Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

Meet the Pelosi family! Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, Judicial Watch uncovered thousands of pages of travel documents related to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's use of military aircraft.

What hasn't been revealed so far is that military aircraft are being used to shuttle Pelosi's kids and grandkids between DC and San Francisco without any Congressional representatives even onboard! Put simply, the United States Air Force is serving as a multi-billion dollar chauffeur- and baby-sitting service for Nancy Pelosi's kids and grandkids -- presumably because commercial travel is beneath the families of the autocrats.

Airplane Stories from a Vintage Reader

Speech Therapy

I thought I would share a tip a speech therapist shared with me many years ago for how to get the most out of speech therapy for your child. 

The magic words she told me to use are "consultant basis."

What that means is that the speech therapist meets with both parent and child about once a quarter instead of more often.  The therapist will assess where the child is, but go over the therapy exercises with the parent, who commits to doing the therapy exercises reguarly at home.

The benefits of this approach are:

1. The best therapists in the area are nearly always running a long waiting list for clients, because weekly appointments fill up quickly and their reputation drives more clients tehir way.  But a consultant basis client does not require weekly appointments, and they may be able to squeeze in a new client on a quarterly basis where they could not fit in another weekly appointment.

2. Parental involvement is a huge factor in the success (and speed of that success) of speech therapy.  The therapist knows this better than anybody, and so when you call and ask to meet on a consultant basis so you can do the therapy with the your child, what you are communicating to the therapist is that you are one of those committed parents who will get involved and work hard, making this a more rewarding experience for all involved.

3. Cost- meeting with a speech therapist four times a year is significantly cheaper than meeting weekly or even only a couple times a month. 

This may not be the best route for every situation, but it is something to consider.

CBS: Yeah, Obama wasn't quite telling the truth about the McCain-Feingold Ruling

CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford... admits....  that Barack Obama “overstated” the impact of Citizens United v FEC. Well … yeah. Katie Couric and Crawford mull over the big takeaway moment from the State of the Union speech, focusing far more on the tradition of stoic non-response of Supreme Court justices during SOTU speeches than the tradition of refraining from attacking the justices in the speech itself. Even at that, Couric notes that this is the most brazen attack by a President against the Court since FDR.

More here.

See also the Huffington Post, which acknowledges that Alito was right, and Obama was wrong about the meaning of the Supreme Court ruling.  The author there focuses on how 'rude' Alito was to say 'that's not true' but doesn't note at all that it's equally tacky for the President to stand up in front of the Supreme Court and lie about them in a SotU speech.

Letters home, spring 1990

Dear Mom,

We planted the garden last week; tomatoes, parsley, celery, and beans, onion, and garlic.

Note: so far as I recall, the only things that really survived my attempts at gardening, the HM's weeding, and the depradations of the boy next door were the tomatoes and parsley. We also did well with sweet potatoes.

I told my mom a story about a friend who asked the EC if she was tired, and the EC replied, "Oh, no! My name is FUN!"

The EC had a pretty severe speech impediment when she was small. I was about the only person who could understand her. She sounded something like a Swedish Elmer Fudd with a Minnie Mouse voice. I'd been nagging the pediatrician at the base to refer us for a hearing test, but she wouldn't do it without a lot of other hoops first. Here were some of them:

The EC passed the preschool special ed evaluation with flying colors and the speech therapists evaluation, too. Both evaluators said she was a very bright, highly personable young lady with a remarkable vocabulary. What was so interesting about those glowing reports is the fact that the pediatrician and eye doctor both suggested that she was probably dyslexic based only on the fact that she can't pronounce her 'R.'

Do you ever wonder why there are so many incompetent folks in the world?

The HG teaches her memory verses to a couple of friends each week- did I mention she is in Brownies? Well, I just did if I haven't mentioned it before.

There is probably more news to share, but I can't think of it just now, so this will have to do. Can I trust you to pass this all on to Dad?

Love,

Me

The EC's speech impediment was a great embarrassment to her, and the neighbor children, at least some of them, were harsh. She was so small for her age, I think they also thought she was years younger than she was and they resented a pint sized Minnie Mouse tagging along and acting like she was as old as they were. We met a speech therapist in private life who gave me some tips on how to help her out (put your teeth together, grit them tight and keep them gritted, grin really big, and say 'rrr-rr-rrr-rr-rrrrr!' like a rooster). We practiced this a couple times a week for a month or two, and suddenly she caught on and literally, overnight she overcame her speech impediment.

She was delighted and all day long she would come up with new 'r' words to say, and practice saying them for us.

In Which Blynken Shares His Opinion of Homework at Ti-Ti's House

He's supposed to be practicing counting by tens, our Blynken is.  So I made up this little ditty, sung to the tune of Ten Little Indians:

I can count by tens to 100
I can count by tens to 100
I can count by tens to 100
Sing along with me:

10, 20, 30, 40
50, 60, 70, 80
90, 100,
Now we're done,
We counted by tens to 100!

I asked him to sing along with me.  He folded his arms firmly in front of his chest, fixed me with a steely eye, and, in perfect key, sang:

Blah, blah, blah, blah
blah, blah, blah...

Even more maddening?  When I folded my own arms and fixed him with my own steely eye and said what I thought of that, he said,

"But why is it rude?"

Haiti- surgeries slowing down, but...

Fifteen days after the quake, a teenaged girl is pulled alive from the rubble. 

Amazing.

We have out of state company right now, and I really don't have the time to give to Haiti that she deserves.  If you want to keep up, please, please read the Livesay's blog- it's beautiful, helpful, encouraging, saddening, so eye opening.  I would post several excerpts from several posts- the one about the 12 year old boy who brought in his younger brother and cried for his brother's pain, the woman who is dying of cancer and cannot continue her pain treatment because the hospital that treated her collapsed- so much to learn.

Real Hope for Haiti is still collecting supplies to be shipped over later- and if you want to really get an excellent bang for your buck, they have ideas on where you can buy supplies, have them shipped to their distribution center for free- so every dollar you spend is for things the mission needs and will put to good use, helping children like those pictured here (oh, this is hard to look at, yes it is.  And I always tell myself, when I see something like this and look away because it makes me feel so bad, "If it's too hard for you to look at, Miss Sensitive, imagine what it is like to live it!") 

Haiti has a long way to go...  Let's not forget her or neglect her:

Today however, many field hospitals are pulling out of PAP. Surgeries are getting to the end thank God. Death from infection is slowing but still ever present. Post op care is a problem. Continuity of care for the country will be lacking. Surgeons to take out rods in 6 weeks needs to be addressed. At Mission of Hope, we are looking at all of these issues and addressing them so we are serving our people best.

It is exhausting.

In the end I do not know what the numbers will be. We are currently at 150 000 dead. 340 000 wounded. Over 100 000 amputees. We overheard a CNN reporter talking that he had spent years in south Lebanon and other war torn countries but this was worse than them all. It is mind-boggling.

Trains for Tuesday

I love wooden train sets- not necessarily Brio, in fact, my fondness for these toys predates my exposure to Brio. I don't know what it is, but I just like them. For years I contented myself with two small sets which none of my children ever played with. I would set them up at Christmas, and that was about it.

