State's Rights?

On Thursday the Post reported that the Republicans in the House passed a bill requiring states to recognized the concealed weapons laws of other states.  When someone enters their state from a state with less restrictive laws they must allow that person to follow their home state's law.  These are the same people who bray about "state's rights" and the horrors of the federal government taking over the power of the state's.  I guess state's rights don't matter when it is something the Republicans don't like such as trying to protect people from crazies carrying guns.

School lunches

Tuesday the Post reported that school lunches count tomato paste as a vegetable. "The argument for the special consideration given to tomato paste has been that once it’s mixed with water, as often happens in making pizza sauce, more of a vegetable is created."  This is because the mean old USDA is once again trying to get healthy lunches for children in schools.  By the above reasoning if I put 6 kernals of corn into a cup of water a kid would be getting the same amount of vegetables as a cup of corn. Crazy of course.  And of course it is the Republican (and Democratic) legislatures protecting their people (read big campaign contributers) that make frozen pizza with the excuse of course that it would cost schools lots of money if they had to cut back and french fries and pizza.  Big surprise in today's paper: schools won't save that much money by continuing to serve them instead of real vegetables.  Once again  it's the poor kids against the big corporations and the big corpations win. Wait, I forgot, according to the Supreme Court corporations are people too.

On Faith- Respecting Michelle Duggar

McGuire thinks that women shouldn't condemn Michelle Duggar for having 20 children- she is just doing what she wants, like any liberated woman.  But one can condemn her for what she is doing to the planet by contributing to overpopulation on a big scale (big for what one ordinary person can do- just think if each of those kids has 20 kids that's 420 new people in just 2 generations!) and contributing to possible ill health and congenital defects in her babies.  Wasn't the last one born premature and have to spend time in the hospital? For the best health of both the mother and the baby there should be at least 2 years between pregnancies- has she done that? And the older a woman gets the greater the chances of all sorts of bad pregnancy outcomes: prematurity, small-for-gestational age, birth defects, mental retardation, maternal hemorrhage, etc.  And how much maternal attendtion does each child get? My mother suffered from lack of attention being number 8 out of 10 kids and it affected her for life. And how much of her decision to keep having children have to do with being on TV and not on love for the children? So no, I don't respect Michelle Duggar.

Ask Amy

Amy suggested that the sister who was upset that her 21 year old unmarried sister was planning on putting up the child for adoption adopt the child herself. That isn't going to happen, based on what she wrote. "...she got herself into this mess. It doesn't seem fair that she just gets to put the child up for adoption and resume her life."  That can be taken as a moralist, judgemental anti-woman manifesto that if you have fun having sex, you should suffer afterwards.  I can also see that the older sister is jealous because she didn't get to walk away from her children. Either way you missed the point that the 21 year old was making the mature, responsible decision (all studies show that children in single mom families don't do as well as ones in two parent families) and the one writing is the one who doesn't get it.