Tag: Oregon

2016 Primaries: Oregon and Kentucky

Next up in the race to the Summer conventions are Oregon and Kentucky. The primary in Kentucky is for Democrats only and is a closed primary, you must be a Democrat to vote, which gives a slight advantage to Hillary Clinton. It is, however, a tough race to call because a lack of polling. Donald …

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#OregonStandoff has Ended

After 40 days and several hours of negotiation with the last militant, that could be heard on a YouTube livestream, the illegal occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has peacefully ended. The last four holdouts in the armed occupation of a wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon surrendered peacefully Thursday morning, 40 days after the …

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Oregon Terrorist Occupation Enters 2nd Week

The armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by a group of white terrorists from other state has entered its second week with no clear end in site. The FBI, who took over operations, has so far done nothing, allowing these heavily armed men freedom to come and go as they please and destroy …

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Improving Transgender Health Care

There has been a slew of stories lately on the medical front concerning treatment of transgender people by medical professionals, emanating from Ohio, Washington, Oregon, California and Massachusetts.

To quote one of the authors of the pieces I shall link to:

There has been a long history of lack of access to basic healthcare and systematic discrimination for transgender people.

–Pat Magee, MSW, for Rage Monthly

Seven stories on the other side.

My Niece is Missing

“God didn’t make garbage.”

Leahnora Isaak identifies as a transsexual woman.  She is also a Mormon.  She is attempting to gain recognition from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints so that she can live her life…inlcuding worship…as a woman.  She says she will be filing a formal request in the next couple of weeks.

Leahnora says she was born without external genitals, but she was given testosterone treatments as a child and was raised as a boy.  She later married and raised a family in Ohio.

Her local stake (an assembly of local churches) has been supportive.  Church leaders have met with fellow members to help them cope with Leahnora’s transition.

I want happiness.  I want companionship.  And I want to live the gospel.  That’s what I want.  And I want this equal for everybody.  I want people to celebrate who I am.  Because I’m not ashamed of who I am.

–Leahnora Isaak

Transgender Politicians Win

Nashua, New Hamphire voters elected the first transperson ever to the New Hamphire House of Representatives on Tuesday.  Stacy Laughton, 28, places gender issues at the top of her agenda, but wants to be treated like any other woman on the House floor.

Laughton has been politically active since she was a teenager.  When she lived in Laconia, she was unsuccessful in several attempts at securing city positions and one attwempt at a run for the State House while running as a Republican.  

She worked on John Kerry’s campaign in 2004 as an independent.  Her shift in allegiance had a lot to do with Gov. Craig Benson’s budget cuts.

He cut welfare funding, he cut special ed funding, he cut a lot of these vitally important programs, and these were programs that I knew lots of people who were on, and I started to see their lives change, but they didn’t change for the better.

–Laughton

Laughton became a Democrat in 2010 and was elected as a selectman in Ward 4 in Nashua, where she now lives.  Several friends and mentors suggested a run for higher office, but it was newly-elected Rep. Maggie Hassan’s plea for people to run which ultimately caused her to do so.

This area of New Hampshire needed somebody like me, somebody who understands the complex issues that this district faces, somebody who understands what it’s like to live with a lower income, somebody who knows the people in the area.

–Laughton

Suing for equal health coverage

Alec Esquivel, 42, is an Oregon transman.  He works as a law clerk for the Oregon Court of Appeals.  Alec’s doctors said it was a medically necessary procedure to have a hysterectomy because of his heightened risk of ovarian and uterine cancer due to the hormone therapy he began in 2001.  Providence Health Plans, third-party insurance administrator for the state, and the Public Employees Benefit Board denied coverage for the procedure, stating

services related to a sex-change operation, including evaluation, surgery and follow-up services are not a covered benefit of your plan.

Alec is therefore suing the state of Oregon and the PEBB to cover his medical care related to the hysterectomy as well as $250,000 in damages and attorney fees.

