Roger Serevino heads civil-rights enforcement at HHS.

But the regulation-averse Trump administration thinks it’s such a pressing problem that on Jan. 18, it announced a proposed new regulation and the creation of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within the civil rights office of the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The announcement was made Jan. 18, carefully choreographed for the day before the March for Life in Washington D.C., giving anti-abortion activists renewed energy.

The new section will handle complaints from health workers who feel their religious or moral beliefs are being violated, for example by having to care for transgenders or by being forced to perform or assist with procedures such as abortion, assisted death or sex reassignment surgery.

Roger Severino was a devout anti-gay, anti-abortion activist before being tapped to head civil-rights enforcement at HHS. His new conscience division is charged with investigating complaints made by health care workers. He attempted to explain the initiative on NPR’s All Things Considered on Jan. 18 saying, “The government should not be saying, you cannot have a job; you cannot be a nurse because of your views on abortion. This is about tolerance on all sides.”

What on earth is this man talking about? How can any health care worker’s freedom of religion be threatened in a health care setting? This is a free country. If abortion offends your religious beliefs, don’t work in a setting that provides them. Health care settings are not in short supply — go find another one. No one’s forcing you to work where you do.

And if it offends your religious beliefs to care for transgenders, gays or anyone else not like you, then you’re in the wrong profession. Go back and read your professional code of ethics. Every health care discipline has a code that prohibits discrimination against patients. Nursing’s, for example, reads in part, “The nurse practices with compassion and respect for the inherent dignity, worth, and unique attributes of every person … The nurse’s primary commitment is to the patient.” If you can’t practice under those principles, go find another line of work. You are a danger to our patients.

About one such claim was made per year of the Obama administration. But 34 complaints arose during Trump’s first year. Is anyone surprised by the 34-fold increase?

After more than 50 years of policy successes to bring civil rights to discriminated-against groups of people, Trump’s election threw open the closet doors of suppressed white supremacists and other bigots. Silent no more! Ku Klux Klansmen can now throw off their hoods, stand up tall and march defiantly through the streets with torches chanting muck against Jews, blacks and browns, like they did in Charlottesville — with the support of our president.

Let’s put these 34 complaints into perspective. With more than 18 million health care workers in this country, 34 represents 0.00000189 of one percentage point of workers. That’s enough to open a new agency division?

Apparently, the meaning of “religious freedom” has evolved from the freedom to practice no religion or the religion of your choice to freedom to discriminate against others under the guise of religion. Do we want government to protect religious liberty or enforce religious dogma?

This meaningless initiative appears designed to reignite the culture wars over “conscience protections.” It won’t work, but it will cost taxpayer money, and it will harm patients by limiting their access to needed services. I guess HHS is no longer concerned with patients’ civil rights.

This and many other Republican initiatives, such as the bathroom bill from Texas’ last legislative session, are all answers to questions no one is asking. Wouldn’t it be nice if government would come up with answers to questions people are asking? Like how do we secure health care for everyone?

Senior budget officials of the esteemed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were called to a meeting last Thursday and read a list of forbidden words and phrases — including the term “science-based” — that the Trump administration does not want to see in the agency’s official budget documents to circulate within Congress and the federal government in preparation for the upcoming presidential budget proposal.

The banned words and phrases are “fetus,” “transgender,” “science-based,” “diversity,” “evidence-based,” “entitlement” and “vulnerable.” This to the home of many of the world’s leading epidemiologists and researchers whose job it is to provide for the defense of the nation against health threats and promote the public health.

Can you imagine the atmosphere in the room? I’m envisioning a stunned silence as jaws dropped and eyes widened. It’s a good thing they were sitting down.

The officials were given alternate phrases, such as turning science- or evidence-based into the clunky “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes” — an outright admission of contempt of science and the triumph of politics and ideology over science. Why not use the more streamlined, “science- and politics-based” or maybe “evidence- and ideology-based?”

When I first started in neonatal intensive care almost 40 years ago, getting parents to sign consents for their baby’s immunizations was easy, no problem. But by the time I retired five years ago, it was the hardest part of my job. Using logic from the Trump administration, maybe the CDC should no longer recommend immunizations based “on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.” Right? Wrong.

