The Houston Chronicle reports that the ubiquitous hacktivist (dis)organization Anonymous is celebrating Halloween by threatening to expose the members of Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico.

My little county, Rio Arriba, in northern New Mexico, has long been overrun by drugs because of this cartel. The guys on the left are not drug kingpins. They are ranchers. And they are seriously put out with the cartels.

Rio Arriba County suffers the highest heroin and polydrug overdose death rates in the US. A few months ago, a beautiful local mountain lake was befouled when a plane flying low to avoid being detected by radar crashed into it, spewing cocaine, fuel, and bodyparts into the water. Nobody knows who was in the plane.

Our rural Hispanic and Native American youth are being systematically plied with drugs by Mexican and Californian gangs to entice them to become mules. We have watched our teen drinking rate creep upward. Children as young as 12 are now addicted to heroin.

I couldn’t be happier that Anonymous has taken on the cartel. However, I wonder if bloggers everywhere will suddenly find themselves targets in a new kind of war. I know how quickly those kinds of wars can sneak up on you.

CROSS-POSTED AT Native American Netroots

by Paul Glover

For ninety-nine years the campaign for universal health coverage has relied on conferences, panel discussions, petitions, and rallies. These vent moral indignation but lack power.  Today, 51 million Americans without medical insurance and 30 million Americans paying for inadequate coverage will not get prompt affordable health care through polite legal means.

That’s because Congress and insurance companies are now significantly owned by multinational investment firms. Thus policy is made in remote boardrooms that maximize profit and minimize people. These stuffed suits and their puppets have no concern for suffering Americans, slick advertisements notwithstanding.

Therefore, to take effective control of medical care, the uninsured and our allies have begun organizing to damage the profitability of insurance investments, while building a new American health system.

The League of Uninsured Voters (LUV) embraces the American tradition of rowdy confrontation that ended slavery, gained votes for women, won the eight-hour workday, pressed for social security, demanded civil rights, secured AIDS funding, and established the nation.

Through LUV, we uninsured take leadership to expand Medicare to all. Liberal campaigns need our initiative, because moral indignation is less powerful than desperation. Richard Kirsch, director of Health Care for America Now said, “We would never want to organize the uninsured by themselves because Americans see the problem as affordability,” according to an AP news article. We 50 million uninsured, though, see the problem as life-or-death.

“[Fred Rogers] is the only human being on TV to whom you would entrust the future of the world.” –Gloria Steinem

When it came to understanding and communicating with people of all ages, Fred Rogers was a genius.

Fred Rogers knew what really made people tick. First, he was a life-long student of human development. Indeed, he studied under some of the best child psychologists and psychiatrists of his time. Second, he had a natural gift for relating to people. Third, and most important of all, he was not afraid to talk with children about the most difficult subjects such as death and divorce. As a result, he helped people of all ages face and surmount their deepest anxieties and fears. This alone makes Fred relevant for today’s world where straight talk about difficult problems is the exception.

In short, Fred was a rare mixture of calm reason, constant reassurance, and never-ending emotional availability. Very few have all three, let alone each to a high degree. I know this for a personal fact. I was not only fortunate to meet Fred on numerous occasions, but to have many discussions with those who worked with Fred’s TV production company. In addition, I have studied his work intensively.

What then if Fred were President? What would he say to reassure Americans in this time of great economic pain and turmoil? While of course none of us know for sure, and I will undoubtedly be accused of putting my words and thoughts into Fred’s mouth, I believe he would say something in the spirit of the following:

Mr G.

Meet Mr. G. He’s been teaching high school in Santa Fe for twenty years.

You might ask,”Is that a neck brace he’s wearing?”

Now that you mentioned it, yes. Mr. G. is wearing a neck brace.

This is the story of how, after an excruciating year of teaching, Mr. G. discovered he’d been standing at the blackboard with multiple neck fractures.

And stage 4 cancer.

He kept teaching until he was unable to stand on his feet.

If the Left is ever to rebuild support for a progressive agenda, we need to persuade more folks to support us. Certainly, we should try to mobilize people who are not currently involved politically, but we should also try to find common ground with people currently on the Right who support a populist economic agenda – those who really should not, on the basis of economic self-interest, be voting Republican, the party of corporate oligarchy.

It’s important to note that when I advocate finding common ground with Republican voters, I do not mean moving to the Center. To the contrary, I mean trying to pull working people who currently vote Republican onto the progressive side by actually generating and working for a Left agenda that they would support. To do this we have to get the focus off of abortion and gay marriage and onto policies that help working and middle class people and their families.

My hope for this strategy deepened this morning, as I read the opening passage of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009) by Bethany Moreton:

In 1999, the Pew Research Center announced the appearance of a new force in American politics. The key to electoral success in the new millennium would lie with a voting bloc that Pew called “Populists.” These voters were largely white Southern mothers, conservative Christians trying to care for families while wages stagnated and public services dried up. They staunchly opposed abortion and gay marriage, but overwhelmingly welcomed government guarantees of higher minimum wages and universal access to health coverage. Pollsters quickly assigned Pew’s Populists a more contemporary moniker: The fate of the nation, they asserted, lay in the hands of the Wal-Mart Mom.

