Who waylays my emails, and by what authority, @Comcast?

@Comcast @XFINITY You charge a lot. Let me receive the emails that are sent to me.

— Susan Chandler (@wobblywarrior) February 27, 2017

I don’t receive happy personal emails about interior or exterior design anymore. I receive unhappy personal emails about public corruption – frame-ups, deadly prison conditions, and more – but I don’t receive all of the emails that are sent to me.

The current email I can’t receive via my Comcast or gmail address is a cleaner copy of the correspondence below sent from Florida US Senator Marco Rubio to Gemma Pena in mid-December regarding the ongoing mistreatment of her mentally ill son, Kristopher Rodriguez, by the Florida Department of Corrections.

The Guardian newspaper has written about Kristopher and Gemma. I titled a post that acknowledged their article Gemma’s journey: to hell and back … repeatedly.

The Guardian didn’t mince words:

After her son tore off his penis with his bare hands in his cell, Gemma Pena thought Florida’s prison authorities might see his illness. They’d see he needed a hospital, instead of solitary confinement.

“No,” she said. “That’s when the nightmare really started.”

The Guardian is read worldwide, but apparently not by Marco Rubio. But The Miami Herald has also written about Kristopher and Gemma:

Gemma Pena traveled from Hialeah to Tallahassee to plead with a House committee Tuesday to establish a prison system that is “less lethal to our mentally ill” and “holds prisons more accountable.”

The Miami Herald has written so much about abuse, neglect and violence in Florida lockups that it’s simply outrageous for Miami-born Marco Rubio to refer any complaint about the Florida Department of Corrections back to the Florida Department of Corrections, sans followup …  Kristopher Rodriguez already tore off his penis, who knows what he’ll do to himself next if the FDC – with its ever-expanding history of cruel and unusual punishment, including homicide – is allowed to continue to police itself.

Predictably, Gemma hasn’t heard from Kristopher in over two months. It’s no secret that Rubio doesn’t care much about anything in between election campaigns.

Rubio earned the hashtag #NoShowRubio for ducking his US Senate responsibilities. Rubio recently ducked invitations to attend Town Hall meetings, playing the potential victim card, of all things. He knows that he would most likely have come face-to-face with Gemma and other distraught Floridians, not hordes of “Liberal Activists” who boo on cue.

The New York Times editorial board addressed the mass incarceration of the mentally ill today. They threw in the the word “inhumane” near the end of their opinion piece, as if someone had belatedly pointed out their iciness, and they looked to soften it somewhat, without a rewrite. Given the bipolar nature of the NYT, we won’t know if the legislation and programs they referred to are part of a push to privatize mental health care until later. Of course, privatizing mental health services would be a disaster. All privatization is disastrous. Do the math.

I know better than to ask Marco Rubio to hold Comcast accountable for providing the services I pay for; I’ll instead address Comcast and the FCC directly on Twitter. Perhaps there will soon be a legitimate “alt” or “rogue” FCC to bring into the mix.

Come to think of it, “alt” or “rogue” Twitter @SenateGOP and @HouseGOP accounts aren’t out of the question. They may even be inevitable.

Teddy Roosevelt Republicans aren’t big on environmental destruction, exploitive labor practices or corporate subsidies; Lincoln Republicans aren’t big on selectively trampling  the rights of certain groups of people; Eisenhower Republicans aren’t big on an out-of-control Military Industrial Complex.

Tides turn, trends reverse … everything can change for the better, overnight. The Roosevelt/Lincoln/Eisenhower Republicans can rise again. Resist until they do. Please.

Kristopher’s life depends on it, so do tens of thousands of others.

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