Obama's Candidacy Angers, Excites Hate Groups

by Dina Temple-Raston
All Things Considered
National Public Radio NPR
October 28, 2008

The charges Monday against two neo-Nazi skinheads accused of plotting to kill Barack Obama drew attention to law enforcement's simmering concerns over how white supremacists are reacting to the possibility of a black president.

The alleged plan that Daniel Cowart of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman, of West Helena, Ark., were hatching was fantastic in its scope. Federal agents said Cowart and Schlesselman planned to rob a gun store, target students at a largely black high school and then try to kill Obama.

The two men did not expect to be successful, but they wanted to die trying, investigators said. They said the two planned to drive as fast as they could toward Obama and shoot at him from the windows of their car. They allegedly had discussed wearing white tuxedos and top hats for the occasion. The suspects are being held without bond on charges of possessing an unregistered firearm, conspiring to steal firearms and threatening a presidential candidate.

This is the second white supremacist plot against Obama that authorities have revealed. In August, just days before Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver, police arrested three men with white supremacist ties for possibly threatening him.

While law enforcement officials say Obama was never in any danger in either situation, they are also quick to say that they cannot afford to take these cases lightly. And they have been expecting new challenges from white supremacist groups.

"There is a probable hypothesis that in the event that Obama becomes president that you could have a galvanization of these white supremacist groups," said John Karl, the officer in charge of the Los Angeles Police Department's criminal conspiracy unit. "Obviously, law enforcement needs to be prepared, and how do you prepare? You need to become as resourceful and comprehensively understand the groups and individuals involved."

Karl says the First Amendment ties law enforcement's hands. Officers cannot move in until and unless these groups actually commit a crime.

"If no crime has been committed, no activity has come up on the radar screen, we can't arbitrarily start rounding people up," he said. "There is a little problem with the Constitution and things like that."

Supremacist Groups In California

Travel out of metropolitan Los Angeles — to Southern California cities farther inland where supremacists have traditionally congregated — and it is clear that law enforcement is in a state of alert.

Chris Keeling is part of the FBI's hate crimes task force in Santa Clarita. As he sees it, Obama's effect on the hate movement is no longer theoretical; it has already happened.

"There is more on the Internet. There are more flyers, leafletting going out, because now they have a target," he said. "Take Obama out of the situation, you're still going to have leafletting. But having Obama in there and being a stone's throw from being the president, has it increased the Internet activity? Absolutely, absolutely."

These days, Keeling works about six hate crime calls a week. Some of them are serious. A couple of months ago, skinheads beat up a customer at a restaurant because he was black. Others are crimes of opportunity. Obama posters, for example, have become an easy target for vandals to deface.

The FBI set up a task force in Santa Clarita partly because racist skinhead gangs have long been a fixture there. For years, the Antelope Valley had been a white enclave — a refuge from Los Angeles. When immigrants began moving in, hate groups saw their membership ranks grow as whites in the neighborhoods banded together. Keeling said Obama's candidacy is adding fear and uncertainty to an already volatile mix.

"This is different. This is new. This has never happened before," Keeling said of Obama's candidacy. "We're not doing anything extra, but we're kind of being more cognizant of things."

Candidacy Fits Into Ideology

Part of the problem is that Obama is playing into the neo-Nazi and white supremacist narrative, said Brian Levin, who studies hate and extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

What the groups were saying — "Jews and blacks coming out of the urban areas are going to take over this white nation of ours" — has occurred, he said.

You only have to look to the Internet to see how white supremacist leaders such as David Duke are using Obama to rally their troops. Duke has called Obama a "visual aid for hate groups."

He says an Obama presidency would provide indisputable proof that whites have lost control of America.

"This is a cultural and racial battlefront," said Levin. "Barack Obama is symbol No. 1 of the worst the future has to offer."

While Obama may be an easy focus of discussion for haters, he hasn't unified them. In fact, in many ways, he has managed to divide the movement.

Catalyst For A Race War

Tim Zaal, a former white supremacist from Los Angeles, says the split Obama has created is almost generational — between old-school Ku Klux Klan types who are viscerally against a black man running for president and a new wave of haters.

"You have the more — kind-of strange to say it — progressive white attitude: The worse it gets, the better," said Zaal.

Zaal says the new generation is particularly focused on what they see as the coming race war. They have been trying to spark one for years. Some think, even hope, that an Obama presidency will do just that.

Zaal says some will actually vote for Obama to send the country into a tailspin. "The faster this country falls, the sooner white revolution will arise," he said.

That mindset is all over the neo-Nazi Web sites. On one, a man with the pen name "LastOfMyKind" wrote, "Could it be that the nomination of Obama finally sparks a sense of unity in white voters? I would propose that this threat of black rule may very well be the thing that finally scares some sense back into complacent whites."

This is what worries the police and the FBI.

How Arnold Schwarzenegger treats disabled people

Where should budget cuts be applied? Arnold changed California regulations to deny services to disabled people where otherwise they qualify for services. People were qualified before 2003 with fewer disabilities than individuals applying after 2003. While more severely disabled people are given nothing, those with fewer disabilities will continue to get services under the new regulations.

This link is self explanatory:

Barack Obama's grandmother dies in Hawaii

Just hours before Election Day, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama announced that his 86-year-old grandmother died Monday after a battle with cancer. The news comes a week after he visited Madelyn Payne Dunham in Hawaii after she fell seriously ill following a hip fracture. His grandfather Stanley Dunham died in 1992.

Barack Obama's Grandmother Dies
By HERBERT SAMPLE, AP
Nov. 3, 2008
Barack Obama's grandmother, whose personality and bearing shaped much of the life of the Democratic presidential contender, has died, Obama announced Monday, one day before the election.

Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86. Obama announced the news from the campaign trail in Charlotte, N.C. The joint statement with his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng said Dunham died peacefully late Sunday night after a battle with cancer.

They said: "She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances."

Obama learned of her death Monday morning while he was campaigning in Jacksonville, Fla. He planned to go ahead with campaign appearances.

The family said a private ceremony would be held later.

Last month, Obama took a break from campaigning and flew to Hawaii to be with Dunham as her health declined.

Obama said the decision to go to Hawaii was easy to make, telling CBS that he "got there too late" when his mother died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at 53, and wanted to make sure "that I don't make the same mistake twice."

The Kansas-born Dunham and her husband, Stanley, raised their grandson for several years so he could attend school in Honolulu while their daughter and her second husband lived overseas. Her influence on Obama's manner and the way he viewed the world was substantial, the candidate himself told millions watching him accept his party's nomination in Denver in August.

"She's the one who taught me about hard work," he said. "She's the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me."

Obama's nickname for his grandmother was "Toot," a version of the Hawaiian word for grandmother, tutu. Many of his speeches describe her working on a bomber assembly line during World War II.

Madelyn and Stanley Dunham married in 1940, a few weeks before she graduated from high school. Their daughter, Stanley Ann, was born in 1942. After several moves to and from California, Texas, Washington and Kansas, Stanley Dunham's job landed the family in Hawaii.

It was there that Stanley Ann later met and fell in love with Obama's father, a Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama Sr. They had met in Russian class at the University of Hawaii. Their son was born in August 1961, but the marriage didn't last long. She later married an Indonesian, Lolo Soetoro, another university student she met in Hawaii.

Obama moved to Indonesia with his mother and stepfather at age 6. But in 1971, her mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents. He stayed with the Dunhams until he graduated from high school in 1979.

In his autobiography, Obama wrote fondly of playing basketball on a court below his grandparents' 10th-floor Honolulu apartment, and looking up to see his grandmother watching...

Republican dirty tricks against Obama

Some Republicans are using race as a weapon against Barack Obama:

Voters Across Nation Hit by Dirty Tricks
By DEBORAH HASTINGS, AP
Nov. 3, 2008

...Complaints have surfaced in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions.

Over the weekend in Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal said fears of high voter turnout had prompted election officials to hold two elections — one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats.
In New Mexico, two Hispanic women filed a lawsuit last week claiming they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration authorities, even though they are U.S. citizens.

"He was questioning her status, saying that he needed to see her papers and documents to show that she was a U.S. citizen and was a legitimate voter," said Guadalupe Bojorquez, speaking on behalf of her mother, Dora Escobedo, a 67-year-old Albuquerque resident who speaks only Spanish. "He totally, totally scared the heck out of her."

In Pennsylvania, e-mails appeared linking Democrat Barack Obama to the Holocaust. "Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, Nov. 4," said the electronic message, paid for by an entity calling itself the Republican Federal Committee. "Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake."...

A Republican recently accused her challenger of "taking Godless money." Isn't all money Godless?

