Texas Women's Health Program

A hot Texas topic currently is the conflict between Governor Perry and the Obama administration over the Women's Health Program and the funding for women's health care in Texas. The Obama Administration made a decision to end the Women's Health Program, which provides preventative health care to over 100,000 low-income Texas women. Governor Perry says that decision was made by the Administration because Texas law prevents this federal funding from going to providers that include abortion services, such as Planned Parenthood. Perry has written a letter of protest to the Administration and has also made clear that Texas will continue to fund these services, with or without the federal government. This implies that Texas will have to come up with other budget cuts to cover the the loss of federal funds.

Much of the reaction has been a heated attack on Perry, accusing him of conducting a “war on women”. Even republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is criticizing Governor Perry's position. Media coverage tends to be one sided, as for example, the Houston Chronicle in the article Perry: How to fundWomens's Health Program? No taxes. No Rainy Day Fund. The one sided coverage leads to the destortion of facts and a biased presentation. It becomes all the more important for citizens to research behind the facts themselves. Looking into it myself, I have found that I disagree more with what Obama is doing than what is being said of Perry's actions. Obama is scratching the funds of the Women's Health Program for the sake of the less than 2% of providers that cover abortions, thereby withdrawing funds from the other 98% of providers that are serving low-income women for a variety of medical needs. Also, under federal law states have the right to set the criteria for “qualified providers”, and yet Obama is punishing Texas for not including pro-abortion providers. Senator Hutchison seems to be endorsing his attack. It seems that Texas women's health care overall is being threatened because of Obama's militantly pro-abortion agenda.

http://governor.state.tx.us/news/bills/
http://governor.state.tx.us/news/press-release/17020/

Blogger going overboard

While looking for a blog article to critique and I found this article on TexasFred.net by another blogger, J.D. Longstreet, that TexasFred wanted to share with his readers. The article is entitled Americans Are NEVER Alone; it goes into the issue that we are no longer free in our country. I quickly came to realize how the article is a bit of a dramatization on the issue of Americans being watched by their government. The article is more of a rant that can't be taken seriously. Granted this subject does have some controversy and can be taken seriously but, when I hear the extent he goes into it, I can't back this article. I know there is the issue of the “patriot act”, even though I am not fully aware of the details, where people are concerned about the amount of power the government can have in their daily lives and privacy. His first remark is that “Americans are no longer free”, but to imply we are not free at all is an obvious exaggeration when we are still able to make many decisions and act on our own and say what we think and feel. To me that means that we are slaves, which he does use in his argument, and I do not think that is at all the case. He starts making more ridiculous comments like: we are watched and listened to every moment of everyday; every phone call or email is being monitored; even that facial recognition cameras watch our movements on highways and city streets and that the government has the ability to look at us through walls to monitor us. This is such an unbalanced exaggeration with absolutely no proof to it. If you're going to make statements of this sort, you need to have someway to back it up with evidence. It's like he is taken any possible thing he could think of or saw on a movie and accused the government of actually making this happen to everybody...really everybody! He also says that the government uses Back Scatter x-rays as a way to look into cars, but this is what is used in the airports and has been shown to be ineffective. Longstreet brings up the point that our internet search engines pick up and keep lot of our own personal information, which is becoming a problem, but he is attacking the government when the fault lies with the actual Internet and the individual companies that use this method to track spending habits and so could end up knowing too much about their users. With this point he veers off his course of attacking the government. Then he goes back to how the government is putting RFID transmitters in garments we buy so as to track the wearers. Again he gives no proof , nor any reason why they would do so. He then starts comparing how it used to be for his generation, when America was free, and says, “we're just old fuddy-duddies muttering gibberish about an America that was once the greatest on the face of the earth – precisely because we are free!”. This isn’t realistic; the older generation votes in record numbers and is often the reason politicians get elected. It's called the blue vote. This whole article to me is just a joke and a source of some entertainment. There is definitely a logical way to talk about this issue that would make a convincing argument and be taken seriously. One of the only statements I could agree with is that the way we live our life effects how much we let the government and other sources know about us. For example, we can limit use of our GPS on our phones and the amount of information we put on the internet for others to see. At best, the only thing this article achieves is that I might look for a more reliable source that gives actual facts, uses a moderate tone, and does not ONLY single out the government, and therefore could be taken seriously.