Filed under: Exotic Pets, Pets News

The Denver Zoo welcomed its first baby orangutan in a quarter century on June 19. However, the little one's first few weeks have been anything but smooth sailing.

Just 11 days after birth, Hesty had to be placed in an incubator by the zoo's primate care team. The baby hadn't been nursing, according to the Denver Zoo, and even though the staff had been doing all they could to get Hesty nursing on her own, they found her nearly unresponsive and severely dehydrated on July 1. At that point, they knew the best thing for the baby was to put her in an incubator near her mother's quarters so they could still see each other while Hesty received the care she needed.

Hesty almost doubled her weight over the next 18 days under the zoo staff's careful eye, while her mother watched closely from her enclosure. Hesty was reunited with her mom on July 19. She still didn't know how to nurse, however, so the staff sedated her mother and trained Hesty on the basics of nursing. She seems to have it down pat these days, but the staff is still monitoring the baby 24 hours a day, and are ready with formula just in case. To see an adorable video of Hesty and her mom, go here.

On the off chance that little Hesty doesn't bring enough cute to the table for you, check out the adorable animals in the gallery below!

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Mother's Bistro & Bar a BUSY, nationally acclaimed restaurant, seeks experienced and responsible morning line cook with a passion for good food and an ability to flip eggs – lots of eggs! You should be an early riser, intelligent, reliable and fast, with an ability to be organized and work clean. A willingness to work hard is essential – you will feed nearly 700 people every weekend day. At least one year line experience in a quality restaurant REQUIRED. Weekend availability is a must.

Please include your resume in the body of your document -- attachments will not be opened. Only resumes demonstrating longevity at previous employments will be considered.

i am writing this post from the road, literally. the mother's new phone can be turned into a "hot spot" so i can connect to the internet from anywhere, including a highway. how cool is that? the family is trying to get to our destination in one day,

The Huffington Post is among many media outlets currently tracking down Amare Stoudemire's possible Jewish heritage. The new New York Knicks star has been in the spotlight ever since his move from Phoenix to the Big Apple. 

Basketball is not entirely a huge sport in Israel, but the Knicks forward was making a trip there this off-season. There was speculation that this was basketball related, but a Jewish website turned that rumor down. Stoudemire admitted he was "going 2 study Hebrew" on his Twitter account .

Haaretz revealed that Amare Stoudemire's mother has traces to Jewish roots. This is the main reason why the basketball star is out in the Middle East. Stoudemire could in fact be learning about his real heritage by the minute. 

"This ze ha'halon sheli" was another one of Stoudemire's tweets. When translated the tweet means "This is my dream." The latest tweets also end with "Shalom." All signs are pointing toward another Israeli star in the NBA. He could one day join an all Jewish All-Star team with Omar Cassipi and Jordan Farmar. 

This all seems like a happy ending and a happy realization, but then comes the professional and real NBA agent to Amare Stoudemire. He officially released a statement saying, "I know there are some reports that he is Jewish, but he is not. He thinks there may be some Jewish blood on his mother's side and he is researching it."

Guess the whole world has to wait and see what will be next in Stoudemire's journey for the truth. Hey, because Stoudemire's move to New York he will always be in the media's spotlight as one of the city's biggest stars. 

Welcome to the celebrity life! This is just one of many realizations that Amare will have about himself, as the media will soon come to know Amare better than he knows himself. 

In a new article over at Deadline, it was revealed that Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Day Watch) could end up directing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a film he was originally only set to produce alongside Tim Burton. Being adapted by Seth Grahame-Smith from his own novel revision of the Jane Austen classic, when Abraham Lincoln was nine years old, his mother died from an ailment called the "milk sickness." Only later did he learn that his mother's deadly affliction was actually the work of a local vampire, seeking to collect a debt owed by Lincoln's father. When Abe learned the truth, he vowed revenge and kept one passion hidden throughout his life: the brutal elimination of all vampires.

There's absolutely no question that our kids are growing up with some things that are way better than what we had. iPhones and DVRs are two things that come immediately to mind. And another: the simple (and free!) pleasures of the playground.

When I was growing up, playgrounds had monkey bars, some metal slides that got hot enough to fry an egg on in the summer, swings, and maybe a merry go round. Unfortunately, fear of lawsuits caused communities to get rid of many of these things (when was the last time you saw a merry-go-round?), and experts believe, took a lot of the fun out of play. Now, there's a new concept looking to restore the fun to the playground and spur creativity in the process.

 

Architect David Rockwell has developed "Imagination Playgrounds." They are big foam shapes that let kids create their own play environments. The first park-based one opened this week at Burling Slip in the South Street Seaport in New York City. Others, called "Imagination Playground in a Box" are popping up all over the country. These come in various permutations that can be used indoors, outdoors, and at variety of locations. As a matter of fact, KaBOOM! (a nonprofit which focuses on building playgrounds for kids and teaching communities how to get playground projects going) just brought two Imagination Playgrounds to Detroit, where I live. Each playground comes with training for a Play Associate, someone educated in the best way to use the toys.

The cool thing is, neither Rockwell nor KaBOOM! makes money from the sale of these kits. Profits are all plowed back into funding more playgrounds for kids. KaBOOM!'s goal is to have every child within walking distance of a safe playground.

Cynical urbanite that I am, I do wonder how they manage to keep these available for kids without every single piece going home with someone to whom it does not belong within about a day and half. However, the Imagination Playgrounds sound like great, multi-age fun, not to mention safer for toddlers. Mine can't be the only one who dismisses the toddler playscapes as too simple but tries to do everything his big sister can on the highest parts of the big kid ones, thus taking years off his mother's life, right?

What's your favorite playground activity?

Image via StevenDePolo/Flickr

أغرى امرؤ يوماً غلاماً جاهلاً * * * بنقوده كيما ينال به الوطر One day a man tempted an ignorant boy

James Knox Polk 1845 - 1849, Democrat from Tennessee
Having been a "dark horse" compromise choice for the Democratic nomination and having scored a razor thin upset victory over the far more well established politician Henry Clay in the 1844 Presidential Election James K. Polk was forced to promise to only serve a single term as President before he ever entered office. However, in contrast to his three predecessors in the office of the Presidency: Van Buren, Harrison and Tyler, Polk was a force to be reckoned with.

It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of Polk's single term had on American history and yet he is often overlooked with considerable attention going to the great "Lions of Senate:" Clay, Webster and Calhoun. Polk was, however, the first man to govern most or all of what we now recognize as the Continental United States having conquered huge tracks of western territory for the Republic in the Oregon boundary dispute and the Mexican–American War.

The question of if this land was to be slave or free would, of course, lead the nation into Civil War and near dissolution fifteen years later and this was foreseen by many in Polk's own time leading to much unrest in Congress and throughout the nation. At this point it appeared that, largely southern, pro-slavery forces had the upper hand but the industrialized north was very much a sleeping giant and a light sleeper at that.

Of course, Democrats at the time did not propose war with Mexico et..al by saying "we need to expand slavery give us more land" but rather promoted their expansionist ideology under the umbrella of the pseudo-religious auspices of Manifest Destiny. Perhaps it was a sign that the Age of Enlightenment had truly come to an end in the 1840s that powerful leaders of industrialized nations could say with a straight face and with absolute certainty that the creator of the Universe which we now know to be dozens of billions of light-year across, if not infinite, gave a flying crap over whether Mexico or the United States governed the Western territories.

Driven by "destiny" Polk proceeded to expand the borders of the United States first completing the Annexation of Texas which had largely been negotiated by his predecessor, John Tyler. Having only been President for six days he could already brag to have increased the US' landmass by a third.

Realizing that Northerners would not be happy seeing the south expanded so drastically Polk then undertook negotiations with Great Britain to annex the Oregon Country (the present day states of: Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming). Less than one year on the job and Polk had already nearly doubled the size of the nation.

Polk was less successful in his attempt to purchase California from Mexico a slight which Polk repaid by sending in troops to disputed territory between the Nueces River (which Mexico claimed as its' northern border) and the Rio Grande (which the US claimed as its's southern border). Clearly, Polk was attempting to provoke armed conflict with Mexico so as to have an excuse to declare war and eventually eleven American soldiers were killed in an ambush (albeit on the wrong side of the Rio Grande) allowing Polk to goto congress claiming that "American blood had been spilled on American soil" ... I know, as if we were being invaded by Mexico or something.

Even John C. Calhoun voted against the war resolution seeing it for the crock that it was but it passed nevertheless and the next year, following severe ass-beatings inflicted upon the smaller and weaker Mexican armies by American troops led by legendary generals Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848 adding 1.2 million square miles of new territory to the United States finally fulfilling the Manifest Destiny. God must have been so relieved.

Polk was indeed the hardest working President, ever up to that part and possibly the hardest working President before Lincoln. Polk was not known to have any hobbies or interests outside of politics and naturally this took a great toll on his health and he died only three months after leaving office at the age of fifty-four. Historian Polls rank Polk in the well above average to near-great range frequently coming in at number ten along with President James Madison whom I also believe to be underrated.

Zachary Taylor 1849 - 1850, Whig from Louisiana
Prior to Taylor's victory over the infinitely more qualified Lewis Cass of Michigan in the 1848 Presidential Election "Old Rough and Ready," as he had been known to his troops throughout his lengthy military career, had never held public office or even voted. As such his views on the issues of the day: tariffs, internal improvements, expansion of slavery, the national bank, et..al had not really been articulated when he entered the Oval Office in 1849.

Taylor was the last President before Jimmie Carter to have been elected from the deep south and was the last President to have owned slaves while holding the office of President. Nevertheless, Taylor took a hard line against the expansion of slavery and roundelay condemned the secessionist rhetoric of such pro-slavery southern firebrands as his son-in-law Jefferson Davis during his brief but energetic term in office.

To be clear, Taylor does not appear to have in any way opposed the institution of slavery but rather saw it as his duty to keep the peace between radical pro-Southern interests on the one hand and increasingly agitated abolitionist forces on the other. Taylor's career had not been in politics but in the Military and he had seen first hand what happens when politicians failed to keep the peace and was going to be responsible for no such thing in his own political career.

Taylor's brief term was dominated by debate over the Compromise of 1850 which Taylor derided as the "omnibus bill" with its' concentration upon Popular Sovereignty allowing individual citizens of the territories to decide for themselves whether slavery was to be permitted within their borders. It is agreed that Taylor had every intention of vetoing the bill but was denied the opportunity due his unexpected death in July of 1850 ostensibly from food poisoning but latter sources indicate medical malpractice to be the cause.

In Historian Polls, Taylor, the third shortest serving President in history, generally ranks near the top of the below-average quartile along with Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Calvin Coolidge both of whom had the benefit of serving at least one full term in office.

Millard Fillmore 1850 - 1853, Whig from New York
Millard Fillmore was not a very good President. So weak and ineffective was his administration that his name is practically a byword for forgettable events, eg: "that regional-semi-quarter-final match was the 'Millard Fillmore' of lacrosse matches."

It almost goes without saying that Fillmore signed the 1850 Compromise in an half-hearted attempt to settle the brewing issue of whether the new territories acquired in the War with Mexico were to be slave or free. This was in stark contrast to the hard line taken by his predecessor.

Of all the provisions of the Compromise the one that most dramatically opens Fillmore up to charges of archvillainy was the Fugitive Slave Act which severely impacted the civil liberties of northerners allowing slave-catchers to run amok in search of runaway slaves from the south to insure that no free-state would be a safe-haven. To make matters worse, southern slaveholders had the nerve to complain that their own liberties were violated by state laws requiring that captured slaves be allowed a trial before they were returned to captivity. States' rights my ass.

There had been hope of another bill called the Wilmot Proviso banning slavery in any of the western territories but it had not passed the Senate and the final Compromise that Fillmore signed contained precious little compromise (California was to be admitted as a free-state big whop) on the part of pro-Slavery southerners and a lot of new restrictions on abolitionist northerners and yet talk of succession continued among the southern politicians. What more did they want?

Furthermore when Civil War finally did break out a decade later the agrarian south proved no match for the industrialized north ... I could easily exceed my monthly bandwidth allowance describing the inanity of the 1850 Compromise so I suppose its' time to move on.

Needless to say, Filmore did not stand for reelection in 1852 but ran as the candidate of the Know Nothing Party in 1856 which was sort of a clownish anti-Catholic secret society which surprised everyone by taking over 20% of the vote. Fillmore died in 1874 at the age of seventy-four. Historian Polls consistently rank Fillmore very close to last as one of the five or six worst Presidents at around number thirty-seven along with Presidents William Henry Harrison who only served thirty days and James Garfield who served only six months.

Franklin Pierce 1853 - 1857, Democrat from New Hampshire
Peirce may very well be the most handsome President and he was clearly the most cultivated having attended college alongside and been a lifelong associate of literary giants of his day such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I say this because Franklin Peirce was a horrible President and not a very nice man either and I wanted to soften the blow a little bit.

Having been, yet another dark-horse/compromise candidate for the Democrats, Pierce somehow defeated a great man in the Election of 1852 in the person of Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott who would be the last Whig Party Candidate for President. Those elegant speeches that propelled Peirce to victory over, arguably, the greatest war hero since the Revolution (and the polling was not close) were undoubtedly the handy-work of author Nathaniel Hawthorne who was Peirce's closest friend and constant companion.

As President however, Peirce would prove a pitifully indecisive Chief Executive as he was already deeply in the throws of the alcoholism that would eventually take his life and was in a horrible state emotionally having witnessed the death of his son in a train crash only two months before taking the oath of office. Peirce also appears to have been heavily under the influence of his Secretary of War Jefferson Davis whose loyalty to the cause of preserving the Union really does have to be questioned at that point.

It has been said that Peirce's policies could not have been more disastrous to the Union cause if the future Confederate President had designed them himself, which may very well be true. Davis also was known for introducing some strangely ineffective policies for the War Department such as his attempt to introduce the use of camels in the cavalry.

That's all speculation however, history shows that no conspiracy is needed to account for a wide assortment of weak and ineffective leaders and early on there were hints that the Peirce administration was being conducted in a disorganized fashion. All this came to a head with publication of the Ostend Manifesto which tied Peirce to a secret plan to annex Cuba by force adding countless slaves to the already overflowing southern states. That combined with the Gadsden Purchase finishing off President Polk's conquest of the southwestern territories from Mexico, convinced many Northerners that Peirce was in the pocket of the Slaveocracy. In my opinion they were correct but this is not the majority view of historians on the subject.

A frequent consequence of corrupted and/or incompetent administrations throughout the history of civilization has been destructive and bloody guerrilla warfare breaking out in the outlying regions of a given government's lands and that is exactly what happened in 1854 in what has become known as Bleeding Kansas. In an attempt to create a transcontinental railroad Senator Stephen A. Douglas pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively nullifying the Missouri Compromise leaving the question of slavery open for "popular sovereignty" in the teritories of Nebraska and Kansas. Nebraska was at no risk of legalizing involuntary servitude, however, Kansas bordered the slave state of Missouri and the possibility of Kansas entering the Union as a slave prompted pro-Slavery Missourians, known as "Border Ruffians" to cross into Kansas to influence formation of a pro-slavery constitution.

In the violence that broke out it appears that the pro-slavery faction were largely the aggressors but it is difficult to tell as there were atrocities on both sides including the infamous Pottawatomie Creek Massacre led by abolitionist John Brown who would be executed in 1859 following an unsuccessful Raid on Harper's Fairy, Virginia.

As an interesting side note, the original title of The Battle Hymn of the Republic was John Brown's Body. Historians today treat him as some sort of fringe nut, but he was taken quite seriously in his own time ... But I digress.

There appeared to be little doubt as to Peirce's sympathies for the "Slavocracy" when he recognized a clearly illegal pro-Slavery Constitution which had been voted in by the so-called Ruffians. Furthermore, the pro-Slavery contingent seemed to have gone mad with power and were now using violence and trickery to force the institution of slavery upon persons who clearly did not want it within their borders.

The violence in Kansas soon spilled over on the floors of Congress when Congressman Preston Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner into unconsciousness with his walking stick permanently disabling Sen. Sumner, the title of the speech that had provoked Rep. Brooks to this extreme "The Crime Against Kansas."

Fully three-quarters of the Republican Party Platform of 1856 consisted of an indictment of Peirce's outrageous behavior in Kansas. And as we shall see, it was about to get worse.

Peirce died of Cirrhosis of the Liver in 1869 at the age of sixty-four. Historian Polls consistently rank Peirce near the very bottom as one of the worst Presidents ever to hold the office typically ranking him at around number forty out of forty-three somewhere between his successor James Buchanan and his predicessor Millard Fillmore.

James Buchanan 1857 - 1861, Democrat from Pennsylvania
There used to be a joke asking who was the smartest President. Persons would then suggest such intellectual luminaries as Woodrow Wilson who had a PhD only to be disappointed when the asker announced they were wrong. James Buchanan, the prankster would announce was the smartest US President, "because he never got married."

