I didn’t vote.  Not for President, anyway.

Oh, I went to the voting booth.  I signed, was given my stub, and was walked over to a voting machine.  I cast votes for statewide races and a state referendum on water and sewer improvements.

I stood there, and I thought about all of these people, who influenced my life so greatly.  But I didn’t vote for who would be the 44th President of the United States.

When my ballot was complete, except for the top line, I finally decided who I was going to vote for – and then decided to let him vote for me.  I reached down, picked him up, and told him to find Obama’s name on the screen and touch it.

And so it came to pass that Alexander Reed, age 5, read the voting screen, found the right candidate, touched his name, and actually cast a vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Oh, the vote will be recorded as mine.  But I didn’t cast it.

Then again, the person who actually pressed the Obama box and the red “vote” button was the person I was really voting for all along.

I also took my 5 year old to the voting booth when I voted and allowed her to push the button for Barack Obama.  So I suppose I didn’t vote for him technically either.

She has been very into this election like I never expected.  Now, she can’t quite get her tongue around his name so she just calls him “Rock the ‘Bama”.  Last night she was so excited she made us promise to wake her up and let her know who won if they announced before my wife and I went to bed.

Knowing that she will never know a world where all of our leaders have always been rich white men is overwhelming.  I am so proud of this country today.  From the back of the bus to the White House in 50 years…you couldn’t ask for a better example of what a wonderfully perfectable system America is.

Perfectable, but not perfect.  On the same night we celebrate the culmination of our parents civil rights movement our own took 2 major steps backward.  The passing of Proposition 8 in California banning gay marriage and Initiative 1 in my own state of Arkansas single cohabitating adults (read:  homosexuals) from adopting or becoming foster parents remind us that the progressive movement is never over.  We must remain ever vigilant.

To those who would despair that these two discrminatory measures would pass, I am with you.   But we take solace in the future.  Both were rejected by large margins by those under the age of 30.  63%-37% in California and 54%-46% in Arkansas.  Among those under 25 the number were even better.

These are large set backs to be sure.  But I have faith that history will see them as minor bumps in the road to an even more perfect union.  We are coming into power and will rebuild this country to reflect our values.  Let no one doubt that.  It will take time but we will see a gay presidential candidate in my lifetime.

Know hope.

Congratulations: Children in the United States do not have the worst quality of life in the developed world. That honor is held by Britain–with the United States a close second. America’s infant mortality rate is exceeded only by Hungary’s; New Zealand is the only country where more people under 19 meet violent deaths each year. On teenage motherhood, we’re way ahead: forty-six births for every 1,000 girls between 15 and 19. The closest challenger (New Zealand again) can manage only thirty. Children born in the richest nation on earth are also the most likely to be noticeably poorer than their neighbors: 21.7 percent of America’s children live in households whose income is less than half the national median. Britain, at 16.2 percent, comes second in the inequality sweepstakes.

[...]

The study shows that the two countries with the greatest economic inequality are also failing their children in less tangible ways. British children reported the worst family and peer relationships and the highest incidence overall of risky behavior (smoking, drinking and unprotected sex); American children ranked third from the bottom (above Britain and Poland) in terms of their personal feelings of well-being. Sure, American adolescents drink and smoke less than kids in some other countries. But the cost of the right’s attempt to meet teenage sexuality with moralizing and repression rather than education is obvious in the teenage pregnancy rates. The country that came out best overall in the study was the Netherlands, known for its traditions of openness and tolerance.

The areas where American children fare worse than most–infant mortality, low birth weight, early childbearing, family instability and child poverty–are all directly related to the status of women. As Ruth Rosen writes in this issue, American women are still underpaid; still working double shifts; still shouldering on their own the burden of care for children and the elderly; still denied the right to control their fertility; still seen as a “special interest group” rather than half the nation. It is incredible that these things still need saying more than a generation after the rebirth of the women’s movement. If the other half can’t be made to see that women’s rights are vital for the whole community, the effects of gender inequality on children of both sexes might at least offer a compelling argument.

[...]

But at least we can afford massive tax cuts and an immoral war.

The second is more narrowly focused on child care and is also at The Nation, but it is a non-subscription article so I will just post this minor excerpt and encourage you to follow the link.

It is as though Americans are trapped in a time warp, still convinced that women should and will care for children, the elderly, homes and communities. But of course they can’t, now that most women have entered the workforce. In 1950 less than a fifth of mothers with children under age 6 worked in the labor force. By 2000 two-thirds of these mothers worked in the paid labor market.

