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.
It’s
no secret that I absolutely cannot stand Texas Senator Ted Cruz. I
still go back and forth between him and Sarah Palin when trying to
figure out who I loathe more. Currently the edge goes to Cruz simply
because he’s actually a senator, whereas Sarah Palin is nothing more
than a failed vice presidential candidate and the Alaska governor who
quit before her first term was up.
That being said, it’s not difficult at all to find ample quotes from Ted Cruz that are completely absurd.
But while there are plenty of quotes proving Ted Cruz is an idiot,
the context of his recent comments about Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid using the “nuclear option” to change the rules of the Senate might
just be his most ridiculous ever. During an exchange with Bloomberg News’ Al Hunt, Hunt asked Cruz about the change in the rules made by Senator Reid:
Hunt: Will it complicate passing budgets or debt ceilings or anything? Cruz: Of course it will. I mean, it will poison the atmosphere of the Senate.
Yes, that’s Ted Cruz accusing Harry Reid and Democrats of
poisoning the atmosphere of the Senate. The guy who many within his own
party can’t stand. The man who staged a fake 21-hour filibuster where
he tried to compare “Obamacare” to Darth Vader and misconstrued the
meaning of Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor. The same Senator who
worked tirelessly behind the scenes to force a government shutdown,
knowing that it stood absolutely zero chance at accomplishing his
ridiculous “goal.”
The same Senator Cruz who, in his very brief time in the United
States Senate, has done absolutely nothing except use his position as
senator to set himself up for a 2016 presidential bid – at the cost of the taxpayers, of course.
Ted Cruz epitomizes “poison” in the Senate. It’s clear to anyone
with any kind of common sense that Cruz only ran for the Senate because
he had presidential ambitions for 2016 and needed a way to get his name
known to voters. And since his election he’s taken up the strategy that
the only thing he’ll do is pander to the tea party, hoping that if he
builds enough support with far-right Republicans, he’ll set himself up
to claim the GOP nomination in 2016.
But like I said, you don’t have to believe me – many within his own party can’t even stand him.
Look at how quickly many leading Republicans emphatically denounced
the idea of shutting down the government again once another vote on the
budget will have to be held in a couple of months.
So while what he said wasn’t the most asinine thing he’s ever said,
the context behind what he expressed might just be the most ridiculous
thing I’ve ever heard him say.
Of all people, for Ted Cruz to accuse anyone of introducing
poisonous behavior in the Senate could be a definition for hypocrisy.
And while this just might rank at the top of my list for ridiculous
comments from the Texas senator, I’m sure it won’t be long before he
says something else outrageous to trump its stupidity.
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.
Veteran’s Day week has seen a flurry of over the top Teabully
happenings down in the Lone Star State of Texas. If you are a Teabully
fan who loves guns and Gods but not the Gays, Texas just might be the
place for you. So here we go with our special edition of crazy Teabully
stuff, Texas style.
1) LiberalAmerica.org covered the incident in Texas when
a group of armed men descended upon a Dallas restaurant to use the
threat of their weapons to quell the First Amendment rights of four
women in the group “Moms Demand Action,” who were meeting over
lunch. Texans can “open carry” their legally registered long guns. The
Texas Legislature has determined that these include semi automatic rifles, the same kind of weapon used by Adam Lanza to kill little children in Newtown, CT, last year, and also used by the Aurora, CO, movie theater maniac, James Holmes. These are the kind of weapons that the “good guys with the guns” are free to take with them wherever they go in Texas.
And if you do travel to Texas, you can take comfort in the great work being performed by OpenCarryTexas.org,
there to extend the freedom of gun lovers who believe that the Second
Amendment trumps all others. This group is working hard to help gun
enthusiasts repress the First Amendment rights of moms to assemble in a
public restaurant, while making sure that lunatics everywhere can obtain
guns legally then use those guns to shoot school children and
moviegoers in the face. OpenCarryTexas.org can even direct you to Texas
restaurants allowing customers to come on in with their guns. They even
have a warm an fuzzy Facebook page.
2) Now we all know how much many Texans love their guns and how many Texans also don’t care much for President Obama. Threats against the President
rose 400% beginning the day this particular President was inaugurated
in 2009. The Daily Kos has reported that President Obama is the most threatened President ever.
