Texas Gov. Rick Perry to be Investigated for Abusing the Powers of His Office, Bribery and Coercion
Posted by: Sky Palma
on AATTP August 16, 2013
This week, a Texas judge said that he plans to have a special prosecutor look at charges that Gov. Rick Perry broke the law when he cut funding for state public corruption investigators.
The watchdog group Texans for Public Justice filed a complaint that stems from an April drunk-driving arrest of Travis County District Attorney, Rosemary Lehmberg, who oversees the state’s criminal ethics department. The department’s cases included the prosecution of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and an investigation into the state’s $3 billion cancer research agency.
After her arrest, Lehmberg pleaded guilty and served a reduced sentence of less than 45 days. Amid loud demands from Perry and the state’s GOP for her to resign, Lehmberg refused. In response to her defiance, Perry threatened to eliminate $3.7 million from the state’s annual funding if she did not step down.
Lehmberg remained in office — and Perry made good on his threat, vetoing the money in June.
According to the two-page complaint that was filed shortly after Perry’s actions, the governor was accused of violating laws regarding “coercion of a public servant, bribery, abuse of official capacity and official oppression.”
“Governor Perry violated the Texas Penal Code by communicating offers and threats under which he would exercise his official discretion to veto the appropriation,”
the executive director of Texans for Public Justice Craig McDonald wrote in the complaint.
Gov. Perry’s office claimed that they haven’t heard anything in regards to an investigation.
Rick Perry Is Quietly Encouraging Texans to Sign Up for Obamacare
Published October 23, 2013 - 3:30pm
Katie Singh
Burnt Orange Report
Governor Rick Perry has always been one of the Affordable Care Act's most vocal opponents. He's called it a "monstrosity," a "stomach punch to the economy," and a "felony." But that hasn't stopped him from telling Texans to sign up for health coverage from the law.
That's right — Rick Perry's administration is encouraging Texans to enroll in the ACA's health insurance exchanges.
As the Texas Tribune reported last week, Texas will soon be shutting down its high-risk insurance pool for residents with pre-existing conditions, pushing them to seek coverage in the federal insurance marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act. According to the Tribune, "the state has deemed the high-risk pool obsolete, as the Affordable Care Act prohibits insurance companies participating in the federal marketplace...from denying coverage to Texans with pre-existing conditions." Governor Perry signed the bill abolishing the high-risk pool into law in June, and it will be shut down by the end of the year.
This is just the latest in a series of hypocritical moves by Governor Perry regarding the Affordable Care Act. Though he's called the law a "criminal act," Perry certainly has no problem accepting money from it. As we reported last month, Perry has accepted over $100 million in ACA grants, and was asking for even more to help expand a state program providing insurance to those with disabilities.
Perry's actions make it utterly impossible to take his position on the ACA seriously. The crux of his argument against the Affordable Care Act has been that it's better for states to control health policy than the federal government. But by accepting ACA grant money, and now by encouraging high-risk patients to enroll in insurance exchanges, Perry's actions have totally undermined his words. In accepting these parts of the ACA, he's essentially acknowledged that federal grants will enhance the state's existing health programs, and that the health exchanges will provide better coverage for people with pre-existing conditions than what the state has now.
Perry's actions confirm what policy experts have known since the law was passed — it's a step forward for Texans. Stacey Pogue of the Center for Public Policy Priorities told the Texas Tribune she "think[s] that people are going to have many more options and many better options in the marketplace than they do in the health pool today."
Texans in the high-risk pool currently pay twice the market rate for health coverage, but they will be able to find much cheaper options in the health insurance exchanges. The ACA's tax subsidies will also make coverage more affordable. In addition, the insurance plans available in the exchanges will expand the level of care people with pre-existing conditions can receive, "as they must cover 'essential health benefits,' some of which, such as maternity care, aren't [currently] covered in the pool."
So, the next time you hear Rick Perry call the Affordable Care Act an "attack on freedom" or some other hyperbole, remember that even he doesn't really think that. Perry's presidential ambitions mean he'll never admit it, but he's repeatedly accepted parts of the Affordable Care Act as good for Texas. In doing so, he's not only recognized that federal assistance can strengthen state programs, but he's also proven himself to be a Texas-sized hypocrite.
