Heather Graham stars as the Public Option in this funny ad, showing how she'll force the lazy, bloated private insurance companies to get back in the game and compete. After all, competition is as American as apple pie. ...
H/T Mati Senerchia
On Jewschool today Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (author/editor of Yentl's Revenge, Surprised by God, and The Passionate Torah) posted a call for user contributions to a new Flikr photostream of images of "Jewish Mothers."
From Flikr:
Go here to see the set and to add images of your own.About Jewish Mothers: The Way We Were, the Way We Are
In honor of Jewish American Heritage Month and in celebration of Mother's Day, the Jewish Women’s Archive is creating a special photo collection on Flikr about "Jewish Mothers."
Photos can show a Jewish mother, now or in the past, in any context -- mothers at home or at work; mothers in the family and in the community; mothers of different generations and family constellations; formal portraits or candid snapshots.
How would you like to represent Jewish mothers?
My sister said something to me the other day, one of those things that stops you dead and makes you say, "Oh my god, she's right!"
What she said was actually commonplace: that most people don't realize how much a special needs child taxes a family's emotional and financial resources.
What was earth-shattering was the fact that she was referring to my situation. And she was right.
You can't tell from meeting them that my sons have Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD).
They're not "special needs" in the sense of having cognitive delays, language deficits or physical disabilities. In fact, they're unusually bright and creative.
But at their worst -- that is, at the moments when they're most overwhelmed by their sensory environments -- their behavior becomes disruptive and dysfunctional. They have meltdowns and tantrums, grow irritable, refuse to make eye contact, run away and even, at their most frustrated and overwhelmed, lash out with feet and fists.
To many people, they appear to be merely extremely ill-behaved boys. Some casual observers conclude that the problem is indulgent parenting. We need to be stricter with them. If we'd just punish them when they run around the store, they'd learn to stay at our side, we're told.
And that's how we know our children are not simply badly-behaved: no amount of reward or punishment can persuade them to behave the way we want them to when they're in such moments. Because they really aren't in control of this behavior. In the face of overwhelming physical stimuli, they respond from the autonomic nerve system, going quickly into fight or flight mode.
Here's the other way we know that our sons aren't spoiled, undisciplined, and disobedient: when you treat the sensory symptoms, the unwanted behaviors go away. You can do this by changing the environment or by desensitizing the child to the stimuli -- for example, the large echoing auditorium where S. often had tantrums became tolerable with the introduction of earplugs that reduced background noise.
The trouble is that it's hard to get people to recognize SPD and to convince the other adults in their lives -- grandparents, teachers, babysitters -- that accommodations, not punishment, is what's needed.
For one thing, few people have heard of it. SPD is sometimes called a "hidden" syndrome because it's not in the DSM-IV (although it's being considered for inclusion in the next DSM).
As a result, pediatricians don't look for it and insurance companies don't want to pay to treat it. (The diagnosis is accepted by the Diagnostic Manual for Infancy and Early Childhood Disabilities (2007) and Diagnostic Classification: Zero to Three: Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health in Developmental Disorders in Infancy and Early Childhood (2006).)
SPD was the topic of Marguerite Kelly's Family Almanac column in the Washington Post with the headline "Neurological Problems May Underlie Behavior":This neurological problem is often inherited, affects one in 20 children and may wreck a child's behavior, her disposition and her relationships with others because SPD can make a child overreact -- or underreact -- to a sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, movement or pain. Her brain simply can't respond to all the messages it gets from the sensory receptors that are in her skin, in and around her mouth and in her inner ear, and this makes her act in ways that annoy others as well as herself.
Some SPD children don't know where their bodies are in space, so they are clingy or they hate to be touched or they stand too close to their friends. Others bite holes in their shirts, walk on their tiptoes, talk loudly but hate to hear loud talk from anyone else, or act like they've been bopped with a bat when someone has only given them a light pat on the back.
