Mazel tov, you crazy kids!

Best. Marriage. Proposal. Ever.:



I don't know about you, but that warmed the cockles of my cynical little heart.

Blueglass and Nasty Bastard

Oh thar be weddin' bells in Blogtopia(™ Skippy) this weeked. Driftglass and Blue Gal tied the knot yesterday, and Bustednuckles and his beloved, Nasty Girl, are heading down the aisle on Sunday.



Who says the left doesn't believe in the sanctity of marriage?



Ah, weddings. I'm all verklempt....

Family values

While conservatives are fretting that some fetophile might have a penny of tax dollars go to pay for an abortion somewhere, and Republicans like my own idiot of a representative Scott Garrett, are voting against extending unemployment benefits for people living in a recession in which one in six Americans are out of work, the families that conservatives love to hold up as props are suffering -- and that means Teh Baybeezzzz....no, wait, these aren't fetii, these are actual children:

Paul Bachmuth’s 9-year-old daughter, Rebecca, began pulling out strands of her hair over the summer. His older child, Hannah, 12, has become noticeably angrier, more prone to throwing tantrums.

Initially, Mr. Bachmuth, 45, did not think his children were terribly affected when he lost his job nearly a year ago. But now he cannot ignore the mounting evidence.

“I’m starting to think it’s all my fault,” Mr. Bachmuth said.

As the months have worn on, his job search travails have consumed the family, even though the Bachmuths were outwardly holding up on unemployment benefits, their savings and the income from the part-time job held by Mr. Bachmuth’s wife, Amanda. But beneath the surface, they have been a family on the brink. They have watched their children struggle with behavioral issues and a stress-induced disorder. He finally got a job offer last week, but not before the couple began seeing a therapist to save their marriage.

For many families across the country, the greatest damage inflicted by this recession has not necessarily been financial, but emotional and psychological. Children, especially, have become hidden casualties, often absorbing more than their parents are fully aware of. Several academic studies have linked parental job loss — especially that of fathers — to adverse impacts in areas like school performance and self-esteem.

“I’ve heard a lot of people who are out of work say it’s kind of been a blessing, that you have more time to spend with your family,” Mr. Bachmuth said. “I love my family and my family comes first, and my family means more than anything to me, but it hasn’t been that way for me.”

A recent study at the University of California, Davis, found that children in families where the head of the household had lost a job were 15 percent more likely to repeat a grade. Ariel Kalil, a University of Chicago professor of public policy, and Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest, of the Institute for Children and Poverty in New York, found in an earlier study that adolescent children of low-income single mothers who endured unemployment had an increased chance of dropping out of school and showed declines in emotional well-being.

In the long term, children whose parents were laid off have been found to have lower annual earnings as adults than those whose parents remained employed, a phenomenon Peter R. Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, mentioned in a speech last week at New York University.

A variety of studies have tied drops in family income to negative effects on children’s development. But Dr. Kalil, a developmental psychologist and director of the university’s Center for Human Potential and Public Policy, said the more important factor, especially in middle-class households, appeared to be changes in family dynamics from job loss.

“The extent that job losers are stressed and emotionally disengaged or withdrawn, this really matters for kids,” she said. “The other thing that matters is parental conflict. That has been shown repeatedly in psychological studies to be a bad family dynamic.”

The only surprising thing here is that it took a study to figure this out.

I was extraordinarily lucky. I was laid off after eight years last year when grant money ran out and no new grants came in. I had seen it coming, I had a resume and a household budget ready to go, and I'd been planning for this inevitability for three years, ever since the last layoffs in 2005. I had a job offer within two weeks, albeit not in the field on which I'd been focusing. It was also September 2008, right before the near-global economic collapse. A month later and I'd be one of these people, only I don't have children that are affected.

It's been infuriating over the last three decades to watch conservatives and Republicans talk about family values why they do their best to screw over American families. For them it's all been about female sexual restraint and male breadwinners, while they pull the rug out from under actual families with children who are far smarter than they're given credit for and can FEEL it when their parents are frantic with worry about how the bills are going to get paid. We hear a lot of pontificating about children from them in Congress, and then they vote against American families every damn time.

