Betty Brink's Posts

How Much Worse Can the Mosque Bashers Get? Ask Big John

On Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), speaking of the controversy over the building of a mosque near Ground Zero, said troops in Afghanistan are being asked to find common ground with Muslims. “If we can’t do that here in the United States, we’re going to have a very difficult time over there,” Reed [...]

Government Negligent in Death of Carswell Prison Inmate

Linda D’Antuono Fenton, a 34-year-old inmate at the Federal Medical Center-Carswell near Fort Worth, died in 2004 eight days after she was taken comatose from Carswell to the trauma center of a local hospital. She never regained consciousness. The circumstances surrounding her death were loaded with unanswered questions. Now, a federal judge has answered at [...]

Rape Victims at Federal Prison Settle with Catholic Church

Thanks to two courageous women, the Catholic Church is poorer by multiple-thousands of dollars once again. But both say that no amount of money can compensate them for what they suffered: rape and sodomy by a priest entrusted with their physical as well as spiritual care. The women, who have asked for anonymity because they still live [...]

Prison Rape. Can It Be Stopped?

“I was sentenced to spend 18 months in prison as punishment for my crime. Rape was not part of that punishment,” said Marilyn Shirley in testimony before the Prison Rape Elimination Commission, established by Congress in 2003. Shirley, a 42-year-old mother and wife, was brutally raped and sodomized by Michael Miller, a senior guard at a federal [...]

Texas Whitewashes U.S. History

“You can just hear the announcement on flights landing at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport,” my friend John said to me. “‘Please return your trays and seats to the upright position, and set your watches back 100 years.’” John was talking about the news out of Texas late Friday that a powerful group of Republican Christian conservatives [...]

Not All Texans are Wing-Nut Secessionists

The eyes of the nation were upon Texas on March 2 as Republican voters turned out in record numbers to send gubernatorial candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison back to Washington with a bumper sticker on her backside that read “Don’t mess with Rick.” Hutchison, the first woman U.S. senator in Texas history, was soundly walloped by sitting-guv [...]