It’s hard to follow American politics from ten thousand miles away (I live in the rural Philippines, and we get the news a day late), but as a Democrat, I was bemused to read in today’s papers that Rick Santorum just won in the Republican primaries of Minnesota and Missouri.
Santorum? I wasn’t aware he […]

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“Traumatic grief, with its unanswered questions, its numbing shock, its horror, its ability to sear disturbing images into our souls that cannot be erased by sleep or by time–this process follows the same general path both for persons and groups.”
When 12:30 struck, none of us fourth graders knew that our young president was being […]

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The president is taking a much needed vacation, this time to Martha’s Vineyard.
So what does the Washington Post have for a headline this morning?
As rebels close in on Tripoli, Obama getting updates on Martha’s Vineyard
Why yes.
Martha’s Vineyard isn’t exactly in the middle of nowhere, and they do have internet connections, an airfield and a […]

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In Massachusetts, a mom who stopped her son’s cancer medicines has been convicted of attempted murder.
Apparently, the son had autism, the mom was not a pristine heroine but a mom who resented being burdened with a handicapped son, and so when he developed a cancer that had a good cure rate with chemotherapy, she didn’t […]

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The NYTimes has a headline that questions if “Shaken Baby Syndrome” exists. Actually, the article is better than the headlines, but I worry that by trying to absolve the guilt of the perpetrator by showing the problems in diagnosing when and how the child was injured, they are missing a  teaching moment.
What you need to […]

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A bit of an uproar in Massachusetts, where the local papers have discovered that Senator Kerry bought a yacht, but has parked it in nearby Rhode Island to get out of paying the local sales tax.
The good news is that, now that he has been caught and shamed, he will pay the half million dollar […]

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In their article in the New York Times, “There’s Only One Way to Stop a Bully,” Susan Engel and Marlene Sandstrom focus on the educational aspects of programs designed to stop school bullying.  Let’s look at the whole picture and especially at the piece that’s usually missing from ineffective school programs:

Laws: Over 40 states have […]

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The following is an article by Fathers & Families Board Member, Robert Franklin, Esq.:
Massachusetts HB 1400 will be voted on in committee soon, perhaps as early as July 13th. It would establish a presumption of equally shared parenting in case of divorce or separation. If a judge deviated from an equally shared arrangement, he/she would […]

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Andrew Malcolm over at the LATimes is wondering what to make of Sarah Palin.
Her poll numbers are low, both when the polls ask if she is qualified to be president and also when asked if people would vote for those she supports, yet in this primary season a lot of those she endorsed have won […]

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Just as many girls as boys are bullies but girls more often target other girls.
Girls do bully other girls physically.  One publicized example is the Florida girls who beat up a classmate and then posted the video on YouTube.
However, most girl-girl bullying is verbal and emotional.  Seven of the nine bullies were girls in the […]

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Bill Cosby is right.
On a special anti-bullying segment on Larry King Live, Cosby lashed out at the bullies who tormented Phoebe Prince for months before she committed suicide.  He also took on the teachers, principal and school administrators who said that they didn’t know what was going on.
For months, Prince was assaulted, pushed and shoved, […]

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Maybe the suicide of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince will finally wake us up.  Maybe the articles in the New York Times, Huffington Post, People magazine and dozens of others will wake us up.  Maybe the long list of charges against the bullies and tormentors will finally goad the public to demand strong action.  Maybe charges of […]

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Phoebe Prince has been back in the news in the past week. This time it is about those who abused her relentlessly before she took her life as a result of being abused at the hands of her peers. Phoebe Prince had moved from Ireland to Massachusetts and enrolled at South Hadley High School. A […]

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I feel for those who who bought modest homes that were overpriced because of the “housing bubble” and now can’t meet their mortgages.
So those who bought modest homes and find they are in a temporary bind in paying off the mortgage probably need some kind of help, either from relatives, bank loans, or government guaranteed […]

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Phoebe Prince continues to make headlines after her recent death as a result of the relentless abuse by her peers at South Hadley High School. This story has opened a lot of floodgates with parents and alumni of South Hadley High School expressing internalized anger as they never stepped in to stop this abuse or […]

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Unless you’ve been living in a closet for 2 week, or are a die-hard Obama supporter trying to avoid the news, Scott Brown, the Republican, won the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy.
Yes, that Ted Kennedy.
Was this simply a local election, judged solely on local issues?  I don’t think […]

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…one Earthquake all too physically destructive, the other a virtual earthquake - shaking our political fabric to its very core, and with it, destruction of the hopes and dreams of the far left.