It's funny, isn't it, how when the conversation revolves around abortion, it's all about baby-killing and the heartlesss, soullessness of those of us who advocate for the sovereignty of women over their own bodies. But as soon as those fetii become actual children, suddenly we have no money to take care of them, even when their parents have done everything right and gotten screwed over anyway.

Oh, and by the way? Here's more conservative family values, though these aren't expressly Republican, they're just coming from a political group with a religious façade and doesn't have to pay taxes:

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn't change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

Of course when you live in a world in which Barack Obama can be called a Nazi and a member of the Great Jewish Worldwide Conspiracy at the same rally, a religion founded by people who followed a guy who washed the feet of the poor saying it can't help the poor if two men want to commit to each other for life doesn't seem all that crazy anymore. Because crazy is the new normal.

And yet another one...

How many more families are going to end up like this:

A father killed his wife and their three children before fatally shooting himself in a northwest Maryland home, leaving a gruesome scene that was discovered Saturday by the youngsters' grandfather, authorities said.

When investigators arrived, the couple's two sons, ages 5 and 4, lay dead in their beds, while the bodies of a 2-year-old daughter and the mother, Francis Billotti Wood, were in the master bedroom of the two-story home, Frederick County sheriff's office spokeswoman Jennifer Bailey said. On the master bedroom floor by the foot of the bed was the father, 34-year-old Christopher Alan Wood, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Bailey said.

The 33-year-old mother and three children suffered "traumatic cuts," Bailey said, but the causes of their deaths weren't immediately confirmed.

The woman's father found them dead around 9 a.m. He had grown concerned after not hearing from them for several days, Bailey said.

Investigators also found a shotgun and other items they believed were used to slash the victims. Several notes were found, but authorities didn't say what was written in them.

No details yet, but my money's on yet another unemployed guy who just couldn't cope.

Best. White. House. Photo. Ever.

Cue the wingnuts ranting about defacement of the White House.

(h/t)

(Melissa has more on this photo.)

Troubling Statistics

Fewer N.J. women receiving prenatal care

The number of women receiving early prenatal care in New Jersey has declined slightly during the last decade, largely because many do not have regular access to doctors or cannot afford to pay medical bills, according to a report released today.

The Prenatal Care Task Force report, released by State Health Commissioner Heather Howard, found teens, minorities and unmarried mothers are at higher risk of poor birth outcomes, including low birth-weight babies. Yet they remain less likely to receive early prenatal care, according to the report.

Uninsured mothers in New Jersey had the lowest rate of trimester prenatal care - 73 percent - while women with private insurance had the highest rate - 96 percent - across all racial and ethnic groups.

The overall average for prenatal care in New Jersey was 89 percent, according to the report, based on birth and infant death certificate data from 1990 to 2004.

These are troubling statistics. Successful early prenatal care programs would show a continuous steady rise. We can guess at a few of the causes. One would be that poor women & teenagers wait longer before confirming a pregnancy, from denial or any number of reasons. Another would be the fear many undocumented women have of entering the public health care system & calling attention to themselves. Prenatal deportation? Sounds cruel, but it's happened. It could be up there on the right wing agenda along with overturning Roe v. Wade & ordering teenagers to stop having sex or else suffer the consequences. Let's call it the Sarah Palin Agenda until we hear otherwise.

These numbers are discouraging, but they they don't have to stay that way. The expansion of SCHIP to all uninsured children & a greater attention to child health in schools will bring many more families into contact with regular health care, & those families will become accustomed to using the resources & more likely to urge others to do the same. For those families, we need more family care clinics conveniently located in the neighborhoods where they are needed, not two bus rides away on the other side of the city, phasing out hospital emergency rooms as primary care providers.