And on YouTube, here are more descriptions:
From the White House blog:
(A modified version of this post appeared in the Cleveland Jewish News, 03/06/09)
For Jews of a certain age, hamantaschen – three-cornered cups of dry cookie dough traditionally filled with dollops of dense, sticky poppy, prune or apricot – are what madeleines were to French novelist Marcel Proust: reminders of temps perdu.
I've always suspected that real pleasure found in hamantaschen was more nostalgic than culinary. For many Jews, hamantaschen remind us of a time when the Jewish community was more tightly knit, geographically, children grew up with nearby or live-in bubbes who baked traditional foods for every Jewish holiday.
Because the truth is this: there are some truly terrible hamantaschen out there. Dirt-dry, with filling that's too thick to chew. My own dear Grandma Gussie made a dirt-dry poppy hamantaschen that had to be washed down with a quart of milk.
Today, Jewish children expect holiday sweets to be, well, sweet. Super sweet. And filled with chocolate.
And so Jewish bakeries, preschool classes and hip grandmas started turning out hamantaschen filled with chocolate chips, marshmallow fluff or pieces of candy bars. A check of online cooking blogs and recipe archives will yield dozens of hamantaschen recipes so sweet they'll make grown-ups' teeth ache just think about them.
The recipe below is adapted from several found online. Sure, chocolate hamantaschen don't look like you'd expect a hamataschen to look, but they still provide an opportunity to talk to kids about Haman, Esther, and the rest of the Purim gang.
Chocolate Hamantaschen Dough
3/4 C unsalted butter or pareve shortening
3/4 C sugar
2 large eggs
1 t vanilla
2-1/2 C flour
1 t baking powder
pinch salt
1/4 C cocoa powder
In large bowl of an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time and vanilla. Add flour, baking powder, salt and cocoa powder and mix until a ball of dough forms.
Divide the dough and shape into two logs. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for a minimum of 1 hour.
Once the dough has chilled, roll out one section about 1/4” thick on a well-floured workspace. Use a cutter to cut approximately 3” circles.
Place approximately 1 t of a filling of your choice in the center of each section. Bring three sides of the dough together to make a triangle. Pinch the three corners together and place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet.
Place in a preheated 350° oven for 9-12 minutes, until the bottom turns golden.
Easy fillings for chocolate hamantaschen
I overheard kids talking about using crushed Pez for filling (they're kosher, you know), but surely they were only kidding -- right?
About 3 weeks ago I wrote a blog post called Why am I so worried that Obama will be assassinated? Should I be? in which I confessed to being unable to stop myself from worrying that Obama might be assassinated.
Over on blogher the post began attracting more readers and comments (13!) from people who shared my worries and wanted to talk about why. Just yesterday *.Lee wrote:
Like many, in my lifetime, I never, ever thought that I would see a black man in the Oval Office. ... I couldn't be more pleased and proud as to what that says about America, but there is the shadow of worry in my heart as well. I didn't think that the country was 'ready' for a woman or a black man as President. I was wrong. ... And no doubt, as the old adage goes, a black man has to work twice as hard to be considered half as good... and no doubt, there will be those who will never be ready, and will never accept this historic event.
In case you don't have enough to worry about as you shop for holiday toys for your kids, you should know that many toys on the shelves of mainstream retailers contain high levels of known toxins like lead, cadmium, chlorine, arsenic, bromine and mercury.
But, you ask, doesn't my government regulate this? Don't they recall dangerous toys?
Well, not so much. Remember the politicians who have been wined and dined by corporate and industry lobbyists, who gave out big corporate tax breaks and who deregulated willy-nilly without establishing any kind of oversight?
They oversaw the toy industry with the same degree of insouciant negligence with which they overlooked sub-prime lending, global warming, and junk bonds.
Search for toys on the go
- EPA has used its authority to require testing for fewer than 200 of the 62,000 chemicals in commerce since 1979;
- For existing chemicals, only 5 chemical groups out of 62,000 have been restricted by EPA in 29 years.
Are you expecting a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving?
Or did you wake up this morning and wonder how you're going to get through Thanksgiving Day without causing -- or getting dragged into -- a family feud?
