What happens in Texas when Planned Parenthood clinics get defunded

Dateline March 13, by Mother Jones. Keep in mind that this is data showing up from the funding reductions passed by the state legislature two years ago.

About a year after Texas slashed its family-planning budget by two-thirds, with 50 clinics shutting down as a result, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project surveyed 300 pregnant women seeking an abortion in Texas. Nearly half said they were "unable to access the birth control that they wanted to use" in the three months before they became pregnant. Among the reasons: cost, lack of insurance, inability to find a clinic, and inability get a prescription. The state's health commission says Texas will see nearly 24,000 unplanned births between 2014 and 2015 thanks to these cuts, raising state and federal taxpayer's Medicaid costs by up to $273 million.

In a state where half of all pregnancies were unplanned in 2011, and 1 in 3 women of childbearing age lacks health insurance, this is only going to get worse.

Again, this isn't new information; it was posted last spring in order to influence the recently-concluded abortion restrictions legislation that Rick Perry signed into law yesterday. In that wake, Planned Parenthood announced three clinics would close in East Texas (only one actually provided abortion services). But seemingly unsatisfied with that result, Texas Republicans are going back for more.

Hours after Texas Republican lawmakers finalized some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country Thursday, a bill to ban abortions as early as six weeks, when a fetal heartbeat can be detected, was filed.

State Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford, filed House Bill 59, which would ban abortions “if it has been determined… that the unborn child has a detectable heartbeat.” North Dakota is the only other state to pass ‘fetal heartbeat’ legislation, and it is being challenged as unconstitutional in court.

More at Burnt Orange and Think Progress. This probably means another round of rallies at the Capitol, followed by a few arrests, some authoritarian displays of force conducted by the state police, and a party-line vote by the legislators. Maybe a lawsuit... eventually.

All we can do for the moment, in short, is simply document the atrocities. Oh yeah, and mobilize opposition for 2014.

The police/surveillance state of the nation

So is this really the best government money can buy?

In a heated confrontation over domestic spying, members of Congress said Wednesday they never intended to allow the National Security Agency to build a database of every phone call in America. And they threatened to curtail the government's surveillance authority.

Top Obama administration officials countered that the once-secret program was legal and necessary to keep America safe. And they left open the possibility that they could build similar databases of people's credit card transactions, hotel records and Internet searches.

The clash on Capitol Hill undercut President Barack Obama's assurances that Congress had fully understood the dramatic expansion of government power it authorized repeatedly over the past decade.

Sort of knocks the legs out from under that "didn't we already know about this?" crap, doesn't it?

"The statute says 'collection'," Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) told Cole. "You're trying to confuse us by talking use."

Congressman Ted Poe (R-TX), a judge, said: "I hope as we move forward as a Congress we rein in the idea that it's OK to bruise the spirit of the constitution in the name of national security."

More Ted Poe:

“Snowden, I don’t like him at all, but we would never have known what happened if he hadn’t told us.”

Poe, the least ignorant Texas Republican in Congress, reveals himself as the blind hog having found an acorn.

Is this just a failing of the Congress, though? No. The corporate media, with its toadies and sycophants fascinated by power, access, and influence is choking on reporting the story again. That's going to have to be its own post, but here's a link regarding coverage of the Snowden/NSA affair: as of yesterday afternoon, just one English language website -- Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller -- had posted former President Jimmy Carter's remark that the United States "no longer has a functioning democracy". There were many articles focusing on his comments about the Zimmerman verdict, however (he supported the jury decision). But Carter may also have been referencing Citizens United and the process by which American elections are funded. From late yesterday...

"It's accepted fact," Carter said during a speech in Atlanta. "It's legal bribery of candidates. And that repayment may be in the form of an ambassadorship to someone who has raised three or four hundred thousand dollars to help a candidate get elected."

So the answer to better government must be that Democrats just have to raise more money than Republicans. Except that Obama accomplished that, and we still have the same problems. Only worse. 

Back to who's watching you that you're paying for. And this isn't about drones.