Then I had a son. He liked them, too. I wanted to add to my his collection, so I started looking for them on ebay.  I would bid time after time, only to lose in the end (because I am a cheapskate).  Then one day I grew tired of losing bids, so I tossed my frugal principles into a corner and dragged a bureau in front of them and bid on not one, but something like six wooden train sets.  I still bid pretty low (I tossed my frugal principles aside, but I could still feel them struggling to escape).

My reasoning was that since I kept losing, it really didn't matter much if I bid on every wooden train set that was ending that particular Tuesday, and I might win one.

Well.  The ending to this story has been obvious from the moment I mentioned I bid on more than one item, but for those who need the dots publicly placed on the i, yes, I won every single bid.  Yes, my husband still remained the calm and likable fellow he is.  Yeah, that may have been the last time I bid on anything at ebay.  I did give about half of them away.=)

No, that did not stop me from buying other wooden train sets when I came across them at yard sales or thrift shops, as evidenced by a box I discovered this week while deep cleaning an unsightly and towering pile of flotsam and jetsam that has been defacing a corner of The Common Room for some time now.  It was marked 'Wooden Train set, 3.50' which I apparently stashed behind the Tinker Toys (which live in an under the bed blanket storage tote because wooden tinker toys are another toy I cannot do not resist).

The Boy hadn't played with the wooden train sets for about three years now, and I had considered getting rid of them.

What?

Why are you looking at me like that?

Stop it!  I don't know what you're talking about.

No, really. I-

All right, all right!!  The truth is that  I had not come close to that stage.    I was still at least three degrees of separation from that drastic step.   What I had done is considered whether or not I ought to consider whether or not I should  get rid of most of them (I still need one or two for Christmas decorations, after all).

My miserable hoarding of wooden trains has turned out to be a good thing after all (why do I hear the refrain of Joseph of the coat of many colors, sold into slavery by his brothers in my ear? Years after being sold into slavery by those brothers, he was in a position to deliver those same brothers from a famine, and he gold them 'you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good...?)

Like Joseph's brothers, I cannot claim any far-seeing, noble, altruistic plan behind my wooden train hoarding.  I just like the things like a magpie likes shiny.  I don't even play with them (decorating with them is not the same thing at all).

But Blynken and Nod play with them- for hours sometimes.  They spread out the tracks all over the Common Room Floor- and there are so many tracks and enough trains to go around that they almost never argue about who gets what (Nod has, elsewhere, been permitted to swipe things from Blynken because 'he's the baby.' As a firstborn Progeny myself I am more inclined to tell the 'baby' to suck it up and return his stolen goods to their rightful owner).  Once Blynken and Nod get started, the FYB forgets that he's a Lego man now, and he gets down on the floor and joins in the fun.  I can't do the floor, but I do curl up on the couch and watch them, occasionally singing songs like "John Henry," "Down by the Station," "Riding on that new river train..."

I do this for two reasons.  One is, I can't help it.  I associate actions with snatches of related song, and I could probably find a song for every activity of the day, all day.
Oh, wait.  I do that.

Well, the other reason is because I enjoy the surreptitious "boy, is she nuts, or what?" looks the boys exchange with each other.

3.5 Meals From a Rotisserie Chicken

Strider was sick this week-end and requested a rotisserie chicken from Wal-Mart: $5 for a lemon pepper chicken. Not the cheapest thing for a food budget by a long shot, but we managed three very good meals from it:

1) Sunday afternoon ~ the chicken as a main dish with salad on the side.

2) Monday lunch ~ Sauteed mushrooms (fresh mushrooms on sale for .59), minced garlic, onion, lemon juice, parmesan cheese, chicken, and pasta.

.25) Tuesday ~ Had chicken with breakfast to boost protein.

3) Wednesday ~ Slowly (on low for about two-three hours) simmered the remaining chicken carcass and remaining meat with onions, carrots, thyme, sage, celery salt, and some additional chicken broth. Removed the chicken bones. Cooked pasta in the broth... tasted the broth... decided to add more thyme (looooove thyme in soup), lotsa curry, a tiny bit of ginger, more celery salt. This soup made me insanely happy.

.25) Thursday night ~ 8:30 p.m. snack

Hi, ho, hi ho, it's off to school we go...

From a 1940s era school text book, a vocabulary and spelling workbook, if I recall correctly.

State of the Union Reactions

Jeralyn et al at Talk Left:

Obama gets an "A" because of the leadership he displayed, his passion in delivering the speech and the confidence he inspired in us. We think our Government is in good hands.

Matt Yglesias:

A reminder that Obama is fantastic at delivering formal speeches and has a fantastic speechwriting stuff. The past twelve months are a reminder that giving fantastic setpiece speeches has limits as a political strategy. You drop out of speech mode into the realm of cold, hard vote-counting and I don’t think anything’s really changed in that regard.

Chris Matthews:

I forgot he was black.

Katherine Mangu-Ward interprets part of the SOTU speech:

Nope, back to normal. People who disagree with Obama hold grudges, have pet projects, keep good people hostage, enjoy sowing division, and think this is all a game.

Bradley Smith on the President's accusation that the Supreme court ruling opened the door to foreign contributions to campaigns:

This is either blithering ignorance of the law, or demogoguery of the worst kind.

Alex Castellanos on the many faces of Barack Obama:

The same president who said he wasn’t interested in relitigating the past . . . did exactly that for over an hour.

The same president who yearned for less partisanship also resorted to it without hesitation, often just a few sentences afterwards, blaming his problems on his predecessor one long year into his own administration.

The same president who yearned to reduce deficits also called for hundreds of billions of dollars in expanded government.

The same president who said “we can't wage a perpetual campaign” just brought in his campaign manager to do exactly that.

And the same president who said he understood that families have to live on a budget said his government would start doing that . . . next year.

The AP finds its journalism instincts and checks a few facts.  Result: Obama doesn't really tell the truth all the time, does he?

Imagine that every time the President used the word "I" in his speech, he'd said "Hedgehog" instead.  Then imagine what a word cloud of the SOTU speech would look like:



Or perhaps we could see a word cloud with Grand-Poo-Bah substituted for "I" and "me":

Homeschooling Mom Schedules Parent Teacher Conference

Or sort of, anyway.

Blynken and Nod have been here since Tuesday, and won't go home until Sunday night. School is still in session. Blynken just isn't going. We do things with him here at home- reading, counting, practicing letters and rhyming words, but still, the boy is in school and it continues when he's not there, and he will be graded on that. So yesterday I did something I wish I had thought to do a long time ago. I looked up his school online.

My intentions were to call the school and just leave a message for his teacher, but this school has a school-based email address for every teacher, so I was able to email her and explain who I was and ask if there were things we needed to be doing so Blynken didn't keep falling behind in school. She emailed me within five minutes of class letting out. She was so enthusiastic she was willing to drive thirty miles out of her way to drop off resources I could use in case I didn't have any. In the snow. Uphill.