Both articles underline the disassociation in American politics with true family values. Not the faux values proposed by the Republicans or the rhetoric from the Democrats. These are the values that American families care about. Or at least they would if anyone told them there was another way.

A copy of the Unicef report can be found here.

Quick, somebody alert the world’s Sunday School teachers! BTW, I love the picture of the Terminator listening to an iPod. I mean, wtf? And here’s the link to the original video, which was actually a slam against Bill-o. If they had actually bothered to read the YouTube posting they would have found out the little girl is an actress, and the video is an ad for a band.

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted, according to the source.

Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.

Look at the two of you dancing that way
Lost in the moment and each other’s face
So much in love you’re alone in this place
Like there’s nobody else in the world
I was enough for her not long ago
I was her number one
She told me so
And she still means the world to me
Just so you know
So be careful when you hold my girl
Time changes everything
Life must go on
And I’m not gonna stand in your way

But I loved her first and I held her first
And a place in my heart will always be hers
From the first breath she breathed
When she first smiled at me
I knew the love of a father runs deep
And I prayed that she’d find you someday
But it’s still hard to give her away
I loved her first

How could that beautiful women with you
Be the same freckled face kid that I knew
The one that I read all those fairy tales to
And tucked into bed all those nights
And I knew the first time I saw you with her
It was only a matter of time

But I loved her first and I held her first
And a place in my heart will always be hers
From the first breath she breathed
When she first smiled at me
I knew the love of a father runs deep
And I prayed that she’d find you someday
But it’s still hard to give her away
I loved her first

From the first breath she breathed
When she first smiled at me
I knew the love of a father runs deep
Someday you might know what I’m going through
When a miracle smiles up at you
I loved her first

Part of me thinks we should take up donations and buy 4000 Charles Darwin dolls and give them to Toys for Tots just to piss off the fundies. But it’s not about that. It’s about the 4000 kids who are going to wake up Christmas morning hoping for a new basketball or hula hoop and instead unwrap a sermon. It’s about those parents who had no other way to give their children a Christmas and turned to Toys for Tots for help. I can only hope that Toys for Tots is doing the safe thing and accepting these things just to store them in a back room somewhere until they can toss them out.

On the other hand, imagine all the blasphemous fun you could have with one of these.

Originally from Pandagon, and definitely read Amanda’s take on it and other works of christian “charity” from yesterday.

ewww! via Pandagon

A) You can’t call yourself a think tank if all your ideas are stupid. And B), if you’re someone from one of the think tanks that dreamed up the Iraq War, and who predicted that we’d be greeted as liberators, and that we wouldn’t need a lot of troops, and that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, that the WMD’s would be found, that the looting wasn’t problematic, and the mission was accomplished, that the insurgency was in its last throes, that things would get better after the people voted, after the government was formed, after we got Saddam, after we got his kids, after we got Zarqawi, and that the whole bloody mess wouldn’t turn into a civil war…you have to stop making predictions!

But I like his new rule for all of us about the Mark Foley scandal better:

New Rule: If you think the worst thing Congress doesn’t protect young people from is Mark Foley, then wake up and smell the burning planet. The – the ice caps are cracking, the coral reefs are bleaching, and our poisoned groundwater has turned spinach into a “side dish of mass destruction.” Read the labels on your food. It turns out the healthiest thing you can put in your body is Mark Foley’s penis.

But that’s America for you: a red herring culture, always scared by the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy, middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald’s, Marlboro, and K Street.

And recently, there’s been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting your children for death. They’re called military recruiters. More young Americans were crippled in Iraq last month than any month in the last two years. And the scandal is that Mark Foley wants to show them a good time before they go?

When will our closeted gay congressmen learn, our boys aren’t for pleasure, they’re for cannon fodder? Why aren’t Democrats and the media hammering away every day about who we’re supposed to be fighting for over there, and what the plan is? Yes, Mark Foley was wrong to ask teenagers how long their penis was. But at least someone on Capitol Hill was asking questions.

You know who else is grabbing your kids at too young an age? Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. By convincing you that your kids are depressed, hyperactive or suffering from ADD. In the last decade, the number of children prescribed anti-psychotic drugs in America increased by over 400%. Which means either that our children are going insane-which we might look on as a problem-or more likely, we have, for profit, created a nation of little junkies.

So, stop with the righteous indignation about predators. This whole country is trying to get inside your kid’s pants, because that’s where he keeps his wallet.

I don’t care – I don’t care if Mark Foley had been asking boys to describe their penis because I have some sad news for you: your kid is so larded out on Cheetohs and YooHoo, he can’t even see his penis. So many of our kids are fat drug addicts nowadays, it’s almost as if Rush Limbaugh had puppies!

