My social work field placement was in the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court in 1989-1990.  A large chunk of my work was conducting a part of the process performed that leads to the clinicians providing information to the jurists so that they can decide whether or not a minor is “amenable” to treatment or other juvenile court options if the minor is “found delinquint” or should be “bound over” to adult court. I’ve used a lot of quotation marks because these...

Alan Rosenblatt is helping us determine just how many and which bloggers have gone from blogging to winning elected office, but as of yesterday, it appeared that I might be the only female political blogger in the country to have done that so far.  I have a hard time believing that, but if it’s true – wow.  Especially since the last thing I did was run “as a blogger.”  Great war stories about that in fact. Editor’s Note: Due to some requests, I’m inserting a...

Who knew!? You know, I’ve been pregnant three times, gave birth to live, healthy babies three times and nursed each of my three babies.  If breastfeeding my babies was not related to pregnancy, someone tell me what was going on with my body, k? Kate Harding at Salon.com has an excellent take-down and analysis of this gobsmackingly narrow decision regarding Totes/Isotoner’s pregnancy discrimination that defies common sense. In the strictest legal sense, the ruling is logical: Allen admitted...

To Love My Country has posted an analysis about White House salaries, based on a previously released list that came from the White House (talk about excellent primary source blogging). First, the idea behind the post, as explained by the blogger: The commentary here is intended to provoke thought about why men dominate the higher positions– where’s the disconnect? Is it women not majoring in Poli Sci at the same rates? Is it post-graduation job choices? Is it because the last administration to...

This morning’s Plain Dealer editorial page features a column by senior political reporter, Mark Naymik, titled, “Small tax issues still matter in a heated campaign, even among two Democrats.” (And hey, I read it in the printed version, not online first). In it, Mark writes: Taxes seem to matter to U.S. senators when people come before them seeking confirmation to administration positions. Senate candidates should be held to the same standard. This doesn’t rival a Nannygate...

If only pipsqueak dust was as magical as fairy dust. Two pipsqueaks sitting around talking Hattip to Jay Rosen and Chris Geidner for the heads up about this video, posted this morning and featuring Plain Dealer news impact editor, John Kroll. Kroll responds to reactions to Reader Representative Ted Diadiun’s video from last week, which was about reaction to Connie Schultz’s column from the week before that. (I’ll have a separate post about today’s video.) To recap:...

During my appearance on CNN.com/LIVE on Monday (7/6), I mentioned that one of the side effects of soon-to-be-former Alaska Governor and GOP Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s decision to not run for re-election as governor and to resign as of July 26 is that, seeing that she has done it (run for her state’s highest office and then leave it with 18 months to go) and justified those decisions with a variety of rationales, who is to say that she has not opened a floodgate for potential...

What’s at the intersection of politics and technology? More than a thousand people at 60th and Broadway on June 29 and 30th, aka Personal Democracy Forum 2009. I attended Day 2 of PdF and suggest that first, before anything else, you check out the new IT Dashboard that lets you see how your taxpayer dollars are being spent by the federal government in a way you’ve never seen before (the system is said to have crashed just an hour after it was unveiled yesterday but it’s fine right...

I’m liveblogging the Personal Democracy Forum all day today and you can follow the current session below. Vivek Kundra is the administration’s Chief Information Officer and has demonstrated the beta version of the IT Dashboard which lets us access government data in an unprecedented way (whether that’s good or bad, you decide). If you’d like to follow all the live-blogs today from PdF, please go here. I will try to post as many as I can – there will be close to 13...

Making Medicine Smarter is a new website that invites visitors to review numbers and research and then propose solutions to the problems they see.  The effort is funded by Medco and describes the site as follows: Medco has built this site to advance the dialog on healthcare reform. Because we feel that fixing healthcare is not about spending more, but spending smarter. Because smarter simply makes healthcare better. Given that President Obama is avoiding the Clinton era of health care reform’s...

A list of what you might consult to learn more about President Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor: Let’s start with the RNC’s talking points, released by The Hill (hattip to this tweet from Brad Baumann) Video of Sotomayor accepting nomination (major hattip to Cleveland Leader): SCOTUSblog: For those who are not familiar with SCOTUSblog, it is the place to start your reading. There are several entries there worth reading. It does not appear that they have...

Huffington Post reported last night that the U.S. House Rules Committee separated what I call the Sunday in the Park with Guns amendment, which got tacked on via a Senate amendment put forth by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and was approved there, from the credit card reform bill. You can read the bill here and see that Sec. 512 is the Coburn amendment.  You can also read here the House Rules resolution to split the amendment from the credit card reform bill. According to the same HuffPo piece, because...