As a Texan, I’ve seen the enigma that is current Governor Rick Perry
first hand. Trust me when I say that most people don’t like him in this
state, and that includes many Republicans. His favorability rating
seems to hover anywhere between the low to mid-40′s with the number of
people who disapprove of his job performance almost always being higher.
These numbers obviously weren’t helped during his 2012 presidential bid that can only be described as a total embarrassment.
Well, the rumor mill continues to churn pointing to the very real
possibility that Perry is contemplating yet another presidential bid.
Something which I’m sure gets comedy writers excited, but it seems very few Texans actually want to see happen. Recently, Public Policy Polling did a survey where they asked Texans who they’d like to see as the GOP nominee in 2016 — and almost nobody chose Rick Perry.
In what should surprise absolutely no one, Ted Cruz led the field,
garnering 32% of the vote. As for the rest of the field, 13% picked Jeb
Bush and Chris Christie, 10% chose Rand Paul, 6% favor Bobby Jindal and
5% like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. Three percent chose Rick Perry.
Think about that for a moment. The governor of Louisiana ranks higher among Texans than our own governor.Hell, Rick Perry ranked so poorly that if the presidential race were between himself and Hillary Clinton—he would lose Texas.
It just goes to show what an epic embarrassment Rick Perry has been
to the state of Texas. The only reason he’s been our longest serving
governor is because he’s never really faced a true Republican challenger
and Democrats in this state stand almost no chance at winning a
state-wide election.
Granted, such strong opposition to the thought of him being the 2016
GOP candidate probably isn’t entirely based on his track record as
governor. I’m fairly certain his disastrous run in 2012 plays a
significant part. It’s not every day you see a presidential candidate
unable to name the three agencies of government he would eliminate if he
were president.
Seriously, every time I watch that video I get a good chuckle.
The sad part is, I highly doubt these numbers would have any impact
on Perry’s decision to run. In his mind, I’m sure he believes he stands
a real shot at not only winning the GOP nomination, but actually
becoming president.I hate to break it to Governor Perry (actually, I don’t), but if the people in your state would rather see the Governor of Louisiana as the GOP nominee or would choose a Democrat for president over you—you don’t stand a chance in hell.
About Allen Clifton Allen
Clifton is from the Dallas-Fort Worth area and has a degree in
Political Science. He is a co-founder of Forward Progressives, and
author of the popular Right Off A Cliff column. He is also the founder of the Right Off A Cliff facebook page, on which he routinely voices his opinions and stirs the pot for the Progressive movement. Follow Allen on Twitter as well, @Allen_Clifton.
A Galveston medical student describes life and death in the so-called safety net.
by Rachel Pearson Published on
I have received permission to share my patients’ stories, and
changed or omitted some names. This is a personal essay; the views are
my own and do not reflect those of St. Vincent’s House or St. Vincent’s
Student-Run Free Clinic.
The first patient who called me “doctor” died a few
winters ago. I met him at the St. Vincent’s Student-Run Free Clinic on
Galveston Island. I was a first-year medical student then, and the
disease in his body baffled me. His belly was swollen, his eyes were
yellow and his blood tests were all awry. It hurt when he swallowed and
his urine stank.
I saw him every Thursday afternoon. I would do a physical exam, talk
to him, and consult with the doctor. We ran blood counts and wrote a
prescription for an antacid—not the best medication, but one you can get
for $4 a month. His disease seemed serious, but we couldn’t diagnose
him at the free clinic because the tests needed to do so—a CT scan, a
biopsy of the liver, a test to look for cancer cells in the fluid in his
belly—are beyond our financial reach.
He started calling me “Dr. Rachel.” When his pain got so bad that he
couldn’t eat, we decided to send him to the emergency room. It was not
an easy decision.