Even amiable families can devolve into bickering under the right combination of stressors, many of which happen to come into play at Thanksgiving:
The holidays are far from ideal, especially with anxieties about the economy this year, said Dr. Herb Rappaport, a psychologist who wrote the book, "The Family Gathering Disasters."
"If someone lost a job, there has been a death in the family, or someone is in the military serving abroad, you can't turn your holiday into a fantasy," he said. "People should try to be realistic and stay on target with what this holiday is about. I don't think people need perfection or the anxiety associated with perfection. What people want is genuine experience."
Shaw surveys some online advice and adds a bit of her own:What I want to know is how to get through a three hour meal with the inlaws and outlaws, as well as your immediate/extended family
without fighting with your father and making your mother crywith your sanity intact.
"If I could add something to the list, it would be this: Don’t bring up past transgressions, such as reminding your older brother, in front of his wife and kids, how he used to hold you down, sit on you, and fart. Not a good idea
leftovers to preventing family feuds. Some good ones:
If you have relatives who fail to respect your boundaries and behave as if the purpose of the relationship is for you to bend over backwards to satisfy all of their needs, you certainly aren’t alone. What you need to do is define boundaries which you consider to be bottom lines that should not be crossed, ones that make you feel violated when they are.Two important points to take away from this article: First, you can love your relatives without sharing values, having the same lifestyle or even being particularly close. Second, you may have to physically remove yourself from unresolvable conflict with a relative (aka "If all else fails, run!"). Most people won't need to do that during the course of a family meal, but it's worth remembering that you can.
Over on Write Like She Talks, Jill Zimon questions the argument of "Social Media And The Motrin Controversy: Or, Will Social Media Kill Advertising Creativity?" Author Catharine P. Taylor worries that reactions like that of "outraged 'Motrin Moms'" will crush creative advertising (such as it is):
Can we expect Johnson & Johnson to be skittish the next time a well-meaning creative director presents something somewhat edgy to the client? Yes. Can we expect said idea, even if it makes it out of the conference room, to be focus-grouped to death before it is unleashed to the vocal masses?
...
[Clients may make] the decision to run increasingly conservative advertising, until fully addressable, trackable TV advertising gives marketers enough insight into their ROI to realize those kinds of ads are ineffective. Until that time, the conclusion I draw is that much advertising will go plain vanilla, and that's too bad for all of us.
The earliest college-style party I know of appears in "Mostellaria" (The Ghost), a farce by Plautus ca. 200 BCE, in which a young Athenian hosts a party for his buddies while his father is out of town on business. Dad comes home unexpectedly, guests are hurriedly hidden, and son spends the rest of the play trying to keep dad in the dark.
A college party is, by definition, designed to drive grown-ups crazy. It's the sine qua non of the term "impaired judgment."
Wow, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic here. Or not. Anyway, here's a new wrinkle.
At Loyola Marymount University in the Los Angeles suburb of Westchester, residents are blaming Twitter for a new wave of wild partying that disturbs neighbors' sleep and brings down their property values.
"Microblogging services like Twitter are not only allowing students to find out where their classmates are partying, but also when the gatherings are about to be shut down by the police,"reports Caitlin Moran in The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus.
A local news station quoted a Los Angeles police officer describing “100 or 150 kids” filing out of a house with “all the things lighting up in their hands” — presumably in response to a microblogged warning."
Watch out for those spooky hordes of fleeing students armed with "all the things lighting up in their hands!" Technology is evil! And here's why, according to the blog WestchesterParent:
Instant messaging means instant party, and they can start quickly at any time of the day or evening. Just as quickly they can end abruptly and restart hours later as students move from party to party fed by today’s technology and making it more difficult for police to respond. [lilatovcocktail's note: emphasis is mine]
The ability to spontaneously generate parties was well-documented in the 16-24 year old population long before social media came along.
Word-of-mouth raves were held in abandoned warehouses in the mid-80s. Prohibition-era speakeasies used code words or had the band play a certain song to alert patrons to police raids.
