As you may recall, Race for the Cure got into trouble when they listened to the recommendations of Karen Handel, an anti-abortion wingnut and former Georgia state official who was their senior VP of public policy and wanted an excuse to cut funding to Planned Parenthood.

Their head in the sand approach to the uproar must not have worked very well if the president, founder and two board members are resigning:

DALLAS – What we have here is a failure to communicate, which is why Susan G. Komen for the Cure has yet to heal from its self-inflicted wounds.

On Wednesday, the Dallas-based breast-cancer charity announced that its president, Elizabeth Thompson, was resigning. Founder and chief executive Nancy Brinker said she would relinquish her post after a replacement is found, and two Komen board members also said they are leaving.

Brinker expects us to believe that she, the foundation’s president and two board members just happen to decide to move on at the same time? That’s what Komen told its affiliates Wednesday, in a perfect example of the kind of forethought that got them into this mess.

It’s disappointing that Brinker, once a brilliant marketing strategist, took so long to do even the most rudimentary damage control, which is still not enough.

Critics have been calling for Brinker’s resignation since January, when Komen said it would stop funding breast cancer screenings performed by Planned Parenthood. Brinker ignored the calls, instead releasing a wooden, video-taped statement which did little to stem the backlash against the nonprofit she founded in 1982.

The savage reaction on social media, in particular, forced Komen to reverse its policy for Planned Parenthood in just three days.

But Komen officials insisted they were misunderstood, not wrong-headed. They said the Planned Parenthood decision was the result of a Congressional investigation – one which was initiated at the behest of
abortion opponents.

Whatever the case, the communications crisis did not end with the policy reversal.

Brinker’s failure, or inability, to take responsibility for the brouhaha over Planned Parenthood earned her a level of contempt usually reserved for, say, a BP executive who complained when a massive Gulf oil spill crimped his schedule.

The BP executive was given the boot shortly thereafter, but Brinker clung to her post in the organization she’d built, despite continuous signs of problems.

It's not like they did much, other than collaborate with the Catholic Church and other players to defund Planned Parenthood, after all. And yet, pink ribbons are wilting all across Komen-land:

Two top executives at Susan G. Komen for the Cure have announced their resignation, amid reports that the breast cancer charity is struggling to raise money and repair its reputation after its decision to defund Planned Parenthood and subsequent reversal.

Katrina McGhee, Komen's executive vice president and chief marketing officer, privately announced several weeks ago that she will be stepping down on May 4, and Dara Richardson-Heron, CEO of Komen's New York City affiliate, announced her resignation on Tuesday. Both cited "personal" reasons and declined to elaborate.

I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Worse yet, it seems Nancy Brinker has not yet come to terms with the harm she has done to her foundation:

A Komen insider told HuffPost that "employee morale is in the toilet" since Komen leadership made the controversial decision to defund Planned Parenthood, one of the nation's most prominent women's health and family planning organizations. The move was led by anti-abortion executive Karen Handel, then Komen's senior vice president for public policy, who has since resigned.

"Brinker [is] in complete meltdown," the source wrote to HuffPost. "People want her to resign but she won't."

Brinker did not respond to a request for comment.

I feel for the employees. My morale has been a bit in the toilet too, particularly since the Komen Foundation move was just one volley in a frontal assault against women. The unending, grinding efforts to strip women of their rights and turn them back into chattel is, well, enough to cause a meltdown. It's just a pity that in this case, it was by a woman who claimed to care about women's health.

[h/t Daily Kos]

But under a state law taking effect Wednesday, Henry and other eligible women won't be able to get care at Planned Parenthood clinics — which treat about 44% of the program's patients — or other facilities with ties to abortion providers, meaning those women will have to find new health-care providers.

The $40 million program is at the center of a faceoff between conservative Republican lawmakers and the federal government, which provides 90% of the program's funding. Although Texas already forbids taxpayer money from going to organizations that provide abortions, the law will cut off clinics with any affiliation to a provider, even if it's just a shared name, employee or board member.

Well, here's a problem. Medicaid funding has some conditions tied to it, and Medicaid funding provides about 90 percent of the baseline funding for the Texas Women's Health Program.

Via Huffington Post:

Cindy Mann, director of the Center for Medicaid and State Operations (CMSO), wrote Texas health officials a letter on Thursday explaining that the state broke federal Medicaid rules by discriminating against qualified family planning providers and thus would be losing the entire program, which provides cancer screenings, contraceptives and basic health care to 130,000 low-income women each year.

"We very much regret the state's decision to implement this rule, which will prevent women enrolled in the program from receiving services from the trusted health care providers they have chosen and relied upon for their care," she wrote. "In light of Texas' actions, CMS is not in a position to extend or renew the current [Medicaid contract]."

The federal government pays for nearly 90 percent of Texas' $40 billion Women's Health Program, and nearly half of the program's providers in Texas are Planned Parenthood clinics. But the new law that went into effect earlier this month disqualified Planned Parenthood from participating in the program because some of its clinics provide abortions, even though no state or federal money can be used to pay for those abortions.

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The Susan G. Komen breast cancer fund reversed its Planned Parenthood action and the right wing anti-choice politician it hired has resigned. But the real lesson of this incident is broader than one decision or one person.

Our society is permeated with a culture of corporate greed, aggression, and power that reaches from the boardrooms of New York to the meeting rooms of Washington.