Terrific Nova special about fractals

Photo at left is the original Mandelbrot set.

Click here to see four up close details of the image at left.

What do movie special effects, the stock market, heart attacks, and the rings of Saturn have in common?

They're all connected by a revolutionary new branch of math called fractals, which changed the way we see the world and opened up a vast new territory to scientific analysis and understanding.

NOVA tells the dramatic story of a group of pioneering mathematicians who developed fractals from a curiosity that few took seriously to an approach that is touching nearly every branch of understanding - including what happened after the Big Bang and the ultimate fate of our universe.

Whose idea was this? Did George Bush really want all this power?

In a May 2007 White House directive, the Bush administration gave itself control over all public institutions, even at the state and local level, as well as tribal areas and some private institutions in the event of an emergency.

Did any of the people who worked on this directive study American history? Do they understand the true source of our country's power? It's our democracy, our institutions. You can't throw out checks and balances, and two out of three branches of the federal government, and still call ourselves a democracy. We would have a monarchy.

TOP 5 REASONS OBAMA SUPPORTERS SHOULDN'T REST EASY

Australia premieres "open phone tests"

Phone a friend in exams
August 20, 2008


A Sydney girls' school is redefining the concept of cheating by allowing students to "phone a friend" and use the internet and i-Pods during exams. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

"Presbyterian Ladies' College at Croydon is giving the assessment method a trial run with year 9 English students and plans to expand it to all subjects by the end of the year.

... An English teacher, Dierdre Coleman said her students were being encouraged to access information from the internet, their mobile phones and podcasts played on mp3s as part of a series of 40-minute tasks. But to discourage plagiarism, they are required to cite all sources they use.

"In terms of preparing them for the world, we need to redefine our attitudes towards traditional ideas of 'cheating'," Ms Coleman said. "Unless the students have a conceptual understanding of the topic or what they are working on, they can't access bits and pieces of information to support them in a task effectively.

"In their working lives they will never need to carry enormous amounts of information around in their heads. What they will need to do is access information from all their sources quickly and they will need to check the reliability of their information."

... International education consultant, Marc Prensky threw out the following challenge to educators in a British Educational Communications and Technology Agency publication: "What if we allowed the use of mobile phones and instant messaging to collect information during exams, redefining such activity from 'cheating' to 'using our tools and including the world in our knowledge base'?

"Our kids already see this on television. 'You can use a lifeline to win $1 million,' said one. 'Why not to pass a stupid test?' I have begun advocating the use of open phone tests ... Being able to find and apply the right information becomes more important than having it all in your head."

Fear of HIV in St. Louis high school

School Tests Students Amid HIV Scare
By CHERYL WITTENAUER, AP
Oct. 23, 2008

NORMANDY, Mo. Students at a suburban St. Louis high school headed to the gymnasium for HIV testing this week after an infected person told health officials as many as 50 teenagers might have been exposed to the virus that causes AIDS.

Officials refused to give details on who the person was or how the students at Normandy High School might have been exposed, but the district is consulting with national AIDS organizations as it tries to minimize the fallout and prevent the infection — and misinformation — from spreading.

"There's potential for stigma for all students regardless of whether they're positive or negative," Normandy School District spokesman Doug Hochstedler said Thursday. "The board wants to be sure all children are fully educated."
A teacher in a neighboring district singled out a girl who dates someone at Normandy High and instructed her to get tested, Hochstedler said. A competing school's football team initially balked at playing Normandy's 8-0 team.

Jasmine Lane, a 16-year-old sophomore, said her boyfriend from a neighboring high school broke up with her on learning of the news — after she bought them tickets to homecoming.

"I cried so hard," she said.

Hochstedler said that as far as he knows, no other district has had to handle a similar situation. Students at the school of 1,300 are being tested voluntarily, and the district is getting advice on the best ways to support kids in crisis.
Sophomore Tevin Baldwin said that many of his classmates in this working-class city of about 5,000 residents want to transfer out of the district, which encompasses other towns.

"Nobody knows what's going on," he said. The district declined to respond to his assertion...

Some ACORN workers did what lots of low-paid registration workers do:

Registration workers for all political parties often get paid a set amount for every person they register. A few of them create phony registrations to get a few more bucks. This does not mean that anyone will show up on voting day and claim to be fictional person whose name is on the registration. The goal is, and has been for as long as I can remember, to get a few extra bucks to live on.

It's wrong of Ohio Republicans to claim that ACORN itself has done anything wrong, much less that it is trying to steal an election.

It is possible that Republicans simply want an excuse to show up at the polls themselves, and challenge legitimate voters in order to get them to leave without voting.

PRESS RELEASE

10/15/08 - During the debate today, Obama declared that solving our education problem is a major solution to our financial crisis. The answer to how to fix our schools will be presented this Saturday. Neither presidential candidate appears to know the answer. Do not miss this event.



Contact: Josh Fertel, River City Marketing at 703-218-1750 or josh@rivercitymarketing.com, or Myra Sawyers, EPIC, at 571-233-6735 or myrasawyers@epicreform.org, www.teachermarch.org, www.epicreform.org or Karen Horwitz, NAPTA, at 312-397-1940 or teacherkh@aol.com. (cell during March - 312 498-9074)



Thousands of Teachers Expected to March on Nation's Capitol Oct. 18 to Bring Attention to Teacher Abuse; Some Wearing Bags on Heads to Hide Identities; Presidential Campaigns Alerted

Thousands of teachers and their supporters, some wearing paper bags on their heads to hide their identities, are expected to converge on the nation’s Capitol Oct. 18 to send a strong message that abuse of teachers must stop because teachers are the anchors of the education system. The organizers have alerted both presidential campaigns about this momentous event.


Education leaders organizing the rally say that the country's educational system is about to implode as have our financial institutions and for the very same reasons - a lack of regulations and greed. In addition to marching on the National Mall, there will be an array of speakers whose message is to convey just why schools are so dysfunctional and what must be done for education reform to work.


This march will be an historic presentation of teachers as individuals, rather than as extensions of the teachers' unions, sponsored by Educators for Progressive Instructional Change (EPIC), a non-profit organization focused on empowering teachers to dramatically impact the process of education reform. These teachers will talk about how administrations operating with too much power and hollow regulations have held schools hostage from the public.


Karen Horwitz, M.Ed., Chicago area native and author of the book, White Chalk Crime: The REAL Reason Schools Fail (2008), will speak about how teachers have been silent about what has been really going on in our schools due to their fear of teacher abuse. (WhiteChalkCrime.com offers more information about her book as well as an opportunity to blog about education concerns.) In 2002, she cofounded the National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse (NAPTA) to unify what she calls a disenfranchised group of teachers and an intentionally divided group of parents and teachers.


This group, whose website is EndTeacherAbuse.org, now exceeds 1,000 members, all of whom are eager to attest to the depravity of teacher abuse and its negative effects on students, but up until now have had no voice because it is simply too unbelievable that a first class nation could be treating its teachers this way, Horwitz said. Teachers from her group will be present at the rally later this month to explain why legislators must bail out teachers from the powerless state in which they find themselves despite their unions, she said.


However, due to the imbalanced playing field in education, few teachers can afford to expose what Horwitz called in her book the "EducRAT$" with their unlimited access to propaganda that blames teachers, parents and children and that instead protects those who are cannibalizing American schools. Thus, EPIC is providing bags to hide the faces of currently employed teachers who fear retribution from school authorities or their unions.


“We need to send a strong message to draw attention to the need for educational reform in this country. Teachers need to Speak Up and Speak Out for their profession and their students, and teachers need to be given the power to do so,” explained Myra Sawyers, M.Ed., President and Founder of EPIC. “This is an advocacy movement FOR teachers. It’s about giving teachers the support, power and respect they deserve.”

“We are holding the March in Washington D.C. because that is where we can create the biggest visual message for all government leaders and the public,” Sawyers said. “Teachers must have a greater role in influencing standards and policies. Amazingly, teachers – those who actually know what education needs – are not consulted. So EPIC is here to give teachers a voice. We want to empower teachers to change the educational world."


From 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, Oct. 18, related events will be held on the Mall in preparation for the March, including presentations by nationally-recognized education reformers who will engage the public in lively discussions about the challenges of modern educational practices. From 1-4 p.m., the rally and Teachers' March will take place at the foot of the Capitol as what organizers are calling a solid show of unified concern. Registration tables, vendors and supporters will be visible along the mall.


"This will be a day of answers, solutions, and enlightenment for all who care about education," Horwitz said. Topics from teacher shortages to avoiding more Columbine shootings will be covered. Participation is free and advance registration is encouraged. Register at www.teachermarch.org.