Okay, not the uphill part. There is no uphill here. But there was really snow and plenty of it, and it was thirty miles the opposite direction she needed to go, and she was willing to put together a package of resources on a moment's notice and bring them out to us the moment she got off work. I am really impressed (Blynken has told me he loves his teacher).

Driving out wouldn't work, because we were on our way out the door to midweek Bible study and would have been gone by the time she got here, but she did email me back a long list of things to work on. It is a very doable list, some of which we'd been working on anyway, and now I can keep doing that but in a slightly more focused way. The only down side is that the list includes sight words, and at least half of them don't really need to be sight words (and, it, am, at, cat, dog, mom, did, up...) and I don't do whole word, but that's really just nitpicking- I can easily work around that by teaching him to read the words (he knows most of his letter sounds) and there are plenty of other things on the list I can do to help Blynken keep up, and I have exchanged four emails with his teacher and I really like her.

In the last email she also told me she was praying for Blynken.

Letters home, 1989

Here's a letter I wrote to my Dad in, I think, 1989, at about the same time I wrote the letter to my mother which I posted yesterday- he was working in another state. The plan was that when he'd settled in to his new job, Mother would quit hers and join him, but he never did settle in (I think my mother knew he wouldn't), and so he ended up returning to California just a few months later.

Dear Dad,

I'm sending you some pictures from our vacation in Korea. I'm trusting you to show them all to Mother ASAP! We had a wonderful time. Korea is beautiful, the people were marvelously kind, friendly, and welcoming. The hotel lady gave us 2 brass swans as a going away present.

I had a pair of boots made to fit my feet. We went to Seoul, visited the Korean National Museum and a palace (I think it was Chung Ung Gon, or something similar). Rode the subway. Lost the EC for a few terrifying seconds. We ate Korean food almost entirely during our four day visit. We still have fire for breath. I would love to visit again- I wish you'd meet us there- it'd be tons of fun.

I met a young man [probably 30s] whose father is North Korean so he's never seen him and doesn't know if he has any relatives on that side of the family. The girls charmed everyone by learning to say "Thank-you" in Korean. They got their picture taken at least a hundred times.

The HG got a new Bible and Bible cover, she reads her Bible constantly and is very proud of it. She read it all the way home on the plane.

The EC struts around saying, "Pa Tooey!" every time she hears food she doesn't like mentioned. She says it with great relish, too. She likes to sing and she makes up hymns all day long, "I'm playing and cooking for the Lord, because I love God and I love to say hallelujah so let's all sing to Jesus, He's our friend..."

She goes on and on and on, don't know how she thinks it all up. I'm sure God enjoys her songs. I know I do.

I could probably think of lots more to say if I tried, but there's no time, so I'll just say I love you, take care, and don't work too hard!



My dad had a stroke while we were visiting my parents just two weeks before we left the states for Okinawa, and I believe this was his first 'real' job after the stroke.

Memory Lane

1989 letter home from Japan, written in December. I was around 27 years old and we had been living in Okinawa for around 3 years. Our two children were six and five years old, and this was our first year homeschooling. We'd been trying to have a third baby for four years, although my parents did not know that. Pip was born the following September, and there were other surprises as well.

Dear Mom,


I've sent Dad [who was working in another state at the time] about 20 pictures from our visit to Korea.  Make sure he lets you see them all!


We thoroughly enjoyed Korea.  it was beautiful, the people were very friendly.  We visited a museum and a palace, went shopping, rode the subway, took a bus to Seoul and had a lot of fun.  The girls especially enjoyed playing in the fall leaves.


The HG gave a piece of candy to a little Korean girl who had fallen down on the side walk and skinner herself up pretty badly.  Then the HG informed us that she had given the candy to Jesus [referencing the passage about 'as much as you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do unto me].


We went to the Yombaru Wild life park yesterday.  We all got to hold Toucans, often uninvited as a couple of times they just flew down onto somebody's shoulder.


Monday I start babysitting again.  The motehr of the little girl I was babysitting had her baby, a 9 1/2 pound baby boy.  She is going back to work when he's five weeks old.  She says she can't wait to get back to work, and she has new respect for those of us who stay home all the time with our children (and now hers as well), she doesn't know how we manage.


I think that's very sad.  It really bothers me when people look at their children as burdens instead of the blessings God intended.  Her husband is an E-6 [the HM was then an E-5].  She has told me before that they live entirely on her husband's salary and put all her income in the bank, where they have thousands and thousands of dollars (she says she makes three times what her husband does).


We got a letter from [my middle brother] and a box of Christmas presents.  The girls, of course, want to open them now.  The HM is iimpressed because they sent the EC a birthday present, too [she and her daddy share a birthday, the week before Christmas].


We won't be home this summer unless we have orders by then and are on our way to Europe.  We'll be here [in Okinawa] 'indefinitely.'


Love,


Me

In fact, we did make it home in 1990, twice. Once when I was around five months pregnant, just the girls and I, and then again in December because my first niece was born just a couple months after Pip was.

We never did make it to Europe. In 1991 the AF sent us to Alaska for 8 months, and from there we moved to Nebraska, where we adopted two children who fit seamlessly in that gap between our second and third daughters. So our third child became our fifth.=)

FOI Commission Declines to Clear CRU of Breaking FOI Law

Excerpt from larger article (this bit comes from an email from the head of the Information Commissioner's Office, charged with investigating aspects of the released CRU letters, otherwise known as Climategate):

The emails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information. Mr Holland’s FOI requests were submitted in 2007/8, but it has only recently come to light that they were not dealt with in accordance with the Act.

Deficits Then and Now

Move On made this video to demonstrate the evils of President Bush's 1 Trillion dollar deficit:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today released a ten-year budget baseline showing $6 trillion in deficits over the next decade. Yet because Congress requires the CBO to include all sorts of unrealistic assumptions (that all tax cuts will expire, that the AMT will never again be patched, that discretionary spending will barely move for a decade), some adjustments must be made.

After building a true budget baseline, the sobering result shows ten-year deficits of $13 trillion. The annual budget deficit never falls below $1 trillion. By 2019, the debt is projected at $22 trillion, or 98 percent of GDP.

More here.

Bonnet tip The Corner

Further body blows to IPCC credibility

Making up subtitles to go with this old movie is a popular past-time- I've seen several. This one was pretty funny:


Only a matter of time until the head of the IPCC steps down, in my opinion:

A senior Canadian climate scientist says the United Nations' panel on global warming has become tainted by political advocacy, that its chairman should resign, and that its approach to science should be overhauled.

Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, says the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.

"There's been some dangerous crossing of that line," said Weaver on Tuesday, echoing the published sentiments of other top climate scientists in the U.S. and Europe this week.

Oh, ouch:

...leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century.

Much more at the link, and all veddy, veddy interesting, as is this article in the UK Times Online:

The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser.
John Beddington was speaking to The Times in the wake of an admission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that it grossly overstated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were receding.
Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned scientists who refused to publish the data underpinning their reports.

He said that public confidence in climate science would be improved if there were more openness about its uncertainties, even if that meant admitting that sceptics had been right on some hotly-disputed issues.

And don't miss this.

