Being Real

Over at Dominion Family, Cindy has been writing about the nature of online friendships. She linked to Alexandra Stoddard's interview here- it's quite good, and I cannot do it justice in a quote or two.

I spend a lot of time on the computer- admittedly too much of late. But here are some ways I reduce that time:

On Twitter I do not follow many people. I follow topics- and right now that topic is the CPSIA.

On Facebook, I am a bit of a snot. I don't go around reading all the updates or leaving lots of messages- I scan a quick few. I mainly use it to look at photographs friends have taken, and to leave messages for some of our daughters' young friends (-teens and twenty somethings- they are the facebook age, after all) who I think need a bit of encouragement, and as a bulletin board (messages to our church adoptees, for instance, asking if they want to come out for the weekend). I frankly resent it when friends my age (and I mean real life friends, not internet pals) think a public message on facebook is a substitute for meaningful discussion and interaction.

Email- I don't email much, although I usually do answer emails. Not always, unfortunately- and while I am getting better, it tends to be the more important ones I don't answer- I set them aside because they deserve time and attention, and then the sieve in my brain let them slip through. I do prefer writing emails to writing snail mail because hand writing hurts my hands.

I never telephone anybody. It's a phobia. My answering machine broke, and now I have to answer the phone, but I dislike it immensely and my children know that and will usually answer for me.

I just about NEVER 'chat' in real time- not with AIM, FB, Google, or any other feature. I strongly dislike those features and leave them turned off, unless I have a really good and specific reason to leave the feature open. I have left that feature open on facebook on perhaps three occasions in the last year, and each time it was because somebody specifically asked me to because they had specific questions, usually of a time sensitive nature. Each time, I was swamped with other people wanting to chat and I felt like a mother of three children under five again, all of them tugging at my skirts and asking questions at once and I found it hard to focus.

At Cindy's blog I said something in the comments about how I think people I meet in real life who first knew me on the internet are disappointed, and the meetings don't go well.
That was me being a cynic, and a forgetful cynic at that, because one of my dearest friends in the world reminds me, when I say stuff like that, that we first met through my writing- she read articles I had published in a church publication, called me, and we kept up a correspondence until we had a chance to meet in person, and since then have met several times- her daughter played the piano at the Equuschick's wedding. But... there have been some who met me who came to that meeting with expectations I could not meet, and they were not happy. One issue is that I do write better than I talk. I am wittier and think better with a keyboard in front of me.

While I know that I have I sat in disbelief while I read posts by people I know in real life, and I know what they are writing has absolutely no resemblance to the truth, I am going to be cantankerous and suggest that equally often, the fault of disappointed expectations is with the reader for expecting too much from a person they know only through the internet, and putting human beings up on a pedestal where they don't belong.

It's not that we live a problem free life- pain we have, and grief enough, and bitterness and crying (from the poem White Bird Flying). But we don't think the internet is the place to lay down and bawl over them. It's unproductive, depressing, boring, and in some cases, actually makes things worse.
As I told a friend recently, Some of us deal best with the monstrous elephants in the living room by ignoring them on the general principle that if we ignore the elephants they ignore us. If we look at them or talk about them, it starts a stampede.
I don't consider that pretending. It's a survival mechanism. But yes, there are elephants in my living room. Different elephants than yours, I think, but they are there, and they are not going to go away.

Yes, my friends, there are mean and vicious, nasty, spiteful, destructive elephants in my living room. We never speak of them, for it wakes them up and it takes a long time to clean up that mess.

We also have dirty laundry, arguments, disobedient children, and so forth. As I said here, a blog is no the place for airing of dirty laundry. It would not be reasonable to assume that we have no dirty laundry just because I don't air out dirty laundry here (and neither do my daughters).

I know, because people write to tell me so, that people can get a rose colored picture of our family based on what I communicate in public. While it is true that I think I have a wonderful family, we none of us are perfect, and some of us are further from that perfection than others (me, most of all). It may seem like nobody here ever disagrees, disobeys, misbehaves, argues, or indulges in other fractious behaviors calculated to make most of the rest of the family long to punch one family member or another in the nose. It may seem like our house is never a mess (this is laughable to the extreme). It may seem that I am organized or that all is always sweetness and light here. This is not the case.

If it seems this way, and yet is isn't, the disconnect is not because I intend to deceive. Indeed, I am puzzled that anybody reads a blog and expects that they are reading all the details there are to know.

I read other people's blogs assuming that they are not airing their dirty laundry (In fact, I don't like blogs that air dirty laundry, and I stop reading them almost immediately), and I fully expect others to read our family blog with the same understanding.

I do not air such things because I wish to be fair to my family.

I think we should think very carefully about how we speak about our families in public, and this internet medium is ever so much more public than public. It doesn't go away. You can delete a page or a post, but it can be retrieved again through google's cache or the internet archives, or somebody else will have saved a screenshot, or printed it out. Our children are going to grow up and see the things we said about them to hundreds or thousands of other total strangers, and they may resent it.

I see so many people publicizing things about their children or their spouses that make me cringe. I think about how I would feel if my children or my husband posted publicly about my most PMS of moments, telling the entire world and all our nearest and dearest strangers my most unlovely traits. That would be a painful betrayal, and the unkindest cut of all seems to me to be allegedly posting those negative things about our family members under the guise of 'being real' or 'needing prayer'.

We should be 'real' with our REAL life friends- the ones who can see more sides than the one we choose to present in print, because however fair and honest we may try to be, we still are human and cannot help but be slanted in how we present details. We should be real with those real life friends who we can trust to be real back, to be honest and tell us, "You are not being fair," or "Yes, that's true, but does it matter? Does it alter how you are supposed to be respond?"

What if the issue within the family is resolved, and the target of an unkind blog post changes his ways- and ten years from now somebody finds that post and gains a negative opinion of that person because of it?

When your family members come to read what you have written in public about them, there should be nothing there to sting and humiliate and leave a painful cut.

Are you writing the kinds of things about your children and husband that would upset you to see written about you? Are you publicizing events in their lives that they can also enjoy and appreciate, or will they be wounded, hurt, and humiliated two, ten, or twenty years from now to come across what you have publicized about them? Can people tell from your writing how much you love and appreciate your family members?

My husband and I love each other dearly, and we have a good marriage. We also have our moments, our disagreements, our irritations. If I were to blog about one of them in the heat of annoyance, I would look very good and he would not. This is not because I would be right and he would be wrong- far from it. Most of the time when we disagree, he is right and I am wrong. And if I were blogging about it in a moment of petulance or the spirit of complaining, I would be doubly wrong. But you would not know that because I happen to have the advantage of words- I write well enough, one of my few talents, that I could hide my guilt behind my words and make him look bad. I know this, so I do not do it. And because I know it, I am suspicious when I see others using the internet as a platform to complain about their family members.

Love covers a multitude of sins. It does not publicize your complaints about the wrong doings of your spouse and children. It does not humiliate, degrade, or repeat the sorts of stories that you would not want repeated about you. It does not sow the seeds of discontent by broadcasting them over the internet.

It is important to have a good friend to whom you can safely vent and share such frustrations, or perhaps a handful of such friends. It is also important not to share the specific faults of family members to the entire internet world.

Principles

Did you know that the word principles comes from the word princepes? The princepes were Roman soldiers but not just any Roman Soldiers. They were experienced soldiers who formed the counter-attack. Which made us think of principles as soldiers in the line of battle helping us to fight the good fight of right conduct and repudiate temptations toward bad.

Well, it would be intriguing if it were true, but I think really it comes from princeps, which is just a word used for the Emperor. On the other hand, this possible line of thinking is also food for thought because if you have good principles they can rule your conduct, (and, in fact, your real principles do rule your conduct even if they are bad principles), but I liked the warrior imagery better.
But then, I am no pacifist.

CPSIA updates for March 31

From AmendCPSIA on Twitter: #CPSIA Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT) agreed to speak at Rally. We now have 6 Reps, 2 Senators and 1 Governor. No Dems yet!

Isn't it adorable?!

From How and Where We Live, an Open Door to Geography by Nellie B. Allen and published in 1924. There are several colored plates in the book by several different illustrators. They are so lovely. E.M. Wireman did this illustration.

Walter Olson's blog yesterday had some excellent links and information (and kind words for yours truly)

This story of a real CPSIA hero, Rick Woldenberg, and how he got involved and what he found when he did is a must read. Seriously:

Rick quickly realized how expensive it would be for companies to comply with the new testing regulations. And, he saw that the legislation would make for more complications and headaches for a wide range of businesses, including his own. “I believe that these new incentives will cause several terrible things to happen. It will cause a lot of responsible products to be dropped. Right now, we sell about 2,000 products. At 2,000 items, we might have 100,000 tasks annually to complete to comply with the law. That’s very impractical but the consequences of failure are severe. So, the law doesn’t want you to sell 2,000 items - it now wants you to sell 50 to make compliance doable. The law also wants me to abandon small customers and go after high volume customers, like Wal-Mart. Only in the mass market do your new costs blend into your old costs. I HATE the idea that there is a law that says I cannot be in the specialty business, because it renders the specialty business un-economic. If you have a dyslexic child and you want to buy products to help with dyslexia, you need a specialized market. Nobody will be able to cater to those markets anymore!”

Large legislation favors big businesses, that's just the way it is. Bureaucracies perpetuate more bureaucracies. The broader the legislation, the more small, individual, unique, items are swept away in the tsunami of law. Only the homogenized, humongous companies (that donate to politicians) are left standing.

It was clear to Rick that the legislative process had taken place behind closed doors. Deciding that this would not happen again, Rick thought “I’ll create a public record so this issue will be open.” He put up a special website and later started blogging. Soon, others joined him. More websites were created and people began paying attention to the need to amend the CPSIA. The effort grew exponentially. “We have a number of people from the education business, crafters, homeschoolers, people from the bicycle, ATV and motorcycle businesses, toys, people who make pens, clothing and footwear companies, members of the consumer specialty industry, sporting goods people—it has become a very big coalition.“

Frustrated because you wrote your rep, and got only a boilerplate formletter, cribbed from the self serving press releases of PIRG or Public Citizen? RIck hasn't gotten one reply to any of his letters.

Here's how you can participate in the rally on April 1st, even if you cannot go to Washington.

Aquarium

CPSIA, Is it time to panic?

From the comments here, at pghpicturebook (book illustrators of Western Pennsylvania), one Karen Jo said, reasonably, that:

I’m not becoming an alarmist about this yet, because...

and then she stated her reasons. You will find her italicized reasons and my responses below. Unfortunately, you see, the law is not reasonable, and where the law is unreasonable, citizens would do well to stand up and fight.

1. the Consumer Products Safety Commission hasn’t officially decided on the issue

Me: Actually, they have said this:

The [publishing] industry has made assertions and done very limited testing, but the Act requires more, as it should, before we can exempt a children’s product from the lead content requirements of the law. We cannot act on the “everyone knows children’s books don’t contain lead” and “historically there has never been a problem with lead in children’s books” assertions, particularly when we now know that children’s books have indeed contained lead in the past. ... They need to provide all of the information that our staff believes is necessary in order for the Commission to act based on sound science and comprehensive market coverage.

That is taken directly from a letter Commissioner Thomas Moore (who also called for the sequestering of some library books) wrote to Congressman Waxman.
Please note the great gulf between 'never been a problem with lead in children's books' and 'children's books have contained lead.' That chasm is where Common Sense apparently plummeted to death.
Ed Kang is a spokesman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, and here he is quoted:

"Kang said local libraries will not have to close their doors or be required to test books to ensure books are safe. On Friday, the Safety Commission issued a ruling stating children’s books printed after 1985 are safe.

In some older books, Kang said, lead was used in inks."

(http://tinyurl.com/cadn3y)

They [the CPSC] also specifically excluded pre-1985 books from the Stay in their official guidelines (http://tinyurl.com/dguc8f):

"the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is announcing its enforcement policy on the lead limits established by the CPSIA.

Manufacturers, importers, distributors, and retailers should also be aware that CPSC will:

*Not impose penalties against anyone for making, importing, distributing, or selling

....

**an ordinary children's book printed after 1985..."

That's pretty official.

2. the federal government hasn’t proven lead could actually be in old books

Me: It doesn't have to prove lead is in anything, the law applies to ALL products, and the burden of proof is not on the government.

The way the law is written, all products are considered guilty until proven innocent- it's up to the sellers and manufacturers to prove there is no lead in their products, and the only legal standard acceptable for such proof is:

"the best-available, peer-reviewed, scientific evidence that lead in such product or material will neither result in the absorption of any lead into the human body, taking into account normal and reasonably foreseeable use and abuse of such product by a child, nor have any other adverse impact on public health or safety.
Congress obviously established a very demanding standard for such exclusions. Indeed, the Commission staff is not yet away of any substance as to which the required showing can be made."

3. the federal government hasn’t handed down reccommendations regarding children’s books

Me: The Federal Government, in the form of Congress, passed a law forbidding the sale or distribution of ALL products intended for the use of children 12 and under without first testing them for lead, and all toys for phthalates, and all childcare products for kids under three for phthalates.

It is disconcerting that lawmakers wrote a law specifically covering ALL products and is now surprised to learn that 'all' would include books, but that is what they did.


4. publishing and printing industries set up a Web site for book publishers last December to post the results of studies measuring the lead in books and their components, such as ink and paper. Those results show lead levels that were often undetectable and consistently below not only the new federal threshold, but the more stringent limit that goes into effect in August 2011.

Me: Carol has answered this (You can read her reply at the original post- that's Carol Baicker-McKee of the Doodles and Noodles blog)- ordinary paper books published since 1985 are probably fine. Ordinary children's books published before 1985 are, right now, illegal to sell, according to the law and the CPSC.

5. The American Library Association said it has no estimate of how many children’s books printed before 1986 are in circulation. But typically, libraries don’t have many, because youngsters are hard on books, librarians said.

Me: I really wish I knew what libraries they are checking. The libraries around me do have many, many such books. And this does effect thrift shops, used book stores, and charities that distribute books as part of literacy efforts (staples and ring binding are not allowed without testing, even for newer books).

6. the lead is contained only in the type, not in the illustrations, according to Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs for the Association of American Publishers

Me: I have no idea why he said that, and it's so erroneous I wonder if he has been misquoted. It is the illustrations that tend to be the problem. Jennifer Taggart (The Smart Mama) has XRF tested a number of older books. MOST of them have no lead, but in a few that did, it was in the illustrations. One copy of Little Women, for instance, had 2700 ppm in the red dress of the cover illustration.

Panicking is inappropriate. But the law is not going to go away if people are complacent about it. Congress needs to amend this law or what's going to go away is our older children's books, thrift store clothing, and a number of unique, hand-crafted products.
Congress won't fix it if people do not hold their feet to the fire.

See also:
These are a Few of My Favorite Things
Good-bye Library BookSales

quirky side-note- I keep humming this to a snatch of tune from Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody-

Mama, they've just killed the books,
XRF guns say some have lead,
the law's the trigger, now they're dead.
Mama, Old books are so much fun,
But now they're going to throw them all away.
Mama, ooh, Didn't mean to make you cry,
CPSIA brings so much sorrow,
Congress carries on, carries on
as if nothing really matters.

Too late, the law has come,
Sends shivers down my spine, they're trashing books all the time.
Goodbye, Library booksales, they've got to go,
This law bans sales of old books and that's the truth.
Mama, ooh, I hate to see them go,
I sometimes wish Waxman had never been born at all...

Gladsome, Jocund, Cunning Words

repost, which I know I've been doing a lot this last week, but I have a lot on my mind and have had trouble settling down to write on anything, because I can't write about what's on my mind.

I first came across the word sesquipedlian in a delicious little book about books, Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman- It makes perfect reading for Doctor's waiting rooms. Each chapter is a stand alone essay, so you can pick it up and set it down as you need to. It's a little gem of a book, absolutely must reading for anybody who loves reading- with some caveats.

I don't relate to or approve of every single thing she says or believes, and neither will you. A handful of moments may bring a blush to the cheek of a young maiden, and, truth to tell, an old matron like me. Nevertheless, I consider it a happy find.

I first read this book a few years back when the HG found a copy at a library book-sale. She began reading the first paragraph to me and I knew I needed to own this book. Anne writes about merging her library with her husband's (they waited until they were married a few years to do this), and how they organized them, and whose copies they kept. Even though I couldn't personally relate to this on a specifically personal level (my husband brought two books into our marriage- his Bible, and Helter Skelter. Merging our books meant I threw away Helter Skelter and he kept his Bible), I could connect on a deeper level with how Anne and her husband felt about their books, related to them, connected with them, and bonded with specific editions.

This ability to see what she is feeling and connect with it is an indication of a good writer, but Anne isn't just good. She's witty. She writes that though they had been a couple for many years, their books remained separate, hers at the north end of their loft apartment, his at the south. They had talked about combining them, so that, for instance, all the Melville titles would be together, but just hadn't done it. They finally decided to take the plunge, and immediately ran into a snag:

Our reluctance to conjugate our Melvilles was also fueled by some essential differences in our characters. George is a lumper. I am a splitter. His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter. Like most people with a high tolerance for clutter, George maintains a basic trust in three-dimensional objects. If he wants something, he believes it will present itself, and therefore it usually does."

Anne believes that books and other small items are 'unreliable vagrants,' and must be kept 'strictly confined to quarters,' so they must work out a way to organize their books together. Again, please be forewarned that there are occasional comments, even in that chapter, that may embarrass some readers. For such a gladsome gift of phrasing, I am willing to overlook strong provocation, which, thankfully, she does not offer.


If I was hooked with chapter one, I was practically a raving addict with chapter two. Who could resist a book with an entire chapter about sesquipedalians? (If you could, don't tell me. I'd rather not know). Sesquipedalians are very long words, and as children Anne and her brother used to compete to see who could find the longest. He won with paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde, which she says they sang to the tune of The Irish Washer Woman (Isaac Asimov did, too, and I'm not sure who did it first).

She writes of her delight in finding, as an adult, a book with twenty words in it she didn't know, and I got to feel the smug pleasure of delight in knowing three she didn't (sapoy, grimoire, and camorra), even though I feel sure she'd merely forgotten her Rudyard Kipling for at least one of them.

That book was published first in 1920, and she suggests that in 1920, readers were more educated than they are today, and certainly had richer vocabularies. She quizzed several of her friends and relations and found her 90 year old father knew 12. A friend who knew seven of them reads primarily from works published before 1918. Her brother knew nine, which she credits to his 'unparalleled advantage of owning no television set,' as well as his science education (he teaches natural history).

This chapter demonstrated a lovely example of the wonder of connections, whereby the more you know, the more you CAN know because you find that there are connections between things that you never knew about- and indeed, could not discover unless you were open to learning things whether or not you can see a utilitarian value to them- an English professor guessed that Mephitic must mean foul-smelling because he'd seen it used in Milton's Paradise Lost to describe the smell of hell. Her brother guessed it was a bad smell because he knew the " scientific name for the striped skunk is Mephitis mephitis, which means stinky stinky." And so we strike another blow against the 'why do we need to know this' crowd.=)

Knowledge cross-pollinates. The more you know, the more you can know, which is another good reason to read those old books (if we needed a reason. We are book addicts, so we don't need a reason. You may call it an excuse or a rationalization if you prefer).

Anne asked her friends and family if they thought we knew more or fewer words now than a few decades ago. A comic (who I can't imagine I'd find very funny), knew none of the 20 on her list yet insisted we know more words today. He said, "I bet we know at least as many, the new vocabulary of the Internet alone has easily made up for everything we've lost from nineteenth century literature."

Anne found that idea mephitic and so do I.

A playwright who knew only one suggested, "We know fewer words, and the ones we know are less beautiful. ...the words we've lost tend to be connotative, and the ones we've gained tend to be denotative. I've never seen modem used in a poem."

Charlotte Mason was lamenting this impoverished vocabulary a hundred years ago:

We are in a bad way for epithets: there are hardly more than a dozen
current amongst us; and of these one person has seldom more than one or two in
everyday use. A cup of tea, a dress, a picture, a book, a person, -- is "nice,"
"perfect," "delicious," "delightful," "jolly," according to the speaker; not at
all according to the thing spoken of. Adverbs help a little; a thing may
be "nice," "how nice!" or "too awfully nice!" but the help is rather in the way
of force than of variety. J. finds all agreeable things "too awfully nice!"
while B. finds the same things only "nice" As a rule, things and persons have
each one distinctive quality; to see what that is in a flash, and to express it
in the fittest word, is a proof of genius, or of the highest culture.

… Little children often surprise and amuse their elders by the fitness
and elegance of their phraseology. We have only to foster this power of theirs,
to put good words in their way, to treat the perpetual use of "jolly" or
"delicious" as rather idiotic, and we are not only fitting our children to shine
in society, but doing some thing to conserve the treasures of the beautiful
mother- tongue of our inheritance. It might be worthwhile to hunt up good strong
Saxon epithets for everyday use from the writers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Milton alone affords a treasure-trove. In the hymn
beginning, "Let us with a gladsome mind," there are half-a-dozen adjectives used
with original force; perhaps half-a-dozen peculiar to that hymn, in their use if
not in their form. We cannot go about talking of the "golden-tressed sun"; that
is too good for us; but to get "gladsome" into our common speech is worth an
effort. "Happy-making" again, in the wonderful _Ode to Time,_ -- could we have a fitter word for our best occasions?

Formation of Character, by Charlotte Mason, pages 217, 218

Random thoughts: I think of this passage every time I or somebody I know uses the word 'cool.'
Miss Mason misquoted the title of Milton's poem, it is 'On Time,' something I shall never be.
I cannot count half a dozen adjectives of the sort she suggests in Gladsome Mind.
I find more here in L'Allegro, one of my favorite of Milton's poems.
Where Miss Mason lists five adjectives all too drearily common in every day use, I can only think of one word in several variations- cool, super-cool, way cool, so cool, and uber-cool. Such an impoverished language must denote a poverty of mind, methinks, including mine own.