About EPIC
Educators for Progressive Instructional Change (EPIC) is a non-profit organization focused on empowering teachers to dramatically impact the process of education reform. It was created by teachers and teacher advocates with the belief that today's educators have the power to transform the teaching profession and must play an essential role in developing education policy. It is not a Political Action Committee (PAC) but a non-partisan organization with no political mandate. EPIC does not lobby for any particular issue. Rather, it inspires teachers to become their own self-advocates. To achieve this objective, EPIC offers members a speaker series, annual conferences, policy forums, activism workshops, participation in political activities, one-on-one support and guidance, an annual newsletter, and other events and activities. Visit www.epicreform.org for additional details about EPIC.


About NAPTA
National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse (NAPTA) is a non-profit, non partisan organization founded to educate the public about teacher abuse and its role in obstructing school reform. In addition to helping teachers, educators, parents and citizens navigate within an education system that is increasingly hostile toward them, it is uniting disenfranchised teachers and giving them a voice. Its 1000 plus members post their stories of teacher abuse and thus student abuse at its website: EndTeacherAbuse.org. Membership is free and all who care about children, teachers, and this nation's future are welcome to join.



For more information, please contact Josh Fertel, River City Marketing at 703-218-1750 or josh@rivercitymarketing.com, or Myra Sawyers, EPIC, at 571-233-6735 or myrasawyers@epicreform.org, www.teachermarch.org, www.epicreform.org or Karen Horwitz, NAPTA, at 312-397-1940 or teacherkh@aol.com. (cell during March - 312 498-9074)

Anti-gay marriage: Conservative Christians are forced to violate the duty to love, and not to judge

Is gay marriage good or bad?

It seems to me that two people committing to love and support each other is a good thing. After all, sex with more than one partner can be dangerous since there are vicious viruses and bacteria that have chosen this avenue to infect human beings.

But let's say, for argument's sake, that we want to consider the possibility that some Christians are correct and that the Old Testament proves that God is against gay sex.

While we consider this, we must keep in mind that Jesus made it abundantly clear that love and kindness are the guiding principles of the New Testament, and that the Old Testament also says, "Judgment is mine, sayeth the Lord."

What we are left with are competing moral principles.

Some people don't know how to weigh competing moral principles. They just choose
one and ignore the others.

Conservative Christians today must weigh the options; they must violate one or more of their principles. If they choose to maintain hostility toward gays, they must violate the directives to be kind and loving, and not to judge.

School board considers endorsement of Prop. 8
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
October 14, 2008

VISTA: The school board is to decide whether to formally endorse Proposition 8, the state ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriage in California, at its meeting Thursday night.

Vista board president Jim Gibson said he asked that a resolution in support of Proposition 8 be added to the agenda. The meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the multipurpose building at Temple Heights Elementary School, 1550 Temple Heights Drive in Oceanside.

The ballot measure arose in May after the state Supreme Court struck down Proposition 22, an initiative that voters passed in 2000 to ban same-sex marriages. Proposition 8 seeks to amend the state Constitution to recognize marriage as only between a man and a woman.

Yesterday, Gibson said he's urging the board of the Vista Unified School District to support Proposition 8 in part because the California Teachers Association opposes it.

“These types of agendas filter into education, so if this decision by the judges stands as is that means the school will eventually have to teach that it's acceptable for two dads, two moms type-of-thing,” Gibson said.

[Blogger's note: Two dads and two moms is a fact. Why teach children to condemn? I don't believe people have a choice whether to be gay or not. Heterosexuals can't choose to be gay, and vis versa. Why not just accept that this is how human beings (and other species) happen to be, and that there's nothing we can do about it?]

In July, trustees of the Grossmont Union High School District voted 4-0, with one abstention, to endorse Proposition 8. Trustee Richard Hoy, who abstained, said at the time that the measure didn't directly affect the public schools. –B.L.

When is an elementary school like an anti-Obama rally?

McCain booed after trying to calm anti-Obama crowd
By PHILIP ELLIOTT and BETH FOUHY
AP
October 10, 2008

The anger is getting raw at Republican rallies and John McCain is acting to tamp it down. McCain was booed by his own supporters Friday when, in an abrupt switch from raising questions about Barack Obama's character, he described the Democrat as a "decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."

[This situation is similar to what happened at Castle Park Elementary in Chula Vista, California when the school district supported teachers who claimed that a fellow teacher might kill them and possibly "everyone else" at the school. In fact, the district forced those teachers to repeat their false accusations under oath. Lowell Billings, the current superintendent, has been dealing with the fallout from the actions that he and the school board approved. The teachers who initiated the problem committed only misdemeanors, but the district's actions included felonies. The California Teachers Association was concerned because two of the local affiliate's past presidents (and Peg Myers, the current CVE president) were involved in the original wrongdoing, and so CTA lawyers also suborned perjury.]

A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events this week as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Obama. Some in the audience are making it personal, against the Democrat.

Shouts of "traitor," "terrorist," "treason," "liar," and even "off with his head" have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.

McCain changed his tone Friday when supporters at a town hall pressed him to be rougher on Obama. A voter said, "The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight." Another said Obama would lead the U.S. into socialism. Another said he did not want his unborn child raised in a country led by Obama.

"If you want a fight, we will fight," McCain said. "But we will be respectful. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments." When people booed, he cut them off.
"I don't mean that has to reduce your ferocity," he said. "I just mean to say you have to be respectful."

Presidential candidates are accustomed to raucous rallies this close to Election Day and welcome the enthusiasm. But they are also traditionally monitors of sorts from the stage. Part of their job is to leaven proceedings if tempers run ragged and to rein in an out-of-bounds comment from the crowd.

Not so much this week, at GOP rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and other states.

When a visibly angry McCain supporter in Waukesha, Wis., on Thursday told the candidate "I'm really mad" because of "socialists taking over the country," McCain stoked the sentiment. "I think I got the message," he said. "The gentleman is right." He went on to talk about Democrats in control of Congress.
On Friday, McCain rejected the bait.

"I don't trust Obama," a woman said. "I have read about him. He's an Arab."
McCain shook his head in disagreement, and said:

"No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with (him) on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign is all about."

He had drawn boos with his comment: "I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."
The anti-Obama taunts and jeers are noticeably louder when McCain appears with Palin, a big draw for GOP social conservatives. She accused Obama this week of "palling around with terrorists" because of his past, loose association with a 1960s radical. If less directly, McCain, too, has sought to exploit Obama's Chicago neighborhood ties to William Ayers, while trying simultaneously to steer voters' attention to his plans for the financial crisis.

The Alaska governor did not campaign with McCain on Friday, and his rally in La Crosse, Wis., earlier Friday was much more subdued than those when the two campaigned together. Still, one woman shouted "traitor" when McCain told voters Obama would raise their taxes.

Volunteers worked up chants from the crowd of "U.S.A." and "John McCain, John McCain," in an apparent attempt to drown out boos and other displays of negative energy.

The Secret Service confirmed Friday that it had investigated an episode reported in The Washington Post in which someone in Palin's crowd in Clearwater, Fla., shouted "kill him," on Monday, meaning Obama. There was "no indication that there was anything directed at Obama," Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren told AP. "We looked into it because we always operate in an atmosphere of an abundance of caution."

Palin, at a fundraiser in Ohio on Friday, told supporters "it's not negative and it's not mean-spirited" to scrutinize Obama's iffy associations.

But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania an author of 15 books on politics, says the vitriol has been encouraged by inflammatory words from the stage.

"Red-meat rhetoric elicits emotional responses in those already disposed by ads using words such as 'dangerous' 'dishonorable' and 'risky' to believe that the country would be endangered by election of the opposing candidate," she said.

Doctors Without Borders

Charity watchdogs at the American Institute of Philanthropy and Charity Navigator give Doctors Without Borders the highest ratings. Worth Magazine says, "They focus tightly on their missions and don't venture into areas in which they lack expertise. And they involve local leaders in program design and implementation, which helps ensure lasting results after they move on."

Doctors Without Borders won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize.

Sarah Palin tried to fire librarian who refused to censor books

Sarah Palin seems to have Jimmy Carter's big negative (he was a micromanager) without his positives.

Sarah has apparently been quite the busybody, going to the Wasilla library before she was sworn in as mayor to ask the librarian if she would censor books. The folks at the Library of Congress might want to keep an eye peeled for a tough-talking brunette who's going to be really upset to know that they keep just about EVERYTHING that's printed.

Palin pressured Wasilla librarian
By RINDI WHITE
Anchorage Daily News
September 4th, 2008

WASILLA -- Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.

