Excuse my impending rant. But I have been seething at the Bush administration's plans to pump in as much as $100 billion in taxpayer money to fledgling businesses Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Not only do I consider these businesses unethical because they prey on our most vulnerable citizens -- people who have no money for college or to buy a home -- but I am sick and tired of the government coddling the rich at the expense of everyone else.

This Washington Post quote by Republican lawmaker Spencer Bachus really resonated with me:

"I do have a problem with stepping in and bailing out shareholders of Fannie and Freddie that have made billions on the way up. They never shared that with taxpayers," said Rep. Spencer Bachus (Ala.), the senior Republican on the House Financial Services Committee.

Seriously. It will be a good day when we miraculously come up with this kind of money for, let's say, education.

But here is where Bachus is totally off the mark:

He suggested capping any assistance to the companies at $100 billion to reflect the worst-case scenario laid out by the Congressional Budget Office.

The office arrived at that scenario by analyzing the financial statements of the firms and consulting with federal regulators, financial analysts and administration officials. It concluded that the most likely outcome is that the firms will not see losses in excess of the $85 billion they have already acknowledged and will not require government assistance. But there is a 5 percent chance that the firms could have additional losses of more than $100 billion, Orszag said, and would require assistance to continue to operate.

Well, these companies have been freely operating under the aegis of the "free market." I say let the free market take its course and allow these investors pick up the pieces. That's what their clients have had to do.

Here is a column many of us work-at-home moms can relate to. How do you juggle work and children when there is little to no childcare? From Parenting columnist Denene Millner:

I work from home, and I feel like I completely ignore my 16-month-old, even when she's in the same room. How do I balance work and kid time?

It isn't easy--I know from being a work-at-home mom. You're juggling three jobs at once: the paying gig, caring for your baby, and caretaker of the house. And you feel like you're not doing any of them effectively, especially the babycare. You have to trust you're doing the best you can.

You can't spend every second of the day with her, so don't beat yourself up. Make the most of the time you do have together. I schedule a lunch break and a few 20-minute breaks during the day (just like office workers) so that my girls and I can do something together, whether it's sharing a snack or drawing pictures.

When Lila was a baby, I hired a sitter to take her out for an hour every other day. I was amazed at what I could get done--and how less guilty I felt knowing that she was active and engaged. Guess what? Both of my kids are just fine--and confident that their mom works hard and loves them all the same.

For full disclosure, I do share a nanny four days a week with three other families -- at varying time slots -- for Eli. Otherwise, I could never get any writing done. I tried to write and take care of Ari at the same time, but after one crying bout during an interview --  I put him in his crib and shut the door, which left me feeling guilty and distracted -- I decided it was best to have someone entertain the baby for me while I work.

Of course, this isn't economically feasible for many families and I do feel like I have to hustle in a short amount of time to patch together what I feel is a respectable enough paycheck. During my frantic moments, I just want to throw up my hands and stay home full-time with the kids so I feel like I am excelling in at least one thing. And just to keep life simpler.

But it is much easier to juggle the two when the children are older as I have had to do this summer with Ari. I have scheduled playdates or headed over to the famous Tumble & Tea cafe to work while he entertains himself with the play structure. Then, there is always television as babysitter, although I really, really try to use this as a last resort. Speaking of mommy guilt...

How do you WAHMs budget your time?

This is kind of an old story -- two weeks old -- but I must share it with you as it illustrates so clearly what happens when government services are shrunk to the point you drown them in a bathtub as Republican anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist so famously put it.

Six-month-old baby Isiah Garcia of Washington D.C. died on June 25, prompting the Child and Family Services Agency to remove his parents' three other young children from their Trinidad home in Northeast, according to the Washington Post.

In an exclusive interview with the Post, Isiah's parents, Morgan Herrera-El and Jesus Garcia, opened up about their troubled relationship which has led Herrera-El and the kids to a shelter for abused women and their struggles to raise their children in a crime-free area.

Throughout the interview, I was angry at the couple for not keeping their relationship together to care for their baby, who apparently died of neglect. I was also indignant at a system that allowed this family to be swindled out of $3,000 when they did attempt to do the right thing and rent a nice apartment. That court case is still a couple months away.

