MOMocrats™

For Earth Day: Backyard Gardening Tips from the White House Kitchen Garden

Home fruit and vegetable gardens are back in fashion, and with good reason. Organic food grown in your own backyard makes the ultimate eco-friendly, locavore meal — it reduces your carbon footprint by decreasing the miles your food travels from the field to your plate to an impressive zero.

An organic food garden also increases the biodiversity of plants in your yard, attracting pollinators (like honeybees) and wildlife, and improving the quality of your soil. And family gardens encourage healthy eating habits by providing a constant source of fresh, healthy food, and give children the chance to learn first-hand where their food comes from, fostering appreciation of plants' role in our environment. 

Last year, First Lady Michelle Obama chose to encourage more Americans to join the earth-friendly home gardening trend by tearing out a piece of the White House's pristine lawn to make room for a White House Kitchen Garden. And the project is still going strong. Just last month, even after a winter of record snows, the White House garden staff were surprised to collect a bumper crop of winter lettuces, greens and peas from beneath simple, inexpensive hoop houses they had erected to extend the growing season:

Go Read It: J.K. Rowling Gets Political, and Ta-Nehisi Coates Honors Confederacy Heritage Month

Many of J.K. Rowling's critics and fans have speculated about what sort of underlying political messages the author might have been trying to send in the Harry Potter series, and whether the fictional heroes and villains she portrays in her fantasy wizarding world have real world models in the form of certain European or American heads of state (MSNBC political pundit Keith Olbermann has said Rowling told him she told really did hide an endorsement of Barack Obama in Book 7).

But this week in The Times, Rowling made a very clear, straightforward political statement in her article, The Single Mother's Manifesto, in which she argues that Britain's conservative Tory Party has a history of cutting programs that help impoverished children and publicly vilifying single parents for political gain -- a history that belies the compassionate conservative image the party is pushing in this year's election. (We all remember how well "Compassionate Conservatism" worked out here in the U.S., right?)

But beyond an astute, passionate analysis of political situation in Britian The Single Mother's Manifesto is a scathing indictment of general Western social attitudes toward struggling single mothers, and a concise call to remember the social consequences societies face when they fail to support the very children and families who most need the help of their community. Trust me: whether or not you pay any attention to the finer points of politics across the pond, if you are a parent who has ever struggled to pay for decent health care, housing, or schooling for your child (or even if you're just a Harry Potter fan who has long wondered what sort of passionate political voice might be hiding under all that allegory) Rowling's manifesto is well worth 15 minutes of your reading time. 

Elsewhere on the web, this week The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates has come up with a brilliant way to honor Confederacy Heritage Month! Wait -- what's that, you say? There's a Confederacy Heritage Month?

Happy Tax Day!

 No, really. Happy Tax Day!

We at MOMocrats get as annoyed as any normal person by the tedious piles of tax paperwork we have to fill out each year to do our social duty. (I mean, seriously: we're a bunch of writers. We have to fill out the Schedule C.) And of course, there are some government programs we are disappointed to see our tax dollars going toward.

But as patriotic Americans, we're also genuinely proud to know that we help pay for many of the public sector agencies and government programs that make this country a better place to live, and so we're happy, on this tax day, to reflect on all the good the hard earned cash we're parting with can accomplish.

Here are some of the things MOMocrats writers actually like paying taxes for:

Julie: I am happy to pay taxes because I know it helps fund schools and I do believe that solid, well-rounded education is a cornerstone of a great culture.

I am happy to pay taxes because I know it helps fund CHIP, and knowing that kids get needed health care is crucial to me.

Need Help Registering Voters Online? There's an iPad App for That.

Or at least, there will be an iPad-compatible mobile application for that, in May, according to Project Vote, which has collaborated with Echo Interaction Group to create software that would help voter registration organizations register applicants to vote over a mobile phone or computer.

Only four U.S. states currently support fully automated online voter registration - Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Project Vote appears to be banking on optimism that more states will soon follow their lead.

There are, of course, a few voter fraud prevention issues posed by online voter registration that must be overcome.

Many states currently allow voters to fill out voter registration forms online, but still require eligible citizens to complete the registration process by printing out the completed forms, signing them by hand, and then mailing them or hand-delivering them to a local voter registration office, in order to ensure that a valid signature is on file for comparison in case the voter's identity ever needs to be verified.

Three Federal Court Rulings You Need to Know About

In the past week, three very important, highly topical rulings related to civil liberties were issued in federal courts. Each of them may affect your life directly, and, depending on whether they stand up to appeal, each may influence the direction of our society for decades to come.

In case you missed the news on these rulings in between the mainstream media's wall-to-wall coverage of Tiger Woods's return to golf and lively discussions of the theoretical proper usage of the word Topeka as a verb meaning "to search for something on the internet," here are the court decisions that I personally wish TV machine were paying a bit more attention to:

Health Reform: It's the Final Countdown

The greatest show on reality television today is on CPSAN. If you're near a TV today, be sure to tune in. In case you need a quick refresher on what is happening today in the House, here is a summary:

Health care reform legislation that would extend health insurance to millions of Americans who are currently uninsured, offer tax cuts to small businesses to help them insure their employees, and prevent health insurance companies from dropping coverage for patients who become seriously ill has already passed with clear majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. The House passed its health care reform bill in back in November; the Senate passed its own version of reform legislation on Christmas Eve.

For the past few months, the main obstacle in the way of putting a final health care reform bill on the President's desk to be officially signed into law has been the task of reconciling the not insignificant differences between those two bills.The process of combining the two versions of health care reform legislation into one bill that would be supported by majorities in both the Senate and the House has been hampered by the Democrats' loss of a seat in the Senate after the death of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, long a champion in the fight for a more affordable, more equitable health care system.

