For years, Rio Arriba County has been the butt of jokes about its high overdose death rates and its supposed lack of coordination between providers. But on August 25, over 350 people showed up at my office (a huge crowd for a working day in Espanola!) to celebrate our town’s health care reform success. (More)

I have been trying to counter the planned negativity promoted by Fox News and corporate interests by standing up to it at every opportunity. Bullying tactics are only effective if individuals allow themselves to be bullied en masse. When specific individuals refuse to be bullied in a public manner, they lessen the effectiveness of the intimidation. The time to stand up is in the beginning, before the bullies completely delegitimize the rule of law.

This week, I stood up to the bullies in two small ways that I would like to share in the hopes that others will follow suit or (even better!) improve upon them: I told my favorite Congressman at a town hall that I disagreed with his sudden unexpected choice to address substance abuse and mental illness as a law enforcement issue; and I wrote a letter to our local newspaper defending this same Congressman from a writer who compared him to Hitler.

If you have followed my recent posts, you know that I believe the recent right-wing push towards extreme bigotry and hate-mongering is a sign of desperation. America’s demography is changing. it is growing younger and browner. At the same time, population is shifting from the northeast and midwest, to the so-called sunbelt: states with large Hispanic population.

The Bush regime recognized the growing importance of the Hispanic vote, and worked aggressively to reach out. Today’s Republican party has been siezed by right wing sycophants such as Beck, Gingrich, Limbaugh and Palin, and has eschewed policy entirely in favor of race-baiting.

We simply cannot let them win.

I live in Espanola, New Mexico, a town of 9,000 people, mostly Hispanic and Native American, with a lot of churches but without a Jewish synagogue. I live in an agrarian mestizo community: most of my neighbors are of mixed Spanish and Native American descent dating from the arrival of Juan de Onate in the 16th century. Leaders in my community worry about passing their cultural heritage on to the next generation in the face of industrial encroachment. Rio Arriba County reminds me of Israel at the time of Akiva, immediately preceding the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.

Although I invited my Hispanic Rio Arriba colleagues to my son’s Bar Mitzvah, none came. Many of my more urbane Hispanic friends in Santa Fe were present. They lived in “the city.” Many had moved away for college and then returned. They were familiar with Jews. I wish I could explain the significance of the B’nai Mitzvah to my struggling agrarian friends. It has helped the Jewish people to maintain our identity in exile for thousands of years.

As the Progressive movement has grown, we have become increasingly proficient at influencing the passage of legislation. We’ve learned to place strategic calls and ads as bill move through committee. We’ve learned about reconciliation and other parliamentary procedures. We have pushed stimulus funding, a health care reform bill, and a financial regulatory reform bill over the legislative finish line. But alas! we are still a nascent movement. And as such, we have not learned to attend to the details of the regulatory process AFTER our bills are passed.

Immigration policy and the Hispanic vote have been a point of contention for Republicans since the beginning of the 21st century. President Bush, to his credit, attempted to pass an immigration policy that would have allowed a guest worker program (and incidentally, broadened the GOP tent), but was stymied by right wing elements in his own party. The strategy was inspired by shifting Congressional demographics and, had Bush succeeded, he might have delivered Republican control of Congress for decades.

Demagogues like Rush Limbaugh who rely on an openly racist base for ratings won the day. The party narrowed and took a sharp turn to the right.

In 2008, Julio Diaz retrieved his wallet from a mugger by taking the man to lunch. Meanwhile, a cat in the Amazon rainforest lures its prey by crying like a baby monkey.

Coincidence?

Having infuriated Democrats with her astonishing loss of Ted Kennedy’s long-held Senate seat to a suburban truck-drivin’ pin-up populist, Martha Coakley is back. But this time she’s racking up a series of impressive legal victories for liberals. She has won a $102 million dollar settlement against Morgan Stanley, taken on insurance companies for paying hospitals based on political clout rather than quality, and successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Athough unchallenged by the GOP in her November race for Attorney General, Coakley is campaigning vigorously. Could she be positioning herself to recapture the MA Senate seat from Scott Brown for the Dems? Is this the real Martha Coakley? Or both?

I am beginning to wonder if perhaps Obama was right to tackle health care reform as a first initiative. It is difficult to find health care issues to write about these days…our mainstream and alternative media are rightly wrapped up in the crises of the day, the Gulf oil spill disaster, the Afghanistan War and high unemployment rates. Of these, at least two are directly tied to our inability as a nation to confront Big Oil. Frustrated with tepid Congressional efforts to stem the oil tide, I decided to take a small step to wean myself off of oil. I began cooking locally available food: weeds!

Several gems designed to strengthen communities’ ability to define local systems of care are buried deep within the bowels of HCR. These provisions encourage community coalitions composed of health care providers, patients and other stakeholders to design innovative strategies for meeting their own unique health care needs. Instead of trying to impose a boilerplate solution to what has become a chaotic patchwork of local capacities and vulnerabilities, the community health coalition approach encourages creative, bottom-up solutions to our nation’s pressing problems. And it builds communities’ political power to advocate for future reform.

I’d like to present you with a treasure map.

Too bad there isn’t a Nobel Prize for news reporting.

If there were one (and nominations were accepted from people like me), I would nominate Rachel Maddow. She has reinvented broadcast news, and completely redefined reporting.

Camino de Paz Team

In May of 2010, a group of northern New Mexico middle school students helped to train the 2nd 45th Agricultural Development Team of the Oklahoma National Guard techniques of organic permaculture farming. The youngsters showed troops how to milk goats, clean eggs and care for bees in preparation for their deployment to Afghanistan in September, 2010. The three week training was coordinated by the Pojoaque, NM-based Permaculture Institute.