In health care, you can do things because you’ve always done them that way. Or … you can do things based on scientific research. The latter is what we do in neonatal intensive care, and what the best hospitals do in all areas. It’s called evidence-based practice. In practice, we look to the CDC for published guidelines on immunizations, infection control and for all manner of health statistics and research data.

Last year, I went to the emergency room after being bitten by a strange dog with nystagmus, a condition in which the eyes make involuntary, repetitive movements. The first thing the doctor did was go to her computer to look up rabies statistics from the CDC. Only then did she give me her recommendation regarding shots.

The CDC funds Texas’ basic health functions such as HIV, sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis control and prevention. It supports state laboratories for new technique development.

It funds disease surveillance. For example, on Dec. 15, the CDC reported with details how widespread flu activity had spread to 12 states, up from seven states a week earlier.

Surveillance is especially critical when you need to know in a hurry where infections are popping up. Remember the case of Ebola in Dallas in 2014? Officials from the CDC were dispatched immediately to help with training and surveillance. Remember the outbreak of Zika virus in Brazil in 2015 that caused children to be born with microcephaly? Hundreds of cases were reported in South Texas, but so far this year only 45 cases. The CDC surveils the virus and funds the Texas Zika Pregnancy Registry and the Birth Defect Registry.

If the administration is saying to the CDC that they can’t use the words transgender and diversity in their budget request, you can bet that means “don’t pay attention to those issues.”

This blatant contempt for science must not stand. We need the CDC to sustain and continue to build its vast repository of science information and its culture of excellence. Politics has no place there.

In 2009, as Congress was debating the Affordable Care Act (signed into law the next year,) he was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. She asked him about the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, an essential ingredient of universal care.

Uwe Reinhardt speaking before Congress.

He answered that Americans have a cognitive dissonance. “Cognitive dissonance,” he said, “means that you hold two different theories that are in conflict with one another, but they’re both in your brain and in your soul …. Americans say the government doesn’t have the right to tell me to buy health insurance, but the same Americans will say if I get hit by a truck and I lie bleeding in the street, society owes it to me to send an ambulance, and the emergency room doctors owe it to me to save my life. How could both be true? Even a teenager would blush at something this ridiculous. If you believe society has a duty to save your life when you get hurt, you have a duty to chip into a fund that pays for that.”

Gross asked him if health insurance purchase were mandated, how everyone could afford it. He responded that a simpler, more helpful question would be, “What percent of a family’s discretionary income, that is, income after food, housing and clothing, should a family be expected to pay for its own health care?”

He suggested that upper-income people such as professors at Ivy League colleges like himself should be expected to pay 15 percent. Those with lower incomes such as waitresses and waiters, would reasonably be expected to pay no more than 5 percent, with government subsidizing the rest.

Reinhardt, who died of sepsis last month at the age of 80, was a plain-spoken advisor and consultant to presidents, congressional committees, countries, the media, corporations and students of health care everywhere. He taught for nearly 50 years at Princeton University, and he explained the most complex issues in health care in brilliant, bright, easy-to-understand prose in his weekly New York Times Economix Blog.

Reinhardt’s views came from personal experience. He grew up in Germany and told Gross “how good it was that when we were paupers, my family, we had health insurance like everyone else in Germany. I’ve never forgotten that. And I would like the American people to have” that.

Living close to a hospital, he saw enough of the horrors of World War II to emigrate to Canada when he was 18 to avoid the draft and to study. There again he appreciated that everyone in the country had health insurance.

After graduation, he immigrated to the United States to earn a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. He became bewildered to see the extent of misery, morbidity and mortality caused by a health care “system” where so many lacked insurance and put off care.

He wondered how a country as rich, resourceful and innovative as America could have failed to develop a system to cover everyone. After all, all the other industrialized countries set up health systems where everyone was covered, their governments viewing health care as a right and a proper role and goal of government to sustain a healthy and productive society.

Without the individual mandate, Obamacare will die. As congressional Republicans contemplate the murder-suicide of getting rid of it, we remember Reinhardt’s words: “What kind of country do we want to live in? One where someone who loses their job loses their health insurance? One where kids coming out of college can’t get health insurance for the next 10 years? One where emergency rooms are packed with people who don’t have access to [primary] care? One where people who have a family member struck by cancer can become bankrupt? One where tens of millions are uninsured?”

These are questions of morality.

A nursing school class on mental health required the students to present on a major personality disorder. One of the students chose narcissism, and her brilliant and unforgettable presentation used Daffy Duck as the subject.

