An Open Letter to Christine Flowers

Regarding: "Swallowing My Pride and Standing Up for Life and Voting for Trump"

You claim you, “cannot put Hillary Clinton in a position to shape the Supreme Court,” and offered your apologia by essentially admitting that you’re unable to refrain from bigotry, and unable to accept that women have as much right to their body as the NRA has to its guns.

You lament that everything piled up for you; same sex marriage, individuals becoming what sex they come to accept they are, and the bearded lady peeing next to you in the “Ladies’ Room.”

The straw that broke your backtrack on voting for Donald Trump was the Supreme Court overturning Texas’s HB2, “Close the Clinics” abortion law. HB2 was a blatant attempt to shutdown access to abortion and it succeeded. In the two years the law has been in effect, abortion clinics have gone from 41 to some 18 operating clinics. If SCOTUS had let the law stand, it is likely that only 9 or even fewer clinics would be available to Texas’s roughly 5 million reproductive age women.

 HB2 has resulted in women seeking the procedure to wait longer, pay more, leave their county (well over a third of women live in counties without abortion clinics) and drive long distances to over crowded clinics. This after having to navigate Texas’s already onerous requirements to be granted “permission” for an abortion. These requirements include state-directed “counseling,” an ultrasound, and description of the fetus by the provider, among other things.

Second-trimester abortions have become more common because of the need to meet these requirements and to wait for an appointment. And according to Texas law, an abortion may be performed at or after 20 weeks post-fertilization only if the woman’s life is endangered, her physical health is severely compromised or the pregnancy is “medically futile.”

All of these procedural impediments, which you term, “inconveniences,” are not only a denial of women’s rights under the Constitution, they are an attack on the authority of the Supreme Court in granting these rights to women under Roe vs Wade.

You, Ms Flowers, are clearly more interested in espousing your anti-abortion agenda than protecting the integrity of our constitutional system. I can forgive you for that — abortion is antithetical to your faith. What I can not forgive you is using your opposition to abortion as a reason to vote for a man whose many grievous faults include his advocacy of torture and extrajudicial killing, his demeaning of and intolerance for ethnic and religious minorities, and a misogyny so ingrained that he spontaneously refers to women in the most degrading terms. Putting such a man in a position to “shape the Supreme Court,” let alone lead this great nation, is unthinkable.

Pro-Life Republicans? Where?

Republicans will do absolutely nothing about gun violence in America. Republicans oppose paid maternity leave (the US is one of only 3 countries not to do so (Oman and Papua New Guinea are the other 2). Republicans are attempting to axe Title X Family Planning. More than half of Republicans in the Senate and almost half of Republicans in the House voted against the creation of Medicare, and House Republicans have vote over 50 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Republicans believe people need to starve before they'll 'really' look for work (Republicans believe that policies like disability insurance or the Earned Income Tax Credit take away a key motivation -- hunger).

People stand in line waiting to fill boxes with food at a Las Vegas food pantry.

Republicans oppose a plan from the chairman of the FCC to subsidize broadband Internet for poor Americans. Republicans want to send children born in America of undocumented immigrants back to where they DON'T come from. Republicans oppose diplomacy to address the Iran Nuclear Issue courting the possibility of armed conflict. Republicans won't even say "climate change" unless to brand it a "hoax," and climate change is already causing hundreds of thousands of deaths due to drought, failure of crops, flooding, and extreme weather. Republicans "Pro-Life?" Hardly.

Money in American Politics: Its Effect on How We View One Another

In his commencement address at Syracuse University on May 13, 2012, Aaron Sorkin said.

"Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character. You're too good for schadenfreude, you're too good for gossip and snark, you're too good for intolerance—and since you're walking into the middle of a presidential election, it's worth mentioning that you're too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy."

Unfortunately, the direction of American political dialogue in the age of the Internet is towards more schadenfreude, gossip, snark, and intolerance, not less. The question is, "why?"

Much has written about the corrupting effect of money on democracy in America. Less is written about how all this money effects the way we Americans view one another. Foreigners seem to come away from a visit to America with the view that Americans are a friendly bunch, quick to say thank you, hold the door open, and prone to say, "Have a nice day," to just about anyone. But how friendly are we to one another? And has that changed?