For those interested, here are a few of the other lovely new words Anne Fadimen used to add to your treasure trove:
Calineries
cajoleries
diapason
adapertile
perllan
paludal
apozemical
alcalde
agathodemon
kakodemon
goetic
sapoy
subadar
aspergill
opopanax
monophysite
cupellation
adytum

Don't you just want to smack your lips over them?

No? Sigh. I know, I know. I am a word geek.

H U G Enormous -- Snake!

Muppet Pelts- the New Fur

We make no pretense of being a fashion blog, and it would be the ridiculous if we did. I think Frump is a Fab Fashion Statement, but I know how out of step that makes me. There's no place in the fashionista world for my standards, which are modestly comfortable, wearable, and did I mention, comfortable?

That said, I don't care how much of a Fashion Philistine this makes me, Madonna appears to have slain and skinned a couple of a Muppets for this outfit:


Or perhaps she's auditioning for the part of Papagena in The Magic Flute, with costumes by Dr. Seuss.

Equuschick likes the color but thinks it looks like somebody rolled her in an Easter Basket.

Pregnancy Tickers

We're looking for one of those pregnancy due date widgets you can post to the blog or get in your email box- and we specifically want one that shows what the baby is doing and how he is growing each week, NOT just 'how many more days.' But we're tired of looking.
I know I've seen these at other people's blogs, but I didn't pay attention- if you know of one, please share the link?

Eels

These things creep me out in a totally cool way. :)

A few books from Sunday's Library Book Sale

Paperback of St. George and the Dragon, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman- Yes, we already have at least one copy of this, if not too. Can you say grandbabies? The Equuschick and Shasta baby has given a new impetus to my picture book buying.
Conscience: Like it needed one.
Me: Shut. Up.

Besides- this was published in 1984, so I consider it a book rescue, as well.

A perfectly beautiful, unmarked, excellent 1950 hardback of Dick Wittington and His Cat, by Marcia Brown

A lovely ex libra hardback of Quips and Quirks by the Watson sisters, Clyde and Wendy- published in 1975. A collection of words that have been used over time to insult or tease someone. Epithets such as quidnunc, mollygrub, whopstraw, and slubberdegullion.

A rather disturbing picture book rendition of Jim, Who Ran AWay From His Nurse, and Was Eaten by a Lion, Hilaire Belloc

A sweet little hardback of The Tale of Johnny Town Mouse, by Beatrix Potter.

I picked up several "The How and Why Wonder book of" in very nice condition. These include The How and Why Wonder Book of:
Explorations and Discoveries
Mathematics
Machines

A Pedlar's Pack, by Elizabeth Goudge

A very interesting copy of When We Were Very Young, by A. A. Milne. The binding is different from what I usually see, in fact, the cover illustrations look like a Kate Greenaway knockoff, but inside it's the usual Ernest Shepard illustrations. The title page says this edition was printed in 1944. The binding is a library binding, and there is a sticker inside the back saying that the special library binding was made in 1972. That looks to me like the 1944 edition was falling apart, and the library paid for the book to be rebound, with new covers and end papers. It's a discard from a local elementary school library.

The Cherub

As we've mentioned, one of our six daughters is profoundly retarded. There are people who get uptight about that label, but it's useful. It gives you some idea of what to expect, what not to expect. It offers an initial, introductory orientation into her world.

'Retarded' didn't used to be an ugly insult. It used to be a perfectly good word that just meant slow. The new term 'delayed' is going to be a negative term in another ten years or so. Kids will start using it as an insult, not ever realizing what they are really doing and saying. Every term ever used to describe our daughter's condition has become an insult, a word laden with baggage. This is not because there was ever something inherently insulting or rude about those words, but because people are inherently uncomfortable with, or even offended by, what they represent.

She doesn't speak and can only sign approximately 20 words right now. She did have more, but she regressed when we moved the last few times. Shifting environments, changing routines, these things have a deleterious affect upon the mentally retarded, and it will take us some time to bring her back up to her previous accomplishments. We've lived in five different houses over the last 11 years- unless I did the math wrong, which is terribly probable.

Our speechless, nonverbal child does laugh, giggle, cry, pout, vocalize with an "I want that" noise and a distinctly different "I don't want that and don't you dare try to give it to me because I am sure it will poison me and is utterly evil besides" noise. She makes up her own signs. Some of them make sense (the sign she made for 'tea' looks like somebody shaking out a teabag), and some of them we have never figured out.

Some of her made up signs I think she made up just to make me look bad. She makes these gestures at strangers, and the strangers look at me and say, "What is she saying?" I have to shrug my shoulders and say I don't know. And then they look at me in disbelief, because obviously, only an unfit mother would not be able to figure out the signs a retarded child makes up, right? Well, she's retarded. That doesn't mean she's stupid. Her development age is roughly close to that of a two year old, and just like any other two year old, not everything she figures out makes perfect sense to those of us on the outside looking in. I think she does it on purpose because she enjoys playing tricks on me. Why not? She plays tricks on the rest of us, too.

She hides things. Of course, we always catch her, because she's so pleased with her tricks that she starts giggling while she slowly makes her way to the hiding place she has in mind for somebody else's precious belonging. We hear that particular giggle and know we should investigate. She hides our pillows, our books, our favorite things.

She pinpoints what it is that will be particularly bothersome to a person, and that's how she teases that person. For my eldest and me, she finds our books and removes the bookmarks, losing our places. For a sartorially splendiferous friend, she would find his sartorially splendid leather coat, wave it at him in the manner of a bull fighter flourishing a red cape- and drop it on the floor the moment she got his attention. For a pregnant and easily nauseated friend, she would stand firmly in front of her and put her finger up her nose, holding it there and smirking. For an extremely gregarious, attention loving friend, she simply studious ignores him- either blankly looking right through him, or casually turning her back on him.

When she decides guests have outstayed their welcome, she brings them their car keys and points to the door.

The last time a qualified professional tested her I.Q. we were told that the results of the test indicated that our daughter could not do anything we had taught her how to do, because she was profoundly retarded. They asked there was anything specific I'd been trying to teach her that I needed help with (we homeschool, the testing was through the public school). I said, yes, that I wanted her to learn to undo her seatbelt and wasn't getting very far. They told me kindly that I probably shouldn't bother. It was a waste of my time and hers, and was not something she would ever be able to do. We left the appointment and drove home. When we pulled up into the driveway, she undid her seatbelt. Of course, she hasn't done it since then, and a couple years later she learned to open her car door while we were driving on the highway, so we haven't worked on this one any further.

She has Cerebral Palsy, too. In her case it's very mild. It means she walks very slowly and never runs. It means that some of her difficulty with sign and speech might be the C.P. rather than the retardation, but nobody knows for certain. It means she needs a leg brace. If it were worse, it would mean she could barely communicate at all, since nearly all of her communication is so physical. She needs her hands, her arms, her body language, the ability to turn her head this way and that, the facial muscle control necessary to make her smirks, her grins, her excited faces and squeals, her self-satisfied little gloating smiles, and her sad faces, her pouty faces, her "gloom and despair! They won't give me a cookie faces."

I wonder about people like her who don't have the physical range of motion and physical ability to control facial expressions that she does. What do they wish they could say but can't?

She used to have a t-shirt with a slogan I loved- it said, "Not being able to speak does not mean I have nothing to say." She outgrew it, and I recently got her another one at cafepress.

Too many people do not believe that one can have something to say even if one cannot speak. Too many people think life is all about the mind and think very little of the heart and soul. These things, the Cherub has in abundance.

P.S. The picture is the wallpaper and paint we chose for her bedroom. Her two favorite things are eating and the color yellow (at least, that's the color she recognises best), so we picked this. And no matter how old she gets, she will never outgrow it.

(sorry about the yellow font- it's fixed now).

Sunday Hymn Post

There is a happy land, far, far away,
Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day.
Oh, how they sweetly sing, worthy is our Savior King,
Loud let His praises ring, praise, praise for aye.

Come to that happy land, come, come away;
Why will ye doubting stand, why still delay?
Oh, we shall happy be, when from sin and sorrow free,
Lord, we shall live with Thee, blest, blest for aye.

Bright, in that happy land, beams every eye;
Kept by a Father’s hand, love cannot die.
Oh, then to glory run; be a crown and kingdom won;
And, bright, above the sun, we reign for aye.



I am particularly pleased with this shaped note singing find.

Here's a shaped note singing version in English- Note that they begin by singing through with just the notes (so,so, la, so, doh), and then go into the lyrics. For the sheet music see here.

For a Choctaw shaped note choir singing in their language, choir listen here. For the Choctaw lyrics they are singing, see here.

cyberhymnal (this is closer to the tempo I am accustomed to hearing for this song)

Here's a Mennonite Choir singing the first verse (slight variation in lyrics on the last line)

Quotes on Habit

'Heroic spiritual lives are built by stacking days of obedience one on top of the other. Like a brick each obedient act is small in itself, but in time the acts will pile up, and a huge wall of strong character will be built - a great defense against temptation. we should strive for consistent obedience each day.'
From the Life Application Bible's intro to Samuel.

We sow our thoughts, and we reap our actions; we sow our actions, and we reap our habits; we sow our habits, and we reap our characters; we sow our characters, and we reap our destiny.
Desiderius Gerhard Erasmus

Sow an action, reap a habit.
Hannah More

Pursuits become habits.

Ill habits gather by unseen degrees, As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
Ovid

Bad habits are best rooted out by replacing them with good habits.

Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton:
"Will power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree oneself to posess. It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them or shifting their burden on others. The making of the substance called Character was a process about as slow and arduous as the building of the pyramids..."

Hospitality and the Vintage Cookbook

Repost


In a 1947 cookbook, in the section on how the 'servantless' household can manage regular hospitality, one suggestion is to have a small repertoire of repeating company menus. Don't go for variety, something different everytime somebody comes to dinner, but develop a reputation for always having that delicious... whatever it is.

My mom did this. We had company every Sunday after church, and Sunday dinner was always potroast with potatoes and carrots, salad, homemade rolls, and usually Texas sheet cake for dessert. Nobody complained, and it was delicious.


The authors of my vintage cookery book say it doesn't matter what delicious whatever it is you're famous for:

"If the same combinations are served more than once to the same guests providing that the food is sufficiently well cooked to justify its repetition. That is the way that reputations for good cooking are built up. We look forward to prune whip in certain homes just as we count upon onion soup at certain restaurants."

They had me right up to the phrase 'we look forward to prune whip.'

Home Decorating

Dresser in my bedroom- the dresser and most of the old stuff on it came from The Rattery.

The fabric is dollar a yard Walmart fabric- that's all it is, a length of fabric, unhemmed, just draped around the dresser.

The dresser is actually my husband's- he lets me decorate because it's out in plain sight.
My dresser is in my closet where nobody sees it, and it's not so pretty- but my dresser won't fit in this space- it's wider. And his dresser is too pretty and too tall to go in my closet.

But we're thinking of moving this dresser to the guestroom and bringing another dresser home from the Rattery.




The chair and pillow came from the local thrift shop. Book-case came from the rattery. Of course, I have rearranged the living umpteen times since this picture was taken.

I really like this chair- and it's also very comfortable. I bought it for two dollars at the local thrift shop.






View from my pillow:

For the first 23 years of our marriage, it was my philosophy and practice that a wife who likes this sort of thing (not all women do) should be careful not to make her home too feminine because her husband just might not enjoy the same decor she does.

Plus, I kept thinking of that article, some of you know the one by Nancy Wilson, that talked about women decorating their houses all frou-frou with ribbons and bows and pink stuff when they should keep in mind that a man lives there, too. So they should cut back on the frou and add some stuff like, I dunno, dead fish on plaques and critter skulls and so forth. Manly-man things.

I also knew that some of the ladies I know have also read that article and if I decorated too much like a girl then they would come to my house and frown upon my roses and lace and think that I decorate in a proto-feminist, Elsie Dinsmore, emasculating or even hoity-toity fashion and they would frown and feel sorry for my husband and think I am too la-ti-dah.

How anybody could look at the dog hair that piles up around here, the dust all over the place, and the mulberry and muds stains on my children and think that I am too la-ti-dah is not a question I asked myself.

But anyway, I spent 23 years toning down my decorating ideas so as not to make them, oh, as pink and fluffy as the picture of the dresser at the top of this post, or the picture of the window at the top of this section, and then in the 24th year, just threes ago before moving into this house, my carefully thought out ideas received a shock.

Before moving into this house the girls and I were looking at magazines and catalogs to get ideas for the new house. Now my husband and I had had the same quilt on our bed for some 20 years. He bought it for us in Korea. It's a cream background with bold red applique. Okay, so the appliqued pieces are hearts, but my husband is a romantic soul (more romantic than his wife, if truth be told) and it really wasn't very frou-frou- it was a bold sort of country look, not at all too feminine.

But after 20 years, I felt like a change. One of the bedroom designs we found was exceedingly frou-frou- lace, ribbons, bows, pink flowers, dainty furniture, curly-que accents everywhere, fol-de-rol, and fancy fluff in abundance. I teased the girls and told them I thought that's how I would decorate the new master bedroom. They thought that was pretty funny, and when their daddy got home that day, they slyly brought him the catalog and pointed out the picture of what they said would be his new bedroom.

The joke fell flat, however, because he just looked at it and said it looked alright to him, whatever I wanted to do was fine by him. The girls thought he was just trying to go along with the joke. They kept trying to rib him, and he kept not seeing the joke, because there wasn't one. He really didn't care.

Still not catching on, I said, "Seriously, Honey. You do know I wouldn't really decorate our room that way, right?"

Puzzled, he asked, "Why not? If you like it, why wouldn't you?"

"Well, because it's feminine, and you live here, too. I've always been careful not to go too floral and female, because I assumed you wouldn't feel comfortable in it. And besides," (this said a bit defensively because he was giving me that 'I think you're a little loopy on this' look), "Douglas Wilson's wife says the same thing, you know."

He just laughed. "Douglas Wilson's wife is married to Douglas Wilson, whoever he is. If he cares that much what color their bedroom is, then sure, she should think about that when decorating. But I'm your husband, and I don't care. You know I probably won't even notice. If you want pink roses and all that stuff, go for it."

"But, but..." I stuttered. "I'm supposed to make sure to include manly man touches, like dead fish on plaques and hunting themes."
But my husband said, quite reasonably, that he doesn't care if I want pink and roses to decorate our room, but he doesn't like dead fish on plaques and he likes to eat his meat, not decorate with it, and if I like paisley, pinks, and roses scattered about the room, then he likes it, too.

The bottom line here is really not a gender issue. It's a communication issue first, a consideration issue next. It is very important to be thoughtful and considerate and respect the tastes of your spouse, not somebody else's, and certainly not some other woman's ideas about what YOUR spouse SHOULD like. You can't really respect your spouse's tastes without asking him personally. I know that should be obvious, but since I went nearly a quarter of a century without thinking that through, maybe I'm not the only one.

And, as it turns out, he did decide after all to turn a corner of the wall space in our room into something clearly his'n. It's full of pictures of the children, the grandmother who raised him, and airplanes.

In one sense, I suppose it clashes madly with the Redoute rose prints, vintage sun bonnet, and wild rose prints on sheet music decorating the walls on my side of the bed. In another sense, I think it works out exactly right.

The First Step Towards a Cure Is Recognizing You Have a Problem...

REPOST:

Found in the dusty archives of old computer files, this was written in response to somebody expressing envy and asking me how on earth I had room for all those books ('all' those books back then was about 2000*). This was nine years, four houses, and three states ago:

Room for books? If I live there, there is no such thing as a house with no room for books. We have four children in one room, two in another, and the baby still sleeping with us. We're crowded but well-read ;-)

Please don't be envious, but consider that you're dealing with a very sick woman. Sick, sick, sick. It’s an addiction more consuming than any other. I must have books. I need them. I'd rather buy a book than get myself new clothes, go out to dinner, or pay the electric bill. I'd sooner go to library sale or a yard sale or thrift shop than I would go to High Tea at the fanciest place in the world. I'd rather read than watch a movie, dust, go for a walk, visit Disneyland, and sometimes I even prefer reading to talking to the real humans in my life=(

WE have nine people in a three bedroom house, which fortunately has an extra room the owners built out of the garage. That's our guestroom/library/computer room/office/pantry (I have a dinky kitchen). We arranged some of the shelves as you find in a library, too, back to back, extending out from the wall, rather than against the wall. I prowl thrift shops and yard sales seeking bookcases (as well as more books, natch). We have shelves attached to the wall. I put any box or crate I come across into service as a bookshelf. There are nine bookcases in the library alone, and that doesn't count the three very long shelves attached to the wall, the two crates and one long box (picture a window box turned on its side and you'll get the rough idea) on the back of my desk, another window box shaped thing turned on its side on the top of one bookcase to extend its capacity and the boxes and boxes of books which I didn't have room for, so I put them under the bed in this room.

In the dining room, which is small enough we have to go sideways around the table, I have two bookcases. In the living room I have put my mantle into service as a bookshelf, have a hutch-top we picked up for free from somebody's trash sitting on top of the stereo cabinet, have another hutch top I just got at a thrift shop on top of a small table, and have a china cabinet full of books top and bottom. I have two old wooden ammunition boxes doing service as bookshelves on top of another cabinet. There is a wood burning stove in this house, and it sits on a raised brick hearth that runs the width of the living room. I even put a bookcase up there, under the mantle, and we use the rest of the hearth to store our library books.

I have three bookcases in the hall, and two of those are so full that we have to keep the books in them stacked horizontally rather than vertically (you can fit lots more in the same shelf space this way, although it's sort of harder on the books than I like). To extend the capacity of those shelves I have another wooden ammunition box on top, with books in it and on it. I even have pressed a sturdy cardboard box into service, with books both in and on top. It's lasted surprisingly well.

I have three full sized bookshelves in my room and one small one sitting on top of a chest of drawers. I have three more of the ubiquitous ammunition boxes doing bookcase service on top of one of those shelves. We've had books in closets, books on top of every flat surface in the house, and I've even got a few books in plastic storage tubs. I've been looking for some time for a used headboard with a built in bookshelf so I can get more space for books without actually taking up anymore space in the house. I'm obsessed.

This is even more insane when you consider that we are military and move every few years. We will not be here more than two more years, and may only have one. Does that stop me? No, it doesn't even give me pause.

I read of one woman who emptied out her kitchen cupboards to make space for books, and I've given that serious consideration. She let her children play with the cans for blocks, and would go rummaging through their toy box at dinner time, I suppose;-)

My daughter has her own business selling books (via e-bay and through an online catalog she updates weekly). To help her out, I took her to library sales about four weeks in a row. I told myself every single time that I was not going to buy any books at all, just browse while she shopped. Oh, the heart is deceitful above all things. In short, I lied. I have 159 books that I bought at those library sales. I still have one laundry basket and one small box to go. But I'd go to another sale in a minute, greedily rubbing my hands together and gleefully cackling, "Books, books, BOOKS!"

Obsessively yours,

DHM
who has three copies of Faust by three different translators, and is trying to read them all at once. Don't envy me. Pity me. I won't mind. I'll probably be too wrapped up in my books to notice=)

* I said it was about 2000, because I had been making lists of my books and authors on grubby notebook pages, and when I counted those titles it came to 2000. When I described where all the bookcases were and how many of those we had and so forth- somebody said I had to have more than that.

Later I was cleaning out a box under my desk, and I found some _other_ notebook pages of books that had somehow gotten separated from the main body of the list. And there were just as many titles listed on those pages as on the ones I already had. So I
actually had around 4,000 books! But like I said, that was some, er, thirty or so library booksales ago....
---------
So naturally, of course, I went to a library book sale just a week or two before I reposted the above article two years ago, and brought home two more Boxes of lonely books. I couldn't help it. They just looked so pitiful sitting there, staring at me, pleading silently to come home with me. I couldn't just leave them there....

And this would also be the justification for the library booksale we're going to Sunday afternoon after church.

The CPSIA Shoves the Poor Off a Cliff

In 1992 we had three little girls, ages 2, 8, and 9. My husband was serving out his enlistment in the Air Force, and I was a sahm. You may have heard rumours about how little enlisted men get paid. Those rumours? They are mostly true.

We weren't seeking adoption at all, but we heard of two little girls who needed a home together, and we just couldn't come up with a good reason to say no. One of the children was severely handicapped, and it was unlikely anybody would take on both of them (nearly 4 and 6 at the time) because of the severity of those disabilities. The birth-mother did not want them separated. And so, over the objections of everybody sensible that we knew, we opened our home to this unplanned blessing.

Unplanned? Surely, of all the ways to add to a family, 'unplanned adoption' doesn't make much sense- how is that even possible? It's funny to call an adoption unplanned, but it really was. What little planning we were able to do came to naught. We were supposed to take the children for weekends over a period of a few months so they could get used to us. On the Wednesday before the first weekend visit, the birth mother telephoned and called off the adoption. We notified our friends and relations. The following day she called and asked the caseworker what time we were picking the girls up. The case worker asked her what had changed. She had her reasons, and I won't go into them here, but she did have their very best interests at heart, so the caseworker gave her a time. And then she dropped a bombshell.
"I want you to come and pick them up tomorrow," the birth-mother said, "but not for a visit. They need to go to their new parents now, and not come back."

So... we went to bed with three children and the next morning suddenly gained two more children who came to us with nothing but the clothes on their backs and some immediate and distressing but treatable medical problems, and some longterm and severe medical problems- again, just two weeks before Christmas. We had no clothes for them, no beds, no presents; nothing was in readiness for them, except our hearts (and even those needed some sprucing up).
(if you are interested in the longer version of our adoption story, see here)

They came on a Friday. We went shopping on a Saturday. Where did we go shopping? Thrift shops, of course. We had an immediate and urgent need for clothing, toys, and bedding for two new children, and we lived on an enlisted man's salary. It was only two weeks before Christmas. The thrift shop enabled us to fill the gap between our income and our needs.

We dressed our five girls from thrift shops, consignment stores, and yard sales over the next several years. Now they dress themselves largely from the same sources- 'new' clothes are supplementary. Not only does this help their budgets, but it also is a culturally and environmentally beneficial practice.