As we shall see, not only is this joke not funny it bears very little resemblance to the truth as Buchanan is widely viewed as the WORST, full-term President whose administration had not been touched by major scandal.

If, the Bleeding Kansas situation were already not enough to convince northerners of the sinister plans of the wicked "Slavocracy" to impose the brutal institution of involuntary servitude upon the rest of the nation irregardless of the wish of the residents of the various states then, the Dred Scott Decision declaring that Congress lacked Constitutional Authority to prohibit slavery in any of the territories, including those bordering Canada, should at least convince one that this "Slaveocracy" business was not a crackpot conspiracy theory cooked up by some tin-foil-hat wearing pothead in his mother's basement.

Needless to say, the Dred Scott Decision was very bad law under any standard of justice one cares to name. The decision begins by claiming that the defendant, Dred Scott had no rights whatever under the US Constitution and thus could not sue in court but then went on for several pages finding the facts of the case against him. Those who claim, still today, that State's Rights and not slavery was the overriding cause of the Civil War have some explaining to do in re Bleeding Kansas and Dred Scott which blatantly usurped State and territorial autonomy in addition to severely restricting the civil liberties of their citizens. And, by the way, the tariff hadn't been a major issue on the national stage in forty years so those making that claim are, at best, misinformed but more likely just lying.

Buchanan cannot be held responsible for the entirety of the Bleeding Kansas affair but his behavior was not much better than his predecessor's in that regard appointing a bellicose pro-slavery partisan Robert Walker as Territorial Governor and endorsed the ill-fated Lecompton Constitution which Congress overwhelmingly rejected. In addition to doing a disservice to the citizens of Kansas this act Slavocracy-boot-lickery caused a severe rift in his own, Democratic, party as northern Democrats, following the lead of Stephen A. Douglas joined Republicans in opposing the measure on the grounds that it violated the cherished principle of "popular sovereignty" which, truth to be told was the principle at the heart of the violence in Kansas in the first place, but let us not look a gift horse in the mouth.

In the Spring of 1860 a House committee chaired by John Covode launched an investigation of Buchanan's behavior in the wake of the Kansas situation in hopes of finding grounds for impeachment. Among other things the committee found that Buchanan had freely used the "power of the patronage" to promote the pro-slavery constitution upon Kansas and that he sought to prevent the reelection of Sen. Douglas. The Kansas situation eventually petered out and Kansas would be admitted to the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861 in one of Buchanan's final acts as President.

In the hotly contested Election of 1860 former Congressman Abraham Lincoln, an outspoken opponent of slavery of any kind being permitted in any of the territories topped a very crowded field becoming the President-Elect of the United States and those perpetual troublemakers, South Carolina, almost immediately called for a convention to discuss secession from the Union. Buchanan, while stating unequivocally that secession was illegal, claimed that he was Constitutionally prohibited from using force to prevent secession. An ineffectual attempt at avoiding rebellion was attempted in the form of the Crittenden Compromise which would have extended the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific but Lincoln and his supporters were adamant that slavery not be permitted in any of the territories.

South Carolina declared their secession from the union on December 24, 1860 and by the time Buchanan left office on March 4, 1861 fully seven southern states had left the Union and had established a government known as the Confederate States of America. Upon leaving Washington DC Buchanan left a note for Lincoln "if, you are as happy about taking this position as I am to leave it then, you are a happy man indeed."

Buchanan died at his home near Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1868 having been the fist President to have authored memoir. In Historian Polls Buchanan nearly always ranks close to dead last at anywhere from number forty to number forty-three, though occasionally the financial scandals of Warren G. Harding and Ulysses S. Grant have pushed him as high as number thirty-seven.

Abraham Lincoln 1861 - 1865, Republican from Illinois
The 1860 Republican Platform that excelled Lincoln to victory in the 1860 Presidential Election contained many useful items such as: securing fair wages for industrial workers, protective tariffs, the construction of a Transcontinental Railroad and the founding of Land-Grant Colleges but those things come a long way down toward the bottom of the page. Of eighteen planks in the platform fully fourteen are simple restatements of the single principle of opposition to the extension of slavery.

Furthermore, Lincoln's first Inaugural Address doesn't mention colleges, tariffs or railroads at all. Things had changed a little bit since the nominating convention.

Lincoln's predecessor had done nothing to prevent the Confederate States of America from seceding from the Union and done very little to protect the military forts that Confederate armies were besieging all across the South. Within six weeks of his accession to the Oval Office Confederate Forces won their first major victory in the Battle of Fort Sumter forever banishing any hope of a peaceful reconciliation, with or without slavery.

Four more states joined the Confederacy shortly after the fall of Sumter who racked up another victory in July at the First Battle of Bull Run. The nation was now in a state of full on Civil War complete with: suspension of civil liberties, conscription and all the "unAmerican" thrills that accompany it.

Lincoln was very active in the planning of war strategy which was largely planned out by Gen. Winfield Scott in his last act as an active duty military commander. Scott's plans were for a quick and decisive overwhelming of the enemy which it would take Lincoln nearly four years to find a General willing to implement fully. In the end, however, it would be Gen. Scott's initial strategy that would win the day for the North.

In the meanwhile, Republicans found themselves with an overwhelming majority in Congress due to the conservative democratic Southern constituency having all resigned their seats to serve in the Confederate Government. This meant that the long-awaited progressive Whig/Republican agenda that southern interest had derailed at least since the death of William Henry Harrison could be passed.

Historian Shelby Foote once noted that he thought that the North was fighting the war with "one hand tied behind their back" for the first three years of the conflict at any rate. But it should be noted that the Land-Grant Colleges, railroads, harbors and other expenditures authorized by Lincoln and the Republican Congress were truly national in nature and did not exclude the Southern States they very much behaved as if the Union were still in tact.

What Lincoln is undoubtedly most famous for is the Emancipation Proclamation delivered on September 22, 1862 only five days after Union Forces scored a major victor at the Battle of Antietam. In truth this was actually quite toothless as it only applied to slaves in states that were still in rebellion as of Jan 1, 1863. Lincoln clearly had no law enforcement powers he could reasonably exercise in those areas at that time. The Proclamation freed slaves in areas conquered by the invading Northern Armies as a confiscation measure taken under War Powers but did not outlaw the practice of slavery.

However earlier in 1862 slaves were freed in Washington DC (with compensation made to their owners) and congress did pass a "resolution" agreeing to undertake the gradual abolishment of Slavery in the Republic, again with compensation to owners.

Following a sea-saw of Union and Confederate victories and defeats under a succession of unsatisfactory generals, culminating the Battle of Gettysburg where Gen. George Meade "snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory" having defeated Robert E. Lee but then allowed Lee's army to escape back to Virginia, Lincoln appears to have stepped up the war effort a notch appointing Ulysses S. Grant commander of the Union Armies. There would be no more hands tied behind anyone's back as Grant's specialty was "total war." The Confederates were remarkable fighters but they had no where near the number of troops at their disposal as the North did and, now, they were going to see what a General in charge who did not to care about his own losses (provided that replacements were available) could do to them.

In 1864 Lincoln faced a tough reelection campaign against his former General and Chief George McClellan. The timing of what came next seems awfully convenient to me but coincidence can happen. As I go though the events of the 1864 Presidential Election keep in mind Shelby Foote's comment about the North having one hand tied behind its' back.

To try and minimize the partisan nature of the conflict Lincoln changed the name of his party from the Republican Party to the National Union Party and chose as his running mate Andrew Johnson a Democrat from Tennessee. The Democratic Party then held its' convention nominating McClellan but choosing as his running mate George Pendleton an outspoken advocate of ending the war and allowing the South to succeed, an error compounded by adding a plank to the party's platform declaring the war a "failure."

Between the Democratic Convention and the General Election: New Orleans and Atlanta fell, Richmond was under siege and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman had begun his devistating March to the Sea setting most of the States of Georgia and South Carolina on fire as he went. The South had been essentially defeated leaving poor old Gen. McClellan with a peace platform and a hippy peacenic running mate ... Really, couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

The war was not officially over but it was over enough for Lincoln to win reelection.

Richmond fell and Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House only six days before Lincoln's Assassination at the hands of actor John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater, April 14, 1865. In his Second Inaugural Adress Lincoln had promised to treat the vanquished South "charitably" but the murder of their beloved President caused Northern politicians to make the Reconstruction era as brutal and humiliating as the law would allow. Only the Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 saved the South from, perhaps, becoming a permanently occupied territory of the North.

Historian Polls almost without exception rank Lincoln at the very top of the list of great Presidents, though he has occasionally been pushed out by Presidents George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt.

Andrew Johnson 1865 - 1869, Democrat from Tennessee
Remembered mostly for being impeached (and acquitted) in addition to his consistent drunkenness and liberal use of racial epitaphs in official state speaches Johnson would appear to be the worst person who could have possibly succeeded Lincoln and in particular under the tragic circumstances in which the succession took place. However, it was during his administration that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the US Constitution were either introduced or adopted: outlawing slavery, guaranteeing equal protection under the law and granting voting rights to all adult male citizens regardless of race (Johnson held out on this one and it was adopted under Grant), and the more lenient reconstruction policy he pursued was very much in keeping with Lincoln's stated opinions on the matter.

Johnson's problems with the Republican Congress began with his veto of a measures to reauthorize the Freedman's Bureau and the very first piece of Civil Rights legislation both of which they passed over his veto. Johnson was clearly hostile to inferring all the rights of citizenship upon the former slaves and immediately broke with Republicans and reunited with his previous Democratic Party who had declared themselves to be "a white man's party."

Another act passed over the President's veto was the (possibly unconstitutional) Tenure of Office Act forbidding the President from dismissing any of his Cabinet members without Congressional consent. Ignoring this act of congress Johnson dismissed Edwin Stanton leading to his impeachment by Congress beginning in March of 1868 and ending in May of that year.

The charges were trivial and the evidence was thin and a two-thirds majority was needed to remove Johnson from office 35 yea to 19 nay. The rest of his term was uneventful save the Amnesty Proclamations of Christmas Day 1868 granting unconditional amnesty to all Confederates.

Johnson was elected to the US Senate from Tennessee in 1875 less than five months before he died at his home in Carter's Station, TN. Historians Polls fluctuate wildly as racism becomes more or less acceptable but he almost always ranks in the worst category occasionally finishing as low as forty-three along with Presidents James Buchanan and Warren G. Harding

Ulysses S. Grant 1869 - 1877, Republican from Ohio
The Election of 1868 in which Grant trounced Horatio Seymour was largely seen as a referendum on the more agressive reconstruction measures Radical Republicans (who then stood for everything they now stand against and vice versa) had been pushing for. The Grant administration was marked by many civil rights breakthroughs for African Americans as well as Native American Indians and in particular by the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibiting the government from from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." However, his two terms were also stained by a number of scandals some of which directly impugn the President's credibility and competence.

In addition to the Fifteenth Amendment, Grant also sign a bill targeting Ku Klux Klan activity in the south as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1875 prohibiting racial discrimination in jury selection.

Other successful measures included the Treaty of Washington settling damage claims with Great Britain who had built ships for the Confederacy that had inflicted much damage upon American commercial vessels during the Civil War, the creation of the first of its' kind Civil Service commission and in restoring civil liberties to citizens of the former Confederacy (save 300 to 500 high ranking Confederate office-holders).

Grant was less successful in his drive to annex the Dominican Republic. The Dominican government had requested annexation to which Grant was amenable but the resulting treaty failed to get the two-thirds majority required in the Senate.

In spite of a wave of coruption and very damaging scandals, which we shall get to in a moment, that had overtaken Washington DC and which Grant was clearly not up to the job of mitigating, Grant won reelection handily over New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, a Liberal Republican also endorsed by the Democrats. Greeley was, frankly, a bit of a kook, so while there was a good deal of sentiment for their platform of clean government and ending Reconstruction Greeley only took six states and died shortly after the election.

Grant's second term was generally uneventful aside from his veto of the 1874 Inflation Bill, an unpopular move in light of the Panic of 1873 which Grant himself had helped to cause, and the subsequent passage of the Resumption Act of 1875 returning to the gold standard. Grant's name would continue to be associated with "sound money" policies long after he left the White House.

As I said, Grant's two terms were marked by unprecedented financial scandals involving: members of his Cabinet, close friends, family members and even Grant himself. Many of these scandals wreaked devastation upon the American Economy:

Black Friday (1869)

Emma Silver Mine (1871)

Star Route Postal Ring (1872)

Crédit Mobilier (1872)

Salary Grab Act (1872)

Sanborn Incident (1874)

Delano Affair (1875)

Pratt & Boyd (1875)

Trading Post Ring (1876)

Cattellism (1876)

Safe Burglary Conspiracy (1876)

It should be noted that Grant's administration is not considered the most corrupt in history. Rather, no not Harding or Nixon, that kewpie-doll remains firmly in the grasp of the Regan Administration.

An extremely heavy smoker, Grant died of throat cancer in 1885 at the age of sixty-three. Because of the enormous number of scandals that plagued his two terms, Historian Polls traditionally to rank Grant fairly close to the bottom as one of the worst Presidents ever, however his ranking has seen remarkable improvement over the past few years. Even with these more recent higher scores he still averages out to rank at number thirty out of forty-three, slighly higher than President Warren G. Harding who is also remembered primarily for the major scandals of his administration.

Rutherford B. Hayes 1877 - 1881, Republican from Ohio
Were there any justice in the mixed up world I would, right now, be writing a summary of the no-nonsense, corruption-free administration of President Samuel J. Tilden who won the 1876 US Presidential Election by a fairly comfortable margin. But Republicans were thieves even then so I shall now share the tale of Rutherford B. Hayes.

The 1876 Election results showed a clear victory for Samuel Tilden, whose reputation as the nation's foremost reformer was earned by the breaking up of New York City's infamous Tammany Hall Political Machine that had blighted Democratic Party politics for nearly a century, but Republicans had managed to challenge the electoral votes of: Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina on the grounds that African-American voters had illegally been kept from the polls. Even with these challenged states in play, Tilden only needed a single electoral vote to claim the White House and Hayes needed them all. An Electoral Commission was established to settle the matter (though the US Constitution clearly mandated that it be settled by a vote of the House of Representatives) which was anything but nonpartisan and in a strict party line vote the commission awarded all the disputed electoral votes, and the Presidency, to Hayes.

It seems likely that Hayes engaged in some sort of informal compromise with Democratic Party leaders agreeing to end the military occupation of the former Confederate States in exchange for their agreeing not to further challenge the 1876 election results. In consequence of this, the Era of Reconstruction came to an abrupt end and Jim Crow laws were soon erected all over the former Confederate states reducing the legal status African American populations who were severely deprived of the full rights of citizenship promised under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the US Constitution.

On the positive side many of the "carpet-bag governments" that had sprung up in the South under the auspices of Northern occupation had become quite corrupt. And Hayes does appear to have been genuine in his desire to enact civil service reform (excluding political operatives from holding nonpolitical Government jobs) for the nation as a whole.

In this he was not entirely successful coming in conflict with Senator Roscoe Conkling, whose power and influence had helped Hayes gain the White House in the wake of the disputed election results, over the removal of Chester A. Arthur and other Conkling lieutenants from prominent patronage posts in the custom-house and the post-office of Conkling's home state of New York. Hayes did manage to implement some minor reforms to the Civil Service but was dogged every step of the way by the Stalwarts in his own party who had become quite powerful in the lackadaisical Grant years.

Apart from: the repeal of Civil Rights legislation, minimal civil service reform and his use of Federal troops to break up the Railroad Strike of 1877 Hayes' term was largely uneventful and having pledged not to seek a second term during the settlement of the disputed election Hayes' only notable intrusion into politics after leaving office 1881 was to speak out against woman's suffrage shortly before his death in 1893 at the age of seventy. Historian Polls generally are unkind to Hayes placing him firmly in the below-average quatril at or around number twenty-four along side unelected Presidents such as Gerald R. Ford and Chester Arthur.

James Garfield 1881, Republican from Ohio
The razor thin margin of victory for Garfield in the 1880 Presidential Election over Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock seems to have been mainly due to gaff on the part of Hancock who, when asked about his party's "tariff for revenue only" plank where he said he thought the tariff "was a local issue." By contrast Garfield was a polished and skilled politician with many years of experience in government. Nevertheless, only 2,100 votes separated the two Candidates on election night though Garfield's majority in the Electoral collage was much more impressive.

Nerds the world over know Garfield as the author of a very unique Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. However, as President his administration was brief due to his having been assassinated by Charles Guiteau following a dispute Garfield had had with Guiteau's political boss Roscoe Conkling over the distribution of patronage in New York State, only six-and-a-half months into his administration.

Conkling was never implicated in the murder personally but the assassination did draw attention to the rampant corruption of the political machine that Sen. Conkling was at the center of and did much to inspire the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act restricting the political activities of most Federal Employees which remains in force to this day.