Things to listen for in the President's SotUnspeech

Number of times he blames the previous administration (some of them are subtle, so listen closely)?

Number of times he refers to the 'middle class?'

Number of times he refers to Big Business or 'Wall Street'?

Number of times he says 'let me be perfectly clear' or some variation of it?

Number of times he says "Make no mistake?"

Number of anecedotal tales of people who suffered from a lack of health care?

Number of times those stories turn out to be, well, not quite as represented (you'll have to find this out the morning after the speech)?\

Number of times he 'takes responsibility' for something by laying the fault at somebody else's door (ie "I take total responsibility for the fact that I couldn't get Congress to change their naughty ways...')?


There's a fun printable bingo card here, as well as links to various games that will shrivel your liver.

Freedom of Speech

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Is the above document familiar to you?  I hope so.  It does not seem to be familiar to far too many citizens of this country.   There's been a lot of flack over the recent Supreme Court decision striking down portions of the McCain Feingold campaign finance law.  I understand the concerns about how campaignns are run and financed and how the advantage seems to go to the camp with the most bucks.  But many of the suggested fixes are totally antithetical to freedom and incidate a gross ignorance of the the first amendment.

In a comment to Kevin Drum's post, submitted by PBCliberal (not verified) on Sat Jan. 23, 2010 4:32 PM PST, PBC Liberal explains

[...]
Greenwald, in a followup to his initial piece points out that not one of the 9 justices in the opinion argued that corporations are not persons and money is not speech.
The concept that a corporation is entitled to first amendment right is a cherished one to those of us on the left, provided you ask the right question. The case that established this was NAACP v Button and is quoted in the Citizen United opinion.
I'm amazed at how this case has so many people talking out of both sides of their mouths; not just the majority side on the court that takes a deserved beating from Justice Stevens' minority opinion for being contradictory and capricious, but the folks who have run in to comment.
The New York Times, for instance, in an unsigned editorial and therefore speaking as a corporation tells us: "Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights.
Can this be the same New York Times that, as a corporation, petitioned the Federal Courts in New York Times vs. Sullivan that the libel judgment against it was a violation of its first amendment rights?
Keith Olbermann on MSNBC nearly froths at the mouth over how corporations are not people and therefore not entitled to free and unfettered speech, in a piece that is actually a work for hire owned by a corporation and disseminated by virtue of that corporation's first amendment right.
Most disturbing is the trend on the left to not even admit that this is a case decided on the First Amendment, as if somehow if the thing is not named for what it is, its nature will change. Even the President, in devoting his Saturday webcast to the issue, failed to mention the sounding of the case in his attack.

Glenn Greenwald writes

It's critical always to note that these are two entirely distinct questions:  (1) is Law X/Government Action Y a good thing?, and (2) is Law X/Government Action Y Constitutional?  If you find yourself virtually always providing the same answer to both questions -- or, conversely, almost never providing opposite answers -- that's a very compelling sign that your opinions about court rulings are outcome-based (i.e., driven by your policy preferences) rather than based in law or the Constitution. More important, I want to note one extremely bizarre aspect to the discussion yesterday.  Most commenters (though not all) grounded their opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling in two rather absolute principles:  (1) corporations are not "persons" and thus have no First Amendment/free speech rights and/or (2) money is not speech, and therefore restrictions on how money is spent cannot violate the First Amendment's free speech clause.  What makes those arguments so bizarre is that none of the 9 Justices -- including the 4 dissenting Justices -- argued either of those propositions or believe them.   To the contrary, all 9 Justices -- including the 4 in dissent -- agreed that corporations do have First Amendment rights and that restricting how money can be spent in pursuit of political advocacy does trigger First Amendment protections.

 I think the problem is that the majority of Progressives neither cherish nor understand the first amendment. I ran into a similar problem when trying to discuss the CPSIA around the time of the Presidential elections.  So many of the idealistic young Progressives at Etsy, for instance, were just positive that the new President could simply revoke the CPSIA because he would want to.  Besides the sad naivete, given that this President never cared about preserving small cottage industries, there was the appalling ignorance of even basic high school civics information about the three branches of government and the separations of power.  This ignorance in people who actually vote is frightening-they truly imagined that any law a president did not like, he could simply revoke at will.  And here is that ignorance again.  Over and over I am seeing progressives focusing on the idea of corporation as entities with first amendment rights part of the ruling as though it is something entirely new and utterly created by these five majority Supreme Court Justices, when, in fact, the legal precedent has been around for over a hundred years. Maybe it's a stupid precedent that should never have flourished, but that isn't the point.  The point is that this is the way it is, this wasn't something new created on the spot by five conservative justices.
 I don't want to defend this status quo because I don't think I know enough about it.

But I do have every interest in defending the First Amendment, and I think it is very, very interesting that Public Citizen et al chooses to approach this issue NOT by changing the status of corporations, but by changing free speech rights for ALL the REST of us.  They are, after all, a corporation themselves, so their self-interest would direct this approach.  But I see no reason for anybody else to follow them down this road.

Of course, altering the legal status of corporations so that the first amendment does not apply to them is also is extremely problematic, as Matt Connolly points out here by asking some excellent Socratic questions.  One hopes somebody may read and learn, because it seems what this country really needs is a national primer on basic, very basic, principles of American Government.
Because then maybe we, as a nation, would recognize the value of the first amendment, and afford it the respect it deserves.  Meanwhile...

Once elected, President Obama issued an order barring officials from talking with lobbyists about the spending of “stimulus” funds.  The ACLU was critical:

The rule is intended to prevent stimulus funds from being “distributed on the basis of factors other than the merits of proposed projects or in response to improper influence or pressure,” according to the memo.

While applauding that goal, Michael Macleod-Ball, chief legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and himself a lobbyist, questioned the means, saying, “The question is whether this restriction, as it’s drafted, is the best way to achieve that end with the narrowest amount of limitation on an individual’s rights possible. “From our perspective, the pretty clear answer is ‘no, it’s not.’”

The “megascandal”  is not widely reported, however, that “stimulus” funds have been steered to Democrat congressional districts, and on no other basis such as socio-economic need.

President Obama appointed Cass Sunstein to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, with influence thoughout the Executive branch and regulatory agencies.  Sunstein favors “using the courts to impose a "chilling effect" on speech that might hurt someone's feelings,” to stifle criticisms of politicians.

The First Amendment is not negotiable, and anybody who wants to tamper with it is an enemy of liberty.

Haiti post, short. Not sweet.

THE TOLL

150,000: Latest estimate of the death toll, from the Haitian Health Ministry. The European Union and the Pan American Health Organization, which are coordinating the health-sector response, have estimated the quake killed 200,000 people.
194,000: Number of injured
134: Estimated number of people rescued by international search teams since the quake

More here.

What Does It Mean To Homeschool for Religious Reasons?

Updated to correct link to Alasandra's blog and fix a couple of spelling errors.

Alasandra takes on the silly anti-homeschooling article here (we blogged about a similar, but different article here; there seems to be an outbreak of anti-homeschooling nonsense about).