Clothing, books, and toys purchased from thrift shops do not come with all the extra external packaging that new items do. They are bagged in used bags donated by the public. They arrive at the thrift shop instead of at a landfill by means of donations. Many times stores will donate unsold inventory to thrift shops. These are items that do not contribute toward further burdening of landfills.

Thrift store shopping is culturally beneficial as it teaches children thrift, and is a direct reproach to the consumer oriented materialism of our culture.

Thrift store shopping benefits charities- most thrift shops are run by and for charities and provide job training and other support to those in need.

And thrift store shopping directly benefits the poor- thousands of others, as we did, fill the gap between what they make and what they need by shopping for necessities such as warm coats, hats, boots, snowpants, hats and scarves at thrift shops. Boots, bikes, and balls can be purchased used anywhere from 1/2 to about a tenth of their price new. The impact of the CPSIA on the poor is devastating.
One reason for this legislative blind spot, I believe, is that politicians and special interest groups like PIRG and Public Citizen have little understanding of what it means to have no margin of error.

And this is important to remember- when you are poor the margin for error is so very, very thin that the consequence of what seems to some to be a very small error in judgment or very small increased cost due to poorly thought out legislation such as the CPSIA is disproportionately large. Even people who are just barely financially comfortable sometimes just can't understand how thin that margin of error is. The poor are skating slowly and shakily on razor thin ice. The smallest mistake, theirs or somebody else's, can send them plunging into life threatening icy waters. You very likely make exactly the same sort of foolish decisions in your financial decisions on a regular basis- but you have a larger cushion to protect you from irresponsibility, whether it's your irresponsibility or that of legislators who pass unread bills or pass bills without hearing from ALL the stakeholders.

When you are poor, there are no margins. You can't take money out of the budget in one area and apply to another because there are no surpluses in any area. There may not be even be a budget.

Being forced to buy a brand new winter coat for your child because thrift shops have had to send all their used coats to the landfill in response to the CPSIA can cause far more devastation for lower income families than the complacently comfortable can imagine. For those who live precariously from one small paycheck to the next, that legislative error might result in having to choose between warm clothes for winter and having the power turned off or not being able to buy gas for the car that week. It might mean an overdraft at the bank, which will then cost more money as the bank adds an overdraft charge, which then means other checks bounce, which means more overdraft charges.

To the complacently comfortable, this sort of scenario seems overly dramatic, but that's because they haven't lived there, and they don't know what it's like. We do. We've lived out of an ice chest for three months because we couldn't afford the deposit to turn on our electricity. I've been reduced to tears when the only food in the house was two eggs, and I dropped one and broke it.

Our thrift shop charges five dollars for winter coats, good winter coats. If they have to send those coats to the landfill and poor families have to buy brand new coats, we're looking at a coast increase of at least 75 percent imposed on the families least able to bear it, and their children will be no safer.

The CDC says that on a scale of 1 to 10, the risk to children of lead poisoning from books is maybe .05- that is a rhetorical way of saying nil. No children I have ever heard of have had an increase of lead blood levels from the zippers on their jackets.

Because I have lived it, the poor to me are very real, living, breathing people, with real flesh and blood children who will be immediately harmed by the impact of the CPSIA as it is written.

To legislators and the special interest groups who pushed this bill through, the poor appear to be an abstract concept, useful for exploitative purposes, as poster children for pet causes, as tools for emotional manipulation and rhetorical propaganda. And that is why they shrug over the reality that they have chosen to impose a very real and immediate harm to poor families by quadrupling clothing expenses for their children in order to avoid the negligible at best and utterly unproven risk of increased blood lead levels in the zipper pull or snaps on a ten year old's coat.




Old Woman in a Shoe from a Mother Goose Book illustrated by Ella Dolbear Lee

I found an old picture of The Boy's Earthworks

This is over two years old, and it is an illustration of how I am ALMOST the coolest mother in the world:

My coolest Mom street cred comes from letting my kids do stuff like this to the front yard (click on the picture to enlarge it so you can get the full impact of what sort of nightmare it would be to have me in your neighborhood):



My son says: Okay. About Thirty two people can fit in it. We have a pantry, and a kitchen, and we were going to have a toilet in there, but it's now been turned into a stockroom.

And herein is the detail that prevents me from being the coolest Mom in the world. My son actually dug a deep hole inside that bigger hole, and he dug it out in a sort of niche big enough for a person to sit in, and he fully expected me to let him curtain it off and actually use it for, er, an, um, 'necessary' room.
And when I got done screaming, stomping, spitting, and making 'oh, eww, ew, ew, ew, ew, yuck' faces and saying things about cholera, plague, stench, filth, and black death, he understood me to mean, "Not in my lifetime or yours, Buster."
And so the fort has a stockroom, but if the tenants of the fort have to answer a call of nature they have to quit being soldiers or knights and ladies or whatever they are playing at (badgers and mice, sometimes, because he loves Redwall) and come inside and use the indoor plumbing just as though they haven't been raised by wolves.

I think it's totallyworth not being the coolest mother in the world.

P.S. full disclosure: while this is the front yard, it actually cannot be seen from the road. You have to be in our driveway to see it.

How CPSIA Hurts the Neediest Children

As some of our long term readers know, there is a specific single parent family we work with from time to time (some previous posts here, here, and here)

The five year old little boy spent the night with us on his birthday this week, just for fun. We were discussing how bedtime routine would go with him, and with a casual remark, he shattered my heart.
It went something like this:
My husband: After you brush your teeth and get into your pajamas, I will read you a bedtime story. You like books, right?
Adorable Little Boy: Yeah. But my mommy doesn't read to me. When I go to my daddy's, he doesn't read to me, either. And nobody reads me bedtime story books

My husband read him three bedtime stories, including:

The Man Who Didn't Wash His Dishes, published in 1950, written by Phyllis Krasilovsky, illustrated by Barbara Cooney. I believe this book is out of print, certainly our copy is a 1950 edition, and we've read it to all of our children and now this charming little boy. I do not think it has been reprinted in a very long time.

The Adorable Little Boy (ALB) laughed, chortled, and gasped in delighted disgust, "Oh, no! That's gross! Ohhh, yuck."

He wondered why that man didn't just do his dishes. He got the giggles when the man ran out of dishes and had to use his soap dish, and then an ash tray.

He was simply delighted- and delightful.



Then my husband read him that deliciously nonsensical, but still informative book on manners, What Do You Say, Dear?

Again the little lad chortled and expressed concern by turns- "Look out!" he said at one point, "that little girl is gong to fall!"

And finally they read the classic Blueberries for Sal, Our copy is a pre 1985 hardback. By then he was tired, it was well past his bedtime. He relaxed in the HM's lap and just let the words wash over him.
If you already own a copy of this book, hang on tight. This is not the time to get rid of your old, tattered copy and replace it with a reprint. The CPSIA's ban on selling pre-1985 children's books is fraught with unsuspected pitfalls and snares for innocent children's books.

In fifteen minutes the little guy got more read aloud time than he normally gets in a week. Or a month. He's a little sweetie from a single parent family, his mother's main source of income is home daycare and what she gets from the state for the two children who live with her. He certainly counts as 'under-privileged.' If he is ever going to have access to books, it's going to be through books found at school, libraries, thrift shops and yard sales- and my house.

Which brings us to the point of this post- the CPSIA harms the poorest children directly for the sake of pretending to preventing dangers that are more imaginary than real. Yes, children are harmed by lead in their blood levels. But the greatest and most direct KNOWN harm is lead from paint- adult paint, paint for houses in older homes and paint on cars- even new cars. The second greatest dangerous source of lead is their drinking water- from lead in the pipes. And the third would be other adult products that are found more often in immigrant populations, like old samovars with lead soldering, lead folk remedies, lead candies from Mexico.

There are NO known cases of children harmed by lead in a book. There are thousands and thousands of case of children harmed by lack of access to books.

As Carol Baicker-McKee, who blogs at Doodles and Noodles, wrote in her excellent comment to this post:

...The other variable to mention is that exposure to a stimulating environment (like one filled with books, perhaps) can prevent or offset the harm of lead exposure. See this link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17290364. There's also more at my blog post on CPSIA and literacy programs: http://doodlesandnoodles.blogspot.com/2009/03/cpsia-and-books-5-threat-to-staple.html. (The lead vs. enriched environment stuff is near the end of the post.)



It is good to remind people that everyone involved here cares about kids and wants to do what is right for them. You don't go into a business involving kids' products unless you like kids - for the most part it's not a mega-bucks business environment, and it has always had tighter regulation and more headaches. The old Saturday Night Live character played by Dan Ackroyd (who was promoting great holiday gifts for kids like the "Bag o' Glass) is a complete fantasy. The recalls the last few years have all been for imported products, all cheap metal jewelry or lead-in-paint issues. (By the way, lead is still legal in certain paints, including auto paint - don't let your kid suck on the bumper - some industrial coatings, and a handful of artists' pigments like lead white which is used sometimes as a ground for canvas). The vast majority of children's products made in the U.S. are safe, with or without this law. Furthermore, even this law won't guarantee that the plastic action figure you pick up at Walmart is harmless - all it does is maybe make it easier and tougher to go after a wrongdoer. But we already had laws that were working well to do that - the leaded toys that were a problem were recalled, the manufacturers were fined, and kids stopped being harmed. The bigger problem has been monitoring, and that is likely only going to get harder, given all the enforcement of new paperwork requirements.



Lead is risky, but we still recognize that sometimes the small risk associated with its use outweighs the small danger it poses. Do you ever take your kid to church? Guess what holds those beautiful windows together - lead. And yes, if the lead is touched (say for cleaning) small amounts can flake off and mingle with the other dust in the church and get into a child who puts his hands in his mouth. But most church-going people will opt to take the chance. And that's the point - in our country, we let parents make their own choices. Want to smoke around your kids? Cigarette smoke is loaded with toxins, including lead. I think it's a terrible idea and wouldn't do it, but other parents choose differently and we let them. This law goes overboard in removing choice from parents, inhibiting the creation and distribution of safe, useful products, and punishing people who have done nothing wrong - and that's why I oppose it and always will.

Parents who smoke run the very high risk of low birthweight for their children, respiratory diseases, middle ear infections, and recurring infections. Parents who expose their children to pre-1985 books risk only making their kids smarter. Yet one of these two things is banned- and it's not the one that carries no known risks for children.

The Equuschick's Further Categorizations & Standards for Books

The Equuschick would like to thank all those who commented on her earlier post, they were fascinating to read.

The question was asked of where she would put Terry Pratchett, and he actually belongs in another category altogether known as the Humour Category. That is his virtue, and a lovely one it is too. Also in the Humour Category is Georgette Heyer who, depending on which book you're considering, properly ought to belong in either Romance or Mystery.

But for one thing The Equuschick likes to pretend she doesn't actually read Romance, she only reads Humour (Georgette Heyer) or Humour's clever older brother, Satire. (Jane Austen.)

She does read Mystery, and the favorite authors in that category include Ngaio Marsh, Ellis Peters, A.A Milne (and a tragedy it is he only wrote one) and Dorothy Sayers.

But Dorothy Sayers is versatile, her Unnatural Death The Equuschick tends to class with Mystery and a teensy bit of Philosophy.

She reads science and other non-fiction often for pleasure, provided only that the writing is up to the same standards she holds for all other reading. It is important for a child to have the opportunity, as The Equuschick did thanks to the DHM, to experience reading non-fiction purely for pleasure.

She also reads a great deal of what could be called Christian apologetics or Christian living, but here unfortunately she is often inclined to lament the fact that Christians seem to have accepted substandard literature on the rather poor excuse that "the message is good." Well, when your message becomes lost forever in the bog of your bad writing and your predictable formula may it be of some comfort to you that "your message was good."

Since when did moral standards become incompatible with intellectual standards? The Equuschick, she wants to know. It is possible, nay indeed it is best, to hold out for both.

And she was rather a difficult child for the DHM, alas. Other children of the DHM seemed to be capable of accepting the fact that no, this wasn't the standard for literature but something could be still gleaned if one was willing.

Oh dear, not The Equuschick. The King's Daughter? She hated it. (The DHM never actually had her read all of it.)


We seem to have accepted the idea that what makes a book a "good" book for a Christian child is simply the absence of the usual sins. If it has no "language" (a rather vague standard), no illicit relationships, no child rebellion, and if everyone is good and kind and sweet and behaves themselves well, than we rejoice for having found a decent book for our little kiddies.

What about the concept of sin and repentance? No one learns repentance who has never first seen sin. What about setting an example of creativity, of a quality of work that will withstand the tests of time?

What The Equuschick first learned of Christian living from any book besides the Scriptures, she learned from C.S Lewis's Mere Christianity when she was 14.

What she learned of life and imagination, and how to appreciate it and interact with it and revel in it, she learned as a child from books like E. Nesbit's, Madeline L'Engles' (and she was so versatile she shows up everywhere) Sterling North's, and L.M Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. (There is a book that was both morally challenging and well-written, which just goes to show it can be done.)

These are the books on which her memories are built. These are the books The Equuschick simply calls Children's Storybooks, and there actually does a traditional genre apply to The Equuschick's tastes.


The Children's Storybooks need not have any supernatural element whatsoever. They must be well-written. They must be about real personalities, true three-dimensional folks who live life having the adventures that most children never will, but why should that stop them dreaming? Ambition can be built on the pages of a Storybook. A child can learn yet again (and yes this is a tremendous priority for The Equuschick) to grasp the possibility that the world can be different than they see it. They must step into the very day-day-existence of someone who lives a completely different life. This is a blessing that will enrich their life throughout every single experience they face.


How can a child change the world if they never knew it could be done? If they never learn to look at the world through another set of eyes, how can they ever see another's point of view? How can they relate to lives different from their own if they never know such lives exist? How can a child have the wings to dream that life could be different than it is if they are never taught to question, never shown the many different shapes that life can take?

Ambition and Imagination are beautiful things. Nourish them. Cherish them. There are many different ways of passing these gifts on to the next generation, but a Storybook always helps.

Reminiscing about The Common Room

(edited repost)

As longterm readers (and those who read the masthead) know, the nine of us (and two large dogs) lived in a 1200 square foot house with one bathroom for three years before this house was built and we moved in.. You may not know that before that we lived in a 2000 sq foot house with two bathrooms for two or three years, and before that we lived in a house of about 1400 sq feet with 2.5 bathrooms and no counter-space in my kitchen whatsoever.

We won't go into the other baker's dozen plus places where we lived during the Headmaster's 20 years in the military. The point is, we collected quite a number of ideas about what we did and did not want in a house. We drew the floor plans for this house ourselves. Now that it's all in concrete, I can see a number of silly mistakes I made, but over all, it's very much what I wanted.

One of the things I actually loved about the little house was the closeness. The living room was central to everything (and the warmest room in the house). Here's what I wrote about it when we lived in it:

"Whenever two or three are gathered together laughing, the other six or seven will surely hear it and come to see what all the fun is about. Whenever two or three are gathered together enjoying a heated discussion about whether the new Narnia movie will be worth seeing in the theater or whether the new Pride and Prejudice took too many liberties, or whether or not Whiter Shade of Pale incorporates Bach strains, the other six or seven are sure to show up to contribute their two cents. When I get a sad phone call and automatically respond to hard news with "No, Oh, no!" I will shortly be joined by children wanting to offer comfort and to be comforted.

I've enjoyed having such a warm center to our home. We found that this central, and only, gathering place also was the heart of our home, and we wanted to keep that heart. I was rather sad at the thought of losing that when we move into the new house.

I kept that in mind while poring over hundreds and hundreds of house plans looking for design ideas I liked. Then I found the perfect solution in a reproduction of Gustave Stickley's craftsman home floor plans. It was for the second story of a woman's club house. Well, five of our six girls would be sleeping in the second story, along with their brother, so that seemed perfect- and it had.... a Common Room!

The design we finally drew and used with our builder looks different than the one in the book, but a couple concepts remained the same- there are bedrooms and a bathroom at the ends of the house, with a huge central gathering space in the middle. This is where we'll spend most of our time, I think, and this is where we'll have games, singings, and general romps. The Craftsman model had a maid's room and some built in writing desks and an extra broom closet. We elminated the maid's room, made a small linen closet instead of the large broom closet, and we won't have built in desks. We will have the central meeting place I wanted, a heart keeping space.

A Common Room isn't really anything fancy. Boarding schools, colleges, and club houses often have them. A Common Room is simply a space held in common for the use of the members of a particular community. It's a place to relax, to feel at home, to discuss cabbages, sealing wax and kings with other people who join you in the Common Room. And that's what this blog is, too, among other things. It's our Common Room, where we invite others to come and partake of good life and good literature, to discuss the things that interest us, and to join us in some small measure while we learn, grown, and enjoy life.

To those of you who have been reading our Common Room discussions, those of you who are new, and those of you have both read and participated through emails and comments, we say "Well come, well come indeed, and we hope you return again and again."

This month marks the third year anniversary in the Big House. Not everything is quite as I wanted- but we are so richly blessed.

There are no longer 9 of us here, as the Equuschick married and moved into the little house last November. The HG graduates in May, and who knows what the future will bring to her? The Common Room has been the location for many singings, slumber parties, movie nights, games, quiet reading, school work, and Bible studies. It's where the computers are.=)

We end up doing more school, the youngest two and I, downstairs in the summer months, because it's cooler.
The kitchen often ends up the gathering place as well- I am glad it is large enough to accomodate a dozen friends.

Some posts from moving month three years ago:
What not to do
When things go wrong (It's funny, but there is also a twinge of sadness here, there is evidence in this post of the dementia my father was diagnosed with just this past year. We didn't realize it then).
Counting our blessings

Frugal Supper

My weekly Frugal Hacks post is up.

The store bought, ready made, convenience tin of curry sauce is embarrassingly expensive, and it's not something we usually have on hand. But we like it so much that we may just keep some stocked up in the pantry anyway.

Aquarium

It's a bit blurry because the glass was fogged (steamy jungle, donchaknow), but I loved these frogs. There were five or six of them all lined up in a row on the same branch.

More on books and the CPSIA

Letter one from one PJFry on Boing Boing:

These books certainly have artistic and historical value, and I don't think that they should be destroyed, but it is important to keep them out of little hands. The ink in most books printed prior to 1985 contain lead. Just touching the books, not to mention gnawing on them which many kids do, can result in unsafe levels of exposure.

There is no safe level of lead in anyone's body, but it is especially dangerous to babies and young children. Blood lead levels of just 5 to 10 mcg/dl in young children, below CDC limits, can result in 7 lost IQ points. There might still be a lot of bugs to work out with the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, like the prohibitive cost of testing for one, but the goal is a very important one.

My reply:

The CPSIA does not keep pre-1985 books out of 'little hands;' it keeps them out the hands of every single American youngster from age TWELVE on down.

And they are ending up in landfills thanks to this bill- many thrift shops have pulled theirs and are refusing to accept them in their donations. My library is pulling ours right now, and if they cannot sell them they will dispose of them.

Books printed before 1985 *sometimes* contained *some* lead in the inks. The Smart Mama (Jennifer Taggart) XRF tested several older books and she found most of them were lead free, only a few had lead in some of the illustrations.

"Just touching the books, not to mention gnawing on them which many kids do, can result in unsafe levels of exposure. "

There is no evidence I am aware of that this is true. What is your basis for making it? What studies do you know of that suggests lead in the ink (which becomes part of the substrate) somehow just comes off on a child's fingers?

And while your next statement may be true (there are no save levels of lead in the blood), you took a flying leap of logic there, as there is not a case on record where lead from a child's book entered the blood stream.

What evidence that does exist suggests that touching, holding, reading, even licking the book will not result in a chlid absorbing the lead, because saliva turns out not to be a very effective way of separating lead out of a printed page.

Actually EATING the entire book *might*- if a child chanced to eat a book that had more lead in it than most other pre-1985 books, but I suspect most children would be complaining of a belly ache for other reasons before they finished chomping down an entire book.

And I don't know any children over 2 who lick, suck, or chew on their books, yet this draconian law forbids the sale of all pre-1985 books for the use of children as old as 12- with zero evidence it's even possible for that book to harm a ten year old.
risk assessment is completely forbidden by the CPSIA as it stands.

Letter two from one PJFry on Boing Boing

I agree with you that there are major major problems with the CPSIA, and I think it would be a terrible tragedy if any books ended up in a landfill as a result of this bill, as I am sure that many probably already have. However, I do believe that it is important to protect children from lead, and other toxins, wherever they may be found.

The problem with lead is that it is a cumulative poison, each exposure results in more lead being built up in the body, and even small amounts of lead can lead to lifelong health and behavioral problems. Lead is in soil, paint chips and dust from older homes, vinyl blinds, pvc coating on power cords, antique furniture, keys, brass objects, and yes, some books. It all adds up.

Babies and toddlers routinely mouth their books, it is the first way that they learn to interact with them. I am sure that I am not the only parent to read their kid a book so many times that they have personally witnessed the ink being worn away. Or to watch the corners of books disintegrate from being sucked on.

Children absorb lead much more readily into their body than adults do. A child will absorb approximately 40-50% of all lead that they place in their mouths, as opposed to adults who will absorb about 10%. And young children, especially those younger than two, place their hands in their mouths much more frequently than adults. Certain health factors, such as a high fat diet, and low calcium and iron intake, can cause even higher rates of lead absorption. Children from poor backgrounds, the kind of children who are more likely to own items purchased from thrift stores, are most likely to suffer from the effects of lead exposure.

Right now, the CPSIA seems poised to do very little to punish the companies that are actually posing a significant health risk to children, and a lot of damage to the people that actually care about nurturing and protecting kids. It would be awful if libraries and thrift stores were harmed or forced out of business by the CPSIA. Likewise, WAHMs making cloth diapers or baby clothes, or the companies that make the wood toys that I buy my children. I feel very strongly that the INTENT of the CPSIA is a good one. However, I do agree with you that it is poorly written and needs to be thoroughly overhauled before being implemented.

My Reply:
I do not know if you are doing this sort of fear mongering bait and switch on purpose or if you really have been deceived by the Press Releases from PIRG, Public Citizen, NRDC, the Consumer's Union and other Naderite groups.