There’s a popular myth that the uninsured—in Texas, that’s 25 percent
of us—can always get medical care through emergency rooms. Ted Cruz has
argued that it is “much cheaper to provide emergency care than it is to
expand Medicaid,” and Rick Perry has claimed that Texans prefer the ER
system. The myth is based on a 1986 federal law called the Emergency
Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which states that hospitals
with emergency rooms have to accept and stabilize patients who are in
labor or who have an acute medical condition that threatens life or
limb. That word “stabilize” is key: Hospital ERs don’t have to treat
you. They just have to patch you up to the point where you’re not
actively dying. Also, hospitals charge for ER care, and usually send
patients to collections when they cannot pay.
My patient went to the ER, but didn’t get treatment. Although he was
obviously sick, it wasn’t an emergency that threatened life or limb. He
came back to St. Vincent’s, where I went through my routine:
conversation, vital signs, physical exam. We laughed a lot, even though
we both knew it was a bad situation.
One night, a friend called to say that my patient was in the
hospital. He’d finally gotten so anemic that he couldn’t catch his
breath, and the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), where I am a
student, took him in. My friend emailed me the results of his CT scans:
There was cancer in his kidney, his liver and his lungs. It must have
been spreading over the weeks that he’d been coming into St. Vincent’s.
I went to visit him that night. “There’s my doctor!” he called out
when he saw me. I sat next to him, and he explained that he was waiting
to call his sister until they told him whether or not the cancer was
“bad.”
“It might be one of those real treatable kinds of cancers,” he said. I
nodded uncomfortably. We talked for a while, and when I left he said,
“Well now you know where I am, so you can come visit me.”
I never came back. I was too ashamed, and too early in my training to
even recognize why I felt that way. After all, I had done everything I
could—what did I have to feel ashamed of?
UTMB sent him to hospice, and he died at home a few months later. I read his obituary in the Galveston County Daily News.
The shame has stuck with me through my medical training—not only from
my first patient, but from many more. I am now a director of the free
clinic. It’s a volunteer position. I love my patients, and I love being
able to help many who need primary care: blood pressure control, pap
smears, diabetes management. We even do some specialty care. But the
free clinic is also where some people learn that there is no hope for
the chemotherapy or surgery that they need but can’t afford. When UTMB
refuses to treat them, it falls to us to tell them that they will die of
diseases that are, in fact, treatable.
Erica Fletcher
Part of the playground at St. Vincent’s House community center.St. Vincent’s is the primary care provider for more
than 2,000 patients across Southeast Texas. Our catchment area is a
strip of coastal plain strung with barrier islands. Drive inland and you
start to see live oaks; go toward the coast and the oil refineries loom
up over neighborhoods. The most polluting refinery in the nation is
here, in Texas City. Our patients are factory workers, laborers,
laid-off healthcare workers, the people behind the counters of seafood
restaurants.
Most of our patients come from Galveston and Brazoria counties, but
some drive two hours from Port Arthur or over from Orange, near the
Texas-Louisiana border, to get to us. That’s how hard it is to see a
doctor in Southeast Texas: People take a day off work to drive two hours
to a student-run clinic that can only provide basic care.
The clinic is overseen by faculty physicians—UTMB docs—who see every
patient along with us students and prescribe medications. These doctors
are volunteers. We are not a UTMB clinic, but we depend on UTMB, which
is twenty blocks from St. Vincent’s, for training our student
volunteers, for liability insurance and for running our blood tests and
other labs. UTMB has given us grants, including one that helped us get
our electronic medical records system, and funds a nurse-managed day
clinic for the uninsured at St. Vincent’s House.
But UTMB is no longer the state-subsidized charity hospital it used to be. The changes began before Hurricane Ike in 2008. But after the storm, UTMB administrators drastically cut charity care
and moved clinics to the mainland, where there are more paying
patients. The old motto “Here for the Health of Texas” was replaced by
“Working together to work wonders.” Among those wonders are a new
surgical tower and a plan to capitalize on Galveston’s semi-tropical
charm by attracting wealthy healthcare tourists
from abroad. Medical care for the poor is not, apparently, among the
wonders. Whereas UTMB accepted 77 percent of charity referrals in 2005,
it was only taking 9 percent in 2011. UTMB ascribes these changes
to financial strain from Hurricane Ike, the county’s inability to
negotiate a suitable indigent-care contract and loss of state funding.