According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn't fully support her and had to go.

Emmons had been city librarian for seven years and was well liked. After a wave of public support for her, Palin relented and let Emmons keep her job...

When evangelical Christians were liberals

I was surprised to find out that William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was an evangelical Christian. He is the hero of the recent movie Amazing Grace.

In the United States over the past few decades, evangelicals have leaned to the far right, more interested in preventing what they see as misbehavior in other people's bedrooms than in making sure that all human beings are treated with respect and decency.

But the old days, when an evangelical forced the abolition of the slave trade in England, may be coming back.

Are evangelical Christians returning to social activism? It seems that they are. More evangelicals are fighting for justice for all, and preservation of the environment.

Should we toughen the weak by taunting them?

Police aren't the only ones who believe in showing contempt for the weak. It's a strategy also used by teachers, school administrators and others who "care for" young people.


Family Calls for New Police Policy for Suicide Threats
CW San Diego Channel 6
8/07/08

The family of a 20-year-old Oceanside man who barricaded himself inside his home, then committed suicide is calling for change. They say their son's death didn't have to happen, and a police negotiator may have pushed him over the edge.

His parents, Bill and Julie Hillestad, are now calling for a policy change because of the way an Oceanside Police Department negotiator handled their son's case. Sattaur had locked himself inside his home with a gun, threatening suicide after a break-up with his long-time girlfriend.

This is part of his exchange with an Oceanside police negotiator.

Police Negotiator: "Grant shut up and listen to me. Will you do that, keep your mouth shut. You need to come out of the house so other people can go home."

Police Negotiator: "Are you going to be a coward to stay in the house or are you going to be a man and come outside and take care of your problems?"

Sattaur: "I don't know"

Police Negotiator: "So you're a coward?"

Sattaur: "Yes"

The ACLU of San Diego has joined Sattaur's parents to bring attention to the case. "The Oceanside Police Department's whole system for responding to depressed people contemplating suicide is broken, " says ACLU Executive Director Kevin Keenan... "It's policies treat suicidal patients the same as barricaded homicidal individuals and hostage takers," says Keenan.

An Oceanside Police spokesman says Sattaur's death is tragic, but their negotiator did nothing wrong. They have no plans to change their policies...

video




ON THE OTHER HAND: A DEATH THAT TOUCHED THE HEARTS OF OCEANSIDE POLICE


Canine commemoration: K-9 units pay tribute to Stryker, fallen Oceanside police dog
By: PAUL SISSON
North County Times
January 15, 2008
A funeral service for Stryker, the Oceanside police dog who died after falling from the Coronado Bay Bridge on New Year's Eve, drew about 100 police dogs and their handlers to North County from throughout Southern California on Monday.

Oceanside Police Officer Kedrick Sadler, speaking publicly for the first time since the dog was killed, thanked his canine partner for his loyalty, discipline and bravery on the bridge that night.

"The only thing I regret is that I was not there to comfort you in your final moments and tell you that you did a good job," Sadler said..



Oceanside remembers Stryker
1/17/2008
By Lance Cpl. Shannon E. Mcmillan
Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton

... OPD canine Officer Stryker [a dog] sacrifice[d] his life in the line of duty.

People and dogs from all over California mourned the loss of Officer Stryker at a memorial here Jan. 14.

...The suspect struggled to his feet and hurled himself from the bridge, carrying with him one of Oceanside’s bravest peace keepers.

“You died doing what you do best, getting the bad guys,” said Sadler, Stryker’s handler and police officer of Oceanside K-9 unit. “With a selfless act to get the bad guy, you lost your life.”

Stryker touched the heart of many police officers’ in the K-9 unit.

...said Manual Villa Nueva..."Stryker was dedicated to the job. He never showed weakness and gave 110 percent..."

American Jews and Sarah Palin

Poor Sarah Palin. Belonging to a judgmental religion can backfire. I think it's arrogant to claim that God intentionally caused harm to one's enemies. Was it God's doing when some crazed person attacked one of their churches? Of course not.


Politico
Jewish voters may be wary of Palin
By BEN SMITH
9/2/08

Barack Obama has struggled for 18 months to lock down the support of a traditionally Democratic group, Jewish voters.

In the past week, John McCain may have helped Obama with his Jewish problem by choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate...

An illustration of that gap came just two weeks ago, when Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the executive director of Jews for Jesus.

Palin’s pastor, Larry Kroon, introduced Brickner on Aug. 17, according to a transcript of the sermon on the church’s website.

“He’s a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism,” Kroon said.

Brickner then explained that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jewish.

“The Jewish community, in particular, has a difficult time understanding this reality,” he said...

Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity.

"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It's very real. When [Brickner's son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can't miss it."

Palin was in church that day, Kroon said, though he cautioned against attributing Brickner’s views to her...

VP choice Sarah Palin and Britney Spears' mom: what's the difference?

The basic difference between Sarah Palin and Britney Spears' mom (both have been in the news recently as a result of their underage daughters becoming pregnant) seems to be political. Spears accepted silently all the discussion of the problem of pregnant unmarried teenagers.

Sarah Palin is suddenly trying to stop the discussion of family values.

It's quite clear that abstinence-only sex education doesn't work for many teenagers. Sarah Palin needs to discuss that subject.

Then there's the subject of communication with teenagers. I simply don't believe that Palin informed John McCain of her daughter's pregnancy. I don't think Palin covered it up, either. I think she didn't know.

How could she not know her daughter is 5 months pregnant? I suspect that the pregnancy is not that far advanced.

I think Bristol Palin was afraid to tell her mother because her mother is unable to deal with reality. Not surprisingly, Palin wants to silence discussion of the matter, not open up to the American people about any realization that she might have been wrong when she opposed sex education that teaches about birth control and cut food and shelter programs for pregnant teens in Alaska.

Good teacher, bad teacher: Women sabotaging women in the workplace

Do women in the workplace sabotage each other? Some of us have noticed this. Below is an essay by a woman born in 1982.

Washington Post
by Hannah Seligson
Aug. 30, 2000

"...Inspired by my own rocky entrance into the work world, I decided to interview other young women and discovered that many of them, like me, were facing a steep workplace learning curve. What was it, I wondered, that was making our first career steps so wobbly when we had been so accomplished and self-assured in school?

Every workplace is different, but certain patterns began to emerge. I experienced and heard of instances when some women, instead of helping a new female colleague, tried to undermine her. Rather than giving “the new girl” the tools to succeed, they might try to sabotage her advancement.

... Women, I have found, can let perfectionism stop them from speaking up or taking risks...

Sarah Palin's fuzzy thinking about pregnant teenagers

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin wrote in her line-item veto (note the initials "SP" in the above document) in this copy of a 2008 spending bill obtained by The Washington Post.

People who make harsh judgments of others are vulnerable when their own shortcomings are exposed. Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is now one of those people.

Palin cut back on help for other people's pregnant teenage daughters, apparently because she found those girls undeserving of society's support. She also opposed teaching teenagers about contraception. I imagine she's more surprised than I am that her seventeen-year-old daughter is pregnant.

Washington Post
By Paul Kane
Sept. 2, 2008
...Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million.

...According to Passage House's web site, its purpose is to provide "young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives" and help teen moms "become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families."

Palin's own daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant and has plans to wed...

Earlier today the Associated Press reported that Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, opposed funding to prevent teen pregnancies, a position that Palin also took as governor. "The explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support," she wrote in a 2006 questionnaire distributed among gubernatorial candidates.

Reporters asked McCain in November 2007 whether he supported grants for sex education in the United States, whether such programs should include directions for using contraceptives and whether he supports President Bush's policy of promoting abstinence.

"Ahhh, I think I support the president's policy," McCain said.

Did the founding fathers say the pledge of allegiance?

From Daily Kos
by J L Finch
Aug 31, 2008

Here is [VP candidate Sarah] Palin's response to a candidate questionnaire for the Alaska 2006 gubernatorial race:

Are you offended by the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
SP: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance


First, the Pledge of Allegiance was not written by the Founding Fathers. It was written much later. Secondly, the words "under God" were not originally part of the Pledge. "Under God" was added even later.

Wikipedia on the Pledge of Allegiance:

The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy (1855-1931), a Baptist minister, a Christian Socialist, and the cousin of Socialist Utopian novelist Edward Bellamy (1850-1898).

Bellamy's original "Pledge of Allegiance" was published in the September 8th issue of the popular children's magazine The Youth's Companion as part of the National Public-School Celebration of Columbus Day, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America, conceived by James B. Upham.