Nobody is arguing that lead isn't nasty stuff in the blood stream or that it isn't a cumulative poison. But you seem to think it somehow just magically enters a child through the air, and this is not so. You jump from 'lead in the blood is dangerous' to 'books poison children,' and there is NO evidence to support this.

Lead is in soil, paint chips and dust from older homes, vinyl blinds, pvc coating on power cords, antique furniture, keys, brass objects, and yes, some books. It all adds up.

Here's where you are wrong- NO, it only adds up if the child actually INGESTS it- there has to be some mechanism to GET the lead from point A to point B, and you seem to imagine this transferrence as something almost magical.

the paint chips have to be ingested, the dust gets on their hands and they put their hands in their mouths, or the inhale it, and the lead in keys, brass objects, etc ONLY 'adds up' in a child if they suck on or chew those things- and sucking doesn't extract the lead from every item- lead crystals, for instance, and books for another. The only scientific data I know of on this topic indicates licking a book does not, repeat NOT leach lead from the printed page. Chewing an entire book MIGHT, IF that book actually had lead in it (doubtful, as lead was NOT used in all pre-1985 books, only in a few) and IF the child at enough pages with lead in them (again, doubtful), and if the child had poor nutrition (vitamin C and calcium deficiencies have a lot to do with the higher lead absorption rates in children from impoverished families)- except, and this absolutely astounds me- there is NO RESEARCH supporting this theory about what MIGHT happen.

You include books with ZERO science to back that up. You are not using any scientific data or risk assessment to back up your claims.

Once more- SOME books have SOME lead in SOME of the colored inks. T

Babies and toddlers routinely mouth their books,

Cute. Not only is there no scientific data indicating any child ever has ever had the slightest bit of lead introduced to their blood stream from a book- not ONE, but we also aren't talking about regulations on only books for babies and toddlers. We are talking about books for 12 year olds, 11 year olds, 10 year olds, 9 year olds. 8 year olds, 7 year olds, 6 year old, etc.

I am sure that I am not the only parent to read their kid a book so many times that they have personally witnessed the ink being worn away.

And your evidence that this somehow magically translated into lead separating out of the substrate, separating out of the ink, and entering the child's bloodstream is based on.... what?

Or to watch the corners of books disintegrate from being sucked on.

When Jennifer Taggart lead tested her pre-1985 books, the majority of them had no lead. A few had lead well within the new limits set by the CPSIA, and a small handful had *some* lead in *some* of the illustrations. Do you understand it's not saturated throughout the book? This is where risk assessment is extremely useful, because, as you say, when babies do chew books, they chew the corners. They do not eat through the center like the Very Hungry Caterpillar. And low and behold, IF there is any lead (and remember there generally is NOT), it will be where there are brightly colored illustrations (and only a few of those) NOT in the corners of the book.

Children absorb lead much more readily into their body than adults do. A child will absorb approximately 40-50% of all lead that they place in their mouths, as opposed to adults who will absorb about 10%. And young children, especially those younger than two, place their hands in their mouths much more frequently than adults.

None of which in any way supports your contention that pre-1985 books need to be kept out of children's hands. In fact, the fact that they would only absorb half or less indicates the law is even more unnecessarily draconian than we knew, since older books do not routinely have lead, and it wasn't used in all the inks, either. .

Children from poor backgrounds, the kind of children who are more likely to own items purchased from thrift stores, are most likely to suffer from the effects of lead exposure.

Children from poor backgrounds are the kind of children most unlikely to own BOOKS, and now they will be even more unlikely to own them, with no benefit to their health, and much harm to their education.

Take a look at this


Letter Three, for another party: I'm certain that there are fewer than a dozen cases that could ever conclusively link lead poisoning to ink in books.

My reply: I am not aware of a single one, and I've been looking as have others. So there are actually zero cases that could ever conclusively link lead poisoning to ink in books.

The law doesn't outright ban their existence (like say Lawn Darts were) but it does put into place regulations that make their existence financially crippling to the point that they might as well ban them.

It is true that private citizens, at the moment, may continue to own those books. They simply cannot donate them to thrift shops or sell them and libraries are not supposed to check them out to children or in cases where children might use them. Libraries are, some of them, ignoring this law. Mine, sadly, is not ignoring it. They are pulling all kids pre1985 books, and because some books have no printed dates other than copyright date, they are pulling some books purchased in the last year or two that were undoubtedly printed post-1985 'just to be safe.'

And recently the CPSC ruled that it doesn't matter, because books have no useful value after 20 years anyway.
here.

CPSIA Rally and Censorship

Since Rep. Waxman (California, D.) has rudely canceled three hearings where he could have heard from the small businesspeople and crafters, the stakeholders who didn't have the opportunity to share their concerns with Congress before Congress actually wrote a law wiping out their livelihoods, those enterprising souls are taking their message to D.C. anyway.

There will be a CPSIA Fly-In, Rally and Congressional Briefing for next Wednesday, April 1 in Washington, D.C. If you cannot go, you can participate through the website, and they hope to have a live feed. There will certainly be Twittering.

The organizers have invited members of Congress and Senators to speak to them, but so far, although this ought to be a nonpartisan issue, all takers have been Republicans.

"One unnamed Democratic member of Congress even conveyed to us that he/she wanted to appear to tell us that we are being heard and help is on the way, but was told in no uncertain terms by "leadership" that an appearance would not be permitted."

Why would Democrat leadership be so heavily invested in this obviously defective bill that they cannot permit the slightest bit of independence in their ranks?

This link will take you to The Gavel, Nancy Pelosi's 'Speaker of the House' blog and webpage, to an article published in 2007 about this very bill and Commissioner Nancy Nord's efforts to bring some sensible balance into the CPSIA. Notice the similarity between their arguments and those that special interest groups such as Public Citizen, PIRG, NRDC, and others have been using. Notice that the dishonest begins with the title, where they boast about a bill that keeps no child safer:

Democrats Stand Up for Consumer Safety

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Representatives Bobby Rush, Rosa DeLauro, Bart Stupak, and Diana DeGette and consumer advocate Donald Mays held a news conference in the Capitol this afternoon on Democratic efforts to promote consumer product and toy safety.

Donald Mays? Among other things (ANSI and ICPHSO), he's "Senior Director of Product Safety Planning and Technical Administration at Consumers Union (CU)."

Speaker Pelosi announced new comprehensive legislation that The Democrats were passing to save us all:

"we want to make sure that we are doing the best possible job to protect America’s children.

“Twenty million imported toys, manufactured overseas, were recalled this summer. Twenty million toys. Some of these toys contained nearly 200 times the legal limit for lead. Two hundred times…"

So... apparently, there was already a legal limit for lead, and that legal standard was being flouted. And notice how she speaks here of toys, only toys. And she says they were imported toys, manufactured overseas, indicating to those who take what Pelosi says at face value that the law would address those issues. As we all know, it does far, far more than that.

She then attributes EVERYTHING in the bill to "Democratic efforts to correct years of failed protection by the Bush Administration."

In its self-congratulatory style, the article goes on to cast Nancy A. Nord as another villain, because of her opposition to the CPSIA, and Bush's support for Nord's views. "Democrats, we are told, "reacted angrily at today’s press conference."

It might just as well have read 'reacted angrily for the benfit of today's press conference' since that was the point- a little grand-standing, a little misrepresentation, a little soupcon of ad hominem attacks... and some grossly dishonest rhetoric:

"US House speaker wants safety agency chief to quit
Kevin Drawbaugh and Diane Bartz, Reuters - October 30, 2007

“Any commission chair who … in the face of the facts that are so clear says we don’t need any more authority or any more resources to do our job does not understand the gravity of the situation,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in calling for the resignation of Nancy Nord, acting chairman of the safety agency.

Of course, Nord didn't object to more authority or more funding. What she objected to is that the bill actually revoked much of the agency's authority by its rigid language, and it also mandated that the funding and resources would largely be directed in litigation and adversarial roles rather than in arenas that actually kept children safe.
Notice this slight of hand (we see it often from defenders of the bill):

Three other Democrats joined Pelosi in calling for Nord’s resignation. They said Nord had done too little in the wake of recalls of millions of lead-tainted toys imported by Mattel Inc ... and other companies. High levels of lead are linked to brain damage in children, and even death.

That's a nonsequiter, that last sentence. Nobody argues that high levels of lead are linked to these things, but there is NO evidence that the majority of products covered by the CPSIA have EVER been linked to any increase in blood lead levels in children.

Donald Mays, Senior Director, Product Safety at the Consumers Union spoke as well, an excerpt of his remarks:

A recent consumer poll by the Consumer Reports National Research Center revealed that our product safety problems could have economic implications. 36 percent of consumers say they will be buying fewer toys this holiday season, and 30 percent say they will not be buying Chinese-made toys at all. 84 percent blame our product safety problems on the manufacturers, but 62 percent hold the U.S. Government or regulators accountable.

We can no longer allow industry to police itself when it comes to safety. We can no longer sit back as our government’s watchdog agencies allow dangerous products to slip through the gaping holes in their safety nets.

We support strong legislation that would give our government agencies the resources and authority they need to protect consumer from this onslaught of hazardous products. Consumer safety must be a non-partisan issue. The CPSC and FDA need strong leadership and the will to develop proactive measures to prevent unsafe products from reaching our homes. Consumers Union urges Congress to make 2007 the year of safety reform, to fix our broken food and product safety agencies, and restore consumer confidence in the marketplace.

So he said the bill should pass because of economic reasons, and now we see that the economic damage caused BY this law is exponentially greater than that caused without it.

If this were truly a non-partisan issue, they wouldn't have to demonize Nord and lie about the issues that prompted her opposition to the bill. Nor would the Democratic leadership be forbidding all members from speaking to those whose businesses are nearly wiped out by this bill.
Here's is what Pelosi claimed:

“In a letter just last week, the chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nancy Nord, said she was opposed to increasing the agency’s funding or authority. One person assigned to testing toys to ensure that they are safe, and the Chairman of the Commission saying she is opposed to expanding the authority or the funding.

This is also what PIRG and Public Citizen have claimed. But it is not what Nord said. In fact, one of her complaints was that the increased requirements of the CPSIA (some of them utterly unrelated to safety) would eat up the budgeted resources, leaving her with less funding than she had before the so-called 'increase,' (which Congress hasn't given the agency, anyway).

Pelosi went on to boaster further about Democrat ownership of the CPSIA issue:

My colleagues who are standing here, they have taken the lead on this. They and Mr. Dingell, the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, have been in the lead, and Congresswoman DeLauro on the Appropriations Committee.

That was 2007. In 2009, Mr. Dingell wrote that March 4th letter to Commissioner Nord asking such perspicacious questions, and I blogged about how Nord and staff replied here.

It is unfortunate that at least at this point, he won't be attending or speaking at the rally.

Rick Woldenberg, who has been in the thick of the fight to amend or repeal the CPSIA from early on, writes:

I have long had the sense that democratic principles were somehow sacrificed in the CPSIA debacle. The closed door bargaining, limited legislative investigation with sources certain to give convenient answers, cancelled hearings when opposing voices might be heard publicly, the generally frosty and sometimes rude reception to opposing viewpoints, all were signs that that fix was in, and our participation in the process was unwanted (and perceived to be unneeded). This is not right - the People are still Congress' employers and deserve a role in rulemaking that affects their destiny so directly. Hence, we felt the Rally was a necessary response to our permanent exclusion from the legislative process. Reaching this conclusion is both shocking and terrifying. We need to take our government back.

If ever there were a bi-partisan rally, this one is it. In favor of amending or repealing the CPSIA we have self-styled radical leftists, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, conservatives, moderates, pro-lifers, pro-choicers, homeschoolers, public schoolers, bikers, librarians, and knitters of sweet baby booties, vegetarians, meat-eaters, hunters, anti-gun folks, military families, pacifists, people who voted for Obama, McCain, Bob Barr, and some didn't vote at all. I am sure there are people on both sides of every political football we could name who are standing side by side in opposition to this dreadfully defective bill.

But leading Congressional Democrats are staunchly opposed to allowing any break in their ranks. They are so irretrievably aligned with PIRG and Public Citizen and other Naderite goups, that they cannot separate themselves from the script that these groups have written.

Dingell is coming closer to doing so- he did break ranks to write Nord himself and ask her some very informed questions. He has now written to President Obama asking him to appoint the third CPSC commissioner- this is important, because Waxman has said there will be no committee meetings until the third person is appointed (actually, the new law authorizes a five member commission). Dingell has his own reasons- Waxman ousted him as chairman. But at least he's pushing in the direction we need him to push.

So far, only Republicans are willing to speak at the Rally. Nearly all the legislative remedies proposed (and certainly the most comprehensive ones) have been from Republicans as well. Is this because the Republicans are 'better?' Ha. I am under no illusions that any politician in Washington feels more strongly about my interests than his own, and his own interests are 'elect me, and then elect me again, and again, and line my pockets.' They are no less self-interested than Dingell, in my opinion.

But right now, on this issue, the Democrats are framing this as a Dem vs Republican issue (actually, as every 2007 article I can find on the passing of the bill shows, they have always framed it that way) CPSIA is a powerful toy that Pelosi and Waxman wish to keep. Some of their fellow Democrats need to remember they work for their constituents, and not for Pelosi or PIRG.

Wacky Hermit asks our alleged representatives in D.C. to attend the rally and add their voices:

This is a bipartisan event. But guess what-- Democratic leadership has forbidden Democratic Congressmen to speak at the rally! On the one truly bipartisan issue in Washington, will Democrats be silent? On the issue that has brought people of every political stripe together in a grassroots movement, will only one party show up to represent them in Congress?

So, I ask you (and especially if you are a true Democrat): Are you a leader or a follower? Because I for one want LEADERS in Congress. I want people who will listen to their constituents and do what it takes to represent THEM, not represent whoever has the most influence. Your real constituents, the moms and pops who vote for you and place their hope for change in you, want CPSIA to not take away their thrift stores and libraries. The American people do not want their minibikes banned or their school supplies to double in cost. The American people cannot possibly want you to make already-safe children's apparel even more expensive in the middle of a recession. All these things and more are happening because of CPSIA. Will you do nothing just so that you can continue to get invited to all the best Washington parties?

(she has much more, and it's all good, click through!)

These are good questions.


I am a cynic. I believe CPSIA is their golden calf, and they do not wish to give it up. They have decided they do not serve the people, the people serve them.


We are told that the negative consequences of this bill are 'unintended.' I believed that at the beginning. But Congress is now well aware of all these 'unintended' consequences. They have legislated a de facto book banning law with CPSIA- books printed before 1985 must be tested before they can be sold, and the mandated third party testing destroys the product. If the consequences are so very unintended, why not fix them?

The leadership has now censored their fellow Democratic politicians- they may not voice their dissent or exercise their God given and constitutionally protected rights of free speech or freedom of association. This is not acceptable.

Pictures from one of the Standard Bible Story Readers and
the 1928 Book Trails for Baby Feet, volume 1, and an old math text for elementary school children.

My Rep's Letter re. CPSIA

So... I wrote my rep to complain about the fact that the buying and selling of pre-1985 kid's books, such as the one pictured to the left, is now forbidden by the CPSIA, and here is what he replied:

"...You would be interested to know that in response to concerns regarding the testing requirements for children's products under P.L. 110-314, on January 30, 2009, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced that the implementation of such requirements will be delayed for one year, until February 10, 2010. Previously, the CPSC stated that resale and consignment stores will not be responsible for testing products, however these stores have a responsibility to not carry products that are harmful. For additional information on this issue, I would encourage you to contact the CPSC..."

The stay, of course, specifically EXCLUDES pre-1985 children's books. The implementation of such requirements is NOT delayed for one year- they cannot legally be sold if they are not tested. The same is true for a number of products- zippers, buttons, snaps, grommets, painted toys, jewelry, mini-bikes, ball point pens, to name some.

It's a pity that my legislator didn't bother to inform himself before giving me such bad advice, is it not?

Woot!

Fellow members of the congregation where we attend were told that their unborn grandchild had no brain. The parents were urged to abort. They were assured there was no brain, and this child would die once born anyway.

They decided that since their doctors' best advice ended with the same heartbreaking scenario no matter what they chose- they were going to be the parents of a dead child- they would prefer to at least have the chance to hold her gently before she left them rather than dismember her, and they continued the pregnancy.

Their baby was born on Sunday. She has a clean bill of health, including a full neurological exam and battery of tests which revealed a healthy, normal baby.

Social Security Slip Sliding Away

Remember this?

Four years ago, George Bush took the momentum from his re-election and announced an ambitious plan for Social Security reform. Despite having sounded the warning bell on SocSec stability in the Clinton years, Democrats suddenly discovered that the system was so sound that any attempt to reform it was “radical” and and attack on benefits for senior citizens. They attacked Bush for even considering reforms along the lines of optional privatization and dug their heels into Capitol Hill until they turned blue. Democrats like Robert Casey ran on the issue in the midterms. Harry Reid said the crisis didn’t exist. Nancy Pelosi concurred. Bush eventually had to drop the issue altogether.

Here's where we are now:

PBS reports that the Social Security surplus, once considered safe for a generation, now may disappear in two years, next year … or may already have vanished. According to Treasury’s website, we tipped over into deficit spending of SocSec in February of this year.

Much more available here.

AIG Officials Getting Threats Targeted at Their Children

Thanks to Congress, which by demagoguery successfully redirected the outrage of the more knuckledragging members of the public from the trillion dollar bail-outs to AIG executives and their piddling (in comparison) bonuses, here are some of the messages those execs are getting:

"Get the bonus, we will get your children," someone identified only as "Jacob the Killer" hauntingly writes in an e-mail.
...
-- I don't hope that bad things happen to the recipients of those bonuses. I really hope that bad things happen to the children and grandchildren of them! Whatever hurts them the most!!

...

-- We will hunt you down. Every last penny. We will hunt your children and we will hunt your conscience. We will do whatever we can to get those people getting the bonuses. Give back the money or kill yourselves.

-- All the executives and their families should be executed with piano wire around their necks --- my greatest hope.
...
-- The Revolution is coming. The family members of your executives are not safe. Your blood will run through the streets in the coming months.

More folks are leaving AIG, going without the retention bonuses they were promised a year ago.

Ed Morrisey asks:

If the public threatens the safety of their families, the Attorney General threatens to prosecute them, and Congress threatens to take the money away they got paid for not seeking employment elsewhere, why should they stay? And here’s an even better question: why should anyone take their place? Would you work for $1 a year just so you could put your children in the gunsights of lunatics doing bus tours past your house and have the state’s top prosecutor pledging to come after you with all the tools at his disposal? The people leaving AIG are literally irreplaceable under these conditions, and we need the FP unit staffed with knowledgable people if we want to see even a fraction of our investment returned to us.

This is what mob hysteria produces, and we can thank Congress and our “shaking with outrage” President for fomenting it. They’ve put people in danger who had little to do with the actual wrongdoing, and deliberately encouraged the drooling, mindless reaction around the nation. They’ve probably kneecapped any possibility of getting our money back out of AIG. I hope people enjoyed their outrage parties, because we just paid $150 billion for them.

Congress should have looked a little harder for some real villains. They shouldn't have been too hard to find.

Aquarium

I love the vibrant colors of these anemones. Taking photos through glass and water is somewhat daunting for me, which makes it all the nicer when they turn out the way I wanted.

Remember the School Search Case?

The one where a 13 year old eight grader on the honor role was stripped searched by school employees who suspected her of having ibuprofin? Her outraged mother put some teeth into that indignation and hired a lawyer. Their case will be before the Supreme Court next month. Here's what an expert has to say about the case, followed by Tom Maguire's response to said expert- because I couldn't get my jaw off the floor long enough to put two coherent, measured sentences together to form my own response:

"'Richard Arum, who teaches sociology and education at New York University, said he would have handled the incident differently. But Professor Arum said the Supreme Court should proceed cautiously.

“Do we really want to encourage cases,” Professor Arum asked, “where students and parents are seeking monetary damages against educators in such school-specific matters where reasonable people can disagree about what is appropriate under the circumstances?”'

"Reasonable people disagree about whether this was appropriate? How many parents strip-search their thirteen year olds, let alone other kids? For Advil? I would guess roughly none. In fact, I daresay that if a thirteen year old came to school officials and complained that her parents were strip-searching her, the school might arrange for a home visit from Child Services."

Some of you will remember the 1996 East Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania school that performed extermely personal exams on sixth grade girls, without their parents' permission, and in many cases over the tearful objects of the little girls themselves.

That school closed ranks, lashed out at complaining parents, and suggested there were some nefarious ulterior motives for their objections. Most of the parents dropped their objections, and all but one of the girls was left in the same school system- whose administrators insisted had done nothing wrong.

Teachers wore blue ribbons in support of the district. The local physicians and the paper stood behind the inspection. The state police and local district attorney investigations said no Pennsylvania law had been broken. Rather than hearing a mea culpa from the system, what the parents received was more like a spanking.
[...]The seven largest employers are the four school districts, the local state college, the county hospital, and the county government.

• In Newton, Massachusetts, the school forced ninth-grade girls in the health classes to go to a drug store and buy condoms and practice putting them on a banana.


When parents who find out about such classes vehemently object, school authorities often arrogantly dismiss parents’ complaints. A Michigan state Senate committee studying the problem of parental consent in public schools, found:


“The treatment of parents with the temerity to object to sex education curricula also reflects a more general attitude toward the role of parents in public education today. “There is a pervasive attitude among many administrators and health educators,” the Michigan Senate committee found, “that they know best what children need. They communicate to parents that they are the professionals and the parents are unschooled amateurs.” Too often, the committee found that parents were treated as if they were an “incidental biological appendage in the raising of their children.”

Time to put the responsibility for education back where it belongs.

For Your Amusement

I've been compiling this list for a long time. It's titled:

"Rules My Mama Never TOLD Me I'd Need to Make."

Here are a few of the items on my list:

Do not shoot the dart gun at the ceiling fan.