Drive down many highways, boulevards or small side streets in America, and your movements are being noted by electronic cameras. Eyes in the sky controlled by local police departments snap photos of every passing license plate and store the data, sometimes forever. Even the smallest of agencies now deploys these high-tech voyeuristic machines, creating massive databases where more than 99 percent of the entries represent innocent people.

All, warned the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday, for a one-in-a-million chance that the cameras might aid in the apprehension of a serious criminal.

"Plate readers are the most pervasive system of location tracking that people haven't heard of," said Catherine Crump, a privacy lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. She wrote the ACLU report released Wednesday questioning the way such cameras are being used. "Even though virtually all of us have had our cars logged into these databases, few know this technology exists." 

More and more on that. Do you feel safer yet? How about last week, when the Texas state troopers confiscated women's hygiene products? And claimed they also found jars of urine and feces, then later reneged on the word "confiscate" and sourced the tip to the "blogosphere"?

How about now?

In emphasizing the more aggressive, confrontational aspect of police work over community service—hurting people instead of helping people—they may be shifting the profile of the typical young person attracted to police work. Browse the dozens of police recruitment videos on YouTube, for example, and you’ll find that many of them feature images of cops tackling suspects, rappelling out of helicopters, shooting guns, kicking down doors, and siccing dogs on people. The images are often set to blaring guitars or heavy metal music. These are the videos that police departments send to high schools and colleges to attract new recruits. At the very first step in the process of staffing their departments, then, these agencies are deliberately appealing to people who are likely to be lured by the thrill-seeking, adrenaline-producing, butt-kicking aspects of law enforcement. Build an entire police force of people who fit that description and you have a force of cops who seek confrontation instead of avoiding it and who look to escalate volatile situations instead of resolving them peacefully. 

This is America, the greatest country inthawerld. The police have never arrested the wrong person or even busted in the wrong house; cops don't just arbitrarily shoot people's dogs. Our criminal justice system has never convicted or, God forbid, executed an innocent man. We do not torture people, and as of 2013 we don't have racial problems or gun safety issues or even concerns about our government spying on us. See, we voluntarily gave up all our privacy to Facebook. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, like Lindsey Graham and Josef Goebbels both said.

It seems to me that all of these millions and billions of dollars could be better spent. Not just the money government spends on defense or security, but also the money being given to elected officials and those aspiring to be.

Surely we are not getting our money's worth when it comes to investing in our politicians. The answer, obviously, is to help them raise and spend even more money. And discuss who has raised and spent the most money for the purpose of assigning probability to election outcomes.

Or maybe it's only a prospect list for those vendors who would like to skim off a few bucks for their own livelihood. And gain some access -- get invited to the good parties; the quiet rooms.

Whichever it is, it doesn't seem to be working right.

Mo' money in government and what we get for it

I don't know why these aggregates get so much traffic -- clicks here yesterday were ten times normal -- but if people want to read it, I suppose I'll have to write it.

Regarding campaign spending...

-- Texans outpace congressional colleagues on big donations:

Texas congressional candidates rely far more heavily on large donors than office-seekers in other states do, a Houston Chronicle analysis of federal campaign data for the 2012 election cycle found.

Three-quarters of Texas' congressional candidates collected less than 5 percent of their campaign funds from donations under $200 last year, a rate that is lower than all but nine other states.

A majority of checks from high-dollar Texas contributions went to Republicans, with just 15 percent of large donors siding with Democrats. Houston, the top city for big-dollar campaign cash, supplied 28 percent of all large donations from Texas last year. The reliance on larger contributions increases the political influence of wealthy donors, said Pete Quist, research director for the National Institute of Money in State Politics. For congressional contenders, it means a shorter path to campaign dollars.

"It's a lot easier for the candidates to just go up to these few donors and get the robust funding of their campaigns done," Quist said.

To fuel the record-setting spending of the most recent election campaign, candidates turned to a powerful minority composed of 31,385 mega-donors across the country. That wealthy stratum, including 2,700 Texans, funded nearly one-third of last year's $6 billion election in spending.

Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, who led Texas in Super PAC spending last year, recorded donations of $25 million. He gave money to 15 candidates, including high-profile out-of-state Republicans Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

It's bound to be good for democracy, yeah?