First, she showed via YouTube the 1957 Warner Brothers short, “Show Biz Bugs.” Afterward, she identified five traits that Daffy Duck exhibited that were included in the DSM IV diagnostic criteria for 301.81, Narcissistic Personality Disorder. They included:

1. Grandiose sense of self-importance

Daffy: “Boy! Listen to that! They love me!!” when the audience was actually applauding Bugs Bunny.

Trump: After he and Melania rode down Trump Tower’s golden escalator in June 2015 to announce his run for the presidency, Trump proclaimed that Mexico sends its criminals and rapists illegally across the border, bringing drugs. Trump piñatas began appearing all over Mexico. In July 2015, his “border tour” involved touching down in Laredo “despite the great danger” for all of four hours, long enough to declare that Rick Perry was doing a lousy job as governor and that he will take jobs back from China and Japan and give them to “the Hispanics … they’re going to love Trump (referring to himself in third person)!”

2.   Envious of others

Daffy: “What!? That rabbit’s name over mine!?! I’m the star! I’ll just see about this.” Daffy Duck was looking at a sign advertising Bugs Bunny’s show that listed, in small print, Daffy Duck as a supporting act.

Trump, tweeting June 18, 2013: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?” Trump’s bromance with Russia’s Vladimir Putin belies an intense envy. After all, Putin’s house is bigger than Trump’s; he has more money than Trump; and rules as dictator without challenge from a pesky media.

3.   Sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

Daffy: Yelling to his cab driver after being driven one block, “Twenty-five cents!? It’s robbery, but I’ll pay it! But you get no gratuity. It’s enough that you’ve had the honor of having a celebrity like me in your cab!”

On numerous occasions, Trump allegedly asked former FBI Director James Comey and high-ranking national security and intelligence officials to drop the investigation of Michael Flynn’s ties with the Russians.

4.   Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people

Daffy: After performing, Daffy receives no applause from the audience. He becomes furious, shouts “Ingrates!” and storms off the stage.

Trump: Rather than universal gratitude when he fired Comey, he got universal outrage, prompting him to tweet: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.” Then his own Department of Justice informs him they’ve appointed a special counsel to lead the investigation into his campaign ties with Russia. He tweets: “With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel (misspelled) appointed!” And “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”

5.   Requires excessive admiration

Daffy: Performing numerous tricks to gain the admiration of the audience, he danced an elaborate tap routine, trained pigeons to walk tightropes, tried to sabotage Bugs Bunny’s fame by putting TNT in his xylophone, and finally, blowing himself up with a mixture of uranium, nitroglycerine, gunpowder and gasoline. He finally received massive applause for this final act.

Trump staged a post-election victory tour and gloatfest.

I’m not diagnosing Trump with narcissism, just comparing his cartoonish traits with those of Daffy Duck. The difference is, Daffy is lovable.

Nurse practitioner Naomi Warren provides primary care for hundreds of devoted patients in McLennan County, one of 220 counties in Texas designated as medically underserved.

While Congress proved incompetent to improve health care, Texas legislators have a golden opportunity right now to dramatically increase access to care. How? By substantially increasing the number of primary care providers. And … it wouldn’t cost a dime.

We’ve got a real problem here. According to The Commonwealth Fund, in 2015 Texas ranked dead last regarding access to and affordability of health care, a shortage of providers being a leading cause. Thirty-five counties have no physician and of Texas’ 254 counties, 220 are considered medically underserved, according to federal data. That leaves 20 percent of Texans — 4.6 million people — without access to a primary care provider.

Bills introduced this session by Sen. Kelly Hancock (R-North Richland Hills) and Rep. Stephanie Klick (R-Fort Worth) could very well pull us out of the ditch. Senate Bill 681 and House Bill 1415 would deploy thousands more advanced practice registered nurses by removing the physician supervision requirement.

First, some context. Advanced practice registered nurses have been around since the 1960s — nurse practitioners (who provide primary care), certified registered nurse anesthetists, certified nurse midwives and clinical nurse specialists. In the 20th century, when doctors were usually men and nurses usually women, doctors staked out ownership of providing primary care, and legislatures inexplicably enabled them.

But nurse practitioners are exquisitely educated, trained and prepared to provide primary care. Dozens of studies throughout the decades demonstrate nurse practitioners provide primary care on par with physicians, having as good or better patient outcomes. They also score higher in communication.