Graduating with the equivalent of a mortgage

I've often had discussions...oh, the heck with it....arguments with some of my Gen-X friends about their endless resentment of baby boomers. In their eyes, we started out fine and then sold out completely, greedily gobbling resources with malice aforethought and leaving nothing for them. The other day a commenter at Washington Monthly blamed rising home prices and the subprime mortgage mess on baby boomers. Boomers are blamed for everything that isn't blamed on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

That there are so damn many of us may mean that we have consumed "more than our share". But then, we didn't ask to be this elephant being passed through a snake. And perhaps Gen-Xers can comfort themselves with the notion that at some point we'll all be dead and they'll be rid of us.

I was working in the Wall Street area when the Gen-Xers came of age. From my perpsective, it was the next generation, those 8-12 years younger than I am, who were the young Wall Street upstarts. When I went from working as an editorial assistant at a book publisher to working at Standard & Poor's, the people I had lunch with, instead of being the same age to a year or so older, were now, on average, seven years younger.

If you want to feel sorry for anyone, it's the kids trying to get through college now at a time when college is the equivalent of a high school diploma -- what you need in order to compete in an ever-tightening job market. At one time, families could afford college with minimal financial aid. Today, boomer parents of college-age kids have a choice: save for your own retirement (and care for your aging parents in some cases), or send your kid to college. The result is that a college diploma now comes saddled with an anvil of debt that is tantamount to a multidecade mortgage.

Bob Herbert explains:

Young men and women are leaving college with debt loads that would break the back of a mule. Families in many cases are taking out second mortgages, loading up credit cards and raiding 401(k)s to supplement the students’ first wave of debt, the ubiquitous college loan.

At the same time, many thousands of well-qualified young men and women are being shut out of college, denied the benefits and satisfactions of higher education, because they can’t meet the ever-escalating costs.

You want a recipe for making the U.S. less competitive over the next few decades? This is it.

Traditionally, one of the sweetest periods in the lives of many college graduates has been the time immediately after leaving school, when they could relax and take the measure of the newly emerging adult world. It was a time, perhaps, to travel, or to sample intriguing employment opportunities, even if they didn’t pay particularly well. Debt was not usually the overriding concern of the young graduate.

That has changed. Along with their degree, most graduates leave college now with a loan obligation that will hover over them for years, maybe decades. Student loans have decisively overtaken grants as the primary form of financial aid for undergraduates.

Two-thirds of all graduates now leave college with some form of debt. The average amount is close to $20,000. Some owe many times that.

Tamara Draut, in her book, “Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead,” tells us:

“Back in the 1970s, before college became essential to securing a middle-class lifestyle, our government did a great job of helping students pay for school. Students from modest economic backgrounds received almost free tuition through Pell grants, and middle-class households could still afford to pay for their kids’ college.”

Since then, tuition at public and private universities has soared while government support for higher education, other than student loan programs, has diminished.

This is a wonderful example of extreme stupidity. America will pony up a trillion or two for a president who goes to war on a whim, but can’t find the money to adequately educate its young. History has shown that these kinds of destructive trade-offs are early clues to a society in decline.

[snip]

The kids who graduate with enormous debt burdens — $40,000, $80,000, $100,000 or more — face a range of uncomfortable and even debilitating consequences, the first of which is the persistent anxiety over how their loans are to be repaid.

I’ve spoken recently with a number of law students who have already decided to go into corporate practice because their first choice — public interest law — would not pay enough to cover their loans. Many students have turned their backs on teaching for the same reason.

At that stage of life, you shouldn’t have to choose between a job you would love and one that you would take simply because it would pay the bills. Talk about stepping on a dream.

There are also plenty of cases of students who have postponed marriage or buying a home or having children because of their college loan obligations.

And then there are those who never see a graduation day. There’s no way of telling what talents have been squandered, or what great benefits to society have been lost, because bright students who were unable to afford the costs have been forced to leave college, or never went to college at all.

Say what you want about not being able to choose a job you would love, there's something to be said for trying to make your way in a field you enjoy before selling out. At least you tried.