Those papers and the article about 'Sham homeschooling' both make a fundamentally erroneous assumption- they read that the majority of homeschoolers homeschool for religious reasons and jump to conclusions, false ones, about what that means.

Alasandra points out that pagans and religious Jews might homeschool for religious reasons, not just scary bad Christian fundamentalists (she also points out how illiberal it is to restrict Christian fundamentalist parents from sharing their spiritual views with their children).
More below the 'jump' (a new feature at blogger I just discovered- that, er, doesn't seem to work):

"Today Everybody Can Afford at Least One Pair of Shoes..."

Title taken from this vocabulary and spelling lesson from the forties. Also of interest, the illustration of a church building and children going to church used as a workbook question.

We Paid $2200 A Day for EACH Congressional rep, friend, and family member...

to go to Copenhagen.

Not too bright...

James O'Keefe (who caught a number of ACORN employees willing to traffic in child slavery on tape) seems to have let his fame go to his head, if this is true.  He and a few other 24 year olds have been arrested for attempting to bug a Senator's office. 

Haiti, and Aid in General

This piece addresses an issue we've touched on here before- the difference between aid that works and aid that makes us feel good about ourselves:

That the various aid agencies on the ground in Haiti are doing their best under the circumstances, to sort out who is delivering what to where and how, goes almost without saying. Proximity to real human suffering can bring out the best in people, even lifelong bureaucrats. This is not the issue in Haiti, or anywhere else that immediate disaster relief is being delivered. Nor need we worry, at first, about waste, when the priority is to save lives.

Yet if our intention is to help, both short term and longer, our emphasis should not be on doing things that make us feel good about ourselves, but instead on what works.

 [...]

This problem is exacerbated by our "culture of narcissism," which focuses on the happyface of good intentions. Good intentions are never enough, prudence is required to convert them into useful action, yet prudence is the last thing on the minds of people jostled by headlines into a need to "do something now."

[...]I lived many years in Asia, and much of my journalistic work was focused on "development issues." I've seen the consequences of aid dependency with my own eyes. It is the same story everywhere, where people are desperately poor: they have no freedom, they are landless, everything belongs to an exploiting class. And that exploiting class is, almost invariably, "leftist," and the nearly-exclusive beneficiary of foreign aid.

On corporate jockeying for position from non-profit aide organizations:

an armoured patrol was being sent into a village which had been ‘cleansed’ to see if there were anything other than bodies in the still smouldering ruins. The battalion commander was approached by the head shed of a well known medical aid organisation to see if one of its teams could piggy back the convoy & be escorted in. The CO deemed that this was a good idea & took it upon himself to contact other aid organisations who might also want to be escorted in. This caused quite a stir & the aid organisation in question let it be known to both the company & patrol commanders that only they should be allowed to go & that if all other humanitarian organisations were excluded, they would ensure that the Army would receive glowing media coverage.* Basically, it’s the same in Haiti & we must never forget that there are whole careers at stake here. Just remember, if there are no starving babies in Haiti, then there can be no salacious TV coverage which humanitarian aid organisations can use to whip the general public with & every politician worth his salt will use the pile of rubble that used to be a hospital to claim up to the moral high ground. With roads as near as damn it impassable there might be no way of getting drinking water to outlying villages but there is always a helicopter available to fly in a camera team.

 It really bugs me when reporters don't bring in water, at least.

On a more upbeat note, this story from the Livesay blog was heartwarming- they (people who transport patients to their clinic) picked him up even though he was a small child with no adults around and brought him back to the clinic because he had wounds that badly needed treating (they did look for family, but nobody around could tell them anything).  His wounds were treated, he was recovering, and he began to have seizures.  The Doctor's guess was that this was no earthquake related, but a prior condition.  When he was well enough, the paramedics (visiting volunteers from NYC), took him back out to the area where they'd picked him up and walked all around, carrying him and asking if anybody knew him.  His family found him- they survived the quake, but he had run away in the midst of the chaos- he's autistic.

This collection of photos (not gruesome) and the accompanying essay are worth looking at.

From the Haiti Rescue Center (Licia is married to Enoch, a Haitian, and they sent their children back to the states to stay with her brother while they stayed behind to continue helping):

• Dad found lunchmeat and cheese at a grocery store.  He was so proud of himself.
• I had to pass through the area where there is over 100,000 bodies buried is mass graves.  It was a terrible feeling. Just terrible to know that so many were buried there just a few feet back off the road in some places.  The local TV station is still reporting that they are burying 12,000 per day, still.
• The gas stations were opened and many places did not even have a line.
• The open-air markets were up and running today like normal.  Which means we were able to get lots of fresh produce for the kids to eat.
• There are some banks opened and money transfer stations opened.
• There are lots of kids that do not have parents.  Some of these kids are too small to talk.  Everyone needs to be careful with what happens to these children.  We have heard that the Red Cross is setting up a system with these kids pictures.  This way family members can go and check out the board and see if they can match any of these families back together. It would be so tragic for a child to be put up for adoption when the parents thought they had died.  Keeping families together is must right now.
 

That was just an excerpt- much more at the link.

Here the stateside brother, Casey, brags on his sisters, brothers in law, and parents, explaining some of the work they were doing before the earthquake.

And here is a post with a list of items they need that you can donate- a friend in MN is collecting donations to deliver. What a great opportunity!

Kreyol Kurt writes of his experiences the day of the earthquake- this is, again, just an excerpt:

I ran back to J and R's building. The baby was still there crying. It seemed to be coming from under a smashed, sideways refrigerator. I don't know if it was a really cheap refrigerator, or if this was one of those super-strength adrenaline moments, but I ripped that refrigerator apart with my two hands. Then I was lifting big chunks of floor and rolling them off the side of the building. Soon a few other guys joined me. A woman began screaming for help. I told her to save her strength and that I knew where she was and that we were coming, but she just kept screaming. After digging for maybe 20 minutes we lifted a huge slab of concrete and could see into a space under a section of floor the woman on her back with a tiny baby almost perfectly upside-down against her waist. I laid down on the floor slab and reached down and under and got a single hand grip of the baby's onesie and pulled him out using the other hand to cradle his head. He was by all appearances unharmed.

Haiti Orphans at risk from child trafficking.

Homeschooling Carnival Up at Corn and Oil

This week's carnival is especially geared towards those who are considering homeschooling, but veterans of home education will also find much of interest.

Susan has done a great job. It's kind of like a homeschooling open house- visit the different homes educators and see what they're doing, how they do it, and why.

I particularly appreciated this idea on how to make map folders (click through to see what I mean). Socialization, quality or quantity is a good read as well, as is this post.

"What about Socialization?" Known as the 'S' Word in homeschooling circles, that was the first question I had some twenty years ago when we started homeschooling. The person I asked said to me, "If you wanted your kids to learn Spanish, would you expect them to learn it from twenty other kids who didn't know Spanish, or would you want them to learn from a Spanish speaker?" I answered that one with the obvious response, and she asked me, "Why do we presume socialization is best learned from 20 other kids who also are there to learn socialization?"