-- It's still easy for incumbents to keep their seats, but it sure costs a lot more:

Over the past 40 years, it hasn't gotten any easier—or harder—to win reelection as a House incumbent. It's just gotten way more expensive.

It's no secret that there's a serious incumbent advantage in the House. (And the Senate, too, but that data are less telling because the chamber has fewer elections and fewer incumbents.) The success rate for House incumbents running for reelection has dipped below 90 percent in only nine of the 34 elections since 1946, according to data compiled by National Journal's own Norm Ornstein and posted by the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute. The reelection success rate has fallen below 80 percent only once. If you're an incumbent looking to keep your job, you are almost guaranteed to win.

And that hasn't changed much, either. The share of incumbents seeking and winning reelection has hovered around the low 90s for the past four decades. In fact, the trendline, in black below, shows that the odds of an incumbent winning reelection have fallen just slightly by 0.7 percentage points, from 93.7 percent in 1974 to 93 percent in 2012.

Ninety-three percent retention. Brought to you by America's banks, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, and the business executives who run them. Ain't it grand?

No, really; what kind of government are we actually getting for all that cash?

-- Pentagon lobbies hard to be allowed to keep failing on military sexual assault:

How does the military keep fending off attempts to seriously change its sexual assault culture? Through the excessive deference of many lawmakers and an enormous lobbying operation, the details of which, as reported by Politico's Darren Samuelsohn and Anna Palmer, are staggering.

In recent months, the Pentagon's big goal has been to block Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's proposal to take decisions about sexual assault and other major crimes prosecutions out of the hands of military commanders and put them in the hands of trained legal experts. The strength of that idea has the military scrambling to accept other important-but-not-strong-enough improvements to the failed anti-sexual assault efforts that have prevailed until now—and exercising its incredible advantages in lobbying Congress:

Nearly every Democratic and GOP member of the Armed Services committees has a career military officer working as a fellow—whose salary is paid by the Pentagon—to help craft legislation, unravel the department’s labyrinth of offices and sub-offices and decipher acronyms. 

“Imagine if we had bankers serving as fellows for the Financial Services Committee. Would we do that?” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who has been pushing the military for years on sexual assault.

Plus there are Capitol Hill liaisons, members of the military who regularly meet with key Hill staff to make the Pentagon’s case on a variety of issues.

This doesn't count the actual defense contractor lobbyists, of course. It's a wonder a single military base has ever been closed. But shielding rapists from prosecution is obviously more serious than $400 hammers, $2000 toilets, incompetent weapons programs that can't be killed by Congress, weapons the military doesn't want that Congress keeps alive, and so on.

As you might imagine, this Catholic Church-like effort to protect the sexual criminals in the ranks means that military recruiters have to, ah, revise their pitch.

On and on we could go in this vein, but in the next post the focus will be on the police and surveillance state of the nation.

No Campaign Finance Reports Roundup

-- No campaign finance reports posted here. Ever. As written many times previously, that is a poor way -- probably the poorest -- of evaluating the quality of a political candidate. In fact it's sort of like picking a horse to bet on at the track based on the size of its owner's bank account. Or declaring which team might win the World Series or the Super Bowl strictly on the amount of the team's payroll.

I'm just not interested in the political insiders -- and those who crave access to them -- telling me what I should think about who is a better man or a woman of the people (sometimes erroneously referred to as "grassroots")  based on how much money they have raised. Not only don't I care, it actually has the opposite effect of convincing me that they care about the 99%. By all evidence of voter turnout in municipal elections, a vast majority of that 99% doesn't care too much either.

If it was in the best interest of our city, state, and nation to vote for people who proved themselves the most adept at pandering for campaign contributions, we'd have the kind of representation in Washington and Austin that we already have. The definition of insanity and all that.

If you don't think there's something wrong in a political system where money is scrutinized and evaluated as the most important thing to getting elected, then you might be part of the problem and not the solution.

There's an app for that. To fix it, I mean.

-- Will almost a million people quit their jobs when (perhaps I should say 'if') Obamacare is fully enacted?