Bellamy's original Pledge read, "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

...In New York City on April 22, 1951, the Board of Directors of the Knights of Columbus adopted a resolution to amend their recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance at the opening of each of the meetings of the 800 Fourth Degree Assemblies of the Knights of Columbus by addition of the words "under God" after the words "one nation..."

Maylasia shuts down political blog

San Diego school boards and government entities are becoming more and more secretive, much like repressive governments around the world.

Secrecy in government is the enemy of democracy, and Americans must work to keep the democracy we have.

Malaysia censors blog after poor poll results
Financial Times.com
By John Burton in Singapore
August 29 2008

Malaysia's leading political blog was being blocked yesterday in what was seen as a crackdown on internet websites credited with contributing to government losses in this year's general election.

The move came as former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was being sworn in as the new opposition leader following a by-election victory this week that returned him to parliament for the first time in a decade.

Mr Anwar vowed to mount a no-confidence vote against the government by midSeptember.

The Malaysia Today website was blocked by state-owned Telekom Malaysia, the country's leading internet service provider, on the orders of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, which said comments posted on it were "insensitive, bordering on incitement".

The MCMC action represents an apparent reversal of government promises not to censor the internet, except for pornographic websites. The policy was introduced in the 1990s to encourage foreign investment in the showcase Multimedia Super Corridor, near Kuala Lumpur...

[Blogger's note: Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff & Holtz, public entity lawyers in San Diego, are trying to shut down this blogger. See Citizen Media Law Project.]

Covering up is hard to do: China lied about a gymnast's age

Hacker uncovers 'proof' that Chinese gymnast is underage
From (London) Times Online
August 21, 2008
Jane Macartney in Beijing

A determined computer expert has delved into cached pages on the Internet to unearth Chinese official documents showing a gymnast who took gold, edging Britain’s Beth Tweddle into fourth place, may indeed be underage.

Controversy over whether He Kexin, gold medallist in the uneven bars, is under the minimum age of 16 has surrounded her participation in the Beijing Olympics. The latest challenge over the age of the tiny Olympian comes from the discovery through a cyberspace maze of Chinese official documents listing her date of birth.

She certainly does not look as if she has reached the minimum competing age of 16. However China says her passport, issued in February, gives her birthday on January 1, 1992, and the International Olympic Committee has said proof from her passport is good enough...

The latest unofficial investigation was carried out by 'Stryde', a computer security expert for the New York-based Intrepidus Group, whose site Stryde Hax revealed a detailed forensic search for Ms He’s age.

The blogger first simply tried Google, only to find that an official listing by the Chinese sports administration that had given her age could no longer be accessed. Next he tried the Google cache, only to find that Ms He’s name had been removed.

So then he tried the cache of Chinese search engine Baidu. There, he found that Baidu lists two spreadsheets in Ms He's name, both giving her date of birth as January 1, 1994 – making her 14 years and 220 days old and too young to compete at these Olympics.

The lists were compiled by the General Administration of Sport of China...

God made gorillas a lot like us

Mourning Gorilla Holds On to Baby's Body
AP
August 20, 2008

A gorilla at a zoo in the German city of Muenster is refusing to let go of her dead baby's body several days after it died of unknown causes.

Mama Gorilla Grieves for BabyFrank Augstein, APA gorilla at a German zoo is having trouble accepting the death of her baby. Officials at the Allwetter Zoo in Muenster said Wednesday that 11-year-old Gana has been carrying her baby's body around for several days...the 3-month-old male baby died on Saturday but its 11-year-old mother continues to carry its body around. Zuehlke says such behavior is not uncommon to gorillas.

Zuehlke says the mother "is mourning and must say goodbye." The mother gorilla is named Gana.

Who gets spanked the most in school?

Study Finds Minority Kids Paddled More
By LIBBY QUAID, AP
Aug. 20, 2008

Paddlings, swats, licks. A quarter of a million schoolchildren got them last year -- and blacks, American Indians and kids with disabilities got a disproportionate share of the punishment, according to a study by a human rights group.

Even little kids can be paddled. Heather Porter, who lives in Crockett, Texas, was startled to hear her little boy, then 3, say he'd been spanked at school. Porter was never told, despite a policy at the public preschool that parents be notified.

"We were pretty ticked off, to say the least. The reason he got paddled was because he was untying his shoes and playing with the air conditioner thermostat," Porter said. "He was being a 3-year-old."

For the study, which was being released Wednesday, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union used Education Department data to show that, while paddling has been declining, racial disparity persists. Researchers also interviewed students, parents and school personnel in Texas and Mississippi, states that account for 40 percent of the 223,190 kids who were paddled at least once in the 2006-2007 school year.

Porter could have filled out a form telling the school not to paddle her son, if only she had realized he might be paddled.

Yet many parents find that such forms are ignored, the study said.

Widespread paddling can make it unlikely that forms will be checked. A teacher interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Tiffany Bartlett, said that when she taught in the Mississippi Delta, the policy was to lock the classroom doors when the bell rang, leaving stragglers to be paddled by an administrator patrolling the hallways. Bartlett now is a school teacher in Austin, Texas.

And even if schools make a mistake, they are unlikely to face lawsuits. In places where corporal punishment is allowed, teachers and principals generally have legal immunity from assault laws, the study said.

"One of the things we've seen over and over again is that parents have difficulty getting redress, if a child is paddled and severely injured, or paddled in violation of parents' wishes," said Alice Farmer, the study's author...

African American students are more than twice as likely to be paddled. The disparity persists even in places with large black populations, the study found. Similarly, Native Americans were more than twice as likely to be paddled, the study found.

The study also found:

-- In states where paddling is most common, black girls were paddled more than twice as often as white girls.
-- Boys are three times as likely to be paddled as girls.
-- Special education kids were more likely to be paddled...

Is USD afraid students might agree with Rosemary Radford Ruether? Sorry, students, that's not allowed.

USD revokes invitation to feminist theologian
By Sherry Saavedra
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
August 20, 2008

A University of San Diego decision rescinding a prestigious position to a Catholic feminist theologian has thrust it smack in the middle of a national debate over academic freedom versus adherence to church teachings.

Two national women's religious groups have sponsored a petition with more than 2,000 signatures demanding that she be allowed to assume the post.

USD is standing by its decision.

“Her public position and the symbol of this chair are in direct conflict,” said USD spokeswoman Pamela Gray Payton. “This chair is a powerful, visible symbol of Roman Catholic theology, and in Roman Catholic theology abortion is disallowed.”

The flap underscores a long-standing issue for American Catholic colleges: the debate over academic freedom versus fealty to Catholic doctrine...

Yang Peiyi's teeth weren't straight enough for the 2008 China Olympics opening ceremonies

The Communist leaders of China are a rigid, unimaginative bunch--but we knew that, right?

Recently a politburo member ordered Yang Peiyi, above, to be replaced at the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics by a girl who had a "more perfect" appearance. The other girl lip-synched to Peiyi's voice on tape.

Strict conformity is apparently required in China, and that applies to teeth as well as to behavior.

Now that they've become capitalists, the Communist leaders of China have no excuse for forbidding democracy. They don't have an ideological leg to stand on. Still, something tells me that democracy won't come to China for a very long time.

McCain's energy policy: stay away when there's a vote on solar and wind energy

Eight Strikes and You’re Out
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: August 12, 2008

"John McCain recently ...[told] a motorcycle convention that Congress needed to come back from vacation immediately and do something about America’s energy crisis. “Tell them to come back and get to work!” McCain bellowed.

"Sorry, but I can’t let that one go by. McCain knows why.

"It was only five days earlier, on July 30, that the Senate was voting for the eighth time in the past year on a broad, vitally important bill — S. 3335 — that would have extended the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and the production tax credits for building wind turbines and other energy-efficiency systems.

"Both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits — which expire in December — to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas. Unlike offshore drilling, these credits could have an immediate impact on America’s energy profile.

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has... missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn’t leave his office to vote..."

Evolution is happening in your local forest and fishpond

From the New York Times:

"Evolution should be taught — indeed, it should be central to beginning biology classes — for at least three reasons.

"First, it provides a powerful framework for investigating the world we live in. Without evolution, biology is merely a collection of disconnected facts, a set of descriptions. The astonishing variety of nature, from the tree shrew that guzzles vast quantities of alcohol every night to the lichens that grow in the Antarctic wastes, cannot be probed and understood...

The second reason for teaching evolution is that the subject is immediately relevant here and now. The impact we are having on the planet is causing other organisms to evolve — and fast. And I’m not talking just about the obvious examples: widespread resistance to pesticides among insects; the evolution of drug resistance in the agents of disease, from malaria to tuberculosis; the possibility that, say, the virus that causes bird flu will evolve into a form that spreads easily from person to person. The impact we are having is much broader.