Gentlemen do not shoot rubber-bands at their sisters' bottoms.

In order for things to work, they must be plugged in.

"NO APRIL FOOL's JOKES WITH TOOTHBRUSHES!"

When your Dear Papa instructs you to go outside to bring the rubbish bins back from the end of the driveway, he intends for you to drag them, push them, or pull them, leaving at least one foot on the ground most of the time. He does not intend for you to turn them on their sides, climb on top, and roll them the entire 250 foot length of the driveway by walking on them after the fashion of lumberjacks at a log rolling contest, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers notwithstanding.

Do not let your sister talk you into holding one end of the rope while she loops the middle around a very high branch in a tree, uses it as a pulley, and then hoists you up by pulling the other end of the rope.

If you talk your brother into holding one end of the rope while you loop the middle around a very high branch in a tree, use it as a pulley, and then hoist him up, do not let go of the rope. Not even to get a better grip.

Do. Not. Climb. In. The.Dryer. And. Shut. The. Door. It. Is. Not. Cute.

Do not pitch coins into your sister's mouth.

Do not stand there with your mouth open letting your brother toss a dime into your mouth.

My mother did tell me never to lick frozen metal, and I did pass this rule on to my children. I was not, however, imaginative nor thorough enough:


Do not hold the metal bucket up while your sister licks the side.

Do not drop the bucket when your sister's tongue is stuck to the side.

If you do get your tongue stuck to the side of a bucket and your brother drops it, do not tell your mother, unless you want her to laugh.


Do not glue your Cabbage Patch doll to the floor. And not to Daddy's flight jacket either. And don't glue it to the couch. And not the chair. Do not glue that dolly anywhere.


Do not pull out the drawers in the largest chest of drawers we own so they look like stairs so you can get your two year old self six feet off the ground by climbing to the top.

Family Bonding

"The more experiences, words, anecdotes, jokes the family have in common, the closer they are bound together....
Humor is one of those spiritual values which will help tide us over the years when the children are young. But that is stopping short of the truth, for humor and gaity and merriment are a never-failing benediction."

From Mrs. Moffett Benton's At the Pace of a Hen.

Humanism Old and New

This was a very interesting read.

Cauliflower Salad

About four to six cups of diced cauliflower (supplement with other cruciferous veggies if you like

1/4 cup diced peppers
1/4 cup diced green olives (we have also used artichoke hearts)

Dressing:
1/2 cup mayonnaise or salad dressing
1/4 or 1/3 sour cream
a teaspoon or two of sugar or honey if you are using mayo instead of dressing
garlic to taste (we like about a T.)
splash of tarragon vinegar (optional)
Italian spices- marjoram, oregano, basil, thyme- whatever you have on hand, a couple teaspoons or so.

Mix well, combine with vegetables- better after about an hour, but we like it either way.

You don't have to have the honey, so this is a low-carb recipe compatible with Atkins or South Beach if you want.
I think it could also use some green onions or diced vidalia onions

Recovering from CPSIA Burnout

Those of you who contacted me when I pulled my Amazon listings (and you know who you are) to say I was over-reacting, explain this:

However, the well-intentioned legislation included a retroactive rule declaring untested items, regardless of lead content, as “banned hazardous products.” The Consumer Product Safety Commission then determined the law applies to children’s items already on shelves.

All of which leaves Austvold and company with few options. Books printed after 1985 are not affected, but thousands of classic children’s literature titles are. Is she following the law’s guidelines? “Absolutely,” Austvold said. “The fine is very substantial. I’m not going to take that risk.”

The CPSC permits the sale of these older books only if testing determines they are safe, but that’s not practical for used bookstores that buy inventory one piece at a time. A Wisconsin merchant estimated the cost of testing her used books at $100 to $400 each. What’s frustrating merchants is that nobody can cite an instance in the U.S. where a child was poisoned by lead from old book illustrations. And while babies and toddlers are certainly known to chew on whatever you give them, the law covers books written for seventh graders.

And then see if you can read this without feeling sick to your stomach:

Congressman John Kline responded and said efforts are underway to change the law, but with the focus on larger budget issues he admitted it could be years before this gets another look.

In the meantime, some used book shops and thrift stores are destroying boxes of old titles. And they’re worried that before Congress enacts a fix, the law may destroy their business.

Commissioner Thomas Moore (tmoore@cpsc.gov; this guy is a disgrace to the original Thomas More) wrote to Rep. Dingell, you may recall, and expressed his disdain for those business owners who object to the fact that the CPSIA will, in fact, destroy their entire livelihood without making children safer, saying he was proud of it as it stood "despite the hue and cry of some in the business community
who will never be happy with the closer scrutiny and accountability required
by the Act..."



The owner of Chapter One Organics responds. Here's a small excerpt from her excellent letter:

The majority of us in the business community would like to see a smart law
that is focused on products that pose risks and the CPSIA is clearly not the
answer. We are seeing huge losses being reported by small and large
companies and it isn’t because their products are toxic, it is because the
law does not work.

It is astonishing to me that after six months of dealing with this, your
response to Representative Dingell’s questions didn’t even scratch the
surface of the issues regarding this law and instead seemed completely
politically driven. As a tax payer, I resent that you are unable to work as
a team with Ms. Nord. In the private sector we often have to work in
imperfect environments. If we don’t design, create, solve problems and
implement, we don’t produce products, money, or jobs.

Let me reassure you that I would not have spent the past four to five months
of my life and money to figure out why and how to comply with the CPSIA if I
were not accountable. We don’t mind complying with laws that work but the
CPSIA doesn’t work.

Here is a long list of links and data from the printing industry.

Ed Driscoll on the CPSIA (bonnet tip The Brothers Judd):



Here's a partial fix:

The American Library Association (ALA) supports legislation introduced by U.S. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) yesterday to amend the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) to exempt ordinary books from the lead limit within the act. This is a welcome step toward ensuring libraries will not be adversely affected by the law.

This story outlines how different resale shops are taking different approaches to the law. There's also a list of the 'most wanted' recall items at the bottom of the story.

This is the always worth reading Walter Olson's take.

The President's Speech

Here's the President's press conference last night. If you watch nothing else, watch his introductory remarks- the first six minutes. Pay attention to how often he does (or doesn't) look at his audience, or indeed, turn his head much at all.

Here's why:
Instead of a telepromptor....

Most media reports I have seen make a point of mentioning the President gave his introductory remarks with a screen, but then did not use the teleprompter for responding to questions from the press.

Some are positively fawning:

The president appears very comfortable discussing complex issues and often performs well in these press conferences. It is no doubt reassuring to many Americans.

And take note: He is responding without a teleprompter.

Seriously unsnarky question here: Isn't that typical? Don't most politicians respond to press questions without a teleprompter? How could it be otherwise, unless questions and answers are prepared in advance?

Here's the transcript.

Here's the beginning of the question taking portion:

All right. With that, let me take some questions. And I've got a list here.

Here's one question and answer that caught my attention:

Stefan Collison (ph), AFP?

QUESTION: Mr. President, you came to office pledging to work for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. How realistic do you think those hopes are now, given the likelihood of a prime minister who is not fully signed up to a two-state solution and a foreign minister who has been accused of insulting Arabs?

OBAMA: It's not easier than it was, but I think it's just as necessary.

We don't yet know what the Israeli government is going to look like, and we don't yet know what the future shape of Palestinian leadership is going to be comprised of. What we do know is this: that the status quo is unsustainable, that it is critical for us to advance a two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in their own states with peace and security.

And by assigning George Mitchell the task of working as special envoy, what we've signaled is that we're going to be serious from day one in trying to move the parties in a direction that acknowledges that reality.

How effective these negotiations may be, I think we're going to have to wait and see. But, you know, we -- we were here for St. Patrick's Day, and you'll recall that we had what had been previously sworn enemies celebrating here in this very room.

You know, leaders from the two sides of Northern Ireland that, you know, a couple of decades ago -- or even a decade ago -- people would have said could never achieve peace, and here they were, jointly appearing, and talking about their commitment, even in the face of violent provocation.

And what that tells me is that, if you stick to it, if you are persistent, then -- then these problems can be dealt with.

That whole philosophy of persistence, by the way, is one that I'm going to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come as long as I'm in this office. I'm a big believer in persistence.

I think that, when it comes to domestic affairs, if we keep on working at it, if we acknowledge that we make mistakes sometimes, and that we don't always have the right answer, and we're inheriting very knotty problems, that we can pass health care, we can find better solutions to our energy challenges, we can teach our children more effectively, we can deal with a very real budget crisis that is not fully dealt with in my -- in my budget at this point, but makes progress.

I think, when it comes to the banking system, you know, it was just a few days ago or weeks ago where people were certain that Secretary Geithner couldn't deliver a plan. Today, the headlines all look like, "Well, all right, there's a plan." And I'm sure there will be more criticism, and we'll have to make more adjustments, but we're moving in the right direction.

When it comes to Iran, you know, we did a video, sending a message to the Iranian people and the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And some people said, "Well, they did not immediately say that we're eliminating nuclear weapons and stop funding terrorism." Well, we didn't expect that. We expect that we're going to make steady progress on this front.

We haven't immediately eliminated the influence of lobbyists in Washington. We have not immediately eliminated wasteful pork projects. And we're not immediately going to get Middle East peace. We've been in office now a little over 60 days. What I am confident about is that we're moving in the right direction and that the decisions we're making are based on, how are we going to get this economy moving? How are we going to put Americans back to work? How are we going to make sure that our people are safe? And how are we going to create not just prosperity here, but work with other countries for global peace and prosperity?

And we are going to stay with it as long as I'm in this office, and I think that -- you look back four years from now, I think, hopefully, people will judge that body of work and say, "This is a big ocean liner. It's not a speedboat. It doesn't turn around immediately. But we're in a better -- better place because of the decisions that we made."

All right? Thank you, everybody.

END

He compared Ireland's civil war to Israel/Palestine? And, When it comes to Iran, we did a video.

Okey-dokey.

Economic Woes

While Congress whips up populist outrage over a few million dollars in bonuses paid out as terms of contracts agreed upon months before the bail-out, recipients of TARP funds show Congress their gratitude by recycling some of those taxpayer funded rescue funds into campaign contributions:

While a few big firms, such as Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase, have curtailed their campaign giving, others are quietly doling out cash to select members of Congress, particularly those who serve on committees that oversee TARP. In recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, the political action committee for Bank of America (which got $15 billion in bailout money) sent out $24,500 in the first two months of 2009, including $1,500 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and another $15,000 to members of the House and Senate banking panels. Citigroup ($25 billion) dished out $29,620, including $2,500 to House GOPWhip Eric Cantor, who also got $10,000 from UBS which, while not a TARP recipient, got $5 billion in bailout funds as an AIG "counterparty." "This certainly appears to be a case of TARP funds being recycled into campaign contributions," says Brett Kappel, a D.C. lawyer who tracks donations. (A spokesman for Cantor did not respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Hoyer said it's his "policy to accept legal contributions.")

The President appointed an Economics Board to discuss this economic crisis. But it seems that vitally important board is either not meeting at all, or it's holding illegal secret sessions, or...? Certainly there seems to be a dearth of that sunshine we were told to expect:

Through an aide, one board member told POLITICO of a board meeting at the White House on Feb. 26. The White House did not respond to a question about that session.

So far, none of the commission members’ meetings have been public or officially announced in accordance with the 1972 federal law which governs such groups, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA.

[...]

On March 13, seven members of the economic panel met with President Obama in a closed-door session at the White House just before a photo-op Obama held with Volcker. The group included Volcker, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson, Yale investment chief David Swensen, and developer and Hyatt Hotel heir Penny Pritzker. No private citizens who don’t sit on the panel attended.

That's okay, says the White House, because it wasn't really a legal subcommitte meeting. Really. Okay, but even if it was, it's technically legal:

But Psaki said the session “was not a PERAB meeting---it was a small group of business leaders meeting with the president.”

The White House said the March 13 session did not trigger the requirement for a public meeting and advance notice because it was not actually a subcommittee of the larger board. In addition, an official said the administration had legal advice that such meetings were permissible as long as they do not pass on official advice from the full board. “Even if it was a subgroup meeting, White House Counsel, the Treasury and (the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel) have advised that subgroups are allowed to meet with the President as long as they are not providing formal advice on behalf of the entire PERAB,” the aide said.

Why did people think they were going to get when they voted for him, and why did they think that?

In truth, there is no history for what he is doing. He is the most radical President of our times, far outside the mainstream of our political philosophy.

He is not a reformer who fixes things. He fancies himself "transformative," a man who reshapes and reorders. It apparently begins with smashing the existing order under the pretext of managing the crisis he inherited.

During the campaign, a fellow journalist confided that "I know Obama is a Manchurian candidate, I just can't figure out what for."

I laughed then, but no more. Obama represents a secular religion that believes, no matter the malady, Washington is the antidote. More government is the chicken soup of his tribe.

It is an illusion of many Republicans and Democrats that Washington can successfully manage the economy and our lives. Our institutions and culture are too big, too diverse and too unruly to be run like a banana republic.

Yet the economic mess has robbed the nation of its confidence, and the vacuum is being filled by politicians bearing promises and borrowed dollars. The true cost of this "help" will come later, with back-breaking debt and a lack of growth and opportunity.

CBO (nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office) says the President's budget will result in 9.3 trillion dollars in deficit spending over the next ten years.

Shep Smith on Congress flushing contract law down the toilet:



We have a rule in this house, a pretty simple one, really- we do what we say we are going to do. If you don't do what you say you'll do, nobody trusts you, everybody knows you're not dependable. Congress might want to try respecting that basic human reality some time.

A bonus, by the way, is not always an 'extra,' a gift. It's part of your pay, much as a waitresses tips are calculated in as part of her income. When my husband managed just one grocery store he got a bonus, too, if the income/outgo ratio was at a targeted level, he got a bonus. Revoking his bonus is punitive, it's like docking your salary. That's not really the government's role. But then, neither is bailing out businesses.

The inimitable Mark Steyn:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner claims he didn’t find out about the AIG bonus issue until March 10. Turns out that he's on video discussing those very bonuses a full week previously.


Still, on the basis of its first 60 days, this is a very odd presidency. In between appearances on Jay Leno and his “March Madness” picks, Barack Oprompta also found time to compare AIG executives to suicide bombers:

Even though it makes you angry because you’re thinking I was responsible, and these folks are irresponsible, and somehow I’m paying for them, it was the right thing to do to step in. The same is true with AIG. It was the right thing to do to step in. Here is the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got, they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up, but you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.

Right. It’s like you’re at the Jay Leno post-show party and suddenly you notice this AIG vice-president has wandered in, with six figures of bonus strapped to his waist and he’s yelling “Allahu Akbar!” — which is Arabic for “I’d like to deposit this in my Cayman Islands account.”

[...]

Right now, Washington is telling the planet: In our America, there are no rules. Got a legally binding contract? We’ll tear it up. Refuse to surrender the dough? We’ll pass a law targeted at you, yes, you, Mr. Beau Nuss of 27 Plutocrat Gardens, Fatcatville. If you want a banana republic on steroids, this is great news. So cheer on thuggish grandstanding by incompetent legislators-for-life like Barney Frank if you wish. But, in any battle between the political class and the business class, you’re only fooling yourself if you think it’s in your interest for the latter to lose.

Several Wall Street companies have expressed outrage, and say they will look into pulling out of government bail out programs if this continues, which raises the question about just how utterly unavoidable the government bail outs were, and the President may now be walking it back a bit.

Even predictably liberal economist writer Krugman is concerned about the Geither's plan, saying he acts as though there are no bad assets, only 'misunderstood' assets.

Michelle Malkin says it's all a smokescreen and points out some other financial doings that the administration just may not want us to notice.

In other news, a reporter with the AP discovers that it's really okay if Obama doesn't keep his campaign promises.

Once in the White House, presidents quickly learn they are only one part of the political system, not in charge of it. They discover the trade-offs they must make and the parties they must please to get things done. Inevitably, they find out that it's impossible to follow through completely on their campaign proposals.

After all:

Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for office promising to balance the budget. But he reversed course when he took over a country in depression and doled out a spending prescription to revive the economy. He made other shifts as well.

The ailing public didn't view him as wishy-washy or politically calculating, but rather as a president who was experimenting in hopes of finding policy to fix the problems. His charm and communication savvy allowed him to get away with it.

Historians agree that seems to be the model Obama is trying to emulate. A charismatic orator, he's trying to govern with a pragmatic posture while projecting a willingness to compromise.

The point is to create a majority class dependent on the government, and then ever larger groups of the entitled:

...there is a risk to the U.S. system with more people relying on entitlements. "Well, they become an interest group," Mr. Becker says. "The more you have dependence on the government, the stronger the interest group of people who want to maintain it. That's one reason why it is so hard to get any major reform in reducing government spending in Scandinavia and it is increasingly so in the United States. The government is spending -- at the federal, state and local level -- a third of GDP, and that share will go up now. The higher it is the more people who are directly or indirectly dependent on the government. I am worried about that. The basic theory of interest-group politics says that they will have more influence and their influence will be to try to maintain this, and it will be hard to go back."

What to do? I don't really know, other than tend your own backyard, be a light and a beacon in your community, teach your children well, and have plenty of them.=)

AIG Exec Tells His Story

The New York Times publishes a letter today from Jake DeSantis, an executive in the AIG financial products division who is quitting. As he lays out his reasons for quitting, it is clear how shamefully our politicians have demagogued this issue.

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

From Betsy's Page

Instruments

Music shop. The detail on the neck of the one in the center was really amazing.

"Would you please act your age back there?"

"Would you please act your age back there? Stop playing with that sign. If you have no greater powers of concentration, leave the room. We’re trying to have a serious discussion, which will include, you understand, a lot of criticism. We really need people to grow up. …

You, who stood up, who has the sign up … The next one that holds a sign up — it is distracting to people. I understand that there are some people for whom rational discussion is not an appropriate means of expressing themselves. You are entitled to do that in general, but not in a way that interrupts those of us who are trying to have rational discussions. So the next one who holds a sign will be ejected. Uh, I do not know how you think you advance any cause to which you might be attached by this kind of silliness."

-Barney Frank, speaking to Code Pink.

Parenting Philosophy

modified, retooled, and restyled repost

I think that two common mistakes American parents make are giving up too soon, (deciding a method doesn't work within a few days, when it might take weeks of consistency to see good fruit), and picking some method or idea as THE ONE RIGHT WAY, particularly when that approach may be one that is not founded in time tested and/or universally applicable principles.

For me, of course, my first criteria is that any approach to parenting must be at least compatible with scripture, and more accurately, rooted in scripture. But I also have another quick litmus test for any parenting idea I hear that even my unbelieving friends can share. That is "If this idea isn't practical and doable by any parent in any time and circumstance, then it's not really universal and therefore can't be really THE ONE RIGHT WAY or NECESSARY."

Here are some examples:
Co-sleeping: Some people like to sleep with their babies and some don't, and this is not a judgment on either camp. However the camp that says it's WRONG to let the little ones sleep with their parents- that camp is wrong. I know this because it is neither practiced nor practical in ever so many cultures and times; therefore, it is not universal. I don't mean that it's wrong to have a separate sleeping space for your baby. I just mean it's wrong to tell other people that it's harmful or bad or in any way unacceptable for babies to sleep with their parents. Since it's not applicable across time and culture, it's not the approach. There may be individual circumstances and situations where it is the right approach, but nobody should be making a blanket claim that a parenting practice found in many cultures for millenia is wrong.

On the flip side, the Equuschick tells me that a book she read recently made the breath-takingly illogical argument that cultures that do not practice co-sleeping have higher suicide rates than those that do, ergo, failure to co-sleep was to put your baby at risk for mental illness. This is ridiculous.

Behavior Modification: Stickers, charts, and gimmicky prizes- okay, these are cute and fun and I've used them for brief, short training on skills like bedmaking, getting in the van and buckling up when it is time to go, or encouraging piano practice. But as an over all discipline and training and teaching method for really important things- nyet. Could hunter/gatherer families work with charts and little prizes? A laplander living in a yurt hundreds of miles from a store? Can a family with barely enough money for food and rent do this? Can a Rain Forest tribe never before discovered by Europeans do this? No. Ergo- while one may find some use and benefit from this sort of thing, one who cannot use such an approach or doesn't like it should not be seen as a failure, especially since there are downsides to it, as well. When your child begins to look at those cheap prizes with a jaded eye and wishes to make a cost assessment analysis as to whether the reward or the disobedience is worth more to him, then you know this method has failed. When it encourages materialism, it should be eschewed. I have found natural rewards and consequences more effective (if we finish this in time, then we have time for that. If you don't practice the piano, you have to pay me back for your lessons).

Date Nights- I know this is a hot button for some, but I really must include it. We have heard preachers at church presume to preach from the pulpit that the parents really need to be willing to hire a sitter for the baby and go out for several hours once a week. That's just foolish. A babysitter and a few hours at a restaurant- these things are not needs. What is a need is for mother and father to continue to spend some alone time together and to talk together. But that need can be met without a sitter and without a restaurant. We know this because all kinds of people in all kinds of times and places have never had access to a sitter, and do not even know what 'dinner and a movie' is.
Furthermore, and I say this without any intention to engage in the breast vs bottle debate, the facts are that formula has only been around for about a hundred years. Any 'parenting tip' requiring the mother to put artificial baby milk in an external container with a plastic nipple on it and leave her baby with somebody else is a tip that has extremely limited applicability, and therefore, while it might be something that a 21st century mother could do and might want to do for reasons that are none of my business, it's not something anybody should ever suggest every mother ought to do.

Letting the baby cry it out, never letting the baby cry it out.
This whole baby crying scene- some people advocate 'letting the baby cry it out.' I never do that, and I think it's a really bad idea. I don't think it's universal, either, as in some places mommies who let their babies cry it out are mommies attracting wild animals to a carry out lunch, or mommies who are inviting the attention of enemies of some other sort. When my babies cried, I picked them up, and I do not consider this spoiling them. They have little other means of communication and I do not think it's fair to blame them for using the primary method they have.