A new study distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that somewhere between 530,000 and 940,000 Americans might quit their jobs after January 1, 2014, as they’re able to get affordable health insurance through one of the public exchanges to be set up under Obamacare. That could provide ammunition for both critics and supporters of the politically explosive law. Critics might see it as evidence that Obama’s reforms encourage idleness while contributing to a growing welfare state. But it might also be a sign that workers have more freedom to pursue meaningful work or other interests instead of sticking to one job just because of the benefits, a phenomenon economists have dubbed “employment lock.”

This is a bad thing how for corporations? It's like mass voluntary layoffs without the separation packages; why would they be upset about that?

-- Justice for Trayvon rallies in a hundred American cities this weekend; noon Saturday, at federal courthouses across the nation. "Juror B37 does not speak for us", according to four of the other five jurors. Here's the story of the Twitterer who single-handedly killed B37′s book deal. (Now that's what I call the invisible hand of the free market.)

Between the injustice served by a clearly biased set of panelists charged with evaluating the guilt of George Zimmerman and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, I have to wonder if the Supreme Court justices who bought the argument that racism is over in America are having second thoughts about that. Perhaps the federal judges who were planning on going in to the office this Saturday have a better understanding.

-- State representative Harold Dutton (D-Houston) has filed a pro-life bill: No abortion restrictions can be implemented until the death penalty is abolished. Sounds good to me.

What I think I like best about it is how it paints pro-birth radicals right into a corner. And they won't be able to tiptoe out of it without getting blood on their shoes.

-- Big Jolly hyperbolically -- or maybe it's hyperventilatingly -- defends Dr. Mark Jones (because he can't defend himself) and Greg calmly bats that away. What's a clown got to do to get in this fight, Dave?

-- Is the tide actually turning, or might it be a storm surge signaling a hurricane? Read all about it in Texas Monthly.

Can Texas Democrats win in 2014 just by increasing the female vote?

The short answer is 'no', but let's dig a little deeper.

The above is a bar graph that Michael Li posted on his FB page a couple of days ago (by the way, he has the best public forum around on Texas politics and if you're not following him there and on Twitter then you're missing out). I responded: "So the way I read this is: women already registered to vote in Texas can easily elect Wendy Davis governor... if they will just show up at the polls and do so."

Li's response was that it isn't quite that simple. After crunching a few numbers I am forced to agree, but since he posted it to "suggest opportunity", let's explore that.

(I'm not going to post any more charts, graphs, or spreadsheets, and we already know math isn't my strongest subject, so if somebody wants to challenge my premise, I'll welcome that discussion in the comments.)

Without having access to Li's precise figures, I have to extrapolate from the bars above to determine what the potential Democratic gain might be, given some other assumptions like: "Can 10% of the registered but not voting women in the 18-24 age bracket be motivated to cast a ballot, or should a more reasonable goal be increasing  existing turnout by that percentage?" The difference in this case is 25,000 versus almost 70,000. And not all of those will be Democratic votes, of course; the split goes more red the older the demographic.

And there's got to be a lot of rounding and estimating, which clouds our analysis. I'm thinking I can still reach a more accurate conclusion than Dr. Mark Jones of Rice University, however.

So let's open with the following parameters.

-- Increasing existing turnout by a factor of 10% is perhaps the most liberal and the most conservative goal for Dems to realize. It might be greater in the younger demographics and less in the older ones, so this will be used as the average.

-- The percentage of Democratic votes in this increase should be fairly high. I don't think the Republican women (or for that matter, men) who did not vote in 2012 have much to grow on, no matter what Phylliss Schlafly says. Not in the country, not in Texas. Still, I'm going to use a conservative estimate of the potential increase for the Ds: 75% for the 18-24 and 25-34 demographics, 67% for 35-49, 60% for 50-64, and 50% for 65+.

So on that basis, what do we have?

-- In the age range from 18-24, it looks like about three-quarters of 25,000 votes, or 18,750.

-- From 25-34, 75% of 10% of almost 600,000 (we'll call it 575K) = 43,125 Democratic votes.

-- 35-49: Ten percent of 1.1 million women who voted in 2012 is 110,000 and two-thirds of that is 73,700.