While almost all states have evolved past physicians’ irrational oppression of nurses, Texas remains among a handful of states that restrict their practice.

As part of a legislative compromise for independent practice in 2013, advanced practice nurses were required to obtain a doctor to sign a document agreeing to supervise their work. Under these agreements, physicians don’t see nurses’ patients, audit 10 percent of their charts and don’t even have to live in the same city. The contract agreements are extremely costly, from $20,000 to more than $100,000 per year according to a Dallas Morning News editorial, effectively pricing the practitioners out of Texas.

Four years out from the pay-to-play requirement, we see advanced practice nurses — who are educated in Texas at taxpayer expense and want to stay in Texas — flocking to 21 other states that don’t restrict practice, including all that border Texas. Heck, the New Mexico Legislature recently appropriated money for an advertising campaign to recruit them!

SB 681 and HB 1415 would end the brain drain. We’ve got around 15,500 nurse practitioners practicing here, but we could have thousands more. The bills would also end the Texas Board of Medicine having any regulatory authority over nurses.

The notion of physicians supervising and regulating advanced practice nurses in any way is, in a word, outrageous. Advanced practice nurses are educated and trained by nurses, regulated by nursing, licensed by nursing and governed by nursing. Nursing and medicine are separate professions, and no other health profession is partially regulated by medicine.

Who opposes the bills? Despite the appearance of conflict of interest, the Texas Medical Association cites patient safety as the concern. Yet not a scintilla of evidence exists from states where nurses practice independently that patients are at risk. This is the same organization that produced a workforce report saying that by the year 2025, Texas would be short 10,000 doctors. You’d think they would want the help.

A broad coalition of 20 organizations has formed to support the legislation including AARP, the Texas Association of Business and think tanks that normally oppose each other — the Center for Public Policy Priorities and the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

If every single nurse practitioner and family doctor were deployed, Texas still could not meet the need for primary care, as the growing demand far outstrips the supply. If SB 681 and HB 1415 become law, Texas could keep the advanced practice nurses it educates and could recruit advanced practice nurses from other states.

Frank wrote about her friends being rounded up, placed in cattle cars and taken to camps to be gassed. Now, for the first time since reading her book, I’m feeling the same quickened heartbeat, horror and fear, but this time for our Latin American immigrants. Thanks to our new president, these “bad hombres,” “bad dudes” are being rounded up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arrested and deported to countries they may not know, countries with gangs and extreme poverty.

Feb. 11, 2017 raid

And what a sloppy job ICE is doing. Supposedly, only the most dangerous, violent criminals are targets. Yet in the February raid, according to ICE data 55 percent of the 51 people arrested from the Austin area were non-criminals, and only two had convictions of a violent crime: assault. The majority were merely suspected of being here illegally.

I know these people. Having earned a Spanish degree before becoming a nurse, my charge nurses knew that my favorite families were the monolingual Spanish speakers, so for more than 30 years I got to care for their babies whenever possible.

I loved these recently immigrated families. They were so uncomplicated, so grateful for everything we did for them. They were practicing Catholics with small altars in their homes decorated with a candle, flowers and images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. They did not smoke or drink. They were relatively uneducated and poor, but many of them rich in ways we can only imagine. They loved their babies as much as any other family in neonatal intensive care.

Merida from El Salvador has been a close friend for 25 years. Thirty years ago, she left her three young children with her parents to come to this country to earn money to send back home. She told me of the harrowing ordeal of traversing some 1,200 miles to Texas with a small group of hopeful immigrants led by the “coyote.” She talked about hunger, bad weather and hiding from police and gangs.

Only a desperate person would leave their children and suffer that kind of hardship. They come from places with no opportunity to the land of opportunity to toil and live like paupers so they can send money home. According to the World Bank, in 2015 they sent $67 billion home to lift their families out of poverty.

They pick our fruits and vegetables, clean our toilets, work in hot restaurant kitchens, lay our tile, plant our landscaping, build our buildings. The vast majority of the construction workers I see downtown are immigrants. They work hard. They are dependable and loyal. Ask any employer.

For all the bluster spewing forth from our president, you’d think they were taking our jobs. They are not. They are doing work that Americans don’t want.