Because of the brevity of his term in office it is traditional not to include Garfield in Historian Polls however the last three such polls have included him in the well-below-average to poor range but he has consistently beaten President George W. Bush

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http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/07/26/ear.khmer.rouge/

My mother's escape from the Khmer Rouge

Editor's note: Sophal Ear is an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is a TED Fellow and author of a forthcoming book on aid dependence and democracy in Cambodia. He spoke at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2010.

(CNN) -- After four years and more than $100 million spent by the international community, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal rendered its first verdict Monday.

Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to serve up to 19 more years in prison in what was an open-and-shut case. From the start, Duch, a born-again Christian, fully admitted his leadership role in Phnom Penh's infamous Tuol Sleng, a school-turned-torture center, where more than 14,000 people were killed.

On this momentous occasion, I'd like to step back by reflecting upon and give voice to one victim of the Khmer Rouge: my late mother, Cam Youk Lim.

My mom passed away in October at the age of 73 in Northern California. When she was only 39, she had managed to outwit the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese communists by escaping Cambodia to Vietnam with five young children, including me.

She didn't live to see this day, but no matter, for her justice would inevitably be rendered the Buddhist way. She decided long ago the Khmer Rouge were Karmic pestilence who would pay the price for their crimes, if not in this lifetime, then in their next life.

She was an incredible woman. She grew up in an age and place when women were the property of men, and yet she sought independence. On her home was a sign "Propriété de Madame Lim" (Property of Mrs. Lim).

She married my father in the 1960s and on April 17, 1975, we ended up in Pursat province, where my father was made to work until he died.

One day, the Khmer Rouge chief told the village that Vietnamese citizens would be allowed to return to Vietnam. She decided to take a chance and claim to be Vietnamese. It was a dangerous gamble.

If it turned out that she was wrong, she would certainly have been killed. People in the commune warned her it might be a trap.

''Auntie, they're lying, they'll kill you when you go back there,'' they said. ''To stay is to die, to go is to die, so I might as well go,'' she told them.

As she arrived in the camp on the Cambodian border with Vietnam, she discovered that she'd given all the boys girls' names and all the girls boys' names. Her spoken Vietnamese was that bad.

But because of the kindness of a stranger, Mrs. Teuv, who pointed this out to her and then tutored her for the next couple of days, her Vietnamese improved so much that she passed the language test that the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese cadres gave her. Remember, if she failed, we would all be dead.

Imagine the courage it took for her to stand there and pretend to be someone she was not: Vietnamese.

On the day of the interview, she wrapped us in blankets and made us pretend to be sick so we would not be questioned. The Vietnamese cadre asked her: ''Sister what is your name?'' She answered in her best Saigon accent:

''My name is Nguyen Thi Lan,'' a name she'd given herself.

They kept asking whether my father, who had owned a small drugstore, had been a big shot. She stuck to her story. ''No, he was a trader, that's all.''

Read more about Sophal Ear and his family's journey

When at last she received permission to leave Cambodia, she was so happy. This chance to leave was like being reborn with all of her children.

On the boat to Vietnam, she was given rice and canned milk for me, as the baby. Without even warming it up, she fed it to me until I became bloated and sick. My sister Sophie cried: ''I want noodles! I want noodles!'' Mom had no money, so she sold her last ring and bought a pot and some three-layered pork fat to make our first real meal in six months.

It was her determination that allowed us to survive, for even after reaching Vietnam's Mekong Delta, we were not out of the woods. Vietnamese authorities told us to find family or we'd be taken to a collective farm, which wasn't much better than living under the Khmer Rouge.

As luck would have it, mom bumped into someone who knew her sister and brother-in-law, who lived in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). She asked that word be sent, and soon after, on a boat down the Mekong, her brother-in-law came to the rescue. He bribed guards to let us out in the middle of the night and in January 1976, we were finally safe.

Over the next two years, mom somehow managed to survive by her wits and the money another sister who lived in California sent her.

The next challenge was how to get out of communist Vietnam. Without diplomatic relations, the U.S. was impossible to reach after the Vietnam War, but France was an option. Getting to France in 1978 took a lot of work.

For one thing, mom had no direct family there, and someone with the same last name had to be found and persuaded to sign papers claiming a family relationship. After signing the papers, they got lost in the mail.

There again, a random person helped. A Frenchman forged signatures, cajoled and yelled at staff in a French government offices. He once demanded they reopen because, by his watch, it wasn't yet closing time.

In France, mom worked hard to sew fancy tablecloths and napkins with embroidered flowers. In 1985, she packed up her bags again and took her three youngest kids (Sam, Sophie and I were minors) to start a new life in the United States.

She worked as a seamstress in the garment factories of Oakland's Chinatown, making wedding gowns that had labels we'd never heard of, much less could afford. She used those same skills to make Sophie clothes that were just as good and custom-made.

All through this time, she pressed us to study in school and to go on to college.

She was not interested in a life of quick riches. Cutting school short to work was out of the question. She believed in education, and for her, education was not only about making money, it was about learning how to think. All this was from a woman who had seven years of formal schooling.

Somehow, she didn't need any more to know that our responsibility was to get an education. And we did. Sam graduated from San Francisco State University and now works as a software engineer. Sophie finished UC San Francisco as a pharmacist. I received my UC Berkeley PhD and became a professor.

The Talmud says that if you save a life, you save the world. The Chinese have another proverb: "When you save a life, you are responsible for that life."

My mom saved six lives from the Killing Fields, and with 14 grandkids and counting, she has saved 20 lives to date.

I say counting because two days ago, I learned that my wife is expecting our second child. Thanks, mom, for helping to bring new hope into this world.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of Sophal Ear and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

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The other day, I met a guy who, like me, has a psychologist mother. His isn't a Jungian-trained therapist, though; he told me that she specializes in "child development psychology." I laughed a little to myself imagining a woman leaning over a toddler with a clipboard, checking various columns and line graphs to assess if her son was keeping up with the various mental milestones that she had studied in school.

When I went ahead and asked him if his mother analyzed him or tried to help him with his problems, he said that she had for a while, but that when he was fourteen, he'd stopped her from doing it.

"Oh?" I said. "How did you get her to stop?"

"I stopped talking to her," he said flatly, with no remorse.

That's when, for me, the conversation turned grim. I felt sad for this guy who, as a pre-teen, had decided his only recourse was to stop talking to his mother altogether. He said they still didn't talk much, and when they did, it was never about anything too personal or problem-related.

What I perceived as his bitterness reminded me of a scene near the beginning of Blade Runner, when an interrogator is trying to determine whether a man is human or instead is one of the Replicants -- an artificially intelligent race of the future -- who the police are trying to track down.

"Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about your mother," the interrogator says, a direction that I'm pretty sure is an homage to the typical Freudian line of maternal questioning.

After a pause, the man being interrogated replies, calmly, "I'll tell you about my mother," and then blows his interlocutor away with a gun he's been hiding on his lap. (Retribution against the pseudo-shrink with a phallic symbol? Okay, maybe that's a stretch.)

So as we keep talking, this other son of a shrink tells me that he'd realized that whenever he was stressed about something -- he specifically mentioned homework -- if he talked it through with his mother it only served to focus his attention more on the problem, which he says always made it worse. If he just ploughed ahead with the work instead of analyzing his blocks, however, he found that his anxieties dissipated. I thought it was a pretty astute conclusion for a kid to come to on his own.

I, of course, had done the opposite. At thirteen, when I realized that my mother was willing to engage with my emotional life and help me through social and romantic problems, I started telling her everything. One big difference between me and this other guy is that I didn't live with my mother and saw her only every other weekend. But, even so, it struck me that we were like mirror images of each other in our reactions to this same circumstance. We are identical, but exactly opposite.

For the relationship column I write for The Globe and Mail in Canada, my editor asked me a couple Mother's Days ago if I was interested in finding out whether it's a good or bad thing for a guy to marry someone who is like his mother. I was intrigued, so took on the topic. As sometimes happens with articles like this, I found out a piece of somewhat unrelated information that was both surprising and illuminating.

I interviewed Claudia Brumbaugh, a professor at Queen's College in New York. For a study, she had asked people to describe the parent they were closer to (75 percent chose their mother) and then a week later asked the subjects to imagine fictional relationships onto pictures of people they'd never met. She told me that, consistently, people would superimpose the same qualities as they'd described about their mothers onto the strangers.

"If you have absolute faith that your mother would never wrong you, you're more likely to think that people in general will not wrong you," Dr. Brumbaugh told me. "That's whether it's a person who is a lot like your mother or nothing like your mother."

In the article, I concluded that we were all wearing "breast milk goggles."

Over the last year and a half, I've thought of this every now and then when I've met new people. To some extent, I think it's true; during my adolescence, I definitely felt closer to my mother and I think that as I meet new people I have a tendency to assume that they possess superior quasi-psychologist knowledge about relationship dynamics and so will be able to explain my feelings to me or guide me through what I am doing right or wrong in that area of my life.

Of course, the more that I'm aware that this is a default reaction of mine, the more I've grown out of it. I practice reminding myself that the person sitting across from me -- including my mother herself when I visit home -- doesn't know what's happening in my psyche better than I do, and certainly doesn't know what's right or wrong for me in terms of relationships. The person may be able to give me advice, but the only way he or she will ever know how I really feel is if I say how I feel.

Being more aware of this didn't stop me, however, from assuming briefly that my mirror man -- the guy who doesn't open up to his shrink mother -- had things more figured out than I did. Huh, I thought to myself, maybe I should not have told my mother so many of my problems and should have relied on her less as I was growing up. Maybe then I would have fewer anxieties? But I reminded myself that his way wasn't necessarily any better -- it's just the one he chose. And the more we talked, I realized he didn't exactly have fewer anxieties than me, either.

Despite the fact that my mirror man is probably sensitive to people trying to solve his problems -- and in fact might assume with his "breast milk goggles" on that everyone is going to attempt to no matter what he does -- I decided nonetheless to try to help him solve the problem with his mother.

"You know," I said, "my mom often wanted to help me with my problems, too. And I realized after a while that I just needed to set boundaries."

"Oh yeah?" he said. "How did you do that?"

"I have conversations with her about it," I said. "I tell her when I just need her to listen. Or I remind her that, as much as she may want to, she can't fix my problems for me. She's been very receptive, and told me she just needs to be reminded sometimes."

My mirror was silent.

"You should try talking to her about it," I said.

"No, that wouldn't work," he replied. He said it with an air of finality. And I let it go.

We didn't stop talking, however. We just changed the subject to our favorite science fiction films.

-------------

[If you are the son or daughter of one or two shrinks, I'd love to hear some of your story. You can contact me at the email address listed on my website or comment on this blog post.]

Once upona time....No that doesn't fit! Ooh, how about: It was an extrodinary evening... Npoe not that one...Hmmm... Maybe I should just start at the beginning.... The dark haired five year old climbed out of her pink princess bed yawning and rubbing her eyes. "Mommy!" She called opening her door. "Daddy! Sissy!" There was no answer, just the soft sound of birds chirping. Rushing down the hall she opened her door to find her mother laying in her enormous bed. "Mommy?" She climbed up her hand squishing in something slightly wet. Lookingat her palm her eyebrows pulled together in confusoin. She knew it was blood but why was it on her mother's bed. She shook her mom who fell off the bed, fresh blood staining the white carpet. "Mommy!" She shrieked, terrified. She ran to her sister's room to see if she was okay, but was scared even more than before. Blood. There was blood everywhere. On the walls, on the celing, all over her sister, Jessika. "Sissy!" She scremed wrappigher little arms around Jessika's torso. Remembering wahat her mother told her in an emergency she ran out the front door and over to the neighbors. Ms. Garthy, her mother's closest friend, answered the door an gasped. The little girl was crying and covered in blood. "Dawn! Oh my dear what happened?" "Mommy! Sissy! Blood!" Was all Dawn said before falling back on her butt crying. Soon there were neighbors and cops all around her. One of the escorted her to the back of an ambulance. Who was this child? Me. Dawnielle Evangeline Parker. I was an orphan until Maya and Cater Day adopted me. I now live in Brookston withthem and their two children, Niki and Jasper. It's been elever years since this happened, but it still haunts me.

Filed under: Recaps, TV Replay

Tonight's episode of 'Louie' (11PM ET on FX) bounces back from last week's funny but strange trip down south, as Louis C.K. continues to show viewers how intertwined his life and his stand-up act really are.

The second story, where Louie reluctantly acts in a Matthew Broderick remake of 'The Godfather,' had its funny moments, especially his pained interactions with Broderick. But the essence of Louie's life is stand-up, and nothing ruins a stand-up's day like someone talking through his or her act.

Louie doesn't just talk down the rude woman who chimes in during his act, he lays waste to her, in his very deadpan Louis C.K. way. "Can you do me a favor? Can you please just die of AIDS?" was one of the cleaner retorts. He also said that she was a "c--- who came from your mother's c---."

If this were any other show, the story would end there, as yet another abject lesson in why you should never, ever try to out-funny a stand-up during his show. But the "one who looks like a Fox News anchor" decided to confront Louie outside the club, and that's where he very calmly gave her the reason why stand-ups hate hecklers so much.

 

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I was standing at my mom & dad's kitchen sink this afternoon, washing up the dishes I'd used to make a meatloaf for their dinner, when the smell of browning meat and simmering chili sauce bubbling from the oven carried me back to another time. To the same place, my parents' kitchen, but to a time when I was a child and my parents were young - and they were looking after me.

And the warmth of that scent memory flowed through me, slowing my breathing, relaxing my body.

I inhaled deeply, trying to pull more comfort from the air in my mother's kitchen. I looked out into the yard where I used to skate on rinks my mom flooded every winter, where my grandma shoveled paths in the deep snow, where I played in the sandbox and lay on a blanket in the sun listening to 45s on my sister's Mickey Mouse record player.

I remember my dad with black hair, taking steps two at a time. I remember my mom wallpapering the stairway, standing on homemade scaffolding without a trace of fear.

And now they are old. And I have woken up 1964 times without Thomas. And life is so different than it was, and every day I find myself sorting through some sort of grief. Sometimes newly realized, sometimes familiar and worn.

There are moments of peace and moments of despair. Moments of joy and moments of sorrow. Always, there is light and dark.

And that's the way it is. Right now, in this aching time as I watch my parents failing and I look into my future and see just a handful of us left and no one following behind; that's the way it is.

This, as it turns out, is what it means to be a grown up: feeling pain, but taking strength from lovely memories and finding moments of comfort in my mother's kitchen.

CHICAGO — A visibly upset Amy Blagojevich fell into her mother's arms during a break in closing arguments at her father's corruption trial on Tuesday. The day before, her 7-year-old sister Annie clutched their mother's hand as the family walked past a line of photographers to enter the court.

Looking for responsible, fun, energetic woman to pick up 2 middle school-age children from school each day, run household errands, shop and help with homework. Clean driving record required. Teaching experience a plus.

September start date. Full-time or part-time employment. Monday through Friday. Flexible hours but must be available in the afternoon each day.

Rod Blagojevich's teenage daughter Amy fell into her mother's arms crying during closing arguments of her father's corruption trial on Tuesday, the day after her 7-year-old sister Annie clutched their mother's hand as the family walked past a line of photographers to enter the court.

There are some cookbooks that make the reader feel confident in their culinary skills, Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook, is not one of those.

However, it is inspiring, challenging and if the stars and the moon align -- incredibly delicious.

While I may have failed to create a masterpiece that could be served in one of the top rated restaurants in the entire country, giving Cappuccino Semifreddo with Cinnamon-Sugar Doughnuts, a shot was a heck of a lot of frustrating fun.

Like a lot of fancy recipes, my first challenge is finding the very specific, uncommon ingredients. Which is why I miss my Fresh Direct, where this recipe is printed, because they do all the difficult grocery shopping for you.

My search for espresso extract led me to three separate places, finally settling on espresso powder with water. Additionally, I also used a cookie cutter instead of a doughnut cutter, and a trial combo of a hand mixer and regular wooden spoon instead of a dough hook. While I made due with a frying pan and oil, this recipe made me miss my deep fat fryer. At the end of the day, my doughnuts may not have been attractive, but they were delicious.

I can't say the same about the cappuccino semifreddo.

What I learned about complicated recipes such as these: Don't try this when the kids are awake and/or you need to be in bed in an hour. Don't try this in a cluttered kitchen with a tiny freezer. Do try this while on vacation in a summer home that has a kitchen and culinary tools that put yours to shame. In other words, if you're not a pro, this recipe will kick your butt.

That doesn't mean I won't be trying this again in my mythical fantasy vacation kitchen. Or perhaps on a long weekend when I con my husband into taking the kids to his mother's for the day. I'm up for a kitchen challenge when the end result sounds as amazingly delicious as frozen and hot cappuccino.

Or maybe I'll just try to get a reservation at French Laundry. That's gotta' be easier, right?

Do you try your hand at incredibly difficult recipes? Would you try this one?

 

Image via Workman Publishing

Her teenage daughter made Michele Hanson's life a trial. Now that rebel is a woman on a mission to help some of the world's poorest children. How did that happen?