Alec Esquivel was denied coverage for a medically necessary procedure specifically because he is transgender. This type of discrimination is unlawful and risks the health of hardworking, productive citizens of Oregon.

Dru Levasseur, Lambda Legal transgender rights attorney

LGBT Aging: Kitzhaber declares May 21 Gay & Grey Day in Oregon

Last week I prepared an essay about LGBT aging, entitled Avoiding becoming part of Gen Silent.  Tonight’s dairy continues on that theme.

Interspersed with some other news about LGBT seniors will be some videos of some of us.  History has proved that the way to get people interested in a cause is to put faces on the cause.

So the diary is video-heavy.  Be forewarned.  I divided the different stories, which come from Portland, New York City, San Diego, Philadelphia and Iowa City, from each other by use of the videos.

Blue Green Oregon

“Oregon is a very poor state with the 2nd highest unemployment in the coutry,” said the man I met at the Explosible Man’s demo.  Most of the state – my part of the state, it seemed was filled with ignorant wingers.  Only Portland and surroundings was blue territory.

The Explosible Man, Dr. James McNight, was demoing and providing lectures on a fantastical new green energy taking dead center aim at the lethal fossil fuel, natural gas, pushed most persuasively by supereme con artist T. Boone Pickens to easy marks like Nancy Pelosi.  Nancy has decreed that natural gas is not a fossil fuel.  She has made a hefty investment in Pickens’ wonderfully named “Clean Energy” that would convert vehicles to natural gas fueling while Boone is monopolizing an even more important liquid, water.

I have written up the magical explosible powders in the Orange Satan to the usual raging apathy for true green:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

When I took my then fiance from Portland to the Oregon Outback where I had lived and have not for over half a century, I got lost trying to find the house where I had lived the first years of my life. The house had long ago burned down and the road was no more.

We stood on a hill in waist high sagebrush overlooking a large swath of Warner Valley.  A buzzard or two circled lazily overhead and a jackrabbit scampered across the desert floor now and then.  There was not another sign of life or human habitation except a gravel road that could be seen crossing the desert.

“We lived on the other side of the draw,” I told my beloved.

She was silent for a bit with the wonder of it all.  “You lived here?” she finally managed.

Well yes.   Lived rather well even though we had no electricity.  

Got water from a hot spring.  The water was atrocious but it was at least wet.  If we had known how to use it, we could have warmed the house with it instead of using wood.

We were actually looking at a monumental ecological disaster, a monstrous crime against nature that eventually chased nearly all the Democrats of old out of the valley.

http://img693.imageshack.us/im…

The Crump Geyser, drilled by the invincible prophet of geothermal power had already become a mud puddle.

Now, a half century later, the Crump Geyser and perhaps the Hallinan Hot Spring, will be developed.  The geese are back.  In our “big city” [population ~2,000), Lakeview and smaller towns have Goose Lake back.  A small wood-burning power plant may rejuvenate an area long ago logged out.  In the Basque country of Harney County, a huge wind farm is being born.  On the coast, America’s first wave farm is under construction.

The state long ago went blue and now is the greenest state of them all, even in the Outback where once life was nearly as hard to detect as on Mars.

This country bumpkin long resident in the backward wilds of Upstate New York is thrilled for Blue Green Oregon.

Best,  Terry

Water Alert In Portland, Oregon

My fellow Portlanders, I just want to warn you not to drink any tap water west of the Willamette River. From the Water Bureau:

Eating Oregon: Will Walk For (Real) Food…

Saturday morning, November 22.  Jay awakes (and refers to himself in the third person) in his tiny apartment in an inner Southeast Portland neighborhood.  Showers, dresses…tries to leave but gets sucked into 30 minutes of college football pregame shows on ESPN…breaks free eventually and throws on a jacket and a hat.

Let’s take a walk to the Portland Farmers Market at PSU, shall we?

First though, we need coffee.  Stumptown of course, mmmm!

Photobucket

Crossposted from La Vida Locavore, journey below the fold…

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