Now here’s disturbing news, and so soon after our trip to Hershey. The Chocolate Manufacturers Association apparently has a petition before the FDA to redefine chocolate – and the new definition wouldn’t require any of those pesky coca butters or cocoa solids.
Can’t wait to see the revised factory tour that discusses those delicious hydrogenated oils.
I was over at the Obama campaign site last night checking of the new Women for Obama initative launched earlier this month with a series of kickoff speeches from Michelle Obama. The first thing you notice about Michelle is that she’s a terrific speaker. Very witty, very engaging, very concise. The second thing you notice is that regardless of what the rest of the campaign is trying to do in presenting Barack as some kind of rock star or political deity, she’s making it her mission to remind everyone that he’s just a man who leaves the butter out and doesn’t pick up after himself nearly as much as she thinks he should.
That in and of itself might be a calculated strategy but even if it is, it’s still pretty funny. Sort of a “My wife thinks I am an idiot but even she thinks you should vote for me” thing.
There have certainly been stranger ones used in the past.
That said, I’m listening to Michelle and I can’t help but notice how much what she is saying mirrors most of the Moms Rising platform. Is that on purpose? That got me thinking…and wondering. When the time comes, will Moms Rising, which, by the way, was co-founded by Joan Blades (a co-founder of MoveOn.org) endorse a presidential candidate? What will their criteria be?
I’m also wondering if the Woman for Obama initiative has been part of the plan all along, after all there is Students for Obama initiative already. Or is it a strategy to get out in front of Hillary?
These are just some musings on a Sunday morning. Anything to avoid having to watch the Sunday talk shows or fold laundry.
I know that I’ve already posted tonight but I fear that this story has been swallowed up by the news cycle and that’s a shame. For anyone out there who missed Kevin Tillman’s absolutely inspiring testimony about the government’s treatment of his brother Pat‘s death, here it is again.
That the Tillman family had to endure this is a national disgrace. That amidst all of this knowledge, we are letting this administration send troops back for second and third tours in this war is an international tragedy.
And by the way, the title of this post is from the Dire Straits song, Brothers In Arms.
The complete stanza reads:
And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms
Milestones in your child’s life, like most of the parenting experience, often come with a mixed bag of emotions. The one our daughter reached this week is no exception.
One one hand, Alex turned five, certainly a milestone birthday in her mind and ours. We celebrated by taking her to Hershey, PA, specifically the Hershey’s Chocolate World Tour. To say that she enjoyed it is a understatement. She exhibited the kind of joy that we adults seem to lose somewhere around puberty in that she literally shook with excitement. And not just from the chocolate high, either. Even when recounting the trip to her grandma the following day, she was unable to keep her body still for more than a nano-second. She also couldn’t get the words out fast enough to describe it. She was loud, rambling and joyful in way that just stamps down your parental instinct to say “shushâ€? and “use your inside voice.â€? In the end, we just let her go because when your child is exhibiting that kind of excitement and happiness, you really don’t want it to end.
On the other hand, Alex is now five, which means she’ll be leaving the very fine day care facility she currently attends to go to kindergarten in the fall and with that comes an entire host of problems. Choosing a school (which will be the subject of another post, I assure you), navigating the various registration and waiting list pitfalls, and then, finding out that our school options may not offer “extended careâ€? for the hours before and after school when our jobs require us to be someplace other than with Alex. And lets not even get into the cost of these extended care programs when they are available. The entire task is so daunting that I found myself trying to relive the experiences of the previous weekend in my head to remind myself of why we’re doing it all. The answer comes readily: for Alex. We can’t be everywhere at once. We need to provide food, shelter, and health care for her so if finding a school with an extended day care program that covers our working hours takes a pick axe and spelunking helmet, so be it. It needs to be done.
And, the fact is, we’re among the lucky ones. The jobs that Dave and I have provide Alex with health care, money to cover our mortgage, food and clothing, funds for day care and we thankfully still have enough non-working time to actually be parents. Not everyone is so lucky. Millions of parents in this country work long hours to meet the needs of their children and can still come up short. I was reminded of this fact during this same week.