Almost 20 years ago I wrote a piece in this newspaper about my 12-year-old daughter, known fondly as Treasure. I was close to despair at the time, because of her ghastly behaviour and my inability to deal with it. Treasure had been a divine baby – never cried, woke up laughing, slept all night, ate up all her dinners. How was I to know that this would happen? No one warns you that your baby might turn into a strange, tempestuous creature; that there would be rows, screeching, fibs and rebellion, flouncing, sneering? It was no fun to face complaints, disapproval and pity from parents who seemed to have done rather better than me. I would often sit alone, quietly blubbing, wondering where I'd gone wrong. And worrying. What would become of Treasure, if she carried on like this?

Then a particular difficulty cropped up – her clothes. We were off on our summer holiday to a Greek island, and I'd promised to buy her a summer dress when we got there. I imagined one of those darling little embroidered, floaty, demure, cheesecloth girls' frocks that I thought were all the rage in 1990, but Treasure didn't fancy one at all. She went straight for a skin-tight, striped, low-necked, bum-length Lycra number, tried it on and asked, "D'you like it?"

I hesitated for a nano-second, and Treasure guessed. "You hate it," she wept. "You think I look horrid!"

I didn't, but what was I meant to say? That the world was packed with dangerous men? What does one say to a 12-year-old to warn but not frighten her? So I said, "It looks a bit too grown-up." Silly me. That's just what she wanted. To look like Madonna. So we bought the dress, and from then on, the skin-tight, worm-style was her dress of choice.

So I wrote about the clothes problem. Anonymously. Then about other problems, because the editor of the Women's page asked me to, and there were plenty of them. Treasure wouldn't do her homework, was staggeringly insolent, fibbed about where she was going and with whom, and was born to spend. She was a fountain of pocket money and I was the source of her wealth. But to her I was also the most ill-dressed and loathsome mother on the planet. And this behaviour was all my fault. How could it not be? I was her mother, I had let this happen. And if I ever doubted it, other people didn't.

"Why do you allow her to speak to you like that?" was a favourite question. Allow? And there was loads of advice. My fault again, because being a blabbermouth, I told everyone everything and begged for advice. So I got it: set boundaries, you are making a rod for your own back (my mother's favourite), be consistent, harden your heart. Easier said than done. Treasure was highly articulate, charming, persuasive, determined, fearless, bossy, relentless and argued like a terrier with a rat. So for us the teenage years were stormy and exhausting. The dress was only the beginning. There was much worse to come: smoking, clubbing, Glastonbury, drugs, raves, boys, sex, tattoos, piercings, exams, unsuitable friends, the boyfriend who murdered the goldfish, the screaming, the door-slamming, the distressed neighbours and the poor dog hiding under the table.

Writing about it at least showed we were not alone. I met normal people in stable relationships with their own Treasures. But it didn't stop me worrying. This is something else no one warns you about – that once you have a child, you are never free of anxiety. The world is a dangerous place anyway, and Treasure was adding more dangers. How would she ever hold down a job if she couldn't even get to school, two minutes away, on time? Would she even live long enough to make the workplace? Would skin-cancer from sunbeds/lung cancer from smoking/drug-induced psychosis get her first? Would she have a reasonably happy life, or had I made hash of it for her?

But now, 20 years on, her life seems to be going rather well. Treasure turned things around, and all the traits that were a pain in the bottom two decades ago have become assets in the work she does now: raising money for a charity she has set up herself, called Small Steps, which aims to provide shoes, food, clothes and medical care for children working on the world's giant rubbish tips.

There were the occasional hints that she might end up doing something like this. In the early Treasure-writing days, I reported on one of our Christmas shopping trips. We were battling our way along the hell of Oxford Street, usually Treasure's favourite place to be, when she spotted an elderly beggar outside Selfridges. He looked very like her Grandpa, but an older, raggedy version. He was holding a few boxes of matches in his trembly fingers and looked utterly wretched. Treasure gave him all her remaining pocket money, but her outing was ruined. She had suddenly realised that the world was grossly unfair. We pressed on into Marks & Spencer, but all she could see was capitalist greed.

She grew up and became a journalist, interviewing celebrities in ritzy nightclubs, but soon sickened of the endless blabbering about clothes, and decided to go travelling. She followed the usual hippy trail – Goa, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, and ended up doing voluntary work in Sihanoukville in Cambodia, teaching and looking after children with HIV/Aids in an orphanage. Sadly, they were some of the luckier ones.

Hundreds of less fortunate children, aged from three upwards, lived on the 100-acre Stung Meanchey rubbish tip on the edge of Phnom Penh. She went to have a look. The dump was burning hot, a mountain of steaming garbage, littered with needles, broken glass, fly-blown animal carcasses. Children lived and worked there, scrabbling about for anything that could be recycled, earning the equivalent of a dollar a day, drinking from fetid pools; and their feet were scarred, burnt and infected.

Treasure came back to England determined to raise money, borrow a camera and go back to Stung Meanchey; to buy boots and other necessities for the children on the tip, film them, and tell the world. But how? She knew nothing about film-making, or money-raising. Luckily she had all the necessary skills – the ones that had driven me round the bend all those years ago. The relentlessness and persuasiveness that she had used to extract pocket money, she now used to raise funds. The bossiness turned into assertiveness, and was perfect for directing a film.

During her years as a journalist she had becomed skilled at getting free gifts for editors and celebrities, who had too much already. Why not get free things for people who had nothing? So as part of the project she is asking every celebrity she has ever met or interviewed to donate a pair of boots or shoes to auction on her website, pointing out that one £500 pair of Louboutins equals 250 pairs of boots for children with no shoes at all.

At the airport we had a tense little Treasure-type squabble, me being anxious and her being super-stressed – because some things never change. But she did it all: bought the boots, gave them out, made her documentary, Small Steps, and screened it. Heaven knows how she managed it, but I'm very proud of her. Now she's back home again, safe. For a while. Next she's off to a rubbish mountain in Nicaragua, then several more. She's called her project Around The World in 80 Dumps.

I am fairly terrified, but I wish her luck. It all goes to show that you never can tell how a Treasure will turn out. It could be better than you expected. If yours is sulky, offensive, dope-smoking, raving, fibbing, binge-drinking, expelled from school, needs collecting from the police station occasionally, he or she may well survive it all. Treasure has. So for those of you who have one, don't give up hope. Hang on in there. Only 20 years to go . . .

• Small Steps is showing at Camp Bestival in Dorset on 31 July and the Hampstead Film Society on 3 August.

US country musician and guitarist with the Georgia Wildcats

Late in his life, Slim Bryant, who has died aged 101, became entitled to make two unique claims. He was the last man living to have played and recorded with Jimmie Rodgers, the Depression-era singer and "blue yodeller" who was the first star of country music. Furthermore, he was the only country musician left who had recorded as far back as the 1920s.

Bryant was born, one of six brothers, in Atlanta, Georgia, which from the mid-1920s was an important outpost of what would come to be called country music, because of its annual Old Time Fiddlers' Convention, its powerful radio station WSB and its rapid growth as one of the primary destinations for northern record companies to bring their portable recording equipment to capture local talent.

He began playing guitar as a boy, his interest quickened by a black man who delivered ice to their house and sometimes took a break to play guitar. He had lessons from Perry Bechtel, whose prowess on the guitar earned him the radio billing of "The Boy With a Thousand Fingers".

In his teens Bryant worked as an electrician, but he also spent time hanging out with the circle of musicians orbiting around the city's most celebrated hillbilly band, the Skillet-Lickers. Aged 20, he made his first recording, playing and singing Ain't She Sweet in a stringband called the Harmony Boys. He then teamed up with the Skillet-Lickers' fiddler Clayton McMichen in the Georgia Wildcats, a popular and influential stringband that would soon leave Atlanta to work on radio stations in Cincinnati, Chicago, St Louis, Louisville and elsewhere. Few hillbilly bands were as widely heard in the south-eastern and midwestern states during the 1930s.

McMichen's friendship with Rodgers led the three men to work together at a session in August 1932. Bryant contributed crisp, modern guitar playing – which would later be admired by Les Paul – to Rodgers's songs No Hard Times and Whippin' That Old TB. He also offered a piece he had written himself and, after Rodgers recorded Mother, The Queen of My Heart, it, too, became enshrined in the stock repertoire of country music, a standby for country radio DJs on Mother's Day. In later years Bryant enjoyed telling interviewers that it had subsequently been recorded by 178 different artists.

Rodgers, whose timing was sometimes unreliable, valued Bryant's ability to keep his music well ordered, and co-opted him for some of his vaudeville appearances that summer. They got on well offstage, too, and the singer invited Bryant and McMichen to accompany him on a trip to Britain, where many of his records had been issued and had attracted a following. But the singer died of tuberculosis in 1933 and the tour never took place.

In the 1930s, perceptive young country musicians soon learned, as their rustic forebears had often failed to do, that writing and, crucially, copyrighting new songs could be a valuable source of income, outlasting the fees or royalties they might receive for ephemeral recordings. During his long career Bryant wrote more than 200 songs, but he was arguably most successful with radio jingles, which he devised for several large companies such as US Steel, Alcoa, Westinghouse and Chevrolet. Many Pittsburghers of a legal drinking age in the 1950s fondly remember his commercial for Iron City Beer.

He moved to Pittsburgh in August 1940, taking over the leadership of the Wildcats from McMichen. In 1941, he joined the roster of the KDKA Farm Hour, an early-morning radio show where he and the Wildcats would be regulars for 20 years, using the daily exposure to book themselves successfully across Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. In 1949 he participated in the city's first TV broadcast. He also made numerous recordings for Decca, Majestic and other labels, and hundreds of radio transcriptions, moving easily across a range of repertoire from country music to pop-jazz to polkas.

In the 1960s, when more modern music began to edge him out of the spotlight, Bryant and his wife operated a card and gift shop in the Pittsburgh suburb of Dormont. He also gave guitar lessons until arthritis stilled his playing in the late 1990s. In recent years the British Archive of Country Music issued three CDs of his old recordings.

He is survived by his son, Thomas, two grandchildren, and his brother Posey. His wife, Mary Jane, died in 1987.

• Thomas Hoyt "Slim" Bryant, country musician, born 7 December 1908; died 28 May 2010

Angela Gordon threatened violence and legal action, and accused staff of racism or harassment

Attempts by teachers, police and social workers to investigate suspicions that Khyra Ishaq and other children in the care of Angela Gordon and her partner were suffering neglect and abuse were thwarted by a sustained campaign of intimidation and lack of co-operation by Gordon, the serious case review revealed.

Gordon, 35, proved extraordinarily adept at swatting aside attempts by professionals to intervene in her chaotic family life. At times she would threaten physical violence, at other times threaten legal action, or accuse them of racism or harassment. She ruthlessly exploited safeguarders' ignorance of the law on home schooling and kept them constantly on the back foot.

Gordon restricted access to her children, removing them from school at a time when official concerns about their wellbeing started to emerge. A succession of police officers and social workers who visited the family to make assessments would often be kept waiting on the doorstep, refused access to the home and prevented from seeing the children.

In her relationship with Birmingham children's services, the review noted, it was Gordon who held the power. Her campaign of resistance left professionals cowed and confused. Some staff, it said, "lost sight of the child and focused instead upon … the adults' behaviours and the potential impact for them as professionals".

The report stated: "The mother's sound knowledge of home education legislation and a hostile and aggressive approach influenced and affected professional actions, preventing a full understanding of conditions within the home, and seemed to render professionals impotent, thereby directing the focus away from the welfare of the children."

On one occasion, in February 2008, a social worker visited the family home to attempt an assessment. The social worker was not allowed into the home but after refusing to leave was eventually given brief doorstep contact with some of the children. "By the time the senior practitioner returned to the office," noted the review, "a complaint had already been made by [Gordon] against the social worker of harassment." An agreed follow-up visit the next day did not go ahead as a result of the complaint.

The review suggested that Gordon's intimidatory behaviour did not excuse professionals' missed opportunities to intervene, but it noted: "Dealing with safeguarding inquiries and assessments can be a stressful process for workers, particularly when attempting to undertake work with aggressive and highly resistant adults."

Although Gordon's life was far from straightforward, the review noted that before her relationship with her partner, Junaid Abuhamza, she had been known to professionals as "an engaged and protective mother of the children". Teachers considered her a "powerful personality" but had never previously found her threatening or violent. But the review suggested that under Abuhamza's controlling and irrational influence her behaviour changed. She became aggressive, obstructive towards teachers and distrusting of other professionals.

The issue of social workers failing to challenge manipulative and aggressive parents was identified as a factor in the second serious case review of the Baby Peter case in 2009. The author of that report, Graham Badman, called for "authoritative social work practice" whereby social workers actively and robustly challenged unco-operative or violent clients.

The Khyra Ishaq review recommended that Birmingham council should commission new guidance and training to deal with "aggressive and highly resistant parents and carers".

Just got tickets on TicketWeb for Day Out With Thomas at Crossroads Village & Huckleberry Railroad on 08/28/10 http://bit.ly/aV5EUU # at Julie's ultrasound. Got to see both PB and J's faces. Glorying in our Creator God who knits us together in our mother's womb # Powered by Twitter Tools

Noone likes to hear a crying toddler on an airplane -- or anywhere for that matter. Some of us feel bad for the toddler (and her parents) and hope everything is okay. Others feel bad for themselves, call it bad luck, and pop on the headphones or take a sleeping pill.

But one disgruntled plane passenger actually had the chutzpah to sue an airline after a screaming three-year-old boy yelled in her ear -- and the airline paid up.

American tourist Jean Barnard, 67, was boarding a Qantas airplane in Australia when a toddler leaned across the aisle and screamed in her ear as she was finding her seat. Barnard says her ears started bleeding and she became "stone cold deaf." She was helped off the plane and taken to the hospital.

The day after the incident, she allegedly sent this e-mail to a friend:

"I guess we are simply fortunate that my eardrum was exploding and I was swallowing blood. Had it not been for that, I would have dragged that kid out of his mother's arms and stomped him to death. Then we would have an international incident."

Then she sued. Barnard, who admitted to wearing hearing aids, said the flight crew should have taken precautions to protect passengers against screaming kids. The airline argued that its staff could not be expected to know that the child was going to scream, and there was no evidence that the child was screaming in the terminal, or on board the aircraft prior to the scream that allegedly caused the damage.

The case was settled out of court last week. Qantas declined to say if the settlement included payment to Ms Barnard.

Maybe she's just getting free flights for the rest of her life -- hope there aren't any toddlers on board.

Do you think an airline is responsible for the behavior of toddlers on a flight?

 

Image via MA1974/Flickr

It matters how you choose to tell a story.

I grew up with a historian for a father and an English teacher for a mother, so I could hardly get away without picking up on this! I've been particularly aware of seeing this in action over the past couple of years as I worked on two self-publishing projects with my father. One project was organizing my mother's autobiographical writings -- how she chose to tell her story. The other was my father's biography of his parents and family. With the biography, I was privileged to see some of the selection process at work: how he organized details to support the themes he'd identified in his parents' lives, which stories he opted to present and which he considered presenting but decided not to include after all.

Of course, in blogging about our experiences with Joy, I'm doing that all the time. Choosing what is important enough to tell, and might inform or entertain or make you think or all of the above, and what's on my mind about Joy that I might appropriately process here, and what have I learned that I might usefully share with you, and what is the truth of our journey as I see it? (The latter of which may sound odd coming from behind a pseudonym, but that too is one reality of my particular mommy-blogging enterprise.)

I'm thinking about all this in context of a powerful post last week from the amazing Jess who writes of her beautiful daughter Brooke at a diary of a mom. And in fact, the title of the post was "Context." She writes of a birthday party where her daughter made some tremendous strides forward, but also sat apart from the group, with her differences written all over her face. The real story of the party, as Jess felt and experienced it, was the context and backdrop of difference. How hard it is, and will continue to be. Among several potential real stories, the hard story was the real one that day.

It resonates. (Just read the comments on the post if there were any doubt!)

And yet.

It makes me think to ask: What is the real story with Joy?

We can choose how we story-tell on a blog -- but to what extent do we get to choose what is the real story?

We've had some radically-conflicting storylines to choose from here lately. Is the real story that Joy is getting more independent with the steps in her potty routine, and happily sitting much longer in the mornings (up to 15 minutes!)? Or is the real story that she hasn't actually produced on the pot for three weeks, and that she likes to splash the handwash-water and lick the liquid soap and drop things into the toilet?

Is the real story that she continues to imitate words, and play peek-games, and generally be more interactive? Or is it the upswing in aggressive behaviors that are causing her to lash out with hair-pulling and hitting at the least bit of frustration, catching peers and adults alike in her wrath, mere weeks before she starts kindergarten?

There are absolutely moments when it feels as if the real story is all about disability and difference and struggle and heartache.

But I personally feel a strong need to choose for a real story of hope, and progress on her own terms and at her own pace, and shining eyes and giggles and playful beeps on her sister's nose. If I let myself inhabit the darker story too much, too consistently, too often -- I'm afraid I won't be the person I want to be. Nor will I be the mother she needs me to be.