And don’t talk to me about their coming here to use our services. The ones I know are too fearful to sign up for Medicaid. When Merida’s body gives out, she will return to El Salvador to enjoy her golden years with her children and grandchildren, who she knows only by telephone. She will not be taking social security nor Medicare.

During hard times in Anne Frank’s post-World War I Germany, the Jews were scapegoated — and murdered. Now, with manufacturing job loss due to automation and globalization, immigrants in our country are being scapegoated — rounded up and deported. Does history really have to repeat itself?

Immigrants are real people, just like you and me. They are here because of simple supply-and-demand economics, and I’m grateful. They have certainly enriched my life.

On a brisk night in October of 1990, many of us had gathered for a hastily called rally for gubernatorial candidate Ann Richards. She was standing on a makeshift stage in the parking lot of the American Civil Liberties Union building on Lavaca Street, across from the Capitol.

We had watched her electric keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, where she proclaimed: “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards in high heels,” so we were excited to see her in person. She talked about issues facing the state with clarity, charm and irreverent, quick-draw quips. But when she got to women’s reproductive rights, she became deadly serious. She told us never to take them for granted, that the day would come when those rights would be under siege.

That seemed far-fetched, but I tucked the scary thought away for a day I hoped would never come.

But here we are.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, by last year more than half the states, mostly in the South and Midwest, are deemed “hostile to abortion” based on number of restrictions.

Not to be outdone by Southern states, nor deterred by last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Texas’ senseless and extreme abortion rules, Texas continues in its tireless, jihadist quest to oppress women by depriving them of abortion services.

It’s interesting how quick our leaders are to hurt poor women. Despite Planned Parenthood’s being indisputably the provider of choice in underserved areas — and despite abortion comprising less than five percent of its services — state health officials moved in December to oust the agency as a Medicaid health provider, a move the agency immediately filed suit to block.

Financially, the effect on the agency would be minimal since only around five percent of its revenue comes from Medicaid. But it would cut 11,000 women from receiving any of its services including birth control and life-saving screenings. Importantly, it would devastate morale, as the people who work there are deeply motivated to help low-income women.

Planned Parenthood has been around for 100 years and is deeply trusted by health care professionals and women of all income levels. My neonatal intensive care co-workers and I have referred countless mothers to the agency.

This session, priority bills are being introduced by the lieutenant governor to prohibit third trimester abortion, ban insurance coverage of abortion and ban abortion providers from donating fetal tissue for medical research. Really? That makes about as much sense as outlawing organ donation.

Another bill would eliminate an exception that allows for third-trimester abortions for fetuses with “severe and irreversible abnormalities” that are incompatible with life outside the womb. And Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, has proposed a constitutional amendment “guaranteeing the right to life of unborn children and prohibiting abortion to the extent authorized under federal constitutional law.” I guess the senator hasn’t heard which way Roe v. Wade went.

Facts, science and reason — endangered concepts — do not support legislators’ assault on abortion. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the abortion rate has fallen to well below the 1973 rate when abortion was illegal and Roe v. Wade decided. So, what’s the point?

On Jan. 20, a confidence man who bragged about assaulting women will be inaugurated as the U.S. president. The day after, tens of thousands of us will gather on the south grounds of the Capitol at noon to demonstrate that the right of women to freely decide whether and when to have children is important. As Ann Richards said, we’ve got to fight to keep our rights from being taken away.

The president of the United States must be a person of virtue and talent who can speak clearly to the American people and set a standard of ethics and moral leadership. The president must be able to win the admiration and confidence of the country, to speak to the people with a clear, unifying voice to alert us of danger as well as opportunity — and all too often to console us. The president is our face, our voice to the rest of the world.

Town Hall presidential debate, Oct. 9, 2016

Our political system with its three coordinate branches of equal powers is brilliant. In The Politics of Hope, Arthur Schlesinger wrote (page 9): “Only strong Presidents have been able to overcome the tendencies toward inertia inherent in a system so cunningly composed of checks and balances.”

But it’s a tough job. In America and Americans (page 46), John Steinbeck wrote in 1966 — when a female president was unimaginable — “We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up …. He is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.” A dark interpretation, but it certainly contains truths. Presidents must have a tough skin and extraordinary resilience.

Until this election cycle, presidential election campaigning has maintained a certain decorum. Primary debates had been for the most part substantive — opportunities to get to know the candidates and their positions. The Democratic debates were like that this cycle.