Other ways in which this family was failed: No one at the shelter helped Herrera-El with the kids who were aged 3, 2, 1 and six months. A social worker who said she would visit the family, didn't. She has since been fired. But why couldn't she visit? Because she had 50 cases to tend to. Why does she have 50 cases? Because there is not enough tax money in the program to hire more social workers. See where this sort of thing leads us?

The couple, who are not married, frighteningly sounded like any other young parent trying to make ends meet.

This month's Vanity Fair "Proust Questionnaire" featured entertainer Bette Midler. And what a class act she is:

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
An empty house and a good book.

What is your greatest fear?
That the greatest days of my country are past.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Impatience.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Ignorance and arrogance.

...What do you dislike most about your appearance?
My roots.

Which living person do you most despise?
The Bluetooth-wearing S.U.V. driver who idles in front of my building.

...What do you consider your greatest achievement?
My daughter, Sophie.

Amen sister!

Sometimes when single parents travel, it can be an isolating experience. The children tend to meet other children on the road, but their parents are left babysitting and with no one to talk to.

Newsweek recently profiled some organizations that cater to single parents by offering childcare and even discounts. Through Single Parent Travel, for example, Lisa Gentile, who was interviewed by the magazine, went on an all-inclusive trip with two dozen other single-parent families.

Lisa and (daughter) Claudia spent most days chatting and playing on the beach with other families, then meeting up again at night for dinner, a stroll or a variety show. They befriended a mother-daughter pair from their home state and have stayed in touch ever since. “The best part is the company,” says Gentile. “You’re meeting people you have something in common with, and their reason for being there is the same as yours.”

...A number of companies are taking steps to make single parents feel more welcome. Breezes resorts (breezes.com) in Curaçao and the Dominican Republic waive their single supplement from May through late December for one adult traveling with kids, and some Beaches resorts (beaches.com) offer single parent weeks, with discounts and activities that allow families to socialize with one another. In July, the Offshore Sailing School in Ft. Myers Beach, Fla., is hosting a weeklong class with special rates for single adults with kids (offshore-sailing.com; $2,893 for one parent and one child, July 13–18). For general advice, singleparenttravel.net publishes a monthly newsletter that includes travel specials and destination ideas. Gentile’s main tip is to just go for it. “You deserve a vacation and to have a good time with your child,” she says. “Don’t worry about what anyone else is thinking.”

Sounds good. How do you single moms decompress on the holiday? How do you decompress period?

Thank you all for your outpouring of support for our dear Round Peg In A Square Hole. I heard from her husband Pablo last night and his brother-in-law was undergoing surgery as his back was broken in at least six places from the fall. He thanked Melinda for the attorney lead and all the support shown here.

I will take food to them tonight, make sure to get in touch with local MTers who have offered to do the same and make sure to keep you in the loop. Please continue to keep this family in your thoughts and prayers.

Missing Children: Remember that case in Portugal, in which a four-year-old girl on vacation with her parents just disappeared? Police are suspending their investigation into the disappearance of 4-year-old Madeleine McCann, at least until new evidence is presented, according to the Associated Press.

The parents and a third suspect will not be charged.

In related news, the Washington Post ran a multi-part series on the Chandra Levy case. She was the D.C. intern from Modesto, California, who had gone missing eight years ago and was found murdered in a D.C. park. The series shared the story of how Levy's parents were able to keep their daughter's case in the news, partly because of the salacious news around her affair with Congressman Gary Condit.

More on New Yorker Cover of Obamas: The media trade publication, MinOnline, had a write-up of the public fallout from the New Yorker cover cartoon of the Obamas satirically portrayed as Muslim extremists. New Yorker editor David Remnick insisted to Charlie Rose that the American people are smart enough to recognize satire when they see it.

With all due respect to him and others who have defended the New Yorker, including apparently Jon Stewart, I have traveled widely this summer and run across family members, acquaintances and strangers who believe that Obama is a Muslim or is anti-American and did not say the Pledge of Allegiance. They looked at me as if I had three heads when I set the record straight and assured them that there are no pastors in Islam. "Obama's pastor is REVEREND Wright, not MULLAH Wright," I'd tell them.

God help us.