I've also learned how to answer the S question with a question of my own. When I am asked about it, I respond by asking "What do you mean by socialization?" I mainly want to be sure we're talking about the same thing, but I've learned that more than half the people who ask me this question don't actually have a working definition of their own for what they mean. Since they do not know what they mean by socialization, it follows that they cannot know the best place to learn it, right?

I enjoyed reading this well prepared mother's responses to the misinformed truant officer who came to her door. It's true- I have found the people working within the government school system are often the worst informed about homeschooling laws (and also, sometimes, about the programs for special needs children they offer, but that's another tale).

Money, Money, Money By the Pound

(titled thus only because Strider and I watched Pete's Dragon again this week)

On the library's cart of free books and magazines, I found the Winter 2010 issue of The Nest magazine... apparently The Knot, one of the web's biggest wedding planning companies, also has a follow-up company for couples setting up home together (The Nest) and how to do baby stuff together (The Bump). Amused by their smart marketing and always interested in house decorating, money, and relationship stuff, I picked it up.

Advertised on the front cover of this issue is a feature called "The Secret to Saving $$$." In this section, readers share their "creative finance tips." Hey, saving money is a good good thing... and in the middle of figuring out the rest of this week's grocery budget (had $12 left and used some of it for cottage cheese on sale, butter on sale, the requisite milk and eggs, and a couple of limes - the limes because the husband requested them especially- there's still a couple dollars left although I'm thinking we may not need it, as last week's budget went towards some meat and cheese and veggies on sale) along with the rest of this week's meal planning (cottage cheese will go towards a pasta dish Strider loves; since Strider was sick this week-end and not drinking as much milk, our mostly used up jug is now buttermilk, so we'll have buttermilk pancakes and scrambled eggs one night), reading other tips sounded like fun.

Tip that caught my eye first:
"We save money, especially on the food budget, by making sure we cook at least three times a week."

Jawdrop.
If we're just talking suppers here, this means they eat out four times a week... and this doesn't include lunches. I'm sure this is probably a couple where both members work full time at a career, but this tip reminded me of the real fact that two people having a job does not *always* mean more money. When you cook at home 15-20 times a week instead of three, you save loads of money.

Another tip:
"The husband and I throw our loose change into a jar in our bedroom closet and we've promised each other a trip to Vegas once it's full. And, um, we don't turn down cash from the in-laws."
Strider does the loose change in a jar thing and it works very well for us. He had over $100 in it when we went on our honeymoon and that paid for a large chunk of our gas (we took a road trip to a rented cabin in the mountains).
Cash is nice, too... but to have part of your savings *tip* be to rely on cash from others... that's sad.

Yuppie magazines are fun. Where else can you find a recipe for making tomato sauce, a decorating feature spread that includes a $225 serving dish, a $50 throw pillow, and money tips that involve trips to Las Vegas and cash gifts from the in-laws?

~ ~
In other reading news, I'm chugging along through the bio of Sandra Day O'Connor and just picked up at the library a copy of Scott Haltzman's The Secrets of Happy Families. Coming from a happy family myself, I thought it might be a fun one to read and review.

"I'm happy to own up to the fact that it's all somebody else's fault..."

This just happened to catch my funny meter just right this morning. After sort of kind of almost appearing to acknowledge that Candidate Obama made transparency promises that President Obama didn't keep, the President hastens to add a version of 'let me be perfectly clear*':

“Let's just clarify. I didn't make a bunch of deals,” Obama told ABC. “There is a legislative process that is taking place in Congress and I am happy to own up to the fact that I have not changed Congress and how it operates the way I would have liked.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31990.html#ixzz0djlo7loY

* I hope we all now realize that any variation of 'let me be perfectly clear' is a verbal tic of the President's which means a lie will follow.

No differences in crime rates between races....

...When you factor out abandonment by fathers. That is, possibly, the saddest statistic I have ever read in my life.

More here, of which this is but an excerpt:

In The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted that the "relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation's mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime."

[...]

In addition, the statistical link between the availability of welfare and out-of-wedlock births is conclusive. There have been dozens of studies that link the availability of welfare benefits to out-of-wedlock birth.

One study found that a 50 percent increase in the value of AFDC and foodstamp payments led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.

Research for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed that a 50 percent increase in the monthly value of combined AFDC and food stamp benefits led to a 117 percent increase in the crime rate among young black men.

In 1995, Dr. Patrick Fagan wrote a seminal summary of the situation: "Over the past thirty years, the rise in violent crime parallels the rise in families abandoned by fathers... High-crime neighborhoods are characterized by high concentrations of families abandoned by fathers... The rate of violent teenage crime corresponds with the number of families abandoned by fathers... Neighborhoods with a high degree of religious practice are not high-crime neighborhoods... Even in high-crime inner-city neighborhoods, well over 90 percent of children from safe, stable homes do not become delinquents. By contrast only 10 percent of children from unsafe, unstable homes in these neighborhoods avoid crime... Criminals capable of sustaining marriage gradually move away from a life of crime after they get married."

But what caused the breakdown of the American family?

There are certainly many factors, but the welfare system; glorification of the single-parent household; and ill-conceived legislation are among the chief culprits.

Much more at the link.

How do we fix this? How do we encourage fathers to turn their hearts toward their children? What does it take to teach young boys to stand up and be men, real men who love their families and protect and cherish their children?

There are some ideas in the article linked above, but I do not think they touch at the heart of the matter.

Another vintage illustration from the Nature Study Book

More information on the book here.

Painful Prayers to Pray

We know all about praying for patience, but lately The Equuschick has resolved to pray another even more painful prayer much more often.

She wants to be more self-centered. When focusing on faults, that is.

It is so tremendously easy to pray "Please let so-and-so see the error of their ways and repent", and this exercise is rendered even more justifiable by the the fact that it is not wrong (but in fact right, and commanded by Scripture) that we pray those prayers.

The difficulty lies in not letting those very necessary prayers for others distract us from the necessity of praying as well "Lord, let me see the errors of my ways."

And then having once prayed this particularly vulnerable prayer, we must further pray "And grant me the humility and the strength of will to repent."

The Equuschick is haunted often by the certainty that her life story, when evaluated on Judgement Day, will have one of those surprise plot twists we see so often in suspense movies and she'll be forced to come to grips with the devastating realization that she was the bad guy all along. (It is for this reason that she appreciated so much C.S Lewis' Till We Have Faces.)

She is therefore resolved that as much is within her she will keep her eyes open and pray continually for the scales to fall from her eyes every time she looks in the mirror.

Moreover, this sort of exercise has the added benefit of the fact that once you're past the excruciating pain that self-assessment always leaves one in, it usually makes one's life simpler.


The Equuschick can pray for So-and-so all she wants (and she should), she can talk to So-and-so and she can wring her hands in frustration because she doesn't know what to do to change So-and-so. Surely the solution is that The Equuschick must change So-and-so.

Or she can change The Equuschick and watch while her example influences others.

The former is not only impossible, it is not even her responsibility. Only the latter is possible, and only the latter is The Equuschick's responsibility.


