinic because of what health care the clinic offers:

The Women of Worth clinic’s main goal is to provide Pap smears and cervical cancer screenings for women who cannot afford them — it does not provide abortions, said Executive Director Marilyn Ringstaff.

When a representative from the Georgia Baptist Health Care Ministry Foundation called last year during the application process for a $42,000 grant to ask if they were an abortion clinic, a volunteer told them “no,” she said.

But they do offer the morning after pill.

And when an unidentified pastor saw that the Baptist group had awarded WOW the grant he called the Georgia Baptist Health Care Ministry, accusing the local clinic of providing abortions, she alleged.

On Tuesday, Ringstaff received a letter from Will Bacon, vice president of development for the ministry, officially rescinding the grant offer.

The morning after pill, which prevents ovulation and fertilization to prevent a pregnancy, is in no way the same thing as RU-486, the pill that disrupts an already established pregnancy, and Ringstaff said she explained this to representatives from the Baptist ministry. But the group is still asking for the money to be returned because the clinic clinic provides the medication.

Ringstaff said the funds would have helped staff the clinic, which has been run by volunteers since 2008.

Now, as Vidalia onion farmers begin to harvest their crops, they face the same concerns again this year about not having enough workers to harvest their crops:

For years, Stanley had depended on mostly Hispanic migrant workers to harvest onions. Last year, Stanley says, many of those workers left Georgia following the state’s passage of a tough new immigration law. This is the first harvest since that law took effect.

This year, Stanley and other onion farmers began using a federal guest worker program called H2A. It basically imports workers from countries like Mexico, and then sends them back when the work is finished.

“I had ordered 60 people (via H2A) with the paperwork and everything,” Stanley said. But he said the government botched that request.

“And now I’ve only got 17 people when I’m supposed to have 60. The excuse they gave me was, they lost my paperwork,” Stanley said.

Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black (R) suggested the H2A program last year could be a way to replace lost workers, but told a congressional subcommittee that improving the program to reduce the red tape would help farmers. And the Georgia Senate unanimously passed a resolution asking Congress to expand the guest worker program so that farmers could hire more workers.

Reforming the guest worker program would not be an immediate panacea for the nation’s broken immigration system, but it could help offer farmers a stable, legal workforce while protecting these foreign workers from exploitation.

But if Deal and Georgia Republicans had stopped to consider how the state’s anti-immigrant law would affect workers and employers before they approved it, then the state could have avoided more than $800 million in estimated farm losses last year. So far, it looks as if Georgia’s farmers could lose just as much this year.

Rep. Ron Stephens (R-GA)

From a credit downgrade last year to global warming, the Republican push for ideological purity has already had far-reaching impacts on the country. One emerging problem with the purity test is that it is very easy to fail, for conservative icons and rank-and-file Republicans alike.

Recently, the Georgia House considered a bill which would have prevented women from obtaining an abortion after 20 weeks, down from 26. Rep. Ron Stephens (R), who considers himself pro-life, originally voted against the bill, along with 16 other Republicans. In an interview with the Savannah Morning News, Stephens recalled his daughter Ashlin’s pregnancy just a few years before, when her child was diagnosed with trisomy, a devastating genetic defect, and how this bill would have affected his family’s decision:

“At five months, they told her part of her baby’s brain was outside the skull and the heart was inverted,” he said. “They said it would take only one or two breaths. She would have watched it die.” After huddling with her family, she opted for an abortion. She discussed the option to terminate her pregnancy with her family. But she didn’t have to make the call, since she had a miscarriage shortly thereafter.

When the bill initially came to a vote in the House, there was no opportunity to amend it to provide exceptions for such situations. Stephens said he was so upset he felt sick and walked off the floor during the roll call.

“For something this cruel to happen to my daughter, or anyone’s daughter,” he said, “is just plain inhumane. I consider myself pro-life, but this provision was a distortion of pro-life values.”

In response, the Peach Tea Party blasted those Republicans, claiming they “displayed a willingness to depart from the conservative principles that form the bedrock of the Georgia Republican Party platform.” A blog on the group’s website referred to those Republicans as “RINOs,” or Republicans in Name Only. This was despite the fact that, when the bill was amended to exempt “medically futile” pregnancies like his daughter’s, Stephens voted for the bill, which passed.

For his part, Stephens said he isn’t worried about a primary challenge, telling the Morning News, “It might even help me with fundraising.”