Blaming twitter for the increase in spontaneous partying is kind of like blaming beer kegs for the increase in student inebriation.
If they were smart, townies and law enforcment would get behind the technology, rather than getting bowled over by it. That's what the administration at Seattle University did last spring.
The Seattle Times reported that when SU officials discovered invitations to an off-campus student party on Facebook, Glen Butterworth, assistant to the dean of students, showed up on the students' doorstep and told them he knew of their plans and that city police and state liquor authorities would be enforcing any code violations.
The students grudgingly cancelled the party. "I was really mad, actually," said party co-host Gina Corsiglia.. "I thought it was pretty outrageous that he came physically to our doorstep ... It's none of [SU's] business ... It's a private residence."
On occasion, someone I know will send out word on twitter that the band they're listening at the Beachland Ballroom is terrific and we should come down. I appreciate that.
And I would go, too, if I wasn't so busy keeping my super-green lawn neatly cropped so that my property values don't go down.
Technorati tags: education, family, writing: blogging: journalism
The hip chicks are MomsRising.org is offering your choice of a free bumper clinger (formerly known as bumper stickers, but now without the glue). MomsRising.org is an online grassroots movement promoting family-frendly poiltices.
Online, MomsRising.org has information and tools related to the 2008 Election, including "8 in 2008," a voter registration drive aimed at moms.
Click Here To view Get Your Free MomsVote '08 Bumper Clinger!!
John Edwards /John Edwards/John
Please keep your pants on.
Seymour Glass, the complexly tragic older brother in J.D. Salinger's fictional Glass family, wrote the following poem at the tender age of eight (the poem is introduced by his younger brother Buddy after Seymour's suicide):
"John Keats/ John Keats/ John/Please put your scarf on."
Seymour's poem takes the form of a familial nagging: its poignancy comes in part from the naive assumption the Romantic tragedy of Keats's early death could avoided if he'd simply dressed more warmly.
My little parody, however, is quite different. There's nothing poignant about John Edwards' extramarital affair with novice filmmaker Rielle Hunter, about which he now admits he lied repeatedly. In an interview for Nightline tonight, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 42-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.
The poignancy all belongs to 52-year-old Elizabeth Edwards, his wife of 30 years.
A lawyer and writer, Elizabeth Edwards accompanied her husband on the campaign trail in 2004 (when Edwards was John Kerry's running mate). She was beside him for the 2008 campaign, despite the fact that her breast cancer, previously in remission, had returned had advanced to stage IV (metastatic), spreading to spots on her ribs and hip.
Although neither of the Edwards is being too specific about dates, the timeline published by various newspapers indicates that Edwards was indeed having an affair with Hunter at the time Elizabeth was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
December 2006 Rielle Hunter is hired by Edwards' campaign to produce a series of webisodes for which she is paid $100,000.
March 2007 Elizabeth discovers her cancer has returned.
October 2007 The National Enquirer first reports Edwards-Hunter affair; Edwards publicly denies it. "The story is false," he told reporters then. "It's completely untrue, ridiculous."
"I've been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years and as anybody who's been around us knows, she's an extraordinary human being, warm, loving, beautiful, sexy and as good a person as I have ever known. So the story's just false."
December 19, 2007 The Enquirer publishes follow-up story that includes a photograph of a visibly pregnant Hunter.
Feb. 27, 2008 Hunter gives birth to daughter named Frances Quinn Hunter. No father's name is given on the birth certificate filed in California. (An Edwards campaign worker claims to be the baby's father).
July 21, 2008 Edwards visits Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton, leaving the hotel at 2:40 a.m. Spotting National Enquirer reporters, Edwards hides in the men's room until he's ousted by hotel security. His wife had not known about the meeting.
Aug. 8, 2008 John Edwards releases statement admitting his affair with the filmmaker.
"In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic. If you want to beat me up -- feel free. You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself."
Aug. 8, 2008 Elizabeth Edwards stands by her huband in a posts on the Daily Kos, pleading for privacy.
"John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me.