But the Republican debates were nasty, name-calling affairs that bottomed out when a sitting U.S. senator, Florida’s Marco Rubio, insulted the genitalia size of an opponent, who took the bait. The debate audiences were just as bad. The nastier the primary debate got, the louder and more raucous the audience became, cheering on their favorite as if attending a world wrestling smackdown.

The tawdry spectacles ultimately produced Donald Trump as their nominee, a man who brags about sexually assaulting women and keeps proving himself over and over again to be a racist, sexist, rude and crude, cruel, ignorant, arrogant, name-calling, self-serving, inconsistent, undisciplined, hot-tempered, inarticulate and impulsive extremist with no vocal filter and no respect for the truth. Not to mention the unpresidential comb-over.

I watched the Republican primary debates, the Republican convention and Sunday’s debate through my fingers feeling like I had come upon a terrible wreck and shouldn’t gawk.

I’m not surprised that there are men like him; we all grew up with a few of his ilk. They were called bullies. I am totally surprised, though, that so many of my fellow Americans — nearly half the electorate — believe that such a nasty character is suited for the office of the presidency.

Our society seems to have undergone a cultural shift where we’ve lost our sense of reverence and decorum. What happened? The anonymity of the internet has surely contributed. Alone in front of computer screens, people can say ugly things they would never say out loud in public or private.

In the evening, do families spend too much time in front of a television, perhaps watching violence, gore and gunplay? Do children see their parents reading books? Do children get the message that education and intellect are valued?

I wonder if Trump supporters feel the promise of America has left them behind. If so, how can electing a confidence man make things better?

I don’t believe that the cultural shift we’ve undergone is permanent and irreversible. I want to believe that one day we will get back to respecting one another and the office of the presidency.

Even worse, my fellow Americans loved him. Filling the debate venues, raucous mobs drowned out the moderators. His vote tally as of June 7 was 13.3 million according to the Wall Street Journal.

Amusement turned to shock, leaving me disgusted and investors and the rest of the world fearful. Disgust gradually slid into a gloom that turned me into a real scrooge. Just ask my husband Ian.

Then out of the blue, a Golden Retriever named Bretagne threw me a rope and pulled me out of the darkness.

Of the 300 9/11 search dogs, the last survivor known living died June 6 in the Houston suburb of Cypress.

Bretagne (pronounced “Brittany”) was just shy of her 17th birthday. Let’s take a look at this great American’s life.

Bretagne at 9 weeks

When Denise Corliss, a volunteer firefighter with the Cy-Fair Fire Department, sought a special dog to train for disaster work, she picked a precocious 8-week-old puppy who had pushed her way through the litter from the back of the kennel to greet her. At 12 months of age, she and Corliss began formal training with Texas Task Force 1 to become a canine team certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Bretagne was two years old when they were called to Ground Zero for their first deployment. Corliss told Tom Brokaw in a 2014 interview that when she first saw the massive twisted steel beams, concrete and ash where the World Trade Center once stood, it took her breath away, dashing her hopes of rescue. But young Bretagne went straight to work digging through the rubble to find human scent. With an eye always on her trainer, she worked 12-hour shifts for 10 days.

Before long, Corliss discovered something unexpected: Bretagne was sensitive to the expressions of the rescuers. She knew which one needed comfort. The grieving NYFD firefighters would hold her close and stroke her fur as they shared their personal stories describing the missing friends, loved ones and colleagues for whom they searched. Bretagne had become a therapy dog.

Nearly a dozen deployments followed to disasters including Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. At age 9, Bretagne retired from search work and became a goodwill ambassador. Each week she would visit an elementary school near her home, mingling with special needs students and serving as a reading assistance dog. Children, otherwise intimidated to read aloud, would read to her.

Bretagne (foreground) swimming in pool with sibling Aid’N

At age 13, she began experiencing so much stiffness and joint pain that she could no longer climb the stairs in her home. Corliss installed an above-ground pool in her backyard and helped Bretagne swim in it for at least 10 minutes a day. She took daily walks around a pond, where she chased squirrels and ducks. Soon she was able to climb the stairs again.

She drew worldwide media attention in August 2015 as the Big Apple threw her a Sweet 16 birthday bash, complete with an illuminated billboard in Times Square and the dedication of a cobblestone in her honor on the plaza of the 9/11 Memorial.