Left with 59 votes out of 100 in the Senate, Democrats have been stymied in their original plans to pass a combined bill quickly by the threat of a Republican filibuster, which would force the Democrats to garner 60 votes (a supermajority) to pass any new bill. After several failed attempts to negotiate with Senate Republicans to try to create a bipartisan version of the bill that would garner a few Republican votes, Democrats have devised a solution that gets around the filibuster problem: The House will pass the Senate version of the bill as-is, which will make the Senate bill eligible to be signed into law. But the Senate has agreed that they will immediately thereafter pass a new piece of legislation that amends their original bill in accordance with compromise proposals outlined by members of the House and the President.

The Senate will use budget reconciliation procedures to pass amendments to their bill, a process which limits what kind of legislative changes the Senate can make, but eliminates the need for 60 votes to overcome a filibuster — instead, the Senate Dems will only need a simple majority of 51.

Today, the House of Representatives will vote on whether to pass the Senate version of the health care reform bill. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has indicated she believes Democrats have enough votes in support of the bill to pass it. Once it passes, the Democrats' new plan to pass health care will be set in motion and is almost certain to succeed.

So if health care reform passage is now almost guaranteed, what about today's vote could possibly be so interesting?

As If You Needed Another Reason to Demand Health Care Reform

The rate of maternal mortality in the United States has doubled since 1987.

That's the latest news on the status of women's health in America, according to a new report issued by the human rights organization Amnesty International.

In the year 2006, for every 100,000 women who gave birth in the United States, more than 13 died from childbirth complications. (In contrast, in our neighbor nation, Canada, only about 7 out of every 100,000 women will die in childbirth.) Two to three American women now die in childbirth every day. Serious but non-fatal health complications during pregnancy and childbirth are also on the rise in the U.S.

A woman in the United States is now more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, or the U.K.

The United States also has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the industrialized world. Yet we spend more on health care per capita than any other nation.

According to the Amnesty International report, 25% of women in the United States do not receive adequate prenatal care. Those American women who lack access to proper prenatal care are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications. Their infants are also more likely to die during or after birth. 

Lack of access to health care is literally killing pregnant women and infants daily, in the wealthiest country in the world. And American women are more likely to die in childbirth now than in the 1980s — not because the quality of our health care knowledge or technology has declined, but simply because a quarter of all pregnant women in the U.S. apparently can't afford to regularly visit a doctor. 

All while Republicans in Congress continue to describe our broken health care system as "The best health care system in the world."

International Women's Day: Celebrate Women

It's International Women's Day. A day to honor women's impact on world history, further the cause of equal rights for women everywhere, and appreciate the women in our own families and communities who make important contributions to our daily lives.

So what are you doing to celebrate?

If you're still looking for something to do, you could hold a dinner party on behalf of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood to raise awareness about the need to improve pregnant women's access to medical care. You could attend a local Join Women on the Bridge event on behalf of Women for Women, an non-profit organization that helps women in war-torn countries escape and recover from the cycle of violence.

You could watch influential women speakers discuss their world-changing work over at the TED blog, or visit WomenCount to read profiles of women running for public office. You could sign Change.org's petition to persuade Congress to pass the International Violence Against Women Act, a bill that would integrate U.N.-recommended measures to prevent violence against women into all U.S. foreign aid missions.

You could donate to organizations that work to empoyer impoverished women and girls, like CARE or Barefoot College. You could send your favorite women International Women's Day ecards through Care2 (and earn credits toward charitable donations that you can later direct to charities that assist women).

If you would like to join a group writing blog posts in honor of International Women's Day, you could join these events hosted by Gender Across Borders and Bloggers Unite.  

Or, you could tell us about the great International Women's Day events you've attended or read about, or point us toward great posts about International Women's Day here in our comment section.

The Other Health Care Reform Protests

This past Sunday, I was watching Meet the Press, and the host of this ostensibly non-partisan political show on the supposedly left-leaning network of NBC, David Gregory, said something that actually made me yell out loud at my television screen.

Gregory was speaking with the Director of the White House Office of Health Reform, Nancy Ann DeParle, about the health care reform legislation currently on the cusp of completion in Congress, and he said, "I'm asking where, where's the evidence that Americans don't want to wait, that they really want to move forward?  The only protests you've seen publicly are on the right in opposition to the bill."

The only protests you've seen publicly are on the right in opposition to the bill, David Gregory said.

And I may, at that point, have channeled Congressman Joe Wilson. 

The only health care reform protests we have seen have been in on the right opposition to the bill? Really, David Gregory? Really?

Because I was at a protest in support of health care reform legislation, right here in St. Louis, Missouri just a few months ago in September. It was a candlelight vigil, actually, to remember the tens of thousands of Americans who die each year because they cannot afford health insurance. 

Celebrate International Women's Day with the White Ribbon Alliance

The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood is an organization working to get women worldwide better access to lifesaving prenatal and childbirth care. Last year, on Mother's Day, we at MOMocrats encouraged our readers to share their own birth and adoption stories to promote the White Ribbon Alliance's Mother's Day Every Day initiative.

This year, we are hoping you will help us spread the word about a new WRA initiative, the White Ribbon Alliance Global Dinner Party. In honor of International Women's Day on March 8th, the White Ribbon Alliance is asking women around the world to hold dinner parties at their own homes and invite their friends to raise money and awareness to reduce maternal mortality. 

Details on the many ways you can participate and suggestions for making your own party a success are available at the WRA website in their Global Dinner Party Guide. If you are planning your own White Ribbon Alliance Global Dinner Party, let us know here in the comments. We'll feature the MOMocrats' own dinner parties — and link to other bloggers' posts about their Global Dinner Party events — in an upcoming post.