On the other extreme are the people who advocate never, ever, letting a baby cry, who will neglect personal hygiene or pull a baby out of the carseat in a moving vehicle just so as to avoid letting the baby cry. If I was in the midst of showering and my baby began to cry, I hurried up my shower, got dressed and got my baby as fast as I could. I've known one or two mother who would race, shampoo streaming into their eyes, dripping and undressed, to pick up their babies so they would not cry for one second. Others would pull over in a vehicle instantly- and one would take her baby out of a carseat while the car was moving- just so the baby would not cry. I hate for the baby to cry, but I'm willing to wait to get to a safe spot to pull over and take the child out.
Bottom line- If possible, I pick up my babies when they cry. I don't manufacture excuses for my babies to cry, and I don't kill myself or risk their lives trying to prevent them from crying when they begin to cry while I am in the midst of something it would be best to finish, either.

Separate bedrooms for the children- there are reasons why this is a nice, pleasant thing to do for your children if you have the space and money. Since moving into this house, all the children have their own bedrooms, so we are not opposed to giving kids their own bedrooms. We are opposed to the idea that this is a requirement. Impossible. Millions of generations have grown up sharing their sleeping space with other family members without dying or even being injured from the practice. Therefore, it is a not a need. It is a want. It may be high up on the cultural want list for some of us, but it remains a want, not a requirement of good parenting. In fact, there are also very good reasons for not giving kids their own bedrooms.

There are so many methods and philosophies about parenting these days, and plenty of them contain useful, attractive ideas that I personally like very, very much. But liking a particular approach is not the same thing as seeing it as a requirement for good parenting. Young parents can be so confused by all the conflicting information and approaches. I found this litmus test really simplified things for me. But of course, my litmus test itself is one of those things that is a preference, not a requirement.

What The Equuschick Reads

The Equuschick was recently asked what her particular reading genre of choice was, but this is a rather complicated question. She shall do her best.


Firstly, you must understand that reading is to The Equuschick what listening to music (she assumes) must be like for people who are into music. They don't like particular groups, they like music. The Equuschick does like to read, but more than that she likes to read the writing.

The genre may be one of her favourites, the story may be good, the message may be moral, but if the writing is not pleasant to The Equuschick she can't stand it. It grates. She is not even talking about punctuation or spelling, but rather about the care given to the words and how they are linked. She needs to be able to flow along with them. To find the tune and move with it, if you're able to follow that confused analogy.

Conversely, this means that there are books she has read purely for the pleasure of how they were written. Ellis Peters is for instance a good mystery writer, but a couple of her books are (like those of all mystery authors) formulaic in plot. But The Equuschick reads them all anyway, for the pure pleasure of how the story is told. She doesn't care where it is going. She just likes how it moves.

So just keep that in mind as the overall standard- Whatever else The Equuschick reads, she reads what she finds to be well-written. This isn't even an academic standard as indicated by the fact that she has a rough time defining for someone else what her standards are for adequate writing. She knows what she's looking for and one day she hopes to be able to express it to others and to teach her children to appreciate the joy of words as well.


Secondly, the types of books that she has enjoyed the most would be classified very generally as Fantasy. But Fantasy is a broad and annoying term that does not cover everything she reads and does often include a ton of substandard novel paperbacks with pictures of dragons being ridden by less than dressed women and those aren't the kind of books she means when she says Fantasy.

So she gives you the system that she personally has invented in her head.

Here we have Fantasy, the overall category. (She would still like another term though, suggestions welcome.)

Fantasy is Divided Into-
*Myth
*Fairy Tale
*Fantasy Storybook (Storybook is a qualifying term used for many genres, but she'll go into that in another post some other time.)

*Myth is the highest, purest, kind of Fantasy. Myth is legend. Myth is folklore. Myth is thousands of years of collective human imagination grappling to come to terms with the supernatural reality that is all around humanity. Myth is war and love and pain and hate and every human experience set against the background of a supernatural struggle that the humans involved barely understand.

Yes, most Myth is ancient and pagan. (Not all though, as we'll see in a moment.) Myth involves to a great extent the gods and goddesses of pagan cultures. They are full of error and falsehood, but even so (especially so?) they illustrate that throughout human history mankind has always felt the need for a Story to be told about themselves. A Story that explains the whys and the hows of their universe. A Story that is not cold and calculating but rather full of the emotion that humans innately understand.

This is the proof of the Myth. Mankind rejected the first true Story. There is a Story (a true story!) of rejection, death, reconciliation, and redemption. That Story is personal and is told all around mankind, but something about that particular Story didn't settle with all of humanity. No, they said. That story must not be true.

But the knowledge that it was lingered. The need for the Story to explain the world still lingered. And so the Myth was born.

And here now we have an opportunity to grasp the Myth, long held by the Enemy and to turn it upside down and The Equuschick is afraid we often shy away from the Myths instead of grasping them with both hands and understanding why mankind needed them and understanding that here were the first Stories that could be used as mirrors to reflect the truth.

And that is what C.S Lewis did, and why a great many Myths are not ancient. If you don't like the power and beauty of the Myth (and it isn't to everyone's taste, it is a little strong) you won't like Till We Have Faces. It is a Myth. He took the ancient Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche and set it in a world of the author's own creation and told it in such a way that the story became a mirror to your own soul. When you reached the conclusion you saw yourself, and your life, in relation in the supernatural world around you and the Glory that exists behind the veil and you were quite properly moved and appalled. And he did it all with beautiful words and a Myth. Just an old story.

Embrace the old stories. There is no better way to illustrate old truths.

C.S Lewis's Space Trilogy is another Myth, and so too is the Lord of the Rings. To call that last just "Fantasy" is quite the insult to the scope and history of the tale.


*Fairy Tale
Fairy Tales, though lately given a twaddleish name by Walt Disney, are what The Equuschick considers to be next in importance to the Myth. If you want to understand her standards for Fairy Tale at all, dismiss the good Mr. Disney.

Fairy Tales are younger than the Myth, but old stories still. Some of them (the old tale of the beast and his Beauty, for instance) are actually just younger retellings of the older Myth.

A Fairy Tale is not concerned as much as the Myth with the universal Story, but rather stories of individuals. The similarity is that the individual still finds him or herself competing with supernatural struggles that seem insurmountable.


This is why it is important to remember that Fairy Tales are not what we think of today as stories for children. These struggles are dark. There is blood often, horrible deaths and mutilations so unknown to the consciousness of our sanitary and "civilized" society that we are often arrogantly inclined to laugh.

But the Fairy Tales came from the times when well, times were just that dark. Children saw blood, they saw death, they saw disease and war and mutilations. They learned mankind's darkest fears at an age when today's children are learning to play the Wii.

And so Stories were needed to tell the children that there was light in the darkness and hope in their hopeless state.

So in light of both the importance of Story and in light of mankind's own history, Fairy Tales should not be neglected. They should be appreciated as well for the sheer beauty and glory of the Stories they tell. The imagination is stretched, perceptions are widened, and a child is learning to see a point of view unknown to them.

But is that the only reason we should teach our children the Fairy Tales? Are we so foolish and complacent that we really believe that our children will never face the kind of pain we see in the Fairy Tales? Are there no fathers today losing their lives in battle? Are there still absent fathers? Divorce? Disease still lives and kills. Sometimes it kills the children. Be cautious lest our overwhelming desire to protect our children means only that they will be that more disillusioned and disoriented when the inevitable dragon strikes. In fact, if you're like many families your dragon all ready has. Let your child find the comfort in the Fairy Tales.

As G.K Chesteron said, "Fairy tales are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."

What are examples of Fairy Tales, then? You can't go wrong with the oldest. The Grimm Fairy Tales. The Blue Fairy Book, Green Fairy book, etc.

But Fairy Tales are still being told today. Not nearly as much as The Equuschick would like to see, but they are still there if you look for them. The Never-ending Story by Micheal Ende is a Fairy Tale. The true and sharp pain that is a characteristic of all Fairy Tales for children is there. Basta's mother is dead, his father is distant and as the story progresses Basta faces a myriad of character issues that all children will face as they grow older and repentance is called for.

The Inkheart trilogy, though younger and not as deep in nature, is still a Fairy Tale. There is true pain, true loss, true suffering, and (if you'll pardon The Equuschick her little joke) "twu wuv."

She is currently facing an internal debate over where to put our friend Harry Potter, but she has decided that at least the last (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) belongs with the Fairy Tale. We may still not find the murdered parents and the cruel aunt and uncle too believable, but there are children all over the world and throughout history who have faced such pain. An Enemy exists and he will wound and maim and kill, but children need Stories to remind their budding souls and imaginations that that the Enemy never triumphs forever.


And now, last and probably Least (at least in the Fantasy Category)...

*Storybook Fantasy
These could also be referred to as modernized or sanitized Fairy Tales. The Equuschick doesn't hold them in fervent devotion as she does the Fairy Tales, but she does love them. Ella Enchanted is an excellent example, an example of slightly higher quality would be E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle. Robin Mckinley's work (Chalice, Spindles' End, Beauty and etc.) The Equuschick tends to class here, even though the majority of them are retellings of the older Fairy Tales. They're not as deep or as dark as the originals but she tells them cleverly and with great imagination.


That is the key here. Imagination. And here is where The Equuschick draws the difference between her kind of Storybook Fantasy and the paperback novel type with pictures of dragons being ridden by less than dressed women. You can't call it Imagination when 7,390,000,000 people before you have all ready thought of a story about a dragon being ridding by a less than dressed women and had their story published in paperback too.

True originality is impossible, obviously, (every Story that can be told has been) but variety is important.

There have been stories about princes returning to their land from exile and woodskeeper's daughters suddenly coming to High Places in court before, but Chalice told the story in a different way and with different ideas.

A child must grow up to learn to look at every Story told from every possible point of view. A Story can mean many things to different people, a Story could mean something entirely different if you just switched this turn of the plot just so, and etc. That's how you use imagination and originality in a world where every Story to tell has been told.


So there you have it. The Equuschick reads other things as well (mysteries, known as Snackbooks, classics, Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Sayers, philosophy and science, humour, and etc.) but this is what she reads most often. This is her passion.

A Little Violent, but Funny

The violence is all with stick figures, by the way.

A Fable

In ancient times a small and powerless people were oppressed nigh unto extinction but a neighboring people more advanced and powerful than they, when a hero arose from among the oppressed people.

After leading his people to a miraculous victory over their far more numerous and powerful oppressors, the people asked their hero to be their king. He refused, saying they should have no king but God, and he went home to his vineyards and wives.

Having many wives, he fathered some 70 sons, lived to a ripe old age, and then died. Although he had not asked to be made king, the people still respected and honored him and his family as leaders. After he died, one of his sons, whose mother did not hold the same rank as the other wives, and was from another clan, went to his mother's clan and suggested that they should do away with his brothers and then make him king. 'After all,' he said, 'as things stand now, it's as though you have 70 leaders, and they are from a different clan. I am one of you, and it would be better to have one of your as king than 70 strangers to tell you what to do.'

So his clan gave him plenty of money, and he gathered about him many vain, worthless, light and reckless men. They slew his half-brothers, all except for one, the youngest, who hid himself.

And then, when the bloody deed was done, the clan made this wicked fratricide king over them all, holding the ceremony at the foot of a mountain. The youngest brother heard of the deed and location, so he traveled there incognito, betook himself to the mountain, and from there, high above them and safely out of reach, he shouted down to them the following story, echoing over the valley:

One day the trees went out to make a king for themselves; and they said to the olive-tree, Be king over us. But the olive-tree said to them, Am I to give up my wealth of oil, by which men give honour to God, and go waving over the trees?

Then the trees said to the fig-tree, You come and be king over us. But the fig-tree said to them, Am I to give up my sweet taste and my good fruit and go waving over the trees?

Then the trees said to the vine, You come and be king over us. But the vine said to them, Am I to give up my wine, which makes glad God and men, to go waving over the trees?

Then all the trees said to the thorn, You come and be king over us. And the thorn said to the trees, If it is truly your desire to make me your king, then come and put your faith in my shade; and if not, may fire come out of the thorn....

Perhaps the murderous clansmen thought this youngest brother had lost his mind. Or perhaps they recognized their new king in the worthless thorn, and waited to see what he would do. At any rate, the youngest brother was able to continue:

"If you acted with sincerity and integrity when you made my half-brother your king, be happy. If you treated my father and his family well, if you treated him as he deserved, be happy. My father fought for you. He risked his life and rescued you from our enemies. But today you have attacked my father's family. You have executed his 70 sons. You have made this worthless man, who is the son of my father's slave girl, king just because he's your brother. So if you are now acting with sincerity and integrity toward my father's memory and towards his family, then be happy with my half-brother and let him be happy with you. But if that's not the case, let fire come out of this son of my father's slave-girl and burn up the citizens of the cities who have strengthened his hands for murder. And let fire come out of those cities and destroy my half-brother as well."

And then, afraid, he turned and flew as though the wind were on his heels, and left that land to dwell where his half-brother would not find him.

His half-brother managed to hold his position for three years, when the people listened to another worthless fellow who wished to be king in his place, and they turned against him. The land his father had rescued was once again wracked by war. In the final days of that war, he killed many of his former allies by fire, and he died when a woman in a besieged tower dropped a small millstone on his head as he attempted to set the tower on fire.

The full story is in the Old Testament book of Judges, chapter 9, and the fable told by the youngest brother, Jotham, is one of my favorite stories of the Bible.

The HG's Final Semester

If you think you haven't been seeing much of the HG, imagine how we feel.

This is her final semester, and she found herself in an elective class that was impossible for her. She's kicking herself six ways to Tuesday for talking it in the first place, for not switching the second week when she realized this was not going to be as 'fun' as she'd expected. Her study partner, an extremely mildmannered, mellow young fellow from church, suddenly burst out in loud screaming a couple weeks ago during a study session.

I think the teacher is a young TA who needed a bit more experience, and I think those two bit off more than they could chew and the combination was toxic to grades. They both dropped the class last week when they got the results of their last exam, and we suspect several others did too. In fact, her study partner left her a facebook message at the precise date and time of the next class meeting after they dropped the class celebrating the fact that they were not in that class.

Unfortunately for the HG, she needed those three credits, or rather, any extra three credits at all to graduate. Her advice to future seniors- take one extra class your last semester, one you don't really need, something light and frivolous. Then you have the liberty of dropping something else if you want or need to.

She attempted half a dozen different fixes, all of which failed (it is six weeks into the semester), and then she asked her favorite history professor if she could slip into his class. She emailed him, and he emailed her back from an airport in Spain, saying, "I only stopped to check my emails for emergency or urgent messages. Yours qualifies. Yes, you can take my class, but I won't be back in the country until past the final deadline to switch, and you're supposed to have my signature and I won't be near computers or faxes, so I hope this email works for you as my permission." It did. He doubts she'll make an A and so does she, but he let her in. OH, breathe, breathe, relief.

She has a LOT of work to do- squeezing 12 weeks worth of work in the final five or six weeks of school, but it turned out she'd already read some of the books, and she has had this prof for four other classes, so knows what he expects. The fact that he likes her and admires her work (he's recommended her for awards and worked with her to get a paper published in a history journal) actually is something we see as a possible drawback, since he knows he can expect from her, and she probably won't be providing it. But She expects she can master a C with more time than trouble.

She had her schedule so she only had to go to school Mon, Wed, and Fri, and this is a Tues/Thurs class, so she'll be making the commute five days a week instead of three. Of course, the plus side of this is that by signing up this late, she avoided two days a week of driving during the icy weather, AND she has a friend with a room on campus, and she lets the HG stay over whenever she needs to, and also lets her take afternoon naps in her room.

But we expect to see very little of her until mid-May as she holes up in her room or on campus studying her very capable brains out, and so you'll see even less. And do not, if you value you her friendship, ask her what she plans after graduation. Right now her post-graduation plans are for a session of serious decompression and she doesn't want to think about anything else.

She notes her GPA will take a hit- but says philosophically that at least it can take the hit. She went off to school this morning with FIVE bags hanging about her person- she looked like somebody had mistaken her for the baggage claims office of a smaller airport.

She also said that a couple weeks back when the campus was swarming with parents and high school students visiting to see if this University was for them, she had a nearly irresistible urge to run at them, wild-eyed, arms flailing, shouting, "No, No!! Go Back!! Get out while you can!!!"

Which, if you really knew the HG, has all the absolutely the hysterically, hilariously comedic value of juxtaposing the impossible with the ridiculous. Picture, if you will, an Eliza Bennet or an Elinor Dashwood behaving in such a fashion, and you'd be about right.

Blenders Again

Since the Equuschick posted about her blender, I thought I'd share about mine. I have the old Bosch universal kitch mixer with food processor and blender, and while I love the mixer and the food processor is indispensable to me, the blender has been a messy disappointment.

So sometime last year at the thrift shop (before I knew the EC wanted one, and possibly before her marriage), I found an old avacado green number from, I think, the seventies. It's a Sears Solid State with a glass container, and it worked marvelously until the black ring around the bottom cracked, resulting in the same messy disappointments we have with the Bosch.

I was looking at blenders on Amazon, thinking I would use my Amazon dollars to purchase a new one when I came across this:

You can also get just the black ring and replacement blade, but since we make a lot of green smoothies that end up sitting out on the counter for an hour or so while various family members make their way to the kitchen to pour their own, I thought the stand might be useful, too. I wasn't sure it would fit, so I compared the picture carefully to my own broken ring, and then took a deep breath and took a chance.

It's perfect. We are so happy with this purchase.

You can also buy a stainless steel jar part, but that's more than I was willing to pay, especially since the 9 dollar accessories cost more than the blender did.

Or you can buy just a collar for only a few dollars, but since my blender is so old, I thought it was probably due for a plastic seal replacement as well.

There are replacement parts for all kinds of blenders, so if yours has a broken part rending the blender a depressing dust-catcher, take a look- it's cheaper than a new blender and easier on the trash as well.

Life in the Echo Chamber

From David Warren at RCP, on why Obama is in trouble:

As I mentioned during the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was seriously unqualified for the job of president. He had no practical experience in running anything, except political campaigns; but worse, his background was one-dimensional.

All his life, from childhood through university through "community organizing" and Chicago wardheel politics, through Sunday mornings listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the left side of Democrat caucuses in Springfield and Washington, he has been surrounded almost exclusively by extremely liberal people, and moreover, by people who are quick and clever but intellectually narrow.

He is a free soul, but he is also the product of environments in which even moderately conservative ideas are never considered; but where people on the further reaches of the left are automatically welcomed as "avant-garde." His whole idea of where the middle might be, is well to the left of where the average American might think it is. To a man like Obama, as he has let slip on too many occasions when away from his teleprompter, "Middle America" is not something to be compromised with, but rather, something that must be manipulated, because it is stupid. And the proof that it can be manipulated, is that he is the president today.

Remember 'The Insulated Life?'

at the Doctor's office, I read the June '08 issue of O, the Oprah Magazine and saw that Maria Shriver, Kennedy relative (Eunice Kennedy's daughter) and reporter says that she thinks her husband Arnold Schwartzenegger was the first Republican she ever even met.!

Not only does she think that she never met a Republican until she was 22 (they married when she was 31 or 32), but he's not that much of a Republican, and more startling to me is that she doesn't even seem to realize what a bizarre statement that was.

Violins

From that same music shop. The violins were more difficult to photograph because they were above my head.

800 dollars a year for groceries?

That's what this article, linked from hotair, says blogger Jane4girls can do. The first link gives a rough overview as to how she does it, and last link is to her blog.

She says:

It took me almost three years to get to the level of couponing and stockpiling I am at now. It did not happen overnight. Once you begin obtaining a stockpile of items you are able to cut back expense on those items. So even though it might not look like I am purchasing much for my family in various food groups, I am, or have in the past, and am using food from my stockpile. That food was paid for once, so I am not including it in my budget again for this year as I use it.

It takes me on average 1 hour per week to find the deals, gather coupons and make my lists. Then I might spend another 30 minutes actually shopping for the items. With the help of Hot Coupon World, I can find out the deals online without having to drive to many stores to find them. This is a real time saver.

I'm impressed, but I don't think I could do this. The couponing, special deals, buy this, ring up that, then buy this, rolling over the savings into that, using CVS Dollars and all that jazz- it makes my eyes cross and my brain shut down. I find this personal shortcoming really, really frustrating, but every time I look at something like this:

second transaction:

4 Digiorno Pizzas $5.49 each used one FREE item coupon and $2/2
1 Red Baron pizza $3.69
1 Eating Right drink $1.00 used $1 coupon (didn't come off so had to go to CS to fix)

$26.65 total

minus $2.67 for the 10% savings
minus $10 catalina from prior pizza deal
minus $5.49 FREE item coupon
minus $2/2 pizza coupon
minus $6 (3 $2 cats from ozarka)

paid 8¢ on gift card but then went to CS to get the $1 from the eating right coupon that didn't come off...AND got another $10 Frozen food catalina

third transaction

10 ozarka Aqua pods $2.00 each used $1/2 catalina
1 Eating Right multi-grain waffles $2.99 used $1 coupon

$22.99 total

minus $2.70 for 10% (cashier rang 12 ozarka by mistake)
minus $5.00 for mega deal
minus $1/2 ozarka
minus $1 Eating Right
minus $10 Frozen Food catalina
minus $2 (2 $2 catalina from ozarka)

paid $3.10 cash, but then went to CS for $4 refund due to over ring of water

also got $10 in catalinas from the water and a $1/2 water catalina

balance for the year $575.98

total saved for the year $986.77

good thing there are four Randalls close by to spread the love!

I am full of awe, admiration, deep respect, and compete befuddlement as to how I would proceed to do the same thing. Fortunately, most of you are smarter than that, and maybe this will help somebody else out.

Begin As You Mean To Go On

I suspect that's what Obama did:;

Anyone—anyone—who believed Obama’s lofty pre-election rhetoric of change and transparency and morality was simply not paying attention to the actual behavior he had exhibited during his entire political career, as well as during the campaign itself.