The state blames budget shortfalls. The Affordable Care Act, better
known as Obamacare, could have been a huge relief. However, Gov. Rick
Perry rejected billions of dollars in federal funding to expand
Medicaid, funding that should have brought access to more than a million
Texans, including many St. Vincent’s patients.
Perry’s refusal is catastrophic health policy. For patients, it means
that seeking medical care will still require risking bankruptcy, and
may lead nowhere. For doctors, the message was not only that our
patients’ lives don’t matter, but also that medicine—our old profession,
so full of people who genuinely want to help others—will continue to be
part of the economic machine that entrenches poverty. When the poor
seek our help, they often wind up with crippling debt.
Because they can no longer count on UTMB to accept their patients,
UTMB doctors now refer many to St. Vincent’s. They’ll treat someone for a
heart attack (because that’s an emergency covered by EMTALA), then
refer them to us for follow-up, even though we don’t have a
cardiologist. They’ll stabilize a patient after her third stroke, put
her on blood thinners and send her to us. They once sent us, from the
ER, a man with a broken arm. They put the arm in a splint and referred
him to us. What did they expect us to do—orthopedic surgery? Put on a
cast? We don’t even have an x-ray machine.
I do not think that these referrals are an official policy. Rather, they are the work of doctors and nurses trying to do something
for patients who have been refused care through the financial screening
process at the hospital. Former St. Vincent’s leader Dr. Merle Lenihan
has described the clinic as a “moral safety valve.” It protects UTMB
from confronting the consequences of the state’s refusal to provide
care.
Among those consequences are the deaths of the poor.
As Howard Brody, director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities,
has shown, 9,000 Texans per year will die needlessly as a result of our
failure to expand Medicaid. However, because dying patients are often
too sick, exhausted and wracked with pain to protest, UTMB and states
like Texas aren’t forced to reckon with the consequences of their policy
decisions.
Because the very sick and the dying may not be able to speak about
these issues, health-care providers—particularly the providers of the
so-called “safety net”—must do so. It is in our clinics, in the bodies
of our patients, where the consequences get played out.
Erica Fletcher
Much of the medication at St. Vincent’s is donated by doctors whose patients have died.Danielle has schizophrenia, and she’s young, and she
struggles with the medications. When we talk, there are long gaps in
the conversation where, I think, she hears other voices. In one of these
gaps, I notice the sun slanting in where it’s beginning to set beyond
the ship channel. There’s gospel music streaming out over the basketball
court from the speakers mounted on the side of the community center. I
am reminded of what the director of the community center, an Episcopal
minister, believes: Every patient is a miracle. The St. Vincent’s House
motto is “An oasis of hope, expecting miracles.”
Danielle looks up and stares right at me. “Here’s what I want to know,” she says. “Why are we so poor?”
St. Vincent’s House, which hosts the free clinic, is a historically
African-American community center in the lowest-income neighborhood on
our island, next to where the housing projects were before they were
condemned. The federal government ordered Galveston to rebuild the
public housing after Hurricane Ike, but the city refused. We elected a
mayor who ran on an explicit anti-public housing platform. Just like the
medical system, the city knows whose lives matter.
Now, dandelions grow in the empty lots left after Ike flooded the
neighborhood. People sit on the ragged, cracking curbs, and run
wheelchairs right down the middle of the street because the sidewalks
tend to end in grassy fields or little precipices.
The community center employs a person to stand in the street and walk
us to our cars after clinic if we want. Who is he protecting us from, I
wonder. Our patients?
Erica Fletcher
Equipment at St. Vincent’s, like this refrigerator, has been donated by UTMB and various doctors or purchased with grant money.In my second year of medical school, I took a
small-group course with a famously terrifying surgeon. He told us his
moral motto: “A physician never takes away hope.”
I never figured out how that motto could guide doctors through a
system where our patients are dying from treatable diseases. Part of my
job, it seems, is precisely that: to sit down with patients and, as
gently as possible, take away hope.
Consider Vanessa and Jimmy. They met in New Orleans when she was 18.
She was working cleaning motels, and he took her on a tour of the
tugboat he was captain of. Vanessa says they came to St. Vincent’s
because the shipyard Jimmy worked for opted out of providing insurance
even for full-time employees like him. They looked for insurance on the
open market, but couldn’t afford it.