We will soon be commemorating the 50th anniversary of the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy that took place in Dallas,
Texas on November 22, 1963. It was announced in early November that
President Obama would travel to Dallas to
promote the ACA. Perhaps, in memory of the Kennedy assassination, the
Facebook page of Gun Rights Across America Texas, had comments posted on
it giving the exact address for the appearance by President Obama and
suggesting that the President would get the Same Texas welcome as JFK.”
3) Republican Gregg Abbott is the current Texas Attorney General and
he is running for Governor to replace the ever entertaining, Rick “Oops”
Perry. Democratic Texas State Senator, Wendy Davis, is running against
General Abbott.
You just never know what you might find on the Abbott for Governor Facebook Page. General Abbott must be a Teabully because he obviously loves that “Don’t Tread On Me” flag which has been incorporated into his campaign bumper sticker available to anyone for a mere $20.14 donation.
General Abbott has had issues with his followers on Facebook and Twitter. Some of his followers have posted death threats against
Senator Wendy Davis . And it is reported that General Abbott thanked a
supporter on Tweeter who had referred to Senator Davis as “Retard Barbie.”
But that seems to be typical of the kind of behavior coming from many
in the Teabully base of followers who use threats of violence, name
calling, and intimidation as substitutes for more civilized methods of
persuasion.
4) LiberalAmerica.org has been front and center bringing the public the latest in crazy that comes from the mind of Evangelical Pastor Rafael Cruz, the
father of Teabully favorite, Republican Senator Ted Cruz of
Texas. Never at a loss for words, Pastor Cruz misstates his credentials
as a mathematician conflating that with a Scientist making him able to
conclude that there is no scientific evidence for the theory of
evolution. Pastor Cruz rewrites his own history of having fought on the
side of Fidel Castro and the Communists as a younger man in Cuba,
allowing him to hypocritically and wrongfully attack the President as a
Communist or Socialist, as if those term are interchangeable.
Perhaps Pastor Cruz needs the refresher course on “Ism’s” that is available as a free download here on LiberalAmerica.org.
5) A list of crazy Texas Tea Party stuff could easily be limited to
Rafael Cruz. So let’s just go through just a sampling of some more of
the good Pastor’s recent off the reservation pronouncements:
Did you know that it is made clear to all through the Bible in Genesis that God is pro death penalty? So saith the Cruz.
Rafael Cruz also says that Black people are uninformed and deceived. Way to convince African Americans to come join the Republican Party dude.
6) This Rafael Cruz pronouncement deserves to be out on it’s own.
Earlier this month Pastor Cruz addressed a gun rights advocacy group in
neighboring Oklahoma where he explained how Atheism:
“Leads us to sexual immorality, leads us to sexual abuse, leads us to perversion.”
I wonder how Pastor Cruz feels about some very well known self
described devout Christians such the Reverend Ted Haggard, the Reverend
Jimmy Swaggart, Republican Senator David Vitter from Louisiana, and
former Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho? What is that saying
about throwing stones when you live in a glass house?
7) Speaking of sex and Texas, here is something from the Canyon Independent School District in Canyon, Texas.
Starting in middle school, and with the permission of parents,
teachers will be giving students sex education instruction that will
include telling the children that virginity means ”not having
participated in any sexual activity of any kind,” and comparing
remaining a virgin to a new toothbrush or stick of gum, which should
stay Wrapped up and unused.”
Of course Texas schools also teach abstinence only and Texas has one
of the highest rates of teen pregnancies. When it comes to repressing
the sexual desires of their kids, to paraphrase Charlie Sheen, Texas is
winning!
8) Justice Antonin Scalia, probably the most Conservative and
Teabully like Justice on the current Conservative dominated Supreme
Court of the United States, says that if he weren’t a Virginian, he’d probably be a Texan.”
And Republican Governor Rick “Oops” Perry told an adoring audience that Justice Scalia would “fit right in.”
Now Justice Scalia has rarely been known to take a position that
didn’t rile up Liberals and Progressives while at the same time bringing
a smile as big as Texas to a Teabully face. But perhaps Justice Scalia
is tipping his hand that he might soon be leaving the bench and
retiring in Texas where he can join a posse or speak openly at a Koch brothers conference, without
having to worry about pesky rules of ethical judicial conduct? Let’s
all agree to chip in for his bus ticket out of town.