In between driving to open houses, calling schools to ask about extended care, and filling out registration forms, I found myself listening to a radio interview with Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, co-founder of Moms Rising, an advocacy group for such “mom� issues as affordable health care, longer and more comprehensive family leave, workplace rights, higher-wages etc. Some of the statistics she cited which caught my ear as I drove to work included:
And yes, I did have to pull over and catch my breath after I heard those last ones.
While I’m not sure I know enough about Moms Rising to endorse them unequivocally, I have to admire their mission. And if it succeeds, the potential is mind-boggling. It’s not simply aiming to be Soccer Moms 2.0. We’re talking less catchy demographic description, and more full-fledged Parental PAC. Our system allows for anyone with an issue, cause, or special interest to try and make their voice heard, for better or for worse. The ones with the deepest pockets are often the loudest, unfortunately. But, every once in a while, with the right coordination and savvy, the weaker succeed by just getting louder.
And, I ask you, who knows more about volume than parents?
Parents need to get louder about issues such as affordable heath and child care, education, flexible work schedules, and paid family leave. There are now simply too many social, economic and legal obstacles to being a good parent these days for us not to be as loud as we can be. Too many parents are too bogged down in the realities of simply surviving to provide their children the kind of body-shaking joyful moments that all children deserve to have and all parents deserve to see.
These days there are a lot of people running around asking to be president. Hang out on YouTube for a while and you can’t miss ’em. Anyway, they’ve all got a lot of special interest groups vying for their attention and they in turn are vying for voters’ attention. They also know that working adults with children under the age of 18 constitute one heck of a voting block.
What better time to show them what happens when parents stop using their inside voices?
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blog has YouTube footage of two speeches in favor of a resolution that would give the District of Columbia a voting representative in the House. (A 417th representative would also be added in Utah to keep an odd number and, incidentally, partisan balance.) They’re mostly on the dry side, but watch Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton – DC’s nonvoting delegate – when someone asks her to yield her time. That outrage seems pretty real to me, and it’s outrage we all ought to feel.
We’re back home after a weekend trip that involved a lot of time on the Pennsylvania Turnpike – some of it driving. And it occurred to me that Pennsylvania, like several other states, is considering leasing its toll roads to for-profit companies, and then using the proceeds to pay for major initiatives (in Pennsylvania’s case, new highway construction and mass transit funding). As I understand it, the logic is that the for-profit company would be willing to pay the lease fee because it could make a profit by increasing tolls and employing other techniques to increase use of the roads and revenue. So maybe it’s a stupid question, but – why can’t the state just do that? Is there such an internal resistance to the government maximizing its revenue that the only way it can derive the full benefit of the resources it provides is to let someone else do it? Something about the logic just isn’t clicking with me.
OK, this is ridiculous. Arlen Specter, ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, apparently decided to abstain from a voice vote on whether or not to authorize the Senate to issue subpoenas to Karl Rove and others in the US Attorney fiasco.
Cameras picked up his lips moving when the “ayes” were called for. Reporters tried to pin down whether or not Specter actually said aye. At first he wouldn’t tell them. Then he later admitted he had been silent during both calls, apparently waiting for an option he liked better.
You know, it’s not like this is important or anything. No reason why Pennsylvanians would want their senator to use that seniority of his to actually take a position on something.
And this guy’s planning on running again in 2010. Can’t wait.
In addition to the mayoral primary, it looks like Philadelphia voters will have a chance to vote on an amendment to the city’s home Rule Charter that would make it illegal to put casinos near schools, churches and residential neighborhoods. Various authorities have said that, given other existing restrictions, that would make it pretty much impossible to put a slots parlor anywhere in the city, and would definitely rule out the two sites that have already been selected by the state gaming board. The city’s legal advisor has said that even though he’s pretty sure the proposed charter amendment would ultimately be ruled illegal by state courts, he can’t prevent the vote. It’s kind of an interesting element of the judicial review process – the courts can’t stop the legislature from passing a bad law, they can only prevent a law that’s been passed from taking effect.