For instance, we are causing animals to evolve just by hunting them. The North Atlantic cod fishery has caused the evolution of cod that mature smaller and younger than they did 40 years ago. Fishing for grayling in Norwegian lakes has caused a similar pattern in these fish. Human trophy hunting for bighorn rams has caused the population to evolve into one of smaller-horn rams. (All of which, incidentally, is in line with evolutionary predictions.)

Conversely, hunting animals to extinction may cause evolution in their former prey species. Experiments on guppies have shown that, without predators, these fish evolve more brightly colored scales, mature later, bunch together in shoals less and lose their ability to suddenly swim away from something. Such changes can happen in fewer than five generations. If you then reintroduce some predators, the population typically goes extinct...

The third reason to teach evolution ... concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence — or indeed, evidence of any kind — has permeated the Bush administration’s policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.

Moreover, since the science classroom is where a contempt for evidence is often first encountered, it is also arguably where it first begins to be cultivated...

Maybe we really aren't as decent as our parents were

Here's a story to make us ashamed: "The Descent of Man."

The New York Times offers a comparison by Maurice Isserman of the recent tragedy on K2 in Pakistan in which 11 climbers died with an earlier expedition on K2 fifty-five years ago.

The August 9, 2008 story says, "...Describing the chaotic events that ensued when a pinnacle of ice collapsed and swept away fixed ropes that climbers from several expeditions high on the mountain had counted on to aid their descent from the summit, Mr. van Rooijen lamented: "Everybody was fighting for himself, and I still do not understand why everybody were leaving each other."..."

100 years since Springfield, Illinois erupted

A white mob rioted for days in Springfield, the town where Lincoln was born.

On anniversary of race riot, Lincoln's hometown acknowledges events it ignored for generations
08-09-2008 1:02 PM
By CHRISTOPHER WILLS
Associated Press

Two days of terror. Black men tortured and hanged. A baby dead of exposure. Four white rioters shot by black defenders.

It wasn't America's first riot, and certainly not the last.

But this one was in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, the president who helped end slavery.

Today, Lincoln's city _ where Barack Obama launched his campaign to become the first black president _ is finally commemorating the events that erupted 100 years ago this month.

At the time, even respectable citizens came out to gawk at the smoldering rubble and a body hanging from a tree.

"His feet dangling and within reach ... the men and boys played with the corpse by swinging it back and forth against the building to hear the dull thud," a local newspaper reported.

Outraged activists helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in response to this "race war in the north."...

The riots led to 107 indictments and 85 arrests.

But witnesses, either sympathetic to the rioters or intimidated by them, were hard to find.

One mob leader killed herself rather than stand trial.

One man was sentenced to 30 days in jail for stealing a sword from a black veteran, and a teenager was sent to a reformatory for a few months.

The city power structure quickly played down the riot.

"This was not a race war at all," one newspaper claimed. In decades to come, the obituaries for key participants _ including the sheriff whose protection of his prisoners helped trigger the violence _ would contain no mention of the riot.

Broader, Bolder Approach to Education

In a recent blog, Eduwonkette writes about the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education described by Sunny Ladd, Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant, and introduces Dr. Suet-Ling Pong's reasearch regarding the effect of family situations and social programs on student learning:

"...In the U.S., children growing up in single-parent families are comparatively worse off in their math and science achievement, relative to similar children in two-parent families, than is true in other countries, and some European countries have much smaller achievement gaps between single-parent and two-parent families than do others.

"A country’s family policy environment is what makes the difference. Family policy takes many forms, including maternity and parental leave, child-care programming and subsidies, public after-school programs, and housing subsidies, to name a few. Countries which Pong and her colleagues describe as having strong family and welfare policies have smaller achievement gaps in math and science between children in single-parent and two-parent families than are found in other countries..."

UCSD designs robots to teach students

By DARRYN BENNETT
Voice of San DiegoJuly 29, 2008


"...A third year computer science graduate student, Whitehill and his colleagues are working to make a new generation of robots that would be effective and responsive teachers. They believe the key is to train them to recognize and respond to facial expressions, the way humans do naturally. Whitehill described the demonstration, part of his research at the University of California, San Diego's Machine Perception Laboratory, as "almost like having a remote control built into your face."...

Better safe than sorry: cell phones and brain cancer

Preliminary results from a study of people who use cell phones over a period of ten years has some doctors worried, including Ronald Haberman of the University of Pittsburg Cancer Institute.

But most doctors want to wait until the final results are in before they warn against cell phone use.

Cancer researcher warns staff to limit cell phone use
By Jennifer C. Yates and Seth Borenstein
ASSOCIATED PRESS
published in San Diego Union Tribune
July 24, 2008


Herberman...said it takes too long to get answers from science and that he believes people should take action now – especially when it comes to children.

“Really at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn't wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later,” Herberman said...

In the memo he sent to 3,000 faculty and staff members yesterday, he said children should use cell phones only for emergencies because their brains are still developing.

Adults should keep the phone away from the head and use a speaker or a wireless headset, he said...

A 2008 University of Utah analysis looked at nine studies – including some Herberman cites – with thousands of brain-tumor patients and concludes that “...The potential elevated risk of brain tumors after long-term cellular phone use awaits confirmation by future studies.”

...A driving force behind the memo was Devra Lee Davis, director of the university's center for environmental oncology.

“The question is, do you want to play Russian roulette with your brain?” she said. “I don't know that cell phones are dangerous. But I don't know that they are safe.”

Farewell, Jesse Helms

I didn't agree with Jesse Helms' politics, but I've come to believe that he was exactly what nature intended him to be. He clearly had an anterior cingulate cortex that forbade him to change.

Jesse Helms: a polarizer, not a compromiser
By LARRY MARGASAK
AP
2008-07-04

"Compromise, hell!" Jesse Helms screamed in a 1959 editorial that captured what would become the legacy of his Senate career and his place in the conservative movement.

Jesse Helms mostly was a polarizer, not a compromiser. He would rather win elections by a razor's edge than change his conservative positions.

Many of his colleagues in the congenial Senate "club" sought compromises on the toughest social issues. Jesse Helms wouldn't play along. He relished his nickname as "Senator No," the man who knew the Senate rules so well that he blocked legislation that violated his right-wing principles and nominees he couldn't stomach.

Have we forgotten the fundamentals of American patriotism?

The survival of American democracy depends on education, and we've been failing to teach our citizens the basic values of our democracy.

David S. Broder
Washington Post
July 4, 2008

...The ideas that define this country are found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as amplified by Supreme Court decisions and statutes in subsequent years. Those ideas have been tested in crisis and in war, and the leaders who steered the nation through those testing times are the heroes whose legacy we celebrate -- Washington, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts.

What disturbs the Bradley scholars is evidence that our generation is failing to educate the next one on the essentials of the American experiment..."

Black skin and patriotism

I've noticed that the most difficult relationships often involve the deepest love. So has Eugene Robinson:

Eugene Robinson
THE WASHINGTON POST
July 4, 2008

...think about the Buffalo Soldiers and the Tuskegee Airmen. Think about Dorie Miller, who, like so many black sailors in the segregated U.S. Navy of the 1940s, was relegated to kitchen duty – until Pearl Harbor, when Miller rushed up to the deck of the sinking battleship West Virginia, carried wounded sailors to safety and then raked Japanese planes with fire from a heavy machine gun until he ran out of ammunition.

Think about Colin Powell – but also think about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., a former Marine. And consider, as we celebrate Independence Day, how steadfast and complicated black patriotism has always been...

The fact that African-American patriotism is never simple doesn't mean it's in any way halfhearted; to the contrary, complicated relationships tend to be the deepest and strongest. It's a historical fact that black soldiers and sailors who fought overseas in World War II came home to Southern cities where they had to ride in the back of the bus – and that they were angry that the nation for which they had sacrificed would treat them this way. To some whites, I guess, it may seem logical to be suspicious of black patriotism – to believe that anger must somehow temper love of country.

Keep a low profile

Advice for followers:

"Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."
--Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711
English poet & satirist (1688 - 1744)


Advice for leaders:

"Be thou the first true merit to befriend, his praise is lost who stays till all commend."
--Alexander Pope

From Wikipedia:
Pope was born in the City of London to Alexander (senior, a linen merchant) and Edith Pope (née Turner), who were both Roman Catholic. Pope's education was affected by the laws in force at the time upholding the status of the established Church of England, which banned Catholics from teaching on pain of perpetual imprisonment. Pope was taught to read by his aunt and then sent to two surreptitious Catholic schools, at Twyford and at Hyde Park Corner. Catholic schools, while illegal, were tolerated in some areas.