What do you think? To what extent do we get an authentic say in the choice of the real story?

There are days when my fists are so tight, veins are protruding out of my arm, my teeth are clenched and my brow's hanging furiously wrinkled over angry eyes. Days where I feel (and look) like a monster.

This is not the momma I want to be. 

I want to be the fun-loving, easy-going, crafty, lets-color-all-day, lazy summer, ice-cream and cookie-eatin' kind-of momma. But there are responsibilities that need to be addressed, and for whatever reason, this summer has been a long, difficult one, what with my husband working all day/weekend long and the kids being extraordinarily clingy to the indoors, unwilling to do anything but sit inside and argue all day, making mom lose her marbles and then-some.

These last few weeks, what with the baby being hurt, stressing about preparations for vacation followed directly by the BlogHer conference, new writing projects, deadlines, conference calls, and all.six.kids.home. for the summer have been more difficult to accomplish than would normally. The kids haven't been making it exactly easy on me, either, knowing there is much to be done before we leave.

I feel like I've failed them, like I've failed myself for failing them. I've witnessed others go on these amazing summer adventures, beaches, trips, and we haven't. My husband is working. I sometimes feel like I barely have time to breathe let alone play. I can't drive hours away to some place cool to take them by myself with six kids (with nothing local), not with our youngest-two as young as they are, anyway. Unless I sprouted an extra set of arms and eyeballs overnight.

This wasn't the summer I had intended. I only hope I can redeem it with our upcoming vacation. A vacation I've been putting a great deal of thought into, researching many options to make it excitingly memorable. (That is, if they let me sit and attempt to finish getting the plans in order without interruption or arguing. Sigh.)

Tonight, though, I just stepped away. Stepped away from responsibility, from the chains I felt were tying me to the keyboard and to commitment and to planning, and I laid on the floor, broken and in need of repair, and took turns lifting each toddler above my head playing airplane with my feet, to the roar of giggles and "Weeeee!" and copious amount of loose drool flung about. 

It was just what this mother's heart needed. Laughter, exercise, recklessly tickling and flying and ohsogiggling.

On the agenda for tomorrow, amidst another full day of planning? A part two to this picture. Outside. In the sun. In the fresh air.

Mommy needs play time, too.

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EDINBURG, Texas – A jury rejected an insanity defense and found a south Texas man guilty of capital murder Monday for beheading his common-law wife's three children in 2003. John Allen Rubio, 29, of Brownsville, showed no reaction when guilty verdicts were returned for each of the four counts of capital murder. Each count reflects one death, and the fourth covers all three. It was Rubio's second conviction in the children's deaths. A state appeals court overturned an earlier death sentence in 2007, because statements from the children's mother, Angela Camacho, were wrongly allowed as evidence. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty again and moved immediately into the punishment phase of the trial Monday afternoon. Only after the jury had been released for the day was any reaction to the guilty verdict visible. Ed Stapleton, one of Rubio's attorney's put his arm around his back and said, "I'm sorry, John. I'm sorry it came out that way." Rubio appeared to nod slightly. With a gag order still in place, neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys could comment on the verdict. Police discovered the bodies of 3-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E. Rubio and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio on March 11, 2003, in a squalid Brownsville apartment. Rubio's guilt in the murders was never never in dispute. Instead, attorneys argued over his state of mind and whether he knew what he was doing was wrong. Rubio told police he killed the children, and evidence showed he made increasingly ferocious attempts — strangling and stabbing them, then finally cutting off their heads. Rubio said first that the children were possessed and later claimed he was the "chosen one" intended to save the world, according to testimony. During closing arguments given before a packed courtroom Monday morning, both sides showed enlarged photographs of the children from happier times. Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos got the last word and accentuated it by showing a photograph of a headless child and making a chopping motion on the floor with a cleaver. "This kind of crime tears at the fiber of who we are here in the Valley," Villalobos said. Testimony showed Rubio had nailed the backdoor of the windowless apartment shut. Prosecutors said it foretold of the killings to come, while the defense claimed it was meant to keep demons out. "These babies were not demons, they were angels," prosecutor Charles Mattingly said. Defense attorney Ed Stapleton reminded jurors of Rubio's childhood — his mother's prenatal drinking, his stepfather's abuse, his experience as a teen prostitute. The defense team's psychiatrists found Rubio suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. "(Rubio) was insane from early on," Stapleton said. A prosecution expert rebutted that diagnosis Friday. The jury returned the guilty verdict after about three hours of deliberation and a break for lunch. Moving into the punishment phase of the trial, Mattingly emphasized Rubio would continue to endanger lives even if he was in prison. He told jurors that Rubio started fires three times while in prison, tested positive for marijuana and was caught with contraband pills. Texas Ranger Rolando Castaneda testified that when he went to the county jail three days after the children's deaths to collect hair and blood samples from Rubio, he found "a young fellow that was laughing and smiling." But Rubio's attorney Nat Perez promised defense witnesses would convince jurors that there was no need to put Rubio to death. "The evidence will show that this young man is not the same from 2003," he said. Jury finds Texas man guilty of beheading children - Yahoo! News

I learned two things today about my mother’s gastroenterologist: (1) he stocks his waiting roo

We've made half-sour pickles from scratch.  We've mastered the art of making pierogis.  We've triumphed over a pot of pickle soup.  We've celebrated the incredible yumminess of bigos.  We've shared with the world a secret family stuffed cabbage recipe.  We've been working hard making Polish cuisine posh, one post at a time.

 

"Fasolka po bretonsku" is a baked bean and meat stew, a grown-up verison of "frank and beans" that is traditionally made in the cooler months.  Although meant as a stew I "Americanized" my mother's recipe and created, what could be, the most scrumptious summer side dish ever.  As always I managed to find a gazillion short cuts making this dish nearly fool-proof.  I can't even begin to describe to you how utterly fantastic it turned out.  Ha.  Get it?  Utterly fantastic that the toddler is wearing a fleece cow costume in 110% summer humidity? This is my life.

 

The ingredients:

• 4 cans of large white beans (Great Northern and/or Butter)
• Pork and/or bacon (I used 11 strips of bacon from the butcher - not the cheap kind)
• A dozen links of Polish kielbasa (Clevelands' Heniens now carries Kowalski products)
• 1 large onion
• Tomato ketchup (2tbsp)
• Tomato paste (1 tbsp)
• Vegeta to taste
• Salt and pepper
• Oil for frying

 

1.  Wash

Before the invention of canned beans you needed to soak beans for 24 hours for an authentic stew-like "Fasolka po bretonsku."  However, I wanted more of a summer side dish so I emptied my four cans, washed them, got rid of any beans that floated to the surface and dried them.  Set aside and forget about them.

 

2.  Pork & Onions

Dice one onion and saute over heated oil.  While browning, cut your pork and/or bacon.  You can use both or just one that you prefer.  Add to onions.  Sprinkle a healthy dose of Vegeta over the onion/pork mixture and sprinkle salt/pepper to your taste (I added none because we rarely use sodium in our kitchen).  Stir and cover for ten minutes.

 

3.  Sausage

Dice kielbasa, add to pan.  I added about a cup-and-a-half of water to the pan, to avoid any burning.  You can add more spices here, if you so desire, like oregano and paprika (I did).  Cover and occasionally stir.  Allow 45 minutes of "sweating" making sure the sausage mixture is extra tender.

 

4.  Candles!

Light some candles around the house because your covered onion/bacon/vegeta/sausage mixture "sweating" while covered for 45 minutes might begin to smell like a Polish restaurant and neighbors will run over to check every-one's green cards.  Yup, it's that authentic of a smell.

 

5.  More secret short-cuts revealed

After 45 minutes take mixture off of heat and squirt some ketchup (about 2 tbsp - we added more by accident because the middle child was having so much fun) and add 1 tbsp of tomato paste to the onion/bacon/vegeta/sausage.  Eye the mixture and add more paste/ketchup to your own taste.

 

6.  Add beans

The washed/dried canned beans you forgot about?  Add them to the mixture now.  Toss around gently and place over low heat for just five minutes or so.

 

7.  Eat

Eat with a loaf of bread as a main dish or use as a side dish at your next BBQ.  It's like the more mature version of "beans and franks" seriously. Like any "stew" it gets better the next day and freezes great.  I fed an army of ethnic-palate-challenged people at my latest posh backyard BBQ and everyone loved this bean side dish.  I hope you do too.

 

Taking one ancient Polish recipe "Fasolka po bretonsku" and making it posh again, yo!

Filed under: TV Replay

Well, all good things must come to an end. Or, all bad things must come to an end. Either way, something is coming to an end here. Since we started covering 'Maury' (weekdays, syndicated) on TV Squad, we've had a perfect, unbroken 100% success rate. Every single episode involved a deadbeat dad who claimed that he was not the father of a woman's child. Then, the dad would take a paternity test -- and every single time, it turned out that the man was the baby's father.

But no more! True, Wendell -- the guest on the latest episode -- seems like the perfect candidate to be a deadbeat dad. He slept with a woman a couple of times, and then she got pregnant. Next, he completely disappeared -- only returning once, on Mother's Day, when he ate all the food in the woman's house, including the baby snacks.

Like every other 'Maury' guest, Wendell says there's no way he could be the father. But then, the results of the paternity test come back, and ... he's actually not the father. Amazing! This has never happened before on 'Maury'! We feel like balloons and streamers should have come down from the ceiling.

 

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Cut exclusively for this past weekend's San Diego Comic-Con was the first ever footage from Darren Lynn Bousman's Mother's Day, his modern day take on the classic Troma film from 1980 that stars Rebecca De Mornay (as "Mother"), Jaime King, Deborah Ann Woll, Briana Evigan, Alexa Vega, Shawn Ashmore, Matt O'Leary, and Lyriq Bent. Bloody Disgusting was on hand to see the clip that ended with a brief montage of the violence we'll see in theaters come 2011. You'll find a full description of what you missed inside. Watch for a release announcement in the coming months.

I feel like I am in a time warp. Summer has been excruciatingly slow but it has also slipped by at an amazing pace. There aren't enough hours in the day and yet, at times, it feels like nothing is moving. When I look back, I wonder why I am left with that feeling when so much did, indeed, get done. Perhaps it's that time again, when every step forward requires enormous amounts of energy, willpower and dedication. Perhaps it's the relentless heat and the draft of cooled air that makes my bones ache, even though the cool is set at an ambient temperature of 80F, three degrees higher than what most people consider comfortable. Medha's been home forever and school starts in less than four weeks - not much left of summer!

But, you know, I feel that way about the last decade, too! Where did it go? While clearing up the house yesterday, we unearthed some old CDs that had audio files of Medha as a toddler - some people clean in spring and they're done; whereas I'm still cleaning from last spring and the spring before that and I can go back to the time that we moved to Colorado from Illinois. We don't have much stuff but we have piles and piles of paper, most of which cannot be recycled without scrutiny as they need to be shredded, but only after monumentous decision-making: to keep or not to keep. The same holds for CDs and DVDs. Wasn't it just yesterday that she was singing her ABCs backwards and belting out You are my Sunshine? Come mid-August, she's no longer going to be a pixie but instead she will be a 7th grader. Where did all those years go?

I may sound like I am complaining but a lot of awesome has also been happening at the same time. I think it is this that gets me through the uphill climb that most of my current tasks seem to take. Jen of the Butter fame gathered us together - was it just 10 days ago? - to watch her nightblooming cereus blossom into a huge flower from a shy bud.



Jen humored me by setting up these shots for me while Marianne and her sister waited bleary eyed till we were done. It was well past midnight when Marianne drove us down the canyon. That's why I can be found saying over and over again that I have the best group of girlfriends ever! That link leads to another piece of awesome, an idli-chutney-dosa-sambar feast that we had at my house last week. The batter fermented beautifully, the idlis were just right and the dosas came off the tava like a dream! My batter could be more finely ground but that is the curse of having a weak blender. One of these days an idli batter grinder will make its way into my kitchen.

I always make a lot of batter. My friends will vouch for the number of pots I had filled with bubbling fermented goodness. Some batter went home with some of my friends while the rest sat in my refrigerator, waiting to be made into more dosas and uttapas. Until I hit on another slice of awesome.


On the face of it, these may look like plain ol' regular waffles but they are not. They are crunchy Indian waffles made from leftover idli batter. While I would love to claim that this idea is the result of my cravings creativity, it's really the work of imaginative homecook, Iyer n Chef Wannabe or Panfusine on Facebook. Her writing is a treat to read and her experiments in applying techniques from world cuisines to everyday Indian food are wildly innovative. Would you have thought of adding blueberries to idlis? Would you have thought of steaming them in cupcake molds? Hey, Kitt! You don't need idli molds to make idlis, as long as you have cupcake molds and a steamer of sorts into which you can stack these molds. Or just make waffles, dammit!

I cooked my Indian waffles about 7 minutes for those who didn't want them to be crunchy and about 10 minutes for those who did. My waffles did not separate into two even if I opened the waffle iron before they were done. Maybe because I used idli batter and not medu vada batter? I'm not sure.

All my life I have used a ratio of 1 measure of urad to 2 measures of idli rava / parboiled rice / regular rice without any problem. Until we moved from sea-level to over a mile high to Louisville, Colorado. After experimenting with all various ratios, I have settled on the ratio of 1:2:1 of urad dal to parboiled rice to regular rice (even basmati will do). There were times when I used 1:4 of urad dal to idli rava with astonishing success but I much prefer the flavor and texture of the final ratio of 1:2:1. I do believe that the altitude and humidity do play a large role in the success of my idli batter. My local South Indian friends may scoff at the idea but I think they have the added advantage of wild yeast in their homes, which is another factor that my home lacks.

Given the prevailing atmospheric conditions in my home and the altitude, the waffles that were cooked for 7 minutes became a little chewy if they weren't eaten right away. The ones that were cooked for 10 minutes dried up further and became a little too crunchy. Nothing that a little bit of heat - in the waffle iron or on the tava - could not fix. A deep dunk in bowl of sambar also helps.

I liked them best slathered with the two coconut chutneys I always make with idlis.

Cilantro-Ginger Coconut Chutney aka Green Chutney

• Half a packet of frozen shredded coconut, about 2 cups
• 1 bunch cilantro
• 1.5 inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced
• 5-6 Thai chillies
• 1 cube frozen lemon juice (approx 1.75 tbsp)
• 10-12 mint leaves (optional)
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• salt to taste
• 1-1.5 cups water, or as needed

Optional seasoning:

• 2 tbsp oil
• 1 tsp mustard seeds
• pinch asafetida
• 1-2 dried red chillies, broken into pieces
• 6-8 curry leaves, washed and dried
• 1 tsp urad dal

1. Put everything in your blender and blend until the coconut is finely ground, adding water as needed.
2. Pour out into a bowl.
3. If using optional seasoning, heat oil in the smallest saucepan you have.
4. Add mustard seeds and when they pop, add asafetida, followed by dried red chillies, curry leaves and urad dal. Keep a splatter screen ready as the oil will get all over your stove otherwise.
5. Turn off the heat and allow the flavors to meld until the urad dal has turned a reddish-gold color.
6. Pour this oil over the chutney and mix well. If Jen's around, ask her if she wants to take a pic before you mix it up.

Garlic Coconut Chutney aka Red Chutney

• Half a packet of frozen shredded coconut, about 2 cups
• 7-9 dried red chillies
• 2 large cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced
• a small ball of fresh tamarind pulp, one that sits comfortably in a 1/2 tbsp measure
• 1/2 tsp cumin seeds
• salt to taste
• 1-1.5 cups water, or as needed

1. Soften the skin of the dried red chillies by soaking them in warm water, at least 15-20 minutes. 
2. Put everything in your blender and blend until the coconut is finely ground, adding water as needed.
3. Pour out into a bowl and enjoy with idlis, dosas, Indian waffles, on toast, on crackers or just like that!

Notes:

• It helps to bring the frozen shredded coconut to room temperature as it will not separate into thick cream and fiber. I didn't have the luxury of getting it to room temperature this time so I let the blender warm it up as it did its thing. 
• Fresh grated coconut is the ideal ingredient for these chutneys but since coconut trees don't grow in the Rockies and my experience with fresh coconut has not been the best, I prefer to use frozen shredded coconut instead.
• If using fresh grated coconut, it must be the meat from a mature coconut. The flesh of a tender coconut is only to be slurped on and eaten as is. Yum! 
• You need to know how spicy your fresh green chillies and dried red chillies are and adjust the amount used accordingly. 
• In winter, use two bunches of cilantro as the size of a bunch becomes rather measly.
•  The green chutney is my mother's recipe and the red chutney is as close as I have been able to get to my Pushpamaushi's recipe.
• Use these recipes as a guideline and adjust the flavors to your tastes.

$23.00
A mama with a baby in a colorful wrap on her back!