9) President George W. Bush has mystified many by his attendance at a Messianic Jewish Bible Institute fundraiser in
Irving, Texas. Now I am not bashing anyone’s religion and I firmly
believe that people have the right to practice or not practice any
religion they like, so long as they follow the Constitution and keep it
out of Government and public law. But this move by President Bush gets
him the final shout out on this special,Texas style list, of Teabully
crazy.
Just because the word “Jewish” is in the name, that does not mean
that the organization is Jewish. This particular “Jews For Jesus”
group, is not promoted by any real Jews. These “Jews for Jesus” groups
are actually in the business of promoting the end of Judaism, the coming of the Rapture, and
the end of earthly existence as we know it. Dedicated to saving the
Jewish people by converting them or letting them suffer eternal
damnation once Jesus returns to take the true believers to an etherial
plane of existence, these faith based groups proliferate in Texas.
The Messianic Jewish Bible Institute has a vision statement on the website which is to:
Bring Jewish people into a personal relationship of faith
with Yeshua the Messiah, knowing their acceptance will eventually mean life from the dead.”
These groups are in the business of convincing Jews that the Messiah,
in the form of Jesus Christ, has already come. And that is contrary to
the Jewish belief that the Messiah has not yet come. Further, when the
Messiah does come, there will not be the end of days, just eternal peace on earth.
The problem with President Bush’s appearance at this fundraiser is
that this group is in the business of fostering public support against
making peace with Iran while encouraging an attack by Israel, with or
without the United States, which might then bring on the end of the
world war. The problem is also that many in the American Jewish
community, which for years had been duped into believing that President
George Bush was a friend of the Jewish People, just might support the
end of the Jewish People and the world as we know it.
President George W. Bush is no longer in office and he is no longer
in a position to do further harm to the United Sates or to the world.
But the questions remain, did President Bush and the advisors around him
believe in the end of days when in office, and were their actions in
taking us to war in Iraq on false pretenses in part based on the desire
accelerate the coming of the end of days?
The founding fathers were smart for insisting that there be a
separation of Church and State. We, the voting public, need to be as
smart as those people were so long ago and make sure that we keep
theology out of our Government and in the private sector where it
belongs.
Edited/Published by: SB
About the Author: Maeby Gever (34 Articles)I
am the voice of my human parents. Dad, 58, mom 56, both retired
lawyers. Dad worked privately as a personal injury lawyer in the
Philadelphia, PA area before retirement. He has a BA in Political
Science, a Masters in Secondary Social Studies Education and he did some
public school teaching before retiring again. Mom also has a BA in
Political Science and she spent her entire 33 year career working as an
attorney for a US Defense Department Agency located in Philadelphia, PA.
She spent the last four years of her career as the Chief Counsel. She
retired in April of this year. I have two human brothers, both Graduates
of the George Washington University. My older human brother is working
his way up in Airport Management at the Philadelphia International
Airport. My younger human brother is a Peace Corps veteran.
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.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) thinks he’s found the solution to keeping
Texas a red state. His “Keep Texas Red” campaign has produced a
disturbing photo of President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi,
and Attorney General Eric Holder.
In the image, pictured above, the powerful Democratic trio appears to
be evil and sadistic, with the president holding his hands out in a
menacing manner over the state of Texas. The image is made more dramatic
with light and dark contrasts.
The ad asks Texas Republicans to “fight back.” By donating, of
course. The goal of the ad — and of the Keep Texas Red campaign — is to
help state Republicans who are seeking re-election. Guess what? Cornyn
has a Democratic challenger — meet Maxey Scherr.
h/t CBS DFW
On Wednesday, November 16, 2011, Lauren
Pierce, the president of the College Republicans at the University of
Texas, Austin tweeted a little “joke.”
“Y’all as tempting as it may be, don’t shoot Obama. We need him to go down in history as the WORST president we’ve EVER had!”
I recoiled in horror at her words. This young woman with her Texas y’all and her Texas ha-ha
is too young to remember November 1963, and all that led to that
terrible day. And, it seems, she is too invested in hating President
Obama to even care.
If I could, I’d drag her back in time to Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963.
Lauren could stand next to me and wave as the presidential motorcade
makes its way down Main Street toward Dealey Plaza. She could step off
the curb onto the face of John Kennedy on a “Wanted for Treason”
poster, and worry with me that my father might have written it. She
could read the somber reflections and the black-wrapped editorials in
the Dallas papers the next day. Lauren could weep with me and my
roommate as little John Kennedy honors his father with a final salute.