The Susan G. Komen foundation has raised millions to support vitally important work, but it has also reinforced some of the worst tendencies in our society. It has leveraged big-company resources so that it could dominate its "marketplace," usually by serving as a marketing arm for a client list that includes some very poorly-behaved corporate citizens. Then it has used its market dominance to bully other organizations, push its own political agenda, and try to reshape the course of U.S. cancer research in dangerous ways.

Just like its most prominent sponsor, the Susan G. Komen foundation has become too big to fail.

The Players

Karen Handel had some bitter words for her critics as she stepped down from her post as Komen's vice president for public policy. "I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it," Handel wrote.

But there was no "strategy," which Handel and others have defined as denying funding to any group that is under federal investigation. As we noted, and others reported as well, a number of other Komen grant recipients were under real federal investigation and were left untouched, while Planned Parenthood was to be cut for being the subject of a trumped-up, one-person investigation conducted by a right-wing member of Congress.

Nancy Brinker, Komen's founder and CEO, served in a number of positions under George W. Bush, while Handel was a Sarah Palin-endorsed gubernatorial candidate. Political affiliations shouldn't disqualify anyone from serving in a charitable role, of course. Like many people, I've often enjoyed working with ideological opponents on charitable issues of common interest. That kind of cause-based allegiance can help bind our society together.

But Brinker brings her ideology into her Komen work, and has done it so effectively that she's transformed the world of charitable giving ... for the worse. There isn't just the matter of her personal compensation, which the foundation reported as $531,924 as of 2010. Or the fact that she's the only employee who flies first class at the charity's expense, according to the fund's IRS financial filing. (See Komen's form 8453-EO for 2010.)

There's an argument to be made that highly effective fundraisers and executives should receive good, if not excessive, salaries and perks. We won't have that argument here. And for all we know, Ms. Brinker may donate her entire salary to charity. She did choose this career over corporate life, after all, which seems like an altruistic move.

Nor will we argue that Nancy Brinker hasn't been effective at her job. But how has she been effective?

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The Susan G. Komen Foundation has absolutely no credibility left. On Thursday, this is what Nancy Brinker, Komen's CEO, told Andrea Mitchell.

BRINKER: In 2010, we set about creating excellence in our grants, not just in our community grants, but in our science grants, putting metrics, outcomes and measures to them. [...] Part of that includes taking these grants into communities and being excellent grant givers. Many of the grants we were doing with Planned Parenthood do not meet new standards of criteria for how we can measure our results and effectiveness in communities.

She went on to emphasize that this was the key reason the funding had been withdrawn -- and played down the fact that the GOP House was currently investigating Planned Parenthood.

But here's part of the statement she released Friday.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.

So, what happened to those "measures" and "metrics" and "outcomes" Brinker was babbling about on Thursday?

Meanwhile, wingnuts are circulating this piece, which claims a Komen board member says they've haven't reversed themselves at all.

Following a new statement Komen for the Cure released making many observers believe the breast cancer charity reversed position on whether it would fund grants to Planned Parenthood, one Komen board member says it hasn’t caved.

Komen board member John Raffaelli talked with the Washington Post after the statement was released and said the new announcement doesn’t necessarily mean there is any reversal until and unless Planned Parenthood receives additional funding beyond what was already planned before Komen’s December decision.

Based on Komen's actions this week, does anyone have any confidence that they'll do the right thing now?

For Komen to regain any credibility at all, Brinker's got to go. And so does the other wingnut behind this.

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Yes, we're in full damage control mode now. Nancy Brinker made a very long appearance on Andrea Mitchell's show this morning to insist that this wasn't about defunding Planned Parenthood, but really it is about "grant excellence."

The clip above is toward the end of the interview and includes reaction from Senators Patty Murray and Barbara Boxer. What's remarkable about Brinker's appearance is her pivot away from the "under investigation" reason for terminating the grants to one of "grant excellence." What, I wonder, does "grant excellence" mean? To me, it means they want a less incendiary excuse for a bad decision. She goes on about metrics but has no answer to questions about what metrics they evaluated and how Planned Parenthood failed to meet whatever expectations they had for the grant.

Brinker and the SGKF have another problem, too, which I'm sure relates to Brinker's pivot to a new reason for the Planned Parenthood decision. It seems that Penn State is the subject of an ongoing investigation too.

MoJo reports:

Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which recently announced that it is ending grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening because of a controversial investigation launched by an anti-abortion Republican congressman, currently funds cancer research at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center to the tune of $7.5 million. Like Planned Parenthood, Penn State is currently the subject of a federal government investigation, and like the Planned Parenthood grant, the Penn State grant appears to violate a new internal rule at Komen that bans grants to organizations that are under investigation by federal, state, or local governments. But so far, only the Planned Parenthood grants appear to have been cancelled.

An internal Komen memo written by President Elizabeth Thompson and obtained by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic states that if "an applicant or its affiliates" is under investigation "for financial or administrative improprieties by local, state or federal authorities," then "the applicant will be ineligible to receive a grant." Penn State, the Pennsylvania university that the Hershey center is affiliated with, is currently under investigation by the federal government over the sexual assault scandal involving former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who has been indicted on multiple counts of sexual abuse of children. In 2008, the Komen foundation awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant to the Hershey center to study treatments that could reduce the risk of breast cancer.

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