I keep harping on the Alice Palmer story. Please read the whole thing if you’re not familiar with it, but here’s a quick summary:

The day after New Year’s 1996, operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

There they began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city’s South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama’s four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.

Fresh from his work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens.

But in that initial bid for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckle arts of Chicago electoral politics. His overwhelming legal onslaught signaled his impatience to gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder [African-American] stateswoman [and Obama mentor] like Palmer.

A close examination of Obama’s first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career: The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it.

The article appeared in the Chicago Tribune in April of 2007. But it remained a largely local story. Somehow, most people—even those who follow politics rather closely—have never heard of it. Why was this not heavily publicized during the campaign? (Yeah, I know; rhetorical question.) Can you imagine what the MSM would have done with it if this incident had been in George Bush’s or John McCain’s past, ? (Yeah, I know; obvious observation).

The Anchoress points out the press hunted down a dentist who fixed a tooth for Bush, but we still don't have any of President Obama's school records, no papers he's written, no report cards. Why not?

Other Signs of Spring

There are many, some more welcome than others. Birds, blooms, buds, and (lady)bugs we enjoy.

Three large spiders spotted inside the house in the last 24 hours? Not so much.

Music store

Last week a few of us went to a music store because Jenny is looking into buying a better violin. The store was in a teeny tiny little building that was absolutely *jam packed* with violins, violas, cellos, a couple viols, and anything you could want or need that related to those instruments. The friend we went with said it reminded her of Ollivander's, except musical instruments. While Jenny and the people who play said instruments were testing out bows and violins, I took pictures. Quite a lot of them. It was all without flash, of course, because I didn't want to bother the musicians or the shop owner (who was rather intimidating...), but it was a pretty well lit room so I got some clear ones. This is one of my favorites.

Coppelia, the Ballet

For years movie-makers have been frustrating book lovers by taking a story and reworking it into something altogether different, yet without changing the name. But movie-makers are only utlizing a tradition older than the cinema.

In the early 1800s the troubled but brilliant German author and music critic E.T.A. Hoffman wrote a series of stories who gained him the title of father of modern horror genre. One of those tales was reworked into the popular Christmas confection known as The Nutcracker. Another dark tale of nightmarish madness, The Sandman, was reworked into a frothy, funny ballet called Coppelia.

There's a synopsis of the story (by Freud) here.
There's a decent study guide to the horror story of The Sandman here (something of this story reminds me a bit of The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James), but I want to talk about the ballet, which is a much more pleasant topic.=)

Dr. Coppelius is a mysterious figure in the village- he doesn't interact much with others, and his daughter Coppelia never leaves the house or speaks to anybody, although she can be seen in her balcony window, reading all day long.

Franz and Swanhilda, a young village couple, are to be married the next day along with other village sweethearts, and all who marry receive a small dowry from the manor, but Franz is getting cold feet and Swanhilda has seen him blow a kiss to Coppelia, so she flounces off, telling him the marriage is off.

Mazurka- here the village sweethearts dance (I may have this one in the wrong place):


Dr. Coppelius drops his key when jossled about by some village young people, and Swanhilda and her friends find it. They sneak into his workshop and discover that it is full of mechanical dolls of all sorts. The girls wind them up and cause some havoc in the workshop. Swanhilda attempts to make friends with Coppelia and discovers that she, too, is merely a clockwork doll, and she finds this hilarious.

Meanwhile, Franz has brought a ladder and climbs up to the window to talk with Coppelia. Dr. Coppelius returns home, the other girls flee. Swanhilda, however, hides behind a curtain with the doll Coppelia and watches while Dr. Coppelius tricks Franz into drinking doctored wine so that Franz falls asleep.
Several scenes at this link, the first being the unwary Franz drinking Dr. Coppelius' doctored wine.

Then Dr. Coppelius attempts to magically transfer the life force from Franz to his Coppelia (which is itself a reworking of the old tale of Pygmalion). It appears to work because the saucy Swanhilda has exchanged clothes with the doll, and she begins to dance.
And here the mischievious Swanhilda pretends to be the doll Copellia:


The Doctor is enchanted, though a bit frustrated as the doll kicks his magic book, thumps him in the head, and isn't quite as compliant as he would like.

Eventually Franz comes to, sees what has happened, and he and Swanhilda sneak away- or, in some versions, Swanhilda shows the Doctor the unclothed doll and then runs away.

Franz and Swanhilda make up, and are married the next day with the other betrothed villagers. Dr. Coppelius shows up and points out that they have destroyed his lifework and owe him some compensation, and Swanhilda sees the justice of his claim and offers to pay him from her dowry. Instead, the village official gives him a bag of gold and all is well (in some versions it's the burgomeister who pays, in others its a squire or lord, and in some versions the burgomeister is Swanhilda's father).

And here is the finale, where the village sweethearts marry and Dr. Copellius wishes them well:


We are going to see a performance of Coppelia in the next month or so, and I collected the above links to show the youngest Progeny, who mistakenly believe they will not enjoy themselves.

There is another study guide here, with questions like:

2. There is a theme in this dance of mechanical dolls
coming to life. The eighteenth century was the beginning of
the Industrial Revolution. What does that have to do with
the dolls that appear so life-like in this story?
3. Name some other fairy tales about bringing inanimate
objects to life? Why is this a frequent theme in fairy tales?
What modern scientific development raises the same
issues?
4. Which dancer did you like best? Why?
5. Which dance did you like best? Why?
6. Should Franz have accepted wine from Dr. Coppelius?
7. How would you feel about an older person who lived
alone and kept to him or herself? What if this older person
appeared to be able to make special or magical things?
8. How would you feel if you were Franz or Swanhilda and
were just starting to climb into Dr. Coppelius' darkened
shop?
9. Why would people in the 17th or 18th centuries be
captivated by the thoughts of mechanical dolls coming to
life?

but I think if I used this study guide, most of us would not enjoy ourselves.

Just for fun, here's the Dance of the Hours with the ostriches from Disney's Fantasia:

(Mandatory) Service Coming Right Up

Last week the House of Representatives passed something called the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act.
The acronym is GIVE, although it probably should have been take, as it appears to be a feeler for mandatory service.


REason reports that

the bill creates a "Congressional Commission on Civic Service."

The bipartisan commission will be tasked with exploring a number of topics, including "whether a workable, fair and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the nation."

"I Love Lucy!"

Lucy in this case is not a red-headed comedian. Lucy is The Equuschick's blender.

Were The Equuschick the Pipsqueak, she would post a beautiful and elegant picture of Lucy The Equuschick's blender. Alas for not being the Pipsqueak. (The Equuschick keeps reading an internet ad that says "Unleash Your Talent", but frankly every time The Equuschick attempts to unleash any talent whatsoever the talent runs away like a bad dog and finds another human. Unfair.)


Anyway. So this blender named Lucy. *cough*

Among the really very small collection of kitchen items that The Equuschick found herself without upon her marriage was a blender. Not crucial, no. But to The Equuschick, a sad loss. The Equuschick makes mayonnaise in a blender, she makes dips in a blender, and upon pregnancy she became practically addicted to smoothies. (She did try to make one in a mixing bowl was. Not entirely unsuccessful, but terribly messy.) She became obsessed with finding a blender.

But this was much more easier said than done, for it had to the right blender. The proper, dependable, reliable and versatile blender that would rise with aplomb to every occasion and stay with The Equuschick for many years.

And also, cheap was good. (Essential, actually.)

Long and wearying was the search as The Equuschick looked at blenders in thrift stores, department stores, and catalogs. She even read an article in a cooking magazine about choosing the blender that was just right for your needs.

Just when The Equuschick had begun to despair, the DHM returned from a foray to a local thrift store with an immersion blender in perfect working order.

The Equuschick was delighted. Smoothies galore! The immersion blender was serviceable, hard-working and very dependable, but sometimes when The Equuschick yearned to make a large mayonnaise all at once she would wistfully begin to glance at blenders again.

But for the most part she remained content, which just goes to show you that treasures only come to those who are no longer looking.

And also, treasures are usually found in unusual places.

Grannytea and the DHM arrived home one day and handed The Equuschick an intact, beautiful unused blender.

The intact part was important, as the blender had been found in The Rattery. Nobody is quite sure why, as it had never been used and was clearly brought brand-new sometime in the fifties.

But there it was. In a box, still with five year warranty (possibly 45 years expired),and a handy-dandy recipie book.

Even with the box however caution was required, and the blender was given a proper sterilizing treatment before it came home to grace The Equuschick's kitchen.

The Equuschick put it to work at once making a fruit smoothie and as it suddenly occurred to her she would not be at all surprised to see this particular blender in an "I Love Lucy" episode, she promptly christened her blender.

Lucy is an astounding bit of work. Her technology is comprised entirely of a "Low" switch, a "High swtich," and an "Off" switch. She is made entirely of plastic. And she is, have we mentioned, a relic from another era? And yet her performance has far excelled any blender The Equuschick has had the pleasure of working with for a many year. (Clearly, when old people say "They don't make ------- like they used to" they are probably right.)

Lucy has made thus far for The Equuschick fruit smoothies, blended bananas, ground nuts, pancake batter, and she has blended both tomatoes and carrots. Future duties will include refried beans and mayonnaise and she looks forward to a long and happy working relationship with this Rattery Relic.

Our First Flowers of Spring

Squill, a low growing spring flower which is the bluest blue I have ever seen, and it just makes my heart hum to see it. It blooms before the crocuses, and appears to thrive just as well in the shade or in the sun. It blossoms in the grass, spreading a carpet of Prussian blue beneath the trees and comes up and dies before the grass needs its first mowing of the season. We have transplanted several bulbs from my late uncle's residence to our yard, and I look forward to many seasons of their blooms, Lord Willing. This picture at Wikipedia does not do justice to the blue of our own squill, but this one might.

How To Create a Banana Republic

Establish a cult of personality.

Nationalize private institutions.

Censorship.

Are we there yet?

A Quote

"What is 'women's day' in the kitchen?" asked Jane of Mother Dimble.

"There are no servants here, " said Mother Dimble, " and we all do the work. The women do it one day and the men the next. What? No, it's a very sensible arrangement. The Director's idea is that men and women can't do housework together without quarreling. There's something in it. Of course, it doesn't do to look at the cups too closely on the men's day, but on the whole we get along pretty well."

"But why should they quarrel?" asked Jane.

"Different methods, my dear. Men can't help in a job, you know. They can be induced to do it: not to help while you're doing it. At least, it makes them grumpy."

"The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.' There is consequently a phatic hiatus."

That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis.

Irresponsible

Obama compared AIG officials to suicide bombers. Now there's some temperate language from a man touted for his amazing communication skills and his mellow. Barney Frank demanded the names and addresses of employees who were receiving bonuses so he could publicize them. Republican Grassley suggested they should commit suicide.

In response, ACORN, which received 2 billion dollars in government funds recently, is took up those McCarthyesque 'hints' and planned to pay a little visit to the private homes of private citizens who work for AIG:

"We’re going to be peaceful and lawful in everything we do," said Jon Green, the director of Connecticut Working Families. "I know there’s a lot of anger and a lot of rage about what’s happened. We’re not looking to foment that unnecessarily, but what we want to do is give folks in Bridgeport and Hartford and other parts of Connecticut who are struggling and losing their homes and their jobs and their health insurance an opportunity to see what kinds of lifestyle billions of dollars in credit-default swaps can buy."

Have they no shame?

As it turned out, there were more reporters than protestors. One wonders if these reporters covered any of the Tea Party events, all of which appear to have far more than forty people at them.

Most of the protestors appear to be in their early 20s, which would explain this:

One amusing anecdote: The protesters stopped at one point in an organic grocery store and were suprised to learn that many AIG execs were shoppers there, and that according to the store's proprietor, they were actually very nice people.

The flummoxed protesters spent several minutes outside trying to figure out how such "evil" people could be nice to an organic grocer.

"Where Were You When Bush....?"

Repost from 2005:

My political beliefs have classically been called liberalism. Only in American within the last hundred years (perhaps the last fifty years) have they been called conservative and the word liberal highjacked to mean leftwing fascism. I believe in the liberalism that F. A. Hayek describes as being based on the "fundamental principle that in the ordering of our affairs we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society and resort as little as possible to coercion..." What he said.

And I agree with Professor Bainbridge:

"So I'll say it again. I believe in a few basic principles of government: Government should be small, mostly leave people alone, balance its books, and defend life (whether born or not).

Has government gotten smaller on George Bush's watch? No.
Has government balanced its books on George Bush's watch? No.
Are the unborn or those at the end of life better protected on George Bush's watch? Maybe at the margins, but he hasn't effected major legal change.
Does government leave us alone? No. In the name of the war on terror, government has become more intrusive on our daily lives."

(there's more, and it's great stuff, check it out). What he said, too.

Over at NRO Mark Levin points out that really, we lost the the Supreme Court back when McCain traded us for a mess of pottage and refused to work on a change to the Senate rules allowing filibusters of Supreme Court nominees:

The fact is that this Gang of 14 moderates, led by Senator John McCain, did make it much more difficult for the president to win an ideological battle over a Supreme Court nominee. The Democrats did, in fact, send warnings that they were prepared to filibuster the second nominee. And under such circumstances, the president would have needed 60 votes to confirm his candidate, not 51.

Lest we forget, Majority Leader Bill Frist and the overwhelming majority of his Republican colleagues were poised to defeat the unprecedented and frequently used (or threatened) filibuster tactics that had been unleashed against President Bush by the Democrats to weaken his appointment power. The big media editorialized against it. George Will wrote at length (albeit unpersuasively) against it (see here and my response to him here). And Bill Kristol's favorite presidential candidate in 2000, John McCain, the leader of the Gang of 14, was all over the media making clear he would torpedo such an effort. And that's exactly what he did. This in no way excuses the president's blunder in choosing Miers. But the ideological confrontation with the likes of Senator Charles Schumer and the Democrat left that many of us believe is essential, including Will and Kristol, was made much more difficult thanks to the likes of McCain and the unwillingness to change the rule before any Supreme Court vacancy arose. This president has been poorly served by his Republican "allies" in this regard. Bush is the first president who has had to deal with an assault of this kind on his constitutional authority. And unless and until the filibuster rule is changed, a liberal minority in the Senate will have the upper hand.

There's more to that link, too, and you should read it all (Mark Levin wrote Men in Black, a book about the Surpreme Court). What he said, too.

And I've already quoted Patterico
on the connection between the filibuster and the current weak nomination.

And what Patterico says here, too:

I voted for George W. Bush in large part because I expected him to nominate genuine judicial conservatives to the federal bench — especially the Supreme Court. Last election season, he said he favored Justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s as important as “Read my lips.” Maybe judges aren’t that important to you — and that’s fine. But to me, it’s a top issue.

And if you’re talking judges in the mold of Scalia and Thomas, Michael Luttig fits the bill. I have no idea whether Miers does.

It’s a double question of 1) qualifications and 2) commitment to judicial conservatism. And these two are connected. Judicial conservatism means knowing the law, inside and out. It’s easy to simply choose a result and build an opinion around it. But to come to the right decision, based on rigorous legal knowledge and backed by a powerful intellect capable of authoring irrefutable judicial opinions — that’s hard.

It’s not enough to be “plenty smart.” It’s not enough to be a solid B+ pick. You have to be at the top of the game, or you will inevitably turn into someone like Lewis Powell, or Harry Blackmun, or Sandra Day O’Connor — in other words, someone who issues decisions that split the baby. And in the abortion context, that’s not just figurative language. O’Connor’s decisions didn’t just split the baby — they stabbed the baby’s skull with a pair of scissors, and sucked out its brains with a suction catheter.

So: George Bush made a promise, and we don’t know whether he has kept it — and by the time we find out, it will be too late.

That’s unacceptable.

As Patterico points out, we got an O'Connor because Ronald Reagan thought it would be best to nominate her first and Bork later. We had a Republican majority when he nominated O'Connor. We no longer had one for Bork. It's just too sickening to think about. Click on the link to read more of Patterico's smarts, and he gets extra points from me for the Neville Chamberlain analogy.

And like him, I do not find it persuasive or winsome or convincing in any way to be told by the likes of Lindsay Graham to shut up, or to be told by the likes of Ed Gillespie that these grave reservations about Mier are prompted by elitism and sexism, or to be told I'm splitting the Republican party because Bush tells me 'trust me,' and I say, "You've overdrawn your account." I'm not the one who overdrew his account, and I'm not a Republican. I only voted that way so he could pursue the war on terror, keep spending down, and nominate strongly Constitutional judges. One out of three is bad.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Incidentally, McCain's work on that gang of 14 and the McCain/Feingold act pretty much solidified the fact that I was never, ever going to vote for him, and I didn't.

So, no, I don't find so much to criticize in the Obama administration because I was or am a die-hard Republican and Bush supporter. And if I was objecting to the Bush economic policies in 2005, you can bet I feel like shrieking in horror over news like this:

...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that the administration’s agenda would generate deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion a year over the next decade — $2.3 trillion more than the president predicted when he unveiled his spending plan just one month ago.

And while Obama would come close to meeting his goal of cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term, the CBO predicts that the nation’s annual operating deficit would never drop below 4 percent of the overall economy over the next decade, a level administration officials have said is unsustainable because the national debt would grow too rapidly.

By the CBO’s estimate, for example, the nation’s debt would grow to 82 percent of the overall economy by 2019 under Obama’s policies, compared with a pre-recession average of 40 percent…

Via HotAir, where I also found this link where Judd Gregg (the President wanted Gregg for his administration) says about this budget, "No generation should do this to another generations."

When This Guy Says It's Only the Beginning....

...It does not sound exciting or reassuring. It sounds kind of sounds ominous to me.

Aunt Sophronia on Getting Rich

One of my domestic treasures is an old book formerly belonging to my great-grandmother. It is titled The Complete Home, An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Life and Affairs Embracing All the Interests of The Household, by Julia McNair Wright. Mrs. Wright wrote to help impoverished families economize during the depression of the 1870's. She writes in the first person in the character of a delightful old biddy named Aunt Sophronia. Aunt Sophronia has three nieces of her own whom she is guiding, and she is aunt by courtesy title to most of the young people in town.

In this excerpt Aunt Sophronia has been invited to a tea her niece is hosting for a newly married lady in town when:

"The conversation happened to turn on this question of building up domestic finances; and some of the young women said to me, "Aunt Sophronia, what are the rules for getting rich?"

"Come," I said, "do you suppose the answer to that question will be short or long, hard or easy?"

Said Helen, "I should think it would be very long, as there are millions of ways of getting rich, and people have been busy for several thousand years in discussing them. It must be a very hard question to answer, also, inasmuch as most people find it so very hard to get rich."

"All that has been said can be boiled to a very short and simple answer, " I replied; "and all the difficulty in the work lies in the needful self-sacrifice. The question first is, What do you mean by getting rich? ...Will you be content to call honest independence, enough to live upon tastefully without fear or favor, enough to keep away the wolves of debt and want, and to send out from your door, on your errands, the full-handed angels of benevolence, will you call that being rich?"

"...I will give you the rules, which are few and simple, and easily performed by self-sacrifice. Work hard; see and improve all small opportunities; keep out of debt and carefully economize. That is the best that all the wisdom of the world has been able to digest and formulate as rules for getting rich. The matter is simple and lies in a nutshell: have the end definitely before you; do your own work toward it and do it honestly, and don't give up until you have reached your goal; the same plain, straight, unadorned and yet passable road is open to all."

Pages 391-392

I read this myself when I was a pre-teen, and I remembered it so well that I read it again to my girls when they were around 13 or so. It looks like it's time to read it again to the FYG.


If you enjoyed Aunt Sophronia, you may also enjoy some of the vintage books we have listed here.

Sunday Hymn Post

Take time to be holy, speak oft with thy Lord;
Abide in Him always, and feed on His Word.
Make friends of God’s children, help those who are weak,
Forgetting in nothing His blessing to seek.

Take time to be holy, the world rushes on;
Spend much time in secret, with Jesus alone.
By looking to Jesus, like Him thou shalt be;
Thy friends in thy conduct His likeness shall see.

Take time to be holy, let Him be thy Guide;
And run not before Him, whatever betide.
In joy or in sorrow, still follow the Lord,
And, looking to Jesus, still trust in His Word.

Take time to be holy, be calm in thy soul,
Each thought and each motive beneath His control.
Thus led by His Spirit to fountains of love,
Thou soon shalt be fitted for service above.

Words: Will­iam D. Long­staff, 1882.

Music: “Holiness,” George C. Stebbins, 1890 A

Acapella version here- click on the link to acapella singing at the top of the page, and then scroll down the list of songs until you reach Take Time to Be Holy.

Holy: Set apart to the service or worship of God; hallowed; sacred; reserved from profane or common use; holy vessels; a holy priesthood.

Spiritually whole or sound; of unimpaired innocence and virtue; free from sinful affections; pure in heart; godly; pious; irreproachable; guiltless; acceptable to God.
From The Brainy Dictionary

Chair of Special Olympics on the Larry King Show

Embedded video from CNN Video

FLDS and Home Schooling

Republican state Rep. Harvey Hilderbran of Texas first made an appearance on this blog back in April of 2005, when I heard that he was trying to change Texas homeschooling laws for the worse in order to go after a little known Mormon Fundamentalist group who had just moved to the state. I knew very little about that group, and what little I thought I knew was mostly wrong. In fact, I think that when I first read about them in '05 I was mixing them up with another, much smaller polygamous Mormon group- I'd seen a special on the other group on television some years and years ago, and for some reason I thought that was the FLDS (I don't even remember who the other group's prophet was, except that I think he'd died and they were waiting for him to come back or something). That other group was more militant than the FLDS. One reason for that confusion was that I didn't realize how many break-away polygamous groups there were- I thought there was just the one. Anyway, keeping my confusion as to who these FLDS were, this is what I said then:

It sounds like a bad situation and one that could become as explosive as Waco (ouch), but I'm never impressed by efforts to restrict the reasonable freedoms of several thousand people in order to punish a few detestable specimens.

