As Oklahoma enacts a law that could close all but one abortion clinic in the state — and Louisiana is poised to follow suit — Democracy Now! looks at the legacy of Dr. George Tiller, who was assassinated five years ago this past weekend. Tiller was one of a handful of doctors providing abortions in the third trimester of pregnancy. He braved constant threats, a firebombing at his clinic and an assassination attempt that left him with gunshot wounds to both arms. On May 31, 2009, anti-choice extremist, Scott Roeder, entered Tiller’s church in Wichita, Kansas, and shot him dead. Watch video clips of Tiller speaking in his own words.
Democracy Now! interviews Dr. Cheryl Chastine, who travels from Chicago to Wichita each week to provide abortions at Tiller’s former clinic, which reopened last year. Requesting to remain anonymous over safety concerns, Chastine discusses the obstacles to abortion access in Kansas and responds to the threats and harassment she and her colleagues face.
“I get up in the morning and there are patients that need me,” Chastine says. “If I allow myself to be deterred from doing this work, then I am allowing a victory for terrorism.”
Democracy Now! is an independent, daily global news hour anchored by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. We air live weekdays 8-9AM ET and rebroadcast throughout the day on nearly 1,400 TV & radio stations in 43 countries. Here we post excerpts from our interviews and key moments from our daily show.
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We’re on strike because it’s really lack of respect. We want lower class sizes. We need staffing, nurses. Over 80 percent of our schools do not have a full-time nurse. And that’s why we’re there. We want the district to come to an agreement that services have been disinvested in our school system for far too long.
Cecily Myart-Cruz, who has taught in L.A. public schools for over 20 years and now is a leader in the historic teachers’ strike that has effectively shut down the United States’ second-largest school district. See more coverage of the strike here from today’s show.
Honduras: As Berta Cáceres Murder Trial Nears End, Will True Perpetrators Be Brought to Justice?
Eight men are on trial in Honduras for the murder of environmentalist Berta Cáceres, who was gunned down in her home in La Esperanza in 2016. A verdict is expected this week—but UC Santa Cruz historian and author Dana Frank said on Democracy Now! today that the trial has been flawed from the outset:
“The trial itself has been a travesty. The government prosecutors have not introduced or taken into account a vast range of evidence of text messages, seized computer messages, phone call records that implicate all kinds of people. And they’re not taking that into account. And also Honduran law says that the family of the victim has the right to review all of the evidence, has the right to be there in court, and that has been violated over and over and over again.
So we’re going to get some kind of verdict—probably somebody’s going to take a fall for this—but we should not in any way confuse that with justice for Berta. The fact that there is even a trial is mostly because of international pressure, including from the United States Congress and people like yourselves. There is going to be a lot of pressure to act like somehow justice has been done and we’re going to put this under the rug, sweep it under the rug.
And it’s really important to say that this is not going to be justice for Berta. This is going to be some kind of a—something for show, as they say in Honduras—and that we still have to call for justice for Berta and have the true perpetrators fully brought to justice.”
See the full interview here.
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Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: We Need to Confront Trump’s Creeping Authoritarianism
29-year-old Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She was elected to represent New York’s 14th Congressional District by a landslide Tuesday, defeating Republican candidate Anthony Pappas with 78 percent of the vote. She spoke with us at her victory party:
I do believe that our president has abdicated his responsibility as a leader of all people in the United States. He has very clearly drawn lines into which Americans he champions and which Americans he doesn’t. And that is why I feel we have a very important duty to not only fight against the spread of anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, but that we need to affirmatively champion the causes of these communities and our neighbors, because this is a—this is a very dangerous time in our democracy, and this is a very dangerous administration that we cannot take for granted. And we need to make sure that we are shoring up support of these communities in very tangible ways.
I think that the key thing to understand about Bolsonaro is that he really comes not from this modern ‘alt-right’ movement of the type of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen, but the Cold War far right that carried out enormous atrocities in the name of fighting domestic communism, which is what Bolsonaro believes his primary project to be. He recently vowed to cleanse the country of left-wing opposition, which he sees as a communist front. And so, the threat and the ideology is far more extreme than anything in the democratic world.
Journalist and Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald, speaking on Democracy Now! Monday about the election of far-right Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
There’s certainly ample evidence that Brett Kavanaugh has been untruthful to the Senate, that he’s lied under oath, that he’s misled the Senate. Every single time he’s testified, he has testified falsely, in my view. His statements have been contradicted by evidence in 2004, 2006, earlier this month in 2018 and just this past week.
Lisa Graves, ex-aide to Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who authored Senate memos Kavanaugh is accused of lying about under oath. Watch the full interview: Ex-Senate Aide: Judge Brett Kavanaugh Has Lied Every Time He Has Testified Under Oath