The Affordable Care Act is supposed to help families like Vanessa and
Jimmy get insurance. Folks higher on the income scale should now be
able to afford insurance thanks to government subsidies. The poorest of
the (legally documented) poor should be covered by Medicaid. And for
those people in between, the federal government offered to pay for
almost all the costs of expanding Medicaid.
More than a million Texans—and most St. Vincent’s patients—are
somewhere in between. They are the working poor, or they are adults
without dependent children, who cannot qualify for Medicaid in Texas, no
matter how poor they are.
When Jimmy’s labs showed a dangerously high white blood cell count,
we sent him to the ER. It was pneumonia, and there was a huge tumor
underneath. Current guidelines would recommend screening Jimmy for this
kind of cancer every year, but we have neither the equipment nor the
funds to offer screening. So it got caught late.
After Jimmy was diagnosed, I helped Vanessa fill out the paperwork to
request financial assistance for cancer care. She wanted to know how
likely UTMB was to offer her husband assistance he needed.
In addition to only accepting 9 percent of applicants, the charity
care approval process is a dark art, and we never know who will be
accepted. According to the UTMB Charity Care policy,
the institution may consider not only a person’s income and diagnosis,
but also such vague qualities as “the history of the problem.” They also
consider whether the treatment will offer “educational benefit” to
medical students and trainees. Physicians in training have to see a
certain number of each type of case. If the programs are hitting quotas
with funded patients, patients like Jimmy are less likely to be
accepted.
The complexity and vagueness of these policies meant that it was
impossible to tell Vanessa how likely UTMB was to take her husband. We
can guess around a 10 percent chance, but we never really know.
For patients facing cancer, this is not a hopeful answer.
Vanessa called from a hospital in Houston in early
November, distraught, asking me to help her decide whether or not to let
the doctors turn Jimmy’s breathing machine off. She was afraid she
wouldn’t be able to live with herself, no matter which she chose. I gave
her the advice I’d give a friend: that I trusted her love for her
husband and her ability to decide from a place of love. Jimmy died late
that night.
Vanessa’s request for UTMB funding wasn’t approved. She has received a
$17,000 bill from UTMB for the visit when Jimmy went through the ER,
and a $327,000 preliminary bill from the Houston hospital.
If the Affordable Care Act had been in effect last year, they would
have been able to afford insurance, get treatment early and avoid
bankruptcy. I use stories like theirs—cancer stories—when I am
encouraging my patients to check out the insurance exchanges.
But with Jimmy gone and Vanessa unemployed, she now falls into the
Medicaid coverage gap. I don’t know how she will get care, if she ever
needs more than St. Vincent’s can give.
My first patient, the one who died in hospice, might have lived if
his cancer had been treated before it had spread from the kidney. But
without the Medicaid expansion, the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t help
him: As an adult with no dependent children, he wouldn’t qualify for
Medicaid now.
In a better medical system, he’d have had a chance at a more
dignified experience of illness. He wouldn’t have had to wait for hours
in a crowded free clinic, and assume the posture of gratefulness that
charity seems to require. He wouldn’t have had to be treated in part by
an earnest, but unskilled, first-year medical student. He, like so many
Texans, deserved better.
When one of our St. Vincent’s patients gets a bad diagnosis, we start
sending faxes: to UTMB, to MD Anderson, to anywhere that might have
funds to help them. Sometimes it works out, but often it doesn’t.
Sometimes I think of it as “sending faxes into the abyss.” And sometimes
I think of it as the slow, diligent, technical way that I have of
insisting that these lives matter.
Perry calls for compromise within GOP: ‘If you can’t win elections, you can’t govern’
By Jeff Zeleny, Richard Coolidge and Jordyn Phelps
November 12, 2013 7:10 AM
Power Players
The Fine Print
Gov. Rick Perry has a prescription for the GOP: stop fighting and start winning.
In
his first trip back to Iowa since his failed presidential bid in 2012,
the Texas Republican told “The Fine Print” that the tea party and
establishment wings of the Republican Party need to come together in the
interest of winning elections.