Lately, Bretagne’s kidneys began to fail, slowing her down. When she stopped her favorite thing — eating — for three days, Corliss knew it was time to say goodbye.

They arrived at Fairfield Animal Hospital to find dozens of uniformed search and rescue workers and volunteer firefighters lining both sides of the walkway, standing erect as they solemnly saluted. Her trainer’s husband tenderly lifted Bretagne out of their car and gently placed her on the ground. Corliss led the dog on her final walk. With head lowered, she wagged her low-slung tail slowly and paused once to look up at the sky.

After about 30 minutes, Bretagne was solemnly carried from the office in a casket draped with a folded American flag as the service men and women bid a tearful farewell, still saluting. She was transported in formal procession to Texas A&M University in College Station where she would undergo an autopsy as part of a long-running study of 9/11 search dogs.

Denise Corliss and Bretagne at Ground Zero

Even in death Bretagne serves as therapy dog. She made America great again for me.

The companies found the ordinance unacceptable. How did they deal with it? The same way they’ve bullied regulators around the world. Here, they circulated a recall petition to oust the council member who worked hardest on the ordinance, Ann Kitchen, and they actually wrote their own ordinance that we will vote on May 7.

Really? If Uber doesn’t like our law they write their own?

Hey, I want to be Uber. The proletariat can vote on which ordinance they want, but not until I’ve aired TV and radio ads and flooded them with constant mailings of large, color, glossy fliers giving the impression that a “for” vote is for us to stay in town, or a for vote is for criminal background checks of drivers; an “against” vote is for a “city takeover.” That’ll scare ’em.

The elderly woman in an Uber flier bears a striking resemblance to Hallmark’s Maxine character.

And I’ll bet the younger folks got a big kick out of my flier that depicted an elderly woman as Hallmark’s Maxine. Haha. They love me!

And I organized a political action committee recruiting my drivers to lobby for me. We call them “peers.” It’s heart-warming, but strange that they’re so passionately loyal to me. After paying for their own gas, car maintenance and car insurance — and my capturing 20 percent of their fares — they’re barely earning minimum wage a lot of the time! Some call it labor exploitation, but they seem to like it, and the genius is since they contract and are not my employees, I’m not accountable or responsible for them! The peers don’t even seem to know I’m working on driverless cars to replace them.

These Austin folk, on the other hand, they’re trouble. I think their intelligence quotient may be higher than the other cities I’ve manipulated. Hell, it’s cost me north of $10 million. If these smarty-pants remember the fox guarding the henhouse proverb before they vote, I may be done for. Hopefully they won’t figure out until after the election that a vote “for” Prop 1 is a vote for my ordinance and that a vote “against” Prop 1 is to stick with the city ordinance.

Help me brainstorm here about the three sticking points in the city’s ordinance that really burn my bacon:

•      Fingerprinting — This comes up in every city I go into, and I’m getting pissed off about it. There’s nothing wrong with my method where the applicant gives me his or her or someone’s name that we can run a criminal background check on. Alleged sexual assaults by our drivers are giving us a bad name, dammit, not to mention that jerk in Kalamazoo who went around randomly killing six people, picking up fares between shootings.

Thing is, fingerprinting, if done by that outfit that Texas contracts with, IdentoGO (what kind of name is that?!), would cost $42 per driver. $42 here, $42 there, pretty soon you’re talking real money. The pesky media, they say I’m worth around $50 or $60 billion, but hey, I can’t afford fingerprinting while I’m trying to get my initial public offering going.

•      Distinctive emblem — I can’t afford that either. Taxis have visible emblems, but they’re oh so old-school. We’re cool and don’t need the hassle. Besides, I’d rather passengers have to hunt around for our drivers. Although I will say Lyft’s pink mustache was almost cute.

•      Blocking a travel lane — What’s the problem with loading and unloading passengers in a travel lane? It’s not as if this town is congested or anything. If they knew it was Uber, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind the delay.

Thank you for letting me talk through all this ridiculous falderal. Clearly, the city is harassing us. If you like the ordinance I wrote prohibiting those annoying requirements, then vote for Prop 1 — my ordinance. If you want to get all nanny-state about it and stick with the city’s ordinance, then vote against Prop 1, my ordinance. But if you do, I’m warning you, I may gather my marbles and go home. Or not. I’ve made a pretty penny here.