-Zachary Bernstein

Ignoring the vocal opposition of activists and labor organizers, the state senate passed an anti-protest, anti-union bill on March 7. If passed into law, the proposed measure would both make it more difficult for unions to collect dues and set exorbitant fines against many union protests against anti-worker businesses: up to $1,000 per day for those individuals charged with illegal picketing and up to $10,000 to those organizations involved with the illegal protesting.

Senate Bill 469—which GOP senators pushed onto the House’s agenda with a 34-18 vote—is sponsored by four senators who are also members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate front group that pushes “model” legislation to state lawmakers intended to push a right-wing agenda in the states. Although it’s not clear whether SB 469 is such a bill, there are reasons to fear that similar bills could make their way to other states through ALEC’s network of corporate-friendly lawmakers.

The four ALEC members behind SB 469 include Sen. Bill Cowsert (R), who works with ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force, and Sen. Bill Hamrick (R), who received campaign contributions from the ALEC during the 2010 election cycle even though he ran unopposed. Significantly, there are also striking similarities between sections of SB 469 and ALEC’s model Right to Work Act:

• SB 469: Section III of SB 469 states, “No employer shall deduct from the wages or other earnings of any employee any fee, assessment, or other sum of money whatsoever to be held for or to be paid over to a labor organization except on annual written authorization from the employee which shall not exceed a period greater than one year. Such authorization may be revoked at any time at the request of the employee.”
• ALEC: ALEC’s Right to Work model bill states, “It shall be unlawful to deduct from the wages, earnings, or compensation of an employee any union dues, fees, assessments, or other charges to be held for, transferred to, or paid over to a labor organization, unless the employee has first presented, and the employer has received, a signed written authorization of such deductions, which authorization may be revoked by the employee at any time by giving written notice.”

Although such a requirement may not seem particularly important, it moves more of the onus of dues collecting onto labor unions, thereby diverting more of their resources and time from pushing for greater benefits for their members.

Furthermore, the GA bill includes a section that threatens to charge protestors not only with criminal trespassing but also with conspiracy to commit criminal trespass—a highly irregular revision of the law that would label the conspiracy charge as a “misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature” and bring harsher legal penalties for those convicted.

The addition of the conspiracy to commit criminal trespass charge follows only eight days after 12 Occupy Atlanta supporters were arrested for criminal trespass after protesting outside AT&T’s Atlanta offices. Given that AT&T is currently one of the 23 corporations serving on ALEC’s Board of Directors, some speculate the timing is no coincidence.

But regardless of where the bill originated, the proposed legislation poses a grave threat to any activists looking to change the status quo through civil disobedience. As Martin Luther King III told a crowd at a March 1 rally, the fines and penalties proposed in SB 469 would have stymied the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We can only hope that the Georgia House of Representatives will listen to its constituents instead of its corporate backers when deliberating this piece of legislation in the weeks to come.

“What we’re seeing here,” Sen. Nan Orrock said, “is an ideological battle that’s being waged to make women a target, to take our access to our Constitutional right of privacy and also our ability to make our health decisions with our doctor and our own best judgment. And it’s government intruding into that decision. The origins of this bill are ideological, it’s coming from an extreme, right, fundamental point of view. And that doesn’t bode well for women in Georgia.” Watch a local news story:

Republican Sen. Josh McKoon insisted that “the war that’s being waged is on a religious minority in this country that has strong beliefs” and predicted that both measures would pass the House, where the GOP has control.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that “about 430 abortion restrictions that have been introduced into state legislatures this year, which is pretty much in the same ballpark as 2011.” Follow the key bills moving through the states, here.

But a few state lawmakers are offering counter legislation that seeks to give men a taste of their own medicine:

EVERY SPERM HAS A RIGHT (OKLAHOMA): To poke fun a “personhood” bill that give full rights to a zygote, state Sen. Constance Johnson (D) introduced an amendment that would also declare every sperm to be sacred. “However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child,” her amendment stated.

CHILDREN DENIED BIRTH BECAUSE OF VASECTOMIES (GEORGIA): State Rep. Yasmin Neal (D) introduced legislation that would limit vasectomies. “Thousands of children are deprived of birth in this state every year because of the lack of state regulation over vasectomies,” Neal explained. Her measure is in response to a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks on the grounds that a fetus can feel pain — a claim disputed by doctors.

