Health

Why I Had an Abortion and Why I Published an Editorial

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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.

Health

Stop the Food Fight! Coming Together for a Healthier America

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How can anyone oppose Michelle Obama’s campaign to combat the childhood obesity epidemic by educating children about healthy eating and exercise? How can anyone not rejoice about recent changes in USDA policies that will make school lunches healthier? Wouldn’t most people agree that it would be a positive thing to use government subsidies to encourage the production of healthy foods and sustainable agriculture, instead of the opposite? As Mark Bittman wrote in the New York Times this week:
Agricultural subsidies have helped bring us high-fructose corn syrup, factory farming, fast food, a two-soda-a-day habit and its accompanying obesity, the near-demise of family farms, monoculture and a host of other ills. Yet – like so many government programs – what subsidies need is not the ax, but reform that moves them forward.

Health

Senator Bingaman Dishes on Health Care Reform

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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
[youtube: video=”ULiCbr-s9pI”]

The transcript follows below:
RACHC: We all know about the “death panels.” Can you tell us some other aspects of the health care reform bill, ones that are maybe a little more real? Senator Bingaman: Well the health care reform bill, I think, is a very major benefit for us in New Mexico.

ESRA

Have You Heard About the "Manhattan Declaration?"

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Rabbi Lerner, in his recent post, alerted readers of Tikkun Daily to two pieces of policy legislation introduced in Congress this week: the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment and the Global Marshall Plan. Both aim at creating a more caring society. In direct contrast to the humanitarian agenda of the interfaith Religious Left articulated in those initiatives stands the exclusionary and divisive agenda of the specifically Christian Right, as exemplified by the Manhattan Declaration (2009). The authors of the Declaration describe themselves as a coalition of “Christian leaders known for their public witness on behalf of justice, human rights, and the common good,” yet they are motivated by what they see as “growing efforts to marginalize the Christian voice in the public square, to redefine marriage, and to move away from the biblical view of the sanctity of life.” While the “sanctity of human life,” “marriage,” and “religious liberty” are ideals that most people support, an exclusionary and anti-democratic political agenda clearly underlies the Manhattan Declaration.

Empathy

The Peril of Good Intentions Without Understanding What's Needed

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We had an email last week from an American physician and writer who is volunteering in rural Borneo. She wrote asking for an online subscription to Tikkun because Michael Lerner’s book “Jewish Renewal is one of the few precious books I carried here in my suitcase, and it is truly invigorating to me, a passionate religious liberal who is hungry for Yiddishkeit yet disappointed by much of the thinking that goes on in modern synagogues.” I asked her if she might be interested in writing some of her experiences for this blog and she sent this wise post about the problems of giving without an adequate understanding of what is needed. She blogs regularly at lowresourcemedicine.blogspot, where, to minimize potential problems for both herself and her NGO, she goes by Dr. Jenny. The road to hell and the privilege of volunteering
By Dr. Jenny
An odd little encounter in our rural Indonesian nonprofit clinic yesterday made me think more about the consequences of volunteering.

General News

"Sovereign Citizens:" The Right Wing Hate Group Behind the Attack on a Jewish Congresswoman?

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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.”

Health

Biologically Inherited PTSD?

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It should be impossible, shouldn’t it? But now it’s looking possible and some researchers think they have found evidence of it. A major milestone in the development of evolutionary science was the defeat of the idea held by evolution’s first great theorist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829), that offspring could inherit the characteristics that their parents had acquired during their lifetimes. This was before it was worked out that biological inheritance works through genes and the language of DNA. While your DNA can be damaged, there is nothing you and your mate can do to otherwise change the genes you pass on to your biological kids.

General News

Scanning the Scanners

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One month ago I drank some extremely noxious laxatives, and went into a small room where a man stuck a camera up my rectum and took a series of photos. It was an invasive and unpleasant procedure, one which I repeat every five years, thanks to advice from my doctor and two friends who have survived colon cancer. I’d rather have a colonoscopy than colon cancer. Whether I want to go through a similar procedure every time I take an airplane is a related question, one we may face in our immediate future. The path that leads to that hypothetical question starts with a media scan of the new TSA (Transportation Security Association) scanners and the policy that comes with them..

Education

A globalization of ‘best practice’?

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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?