This Sunday, I published an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal North explaining why I terminated a pregnancy at 16. I was inspired by Democratic Representatives Gwen Moore (WI) and Jackie Speier (CA) who stood up on the House floor in the middle of an assault on Planned Parenthood and the definition of rape and described their own decisions to end a pregnancy.

I intend to mail a photocopy of my editorial to the Congresswomen.

I hope every woman who has ever faced this decision will do the same. If we refuse to be intimidated or shamed, then we can’t be intimidated or shamed.

My public response, which appeared in the Journal North on March 6th follows below the jump. (Sorry, I can’t link because I don’t have a paid subscription to the Journal online).

On Thursday, February 17, I received one of the best phone calls of my life.

I wondered who was calling me from the (306) area code. Where was that anyway?

“It’s mrghhtbfxr,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Who?” I asked.

“mrghhtbfxr!” repeated the voice excitedly.

“Who????!!!!!”

It’s River! I’ve found a kidney!” Kitsap River is a Daily Kos blogger. I had been trying to give her a kidney.

I was so happy for River. But I was also so happy for me!

After a year of tests, I had just been confirmed as a match. I was mustering my courage for a SERIOUS TALK with the husband and kids.

Saved by the bell! Now I could keep my kidney without feeling guilty.

Far from being a “job-killing health care law,” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is one of the largest job creation bills New Mexico has seen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. PPACA also contains a number of common sense insurance reforms that take effect immediately. In the exclusive video below, Senator Jeff Bingaman describes some of the most important reforms and what they mean for New Mexico. (Ironically, he was suffering from a cold when I interviewed him.)

Please feel free to share this video with friends who want to know how they will benefit from PPACA

Crossposted on AlterNet

On Saturday January 8, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a 22-year-old man identified as Jared Lee Loughner. Congresswoman Giffords was Arizona’s first Jewish member of Congress. An individual identified as Jared Lee Loughner had recently posted a number of videos on YouTube including one that listed Mein Kampf as a favorite book.

At first glance the videos, which consist of incoherent white text on a black background, appear to be the ramblings of a lone, mentally ill individual. Upon closer inspection however, they spew the rhetoric of an anti-semitic, anti-hispanic, “Christian” right wing confederacy known as “Sovereign Citizens.” This loosely organized, little-known menagerie of militias, miscreants and misfits spawned such violent luminaries as Oklahoma City Bomber Terry Nichols and, more recently, father and son team Jerry and Joseph Kane who gunned down two Arkansas police officers during a routine traffic stop last May.

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been tracking the “Sovereigns” for over a decade.

The Southern Poverty Law Center posted this instructional video on YouTube on November 1, 2010 to assist law enforcement officers to identify potentially violent “freemen” on the highway and to take appropriate precautions when approaching them. The video shows Jerry and Joe Kane mowing down two policemen in cold blood. It also shows Jerry Kane threatening to murder government officials prior to the shooting. This video should be shown to every police officer in America.

We Europeans find a lot of news of the United States in our media. Many of us follow with interest, much puzzlement and relatively little understanding of the posturing, the insults, the exaggerations. Obama doesn’t look much like a socialist to us… But I was hurt the other day by the nameless Republican figure who sneered that Obama was trying to make the US more like Europe – but that Europe was 20 years behind. Behind what?

I believe that we should all be able to cultivate a healthy nationalism, a pride and love of country. But perhaps we all also need to work harder to work our way up the league tables, by learning from each other’s best practice. Take education. The United States objectively has much to learn here; her ‘end of term report’ reads much like my school reports: ‘Could do much better. Needs to try harder.’ (see UNICEF’s “big picture” comparison of the performance of schools in the world’s rich industrialized nations.) The US is close to the bottom of many league tables of school achievement. But who has got it right? Here in Europe, the Finns seem to have got a lot of things right, and apparently they’re rather overwhelmed by the visiting delegations wanting to pick up good tips. But I find that highly encouraging: clearly in some fields, we are getting more ready to look around and see what we can learn from those who seem to be doing better than us.

Last night, Jon Stewart snagged an exclusive interview with President Barack Obama on filibuster reform which the President supports. A few weeks ago, I visited Washington and dropped in on my New Mexico Congressional delegation. Senator Tom Udall shared his thoughts on The Constitutional Option, a rules change he is proposing at the beginning of the next Congress to reform filibuster abuse. My exclusive video interview of Senator Udall on filibuster and health care reform is posted below.

That silent scream you heard, that reverberating vibration that you felt, that disturbance in the force that caused you to pause this past Sunday was me screaming silent screams at my television as I watched debates in several senate races. What is a silent scream? This is when the body and breath tenses as if to scream and rather than releasing a sound, one releases a cleansing breath.

