Culture

Sabbath Dinner: Cooking With Weeds

By |

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!

General News

How Communities Can Build on Health Care Reform

By |

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. This push was born out of an unusual alliance: career federal bureaucrats who hunkered down in agency basements to wait out the Bush administration, former federal bureaucrats who left their jobs because they could not wait out the Bush administration, local government officials and community leaders began meeting in the middle of the last decade to discuss “outcome driven health care.”

General News

What the Left Should Learn From Fake President Maddow

By |

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. In the days of my youth, news reporting was “objective,” meaning that it was reported from the perspective of a middle-to-upper class white, male, American elder. Reporting was not intended to inspire activism, but rather to support the status quo.

Culture

Schoolchildren Teach Organic Farming to Troops

By |

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. The Oklahoma 2nd 45th Agricultural Development Team is a battalion of guards formed to assist Afghanistan to rebuild the small farm infrastructure indigenous to that country prior to the Soviet invasion and subsequent simultaneous rise of poppy farming and the Taliban.

General News

New Mexico Teaparties Proclaim Love for IRS

By |

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… According to the Independent, members of The New Mexico Alliance for Retired Americans began noticing flyers on bold yellow paper posted throughout Albuquerque’s posh Anglo Northeast Heights neighborhood in the days immediately following the kamikaze strike on the Austin IRS building.

General News

Inside the Black Box: Health Care Reform Optimism

By |

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.

General News

Tickled Blue

By |

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.

General News

Blazing Saddles D.C.-Style

By |

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? On January 19, Scott Brown supposedly rode a wave of public disgust over the Dems’ proposed “Government Takeover of Health Care” (or so the story went) to hand Republicans a 2/5 majority in the Senate.

Judaism

The Teddy Bear Incident

By |

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.