She could listen to my father, back home in Chicago, remind me that “the
Communists killed one of their own.”
Maybe, just maybe, Miss Lauren Pierce would take to heart what the DallasMorning News said on November 23, 1963:
“We join the rest
of the nation in expressing heartfelt sympathy and trust that the warped
and distorted who become unstable in their opposition (to Kennedy) will
retreat into the darkness and not emerge until they regain the light of
reasonableness and balance.”
Maybe Lauren would learn something from November 1963 in
Dallas and she’d rethink her tweet. And, maybe just maybe, the rest of
the red-meat, hate-Obama crowd she leads at UT Austin would learn
something, too. The
day before President Kennedy arrived in Dallas thousands of these
handbills labeling Kennedy a traitor appeared in downtown Dallas.
At the time, I was a college freshman at the University of Dallas, a small conservative college just outside Dallas.
My father, Stillwell J. Conner, a John Birch Society National Council
member and Birch spokesperson, had attacked Kennedy as a Communist for
four years. When I saw the poster on the street in Dallas, I worried
that my father and his John Birch friends―friends like Fred Koch,
General Edwin Walker and Robert Welch—had a hand in it.
Months later, the Warren Commission identified the creator of the
poster as Robert Surrey, a right-wing Dallas activist and associate of
Major General Edwin Walker, who lived in Dallas. Despite the
connections outlined in the Warren Commission report, my father never
acknowledged the existence of the handbill or any Birch connection to
it. When I mentioned it, I was told to “stop telling tall tales.”
I found this article on The National Memo about a speech given by Wendy Davis.
Apparently, she dared to give her definition of what it means to be "pro-life":
“I am pro-life,” she told a University of Texas at
Brownsville crowd on Tuesday. “I care about the life of every child:
every child that goes to bed hungry, every child that goes to bed
without a proper education, every child that goes to bed without being
able to be a part of the Texas dream, every woman and man who worry
about their children’s future and their ability to provide for that
future. I care about life and I have a record of fighting for people
above all else.”
“This isn’t about protecting abortion,” Davis explained in the same
appearance. “It’s about protecting women. It’s about trusting women to
make good decisions for themselves and empowering them with the tools to
do that.”
Conseratives are throwing a fit about her definition of "pro-life"! Incredible!
link
Originally posted to varii on Wed Nov 06, 2013 at 02:13 PM PST.
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.
President Barack Obama took some pointed shots at Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-TX) on Wednesday without ever addressing the Texas Republican by
name.
Speaking at a Dallas fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial
Campaign Committee, Obama was on Cruz's turf. As he heaped criticism on
GOP intransigence, Obama said that some Texas lawmakers are among the
worst offenders.
"But we could name for you a whole bunch of Republicans who are good
and decent people who are as frustrated as we are in some ways about
what's happened to their party," Obama said, according to a White House
transcript. "But right now at least, there's a group that -- and a few
of them are from Texas, I've got to admit -- who just aren't willing to
do the hard work and the compromise necessary to move the country
forward."
For that reason, Obama said "it is absolutely critical that we transform Congress."
When he turned his attention to the government shutdown, Obama made another thinly veiled reference to Cruz.
"Now, I’ll give you the second example of what precipitated --
according to at least one senator from Texas -- the necessity for the
shutdown, and that is the Affordable Care Act," Obama said, while
expressing anger "with some IT people in Washington" over
HealthCare.gov's woes.
Texas Republicans are disenfranchising their strongest demographics.
Consider this bit of nonsense in Texas, thanks to the state's new stringent voted ID laws:
Tarrant County [Texas] Elections Administrator Steve Raborn
said Saturday that people who might find themselves in a similar
situation should cast a provisional ballot and obtain identification
needed to “cure” it within six days. […]
Raborn's office reached out to people who might have expired driver licenses, such as those who live in nursing homes, to let them know that the license can be expired by no more than two months to be a valid photo ID for voting. […]
90-year-old Jim Wright, the former speaker of the House, was prevented
from voting because of this requirement, one which disproportionately
affects seniors with lapsed IDs.