Fine. What else can she say? She's only the gazillionth political wife this decade whose husband can't keep his pants on.
Problem: How to keep male politicians from feeling so "special, egocentric and narcissistic," they no longer feel obligated to behave morally or responsibly?
Solution:
Immediately upon submitting their name as candidates for ANY public office, male politicians will be required to attend a course on the pitfalls of power, for their own safety as well as that their his loved ones.
1. They will study -- and be tested on -- the nature of power: the way is gilds the holder with a false allure that attracts male and female power-junkies and offers never-before-encountered opportunities for dubious, if not downright immoral, sexual, financial, social behaviors.
2. As in Driver's Ed classes, students will watch gruesome documentary footage of the horrible wrecks other politicians have made of their careers and lives, including public confessions, impeachment hearings, and police mug shots.
3. They will memorize the following definition of political power:
"Election to public office is not an indicator of personal worth, let alone omnipotence, infallibility, or irresistibility. Public officials only don -- temporarily -- the mantle of institutional power with which voters have entrusted them."
4. Before bedtime, they will repeat to themselves the following caveat:
"I will not fall in love with the illusion of my own personal power; I will not allow others to fall in love with the illusion of my personal power; and most of all, I will never exploit anyone who has falls in love the illusion of my power."
This is the Year of the Online Video election.
Today I received via RSS two anti-McCain videos from two separate action groups, both using McCain's old interviews and speeches to reveal his weaknesses. A digital version of "give him enough rope to hang himself" strategy, these videos are like a kind of political instant replay -- YOU make the call.
Everyone's been talking about the increased role of the internet in this year's election, which was confirmed by last month's Pew Public Policy Report on the internet and the 2008 election. The report found that so far 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others.
But the easy proliferation on online video footage is or will be every politician's worst nightmare. The videocam is mightier than the pen AND sword when it comes to undermining a candidate's authority, authenticity, and veracity. The Pew study found that:
MARSHALL McLUHAN: -- I heard what you were saying. You, you know nothing of my work. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
WOODY ALLEN: (aside) Boy, if life were only like this.
This cool widget is from American Public Media
(A tip of the hat to Carrie Rosenfelt via Facebook.)
The survey is a little squished here;
it looks better on the WCPN website.
New NE Ohio Abortion Clinic Faces Eviction Because Pro-Lifer Protesters Disturb the Peace
According to a story in the Akron Beacon-Journal, G & H Healthcare (formerly Ohio Women’s Center) is being evicted from its new location in the suburban Corporate Woods Parkway office complex in Green, Ohio.
Beacon Journal medical writer Cheryl Powell reports:GREEN: Protesters might be close to scoring a victory in their efforts to force an abortion provider out of a new suburban location.
The Green clinic provides ''medical abortion,'' which is a nonsurgical termination of a pregnancy (using a combination of medicines, including Mifeprex, also known as RU-486) in ''a private doctor's office setting,'' according to its website.
Green Mayor Dick Norton said on Wednesday that the owner of a Corporate Woods Parkway office complex is evicting a business known as G&H Healthcare because of disturbances, including demonstrations outside the complex.
G&H Healthcare had been known as Ohio Women's Center before it relocated this month from Akron to Green. The Ohio Women's Center's Web site says that it offers nonsurgical abortions.
Right to Life of Summit County has been urging its members to call or e-mail the mayor's office and to hold ''peaceful and prayerful'' protests outside the business since last week, said Gregory D. Frank, the group's executive director.
In a recent Action Alert, Planned Parenthood adds that "G & H Healthcare provides a wide range of women's health services, including birth control, well woman care and early medical abortion. They are even laying the plans to offer breast cancer screenings and adoption services."
From the Action Alert: What can you do?
You can call the city law office at 330-896-6615 and let them know that you support the medical center being in Green, and that the women of Green and the surrounding area deserve access to comprehensive medical treatment. After you make the call, please send us an email to let us know how it went!
From the Beacon Journal: Photos of the scary Anita-Bryant-ish protestors (photos by (Karen Schiely/Akron Beacon Journal) 
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