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision dramatically increased spending on campaigns and spawned a new wave of political organizations funded by wealthy individuals. Then, in 2014, SCOTUS struck down the limit on the total amount of money wealthy donors could contribute to candidates and political committees. The result of these decisions should be no surprise. According to the Brookings Institute, “When candidate and independent spending are combined, 2014 ranks among the most expensive, if not the most expensive, in history.” And recently the Koch Brothers announced that they plan to spend nearly $900 million on the 2016 election. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money!

Because of all this money flowing into the coffers of congressmen, and candidates, there is a growing sense among everyday Americans that their government does not truly represent their needs, values, nor aspirations, but rather the special interests of those who contribute the most money. Naturally, views differ on whether the result is a government that interferes too readily in the affairs of the public -- is too intrusive, too protective, too burdensome -- or a government that is too permissive of corporate practices that harm people and the environment.

The political parties and their supporters exploit this dichotomy of views in an attempt to wring more money out of contributors like you and I; everyday Americans, who can't compete with the Koch Brothers and their ilk, but feel we have a dog in the fight.

Using TV ads, direct mail, email, social media, and townhall meetings and the like, we are bombarded with the stock and trade of campaign fund raising memes: anger and fear. We are told by the Right that the president is a socialist hell bent on "redistributing wealth" and turning America into a communist state. The Left rails against Republican efforts to turn back the clock on civil liberties, the social safety net, and women's reproductive rights. The campaigns orchestrate outrage over this or that congressman's hypocrisy when their infidelity or insobriety surfaces. If real failings fail to be real enough, elaboration is used, with just enough ambiguity to make allegations juicy without being libelous.

To make matters worse, campaigns and their associated PACs and Super PACs have been collecting massive amounts of data on voters and crafting their messages to push the hot buttons of the demographic most likely to be convinced and to contribute. Workers in the oil and gas industry are told that Al Gore has a huge house, drives an SUV, and flies in his private jet to speaking engagements where he laments global warming. Women collecting food stamps are told that the congressman who demanded they be drug tested was arraigned for possessing cocaine. PETA members see "Sponsored Ads" show up on their Facebook page showing pigs confined to cages, with a link to an article on a Republican-sponsored bill to remove "burdensome regulations" on the treatment of livestock, while ranchers get push notifications about Democratic sponsored legislation that would require eggs be from free range chickens. It's all carefully choreographed to raise your ire and their coffers.

 Campaigns spend a good chunk of the money they collect from donors on "Big Data" and the algorithms that turn it into big propaganda. Frank Pasquale, in his recently published book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information, has written that,

"Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior—silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed, to the point of being invasive."

But more than invading our privacy, an invasion made easier by how wide we fling open the pages of our digital books, these corporations, PACs, Super PACs, campaigns, and candidates are invading our psyche. By telling us that our political opposites are bent on wresting from us no less than our, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," they are setting us one against the other as not just as political adversaries, but as sworn enemies.

Among the more strident agitators, the National Rifle Association stands out as the best organized, most effective in their narrow issue area -- gun rights -- and most divisive, with their inflammatory rhetoric and wide-ranging attacks on "jack-booted government thugs," and "anti-gun, left-wing activists." As much as anything, the NRA has promoted a 'fear thy neighbor' mentality, and a shoot first, "stand your ground" ethos. But they aren't alone, polemicists on both sides of aisle use hyperbole like a magic wand, turning Americans against each other for the simple purpose of extracting contributions for campaigns. And it never ends.

The enormous amounts of money flowing into the political coffers of campaigns, candidates, PACs, and Super PACs generates a whirlwind that swoops down on Americans, wrests ever more money from them to 'offset the other sides money,' and leaves them twisted against each other.

Mao Zedong (it may have been Sun Yat-sen originally) is credited with saying, "Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed."One wonders how long the distinction will hold.

Texas Legislators Who Should be Required to Undergo a Prostate Biopsy

Sen. Dan Patrick (nee Goeb), R-Houston with Rep. Sid Miller R-Stephenville speak
together in favor of HB 15, the abortion sonogram bill on May 4th, 2011