From early childhood he suffered numerous health problems, including Pott's disease[3] (a form of tuberculosis affecting the spine) which deformed his body and stunted his growth, no doubt helping to end his life at the relatively young age of 56. He never grew beyond 1.37 metres (4 feet 6 inches) tall. Although he never married, he had many women friends and wrote them witty letters.

In 1700, his family was forced to move to a small estate in Binfield, Berkshire due to strong anti-Catholic sentiment and a statute preventing Catholics from living within 10 miles of either London or Westminster.

Food Crisis Felt Most Acutely By the Poor

The global food crisis is causing some U.S. families to adopt survival tactics of those in developing countries, says Raj Patel, former analyst for Food First, a leading food policy think-tank. Patel, author of "Stuffed and Starved," tells Liane Hansen that poverty is what leads to hunger.
May 18, 2008
NPR
Listen to story.

McCain's pastor likened Catholic Church to "great whore"

John McCain's pastor said that "God punished New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina for planning a gay pride parade."

Then there was this from Reuters UK by Jim Forsyth:

"A Texas evangelical leader who endorsed Republican presidential candidate John McCain earlier this year has apologized for anti-Catholic remarks that angered Church members and embarrassed McCain's campaign.

"John Hagee, pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, wrote a letter of apology to the Catholic League on Monday for comments in which he called the Church "apostate" and likened it to the "great whore" in a passage of the Bible..."

(http://uk.reuters.com/article/UKNews1/idUKN1343588920080513)

If you are wondering why Mr. Hagee said this, he has come up with an explanation. He made the statement, he says, "In my zeal to oppose anti-Semitism and bigotry in all its ugly forms..."

Clearly, we must be careful when judging others that we don't make an ironical spectacle of ourselves.

Retention: to flunk or not to flunk?

Voice of San Diego's Emily Alpert writes:

Getting Struggling Students Help Earlier

Parents don't like social promotion. They also don't like grade retention, which prevents kids from advancing a grade if they're failing academically. (If you don't believe that, check out this article about what happened when San Diego Unified let parents of failing students decide whether or not they would be retained.)

San Diego Unified has drafted a plan that aims to prevent both social promotion and holding kids back by directing help to struggling students earlier in the year. The new plan includes interventions at first, third and eighth grade, and will be up for approval by the school board on Tuesday.

Check out the plan HERE. The last page is a flow chart that shows the steps in the process, and what would happen to students who don't make the grade.


http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2008/05/12/this_just_in/180struggling050908.txt
May 9, 2008

Conservatives are happier; they are better at rationalizing inequalities

Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?
AOL News
Jeanna Bryner
2008-05-07
provided by Live Science

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one's social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.

If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.

"Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives," the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, "apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."

The results support and further explain a Pew Research Center survey from 2006, in which 47 percent of conservative Republicans in the U.S. described themselves as "very happy," while only 28 percent of liberal Democrats indicated such cheer.

The same rationalizing phenomena could apply to personal situations as well.

"There is no reason to think that the effects we have identified here are unique to economic forms of inequality," the researchers write. "Research suggests that highly egalitarian women are less happy in their marriages compared with their more traditional counterparts, apparently because they are more troubled by disparities in domestic labor."

The current study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/are-conservatives-happier-than-liberals/20080507160009990001

Mildred Loving: "We are not marrying the state."

Mildred Loving, black woman whose interracial marriage led to landmark ruling, dies at 68

05-05-2008
By DIONNE WALKER,
Associated Press Writer

RICHMOND, Va. (Associated Press) -- Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

"I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble _ and believed in love," Fortune told The Associated Press.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

"There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause," the court ruled in a unanimous decision.

Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero _ just a bride.

"It wasn't my doing," Loving said. "It was God's work."

Mildred Jeter was 11 when she and 17-year-old Richard began courting, according to Phyl Newbeck, a Vermont author who detailed the case in the 2004 book, "Virginia Hasn't Always Been for Lovers."

She became pregnant a few years later, she and Loving got married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Mildred told the AP she didn't realize it was illegal.

"I think my husband knew," Mildred said. "I think he thought (if) we were married, they couldn't bother us."

But they were arrested a few weeks after they returned to Central Point, their hometown in rural Caroline County north of Richmond. They pleaded guilty to charges of "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth," according to their indictments.

They avoided jail time by agreeing to leave Virginia - the only home they'd known - for 25 years. They moved to Washington for several years, then launched a legal challenge by writing to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who referred the case to the American Civil Liberties Union...

After the Supreme Court ruled, the couple returned to Virginia, where they lived with their children, Donald, Peggy and Sidney. Each June 12, the anniversary of the ruling, Loving Day events around the country mark the advances of mixed-race couples...

http://sandiego.cox.net/cci/newsnational/national?_mode=view&_state=maximized&view=article&id=D90FIFEGK&_action=validatearticle

Overbearing authorities punish father for giving son lemonade

I saw the menu this man looked at when he ordered lemonade for his son.

It said:
Beer
Lemonade
Peanuts

If it had been all alcoholic beverages on the menu, I wouldn't buy the man's story that he made a mistake. But who would guess that there would be NO non-alcholic beverages on the menu?


From CLCIK ON DETROIT
Dad's Oversight Lands Son In Foster Care
April 28, 2008


ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- An Ann Arbor couple's 7-year-old son ended up in foster care over Mike's Hard Lemonade.

Christopher Ratte, 47, a professor at University of Michigan, claims he accidentally gave his son, Leo, some of the alcoholic beverage at Comerica Park a few weeks ago. He said he didn't even know the alcoholic lemonade existed.

"I got a beer for myself and asked Leo if he wanted a lemonade because there is a sign that said, 'Mike's Lemonade,'" said Ratte.

He said he bought his son the drink at the beginning of the Tigers game and it wasn't until the ninth inning when a security guard noticed the bottle in Leo's hand.

The security guard asked Ratte if he knew it contained alcohol. He said he didn't and when he went to grab the bottle out of the child's hand, the security guard grabbed it first.

"It's just the simple fact that I didn’t know this brand and didn’t suspect some of the lemonade sold in ballparks are alcoholic."

A short time later, Ratte was being questioned by Detroit police at Children's Hospital, where the child was taken by ambulance.

The child said he was feeling a little nauseated, but showed no other symptoms of being intoxicated.

The security guard said the boy drank about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is about 5 percent alcohol.

However, the child's bloodwork detected no trace of alcohol.

The child remained in foster care for two days before his mother, Claire Zimmerman, a U-M architecture professor, was able to take their son home as long as the father relocated to a hotel.

It was two more weeks before the father could move back home. The last hearing closed the case.

Ratte and his wife have filed a formal complaint with the Child Protective Services ombudsman's office stating they thought the treatment was excessive.

"Fine this guy bought this drink for his son. We need to look into it, but we don't need to take the most extreme measures," Ratte said in reference to Child Protective Services.

Ratte has apologized for his mistake.

http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/16031059/detail.html

Pillars of the community are sometimes worse than the delinquents

Dungeon case stuns Europe's media

BBC News
April 29, 2008

The events in the eastern Austrian town of Amstetten are front-page news across Europe. As well as disgust at the revelations surrounding the actions of Josef Fritzl, there is disbelief that he escaped the notice of the authorities - and the suggestion that he may have had outside help.



LE PARISIEN - FRANCE
Austria ran out of superlatives to describe the horror suffered by Natascha Kampusch, kidnapped and isolated in a dungeon by her captor for eight long years. Overwhelmed, Austrians will not find words strong enough to convey the monstrous and diabolic history which has played out in secret for three decades at Amstetten.


LIBERATION - FRANCE
The Austrians are asking themselves: Why didn't social services, who visited the family several times, notice anything unusual? How could the neighbours who all know each other in this part of town not have realised anything? How was Josef able to live a double life for almost a quarter of a century? And what did his wife, who according to the investigators "didn't ask questions", really know?


DIE ZEIT - GERMANY
What does this say about a community, in which an authority figure can go about breaking this private taboo without any great difficulty for almost a quarter of a century? Is this a society which is afraid to have to look into its own abyss?


DAILY MIRROR - UK
The World's Most Evil Dad... the brute whose word was absolute law, locked the door with a code only he knew and cruelly told Elisabeth and the children that it was booby-trapped with explosives.


DAILY MAIL - UK

Neighbours said the three [children] kept above ground were well-balanced and polite members of the police sports club and voluntary fire brigade. Their grandmother, according to many, was a pillar of the community, baking cakes for fetes and becoming an active member of the parent teachers' association at their private school.