Republicans have been the ones gutting the programs that have made college easier for the middle class to afford, and now you have a generation that cannot do what Republicans think is the backbone of society: get married, set up a home, and start making babies. How do you pay for children and buy a home on an entry-level salary when you have the equivalent of a mortgage hanging over your head?

Oh, shit.

I've got a BAD feeling about this...

John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat making a second bid for the presidency, called a news conference for Thursday to discuss the future of his campaign, a day after he and his wife, Elizabeth, visited Mrs. Edwards’s doctor to assess her recovery from a bout of breast cancer.

Mrs. Edwards, in a brief interview from her home in Chapel Hill, N.C., said she and Mr. Edwards would discuss her health at the news conference, but she declined to elaborate.

“I’m still here,” she said.

Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for the Edwards campaign, would not comment. The news conference is to be held in Chapel Hill.

Mr. Edwards canceled a campaign appearance in Iowa on Wednesday to join his wife on what he had described as a presumably routine follow-up examination.

Mrs. Edwards, 57, received a cancer diagnosis in 2004 almost on the day that Mr. Edwards, the vice-presidential candidate, and Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, were defeated in their race for the White House.

Mr. Edwards has said he waited to announce a second bid for the presidency until he and Mrs. Edwards’s doctors were confident about her recovery.

Since then, he had established himself as a strong third contender in a race that includes Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois. A decision by Mr. Edwards to withdraw, should he decide to do that, could have a profound impact on the dynamics of the Democratic contest.

After the campaign announced its intention to hold the news conference, concern grew quickly among former and current aides to the Edwards family. One close family friend reached Wednesday evening declined to comment on the announcement, but said it would affect, at least temporarily, the future of the campaign.

I think it's pretty clear what this means.

Fuck the campaign, although frankly, I was kind of hoping that Edwards would be the one standing after Obama and Hillary knocked each other out. But as another 50+ year old woman who was fortunate enough to have just had yet another clean mammogram (the bone density test was another story), and suddenly realizing that the good health I've enjoyed all my life can no longer be taken for granted, I fear for what this means for Elizabeth Edwards and the rest of the Edwards family.

John Aravosis is right: You don't hold a press conference about the future of the campaign when everything after an exam is A-OK.

Breast cancer is a hideous disease, and not just because of the disfigurement that often goes with it. A women has a one-in-three chance of dying of the disease. By age 40, you have a 1-in-54 chance of developing the disease, which makes every clean mammogram something to celebrate.

Already this year we lost Molly Ivins to the disease after a long struggle. We've seen Jane Hamsher be about as brave as it's possible to be in undergoing treatment for a second recurrence and then going to cover the Libby trial.

As disappointed as I'll be if Edwards is suspending his campaign (which with the short timetable would pretty much knock him out of the race) or withdrawing entirely, my thoughts today are with the Edwards family. Here is a family that has already undergone the worst thing a parent can endure, in the loss of a child and may now be facing a bout with this awful disease. The next time a Republican who's been married three times like Newt Gingrich or Rudy Giuliani talks about how Republicans are the party of family values, think about John Edwards for a moment. The next time one of your wingnut colleagues talks about Republicans being the party of family values, think about the Edwards family.

UPDATE: Listening to Edwards' press briefing. My reception isn't good, but it sounds very, very bad, for all that he's putting on a good face. The recurrence seems to be in the bone. It's a small size, and he's talking of "optimism" and that it's "treatable", but it's not "curable." He's drawing a parallel with diabetes, as if this were a manageable disease, which I think is probably overly optimistic; but hopefully their optimism is not misguided. Elizabeth is speaking now. DAMN, this is one strong woman, but this is a bear of a disease, and bone mets are never, ever good news.

They are not suspending the campaign. I'm not sure what I think about that. I admire their courage, and I'm not going to second-guess their decision.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jane Hamsher, who's in a better position than anyone to comment, weighs in.

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