Justice for Trayvon vigils in 100 cities today

In over one hundred cities across the United States, NAN is organizing “Justice for Trayvon” vigils on Saturday, July 20th to press the federal government to investigate civil rights charges against George Zimmerman. Hundreds of national preachers, led by Rev. Al Sharpton and NAN will hold prayer vigils and rallies in front of federal buildings calling on the Justice Department to investigate the civil rights violations made against Trayvon Martin.

Texas cities include Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Wichita Falls.

Houston

City Hall, 901 Bagby, 11 a.m.

Austin

Texas State Capitol Building, 1100 Congress Avenue, 12 Noon

San Antonio

Federal Courthouse, 655 E. Cesar E. Chavez Blvd., 11:00 a.m.

Wichita Falls, TX

2003 Collins Ave., 2 p.m.

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.