Read more: http://www.pleonast.com/users/pandora#ixzz0dfHSvFnz

IPCC Report Riddled with Problems

WWF stands for the World Wildlife Fund, an activist conservation group. 'The Himalayas are melting claim' in the IPCC report was based solely on a non peer reviewed tale told in a WWF publication, and that tale was based on a phone conversation- no peer reviewed literature in sight. You know the Himalayas are melting claim- the one which gave a specific date by which the glaciers there would be gone, the one getting all the negative publicity for the IPCC right now. It's ironic that this claim which we now know to have been the result of a silly sort of game of gossip rather than science, was challenged by scientists in India (and questioned by several reviewers of the report and their concerns were ignored), and the response of the the head of the IPCC was angry, hostile denial.

So the IPCC is now apologizing. "They" found that tiny little error and corrected it, so sorry, it was an accident to include a claim sourced only by the activist group WWF, but hey, shock, who really believed they were perfect?

I am sure you noticed that snide slide into slight of hand, right? The issue, of course, is not whether or not they are 'perfect,' but whether or not their reports are nonpolitical, purely science based, and based only on the peer reviewed literature- particularly since a favorite tactic against skeptics has been to block them from publishing while insisting that only claims made in peer reviewed articles are credible.

The use of the WFF as a source, combined with the IPCC head calling those who challenged this shoddily sourced and unsupported claim 'voodoo scientists' isn't a trivial error- it's not like an honest mistake such as transposing numbers or adding a column incorrectly. We also now know this was deliberate- the lead author of this section knew this claim was not based on any peer reviewed research; others questioned the use of this claim and reviewers offered corrections, yet the IPCC ignored those concerns and included it anyway, and one of the authors of the report as admitted this was expressly to influence politics, something the IPCC supposedly is not supposed to do (in a moderator's edit to comment #91 here, NASA employee, blog moderator and blog owner at Real Climate, Gavin actually claims "The IPCC does not argue for measures. The reports are policy neutral."] .  The head of the IPCC used this information as the basis to win hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, as well.

And it turns out, this use of the activist and non-peer-reviewed literature of the WFF is not an isolated incident:

AR4 is the shorthand name for the 2007 Nobel-winning IPCC report. When one types "WWF" into an AR4 search box dozens of references are returned.

For example, a WWF report is cited twice on this page as the only supporting proof of IPCC statements about coastal developments in Latin America. A WWF report is referenced twice by the IPCC's Working Group II in its concluding statements. There, the IPCC depends on the WWF to define what the global average per capita "ecological footprint" is compared to the ecological footprint of central and Eastern Europe.

The rest is fascinating- including this eye-opener:

I haven't yet fully explored the Greenpeace citations, but two occur in the first paragraph on this page.

Finally, there are these authoritative sources cited by the IPCC - publications with names such as Leisure and Event Management:

• Jones, B. and D. Scott, 2007: Implications of climate change to Ontario’s provincial parks. Leisure, (in press)
• Jones, B., D. Scott and H. Abi Khaled, 2006: Implications of climate change for outdoor event planning: a case study of three special events in Canada’s National Capital region. Event Management, 10, 63-76

This, apparently, is how you win a Nobel prize.

NASA repeated the error, only they kicked up the scare factor a notch by shortening the timespan for doomsday- nobody is sure why or on what basis (other than somebody just wanted to, or somebody just wasn't paying attention, take your pick)

On a page headed “Evidence” and subtitled “Climate Change: How do we know?” NASA once informed its readers:

“Mountain glaciers and snow cover have declined on average in both hemispheres, and may disappear altogether in certain regions of our planet, such as the Himalayas, by 2030″

This has been abruptly replaced, without so much as a footnote of acknowledgment of the error and recent correction:

“Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.”

 In another portion of the 'it's not big deal, nobody expected perfect' IPCC report, a claim about the effects from global warming in African agriculture was based on paper (not peer reviewed) from a sustainable development lobby group.

You'll also want to read the backstory to the melting Himalayas story- the IPCC nearly quotes word for word from an interview in a, you guessed it, non-peer-reviewed magazine.

There are new revelations coming out daily, including 'Amazon-Gate'

The IPCC also made false predictions on the Amazon rain forests, referenced to a non peer-reviewed paper produced by an advocacy group working with the WWF. This time though, the claim made is not even supported by the report and seems to be a complete fabrication.

Click on the link for more.  

More at the link.

Teaching Grammar and Punctuation in The Common Room

I have been homeschooling since 1988.  Our oldest three are graduated, our fourth is wrapping up a college prep year, The Cherub is disabled to the point that she will never leave preschool, and our youngest home educated students are 11 and 13.

We don't, after the fiasco of inflicting an otherwise excellent program called Jensen's Grammar upon my eldest two progeny far too early, do grammar or mechanics workbook pages until approximately age 12.

In the early years I do copywork. I have a couple scope and sequences I like (Borg Hendrickson's is fantastic, and I use one from Hewitt Research Foundation, too) and I give them a look once or twice a year to get a sense of what a child this age might roughly be expected to know. I make a note of those objectives, and in the copywork I choose I look for samples that demonstrate those grammar and punctuation skills appropriate for my child's age.  I point them out when the child checks his copywork against the model. 

So what do I use for Copywork?  I choose passages from their reading, the hymns we are learning each week, and poetry.  I do not ever, ever use their own work for copywork, that would completely eliminate the good that copywork is supposed to do.  Copywork, when selected from well written (and age appropriate) literature is a way for children to slow down and take a close look at the details of good writing.  To use the child's own work for copywork would be sort of like... well, imagine this scenario:

Suppose we are studying flowers.  We read a few books about flowers, we plant flowers, we go to a nursery and choose flowers, we get a nice, broad overview of flowers, and then I have my child draw a picture of a flower, and to study a particular flower in detail to learn about the stamen, anthers, petals, stems, and leaves, I give him a magnifying glass and instruct him to examine, not a real flower, but his own drawing, which may or may not contain those important details.  So for writing, when we do copywork, I choose an example of excellent writing.

We also do not start copywork until the child has mastered penmanship- not that his handwriting needs to be perfect, but he has to have some idea of how to form his letters or copywork is just an exercise in frustration.  Then copywork is only a sentence.  Then it's two.  Then we move up, incrementally, until it's a couple of paragraphs.

At about 10-12, depending on the child, we add studied dictation to our school stuff. I aim to do this once a week. I rarely manage to do that, but it is ideal and I should do better. Studied Dictation and Copywork are the bones of the whole thing. This is input, and we do it for years before I require output. I try to point out things like comma use, capitalization, and so forth, on an as needed basis. Some of the Progeny pick up more than others, but I am pretty sure that the same issues that made it difficult to observe and apply learning in this setting would have rendered grammar workbooks a near total waste of time.

Even though we've moved on to studied dictation, copywork is never completely dropped.  At some point, however, they transition this into their own 'commonplace book,' their own notebook where they keep quotes and excerpts of their choosing from their own writing.

Meanwhile-

We play Mad-Libs to learn the parts of speech. Sometimes I make up my own mad libs just for fun.

I teach key-boarding, or rather, I let Mavis Beacon teach it (8-10 and up). We've had this for years. This is important because...

