Melinda Gates On How Birth Control Made Indonesia World's 8th Largest Economy

Melinda Gates return recently from Indonesia -- a trip planned long before President Donald Trump reinstituted the Mexico City rule, aka the global gag rule, in a significantly harsher updated version. 

Melinda and Bill Gates have one of the world's best brain banks when the topic is transforming economies -- not only with lip service words about empowering women -- but also with giving them access to contraceptives. As Melinda explains in her USA op ed, contraceptives are one of the greatest anti-poverty innovations the world has ever seen. 

Fifty years ago, fewer than one in 10 Indonesian women used birth control. The average Indonesian woman had five or six children and the entire family lived in extreme poverty. 

When offered support from donor nations like the US, Indonesia implemented a hugely successful family planning initiative in give decades. Today most women in Indonesia have two or three children, who stay longer in school. More women work outside the home and not only did family incomes rise, but so did the entire country's. 

Today, Indonesia has the globe's eight largest economies and family planning is a key reason. But now access to contraception is perilous across the world, because of proposed cuts by the Trump administration to family planning. 

Read AOC's Women News in-depth from (a furious) Melinda Gates about the impact of political budget cuts from the Trump administration. We MUST view these cuts through a dual lens. Yes, they are part of a massive attempt to cut everything from arts funding in America to school lunches. But the cuts to women's health are also politically motivated to curb women's empowerment and advancement worldwide.

The majority of members of the Trump administration say they believe in women's empowerment while taking every move to cut of funding to clinics who even utter the word 'abortion' not even offer them in their facilities. By greatly expanding the language in the Mexico City rule, the Trump administration is cutting off any access to contraceptives at the same time. His ultra right-wing administration has advanced this agenda around women for years. 

Does Kellyanne Conway Really Live In An Alternate Universe?

Writing for The Atlantic, Molly Ball takes a more serious look at Kellyanne Conway, giving her major credit for articulating the anti-immigration policy that came to dominate the Donald Trump primary and presidential campaigns. 

In 2014, Conway was part of a group of Republicans that produced a poll for FWD.us, an immigration-advocacy nonprofit founded by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. The poll showed that immigration reform was a political necessity for the GOP—a finding that contradicted the line Conway had been pushing since the 1990s. Two months later, Blueberry -- her Secret Service code name -- produced a different poll, demonstrating that “enforcement of current law” and “encouraging illegal immigrants to return to their home countries” could be a winning message. Conway's new findings were rebuffed by Republican donors. But Steve Bannon's far-right wing Breitbart.com called it a "blockbuster".

Trump's Transition Poll #s Dropping Fast | Trump Says Repeal ACA At Once

Trump's Poll Numbers Diving

1. Only 37% of voters approve of Donald Trump's transition to the presidency, writes a new Quinnipiac University poll. Women lead the way with 59% of female voters disapproving of how Trump is doing his job. 

The measures of Trump's personal qualities all are more negative than they were in a November 22 Quinnipiac University poll:

53 - 39 percent that he is not honest, compared to 52 - 42 percent November 22;
49 - 44 percent that he has good leadership skills, compared to 56 - 38 percent;
52 - 44 percent that he does not care about average Americans, compared to 51 - 45 percent who said he did care;
62 - 33 percent that he is not level-headed, compared to 57 - 38 percent;
71 - 25 percent that he is a strong person, compared to 74 - 23 percent;
68 - 27 percent that he is intelligent, compared to 74 - 21 percent.

Trump Takes on Vaccine Safety

2. Long a skeptic of vaccines, president-elect Donald Trump met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to chair a new commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity, Kennedy told reporters in Manhatan's Trump Tower lobby on Tuesday. 

The unprecedented move would contradict established science, medicine and the US government's position on links between medical conditions like autism and vaccines. Kennedy is a proponent of a widely discredited theory that links vaccines and autism. 

In 1998, a well-respected journal published the work of researcher Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues that linked standard measles, mumps and rubella vaccines to autism. Based on a tiny sample size of 12 and speculative conclusions, the research was embraced by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey and Trump who actually called upon parents to stop vaccinating their children. 

The problem: The study was an elaborate fraud.

Editors of the Lancet, which published the original piece, discovered that Wakefield had been funded by attorneys for parents who were pursuing lawsuits against vaccine companies and that a number of elements of the paper were misreported.

In February 2010, the journal retracted the piece, and in an investigative piece in 2011, in The BMJ found even more shenanigans in the way the study was conducted. Some parents of children in the study reported by Wakefield to have autism said they did not, and others who were listed in the study as having no problems before the vaccine actually had had developmental issues. via The Washington Post

Trump Tells GOP To Quickly Replace Health Care Law

3. President-elect Trump told Republicans to "get to business" and quickly repeal President Obama's Affordable Care Act, saying "Obamacare has been a catastrophic event." Trump indicated that he expected a repeal "probably some time next week", then saying "the replace will be very quickly or simultaneously very shortly thereafter."

Several Republicans are very nervous about repealing the ACA without a clear alternative plan in place. via The New York Times