DE STANDAARD - BELGIUM
How was it possible that Josef Fritzl regularly went on holiday to Thailand for two to three weeks without his prisoners starving in the cellar? Did he handle it completely by himself or did he have help from outside?



CORRIERE DELLA SERA - ITALY
You can see the birdcage from the pavement of Dammstrasse... When he wasn't playing the good husband with old Rosemarie, or wasn't too tired from being a good grandfather to the three son/grandsons that he ended up looking after, when he wasn't telling jokes in the bar, watering his lawn, going fishing or helping his neighbours fix their broken kettles, when he wasn't disappearing for hours into the cellar to work, when in reality he was opening up the secret bolt to feed his slaves, when his double face didn't have to divide itself between the normal and the horrific, he also found time for them - those small birds, poor little things.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7373462.stm

April 20 birthdays include world's oldest person

Edna Parker of Shelbyville, Indiana turned 115 yesterday. She was born April 20, 1893. Scientists think she's lived so long because of genetics, environment, and not dwelling on stressful events.

Key scientist sure "God particle" will be found soon

Click here for original article
Key scientist sure "God particle" will be found soon
Mon Apr 7, 2008
By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - British physicist Peter Higgs said on Monday it should soon be possible to prove the existence of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life possible -- as he first argued 40 years ago.

Higgs said he believes a particle named the "Higgs boson", which originates from the force, will be found when a vast particle collider at the CERN research centre on the Franco-Swiss border begins operating fully early next year.

"The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly ... I'm more than 90 percent certain that it will," Higgs told journalists.

The 78-year-old's original efforts in the early 1960s to explain why the force, dubbed the Higgs field, must exist were dismissed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Today, the existence of the invisible field is widely accepted by scientists, who believe it came into being milliseconds after the Big Bang created the universe some 15 billion years ago.

Finding the Higgs boson would prove this theory right.

CERN's new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) aims to simulate conditions at the time of that primeval inferno by smashing particles together at near light-speed and so unlock many secrets of the universe.

Higgs was in Geneva to visit CERN for the first time in 13 years in advance of the launch...

Neatness a sign of godliness — or compulsion?

Neatness a sign of godliness — or compulsion?
Spectrum of tidiness runs from merely orderly to life-hampering disorder


By Melissa Schorr
MSNBC contributor
March. 12, 2008

She has color-coded folders to organize her take-out menus and bills. Clear containers to stash her toddler’s toys. A fridge with condiments neatly in a row.

Welcome to the world of a compulsive neat freak.

“I do drive myself crazy,” confides Donna Sullivan, a mother of two and a part-time accountant in Scituate, Mass. “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t like this. But when I come in and everything is clean, I feel calmer. I think that’s why I do it.”

Call them neat freaks or clutter-phobes — the types who lament their house is a total mess if one coffee table book is slightly out of place. Experts say the desire for neatness runs along a spectrum, from finicky Felix Unger-types with a need for control to those with a truly life-hampering disorder, such as TV’s Adrian Monk, the obsessive-compulsive detective.

“It’s who I am,” says Perri Kersh, owner of Neat Freak Professional Organizing in Chapel Hill, N.C., who was dubbed “neatest” by her high school classmates and, at age 4, carried around an imaginary device for organizing ties. “I don’t think anyone who knew me would be surprised to know what I do for a living.”

Our attitude toward neatness is likely shaped during childhood, from parents who frown on messy rooms to picture books like “The Cat in the Hat,” with its implicit message against trashing the house.

Those who take it to the extreme as adults often have taken that message too far, associating neatness with a quality required to be a good person, says Amie Ragan, a clinical psychologist in Birmingham, Ala., who runs the blog Psychology of Clutter.

Clutter-phobia may also be programmed into certain people’s genes, since extreme cleanliness likely once conferred a survival advantage by warding off germs, disease and death.

"Anxiety has evolutionary value — it keeps us alert and vigilant,” says psychotherapist Tom Corboy, director of the OCD Center of Los Angeles. “The problem is people can develop this over-the-top anxiety to things that don’t deserve it, like knickknacks on a shelf.”

When it crosses the line into pathology, psychologists say, is when it begins to negatively affect your life. “It’s a problem when your need for constant order causes you extreme distress or problems in your relationship,” says Ragan.

Kersh says she hasn’t gone that far.

“I don’t think I’ve moved into the pathological side,” she laughs. “I’m not an obsessive hand-washer.” Instead, she sees hanging onto too many possessions as the true hang-up. “It’s just stuff, it’s not our memories, it’s not who we are. You’ve got to let go or you’ll be living in a storage unit.”

'It's not just putting up cool shelving'
In her quest for complete clutter control, Kersh and her family even underwent a “six-month experiment in buying nothing.” (Necessities excluded.) “We were so used to saying, `I want it, I’m going to go get it.’ Now, we’re very conscious of what we consume.” More news from MSN Health
Symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Overview of OCD
Are You a Clean Freak?
Support Groups for Messiness


Kersh believes anyone can rid their lives of clutter, but it requires commitment. “It’s not just putting up cool shelving,” she says. “It takes work.”

Erin Doland, editor-in-chief of the blog Unclutterer and a contributor to RealSimple.com, was once an amateur hoarder, saving everything from college T-shirts to ticket stubs, until her husband laid down the law. “I started purging, and it felt so good I kept going,” she recalls. “I went from one extreme to the other. Everything went.”

Today, she stacks her shoes in plastic tubs, has a firm re-gifting policy, and snaps digital pictures of sentimental items before tossing them in the trash.

Before her transformation, Doland says her clutter weighed on her. “I always felt like there was a cloud hanging over me,” she says. “Now, I can say, if something doesn’t have a purpose, why is it in my home? And I think that’s healthy.”

As she and her husband prepare to adopt a baby from China, they have already sat down the grandparents for a stern chat about limiting the influx of toys. “The kid’s not going to grow up in some minimalist bubble,” she says, “but we want to limit the insanity.”

After being on the receiving end of too many gifts that weren’t being used, Doland entered an agreement with her in-laws to re-gift any unwanted items with no hard feelings. “We started by talking about clothes that didn't fit and moved into other gifts that didn't necessarily ’fit’ either,” she says.


Kersh believes in taking a firm line against becoming a storage facility for your relatives’ castaways. That means not feeling obligated to inherit your grandmother’s set of china when you already have one. “You could host a dinner party for 60! Who’s going to do that?”

But when neat freaks and slobs must live under one roof, compromise is key. Kersh has inspired her once-messy husband to organize his dress shirts by color, while he has forced her to let the dirty dishes wait until after their Saturday morning stroll. “He’s helped me relax,” she admits.

Closer to God?
Still, conventional wisdom holds that neatness is the “morally superior” choice.

“Neat people are generally conscientious — they pay attention to order, think before they act. These are the people you want in the air traffic control tower,” explains Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin and author of the upcoming book “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.”

But while most of us tend to think well of someone who is tidy, assuming that they are more considerate than their peers, that’s not necessarily the case. Gosling, who dubs this misperception the “Mr. Rogers factor,” did research that found neat people are no more likely to be kind or sympathetic than their messier counterparts.

David H. Freedman, co-author of the book, “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” argues that extreme neatness does have some drawbacks.

One, he says, is the loss of creativity.

“If you make your environment very neat, you’re making everything predictable,” he says. “You will lock out bad things — you’re less likely to be late, things are less likely to spill or break — but you’re also locking out luck.”

That messy desk or kitchen is more conducive to making the random connection that could lead to a scientific breakthrough or a new recipe.


Another, surprisingly, is time.
True, messy people waste time rummaging for their keys. But, Freedman says, neat people spend all their time constantly putting things away throughout the day, while those who let things pile up and tackle them in one chunk save precious minutes in the long run.

“I’ve had hundreds of people tell me about neat freak habits, and not a single one has denied suspecting there is something a little wrong with them,” Freedman says. “People who are neat are helpless to be otherwise — they’re prisoners of it.”

Even the clutter-phobes admit their strategy can backfire. “I have one regret,” Kersh says. “Getting rid of this awesome pair of brown elk skin cowgirl boots.”

Melissa Schorr is a Boston-based freelancer who has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe Magazine, Reuters Health, Working Mother, Self, GQ and People. She is the author of the young adult novel "Goy Crazy."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23565682/

Why children are falling through the cracks

Lots of children are failing, not just special ed kids. Most teachers can not handle teaching more than one level at the same time. They need to learn. I figured out how to do it, and it was fun, with kids of all levels working together and repecting each other. I would like to see the best teachers get paid more, and the worst teachers should be working under the supervision of good teachers.