-- Texas female voters from age 50-64 total over 1.3 million according to the bar graph above, but let's round down to that 1.3 figure and take 10% of it and then 60% of that. That equals 78,000 D votes.

-- Finally, in the 65+ category, half of 10% of something around 950,000 is 47,500.

18,750 + 43,125 + 73,700 + 78,000 + 47,500 = 261,075. Again, a conservative estimate of additional Democratic votes from Texas women who are already registered to vote.

In a recent article at the Texas Tribune they helpfully disclose the vote tallies by which certain Democrats lost to Republicans in recent statewide elections. Here's that excerpt.

The grim performance of Democratic candidates in Texas over the last 10 years is hard to understate. Over the previous decade, the closest Democrats have been to any of the big ticket offices were 11 points in the 2008 presidential contest (950,695 votes), 12 points in the 2002 and 2008 Senate races (540,485 votes and 948,104 votes, respectively) and 9 points in the 2006 governor’s race (406,455 votes). 

The TexTrib goes a little farther in that piece with their back-of-the-envelope calculations of what the Latino effect might be. But they reach the same conclusion as me.

Suppose that some combination of Battleground Texas, amplified mobilization and good old-fashioned political persuasion increases Hispanic turnout in the state from 48 percent to, let’s say, 60 percent (no small feat) and, further, that the Democrats maintain a nearly 3-to-1 advantage in their vote choice (based on that 71 percent figure). That would create an additional 356,560 votes — about a third of the way toward closing the 1 million vote shortfall the Democrats suffered in the 2008 election in Texas (and remember, that was on a good day). 

I prefer to look at gender demographics as opposed to ethnic ones just for the sake of simplicity. There are people with Latino surnames who are Caucasian, to use just one example. (Exhibit A: my pal Neil Aquino. Hurry up with that new blog, by the way.) But everybody is fairly identifiable as male or female.

So what we have learned here is that -- short of a massive die-off of dessicated conservatives in the next 18 months in Texas -- Democrats still have a long, long way to go. That doesn't mean they shouldn't keep pushing, of course.

The sun is rising and the tide is turning, sooner than later. The events in the state Capitol -- and the events that occurred over the weekend in Sanford, Florida -- suggest extra motivation for people who can be convinced that voting might change things for the better. Latinos should already have all the motivation they need, and represent the greatest untapped resource. But everybody who is motivated is going to have to get registered, make sure their ID is current, and then get themselves to their polling place armed with enough knowledge to make the right choices for the future of Texas.

A tall but not insurmountable order.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance joins the family of Trayvon Martin in being "saddened" by the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff gives some advice on what to do now that the anti-abortion bill has passed.

Horwitz at Texpatriate explains why he is a Democrat.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson says the dream that once made America great has become a nightmare for too many: We must “make morality possible again”.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme can hardly wait to see the results of the republican War on Women in 2014. Some Blue Dogs like Eddie Lucio Jr. are already feeling a pinch.

Dr. Mark Jones of Rice University tried to take down Wendy Davis' political prospects, and PDiddie at Brains and Eggs had to take down Jones. Conservatives drinking "librul" whine still smell like vinegar.

At TexasKaos, lightseeker foresees the destruction of Texas Republican Party. Check it out: Texas Republicans - The Coming Crackup?

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Juanita eulogizes Bev Carter, Fort Bend political journalist and rabble-rouser.

Lone Star Ma deplores the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

Jason Stanford has a personal story about why the omnibus anti-abortion bill is such a miscarriage of justice.

Equality Texas reports from the Texas GSA Network Activist Camp.

Greg Wythe shreds a recent story that claims Sen. Wendy Davis is "too liberal" to win in Texas.

Texas Vox looks at a series of new studies that focus on the destructive effects of pollution.

The Texas Green Report explains why you should care about the cost of tap water.

Concerned Citizens reminds us once again that elections have consequences.

BOR analyzes the litigation that is likely to arise from the passage of the omnibus anti-abortion bill.

Sunday Rude and Crude Funnies

Look at all those dicks in her uterus...

Greg Abbott performs a River Walk later this afternoon...