Handcut sustainably harvested hardwood poplar with woodburnt details. Mama and baby were given a wash of AP certified non-toxic waterbased paints, handsanded and coated with beeswax and organic jojoba oils for sheen and to protect the wood. All edges are sanded buttery smooth, ready to be loved by little hands.

Mama measures 5.5" tall so she is in 1" scale, which is common scale for many dollhouses. One inch = one foot.

These make lovely Mother's Day, baby shower and new mama gifts and little ones like to play with them too.




(This design and description text is copyright 2008-2010, Woodmouse/Amber Dusick.)

The Mother's Day Out program at Christ the King Lutheran Church is looking for several individuals to join our dynamic staff beginning in September 2010. We need several teachers in a variety of age groups, as well as a curriculum coordinator to develop our Pre-K lesson plans.

* If you love working with children under 5, this is an opportunity for you!

* If you have the patience, understanding and creativity to help a child reach their potential, this is an opportunity for you!

* If you have energy to spare, this is an opportunity for you!

Our program provides a nurturing, caring place where children can play together and learn how to be kind and caring with each other. We model Christian behavior for them and hope they will experience the values and ethics that are similar to those stressed at home.

• LOVE working with young children and their parents.
• Have a positive attitude and be a good team player.
• Strong English communication skills.
• Clear TB test
• CPR & First Aid certification is preferred.

Hours: Monday-Friday from 9:00am - 2:00pm
Teachers start September 9th. Fall classes begin September 13th.
Location: Great Falls, VA
Salary: Starts @ $10/hour

If you are interested in learning more about our program, please contact Karen Anderson at mothersdayout@verizon.net or 703/759-6935.

Listening to Ed Miliband denouncing New Labour in an interview on today's World at One (BBC Radio 4) reminded of something I wrote six years ago, when the said Miliband was one of the Brownites who was busily briefing against Tony Blair.

Local College Student needed for Mon - Friday afterschool help for 2010-2011 school year (September through June). Sophomore and above w/ previous experience caring or working with children. Necessary Hours: M, W, Th, F -- 2:30 - 6:00. Tues -- 1:30 - 6:00.
Pick up 5th grader from Encino school, communicate w/ teacher on day, assist with homework, take to after school activities like Tae Kwan Do or playdates, light housework i.e. dishes, grocery shopping, errands, etc. Need to be a problem solver, responsible, good communicator, good student, sporty and active, friendly and outgoing, comfortable w/ dogs. Reliable and safe car needed with good driving record and comprehensive insurance. No convertibles please!
Need at least two references with resume ... send immediately.

United Airline workers at O'Hare are a bit red-faced after a weekend incident in which they lost track of a nine-year-old child for several hours. Julien Reid, splitting time between his mother's home in Ottawa and his father's home in San Francisco, was returning to Ottawa this weekend when a layover at O'Hare lasted a lot longer than it should have. After deplaning at O'Hare, Julien's connecting flight was delayed so he stayed in a room for unaccompanied minors and special needs flyers from which, according to an attendant Julien's mother spoke with, the airline apparently forgot to fetch him.

He was in a "tiny, little room cramped with kids," where they played the same video on a loop all day, he said. The only food he'd been given was McDonald's, a less than satisfactory option for a vegetarian like him. He said he and the other children were yelled at "to stop being kids."

Julien's mother, Genevieve Harte, has her own theory on what happened: the airline bumped him from the flight without notifying anyone. "It's a lot easier to have a kid that's not going to say anything than an adult who has a business meeting that's going to scream at you in front of everybody." Not helping matters was that there was no United rep in Ottawa meaning Harte didn't know about Julien's situation until the kid called her from his own cell phone, prompting Harte to call United. She was finally connected to the attendant at the room where Julien was stashed and learned of what happened. All told, Julien spent about eight hours in the room before he was put on a later flight home to Ottawa. A spokesperson for United told the Calgary Herald the airline has apologized for the inconvenience, refunded the childcare fee, and has made "an undisclosed goodwill gesture."

As Mother's Day is now upon us, the Siam Bayview Hotel in down-town Pattaya is pleased to offer mums two very special promotions: stay two nights and get the third night free and book two rooms and get the third free! Offer available from August 6-16

Waist-high water receded today and sunny skies prevailed throughout the Chicago region as residents dried out their moldy basements and water-logged furniture.

Suburban streets were lined with torn-up carpets, damaged exercise equipment and an array of fish. Several cities and towns declared themselves disaster areas to receive additional help from the state.

At the height of the torrential downpour on Saturday, 43 Chicago viaducts were flooded. A 46-year-old man's body was found floating in a Southwest Side viaduct, although an autopsy was inconclusive as to whether he drowned, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.

Although the cleanup continued, the worst appeared to be over.

Commonwealth Edison officials said that crews had restored power to more than 98 percent of customers who lost service in storms Friday and Saturday.

As of about 5 p.m. there were about 1,200 customers who were still without power after a height of 170,000 customers, ComEd officials said.

In Chicago, there were only about 200 residents without poweer. Most of those still without power were in the north suburbs, where about 975 customers were still without power; the remainder of those without power were in the south and west suburbs, said Laura Miceli, a ComEd spokeswoman

Sunday was the perfect beach day for those who weren't consumed with clearing out their homes. But no one could get in the water because of possible contamination.

Westchester appeared to suffer the most damage. Water gushed through Donna Jacklin's home early Saturday in the 2900 block of Kensington Avenue. She and her family had about 45 minutes to grab things from the basement and move them to higher ground.

Yet both her basement and first floor flooded, leaving little to be saved.

"This is my whole life," said Jacklin, 59, who has lived in her home nearly 30 years, as she scanned the piles of furniture and ruined family pictures lying on her front lawn.

It looked like her neighbors were having a huge yard sale. Two houses down from Jacklin, piles of stuffed animals, boxes of record albums, and soggy books sat in John Griffith's driveway. He spent the day cleaning his basement, where water levels reached 4 feet.

Joe and Geri Ward jumped on a plane home from Boston when their son called and told them about the flooded basement. She cried all night.

Their son David Ward, 36, who also lives in the home, said the high water forced him to leave Saturday. Trying to stay and fight the flood turned into "a useless battle."

The near-record rainfall forced the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District to discharge sewer water in Lake Michigan at the Chicago River locks and the Wilmette pumping station. The swimming ban at Chicago-area beaches is expected to remain in effect until at least Monday.
Terrence O'Brien, president of the district, said the average rainfall across Cook County was four-and-a-half inches, "equivalent to over 60 billion gallons of water."

The hardest-hit areas were the central parts of the county and Chicago, O'Brien said, and the highest recorded rainfall in the city during the storm was 7 inches, at a rain gauge on 39th Street in Chicago.

City officials awaited toxicology results to determine the cause of death for Martin Garcia, who was pronounced dead at 2:40 p.m. Saturday after his body was found floating in the water in the 2500 block of West 21st Street, officials said.

Garcia, whose home address was unknown, had evidence of head trauma. Police are investigating his death.

At the River City condominiums along the Chicago River, the garage and ground level accumulated more than 12 feet of water. Electricity and gas were cut off, leaving the 17-story building without elevators, air-conditioning or water. More than 700 residents were evacuated.

On Sunday residents were escorted to their units, where they had 5 minutes to collect up to 5 days worth of clothes and belongings. Some residents still weren't sure where they were going to go in the interim.

Meanwhile, flood warnings -- which mean that flooding has been reported or is expected -- are in effect for the following counties: Cook, Lake, McHenry, Kane, Kendall, Will and LaSalle, according to the National Weather Service and Chicago Weather Center. But most area rivers, while still high, had already crested and their levels were going down this afternoon, according to the weather service.

The weather service officially recorded 3.64 inches of precipitation at O'Hare International Airport on Saturday. The mark broke the previous record for July 24 -- 1.48 inches set in 1900. The one-day record is 6.64 inches, set Sept. 13, 2006, and the record for a 24-hour period is 17.1 inches, set in August 1987.

The next chance of thunderstorms Tuesday night and Wednesday, according to the weather service.

In Naperville, the DuPage River rose several feet, which led to some flooding along the Riverwalk. Residential areas no longer appeared to face an imminent threat from rising water, according to officials.

The Town of Cicero began taking damage estimates Sunday afternoon. In the first hour alone, more than 200 families filed reports, officials said. The town, which will continue taking reports Monday, said they will be used to help Cicero qualify for relief from Cook County, the State of Illinois and other agencies.

Cicero President Larry Dominick declared the suburb a disaster on Saturday. Maywood Mayor Henderson Yarborough also issued a declaration of disaster.

Along Fairbanks Road in Riverside, pumps furiously pushed water from clogged storm sewers back into the raging Des Plaines River on Sunday. Parts of First Avenue, which had been closed since Saturday when the river breached its banks, were still shut down.
Some residents spent the day packing up to leave -- at least temporarily.

Katie Waters and her two cats were headed to her mother's home in LaGrange Park. "I don't know how long I'll be there," she said.

Roy Lee Brown, 55, of Bellwood was still pumping water out of his basement Sunday morning. He estimates he had 4 feet of standing water, which damaged his furnace and hot water tank. To bathe he had to warm up water on the stove.

"It was like a little (Hurricane) Katrina," Brown said. "I've never seen anything like it in my life. It got up in the morning, looked out the window and saw nothing but water outside."

Bernard Morrison, 49, of Maywood will have to close his home day care for at least a week. Morrison estimates about several thousand dollars worth of damage to the basement. He will need to replace the ceramic tile, rugs and possibly his washer and dryer.

"It's a mess," he said. "I've never (seen) a disaster like this. The streets and most of the neighborhood was a giant swimming pool."

Carlos Sadovi, Joe Ruzich and Deb Kadin contributed to this report.

-- Kristen Mack and Jennifer Delgado

Click HERE for a CLTV report on this story.

As part of my therapy regime to reduce the pain in my neck and shoulders, I've been trying to blog less on weekends. In fact, I've been trying to stay away from the keyboard entirely on weekends. That should be pretty easy for the rest of the day, which will be dedicated to setting up my mother's new computer, which might be bad for my sanity but probably good for my shoulders.

In the meantime, though, I see that his trip to Vegas has prompted Matt Yglesias to double down on his argument against corporate regulation. Here's the original version:

Regulate business to prevent negative environmental externalities, sure. Basic safety, okay. But the idea that what we need is for a bunch of people to get together and say that it would be better to ban this and that and the other capitalist act between consenting adults just strikes me as the wrong way of going about things. Purely economic regulation of this sort doesn’t have a compelling track record, runs into all kinds of Hayek-esque knowledge problems, and is basically an open invitation down the road for regulatory capture and the use of rules to prevent the emergence of competition. Count me out. For me, it’s all about higher taxes to finance more and better public services. That’s my brand of liberal economics — take the rich people’s money and use it to pay for stuff, don’t tell them what to do with the companies they run.

And here he is on Saturday, responding to my post about the increasingly popular practice of checking job applicants' credit scores before hiring them. At first, he says, this sound good:

But at the same time I try to adhere to the principle I outlined here and resist the urge to call for regulating the business practices of private firms when the issue isn’t pollution or some other case where the externalities are clear. After all, it seems like either this credit check business is a sound business practice (in which case allowing it is making the economy more efficient and ultimately building a more prosperous tomorrow) or else it’s an unsound business practice (in which case competition should drive it out).

The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. Which is odd, in a way, since I'm not really a ravenous supporter of micro-regulating the business community. For example, I'd like to see labor unions spend more time negotiating pay and benefits and a lot less time negotiating the kind of stultifying work rules that drive managers crazy. I agree with conservatives that Sarbanes-Oxley went too far and probably ought to be scaled back. And I agree with Matt that local zoning regs often become little more than hammers for NIMBYism and soft corruption.

So I get where this is coming from. Still, there are some fundamental questions here about how we expect businesses to treat both employees and consumers, and not all of those questions can be reduced to dollars and cents and higher marginal tax rates. Partly this is because, practically speaking, the rich and powerful are — well, they're rich and powerful and will never allow marginal rates to get too high. Short of another major depression, this just isn't likely to change dramatically.

It's also because we've gotten beyond the point where higher tax rates are even feasible as a leveling mechanism. According to Piketty and Saez, the income of the top 1% in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past three decades and the income of the top 0.1% has quadrupled. This during a time when per capita GDP has increased about 50%. In order to tax these incomes down to anywhere near the trend rate of growth for the whole economy would require top marginal rates of 70-80% or higher. Not only is that politically infeasible, but rates like this would almost certainly hurt economic growth as well.

But this isn't my biggest concern. It's true that income inequality can be partly addressed by progressive taxation, though I'd much prefer to see it addressed at the source since a healthy economy is one in which everyone benefits, not one in which a small plutocracy hoards the wealth and then doles it out to the working class if and when it can be persuaded to do so. More important is the fact that we liberals shouldn't view the relationship between businesses and individuals as solely economic transactions. There are core questions here of human dignity and basic fairness that exist quite aside from money.

Here's an example. Back in 1968, Congress passed the Truth in Lending Act. Among other things, it made credit card companies liable for charges on stolen credit cards over $50. In a purely economic sense, there's really no excuse for this. Why should a card company be responsible for your carelessness? If you're dumb enough to let someone steal your card and run up thousands of dollars in charges, it ought to be your responsibility. It's ridiculous to make a bank — and by extension, its customers — subsidize the losses of individuals who can't take care of their own finances.

Today, this argument would almost certainly carry the day. Even most liberals wouldn't fight it. It's as if we've been brainwashed against arguing that we should do something purely because it represents the way we think people deserve to be treated. We need graphs and charts and dueling models of economic distribution instead. 

But as recently as 40 years ago we didn't allow ourselves to be defined purely as pseudo-economic actors. Yes, there's an element of moral hazard in the $50 rule: people won't be as careful with their cards if they know someone else pays the bill if they get stolen. But we also recognized that, in fact, ordinary people are careful with their wallets and their credit cards regardless. And being responsible for thousands of dollars in charges could ruin an ordinary person. In fact, merely the fear of being responsible for losses like that from an everyday transaction can be debilitating. Businesses, on the other hand, can handle it. They can spread the losses among their customers, they have the resources to work on ways to reduce credit card fraud (which they did), and they can treat this responsiblity as an ordinary cost of business, not a nightmare waiting to happen.

That's worth a lot. How much in dollars, I couldn't say. But there's are rules and regulations we should put in place purely because they represent the way we think people should be treated. Potential employers shouldn't have access to my credit record because that's something I think we should treat as private. Banks shouldn't be able to retroactively raise interest rates on credit card balances because that's something I think is fundamentally unfair. Pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be allowed to sell drugs that don't work (even if they're safe) because I don't think sick people should be treated that way. Restaurants shouldn't be allowed to run filthy kitchens on the theory that an occasional outbreak of food poisoning isn't worth the cost of preventing. Farmers shouldn't be allowed to pay migrant workers two dollars an hour in scrip because I think adult human beings deserve better than that even if (or maybe especially if) they're desperate. I can't necessarily justify any of these things on economic grounds, and even if I could I'm not sure I'd want to. Because that's not truly why I believe them.

Even on the left, I feel like we've allowed ourselves to buy far too heavily into the homo economicus model of human interaction. But if I can be allowed to put on my old school lefty hat for a moment, that model just doesn't work when the power relations are too far out of whack. And to a large extent, businesses simply have the whip hand on too many things today. When you sign a form from your doctor agreeing to send all complaints to arbitration instead of to the civil court system, this isn't really an agreement between consenting adults. Once the AMA has convinced enough doctors to require this of all their patients, you no longer have a choice. You either give up your legal rights or else you go without medical services.

The alternative, of course, is political, not economic: pass a law that says access to courts is a basic right that can't be taken away even if your doctor or your credit card company or your employer forces you to sign a piece of paper to the contrary. Pass a law that prohibits employers from checking credit scores — even if that's economically efficient in some technical sense — simply because individuals ought to have a certain zone of privacy in their personal affairs. Pass a law that outlaws no-doc liar loans because they're bad for the country regardless of whether individuals can make money from them.

I'm rambling. Sorry. I wish I knew how to write this kind of thing better. But I just wanted to get it off my chest anyway. Corporations aren't people, and they can perpetuate unsound and unfair business practices for a lot longer than you'd think — leaving plenty of misery and personal havoc in their wake. We're perfectly justified in requiring them to treat people decently even if we don't have an economic justification for it. We used to understand that better than we do today.

(originally posted on Blogger on May 9, 2010) So, it’s Mothers Day evening and the kids are fi

As part of my therapy regime to reduce the pain in my neck and shoulders, I've been trying to blog less on weekends. In fact, I've been trying to stay away from the keyboard entirely on weekends. That should be pretty easy for the rest of the day, which will be dedicated to setting up my mother's new computer, which might be bad for my sanity but probably good for my shoulders.