“If you can't win elections, you
can't govern,” he said. “Stand up for what you believe in, but at the
end of the day, electing individuals who are going to implement good
economic and social policies in this country is the goal.”
Perry
pointed to the government shutdown as a distraction that contributed to
Republican candidate Ken Cuccinelli losing the Virginia governor’s race
last week.
“In hindsight, I would have a whole lot rather the
candidate in Virginia been able to talk about Obamacare and the impact
of that rather than the government shutdown,” Perry said. “It would have
been wiser for us to have laid the wood to the president, so to speak …
let it become an issue of ‘Mr. President, you own this.’”
Perry
said President Obama “knowingly perpetrated a fraud on the American
people” in promising that people would be able to keep their current
health insurance if they liked it.
Millions of people have
recently learned that their insurance is being cancelled because their
policy doesn’t meet the standards set by the new law. And while the
president has apologized for the broken promise, Perry said it’s not
“even close enough.”
Still, Perry doesn’t think the Affordable Care Act should be completely thrown out.
“There
are probably parts of the law that were wise and smart,” he said.
“That's the reason it needs to be opened back up. You know, work with
the parts of it that make sense.”
When it comes to winning the
White House in 2016, Perry voiced skepticism that Gov. Chris Christie’s
broad appeal in New Jersey will translate into votes nationwide.
“Is
a conservative in New Jersey a conservative in the rest of the
country?” he said. “I'm just saying that we'll have that discussion at
the appropriate time.”
As for his own plans in 2016, Perry said he’s keeping the door open for a possible run.
“It’s
an option up there,” he said. “I'm the governor of Texas until January
of 2015. After that time, we'll make a decision about what the future
holds for us.”
For more of the interview with Perry, including
whether he thinks Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis has a shot at
filling his seat as governor, check out this episode of “The Fine
Print.”
ABC News’ Alexandra Dukakis and Gary Westphalen contributed to this episode.
Larry Falk, Jay Enyart, Richard Bowring and John Hansen assisted in production.
The voters in the state of Texas would prefer Louie
Gohmert, the lowest watt bulb in what is an admittedly dim chandelier,
to Julian Castro, one of the best young candidates the Democratic party
in that state has to offer. And they would do so by nine fking points. A
full nine percent more of them would vote for a man who thinks people
are sneaking into the country to have babies for the purposes of having
them grow up to be terrorists, who thinks pipelines are good because
caribou like to hump next to them, who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood has
infiltrated the White House, who thinks the Aurora theater shooting was
God’s angry vengeance for the absence of prayer in the schools, and who
nominated Allen West for Speaker of the House after West already had
lost for re-election. This isn’t sending your government off the rails.
It’s sending it over a cliff, lighting it on fire on the way down, and
feeding the flaming embers to great white sharks with asbestos mouths.
This isn’t gee-I-hope-he-wins-the-primary because that would be good for
the Democrats. Right now, he would win the damn election.
Louie Gohmert.
By nine points.
Holy mother of god.
I realize it’s bad form to crib a substantial portion of a post from
another source, but this is so fantastic that I want to do my small part
to make sure it’s seen by every single person who follows politics
online.
Coincidentally, the Huffington Post published a fun little piece yesterday called “10 Things We’d Lose If Texas Actually Seceded”
and, if you need the short version, the answer is nothing. We’d lose
absolutely nothing. Those ten things add up to exactly zero. About a
year ago, I expressed this same sentiment in an open letter here at Banter.
Bottom line: Please, Texas, make good on all those threats and get
the fuck out already. You won’t be missed. We can even set up some kind
of refugee program to get the few smart ones out.
Politico reported
Tuesday evening that Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) administration is in
negotiations with the Obama White House to accept about $100 million in
federal money to implement an Obamacare Medicaid program to help elderly
and disabled Americans.
Perry has been a heated opponent of the health law. He refused to
accept $100 billion in federal funding to expand Texas’ Medicaid program
under Obamacare, which could have helped 1.5 million poor Texans
afford basic health benefits. As recently as April, Perry essentially
called the expansion a joke. “Seems to me April Fool’s Day is the
perfect day to discuss something as foolish as Medicaid expansion, and
to remind everyone that Texas will not be held hostage by the Obama
administration’s attempt to force us into the fool’s errand of adding
more than a million Texans to a broken system,” said Perry.