I perform these silent screams so that my family watching the NFL on Sundays do not call 9-1-1 thinking that I have experienced some kind of psychotic break. These debates are enough to make a body want to just hand back one’s sanity. I am a Sabbath-keeping Baptist. I learned to honor the Sabbath from my Jewish friends. Because I write six days a week, I only write on Sundays to take notes during the sermon during worship. So, I cannot accurately name the names of the candidates in the various debates. Perhaps this is a good thing because some of what came out of the mouths of these people is worth writing about only as a source of incredulity.

I could not believe the distortions, the lack of logic, the irrelevancies and the outright nonsense that I heard. But what I really found frustrating was the discussion around health care.

In this last installment of my interview with Bishop Gene Robinson, we discuss interpreting collective story in an inclusive fashion culminating in Gene’s interpretation of Exodus as “The Greatest Coming Out Story Ever Told.”

Feel free to check out the first two installments if you are so moved:
Morning Feature: Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks About Obama and “The Left”
Furthermore! Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks: From Tolerance to Empathy

This diary is dedicated to Father Paco Vallejos, who has facilitated my own journey from tolerance to empathy.

Several weeks ago, I interviewed Bishop Gene Robinson, a leader in the modern civil rights movement for Tikkun Daily. Bishop Robinson, who delivered the inaugural prayer, is the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. You can read the first installment of my interview about Obama and “the Left” here.

Unless you have been blogging at community sites such as Daily Kos and Streetprophets, you probably do not know that a blogger who calls herself Kitsap River needs a kidney.

Some of us contributed to the community quilts Sara R made for River and her husband, CharlesCurtisStanley. For the past year, I have been (somewhat ambivalently) completing requirements necessary to donate a kidney to River. River lives far from me, and even if she lived nearby, she is not someone I would have been likely to cross paths with. We frequent different worlds. Nevertheless, last week, I underwent my first set of blood tests.

The donation center mailed a kit to my local hospital. I fasted and drank a dreadful bottle of orange sugar water. Over a four hour period, I gave up 20 vials of blood and a jar of urine for the cause.

I was surprised by my personal reaction to the tests: I felt suddenly and overwhelmingly guilty.

A few weeks ago, the congregants of Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe were honored by a visit from Bishop Gene Robinson who delivered the evening’s d’Var Torah.

Bishop Robinson is the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. He was invited to Santa Fe as Grand Marshall of the Gay Pride parade. When Rabbi Marvin Schwab learned from a colleague at St. Bede’s that Bishop Robinson might be barred from speaking in an Episcopal Church, he invited him to deliver the Friday Night D’Var Torah at Temple Beth Shalom. I remembered the Bishop from his inaugural prayer. His sermon was an inspiration. After services, my teenage daughter, who had complained incessantly throughout the long drive from Albuquerque about being dragged, dragged to Temple for her brother’s best friend’s eruv bar mitzvah, turned to me and exclaimed, “Oh My God! I’m so glad I came!”

I asked Rabbi Schwab why he had extended the invitation and what he thought the impact would be on our congregation.

I felt that what Gene had to say was important and it was important that the community have a chance to hear it and that Temple Beth Shalom would be a neutral ground where he could speak and say anything he wanted. I think it was great. I think in terms of speaking to tolerance, respect for people as human beings, to see human beings with respect to see beyond some of the nonsense and to see that everyone has a divine spark within them… This was a message that Gene could deliver with eloquence. We are a welcoming congregation. We have members that happen to be homosexual. This was a way of reaffirming for them that they really do have a place within our congregation and the greater community.

Rabbi Schwab lent me the Temple’s DVD recording of the d’Var Torah. The instant I figure out how to upload it to the web, I will embed it in a diary. However, Bishop Robinson was kind enough to grant me this interview for Tikkun Daily. The first installment of the interview, Bishop Robinson on Obama, follows below the break.

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)

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.

• A manager in a failing department store runs to the bathroom and throws up, consumed with the fear of losing her health benefits which, even with COBRA, will cost too much.

• A teacher wakes up multiple nights a week with his whole body clenched, dreading that California’s annual pink slip won’t be retracted this time.

• A factory worker grieves the loss of friendship and socializing at work as much as the lost income.

Very likely everyone reading this knows someone who has recently lost a job. Unemployment is a strange word; defined negatively, it fails to convey the meaning of an often devastating experience (though one that, together, we can mitigate). In a society that has allowed many supportive institutions to atrophy, job loss looms even more menacingly than it would elsewhere. Added to the practical economic blows are wrenching emotional wounds: fear, self-blame, despair, and lowered self-esteem.

The late Cambridge University professor Marie Jahoda (a Jew and former prisoner of the Austrian Fascists) noted in an important 1982 article, that having a job “imposes a time structure on the waking day; it compels contacts and shared experiences with others outside the nuclear family; it demonstrates that there are goals and purposes which are beyond the scope of an individual but require a collectivity.” Unfortunately, for too many, work is the only significant collective activity they have outside the nuclear family.

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?