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There are a lot of Democrats like myself who will wonder why the Democratic party is using what they know is an obscene word, instead of bringing up the very real issues of the election.If you who aren’t familiar with the gay community, the word “teabagging” is a euphemism for a practice that normal Grandmoms […]

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The Massachusetts Senate race is getting the headlines on Drudge. Hmm…makes me wonder what’s going on, when a state most famous for it’s welfare and compassion might vote for a Republican. Yes, I’m old enough to remember Romney and Senator Brooke, but they are the exception to the rule.
The funniest line in the race this […]

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 Americans have been vilified and conditioned to believe that they are the worst polluters on the planet.   The USA has the assignment; worlds whipping boy for any and all environmental abuse on the earth.  Somehow it’s all our fault that 16 of the worlds 20 most polluted cities are in China.     None of the top […]

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Walking out the door, my to-be husband whispered to me that she wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t been standing behind me. He truly believed that the only reason she asked for my ID was because I was with a minority. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

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Now, I understand that Professor Gates had just returned from a long trip. I know that when I come home from a long trip, I am tired and crabby. It had to further aggravate him that when trying to get into his home to finally kick his shoes off and rest, the door was jammed. Topping off a long and tiring day, the police showed up and began questioning him. All he wanted to do was take a hot shower and go to bed, right? That’s all understandable. But none of it was Crowley’s fault and there is no indication that racial profiling occurred.

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I once was wending my way home after a midnight flight when I saw the blue lights of a cop car telling me to pull over.
Now, I was tired (coming back from a weekend ER shift in another state) and cranky. And, I was alone on a stretch of lonely rural road where two women […]

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I wasn’t too surprised that Proposition 8,which defended traditional marriage, passed in California because of the large number of Black and Hispanic Democrats who voted against it.
Their votes were actually about how people traditionally live together, and the place of marriage in society, but fifty years after the sexual revolution, one doubts that the mainstream […]

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A few days ago, a sister forwarded a plea that I join thousands of Mormons like us in protesting this Sunday’s segment of Big Love, which will include a portrayal of the temple rites practiced and held sacred by faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Instead of training my keyboard […]

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“That we allow defense attorneys to obfuscate and eroticize rape trials as a way of distorting the truth to produce an unfair result only adds insult to injury.” I guess the accuser’s story is always “the truth” and giving consideration to the accused’s explanations–”the sex was consensual,” etc.–is just “indulging male entitlement over women’s freedom.”
From […]

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Isn’t this rich? At a rally in Sarasota, FL, yesterday Barack Obama said:  
The reason that we want to do this, change our tax code, is not because I have anything against the rich. I love rich people! I want all of you to be rich. Go for it. That’s the America dream, that’s the American […]

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Caylee Anthony has been missing since mid June and now everyone except for the Anthony’s are saying the little girl is dead. Her mother, Casey Anthony has been named as a suspect now in Caylee’s disappearance. Casey refuses to talk to authorities and won’t tell anyone the truth about what happened to her daughter which […]

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Giovanni Gonzalez’s mother Daisy Colon of East Boston dropped him off to spend the weekend with his father, Ernesto L. Gonzalez on the weekend of August 15. When she returned to get him that Sunday night the child was not there.
The father of the boy insisted that he didn’t have the boy that weekend but […]

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By Cynthia Ruccia, Special to The Stiletto Blog
Wow … flying to St. Paul, MN, for the Republican National Convention. I still feel like I’ve fallen down that rabbit hole in “Alice in Wonderland” and the world is upside down.
Honestly, when 2008 started, I had a whole set of New Year’s resolutions just like everyone […]

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