Texas Gov. Rick Perry to be Investigated for Abusing the Powers of His Office, Bribery and Coercion

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.

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Rick Perry Is Quietly Encouraging Texans to Sign Up for Obamacare

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.

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Ted Cruz Quite Possibly Just Made His Most Ridiculous Statement — Ever

November 26, 2013

By Allen Clifton


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.

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Ted Cruz’s Aggressive Campaigning Could Hurt Him With Crucial Iowa Voters

By Ben Jacobs

November 25th 20135:45 am

followMore Stories by Ben Jacobs

After leading the shutdown and making headlines for months, the senator is aggressively campaigning in Iowa. But will voters burn out on him before the crucial caucus vote?

Eventually, even the most gleeful child learns that there is such a thing as too much ice cream when the carton is empty and all that’s left is the toothache. Might conservative Iowa Republicans, a demographic that plays an outsize role in the presidential nominating process, ever feel the same way about Ted Cruz?
The Texas senator has been in office for less than a year and has already become a national figure and a frontrunner not just in the 2016 Iowa caucuses but eventually to receive the GOP nomination as well. Indeed, according to prominent Iowa conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats, Cruz would win the Iowa caucuses “going away” if they were held today. His problem is that they still are two years away, plenty of time for even those conservatives most excited by Cruz to tire of the Texas senator.
Cruz’s 21-hour anti-Obamacare speech on the Senate floor on the eve of October’s government shutdown established him as a national figure, but his star had been rising before that. It was Cruz’s performance in the 2012 Texas Senate primary, when he won as an underdog Tea Party candidate, that gained him prominence in the Republican Party. Cruz combined Hispanic heritage (his father was born in Cuba) with unimpeachable conservative credentials and a sterling legal record as Texas’s solicitor general, arguing nine cases before the Supreme Court and drawing comparisons to a fellow Harvard Law graduate, Barack Obama.

Campaigning aggressively at this stage in the election cycle would expose any political weaknesses far earlier than they might otherwise.

The Obama comparisons ended once Cruz took office. As a junior senator, Cruz has aggressively courted national media coverage to promote his causes, a strategy counter to the one President Obama used when he first entered Congress. According to Tommy Vietor, a former Obama Senate press aide who later worked for Obama both on his 2008 campaign and in the White House, the then-Illinois senator “basically declined every national press interview for nine months once he took office.” It was the same approach taken by Hillary Clinton when she was elected in 2000: “Keep your head down, focus on your work, and don’t look like you’re a show horse.”
In Vietor’s opinion, “when you’re an elected official and out doing every possible interview and on cable news, it diminishes you and makes people wonder why you aren’t spending more time doing your actual job.” As senator, Obama also took pains to avoid the appearance of even considering a presidential campaign and only visited Iowa twice before beginning his presidential campaign, both times while campaigning for fellow Democrats in the runup to the 2006 midterm elections.
By contrast, some grassroots Iowa Republicans say Cruz has hit just the right notes. Jamie Johnson, a member of the Republican Party of Iowa’s state central committee, said Cruz’s approach to the Hawkeye State has been “just right.” He noted that the Texas senator has made three trips to Iowa, each for a high-profile event, and that he likely won’t be back in the Midwest until next spring. Craig Robinson, a former party operative and editor of the Iowa Republican, voiced a bit more skepticism. While he acknowledged that Cruz has been in the state “a lot,” his criticism is not so much that the Texas senator is spending too much time in Iowa but that he has been concentrating on the wrong parts of the state. Cruz has been “been Des Moines-focused,” Robinson said. “It would be a bigger deal to me if he went to Dubuque or Davenport. That would be more interesting, rather than repeating” his trips to metro Des Moines.

As a presidential hopeful on the right of the Republican Party, Cruz has far more reason to visit Iowa in an effort to attract publicity than most of his potential competitors. After all, the past two winners of the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008, might run in 2016, along with a number of other conservatives with strong links to the state, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) or Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), another former presidential candidate. Cruz is appealing to a specific slice of Iowa caucusgoers, committed conservatives who are far more familiar with his competitors. As one observer pointed out, he has “more ground to make up.”
The risk for Cruz with Iowa voters is that campaigning aggressively at this stage in the election cycle would expose any political weaknesses far earlier than they might be otherwise. Doug Gross, who was the Republican nominee for governor in 2002 and is associated with the pro-business, establishment wing of the GOP, said the Texas senator is exposing his “feet of clay.” Gross said he thought Cruz performed poorly on his most recent visit to the state in October, when he spoke at the Republican Party of Iowa’s Ronald Reagan dinner in Des Moines. In Gross’s opinion, Cruz gave “a 45-minute self-indulgent rant” that hurt him with Iowa Republicans and “was better suited for D.C.” than a friendly part of the Midwest, where “neighbors know neighbors.”
Of course, as Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier emphasized, his speaking schedule isn’t just about Iowa. “The senator accepts event invitations and schedules interviews that offer the best platform for him to share his priorities and make the argument for the policies he is pursuing in the interests of the Texans he represents,” she said. She noted that Cruz’s camp was “mindful” of the risk of overexposure but still “pleased that his message has been able to resonate largely through the work he has done in his role as a senator—in committee hearings, statements on the floor, etc. Of course, media interviews are a part of getting that message out, too.”
The problem for most politicians is that they are never “new” for long. They all eventually become known quantities. While Vietor pointed out that Cruz has “completely diluted his sort of freshness factor and everything he says is completely predictable,” that’s the case with almost every public figure who has stuck around in politics. The Texas senator was always going to lose his initial bloom after the wave of publicity surrounding his 21-hour speech and his leadership role during the government shutdown. The question now is whether Cruz and his team can deliver a message that resonates and maintain an appeal with Hawkeye State voters who no longer see him as the exciting new guy.