In the meantime, though, I see that his trip to Vegas has prompted Matt Yglesias to double down on his argument against corporate regulation. Here's the original version:

Regulate business to prevent negative environmental externalities, sure. Basic safety, okay. But the idea that what we need is for a bunch of people to get together and say that it would be better to ban this and that and the other capitalist act between consenting adults just strikes me as the wrong way of going about things. Purely economic regulation of this sort doesn’t have a compelling track record, runs into all kinds of Hayek-esque knowledge problems, and is basically an open invitation down the road for regulatory capture and the use of rules to prevent the emergence of competition. Count me out. For me, it’s all about higher taxes to finance more and better public services. That’s my brand of liberal economics — take the rich people’s money and use it to pay for stuff, don’t tell them what to do with the companies they run.

And here he is on Saturday, responding to my post about the increasingly popular practice of checking job applicants' credit scores before hiring them. At first, he says, this sound good:

But at the same time I try to adhere to the principle I outlined here and resist the urge to call for regulating the business practices of private firms when the issue isn’t pollution or some other case where the externalities are clear. After all, it seems like either this credit check business is a sound business practice (in which case allowing it is making the economy more efficient and ultimately building a more prosperous tomorrow) or else it’s an unsound business practice (in which case competition should drive it out).

The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. Which is odd, in a way, since I'm not really a ravenous supporter of micro-regulating the business community. For example, I'd like to see labor unions spend more time negotiating pay and benefits and a lot less time negotiating the kind of stultifying work rules that drive managers crazy. I agree with conservatives that Sarbanes-Oxley went too far and probably ought to be scaled back. And I agree with Matt that local zoning regs often become little more than hammers for NIMBYism and soft corruption.

So I get where this is coming from. Still, there are some fundamental questions here about how we expect businesses to treat both employees and consumers, and not all of those questions can be reduced to dollars and cents and higher marginal tax rates. Partly this is because, practically speaking, the rich and powerful are — well, they're rich and powerful and will never allow marginal rates to get too high. Short of another major depression, this just isn't likely to change dramatically.

It's also because we've gotten beyond the point where higher tax rates are even feasible as a leveling mechanism. According to Piketty and Saez, the income of the top 1% in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past three decades and the income of the top 0.1% has quadrupled. This during a time when per capita GDP has increased about 50%. In order to tax these incomes down to anywhere near the trend rate of growth for the whole economy would require top marginal rates of 70-80% or higher. Not only is that politically infeasible, but rates like this would almost certainly hurt economic growth as well.

But this isn't my biggest concern. It's true that income inequality can be partly addressed by progressive taxation, though I'd much prefer to see it addressed at the source since a healthy economy is one in which everyone benefits, not one in which a small plutocracy hoards the wealth and then doles it out to the working class if and when it can be persuaded to do so. More important is the fact that we liberals shouldn't view the relationship between businesses and individuals as solely economic transactions. There are core questions here of human dignity and basic fairness that exist quite aside from money.

Here's an example. Back in 1968, Congress passed the Truth in Lending Act. Among other things, it made credit card companies liable for charges on stolen credit cards over $50. In a purely economic sense, there's really no excuse for this. Why should a card company be responsible for your carelessness? If you're dumb enough to let someone steal your card and run up thousands of dollars in charges, it ought to be your responsibility. It's ridiculous to make a bank — and by extension, its customers — subsidize the losses of individuals who can't take care of their own finances.

Today, this argument would almost certainly carry the day. Even most liberals wouldn't fight it. It's as if we've been brainwashed against arguing that we should do something purely because it represents the way we think people deserve to be treated. We need graphs and charts and dueling models of economic distribution instead. 

But as recently as 40 years ago we didn't allow ourselves to be defined purely as pseudo-economic actors. Yes, there's an element of moral hazard in the $50 rule: people won't be as careful with their cards if they know someone else pays the bill if they get stolen. But we also recognized that, in fact, ordinary people are careful with their wallets and their credit cards regardless. And being responsible for thousands of dollars in charges could ruin an ordinary person. In fact, merely the fear of being responsible for losses like that from an everyday transaction can be debilitating. Businesses, on the other hand, can handle it. They can spread the losses among their customers, they have the resources to work on ways to reduce credit card fraud (which they did), and they can treat this responsiblity as an ordinary cost of business, not a nightmare waiting to happen.

That's worth a lot. How much in dollars, I couldn't say. But there's are rules and regulations we should put in place purely because they represent the way we think people should be treated. Potential employers shouldn't have access to my credit record because that's something I think we should treat as private. Banks shouldn't be able to retroactively raise interest rates on credit card balances because that's something I think is fundamentally unfair. Pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be allowed to sell drugs that don't work (even if they're safe) because I don't think sick people should be treated that way. Restaurants shouldn't be allowed to run filthy kitchens on the theory that an occasional outbreak of food poisoning isn't worth the cost of preventing. Farmers shouldn't be allowed to pay migrant workers two dollars an hour in scrip because I think adult human beings deserve better than that even if (or maybe especially if) they're desperate. I can't necessarily justify any of these things on economic grounds, and even if I could I'm not sure I'd want to. Because that's not truly why I believe them.

Even on the left, I feel like we've allowed ourselves to buy far too heavily into the homo economicus model of human interaction. But if I can be allowed to put on my old school lefty hat for a moment, that model just doesn't work when the power relations are too far out of whack. And to a large extent, businesses simply have the whip hand on too many things today. When you sign a form from your doctor agreeing to send all complaints to arbitration instead of to the civil court system, this isn't really an agreement between consenting adults. Once the AMA has convinced enough doctors to require this of all their patients, you no longer have a choice. You either give up your legal rights or else you go without medical services.

The alternative, of course, is political, not economic: pass a law that says access to courts is a basic right that can't be taken away even if your doctor or your credit card company or your employer forces you to sign a piece of paper to the contrary. Pass a law that prohibits employers from checking credit scores — even if that's economically efficient in some technical sense — simply because individuals ought to have a certain zone of privacy in their personal affairs. Pass a law that outlaws no-doc liar loans because they're bad for the country regardless of whether individuals can make money from them.

I'm rambling. Sorry. I wish I knew how to write this kind of thing better. But I just wanted to get it off my chest anyway. Corporations aren't people, and they can perpetuate unsound and unfair business practices for a lot longer than you'd think — leaving plenty of misery and personal havoc in their wake. We're perfectly justified in requiring them to treat people decently even if we don't have an economic justification for it. We used to understand that better than we do today.

[Publishing posts have been delayed due to travel, but will be caught up soon]

I know this going to sound like "A Christmas Carol" in July, but this has been a strange week of dreams for me. You see, I have been visited by three ghosts of my past....my father, then my mother and last night my grandmother. I haven't spoken to my father since 1991 and my mother and grandmother have long passed away back in the 80's. All of them told me something that I long to hear from each of them. Approval....of my lifestyle, of who I am as an artist and most importantly approval of me.

My grandmother (my mother's mother) was always there for me and I guess because I was her first grandchild, she always gave me unconditional love. But since she died when I was 15, I never got the chance to tell her I was gay. I always assumed she knew.

With my mother's passing, it was very difficult for me to wrap my head around since she had stopped speaking to me for a few years and suddenly showed up on my doorstep on July 4th, 1987 with my younger brother. She knew I was gay and had even asked when I was 11. So, it was no surprise to her when I invited her in and my boyfriend came walking out of the bedroom. She accepted him as if he was part of the family. From that day on, she and I had the mother/son relationship that I had dreamed of. But it all came to a crashing end when she died on July 18th, 1988.

But I guess the strangest visitor was my father. We stopped speaking on Thanksgiving Day in 1991 when he got drunk at his mother's dinner table and accused me of ruining his name by being a homosexual. Trust me....I am making it sound a lot more elegant in my wording. This was one old gay bashing session with words. My grandmother threw him out of her house. In that dream, he was waiting at a train station with a new wife. He was sober and actually looked me in the eyes and told me that he had been keeping tabs on me. He told me that he was proud of me and that he had always been there. This is when I realized it was a dream. With the last interaction with my father, I would never hear such words from his lips.

So, this leads me to believe that my father has past on as well. It also reminds me that communication is key in relationships. Some would say that I should look him up to be sure. But I believe I should take this as a sign and remember all of them like they were in my dreams. Present, loving and accepting....the way family should be

Funny, I was writing in response to a new post on the site but by the time I finished tapping out my comments, the OG post was removed. In respect to the privacy of the original poster, I'll just paraphrase the part I was responding to: "to what extent should we push our kids to learn things that they may not enjoy?" The OP was talking about Chinese school, a grand tradition that many an ABC can probably relate to. Here's what I wrote in response:

I went to Chinese school for several years as a kid. I retained practically nothing out of the experience and while I won't say it was a waste for time, I do think that trying to master a second language that you're not immersed in at home is extremely difficult, especially if not done at the inception of language in a child's life.

The thing is: my parents made a very conscious choice to raise my sister and I in an English-speaking household; they wanted to see us succeed educationally and to them, that meant mastering English. In hindsight, one can question the logic of their decision; my mother's older sister raised her son (my cousin) in a Chinese-speaking household and as a result, he's very proficient in both English and Mandarin. But I rarely felt like I missed out. I have skill sets other people don't have as a consequence of my education just as I lack some skills that I might have acquired if my life had gone differently.

Do I wish I spoke better Mandarin? Absolutely, especially the times where I'm visiting China. But I don't put that on my parents' decisions. I could have taken Mandarin in college. I could take it now. But just as my parents made their choices, I've made mine too and that's been to accept that, at least right now, learning Mandarin isn't enough of a priority compared to other things I'd rather spend my time on (and in any case, if I was really going to go to language classes, I'd take Spanish first).

All of this is to say: it's complicated. My daughter (5) has her first piano recital today and she's very nervous about it. The pain of her anxiety pains me but I'm glad she's taking piano. I wish I had stayed with my lessons more as a kid but like Chinese school, my lack of progress and general antipathy eventually lead my parents to accept my decision to stop doing it.

Do I wish my parents had insisted otherwise? That's very hard to say. On the one hand, I wish *now* that I had better musical skills. But I can't say, "I wish my parents had forced me to learn." That would have created tension in our relationship by forcing them to force me to practice. Would that tension and resentment have been worth it in the end? Possibly. Possibly not. The old taunt, "you're going to thank me for this one day!" doesn't always get proven right. Sometimes, decades later, people are resentful about what they're forced to learn. That's the risk.

My wife and I talk about this a lot: is it our responsibility to pick what skills we think our daughter should master? Obviously some - how to read and write, how to swim, how to get along with others - have practical social and literal survival skills. But playing piano, learning another language, learning how to draw, etc. - those aren't essential (not to us). I think our current philosophy is to support what she wants to learn but not necessarily pick those paths for her. We wonder, all the time, if that's the best thing for her but like I said, we all make our decisions and have to learn to live with them. As the cliche goes, only time will tell if our choices were the "right" ones.

You can choose online where you'll have a great array to choose from, whether you're looking for mother's day gift basket, thank you gift boxes or anything that fits the occasion and your intention.

"Admitting to a favorite kid is one of the biggest taboos in parenting, although the vast majority of moms -- and pretty much all kids - perceive that there is a golden child in just about every family," blogs Amy Kuras in Toddler Newsletter.

No! Admitting to having a favorite kid isn't one of the biggest taboos in parenting. NOT admitting to having a favorite is! Denying what is true can be disturbing to everyone in the family, making everyone feel a little crazy and eroding healthy family relationships.

The vast majorities of moms describe having a child whom they prefer and who receives special treatment, and still, parents have a hard time admitting that they favor one child over others. The terms differ but the message is the same---there is a favorite child. Children seem freer to acknowledge the existence of favoritism in the family. Each child is an individual and so is each parent. It is perfectly natural that a given child and a given parent have a special resonance; sometimes it is brief and sometimes it is more permanent.

Two recently published studies, independent from one another, agree that favoritism
• is common to families;
• can contribute to depression in both the favored and unfavored child;
• impacts all family members for life.

One study, directed by Cornell University gerontologist Karl Pillemer and published in the April issue of Journal of Marriage and the Family, found that "(P)erceived favoritism from one's mother still matter to a child's psychological well-being even if they have been living for years outside the parental home and have started families of their own." The second study, recently published by this author in the book The Favorite Child, explains that favored and unfavored children are vulnerable to depression because there is tension associated with being chosen as well as not being chosen by the parent important to the child.

Why depression...

Children growing up as the golden child or the unfavored child are equally vulnerable to suffering from symptoms of depression. Longing to be the favorite child or working to maintain that status creates complicated issues for both the unfavored and favorite child. The personalities of each are likely to be marred by symptoms of depression: Each child may struggle with loneliness or emotional isolation; achieving psychological independence; having addictions that undermine the quality of their lives.

There are advantages to being chosen. In species of birds and animals, life can depend on being selected as mothers offer their milk to some infants, who survive, and not to others, who die. In humans, while being selected and its consequences are usually not so dramatic, the emotional health of the child largely depends on that child's feeling secure in his mother's love. Commonly, children not only crave their parents' love but also want to believe that this love is greater than the love parents feel for anyone else. Adults smile as toddlers ask their mothers and fathers, "Do you love me more than anyone else in the whole wide world?" As children grow-up, a major task to be accomplished, necessary for their healthy functioning, is to learn to feel secure in the world without requiring ongoing parental affirmation. To the degree that children do not accomplish this important milestone, they are vulnerable to depression.

For unfavored children
Children who have never felt this affirmation, the unfavored child, often live their lives looking for this validation. They look to others to choose them as they had hoped their parents would. Since no one can fill the void created by parental neglect or oversight, these unfavored children often grow up insecure and not believing themselves lovable. One father, who grew up feeling unfavored, lamented the pain he feels each Father's Day as he doesn't trust his children's celebration of him. He knows the problem resides within himself as his heart is not fully open to their embrace. A lifetime of disappointment has taught him that there is emotional safety in being walled off to the expectation that he will be chosen for special kudos.

These children are especially vulnerable to struggling with establishing intimacy, or being easily frustration or angered. First, to be intimate, one's heart has to be open to others, and like the father described above, unfavored children often have developed defenses to protect themselves against being disappointed that they are not chosen by people important to them. This tendency to close one's heart makes establishing and maintaining intimacy difficult.

Second, children who grew up unfavored often have adopted the attitude that no matter how hard they try, they will not achieve the desired outcome. Throughout their childhood, they may have worked hard to achieve the more preferred status; but as hard as they worked, they failed to achieve this position. They never grasped that most likely their unfavored status was rooted primarily in their parent's inadequacy, not in theirs. These children easily feel defeated, and overtime, develop the opinion that hard work does not bring the desired reward. They are easily frustrated and walk away from challenges.

Third, unfavored children are vulnerable to developing personalities impacted by underlying anger. They are angry at the parent who treats them as the unfavored child. They are angry with the other parent for not altering the course of events. They many be angry at the sibling who is favored, especially if that sibling exploits the advantages of being favored. Unfortunately, as the child grow up, their anger is likely to be easily ignited and inappropriately expressed.

For favorite children
Golden children are also vulnerable to depression. They are likely to develop unhealthy personality traits, and be robbed of knowing themselves well. First, favorite children, having grown up mastering the art of knowing how to get what they want from the adoring parent, have mastered the art of manipulation. They expect the quid pro quo to be enacted: The child believes that in exchange for making important people in their adult worlds feel valued, these adults will give them what they want and not hold them accountable for questionable behaviors. These golden children grow up knowing how to get what they want, when they want it, and to feeling entitled.

Second, favorite children are likely to mature without having forged their own identities. These children, wanting to insure their favorite status, can be preoccupied with pleasing the important parent. A gay man called in during one of my NPR interviews to report that he was frightened to come out to his parents. If he did he knew that he would loose his favorite child status, and he did not trust that he could function successfully in the world without it. Yet, he acknowledged that his heavy drinking permitted him to escape the discomfort he felt in living with the secret.

Third, ultimately favorite children are prone to harbor underlying anger at the parents who favor them. The children tend to feel trapped by the relationship. As one woman expressed, "Do I have wait for my mother to die to have my own life?"

...and what's to be done

As elaborated in my last blog and suggested by Pillemer, open communication among all family members is the best technique to prevent hurt feelings within a family to fester and to begin to remedy the injury that has corroded family relationships. Such dialogue is difficulty to obtain. All family members must value it, and everyone has to be willing to work for it. Everyone must

1. LISTEN to each other;
2. RESPECT different viewpoints;
3. STRIVE to accept the truth of different perceptions;
4. WORK deliberately at not being defensive;
5. FEEL safe to express words of personal truth.