So we can pretend that the biggest threat to our children is some creep on the Internet, or we can admit it’s us. Because when your son can’t find France on a map, or touch his toes with his hands, or understand that the ads on TV are lying, including the one where the Marine turns into Lancelot-then the person fucking him…is you.

Amy Burris sits across the desk from the executive director of the King’s Daughters’ School Center for Autism in Columbia, Tenn., trying to make sense of the words.

“We don’t do fund-raisers here,” the woman says with distaste, as if Amy had suggested nude bowling or a wet T-shirt contest. “We accept two sources of income at most.”

“Oh, I’ll take care of the fund-raising,” Amy protests, but the gray-haired matron cuts her off.

“Miss Burris, let me try to explain this to you.” The carefully modulated tones of culture shape her voice. Her manicured hands sport an array of gemstones. She wears tailored slacks, a long-sleeved Oxford blouse and a royal purple sweater tied at her breast.

Amy wears a knee-length flowered skirt, a sleeveless blue shirt and sparkly sandals from Old Navy. Her long brown hair is twisted into a bun. She had looked at herself approvingly in the motel room mirror that morning.

“Don’t I look motherly?” she had thought with pride.

Now the administrator is stripping that pride away.

“The parents here at the King’s Daughters’ School Center for Autism, well, they’re very committed parents who prepared financially to have children, Miss Burris. They’re architects, whose wives are physicians.” She tightens the purple sweater with each phrase. “They’re certainly not students.”

Amy is a graduate student at the University of Arkansas. She’s spent her rent money to get to Columbia, with the fevered hope of enrolling her autistic son for even a few months.

“A child with autism has ongoing needs,” the executive director explains later. “Some of our children are here for years. A few months’ work does not necessarily make a difference.”

Charlotte Battles is being truthful, but the words cut Amy’s heart like a knife. She tries to align them with the reality of her life — married at 19, pregnant at 20, a stay-at-home mom thrown into the world of autism advocacy at 24.

The questions come. How do you prepare for an autistic child? How do you deal with the fear that clutches your heart like a fist when you begin to realize something is wrong? How do you accept the chilling diagnosis, the realization that your child has just become a statistic, one of 1.5 million children in the United States with the disorder? How do you plan to parent a child with a complex developmental disability that impacts every area of his life, particularly communication and social interaction?

How do you cope?

It’s very easy to get angry at the way the director treated Amy Burris. It was probably the most condescending thing she could have said. But the true villain here is a society that values the children of architects and physicians more than the children of a speech language pathology student. What has he done to be denied the help he needs other than be born to the “wrong” mother? (And wrong definitely belongs in quotation marks when referring to Amy Burris.) If everyone is entitled to a free education in this country shouldn’t we be willing to provide that education? It is worth it to society to give everyone as much help as they need to become a functioning member of our society. It is shameful that the richest nation in the world, who claims to have a “no child left behind” policy, will not provide the necessary help that Steven Burris needs. Instead of taking care of our children, our government wastes billions of dollars in an unnecessary war.

There are two heart-wrenching stories in The Morning News about Amy Burris and her family. The first takes a close up look at her attempts to enroll Steven in a private boarding school. The second piece takes a longer look at the impact raising an autistic child has had on Amy’s life and on the rest of her family including Steven’s massive setback following his parents’ divorce. I think both of them are marvelous and anything I could add would be unnecessary. If I am half the parent Amy Burris is my children will be very lucky.

Fathers: watch what you say. It seems dads may have more of an influence on their children’s language development than they might think.

Lynne Vernon-Feagans at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her colleagues sat in on playtime with 92 families with dual incomes, observing how much each parent spoke to their child, the words and sentence structures they used, and the types of questions they asked.

Children whose father’s vocabulary was more varied when they were 2 years old had more advanced language skills at age 3. Surprisingly, the dads spoke less and asked fewer questions than the mothers, suggesting it was not how much they spoke but what they said and how they said it that resonated with their children.

The issue of my amatory consort and I will be guerdoned with an ample lexicon.

The mother’s vocabulary did not seem to have a significant impact on language development. However, because most of the mothers in the study used a large number of words when talking to their children, there could also be a threshold at which a large vocabulary ceases to be an advantage to the child, says Vernon-Feagans. “Perhaps when parents’ vocabulary falls below such a threshold, as is more likely to occur with fathers in this study, children’s later expressive language development may be negatively impacted,” she says (Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2006.08.003).

Men no like words.