Now consider this, from the 2012 presidential national exit polls:
What kind of moron party disenfranchises its most reliable voters? And
not just seniors, who make up a massive proportion of non-presidential
year turnout. Married women too. And guess how married women vote?
attribution: 2012 exit polls
So Republicans, in their zeal to disenfranchise brown and young people,
have created a voter ID law that solves a non-existent problem and
subsequently disenfranchises two of their most important base groups.
We knew the GOP was stupid. This notches it up to a whole new level.
Originally posted to kos on Tue Nov 05, 2013 at 11:25 AM PST.
This weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) responded to the story Mother Jonespublished
last week that revealed inflammatory remarks made by his father, Rafael
Cruz, a Cuban-born, septuagenarian businessman-turned-pastor. Speaking
to the North Texas Tea Party last year on behalf of his son, the elder
Cruz called
President Barack Obama an "outright Marxist" who "seeks to destroy all
concept of God." At that event, Rafael Cruz also urged the crowd to send
Obama "back to Kenya." Or ship him "back to Indonesia," he said. Asked
to comment on his father's remarks, Sen. Cruz's office told us, "These
selective quotes, taken out of context, mischaracterize the substance of
Pastor Cruz's message." It added, "Pastor Cruz does not speak for the
senator." Yet after the story was posted, when a Texas television
station questioned the senator directly about his father's statements,
Ted Cruz dismissed them as a "joke."
He went on to claim the article was the result of "the politics of
personal destruction" and en effort by people "trying to smear [Rafael
Cruz] and use that to attack me."
There's a lot to unpack here. Does Ted Cruz believe it's a joke to
accuse the president of trying to destroy God? Or that his father was
kidding when he suggested Obama is "wicked," asserted that the president
is attempting to "destroy American exceptionalism," said he wants
government to be God, and insisted that "social justice is a cancer"? As
for attacking the son with the father's statements, the senator did not
explain why it's unfair to hold him accountable for remarks made by a
person Cruz's campaign routinely deployed as an official surrogate.
According to campaign disclosure records, Cruz's Senate campaign paid
Rafael Cruz about $10,000 in traveling expenses in 2012 and 2013. And in
August the conservative National Review noted that the father-son duo had forged a "political partnership," reporting: "Cruz
has kept his father, a 74-year-old pastor, involved with his political
shop, using him not merely as a confidant and stand-in, but as a special
envoy. He is Cruz’s preferred introductory speaker, his best messenger
with evangelicals, and his favorite on-air sidekick." Put it this way:
Rafael Cruz is far closer to Ted Cruz and his political endeavors than
Jeremiah Wright was to Obama and his campaigns.
I've asked Ted Cruz's office to explain whether the senator
considered all of Rafael Cruz's harsh utterances about Obama to be jokes
and whether he'd like to comment on Rafael Cruz's role as an official
campaign surrogate. So far, there's been no reply.
There might be a much bigger issue regarding Ted Cruz's response to
the article about his father. In July, the senator, with his father by
his side, accepted the blessings of fundamentalist pastors in Iowa (see
above) who are adherents of Christian Reconstructionism, a view that
holds that God anoints individuals to be "kings" who strive to influence
or control key institutions of society (say, the government) as a
prelude to the second coming of Christ. The blessing
of Ted Cruz contained this line: "Father, we believe that no weapon
formed against [Cruz] will prosper and every tongue that rises up
against him in judgment will be condemned."
This blessing seems to suggest that the pastors believe that those
who criticize Ted Cruz will be condemned by God. This certainly seems in
sync with Rafael Cruz's remarks and his preaching at religious
gatherings of fellow evangelicals. But a serious question is raised:
does Ted Cruz himself see his detractors as being on the wrong side of
God? Can those who raise inconvenient questions about him or his father
expect to receive a mighty smiting from above?
This is no joke. Such a mindset—my detractors are destined for
hell—could certainly affect how Cruz would govern, should he reach the
pinnacle of power. Given that he willingly accepted this blessing, it
would hardly be inappropriate to ask Cruz what he thought of it.