 

 

Older academic couple is looking for energetic, enthusiastic, very smart, organized, reliable, part time teenage 'mother's helper' (super flexible hours) for a few hours a day from July 26 through Aug 31. We are across street from Supreme Court, near the U.S. Capitol and Library of Congress, 5 min from Union Station or Capitol South Metro stops. My husband just tore several ligaments in his knee and can only walk, with difficulty, on crutches for the time being. I need help a.) waiting on him, and b.) doing everything around the house he used to do. Help with ORGANIZING, meal prep and clean up, carrying heavy things, and then with just coping with the too-much-to-do syndrome. Lots of housework type things – lugging and hauling, packing and unpacking, doing dishes, light cleaning, leaf blowing, folding clothes, running the washer, unloading groceries, fetch and carry type stuff. And in addition many of these needs arise somewhat (not entirely, by any means) unpredictably – where we have guests coming for dinner -- or grandchildren visiting -- or I need errands run, car emptied, etc. We need help preparing dinner (even frozen dinners), trash taken out and in, and the bathroom wiped down.. Dog walking sometimes etc etc etc. My professor husband is lovable but preoccupied and now immobile for a few weeks. I am neat. We are friendly and deeply deeply appreciative and considerate of your schedule whenever possible….. On the plus side, despite the low pay, we would be UNDYINGLY grateful for your help…..…..

The country's youngest convicted killer is back in trouble after allegedly punching his mum on Mother's Day. Bailey Junior Kurariki, 21, has been charged with assaulting his mother Lorraine West at ...

Female circumcision will be inflicted on up to 2,000 British schoolgirls during the summer holidays – leaving brutal physical and emotional scars. Yet there have been no prosecutions against the practice

Like any 12-year-old, Jamelia was excited at the prospect of a plane journey and a long summer holiday in the sun. An avid reader, she had filled her suitcases with books and was reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban when her mother came for her. "She said, 'You know it's going to be today?' I didn't know exactly what it would entail but I knew something was going to be cut. I was made to believe it was genuinely part of our religion."

She went on: "I came to the living room and there were loads of women. I later found out it was to hold me down, they bring lots of women to hold the girl down. I thought I was going to be brave so I didn't really need that. I just lay down and I remember looking at the ceiling and staring at the fan.

"I don't remember screaming, I remember the ridiculous amount of pain, I remember the blood everywhere, one of the maids, I actually saw her pick up the bit of flesh that they cut away 'cause she was mopping up the blood. There was blood everywhere."

Some 500 to 2,000 British schoolgirls will be genitally mutilated over the summer holidays. Some will be taken abroad, others will be "cut" or circumcised and sewn closed here in the UK by women already living here or who are flown in and brought to "cutting parties" for a few girls at a time in a cost-saving exercise.

Then the girls will return to their schools and try to get on with their lives, scarred mentally and physically by female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice that serves as a social and cultural bonding exercise and, among those who are stitched up, to ensure that chastity can be proved to a future husband.

Even girls who suffer less extreme forms of FGM are unlikely to be promiscuous. One study among Egyptian women found 50% of women who had undergone FGM "endured" rather than enjoyed sex.

Cleanliness, neatness of appearance and the increased sexual pleasure for the man are all motivations for the practice. But the desire to conform to tradition is the most powerful motive. The rite of passage, condemned by many Islamic scholars, predates both the Koran and the Bible and possibly even Judaism, appearing in the 2nd century BC.

Although unable to give consent, many girls are compliant when they have the prodecure carried out, believing they will be outcasts if they are not cut. The mothers believe they are doing the best for their daughters. Few have any idea of the lifetime of hurt it can involve or the medical implications.

Jamelia, now 20, who says her whole personality changed afterwards."I felt a lot older. It was odd because nobody says this is a secret, keep your mouth shut but that's the message you get loud and clear." She stopped the sports and swimming she used to love and became "strangely disconnected with her own body". Other girls have died, of shock or blood loss; some have picked up infections from dirty tools. Jamelia's mother paid extra for the woman to use a clean razor. It is thought that in the UK there are one or two doctors who can be bribed by the very rich to to carry out FGM using anaesthetic and sterilised instruments.

Comfort Momoh works at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London, in one of the 16 clinics up and down the country who deal with FGM and its health repercusssions. Women who have had much of their external genitalia sliced off and their vaginas stitched closed, but for a tiny hole, also come to be cut open in order to give birth.

There are four types of female circumcision identified by the World Health Organisation, ranging from partial to total removal of the external female genitalia. Some 140 million women worldwide have been subjected to FGM and an estimated further two million are at risk every year. Most live in 28 African countries while others are in Yemen, Kurdistan, the US, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Canada.

The UK Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 makes it an offence to carry out FGM or to aid, abet or procure the service of another person. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, makes it against the law for FGM to be performed anywhere in the world on UK permanent residents of any age and carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment. To date, no prosecutions have been made under UK legislation.

"Obviously in summer we get really anxious. All activists and professionals working around FGM get anxious because this is the time that families take their children back home. This is the time when all the professionals need to be really alert," said Momoh.

"There is no hard evidence in figures about what is happening in the UK because it's a hush-hush thing. It's only now that a few people are beginning to talk about it, which is good because change will only come from within and the numbers coming forward are rising. But there is a lot of family pressure. When I first started in 1997 we had two clinics in the country, now we have 16."

One woman told the Observer how a midwife examining her had raced retching and crying from the room. She had no idea she was "abnormal" before that happened. There is a clear need for women who have suffered FGM to be able to visit health professionals who understand what has happened to them. Momoh said that for those who wanted it, some surgical reversal work could sometimes be done on women with the most severe FGM procedure, Type III. For those with other types, counselling and support is all that can offered.

"Periods are agony – you get a lot of women who are determined to have reversals while they are having their period but then when the pain has stopped they lose their nerve again," said Leyla Hussein, 29, who has had to have years of counselling to cope with her own anger and distress at what was done to her as a child. It has helped her forgive her own mother's complicity in the mutilation she endured, though the older woman could not understand why Hussein would not have her own child, now aged seven, cut. But Hussein has vowed that she will be the last generation of women in her family to suffer.

"It was my husband who said on our honeymoon, 'We are not going to do this thing to any child of ours.' I was quite shocked, I hadn't questioned it. But I now realise a lot of men are not in favour of FGM, not when you tell them the woman is not going to enjoy herself."

Hussein is among a slowly but steadily growing band of women who have reacted against what happened to them with courage and a determination to stamp out FGM. Hussein has run support and discussion groups for affected women and for men, and formerly worked at the African Well Women's Centre in Leyton, east London.

"I can really relate to some of the women who are very angry, but how do you blame your mother, who loves you yet planned this for you? There is a lot of anger and resentment. Many women blame themselves and of course there are flashbacks to deal with. I had blackouts – anytime I had to have a smear test, I would pass out because lying in that position brought it back to me, but the nurse is used to me now and allows a little more time with the appointment."

"The new generation, born and raised here in Britain, they are used to expressing their views and it will be a lot harder to shut them up. Last month was the first ever march against FGM [in Bristol where 15 to 16 mothers protested] and that is a sign of something new."

Asha-Kin Duale is a community partnership adviser in Camden, London. She talks to schools and to families about safeguarding children. "Culture has positive and negative issues for every immigrant community. We value some traditions, and most are largely good.

"FGM is not confined to African countries. It has no basis in Christianity, it has no basis in Islam; none of Muhammad's daughters had it done. For some parents it is enough to let them know that and they will drop it completely. Everyone needs to understand that every child, no matter what the background or creed, is protected by this law in this land."

She said there needed to be an understanding of why FGM took place, although that was not the same as accepting that the practice had a cultural justification.

"FGM has a social function and until this is understood by social services and other bodies they will never stop it. It is a power negotiation mechanism, that women use to ensure respect from men. It prevents rape of daughters and is a social tool to allow women to regain some power in patriarchal societies. With girls living in the UK there is no need to gain the power – it has to be understood that girls can be good girls without FGM."

For Jason Morgan, a detective constable in the Met's FGM unit, Project Azure, the solution lies with those girls themselves: "Empowering youth, giving them the information, is the way forward. They are coming from predominantly caring and loving families, who genuinely believe this is the right thing to do. Many are under a great deal of pressure from the extended families.

"Sometimes it might be as simple as delivering the message of what the legal position is; sometimes we even give them an official letter, a document that they can show to the extended family that states quite firmly what will happen if the procedure goes ahead. The focus has to be on prevention."

Project Azure made 38 interventions in 2008, 59 in 2009 and 25 so far this year. For Morgan those statistics are just as important as getting a conviction. "We know it happens here although we have no official statistics, but we have seen very successful partnerships and we don't want to alienate communities through heavy-handed tactics.

"While a prosecution would send out a very clear message to practising communities, really it is very difficult and you would be relying on medical evidence, and in turn that would all hinge or whether the child consents to an examination."

But Naana Otoo-Oyortey is not so content with the softly-softly approach: "We have anecdotal evidence that it is being done here. So someone is not doing their job: it's an indication that the government has been failing to protect children. The commitment is hollow."

Head of the leading anti-FGM charity Forward UK, Otoo-Oyortey said people value the FGM tradition as something which holds a community together and gives it structure. "It's seen as a party, a cutting party because it's a celebration – people expect it as a way of welcoming a girl. A lot of women will mention to us that there have been no prosecutions here so why do we worry about the law? At the end of the day who will know?

"And we cannot just blame the women as the men are silently supporting it by paying for it. The new government's lack of a position on FGM is very worrying. We don't know what they will do, but we do know that the summer holidays are here again and we will be left to pick up the pieces in a few weeks' time."

And for those who will be "cut" this summer, the effects will be lifelong. Miriam was six when she had her cutting party at her home in Somalia, two years before war arrived to force her family out.

When she was 12, doctors were horrified to find that what they thought was a cyst in her body was actually several years of period blood that had been blocked from leaving her body. Unable to have children, she now lives and works in England and worries about other girls. "I'd seen so many people circumcised, all my neighbours, so I knew one day it was going to happen to me. We knew what was happening," Miriam said.

"The little girls who were born in Europe have no clue. They will be traumatised a lot more. The only thing they know is that they are going away – that's what they say, 'We're going on a holiday'.

"Then her life and her head are going to be messed up. It's amazing how many people are in mental health care because of their culture. Don't get me wrong, I have religion and culture and I love where I'm from and I love what I stand for. But culture should not be about torture.

"Why would anyone want to go and cut up a seven- or eight-year-old child? People need to wake up — you are hurting your child, you are hurting your daughter, you're not going to have a grandchild, so wake up."

Ashley Willis sat nervously on the pool's edge, hands clenching the concrete wall, looking away from the water. Her cousins fearlessly splashed in the water, but Ashley needed a little persuading to take her first jump into the pool.

On a recent summer morning, Ashley had a special instructor with a lofty purpose. The tall, muscular 26-year-old who patiently helped the reluctant 8-year-old through the pool was Olympic gold medalist Cullen Jones. And his mission was to help minority children like Ashley feel more at ease in the water.

"Do you breathe?" Jones asked the girl with braided hair after he guided her through the pool. She was attempting a freestyle stroke without taking many breaths.

"I'm not really comfortable doing the little strokes," she said as she hopped out of the pool at Douglas Park. "It feels like you're going down."

Experts say minority children like Ashley are far more likely to be afraid to swim than nonminority children. A recent report released in May by USA Swimming showed that nearly 70 percent of black children and nearly 60 percent of Hispanic youth have limited or no swimming abilities, while only 40 percent of white children said they have limited or no swimming abilities.

Those disparities can have deadly consequences. The drowning rate of African-American children between 5 and 14 years old is 3 times that of white children in the same age range, according to 2007 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control.

The recent death of 9-year-old Destiny Bahena, who died on July 4 after she tried to save her sister in Lake Michigan, highlighted the dangers of getting in the water with poor swimming skills.

But USA Swimming and other organizations nationwide are trying to change the disparity through community outreach programs like USA Swimming Foundation's Make a Splash initiative. Jones, who serves as the initiative's spokesman and was the second black swimmer to win a gold medal, is touring the country, recalling his own near-drowning experience at 5 years old and his mother's relentless push to get him to learn to swim.

USA Swimming's report, "Constraints Impacting Minority Swimming Participation Phase II," looked at the reasons for the disparity. Factors include lack of encouragement from parents, who may not see learning to swim as a high priority, in part because they themselves cannot swim. Experts also point to concerns over personal appearance.

Locally, the Chicago Park District partnered with Make a Splash to promote its free swimming classes for children. The district distributed 100,000 brochures and 5,000 fliers at schools and churches in minority communities to inform families that such programming exists.

In fact, about 100 Chicago Park District pools offer free learn-to-swim classes for children, but many of the city's pools average fewer than 100 swimming class participants a year.

After Destiny Bahena drowned, her father, Pedro Bahena, 29, blamed himself for not protecting his daughter. Destiny and his three other children never learned to swim. Instead, he and their mother, Ana Encarnacion, warned the children to stay away from the water.

Encarnacion, who also does not know how to swim, said she tried to avoid water altogether by planning extended family activities closer to home. But that too is difficult.

"I understand how kids are, they see the water and want to jump in and play," Bahena said.

Angela Stevenson, Ashley's aunt and a mother of three, knew early on that she wanted her kids to learn how to swim. But she and her husband weren't sure at what age her three children would be ready. One concern was that if too young, they wouldn't properly fear the water.

"I'm worried that they might be playing around and not be paying attention and have something happen," said her husband, James Fenderson.

Eventually, the couple were able to come to an agreement, and their children have since been taking lessons consistently.

"I wanted them to learn, to respect the water," Stevenson said. "That was an internal family struggle."

Still, swimming classes bring other challenges for her children, Stevenson said. During the winter months, her daughter Jayla has to take extra time to dry her coarse hair after a swim, and keeps her locks tightly braided so she doesn't go to school looking unkempt.

"For African-Americans, it's about what to do with your hair every day, how to manage it," Stevenson said.

Ashley's Park District lessons have helped, but her mother, Andrea Stevenson, says keeping her in them has been tough. Between Stevenson's job in the suburbs, upcoming courses at Malcolm X College, and Ashley's grades, the lessons haven't fit into the family's schedule.

"I want her to know how to swim, but I want her to be able to have her homework done," Stevenson said.

As a result, Ashley hasn't continued her lessons after her most recent session ended in June.

-- Serena Maria Daniels

NEW YORK — Britain's Prince Harry took a tumble from his horse Sunday before his defeat in a New York polo match against the world's best known polo player, Argentina's Nacho Figueras.

But it was all for a good cause – to benefit 400,000 children of an AIDS-ravaged African nation.

The 25-year-old son of the late Princess Diana fell off his polo pony in the first half of the 3rd Annual Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic on Governor's Island.

But he had a smile on his face as he got up and continued the contest, which Figueras' Black Watch team won 6-5 in overtime. At first, the prince's Black Rock foursome was ahead, with Harry scoring an early 2 points, despite his fall.

"I think his horse got spooked, or something," Figueras told The Associated Press, adding, "It was a very tight match – right till the end, we didn't know who was going to win so it was very exciting to play."

But polo was not the main point of the day.

The United States "has always protected the downtrodden, the poorest, those most in need of help in the world," Harry said before the match. "And to me, this is what the United States stands for."

Harry played as part of his pledge to continue his mother's work. Princess Diana, who was often photographed embracing HIV-positive mothers and children, died in 1997 in a Paris car crash.

Sunday's heat, topping 90 degrees, "is a welcome relief after the snow and ice of Lesotho, where I was last week," her son said of the southern African nation where he said he took his brother, Prince William, to show him the work of his charity.

Earlier, Harry joined guests in the VIP "marquee" – a fancy white tent where lunch tables for 10 overlooking the field went for as much as $50,000.

While the day was meant to be a relaxing summer celebration, the combination of polo and royalty gave the occasion a decidedly formal air. Guests invited to be in the presence of "His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales" were also instructed on attire.

"Gentlemen" ought to wear a "summer suit," the invitations said, and the "ladies" were challenged to sport "their most daring hat." True to English tradition, many women showed up in what could only be called "daring" items atop their heads, from feathers to fruit.

Anyone bringing a child had to make sure each had "their own caregiver." No youngster was allowed in the VIP tent and was instead relegated to an adjacent area filled with games and snacks.

Proceeds from the day would go to American Friends of Sentebale, a charity set up in 2006 by Harry and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho for "the vulnerable children of Lesotho," where many children are AIDS orphans.

Harry said both he and the African prince wanted to follow the examples set by their mothers.

"Both were very much loved, and both loved people – both loved helping people who needed it the most," he said.

About 100 children in Lesotho lose one or both of their parents each day, Harry said, adding that the orphaned children survive with no prospects of a regular nourishing diet and little hope of a meaningful education.

Celebrity sightings at the Veuve Clicquot included Susan Sarandon, Julianna Margulies, Val Kilmer and Mary J. Blige. The tally for the day was not immediately available, but was likely hefty, given the minimum price for a table for 10 in the VIP marquee – $20,000. The $50,000 tables were closest to that of the prince. That included the champagne accompanying a meal prepared by chef Michael Romano of Manhattan's Union Square Cafe.

A picnic on the grass went for $250 per person.

Harry's three-day visit to New York began Friday at the West Point Military Academy north of the city, followed by UNICEF on Saturday and throwing the first pitch at a Mets game.

Figueras told the AP that he plans to visit Lesotho sometime in the fall.

And though "I push him as hard as I can inside the polo field, we're all equal," the Argentine star told the AP. "Today, we all won because today was about those kids in Africa."

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