I quoted from this article (pasted below, and it's also online here), and little realized how inaccurate the article was. Hilderbran claims

"It's been reported," Mr. Hilderbran said, "that this self-proclaimed prophet encourages his followers to take dozens of wives, many of whom are underage and forced into marriage. I've heard that he encourages them to 'bleed the beast' by cheating the government and draining the welfare system of funds that should be used for hard-working families.

We now know that 'bleeding the beast' is not and never was an FLDS phrase, that was a term Flora Jessop made up and passed on to gullible people. And there were no recipients of welfare on the ranch.
This reality doesn't seem to have made a dent in Hilderbran's thinking, however. He's boasting about how wonderful that bill was (it actually failed, but he piggy backed parts of it onto other bills):

Hilderbran added, “Without H.B. 3006, which we passed during the 79th Legislative Session, none of the indictments that law enforcement got against these men would have been possible. This session, we are coming full circle to make sure we protect the children from anyone who might be complacent in abuse.”

And he's working on a new bill, again targeted at the FLDS, and again, restricting the reasonable liberties of thousands in order to target members of a religious group, and target them unfairly. Brooke Adams writes:

HB 4255 adds this paragraph to the Texas Family Code:

“In making a determination under Subsection (b), the court may find that based on the circumstances no reasonable efforts would prevent or eliminate the need to remove a child and that the department satisfied the requirements of Subsection (b) even though the department made no efforts to prevent or eliminate the need to remove a child.”

Here is what Subsection (b) says: “In determining the reasonable efforts, if any, that are required to be made with respect to preventing or eliminating the need to remove a child from the child’s home or to make it possible to return a child to the child’s home, the child’s health and safety is the paramount concern.”

So, if I am reading the proposed language correctly, under some circumstances, the Department of Family and Protective Services could make no effort to keep a child in a home, which is exactly what happened in the YFZ Ranch investigation. The language is contrary to Texas’ stated policy of making family-based services a priority (see blog on testimony before the Human Services committee).

In the comments to that post, Tx Blues writes:

OK, as I read the bill, it does the following:

1 - Failure to Report Child Abuse becomes a Class A misdemeanor on the second offense (1 year), unless the offender is a professional (doctor, teacher, etc). In that case it is a Class A on the first offense, and a State Jail felony (2 years) on the second offense.

2 - Removes the requirement for CPS to make any efforts to avoid removing the child from the home.

3 - May remove the perpetrator instead of the child from the home only if the adult that is left at the home with the child is likely to notify law enforcement of the perpetrator’s return to the home.

4 - Deletes the requirement for the child to be in immediate danger in order to remove the child.

5 - Changes the penalty for failing to report a birth from a Class C (fine only) to a Class A misdemeanor (1 year).

It also refers to changes in the Education Code, primarily in the area of investigation of compulsory school attendance by peace officers, but the actual text is omitted from the bill. Since this was filed on the last day to file a bill this session, that language will probably be added in a committee substitute, if it gets a hearing.

It is far more sweeping than it looks on the surface…

I would like to know exactly what those proposed changes to the Education Code are, and why Hilderbran thinks they are appropriate. Looks like homeschoolers in Texas need to start talking to their legislators.


Unpopular groups find themselves the target of wild rumours and exaggerated accusations at various times- I assume we're familiar the blood libel stories against the Jews, said to require the blood of Christian babies in their Matzo, the exaggerated stories of illegitimate children buried in the walls of nunneries, Janet Reno justifying Waco by talking about babies being beaten...

In response to FLDS moving in to the area, State Legislator Hilderbran, representative to Schleicher County, where YfZ ranch is located, proposed many legislative changes aimed directly at the FLDS. He invited Shurtleff, Utah Attorney General to testify:

"Imagine a community run as a theocracy," Shurtleff, the Utah attorney general, said at the Capitol in April, in testimony encouraging lawmakers to strengthen Texas' polygamy law (making it a felony offense) and to raise the age of consent for marriage from 14 to 16. (Gov. Rick Perry duly signed the measures into law last month, as amendments to SB 6.) In Short Creek, women are considered the exclusive "property" of the male "priesthood," Shurtleff explained, and are not allowed to attend school beyond the sixth grade. Women are expected to remain entirely subservient to men (or face retribution), and plural marriages are considered necessary to facilitate male salvation – indeed, Jeffs reportedly has at least 40 wives and 56 children. (On average, Krakauer told Texas lawmakers, FLDS women have between eight and 15 children each. And celestial wives, whose marriages are not recognized by law, are encouraged to "bleed the beast" by applying for food stamps and other welfare subsidies.) "This is the kind of stuff that, as the chief law enforcement officer in the state of Utah, keeps me up at night," Shurtleff said.

I've italicized all the parts of his testimony that we now know are not true. I think a couple others are questionable- the idea that plural marriage is necessary for salvation, for instance, is an interpretation based on a Christian rather than Mormon idea of the afterlife- I think it might be necessary for elevation to godhood in FLDS theology, but most Americans would read that statement and think it means the FLDS teach a man will go to hell if he dies with only wife, and my understanding would be that you probably won't be elevated to godhood, but there's not a question that a man with only one spouse would go to hell. I am open to correction on that.

Flora Jessop, btw, is quoted extensively in the above article, and she makes claims that are clearly nonsense that the author of the article accepts at face value, with no critical thinking whatsoever. One of them is that the FLDS 'lost boys' don't even know how to bathe or perform basic grooming tasks such as applying lotion because they are trained never to touch themselves. At. All. These are boys. Does Flora or the reporter honestly expect us to believe that they do not brush their hair, wash their faces, dress themselves, shower, and we are expected to believe they use the bathroom like girls? Please.


According to a writ of Habeus Corpus filed on behalf of three FLDS fathers (the top of page 68 of the PDF, 71 of the document):

He [Hilderbran] expressed fear that the FLDS would take over the electorate and he and the Attorney General of Utah presented testimony alleging that the members of FLDS killed small animals to give their children the feel of blood on their hands and other atrocities vilifying all members of FLDS.

Blink. I cannot believe adult legislators listened to such nonsense with a straight face.
The HG wants to know, "So, what? Don't many hunters have a tradition of wiping the blood of the first kill on their faces or something weird and icky like that?"
The YfZ community is an agrarian community. In an agrarian life, you have to understand the connection between the meat you eat and the death of an animal. If that's abuse, then I hope Hilderbran is a vegetarian.

Brooke Adams once reported on her reading of ''Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict.''
She said:

Let me share the recommendations made by Christopher G. Ellison and John P. Bartkowski in their chapter titled, ''Babies Were Being Beaten: Exploring child abuse allegations at Ranch Apocalypse.''

The title is borrowed from a statement by then-Attorney General Janet Reno in explaining why the government had to act as it did at Waco.

The chapter centers on the allegations of physical, sexual and emotional abuse leveled at the Davidians, primarily leader David Koresh, and how those claims shaped public opinion about the group. The authors discredit most of the physical abuse claims based on a ''dearth of contemporaneous evidence'' while finding substance in the sexual abuse allegations.

Even so, ''the apparent theological underpinnings of these relationships and the consent given freely by the parents underscore the complexity of these situations, dictating some degree of interpretive caution.''

They note that the government put off criticism of its actions by ''emphasizing child-saving themes'' and that apostates who made most of the claims ''were able to use largely unsubstantiated allegations in their unrelenting campaign to demonize David Koresh.''

Child abuse allegations resonant with the public, the authors said, and ''have the potential to cement an odd anticult alliance from forces of the sociopolitical left and right: law enforcement agents, therapists, social workers and other children's advocates, as well as diverse segments of the religious establishment . . . ''

Here is the ''stocktaking'' the authors said was necessary to avoid similar catastrophes, which I am closely quoting below:

1. Authorities and media should investigate carefully the complex process of claims-making surrounding mariginal religious groups and their child-rearing practices. . . . It is important to link conflicting accounts about the group to the divergent ideological, psychological, and material interests and agendas of the adversarial parties.

2. ''Child abuse'' should be defined very carefully, so as to avoid loose and ideologically laden uses of this stigamtizing label. Children who are physically punished, taught a distinctive (e.g., apocalyptic) theology, or raised in an unusual set of circumstances (e.g., communally) are not necessarily being abused by their caregivers.

3. Authorities who must adjudicate the various claims and counterclaims about marginal religious groups should solicit and take seriously the input of social scientists who are familiar with the theology, history, and collective dynamics of such groups.

4. When child abuse claims are at issue, these investigators should be attentive to the growing body of scholarly research that treats such accusations critically. . . . studies in this tradition suggest that child abuse allegations often turn out to be inaccurrate for various reasons, and that a substantial proportion of such allegations emerge from child custody battles, or from other intrafamily or intragroup conflicts.

5. At each step in the investigative process, it must be the responsibility of authorities to weigh carefully the tradeoffs between the preservation of religious liberty for minority religious groups and the welfare of the children. They must avoid taking steps which might jeopardize the physical or emotional well-being of the youngsters.

Almost any Civil liberty can be violated today 'for the sake of the children' and Hilderbran wants to give the people who botched the YfZ case even more power and authority- and less accountability.

Certain elements are amassing more and more power unto themselves, and it's all 'for the sake of the children,' of course. "The children' are the nuclear weapon in contested divorce cases, and they are increasing used to control other elements of society we find uncomfortably nonconformist.

Richard Wexler, Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, says:

Imagine for a moment that, when he was Attorney General, John Ashcroft had proposed anti-terrorism legislation with the following provisions:

Special anti-terrorism police can enter any home and search it without a warrant; in fact, they can do it based on no more than an anonymous tip. (Or they can simply threaten to detain anyone in the household if they are not given permission to enter.) Not only can they search the home, they can stripsearch the occupants or arrange for a doctor to do so.

They can detain any member of the household for anywhere from 24 hours to a week or more before they even see the inside of a courtroom. In fact, detention will probably last for the duration of the proceeding because no judge wants to look "soft on terrorism."

Those arrested under this statute get a lawyer only moments before the first hearing begins – or perhaps only after that hearing already is over, and that lawyer often is too overwhelmed to mount a real defense. Or maybe they get no lawyer at all. To prolong detention the standard of proof is merely “preponderance of the evidence.” And all of the trials and hearings and most of the records are secret. (In Texas the hearings are open, but that's unusual).



what I have just described *is* the current law on child welfare in most states. And it’s largely the left that wants to keep it that way.

Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
www.nccpr.org

I don't think most of the right is very interested in changing it, either. Oh, some of us may say we are, and we may talk about being strict constructionists, and Constitutionalists. But we've let the Child Abuse Industry control the terms of the discussion, (the source of the fallacious 'erring on the side of the child' doctrine) and so we're afraid to speak up. People will think we're guilty of something we want to hide, or accuse us of supporting, aiding, or abetting child abusers. Or worse.

Homeschoolers, Hilderbran is trying to curtail our freedoms because he doesn't like polygamy. Who will be next?
-----------------------------------------

Here's the entire 2005 article recounting Hilderbran's initial legislative efforts to make religious discrimination part of Texas law. If anybody can give me a link to the actual testimony in HR 3006 of that year, I should be grateful:

AUSTIN, Texas -- A burgeoning, secretive sect of polygamists in a small, western Texas rural community has state legislators considering new bills to combat what many consider the group's unacceptable lifestyle.

State Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, a Republican, is pushing several changes to state law, particularly those concerning child-protective services, home schooling and marriage between stepchildren and stepparents.

At issue is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a rogue flank of the Mormon denomination that secretly purchased a 1,691-acre ranch outside Eldorado 14 months ago and moved several dozen followers from Utah to begin building a religious center. Warren Jeffs is the self-named prophet of the sect.

Several specialists on polygamy testified last week before the House Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee, including Utah's attorney general and a well-known author who has written extensively about fundamentalist sects.

"I'm embarrassed," Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff told the legislators, "that for years Utah did nothing. I feel bad that we have basically exported our problem to Texas."

Jon Krakauer, author of "Under the Banner of Heaven," who has spent years investigating the sect, predicted that the group would head south to Texas and thinks there will be a bloody outcome if authorities try to arrest its leader.

"I personally think the possibility of another Waco or Jonestown is huge," Mr. Krakauer said, referring to the deadly standoff in Texas and mass suicide in Guyana. "If [Mr. Jeffs] feels cornered and threatened, he's not going to go out alone. He's not going to allow himself to be arrested."

The group had been under increasing pressure from Utah and various civil lawsuits to criminally prosecute several of the sect's hierarchy who have conceived children with underage girls. Some say that is why the group ventured to the remote Texas site. Mormons officially outlawed polygamy more than a century ago.

Mr. Hilderbran said Saturday that several suggestions had come as a result of last Wednesday's hearing -- some fine-tuning that would be in the final bill. He said he would have the legislation ready to introduce later this week.

"It's just too hot a subject to be ignored," he said.

"It's been reported," Mr. Hilderbran said, "that this self-proclaimed prophet encourages his followers to take dozens of wives, many of whom are underage and forced into marriage. I've heard that he encourages them to 'bleed the beast' by cheating the government and draining the welfare system of funds that should be used for hard-working families. The people of Schneider County and Eldorado don't want this type of activity going on in their own back yards and neither do I."

Mr. Shurtleff, in his second term as Utah attorney general, praised Texas authorities for dealing with what he termed "a growing problem."

"He told us we'd better not wait as long as Utah did in dealing with it because it could get a lot more difficult later on," Mr. Hilderbran said.

You can read more about his efforts here, and his impolitic statements about why his political goals (keep the FLDS out, make them miserable if they come).

The President on the Special Olympics

Speaking sans teleprompter, something he does poorly, the President went on the Jay Leno show (gotta keep up that celebrity status) and said his bowling scores were so bad it was 'like the Special Olympics or something.'

Leno blinked and just talked over it, and the response of the country varies- as the mother of a child with profound disabilities, the sort of child the President would prefer were dismembered in the womb, I have to say I am not as outraged by his comment as most of those on the right. I think it was tin-eared and kind of clueless, but 'retard' is equally tin-eared and clueless, and I see that tossed around all over the place by plenty of people, regardless of their politics. It's a reflection of our toxic culture, and that toxicity has been around a long time before the President came along. I wish he'd rise above it instead of perpetuate it, but I'm not wasting a lot of emotional energy being offended by it.

I think it's not really something you get unless you've been there. I think it's telling that Governor Schwarzenegger is excusing the remark, while his wife Maria Shriver is criticizing it (Shriver's mother started the Special Olympics. She got involved in causes for the disabled after her husband had one of their daughters lobotomized without telling her, and she needed special care for the rest of her life).

So... I honestly don't think it's hypocritical of President Obama to make a joke using cognitively disabled athletes as a platform to get a cheap laugh when Candidate Obama called for Imus to be fired a week after his apology and suspension for his disgusting remarks about the women's basketball team at Rutger's University, and spoke of the coarsening of the culture and said:

"Insults, humor that degrades women, humor that is based in racism and racial stereotypes isn't fun," the senator told ABC News.

"And the notion that somehow it's cute or amusing, or a useful diversion, I think, is something that all of us have to recognize is just not the case. We all have First Amendment rights. And I am a constitutional lawyer and strongly believe in free speech, but as a culture, we really have to do some soul-searching to think about what kind of toxic information are we feeding our kids," he concluded.

The President has two daughters he loves very much, and of course he takes it personally when somebody calls black female athletes degrading, racist names, and while I agree Imus' remarks were disgusting and unfunny, it doesn't touch me in the same place it does the loving father of two little black girls.
It isn't funny to compare his poor bowling scores to the Special Olympics, either, but he doesn't have a special needs child so he doesn't understand that in the same way I do- it was a gaffe, not much more.

That said, I think these two videos at Hot Air are well worth watching, if only for the pictures of the totally scrumptiously adorable Trig Palin.

Nord and Moore Respond to Rep. Dingell on CPSIA

I promise not to eat it, I just want to ride it! ~caption from a kid's t-shirt at Malcolm Smith's CPSIA protest today.

The Wacky Hermit wants to host a CPSIA debate on her blog, and she's looking particularly for somebody to take the Pro-CPSIA side, which seems to be a bit bashful of late.



Publisher's Weekly has a good article, quoting Valerie Jacobsen and Jennifer Taggert (the Bookroom and The Smart Mama)

Valerie also talked to a Wisconsin official about enforcement of the CPSIA in her state:

She said that even though, right now, Wisconsin is not actively enforcing the post-1985 standard, she does not want me to feel that there’s no potential problem if I were to continue to sell old children’s books. She told me that there are federal inspectors in Wisconsin who are required to enforce CPSIA as it pertains to books, that CPSC inspectors who are already in Wisconsin do visit bookstores and thrift stores to check on compliance. Also, if a consumer were to come into my store and feel inclined to report me to Wisconsin DATCP for CPSIA non-compliance, then the DATCP would be required to come and investigate.

She said that I “may want” to set aside all of my pre-1985 books and hold them and not offer them for sale and wait to see what will happen, perhaps hold them in a garage for now, especially since Congress might even make changes to the law that could allow me to sell more of them in the future. She said that she didn’t want to tell me that this is what I should do, but she wanted me to understand that CPSIA is the law and that CPSIA being enforced at the federal level as written, and that it’s definitely enforceable and ultimately will be enforced at the state level as well.

Nord's reply to Dingell's ten questions- excellent, excellent read.

Unlike her co-commissioner's letter. Thomas Moore, on page 2 of his letter says:

Congress has entrusted this agency with a large and important mission. The passage of the CPSIA was a huge vote of confidence for the agency and despite the hue and cry of some in the business community who will never be happy with the closer scrutiny and accountability required by the Act, it is a major accomplishment of the last Congress, and one that your leadership was instrumental in achieving.

Got that, you whiners? The ONLY reason to complain is that you're malcontents who simply prefer to work in dark corners, like rats, and avoid 'scrutiny and accountability.' That's what this is all about.

I do agree with staff that additional time to implement certain of the Act’s provisions (such as the one that made nearly all the voluntary requirements in ASTM’s F 963 mandatory) would have been preferable. However, I think that when the agency gets the third Commissioner, we will be better able to address some of the concerns voiced by staff and by industry. Until then, any legislative “fixes” are premature. Only the Commission should recommend what, if any, changes should be made to the CPSIA and no assumptions should be made that there are no other solutions than legislative ones until all three Commissioners have a voice in the matter.”

Only the COMMISSION should suggest changes? Voters, the peons, don't matter, and we certainly do not deserve to be heard by our government. What a singularly outrageous idea for a person serving in a democratic government to hold. It is instructive to know that Moore has NEVER had a non-government job that I know of.

There is such a thing as law....

And there is such a thing as law. The way to break a contract legally is Chapter 11. Short of that, a contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress will summarily cancel contracts?

Even worse are the clever schemes being cooked up in Congress to retrieve the money by means of some retroactive confiscatory tax. The common law is pretty clear about the impermissibility of ex post facto legislation and bills of attainder. They also happen to be specifically prohibited by the Constitution. We're going to overturn that for $165 million?

...Or there was. Once.

Read it all. Krauthammer also points out just how small the AIG bonuses are compared to the money AIG received (and others have pointed out these bonuses are likely not going to the people who caused AIG's problems) and the violation of NAFTA which will cause twiddles three billion dollars in damages to forty states for the sake of 97 Mexican trucks. Which, maybe, if somebody had actually READ THE BILL, somebody would have noticed.

Clean Your Face With Oil

Agatha June left a comment to the post about baking soda and water instead of shampoo- she said we might be interested in something called 'the oil cleansing' method of skin care.

You can read about it here

Basically, you massage a mixture of castor oil and a carrier oil into your skin, hold a hot wet wash cloth over your face to steam it a bit, and then wipe face clean. That's about it.

I discovered the cleansing properties of oil accidentally when the FYG was confined to the couch for a few weeks while severed tendons in her foot healed after surgery- she had a cast on and wasn't even supposed to move around on crutches.

I gave her sponge baths, but she has dry skin and we were having as much success as I would have liked, until one evening when I rubbed some oil on her skin, using a damp cloth, in order to help with the dryness. Her skin was cleaner than it had been since she cut her foot jumping up and down in the bathtub and landed on a sibling's razor.

Since then, whenever the boy has a particular dirty neck from his excavating his earthworks (I tried to find the picture we posted of his holes to China, but I gave up), I oil it down and wipe it off with a warm damp cloth before his bath, and then oil and wipe again afterwards. He's ten, and ought to be able to do this himself, but so far as I can tell, those stories about boys not washing behind their ears? They are all true.

Good for Michelle Obama

She visited a D.C. school specifically to meet with a handful of students who are not on the fast track to success, but could be with a bit of motivation.

Transcripts of her remarks are here.

My Great-Great- Grandpa's Teaching Examination

(repost)

My great-great grandfather was a teacher in Ohio and Indiana from about 1898 through sometime in the early 1900's. We've been going through an old box of family papers and found two of the exams he had to take to keep his teaching certificate. I'm sharing the first half of one of them today and may share the second half next week. They are very long and tedious to type. They are in extremely small print on tissue thin paper that is just under 6 inches wide and just over 19 inches long. There are some punctuation marks I do not know how to duplicate on my computer (the little circle for degrees, the umlaut that belongs in zoology, that sort of thing), but I think for the most part it's self explanatory. Could you have passed this test?

April, 1900.
Examination Questions.

For Second Division, Sixty-Months’ State License, as Provided in H. B. 351, Approved March 6, 1899; and for County and State High School License.

NOTE:-- The requirements for a sixty-months’ license are as follows: The first division, an average of 95 per cent, not falling below 85 per cent. In the “Common Branches:’ the second division, an average of 75 per cent, not falling below 60 per cent in any of the five branches, as follows:

Group 1. Literature and Composition (required of all applicants)
Group 2. Algebra or Geometry (one required).
Group 3. Botany, Zoology, Chemistry, Physics, or Physical Geography (one required).
Group 4. History and Civics, Latin or German (one required).
Group 5. One subject from “2,” “3” or “4” not already taken. Five subjects are required in this division.

In order to secure a sixty-months’ license the MSS. of both divisions must be sent to this department, by number, for gradation. The fee of $1.00 must be sent with the MSS. in each division.

ENGLISH L