Actually, I did. Along with those queries noted above, I asked his
office whether Senator Cruz believes that his critics will be condemned
by God? No answer yet on that, either. I suppose those who report
unflattering facts about the senator may have to wait until Judgment Day
to see if those Cruz-courted pastors have it right. UPDATE: After this story was posted, Sean Rushton, a
spokesman for Sen. Ted Cruz sent the following response: "Sen. Cruz
loves and supports his father, even though their views and perspectives
are not always the same. The Constitution protects Mr. Corn's right to
embrace whatever faith he chooses—or no faith whatsoever—but, it is
unfortunate that his agenda would call for the public condemnation of
Christian pastors who pray verbatim from the Bible (namely, Isaiah
54:17)."
Former
House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas stands next to the Texas pillar while
touring the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., on July 29,
2005. (AP Photo/Yuri Gripas)
Former Speaker of the House
Jim Wright has voted in every election since 1944 and represented Texas
in Congress for 34 years. But when he went to his local Department of
Public Safety office to obtain the new voter ID required to vote – which
he never needed in any previous election – the 90-year-old Wright was denied. His driver’s license is expired and his Texas Christian University faculty ID is not accepted as a valid form of voter ID.
To be able to vote in Texas, including in Tuesday’s election for statewide constitutional amendments,
Wright’s assistant will have to get a certified copy of his birth
certificate, which costs $22. According to the state of Texas, 600,000
to 800,000 registered voters in Texas don’t have a valid form of
government-issued photo ID. Wright is evidently one of them. But unlike
Wright, most of these voters will not have an assistant or the political
connections of a former speaker of the house to help them obtain a
birth certificate to prove their identify, nor can they necessarily make
two trips to the DMV office or afford a birth certificate.
The
devil is in the details when it comes to voter ID. And the rollout of
the new law in Texas is off to a very bad start. “I earnestly hope these
unduly stringent requirements on voters won’t dramatically reduce the
number of people who vote,” Wright told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “I think they will reduce the number to some extent.”
As I’ve reported previously,
getting the necessary voter ID in Texas, which has one of the strictest
laws in the country, is no walk in the park. As in Wright’s case, you
need to pay for a birth certificate or another type of citizenship
document to obtain one (which Eric Holder called a poll tax).
A handgun permit is an acceptable voter ID in Texas but a university ID
is not. And there are no DMV offices in 81 of 254 counties in Texas.
That’s probably why only 50 of the 600-800,000 registered voters without
voter ID in the state have so far successfully obtained one. (The
Department of Justice has filed suit to block the law, which was invalidated by a federal court last year but reinstated when the Supreme Court invalidated Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. Texas filed a motion last Friday to dismiss the lawsuit.)
Beyond
the hundreds of thousands of voters, like Wright, who don’t have valid
ID, millions more in Texas could be inconvenienced or disenfranchised by
a provision of the law stipulating that a voter’s photo ID be
“substantially similar” to their name in the poll book. In this year’s
elections for statewide constitutional amendments in Texas, a district court judge, a state senator
and both candidates for governor — Wendy Davis and Greg Abbott — had to
sign affidavits to vote because their IDs didn’t match their poll book
names.
In a highly ironic twist, Davis, a critic of the voter ID
law, offered an amendment to allow voters whose IDs were not identical
to their poll names to be able to sign an affidavit to vote, which
allowed her 2014 gubernatorial opponent, Greg Abbott, a top supporter of
voter ID, to cast a ballot this year.
Reported Zack Roth of MSNBC:
In
2011, Davis introduced an amendment to the voter ID bill saying that if
names are substantially similar but not identical, voters can sign an
affidavit and still vote. The original bill as drafted by Republicans
would have required voters in that situation to present a document
showing a name change — something few people bring with them when they
go to vote.
And it gets better — or worse. Greg Abbott, the
front-runner for the GOP nomination for governor, also will have to sign
an affidavit, his campaign said, thanks to a similar names mismatch. Abbott, the state attorney general, has defended the voter ID law in court.
“If
it weren’t for Wendy Davis’ leadership, Greg Abbott might have nearly
disenfranchised himself,” Davis spokesman Bo Delp said.
One in seven voters in Dallas County has had to sign an affidavit in
order to vote this year. That’s over 1,000 voters so far. This
requirement can create a lot of confusion and, at the very least, makes
voting take longer than it should. In a high turnout election, like in
2014 when Davis will face Abbott, Texas could very well resemble Florida
when it comes to long lines and electoral dysfunction. “When you have a
huge turnout, a minute for every voter could really produce some
lines,” Dallas County elections administrator Toni Pippins-Poole told
the Dallas Morning News.