Ah yeah. Berkeley Parents Network is back! As are cranky letters by cranky parents ratting each other out:

Chore trouble. I am a SAHD and grad student. She works and is a grad student. She has rejected all my plans for division of chores, my request that we do dishes together, and my request that we pick up the floor for five minutes together. When pressed, she finally came up with her own plan, but has consistently failed to follow through with what she says she will do. The bar has been lowered and lowered, so that now she has committed to doing one chore a day, and she has a hard time following through with that. She asked me if I wanted her to prioritize doing chores over spending quality time with her, and I said, ''Yes!'' She was surprised, and I explained (as I have countless times in the past) that it's hard for me to feel loving towards her when: I feel like we don't help each other AND I can't count on her to do what she says she's going to do. From my perspective, it would be pretty easy to me feel like we are in an equal partnership, but she refuses to meet me halfway here. (Incidentally, I don't know why she can spend two hours watching a movie with me, but refuses to spend five minutes with me picking up toys.)

Am I nuts? Is it unrealistic to expect that my wife does SOMETHING to help around the house? She says she's too busy, or too tired... but dangit, I'm busy and tired, too! Is there any hope for this situation? Thanks!

Reliving my parents' problems

It's always nice to see a man -- and not just mom -- gripe about household chores. That's progress!

But it led me to re-visit and reconsider the division of labor in my own household. So far, so good. I do the food shopping and cooking. We both do dishes and laundry, although lately, none of us has been picking up the kids' room and it is a mess. Then again, this does not bother us. We figure we will get the house back when the kids are older.

What about you? How is domestic labor divided up in your home?

The blogosphere is abuzz with Olympic champion Marion Jones's request for a presidential pardon. Jones, who won three gold and two bronze medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, is serving an eight month sentence in Ft. Worth for lying to federal investigators about using performance-enhancing drugs and a check-fraud scheme.

From Fox Sports:

After frequently denying that she ever used performance-enhancing drugs, Jones admitted last October she had lied to federal investigators in November 2003. Jones also admitted lying about her knowledge of the involvement of Tim Montgomery, the father of her older son and a former 100-meter world-record holder, in a scheme to cash millions of dollars worth of stolen or forged checks.

Jones was sentenced in January to six months in prison and 400 hours of community service in each of the two years following her release. She was sentenced to six months on the steroids case and two months on the check-fraud case, but was permitted to serve those sentences concurrently.

The judge in Jones' case said the check-fraud scheme was a major crime, and the wide use of steroids "affects the integrity of athletic competition."

She has been in jail since March. As many in the Fox thread pointed out, she may have already served her term by the time the Justice Department gets to her application.

But I cringed to learn that Jones has two sons, a four-year-old and six-month-old. Not surprisingly, she is desperate to see them and the Celebrity Baby blog had a lengthy conversation about what she told her four-year-old and what it must have been like for the baby not see his mother. My heart breaks for her family.

Then again, this is no different than the many convicted mothers who are kept from their children and do not have Jones's name to remain in the press. Why oh why would a woman of Jones's talents be involved in a check-fraud scheme? I. don't. get. it.

What do you think? Should Jones receive a pardon or have her sentence commuted?

I could relate to the fears and uncertainty felt by the parents in this MSNBC article.

Mothers-to-be are receiving up to dozens of pamphlets urging them to bank their baby's cord blood. The cord blood contains stem cells, which are uniquely suited to the child and can help treat cancer and other childhood diseases.

But as MSNBC health writer JoNel Aleccia pointed out, the pamphleteers are private companies not upfront about the costs and low chances that a family will actually use the cord blood. Also, many hospitals are not equipped to handle donations for the public -- another option for families.

The vast majority of those parents — about 97 percent — will do nothing, and the umbilical cord and the cells it contains will be discarded as medical waste.

The tiny fraction that remain, however, will be caught in the sharp debate between private cord blood firms vying to cash in on an estimated $1 billion industry and public registries trying to boost diverse donations to fuel research and save lives in the community at large....

Overall, the chance that a publicly stored unit of cord blood will ever be used is about 650 times higher than the odds that a privately banked unit will ever be needed, (Dr. Dennis) Confer added....

The American Academy of Pediatrics last year urged parents to privately bank their babies’ blood only if they had an older child with cancer or a genetic disease that could benefit from a sibling’s donation. Otherwise, parents should donate to public banks, the panel said.

Because no one in our families had had the diseases listed on the cord blood registry, we opted against privately banking Eli's cord blood. We offered to donate it, but the hospital I delivered at was not equipped to take it. My midwife, however, assured me it was in the making, which is such a good idea IMHO.