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Embarrassing New Poll Shows Practically Nobody in Texas Wants Rick Perry as President

November 19, 2013 By Allen Clifton



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.

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Nine Crazy Tea Party Incidents: Special Texas Edition

Nine Crazy Tea Party Incidents: Special Texas Edition

By Maeby Gever on November 15, 2013


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.”

The Jews For Jesus website says that:

Direct Jewish Evangelism is our priority.

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.

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Texas’ Other Death Penalty

A Galveston medical student describes life and death in the so-called safety net.

by Rachel Pearson Published on Wednesday, November 13, 2013, at 2:01 CST

 

 

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.

Tags: Affordable Care Act, EMTALA, Galveston, medicaid, Obamacare, Rick Perry, St. Vincent's, Ted Cruz, University of Texas Medical Branch, UTMB

Rachel Pearson is an MD/PhD student at the Institute for the Medical Humanities and the University of Texas Medical Branch.

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Sen. John Cornyn Promotes ‘Scary’ Ad Showing An Evil Obama, Pelosi

By Tiffany Willis on November 12, 2013

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

About the Author:
Tiffany Willis (89 Articles)I'm the founder of Liberal America. An unapologetic member of the Christian Left, I have spent most of my career actively working with “the least of these” and disadvantaged and oppressed populations. I’m passionate about their struggles. To stay on top of topics I discuss, subscribe to my public updates on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, or connect with me via LinkedIn. I also have a grossly neglected personal blog and a literary quotes blog that is a labor of love. Find me somewhere and let’s discuss stuff.

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GOP Conspiracy to Commit Rape

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What Young Republicans need to learn about JFK & Obama Hate

by Claire Conner

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 Dallas Morning 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.”

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"Wendy Davis Redefines ‘Pro-Life,’ Enrages Anti-Choicers"

"Wendy Davis Redefines ‘Pro-Life,’ Enrages Anti-Choicers"

by variiFollow

 

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.

Also republished by Turning Texas: Election Digest, Kitchen Table Kibitzing, Abortion, and Pro Choice.

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The Mess That’s Texas

Quote of the Day: The Mess That’s Texas

By Chez Pazienza · November 06,2013

From Charlie Pierce’s “What’s the Matter with Texas?” post over at Esquire today:

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.

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Rick Perry Quietly Lobbies The White House For $100 Million In Obamacare Funding

By Sy Mukherjee on August 21, 2013 at 10:58 am

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX)

CREDIT: AP Images

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.

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'One Senator From Texas': Obama Calls Out Cruz, But Not By Name

AP Photo / Evan Vucci 

 

Tom Kludt – November 7, 2013, 6:18 AM EST5519

 

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.

 

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Republicans even stupider than imagined, disenfranchise own voters

Republicans even stupider than imagined, disenfranchise own voters

by kosFollow

 

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.

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Texas Voter ID Law Ensnares Former Speaker of the House, Candidates for Governor, State Judge

November 4, 2013

by Ari Berman

 

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.

 

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Texas' Restrictive Voter ID Law Stops A Former U.S. House Speaker From Getting A Voter ID Card

The Huffington Post  |  By Ashley Alman Posted: 11/03/2013 10:06 pm EST  |  Updated: 11/04/2013 10:30 am EST

Watch here:
Former U.S. Speaker of the House Jim Wright (D-Texas) tried to get a voter identification card at a Texas Department of Public Safety office on Saturday.
But the only photo identification cards Wright has -- an expired Texas driver's license and a Texas Christian University faculty identification card -- do not satisfy the requirements of the state's restrictive vote identification law, passed in 2011. Wright is 90 years old.
“I earnestly hope these unduly stringent requirements on voters won’t dramatically reduce the number of people who vote,” Wright told the Star-Telegram on Saturday. “I think they will reduce the number to some extent.”
According to the Star-Telegram, Wright will return to the office Monday to get a Texas personal identification card with a certified copy of his birth certificate.
If Wright successfully obtains a personal ID card on Monday, he will be able to vote on Tuesday. But his assistant, Norma Ritchson, is worried other elderly citizens will face obstacles when trying to vote.
“I’ve been thinking about the people who are in retirement homes,” Ritchson said. “I’ve read that this is the lowest early voter turnout in a long time and I wonder if this [ID requirement] is the cause. We’ve tried so hard to make voting easy, and now the Texas Legislature has made it harder by making you have a photo ID.”
State Sen. Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth) also ran into problems when attempting to cast an early vote last week. She is identified as Wendy Russell Davis on her driver's license, but listed as Wendy Davis in voter registration rolls. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate had to sign an affidavit of her identity to cast her vote.
And Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, Davis' potential Republican challenger, had to sign an affidavit due to a similar issue. Abbott is identified as Gregory Wayne Abbott on his driver's license, but only Greg Abbott in his voter registration file. Abbott has defended the voter ID law in court.
CORRECTION: Former House Speaker Jim Wright was incorrectly referred to as a Republican. He is a member of the Democratic party.

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How Ted Cruz's Father Shaped His Views On Immigration

by

June 20, 2013 3:01 AM

 http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/06/20/193585553/how-ted-cruzs-father-shaped-his-views-on-immigration

 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.

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