2010 RI NOW PAC Endorsements

Here are the Rhode Island National Organization for Women PAC endorsements.

(Please note that all the candidates in this post are 100% on RI NOW's issues in addition to the highlights I'm covering here.)

Campaigns I've been volunteering for :

Betsy Dennigan (National NOW endorsement):
Betsy Dennigan is an emergency nurse and attorney who is running for national office in District 2.  She is an able and worthy candidate and is focusing on healthcare, education, and stimulating the fishing industry and green industries in Rhode Island.  I've written several posts about her on this blog already.

Angel Taveras
 A strong progressive candidate for Providence, Angel is focusing his mayoral platform on housing, which the city certainly needs, and environmental issues, including municipal composting, which  I worked on back in 2008 (cut to terribly-kept old blog) with David Mittelman in congruence with Andy Posner of the Capital Good Fund.  I am sure that Andy will be invested in helping guide Angel through the process of finding sufficient land, finding staff, dealing with the NIMBY'd nature of gentrification within Providence, etc. He also wants to fix zoning laws, which, after having worked for the Census, I can see is a huge problem in the city.  The difference between commercial and residential zoning has really affected cost of living, making rent far too high downtown and turning Providence into a ghost town after business hours.  Providence needs a mayor who will actually help uncover and remove deep-seated problems, and I think Angel's capable of doing so.

Therese Caron
A criminal defense lawyer, Therese is a fighter for justice.  She is an advocate and self-identifies as a feminist.  She is the lesser-known Progressive face in the race for the District 2 Representative seat vacated by David Segal, but she will make up for it by working twice as hard in office.   While I would support either Therese or Chris in office, as I know them both personally, Therese's story especially appealed to me.  She was been a public defender for twelve years, and now works with helping low-income people in difficult situations.  She decided to run for Segal's seat when she found out it was vacated--after he announced it--on the basis that her daughter was in high school and therefore old enough to handle the time commitment that Therese would invest in the Representative position.  Therese is a true Rhode Islander, and I think she would serve her district well in office if elected.

Politicians I've met with or otherwise support:
Chris Blazejewski
Gina Raimondo
Theresa Tanzi

Skimming the Surface of the State of the Union

I'm pretty sure that despite Obama's lofty goals with health care, there will continue to be problems that plague the way our system works, and the way the American people react to it.
For instance, this article about co-payments with health insurance.  It makes complete sense that people will reduce the number of trips that they make to the doctor if their copay is too large, causing their well-being to snowball into more serious conditions and leading to large and unmanageable hospital bills.

I do not understand why people cannot comprehend the importance of education's impact upon healthcare.  The two are inherently intertwined.  Too much of self-care has been left to families, and only the most severe medical threats are taught in schools.  Drugs, AIDS, and sexual consequences are usually stressed in health education, if a school is well-funded enough to have such a program, but there is an overwhelming negligence toward health maintenance and truly caring for oneself.  This, my friends, is a problem.  It is all related.  By depreciating the value of health to the benefit of "more important" school subjects (read: subjects that will be present in state tests), health and education about illnesses, up to and including mental illnesses, become forgotten or forsaken.  There is so much of an emphasis upon rushing, upon competition, in American society, that health falls to the wayside, and Americans then pay for it, in volumes and multitudes.

Here is an article about an educational radio show in Spanish that is currently broadcast in Rhode Island on Wednesday mornings at 9.  This is the sort of program that I think would be effective-- it reaches not only those who can read, and can read in English, but it also allows for interaction between patients and doctors on important topics that can be embarrasing to raise with one's physician in person.  I hope that this program fosters others that can become even more successful and use media that are easily accessible to a large number of uninformed, hard-working, and treasured citizens of the United States.

Take care.