Children are coming out at a younger age that gay straight alliance clubs are popping up in even middle schools, according to a story in the Washington Post.

But as the Post also pointed out, laws and protections against harassment of gays and lesbians have yet to catch up.

In recent years, 110 Gay Straight Alliance clubs, which are common in high schools nationwide, have sprouted in middle schools, including nine in Maryland and Virginia. Kevin Jennings, the founder of the first club, said he "never anticipated" they would also form in middle grades. His organization, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, is creating age-appropriate pamphlets to respond to the trend.

This year, students in 1,046 middle schools took part in the Day of Silence, a protest against LGBT intolerance, organizers said, double the participation level of the previous year....

While children are coming out younger, studies show that they are doing so in schools where staff members have received little training in the area, where their fellow students use such language as "That's so gay" every day to express dislike, and where anti-bullying policies often don't exist or don't specifically protect students on the basis of sexual orientation.

In May, Maryland became the 11th state to enact a law to protect schoolchildren from being bullied because of sexual orientation. The District has had such a law since 1973; Virginia does not have one.

But California's anti-bullying policy, which is among only a handful to cite gender identity in addition to sexual orientation, could not stop what happened in February to the openly gay eighth-grader in a computer class in Oxnard.

Lawrence "Larry" King was in that class when he was fatally shot twice in the head....Larry didn't dress like other boys. He wore purple eye shadow and high-heeled boots. The 14-year-old classmate he had considered a possible valentine is charged with his death.

On the one hand, openly gay students are not suffering the alienation their closeted forebears did. But on the other hand, their parents, including at least one mother quoted in the Post story, worry that their children will become the target of ridicule and bullying.

Have any of your children come out? What were or are their experiences in school?

Courtney over at Feministing had a hilarious post about debutante balls. Apparently, a high school friend had a letter she wrote to the Colorado Springs debutante committee, rejecting their invitation. Here is what a high school-aged Courtney wrote:

I write in order to decline your invitation to be a 1998 debutante...I believe that the Debutante fanfare is a glazed over form of outdated discrimination...The simple fact that there are still organizations, like yours and the Jolly Jills, who spearate black and white young women as they brink on the edge of their adult lives, is a sad, sad message...To uphold tradition and validate family and giving are wonderful values to introduce into society. But, if in the process, you also introduce notions of socio-economic discrimination and racial segregation. What an unnecessary shame.

This post got me thinking if I have attended any such balls. Actually, no. Thankfully, where I lived in New Hampshire not even the prom was that big of a deal. I had never even heard of a debutante ball until I went to college and met someone who had one.

My friends in Florida had quinceañeras, which unfortunately cost the price of an American wedding, which is probably why I didn't have one. That, and the thought of showing up at my 15th birthday party in a billowy white dress and eating what looks like a wedding cake, would have been too embarrassing for me in my New Hampshire town.

I may throw a small one for my daughter in El Salvador or California, depending if she wants it. She will attend a school with many Latinos so I am assuming she will ask for her own quinceañera -- unless she is like Courtney and rebels. LOL!

But what about you all? Have you had a debutante ball, Sweet 16 party, Bat Mitzvah or quinceañera? What was your experience?

What's up with our fellow beings in the blogosphere?

Fellow MTer Christina included a lot of great shots from Austin and musings from the Netroots Nation Convention in her blog Trees and flowers and birds.

Michelle Obama is posting at BlogHer. Here is a recap of all the live blogging from the BlogHer conference this past weekend. Did any of you go? How was it?

Thankfully, our Hillary got wind of this New York Times story in her blog Actually: Shoddy electrical work on military bases by private companies has caused more deaths and injuries than previously admitted by the Pentagon.

In related news, San Francisco will have a ballot initiative this fall to name one of its sewage plants after President George W. Bush, according to the blog Arredonald.

The Anti-Racist Parent had the most comprehensive recommended book list -- "African American Studies 101" -- for white parents adopting black children.

This picture of Crazed Parent's dog with her lovey was adorable. You must see!

I am sorry I missed this episode of Wife Swap: Jeremy Adam Smith of Daddy Dialectic wrote about a wife swap between a family that had a high-powered career woman and a born-again Christian who home-schooled her six children. Sadly, the families ended up disgusted with one another rather than respecting their differences. What do you think? Did you see the show?