At about 11 or 12 or so, I have them start doing some writing on a word program with the spell and grammar checker on. I do explain this is no substitute for a brain, it's just an aid, and they must make the final decisions about whether something is right or wrong.  I like this because I believe it's immensely useful to have your attention immediately drawn to a word that might be spelled incorrectly.

About age 12 we do the big red grammar book called Easy Grammar Plus. We do not use the books that go before this one because we don't think they are necessary. It's like potty training- you can work really hard at it, spend much time, attention and training on a daily basis, and your child will be toilet trained at 24 months. Or you can let nature take its course, wait until the child is read to proceed at his own speed and he'll be potty trained at two years (that's not mine own, but I forget where it came from).

I refer frequently to a good handbook of English- I like the Little, Brown, Handbook, the same copy I have had since college a quarter of a century ago where I studied under Delane Way, one of the kindest, gentlest, sweetest, hardnosed sticklers for perfect grammar that I have ever known. He was a wonderful man and a great example of a Christian man, teacher, and father (I think he had around 12 children). I am blest to have known him. You can pick these books up for a song at thrift shops and used book sales (or through the used section at Amazon). It's not as comprehensive, but the Rod and Staff handbook is very, very good and it is easier for many people to use, particularly for one of the Progeny. Granny Tea is another such walking handbook and she does her part by correcting all of us, but especially me, whenever the opportunity presents itself, which is, apparently, quite often.:P

In High School we use Jensen's Grammar (I see he has one now on General Punctuation), which really is an excellent worktext as worktexts go, it's just not for ten year olds. I do not know what I was thinking, I really don't. Dr. Vavra's site is free, excellent, thorough, and it's helpful, although it takes some time and thought to navigate the site. Please don't ask me how to do it or where to start. I worked through it, printed the pages, and then allowed my brain to download everything I learned.

Then we read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss.

Bob the Angry Flower's Quick Guide to The Apostrophe, You Idiots, is hilarious and educational at the same time. I love this thing. Bob the Angry Flower is pretty funny, but often unsuitable for mixed company, small children, conservative Christians, and maidens of virtue, so pursue further Bob reading at your own discretion.

Another resource I like, but many people do not, is Learning Language Arts Through Literature, with the following caveats:
I don't do the 'underline the verbs in green, draw a red circle around the adjectives,' etc, etc, at least not every time.  I do not do every single assignment exactly as described.

I do use the companion grammar handbook correlated to the lessons and answer key, Learning Grammar Through Writing.
It is excellent, only 72 pages and written simply enough for grade school students to understand, and great for parents who aren't comfortable with their own grammar skills.

I don't use the blue book for first grade, and I didn't use the gold book for high school (they may be excellent, I just didn't use them).

The version I use is the older, original version.  My copies are falling apart, and are now being used with the sixth time (the Cherub will never use them).  Possibly I will pass them on to Grandchildren or maybe attempt a few lessons over the summer with Blynken.

  I have seen the updated, new and improved version, and I vastly prefer what I have.  A friend and I have spoken about the way many excellent home made, self published homeschooling materials are 'revised' and 'improved,' and we almost never consider the 'improvement' to be one.   It seems to us that the 'improvements' all seem to be away from unique, ideal for homeschooling, and towards institutionalized, cookie cutter, formalized schooling at home.  This is sad, to me, as it seems that homeschoolers want to downplay our strengths and live within our weaknesses, and perpetuate them by duplicating tools and methods designed for use within government institutions which mass produce education for a group of age segregated peers who have to be gotten in lock step through a state designed program.   That's NOT what I am doing, so I don't want to use those tools for my home educated children any more than I want to use industrial, corporate structured greenhouse to grow home-grown tomatoes that have been kissed by the sun and caressed by real rain. 

That said, you can create your own lessons similar to the original Learning Language Arts Through Literature by reading and implementing the ideas in  Ruth Beechick's books

When we move into high school, we read things like these:

Leaning Tower Of Babel (Common Reader Editions)

Less Than Words Can Say (Common Reader Editions)

The Graves Of Academe

This article about teaching good writing to students for whom English is their second language is also full of useful information for assessing, and teaching, good writing skills to native English speakers as well.

News and Views

Connection found between lower back pain and being in debt.

Venezuela Oil ‘May Double Saudi Arabia’

health care plan, not so dead after all.  It's like a zombie. 

Arkansas Rep. Marion Barry (D), has been warning his colleagues of a midterm bloodbath, and telling Congressional leaders and the Whitehouse that their pushing the blue dogs to vote for this Health Care Plan is going to cost them severely and it will be a repeat of the election in '94, when Republicans regained the House for the first time since the fifties.   The Whitehouse response, according to Barry, as framed by the President and Narcissist in Chief was: ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’

How many jobs 'saved or created' with stimulus? Depends on which Whitehouse official you ask, because obviously, they have no way of honestly tracking that, of course. It's impossible. So I guess they just make stuff up.

China and India won't sign Copenhagen agreements.

Sales of previously owned homes in the US took an 'unexpected' plummet in December- they are the lowest in 40 years.  

Israel's Prime Minister says they are keeping parts of the West Bank forever.

CRN Comment: This is another astonishing development following the global warming science scandals of Climategate plus the admissions that the UN climate panel report contains a false claim about Himalayan glaciers and erroneously links natural disasters with global warming. The influential Stern Review, which has been unashamedly used to justify costly and restrictive climate policy, has been shown to be seriously flawed. Rather than admit to the errors and re-write the report, it seems to have been subjected to a fudged alteration in the hope that no one notices. How many more revelations will it take before our politicians admit that the climate policy ‘king’ has no clothes?

NASA not only cited the erroneous melting Himalayas claims, they just moved the date up five years without any basis at all. And now they've tried to hide their claim.

The President on the dirty politics of no-bid contracts then, and now (he's just awarded a Democrat donater a 25 million no bid contract)

Coptic Christians and freedom of religion in Egypt (where the Coptic church predates Islam by a few centuries, but that isn't saving their lives)

more at Gates of Vienna Newsfeed

Haiti Rescues

Here's irony for you- I mentioned here the 75 year old nurse mother of a friend of ours, who was in Haiti during the quake and nobody heard from her for three days, and then she was found and was home safe, no injuries at all.  As a nurse, she'd been doing what she could to help others during those days when nobody heard from her.

She arrived home safely, and a day or two after getting home, slipped on the ice outside her house and broke an arm.

During the earthquake she was at her interpreter's house. I think she had only just walked in, but that's my assumption based on a couple of other things I heard.  The quake started, she was too stunned to do more than drop to her knees and pray. The interpreter yanked her out of the house just as it collapsed around them.  They slept outside over the next few days, and, as I said, did what she could to help, but all she had was tylenol and band-aids, and those were useless for cases like the toddler who was brought to her with internal injuries, who died of them while she watched helplessly. 

This man's survival story (he used his phone app for first aid treatment) is pretty incredible, and sad.  When the earthquake hit, he was in the lobby of a hotel with his friend.  When it was over, he couldn't see his friend, and he crawled to an elevator and holed up there.  They were able to dig him out some sixty hours after the quake.