Supporters of voter ID, like Abbott, claim the law is necessary to stop voter fraud, even though there’s been only one voter impersonation conviction in
Texas since 2000. Instead, the law is ensnaring the top political
leaders in the state. And this is only the beginning, unless and until
the federal courts decide to stop it.
Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and an Investigative Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute. His first book, Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics,
was published in October 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. He is now
working on a history of voting rights since 1965. Tweet him @AriBerman.
How Ted Cruz's Father Shaped His Views On Immigration
by
As the Senate debates a massive overhaul of the nation's immigration
laws, one of its newest members has emerged as a leading opponent of the
bill's most controversial feature: a path to citizenship for millions
living in the country unlawfully.
The views of that freshman
senator — Texas Republican Ted Cruz — have been significantly colored by
the saga of his own father, an immigrant from Cuba.
"In my
opinion, if we allow those who are here illegally to be put on a path to
citizenship, that is incredibly unfair to those who follow the rules,"
Cruz has said.
And the example he frequently points to is his father, 74-year-old Rafael Bienvenido Cruz.
"I
came to this country legally," Cruz's father says. "I came here with a
legal visa, and ... every step of the way, I have been here legally."
In
an interview near his home outside Dallas, the elder Cruz says that as a
teenager, he fought alongside Fidel Castro's forces to overthrow Cuba's
U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. He was caught by Batista's
forces, he says, and jailed and beaten before being released. It was
1957, and Cruz decided to get out of Cuba by applying to the University
of Texas. Upon being admitted, he adds, he got a four-year student visa
at the U.S. Consulate in Havana.
"Then the only other thing
that I needed was an exit permit from the Batista government," Cruz
recalls. "A friend of the family, a lawyer friend of my father,
basically bribed a Batista official to stamp my passport with an exit
permit."
The Rafael Cruz that his son Ted portrays is a kind of
Cuban Horatio Alger — arriving in the U.S. with only $100, learning
English on his own and washing dishes seven days a week for 50 cents an
hour.
"Since he liked to eat seven days a week, he worked seven
days a week, and he paid his way through the University of Texas," Ted
Cruz says of his father, "and then ended up getting a job and eventually
going on to start a small business and to work towards the American
dream."
Only he did that in Canada, where Ted was born. His
father went there after having earlier obtained political asylum in the
U.S. when his student visa ran out. He then got a green card, he says,
and married Ted's mother, an American citizen. The two of them moved to
Canada to work in the oil industry.
"I worked in Canada for eight years," Rafael Cruz says. "And while I was in Canada, I became a Canadian citizen."
The
elder Cruz says he renounced his Canadian citizenship when he finally
became a U.S. citizen in 2005 — 48 years after leaving Cuba. Why did he
take so long to do it?
Ted Cruz talks with his father, Rafael, on
the day of the GOP primary election in May 2012 at the campaign's phone
bank in Houston.
Pat Sullivan/AP
"I don't know. I guess laziness, or — I don't know," he says.
Peter
Spiro, a legal expert on U.S. citizenship at Temple University, says
Rafael Cruz followed "sort of a zigzag path to citizenship." Spiro says
Cruz's multicountry odyssey did not follow traditional models for
immigration.
"Ted Cruz himself seems to be an advocate of those
traditional immigration models," Spiro says. "Maybe he should be a
little more tolerant of the nontraditional versions, given his own
father's history."
And yet Ted Cruz wants to change the immigration bill with an amendment removing the path to citizenship.
"The
11 million who are here illegally would be granted legal status once
the border was secured — not before — but after the border was secured,
they would be granted legal status," he says. "And indeed, they would be
eligible for permanent legal residency. But they would not be eligible
for citizenship."
And they would thus be ineligible to vote.
Such immigrants would most likely vote Democratic — and Texas Democratic
Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa says that's the real reason Cruz
opposes a path to citizenship.
"All these specious arguments
that are being made about, 'Whoa, my dad got in here the right way and,
therefore, everybody else should' are just — are bogus and everybody
knows that," Hinojosa says.
Speaking Wednesday with
conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, Ted Cruz said that by promoting
what he called "amnesty" for immigrants in the U.S. illegally, Senate
Democrats are indeed hoping to get a lot more Democratic voters — but
not among immigrants who did things the right way, like his father.
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