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave the commencement address at Barnard College yesterday.  Here’s an excerpt: And women’s progress is more than a matter of morality. It is a political, economic, social and security imperative for the United States and for every nation represented in this graduating class. If you want to know how stable, healthy, and democratic a country is, look at its women, look at its girls. When I went to the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing...

On the heels of this post and very lengthy discussion about why there are far fewer conservative or Republican women in elected office than there are liberal or Democratic women comes yesterday’s announcement by South Carolina State Representative Nikki Haley – a 37 year old third-term Republican from Lexington County – that she is entering SC’s gubernatorial primary race (here is her campaign website). From The State: Haley, an accountant and mother of two, said she wants...

Two days ago, I flagged and wrote about Politico’s story on this topic. Two more articles about this slap on the forehead today.  First, from US News & World Report we have, “Republicans reject women when they shed moderates.” Highlight, which echoes my reaction at the end of my post yesterday: The Republican National Committee says it’s running a grass-roots recruiting drive to get women to run for office in all 50 states. That’s fine. The problem is, that to encourage...

I’ve written before about New Hampshire’s state legislature: the House and Senate are both led by women and the Senate is majority female.  When I’ve written about these details, I’ve also written that while it’s something to cheer, we need to keep track of how exactly it might make a difference in governance and life in New Hampshire – and whether voters ultimately decide that they’re happy with their composite choices. Today, the Boston Globe published...

Big kudos to Chris Cillizza’s Cheat Sheet for mentioning Maria Shriver’s effort, A Woman’s Nation: A Woman’s Nation: Maria Shriver, California’s first lady and scion to the Kennedy political legacy, is lending her name to a nationwide effort to document the state of women in society — the first such major project since the Eleanor Roosevelt led a similar project for President John F. Kennedy. A Woman’s Nation, as the effort will be known, will combine the...

After reading this post at the Ohio-based blog, Plunderbund, about House Minority Whip Eric Cantor’s attempt to offer online answers to (his notion of) constituent concerns, here’s what I wrote in a comment there: What is most obviously out of touch about Cantor’s site is that it is geared ONLY toward people who: -already have a job -already have a house -already have savings as opposed to the more than 22 million who are either out of work or are underemployed, the millions who’ve...

The White House blog posted this photo* of last night’s seder: The president and his guests are using the Maxwell House Coffee Haggadah (which is the one we used at our cantor’s home on the first night). I recognized the outside decorations immediately, double-checked them here and then zoomed in on the official photo. Here’s a close-up of the haggadah in President Obama’s hands and the one being held by the guest to Obama’s right: You can see “Maxwell House”...

Last night, I read about President Obama’s letter wishing those individuals who celebrate Passover a good holiday. Now comes word that there will be a seder in the White House: US President Barack Obama will celebrate Passover Thursday night with staff and friends in what is believed to be the first White House Seder attended by an American president. The event was slipped onto the president’s public schedule Tuesday night with little fanfare, following a letter signed by Obama earlier...

One thing that I’ve noticed since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, but which comes as no surprise, is that, how, when you campaign on the idea of transparency, and you succeed a president whom people say they voted for because he was so folksy and you’d want to have a beer with him but that president then abused that folksiness image to let people who saw him as folksy trust him (because they’d have a beer with him) when they should not have (reasons for going to war in Iraq, shenanigans...

Salon.com has compiled a review of the health and well-being of the Republican Party, state by state: The following list examines the trends in each of the 50 states over the past three election cycles, assessing demographic shifts, voting patterns, rising and falling political stars and organizational strengths and weaknesses. The picture it paints is not pretty, but it is not hopeless either. We have (roughly) ordered the list by the relative love that each state has for its Grand Old Party. While...

This is the kind of corporate transaction that could negatively impact the American brand name. Genentech is an amazing story and an amazing company, but I would like it to stay an amazing American-owned company. I’m happy for the business that they have such an offer, but here we are in an economic crisis, complaining about outsourcing jobs and manufacturing, as well as importing more than we export, and still, there’s the Genentech sale. One reason this hits me so hard is that I actually remember...

I’ve been getting word of the announcement that President Obama would create the White House Council on Women and Girls today since yesterday afternoon, so it’s almost a bit anti-climactic.  However, don’t let my blasé it takes a lot to impress me attitude dissuade you from recognizing what a big deal this actually is. You can read the full announcement from the White House after the jump here. While I hear and fully expect that nearly all women’s groups will happy about council’s creation,...

And hey, I live in the heart of it all – my congressional district’s well-being index (I’m in Ohio’s 11th, Marcia Fudge is my rep, replacing the late Stephanie Tubbs Jones) is 426 out of 435 -no wonder I feel so…not well. According to the State and Congressional District Resource for Well-Being, ”a product of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index,” my state, Ohio ranks 47th most “well” state (meaning, not very well at all) out of 50. The NYT...