These children from my community are the only youngsters who have ever trained US troops.

“Hey, look at this!” I shouted to my husband, early one morning a few weeks ago. “Ian’s on the front page of the Huffington Post!”

Ian is my oldest brother. According to family lore, he went to school in France as an exchange student at 16. He then entered Friends World College where, after listing his interests as French, totalitarian government and oceanography, he was dispatched to Haiti on a fishing boat. He earned graduate degrees in oceanography in Oslo, Norway and then spent an indeterminate amount of time building fish hatcheries throughout the third world, traveling, or both. He is fluent in English, Creole, French, northern and southern Norwegian and Italian. Eventually, he became an expert in the impacts of oil on Gulf ecosystems.

“He says BP is lying about the size of the spill,” I said as Richard brought me my coffee.

I just ran across this peculiar tale of IRS-love in the New Mexico Independent. It seems that a group of Albuquerque seniors decided to wage a rally in support of the IRS after learning it was targetted for a Tax Day tea-party protest.

Tea partiers are saying they actually like the IRS and were holding an unrelated rally in a different spot. I guess the school-loving, sidewalk-hugging grannies and gramps must be suffering from Alzheimers…

Cross-posted as a Morning Feature at Daily Kos.

Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other luminaries are skewering Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) for crowing about his insertion of a new IRS rule into the Health Care Reform Bill after first voting against HCR. Because he has publicly mocked and blocked HCR (along with other Repubs), and because the importance of his new rule is only appreciated by hospital financing aficianados, his announcement had the loft of a lead comforter.

I love Rachel Maddow. I wake up every weekday at 5:00 am to her podcasts. And I am no fan of Chuck Grassley. But I am ecstatic about the Grassley rule. You will be too, once you understand it.

If you’re like me, you stayed glued to your computer Sunday watching every last hurled insult and suspenseful motion to recommit. You had trouble understanding why a faceless Republican (who was eventually discovered to be Randy Neugebauer from Lubbock, TX) called Stupak a “baby killer” and why Dems seemed happy Stupak’s motion had passed.

If you were like me, you were engaged in life’s other duties for several hours, didn’t know Stupak had reached an agreement with the President and had no idea that his motion to recommit (or whatever) was actually a motion to bring HCR to the floor for a vote.

You eventually exulted with the Democrats and thumbed your noses at sulking Repubs without being quite sure exactly what had happened. Parliamentary procedure is a labyrinthian sport.

Sunday was historic. The bill that eventually passed without a single Republican vote was a Republican bill in many ways, modeled after Mitt Romney’s public-private Massachusetts hybrid. It was not the government takeover I had hoped for. In fact, as many have noted, the bill mandates that all Americans purchase private policies without providing us the option of publicly offered insurance. So why are some packs of teabaggers waving signs threatening Representatives with gun violence over health care reform while others hurl racial or homophobic epithets at Congressmen?

News of progress on health care reform is breaking like a tsunami throughout the Blogosphere.

In the past, industry lobbyists, able to rely, on their ability to lurk in shadowy back room secrecy, cut deals with Senators that sucked the lifeblood from our public sector. The public was locked out of the black box. We had no understanding of parliamentary procedure, no ability to influence it, no say in the process. Congress was like a kitchen overrun by cockroaches. The Sugar Pops belonged solely to them.

The internet has enabled average Americans to break open the Congressional black box. We are able to observe procedure. We know who the parliamentarian is, what he does, why it matters. We can initiate public action at the drop of a dime. Four years ago, who could have imagined an overnight calling campaign in support of “the self-executing rule?”

This is why I am taking a brief break from meaningful spiritual dialogue to bring you Senatorial minutae. I think I know why James Joyce an entire chapter of Ulysses to a description of Leopold Bloom enjoying his morning crap.

Plug your noses!

The delightfully wacky HCR (Health Care Reform) circus caravan rolls on.

As of March 11, 41 Senators had either signed or issued statements of support for a letter to Harry Reid initiated by Alan Grayson and the PCCC urging passage of the Public Option through reconciliation. For the first time, the Public Option is looking like a very real possibility.

Only three Dems have come out absolutely opposed (not including Liebermenace who, perhaps as a ploy to reinvigorate his flagging attentometrics, is playing coy). The Dems can lose up to six fence-nesters and still pass the Public Option. “And how,” you might be tempted to ask, “has Alan (The-GOP-healthcare-plan-is-die-soon) Grayson, an outspoken House Freshman, managed to get 41 Senators to support his letter despite White House efforts to back-burner the entire endeavor?”

Simple! The PCCC conducted a series of statewide polls demonstrating tremendous support for “socialized Medicine” among Democratic and Indie voters!

Gotta luv that guy! Maybe Rahm should try to twist his arm in the shower. Or at least poke him in the chest.

Can right wing over-exuberance in the face of their Massachusetts victory have spurred the sudden and vibrant revival of healthcare reform? It has risen unexpectedly, like the miraculous victim of a head injury, from its seemingly permanent coma.

But the best part of the story is the identity of the doctor restoring HCR to life: Anthem Blue Cross! Who says insurance companies can’t fix healthcare?

Crossposted on The Daily Kos and on AlterNet.

In the months before my mother suffered her first obvious psychotic break and my family shattered like glass, I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that my brother, sisters and I had been left alone. At six, I was the oldest. My siblings were four, three and one.

It was the first time I was called to political action. It was the moment I realized something in our home was terribly, irretrievably wrong.