I’m still trying to figure out where I stand on the proposed amendment. I’m not against legalized gambling in principle. It’s an activity that has its dangers, but so do drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, and playing the lottery, and all of those things are legal. And if people are going to gamble, I’d prefer that the city and state get some of the revenue benefit from it. (I will also admit, in a totally tangential way, that the introduction of slots gambling to the race track right outside Philadelphia has caused an increase in the number of bus routes running through my neighborhood, so I’m happy about that.) But there is a larger issue at stake, in that once again the state government is coming in and taking control of important civic decisions away from Philadelphia, its citizens, and its government. And I’m thinking that it might be worth voting for this charter amendment just as a way of registering my complaint on that score and not making it easy for the state to keep barging in.
Got an e-mail from MoveOn.org today. (I signed up around the time of the Vote for Change tour, and haven’t really participated in a lot of the organization’s activities since then, even though the possibilities for Internet-harnessed democratic decision-making intrigue me.) They’re trying to figure out whether or not to support the House leadership’s version of the supplemental funding bill on Iraq. The bill sets a timetable for withdrawal, but doesn’t have any kind of automatic funding shut-off or anything as an “enforcement” mechanism. So some on the anti-war side say it doesn’t go far enough, and want to defeat the bill in hopes of getting a stronger version. My sense is that it’s worth supporting something that even gets the notion of a timetable on the record, and that if this goes down the next version will be weaker, not stronger.
But as I’ve been thinking about this, going over options in my head and playing Armchair Congressman, it just seems that there is not an effective way for a Congress to put a stop to a full-scale military operation. People can point to precedents and clauses and delineated powers that justify a complex situation like Jack Murtha’s readiness standards, but in terms of the way our expectations and customs have involved, the closest thing Congress has is the defunding hammer. And I think that if Congress refused to fund, or even said that in X number of months they were going to defund, the president would be able to muster enough political backlash to make that a tremendously difficult thing to make stick. So I admit, I kind of gave up a little bit about Iraq – the voters had a chance to change direction in 2004, they chose not to, and 2006 notwithstanding, the next real chance voters are going to have to change direction is in 2008.
So I started to think ahead a little bit. We need to change something about our political culture if we don’t want to find ourselves in this boat again. And a big change in political culture is a long-term, aim-high, pie-in-the-sky kind of thing. So what I think would be worth advocating would be a constitutional convention or amendment to rewrite some of the war powers. I mean, we’re still pointing to the fact that only Congress has the power to “declare war,” but I believe that the United States has engaged in at least five conflicts that are popularly referred to as wars without an official declaration from Congress since the last time it declared war. (I’m counting Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and both conflicts in Iraq.) Military operations just don’t work the way they did in the 1700s, and we need a legal structure that recognizes this. There ought to be a way to amend the Constitution so that any extended military combat action that is not immediately necessary for self-defense has to have explicit Congressional approval. Furthermore, it should be explicitly stated that the Congress has the power to rescind this approval and order the president to begin an orderly withdrawal of troops. If these things were clear, debates like the one we’re having now wouldn’t be clouded by discussion of whether or not this is an unjustified intrusion by Congress into the presidential role as Commander-in-Chief or whether or not Congress has the authority to rescind an authorization to use military force. The debate would solely be about whether Congress should use an explicitly-granted power in this particular circumstance. I have a hunch that if the Iraq debate were being held on those terms, it would be a very different one.
A bunch of threads are colliding against each other in my head right now. Reuters is reporting on a new poll that shows a majority of Americans want a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq. In the meantime, there have been numerous reports about the Congressional Democrats’ problems coalescing behind any particular proposal to try and stop the war before Bush leaves office. (Here’s Dick Polman from the Inquirer on the subject, and right now the front page of MyDD.com has several competing perspectives on the subject.)
Meanwhile, I’m putting together review material for my American Philosophy students, and going over some of the Anti-Federalist writings that opposed the Constitution because they thought the new national government was too powerful and insufficiently responsive to the people – some thought that the checks and balances that we all learned about in grade school would just gum up the works and keep the government from doing what the public wanted. Which was precisely what folks like Madison and Hamilton had in mind, of course. And many times I think that’s a good thing. Right now, though, maybe not so much.