Apt. 11D

Voter ID Laws

On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's voter identification law, concluding that the challengers failed to prove that the law’s photo ID requirement placed an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.

Voter IDs have been pushed by Republicans in several states, in addition to Indiana.

Next year, they'll bring back poll taxes and literacy requirements. Good news!

Parental Rights and the State

The subject of child abuse has been in the news and on this blog quite often lately. Just today on the morning news I heard about a freak in Austria who imprisoned his daughter in his basement, that 31 of the teenage girls from FLDS were either pregnant or had already had a baby, and that Mylie Cyrus went topless in Vanity Fair with her parents watching (way to kill the golden goose, folks).

So, last week, I asked what grounds were sufficient to terminate a parent's rights over a kid.

Harry B. at Crooked Timber fleshes out an argument he made in my comment section about parental rights.  He says that parents should have a great deal of latitude to raise a kid as they see fit, however those rights end when a child is abused or neglected. He says that a child's interest is probably more involved that just getting a decent breakfast and avoiding a beating, but he doesn't elaborate in this blog post.

The problem, according to Harry B., is that the remedy for the situation may be worse than status quo. The disruption of families, even bad ones, can lead to other serious problems for the kids. The foster care system in our country has an uneven track record.

Harry throws out a final, and excellent question.

What kinds of public policy will make it more likely that more parents will meet the (in my view quite stringent) conditions on retaining a fundamental right to raise their child. How, in other words, can we arrange policies so that events like this one with the FLDS don’t arise in the first place?

In the interest of not confusing the conversation, respond to Harry at CT. All other random and less serious comments can be left here, as always.

Improving Your Parents

Bob Morris used to push his old father to walk more. On a visit to NY, his dad struggled to walk up a a broken escalator out of the subway.

Strange as it sounds, I felt pleased he had gotten a good workout. In the year that followed, as his heart grew weaker, I kept at him to walk with me. Worn out after a good life, he’d refuse, and I’d be angry. What he really needed was more affection, not exercise. Yet I kept trying to impose my will on both my parents right to the end. How dare they become so old?

I think about them now, when I go out walking with such determination it’s almost as if I’m trying to walk away from myself. I’ve heard that you’re only free to become the adult you have always meant to be when both your parents are gone. But often I just wish I could have been someone else when they were alive.

I loved this essay, because the broken subway escalator is such a city thing. It's part of the hell/heaven experience of Manhattan living. It also reminded me of my own misplaced self-improvement plans for my grandmother and how much I miss her every day.

The Question of the Super Delegates

What would happen if the delegate count based on the popular vote goes for Obama, but the super delegates vote for Hillary and tip the nomination her way?

Dick Morris writes that if that happened, a civil war would erupt. My husband says it would mean the end of the Democratic party. My buddy, Suze, says that nothing would happen. A civil war didn't happen when the Supreme Court tipped the election towards Bush, even though he lost the popular vote.

What do you think?

Weekend Journal

On Saturday, some old friends dropped by for the first barbecue of the season. There's nothing better than shriveled hot dogs and a pasta salad of leftovers. Something happened that night that reminded me of an old boyfriend long forgotten, so after they left, I plugged his name into Google to see what happened to him.

There's Nothing Part-Time About Academia and Blogging

How much time do I spend in front a computer? Waaaaay too much. Between blogging and my so-called part-time academic job, I'm always here.

My fun loving neighbors get home at 5:30 and start drinking beers on their back porch. They call me over for a while, but I end up back here after a short break. My kids make me play board games with them, but then I end up back here.

Ingrid wonders why part-time academics bother with the part-time employment, since there's nothing part time about research. Well, getting out of committee work certainly is a good thing, and so is the flexibility.

Dan notes the parallels to blogging. So, academic bloggers really have no lives.

I think grad school screwed me up. I long ago disassociated work with money. I'm still surprised that my college sends me a check every two weeks.

Eating on the Campaign Trail

It may be because I'm fighting back a stomach bug, but I've been feeling really sorry for the candidates lately. I just couldn't imagine being happy all the time, shaking all those hands, pretending that I'm overjoyed to see someone who's name I've forgotten, and eating all those waffles.

I've been wondering what the etiquette is when you are just too full to eat another pancake or plate of pasta. Do the candidates force it all down, so as to not offend the locals or is it cool to just to take a bite and pass the plate to a staffer? What is average weight gain of a candidate on the campaign trail? Is this why Hillary keeps wearing larger and larger jackets?

Maureen Dowd speculates about how slim Obama has been dealing with the force feeding aspect of the campaign.

He is frantic to get away from her because he can’t keep carbo-loading to relate to the common people.

In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.

It may be the stupidest column ever, as Matt and Megan say. But I was wondering how Obama was coping with the food intake challenge of our election. Because in America, we don't really care policy positions, we just care about pancakes and whiskey shots.

This election is feeling like a season of Survivor. We're down to the last two candidates. We've put them through the icky food challenge, the lack of sleep challenge, the embarrassing moments from their youth challenge.

What should be their final challenge? Should we make them stand up on a pole in the water and see who falls off first? Should we get all the people voted off the island and have them make insulting speeches about the two survivors? "On this island, there are only two kinds of animals - the snake and the rat..." Maybe just a rope maze?

Back Again

This is the tail end of the semester, and I'm limping to the end. One more week of classes and then finals. This week has been round the clock paper grading and lecture writing and school events. It's all been complicated by the fact that the kids have off this week, but I don't. So, Steve had to take off some days from work, and I had to work at home with the kids the other days.

Today I took Jonah to school with me. He loves coming to school with me. We went to the school cafeteria and I let him pick out some juice and a granola bar. On the way back to my office, he sped again of me, so he would look like one of the students and not just a kid with his mom.

He was oddly quiet and slow, which is very unusual for Jonah, but I didn't think too much of it. On the way to class, he said he stomach hurt. I chalked it up to too much orange juice.

Towards the end of class, we were watching Obama's race speech on YouTube, when Jonah came running up to me and said he had to be sick. I ran out of class with him and got him to the men's room in time for him to vomit. He said that he didn't quite make it to the toilet in time.

I handed papers back to the kids and took Jonah back home. I'm feeling a bit queesy, too. I have a lot of backed up posts that I have to spit out. Maybe it will make me feel better.

Spreadin' Love

Bob Herbert in the Times, "Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education.

When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong."

One of my students sent me a link to Edwards on Colbert.  Alexandra Stanley has more on politicians making an ass of themselves on TV.

The best bidet commercial ever.

PA Primary

So, it looks like Hillary has it in the bag in PA. If you're voting there and have good stories, give us the dirt.