MORE HOOPS TO CLEAR FOR VIAGRA (OHIO): In response to Ohio’s so-called Heartbeat Bill, which would prevent abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, state Sen. Nina Turner (D) will introduce a bill that would make men jump through hoops, like a psychological screening, before they could obtain Viagra and similar drugs for erectile dysfunction. “All across the country, including in Ohio, I thought since men are certainly paying great attention to women’s health that we should definitely return the favor,” Turner said.

RECTAL EXAMS FOR A VIAGRA PRESCRIPTIONS (VIRGINIA): To protest Virginia’s bill requiring women to receive an ultrasound before an abortion, state Sen. Janet Howell (D) attached an amendment to the bill that would have required men to receive a rectal exam and pass a cardiac stress test before doctors wrote them a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication. “We need some gender equity here,” Howell said. The Virginia Senate rejected her amendment, but both chambers passed the ultrasound requirement after clarifying that women would not be forced to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound.

KNOW THE SIDE EFFECTS OF VIAGRA (ILLINOIS): State Rep. Kelly Cassidy (D) decided to push back against GOP attacks on women’s health by offering an amendment that would require men to watch a “horrific video” about the side effects of Viagra before the received a prescription for the drug. His bill is in response to a measure requiring women to undergo an ultrasound before an abortion. “If we are going to do this, we need to do it in a way that is applied equally,” Cassidy said.

PROTECT ALL SPERM (DELAWARE): Mocking the “personhood” measures, the town council in Wilmington, Delaware approved a satirical resolution “that asks state legislatures and U.S. Congress to enact laws that forbid men from destroying their semen.” The resolution notes that if lawmakers think a female egg has full rights, then they should say the same thing about sperm.

Nineteenth Century nullificationist Senator John C. Calhoun

(1) There is created the Joint Commission on Recommendation, which shall be charged with recommending and proposing for a vote by a constitutional majority the nullification in its entirety of a specific federal law or regulation which is deemed to be outside the scope of the powers delegated by the people to the federal government in the United States Constitution or at odds with the Georgia Constitution . . .

(4) Upon recommendation for nullification, the General Assembly may vote to nullify following such recommendation. The appropriate documentation reflecting the vote shall be documented in legislative journals of the House and Senate. In the event the General Assembly votes by a constitutional majority to nullify any federal statute, mandate, or executive order on the grounds of constitutionality, neither the state nor its citizens shall recognize or be obligated to live under such statute, mandate, or executive order.

The unconstitutional idea that a state can nullify federal laws nearly sparked a civil war when it was invoked by southern slave owners in the 1830s, and it was a backbone of the segregated south’s efforts to maintain Jim Crow. Beyond a few flare ups, however, is has nearly always existed on the margins of American constitutional radicalism. As James Madison warned, nullification would “speedily put an end to the Union itself” by allowing federal laws to be freely ignored by states.

Nevertheless, it has experienced a bit of a renaissance after a pseudo-historian named Tom Woods published a book on the subject that is popular among certain segments of the Tea Party. Woods also published an article claiming that “[t]he real watershed from which we can trace many of the destructive trends that continue to ravage our civilization today, was the defeat of the Confederate States of America in 1865.”

Sadly, Sens. Rogers and Williams are far from the only elected officials who do not recognize that the proto-Confederate idea of nullification cannot be squared with the Constitution. Texas recently passed an unconstitutional law nullifying a federal law regulating light bulbs and numerous states have passed equally unconstitutional nullificationist attacks on the Affordable Care Act.

DITTY: There are 23 sexual orientations that fit under this definition and if this bill became law, then what we would be protecting for public employees is not only heterosexuality, bisexuality, pedophilia, transsexuality, transvestitism, I’m not going to read them all. Voyeurism, exhibitionism, feetism, zoophilia, necrophilia, klismaphilia and the list goes on. I teach in the public school system and I wonder if this would impact the public school system. And we have parents who bring their kids to school everyday and expect the school to protect them. And what’s going to protect our children if someone that is a pedophiliac comes in and gets a teaching job, is a bus driver, is a custodian, and they can be people that just want to prey on people and they will be protected with this law.

Watch it:

Jeff Graham, executive director of Georgia Equality, said the measure is still “very much alive,” but faces “a huge challenge to get it through this year.” Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, “covering 44 percent of the United States population.” Sixteen states or 33 percent of the population is covered by a statewide law prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity.”