Now, Perry is seeking federal dollars for Texas’ Medicaid program anyway.
The Affordable Care Act grants state funding to expand a program
called Community First Choice, which aims to improve the community-based
medical services available to disabled and elderly Americans. The
wildly popular program is administered through Medicaid and could
prevent thousands of disabled and older Americans from being uprooted
from their homes and into a long-term care facility for their
treatments. Approximately 12,000 Texans could take advantage of it in the first year alone.
Perry spokespeople emphasized
to Politico that the governor’s support for the program — and the
Medicaid funds that make it possible — shouldn’t come as a surprise and
doesn’t change his position on the Affordable Care Act.
“Long before Obamacare was forced on the American people, Texas was
implementing policies to provide those with intellectual disabilities
more community options to enable them to live more independent lives, at
a lower cost to taxpayers,” said the spokesperson in a statement. “The
Texas Health and Human Services Commission will continue to move forward
with these policies because they are right for our citizens and our
state, regardless of whatever funding schemes may be found in
Obamacare.”
Advocates for the poor and disabled who support expanding Community
First Choice under Obamacare were apprehensive to even talk about the
program’s relation to the health law out of fear that Texas officials
would back out of their funding bid over political considerations.
“[I]t would be worse than a shame if Texas’s moving ahead with
[Community First Choice and Balancing Incentive Program] policies — both
are from the ACA — was hurt as the result of scrutiny from a press
inquiry,” one Texas advocate told Politico.
And that's not the only whopper students are
being taught as history in some Texas charter schools
By Jonny Scaramanga Friday, Oct 25, 2013 04:45 AM -0700 When Joshua Bass, an engineer, sent his son to iSchool High, a
Houston charter school, he was expecting a solid college preparation,
including the chance to study some college courses before leaving high
school. Instead, the Basses were shocked when their son came home from
the taxpayer-funded school with apparently religiously motivated
anti-science books.
One of these books blamed Darwin’s theory of evolution for the Holocaust:
[Hitler]
has written that the Aryan (German) race would be the leader in all
human progress. To accomplish that goal, all “lower races” should either
be enslaved or eliminated. Apparently the theory of evolution and its
“survival of the fittest” philosophy had taken root in Hitler’s warped
mind.
For Joshua, attacks on science in the classroom
were unacceptable. Joshua began to research ResponsiveEd, the
curriculum used at iSchool High. It emerged that ResponsiveEd was
founded by Donald R. Howard, former owner of ACE (Accelerated Christian
Education). ACE is a fundamentalist curriculum that teaches young-Earth
creationism as fact. Last year it hit headlines because
one of its high school science books taught that the Loch Ness Monster
was real, and that this was evidence against evolution.
ResponsiveEd
is the latest in a long line of concerns raised over the religious
affiliations of charter schools. Civil libertarians have raised concerns over Jewish schools converting to charter status. In 2010, more than 20 percent of Texas charter schools reportedly had a religious affiliation. And ResponsiveEd aims to expand further.
After Howard left ACE in the 1990s, he founded Eagle Project charter schools, which became
Responsive Education Solutions, or ResponsiveEd, in 2007. ACE’s selling
point was that it integrated Bible lessons into every academic subject.
ResponsiveEd planned to do the same, but without the explicitly
religious basis. Howard told the Wall Street Journal in 1998: “Take the
Ten Commandments – you can rework those as a success principle by
rewording them. We will call it truth, we will call it principles, we
will call it values. We will not call it religion.” But in Joshua Bass’
mind, at iSchool High, his son was taught religion in class.
Charter
schools receive public funding but operate privately. While promoting
creationist science is deemed unconstitutional in public schools,
ResponsiveEd charter schools appear able to challenge mainstream science
in the classroom.
ResponsiveEd says it
has 60 schools in Texas, with an extended charter to open 20 more by
2014. It also has facilities in Arkansas, and plans to open in Indiana.
Amazingly, it isn’t the only charter school curriculum based on
Accelerated Christian Education’s format.