The anti-abortion bill (HB 954), offered by Rep. Doug McKil­lip (R), “would effectively outlaw abortion 20 weeks after an egg is fertilized, the point where the lawmaker said fetuses can feel pain,” but would allow for exceptions in cases where a pregnancy threatens the life or health of the women. The bill also does not include exemptions for rape or incest and stipulates that doctors “performing abortions without the justifications the bill requires would be subject to a prison sentence of one to 10 years.”

Fourteen states have imposed prohibitions on abortions after a certain number of weeks, generally 24, and 6 of these states ban abortion at 20 weeks on the grounds that the fetus can feel pain at that point in gestation — a claim disputed by doctors:

Doctors’ groups and other experts testified during a committee hearing that establishing a 20-week rule could force prospective parents to make a decision on ending pregnancies before having all the information available from genetic tests that can reveal whether a fetus has severe physical problems.

“People could be making decisions on information that is not definitive,” said Dan Wies­man, a certified genetic counselor at Emory Health­care.

The concept of “fetal pain” is widely panned by many in the medical field, with the Journal of the American Medical Association determining that “pain perception probably does not function before the third trimester.” So discredited is the concept of fetal pain that even a Kansas Republican slammed the “false research,” adding “I would be embarrassed to be a state that bases its laws on untruths.”

Under current Georgia law, women can have abortions until 26 weeks after fertilization. Beyond that point, the procedure can only be performed “if three physicians agree that the woman needs it for medical reasons that can include mental health issues.”

“The Republican attack on women’s reproductive rights is unconscionable. What is more deplorable is the hypocrisy of HB 954’s author,” House Democratic Leader Stacey Abrams (D) said. “If we follow his logic, we believe it is the obligation of this General Assembly to assert an equally invasive state interest in the reproductive habits of men and substitute the will of the government over the will of adult men.”

Price, who serves as the fifth ranking Republican in the House, made the comments to ThinkProgress this morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. Like virtually all Republicans in Congress, he opposes the recent Obama administration rule requiring employers and insurers to offer birth control at no cost.

We asked Price, who is a medical doctor by trade, what he would say to low-income women who can’t afford birth control if it’s not covered by their insurance policies. Price responded by denying their very existence. “Bring me one woman who has been left behind,” he demanded. “Bring me one. There’s not one”:

KEYES: Obviously one of the main sticking points is whether or not contraception coverage is going to be covered health insurance plans and at hospitals and whether or not they’re going to be able to pay for it, especially for low-income women. Where do we leave these women if this rule is rescinded?

PRICE: Bring me one woman who has been left behind. Bring me one. There’s not one. The fact of the matter is, this is a trampling of religious freedom and religious liberty in this country. The president does not have the power to say that your First Amendment rights go away. That’s wrong.

In fact, there are tens of millions of women in the United States who have struggled to afford or don’t have access to contraception. A recent Hart Research survey found that one in three women voters have struggled to afford prescription birth control, including 55 percent of young women aged 18 to 34.

Fortunately, the Obama administration has moved to help these women by requiring insurers to provide birth control at no charge, a move that Price vehemently opposes.

Chester Brown (left)

Chester Brown, a high school senior in Hinesville, Georgia decided in July that he would play his college football at Georgia. Brown was so excited to play for the Bulldogs that he had the date of his commitment tattooed on his arm. But last week, Brown, the son of Samoan immigrants, abruptly announced that he was withdrawing his commitment, a decision that was likely due to an anti-immigrant policy adopted by the Georgia state college and university system in 2010, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

However, a variety of people with direct knowledge of the situation confirmed to the AJC on Tuesday that Brown’s change of heart was because his admissions application to UGA was rejected because of a controversial Board of Regents policy that was adopted in October 2010.

That policy…states that an undocumented student can’t take the seat of an otherwise academically qualified Georgia resident who has been turned away because of capacity constraints.

The policy that may ultimately keep Brown from playing football at Georgia states, “A person who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible for admission to any University System institution which, for the two most recent academic years, did not admit all academically qualified applicants (except for cases in which applicants were rejected for non-academic reasons).” It was instituted in 2010 after the state Board of Regents, which oversees state colleges and universities, found that less than a hundredth of a percent of students — 521 of roughly 311,000 — were undocumented. Within the 511 was a “smaller subset” of students that were considered “illegal,” according to the AJC.

Brown’s mother “insists that he was born in the United States,” but the family lacks documentation to prove it. There is, however, still a chance Brown could realize his dream of becoming a Bulldog. His high school principal has been in contact with both admissions officials and immigration attorneys in attempts to help Brown gain admission.