Paradigm Accelerated
Curriculum (PAC) was founded by former ACE vice president Ronald E.
Johnson. Where ACE is an “individualized, accelerated” curriculum based
on the “five laws of learning,” PAC is an “accelerated individualized”
curriculum based on the “six principles of learning.” Like ACE and
ResponsiveEd, it questions the theory of evolution and presents the “catastrophist theory”
of Noah’s Ark as a credible rival explanation. Like ResponsiveEd, PAC
teaches that the theory of evolution influenced Hitler to create the
Third Reich. It also relies on the traditional creationist argument of “gaps” in the fossil record:
Darwinism
claims that humans gradually and mysteriously evolved from non-living
materials. Some critics humorously claim that evolution proposes a
philosophy of “from goo to you by way of the zoo.” […]
Evolutionists
insist that their theory must be right and that missing fossil evidence
is merely the result of a flawed fossil record; the catastrophists
insist that evolutionists have not exercised the scientific method of
discovery and therefore have little real scientific evidence to prove
their theory.
In another chapter, the PAC science materials use examples in history where science has been wrong – geocentrism, phlogiston,
an obsolete theory that attempted to explain burning processes, and
ancient Egyptian superstitions (such as using fly excreta to treat
tumors) – to undermine the authority of science in general:
Many
other historical blunders of science could be mentioned. What we need
to keep in mind is that scientists are human beings. The assumption that
they are completely objective, error-free, impartial, “cold machines”
dressed in white coats is, of course, absurd. Like everyone else,
scientists are influenced by prejudice and preconceived ideas. You
should also remember that just because most people believe a particular
thing does not necessarily make it true.
This passage
has a striking resemblance to John Hudson Tiner’s “When Science Fails,”
an Accelerated Christian Education literature book that uses just such
examples to undermine science and cast doubt on the theory of evolution.
ResponsiveEd’s teaching on evolution promises that students will, among other things:
Explain the difference between microevolution and macroevolution.
Describe the theories concerning the origins of life.
Discuss theories of human development.
Express opinions regarding evolutionary theory in general and human evolution in particular.
Describe controversies regarding evolution.
To
explain: Microevolution and macroevolution are frequently used as a
false dichotomy by creationists, who say they accept the former and
reject the latter. Biologists say that the two terms refer to identical
processes over different time scales, so there is fundamentally no
difference. The references to “theories” of origins of life and of human
development implies that rival theories will be discussed. Since
mainstream science has no rival to evolution, this is presumably a
reference to creationism or intelligent design.
The
connection to ACE gave Joshua Bass further cause for concern. Much of
the criticism of ACE over the years has been for its educational
techniques as much as for its doctrinal emphasis. Harry Brighouse,
professor of philosophy and affiliate professor of educational policy
studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison, called it “a crude curriculum … very much based on rote learning,” and described ACE’s
social studies as “a kind of Christian version of the Stalinist
approach to history but without the intellectual subtlety.”
David Prideaux and Cathy Speck of Flinders University, Australia, said ACE
students were “in a situation of conceptual and cognitive
disadvantage.” The harshest criticism came from a 1987 article in the
Phi Delta Kappan that stated:
If parents want their
children to obtain a very limited and sometimes inaccurate view of the
world – one that ignores thinking above the level of rote recall – then
the ACE materials do the job very well. The world of the ACE materials
is quite a different one from that of scholarship and critical thinking.
The
criticism did not only come from secular sources. Educators at the
fundamentalist Bob Jones University also criticized ACE’s academics,
says historian Adam Laats,
“According to BJU writers, the ACE and A Beka curricula failed to
adequately educate their students academically or spiritually by
neglecting … higher-order thinking skills.”
For Joshua Bass, the
decision was simple: he removed his son from iSchool High after just
four weeks. For citizens in Texas, however, the concern remains that
public funds are being channeled to schools that teach religiously
motivated lessons.
Katie Singh
Governor Rick Perry has always been one of the Affordable Care Act's most vocal opponents. He's called it a "monstrosity," a "stomach punch to the economy," and a "felony." But that hasn't stopped him from telling Texans to sign up for health coverage from the law.
About Allen Clifton
