I’ve had a lot of sympathy for you. You had name recognition and a commanding lead in the polls before actual voting and caucusing began, and were making history as the first woman to run for President on a major party ticket, and yet you were never able to deliver the knock-out punch you and your gifted chief strategist were hoping for. The presidential nomination that you thought was yours moved ever further away from you.

You were the first student to give the commencement speech during your graduation from Wellesley and were a graduate of Yale Law, working-class roots that are so solid I was surprised to see you drinking beer and taking a shot of whiskey to play up those roots. I winced as your husband blundered about like a Bill in a china shop, afraid that his antics would damage your reputation.

But it wasn’t until you started playing up your gas tax holiday plan — or, rather, your echo of John McCain’s plan — that I started losing that sympathy. “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists”? Really? The economists’ analysis of your gas tax holiday plan is an example of “elitist opinion”? Color me stupid, but I’d like the President to take advice from people who know what the hell they’re talking about instead of going with their gut.

But now? Now you’ve squandered any sympathy I might have had for you.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she went on to say. No kidding. That pattern is you and your campaign moving slowly from insinuating that Obama is just a black candidate to decrying his playing the “race card” to out-and-out saying that whites won’t vote for him because he’s black.

It turns out that when you were running on your establishment credentials against Obama’s message of change, you were hearkening back to the 48th governor of my state.

National Security Letters are particularly dangerous because there’s no judicial approval or oversight, and they come with a nasty gag order that prevents you from talking to anyone about it other than your attorney. Imagine trying to fight an NSL in court, unable to tell your friends or family why you’re going to court — remember, you can’t even admit that you’ve been served with an NSL! While the FBI claims that NSLs can only be used in cases relevant to an authorized FBI national security investigation, they’ve instead used it to skirt the laws restricting domestic surveillance. And for such a powerful tool, the FBI is remarkably lax in keeping track of NSLs, telling Congress they can only estimate how many NSLs they’ve issued. Worse, they have consistently underestimated the number to Congress.

The need for secrecy leads to the desire for secrecy regardless of need. Without oversight, review or appeal, secrecy feeds on itself, and government agents turn to it because it makes their investigations easier. It’s good to see a case where that unneeded secrecy is publicly challenged and stopped.

It looks like I was right, if this post is any indication. The would-be parents are making $200,000 in Silicon Valley, and aren’t sure how to make ends meet. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the readers to determine how reasonable the poster’s proposed budget is. Note that he’s in the top 5 percent of US earners, views his monthly budget as “austere,” and has come up with similar budgets for living somewhere other than Silicon Valley.

It should not require a shared Google calendar to pull off. And yet for the second time in about three weeks, Stephen and I have had our wires so crossed that we didn’t know what we were doing.

So now our family has a giant Google calendar. Everyone has their own color and every event is now being meticulously added for the greater good. Greater good in this case is marital harmony.

May is full of family visits to celebrate Liza’s birthday. June is full of Eli’s camps. He’s taking swimming lessons for two weeks and then going to soccer camp for a week. July is shaping up to be our trip to Japan. August will bring the school schedule with it.

I’m already exhausted and school isn’t even out for summer yet. But better this schedule than the one from last year! This time last year I was beginning my two weeks of off and on labor before Liza’s birth. Let’s just say I’m looking forward to the 20 hours of flying to Japan way more than the 20+ hours of labor.

“President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,” White House press secretary Dana Perino told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.”

She went on to say that President of the United States Who Has A Record Low 22% Approval Rating Bush would strive to be more exact in the future.

Eli had a dental checkup this morning and all went well except the dentist insists that Eli now give up his pacifier. He started to whinge about it before we even got to the car. I struck a deal with him. If he could do without the binky and the bulk of the moaning about the binky for a whole week, then next Wednesday we’d go to the Pizza Rat, a.k.a. Chuck E. Cheese’s, for lunch. He agreed to it and was unusually silent during the ride towards home. I asked him a couple of times what he was thinking and he said he was thinking about going to Chuck’s.

About 3 blocks from home he started coughing. I asked if he was ok and I passed him a napkin just in time for him to throw up all over the napkin, himself, the car seat and the backseat.

I don’t know if you missed the post from this weekend but I’ve already had my quota of vomit for a while. Also, Stephen and I struck a deal back four years ago when I was pregnant that he would deal with the vomit and I would deal with the blood. Yeah, so far that deal has not worked out in any shape or form.

I’d just like to let the universe, and you guys, in on a little secret: I hate vomit. I hate to do it myself, I hate to smell other people’s and I most especially hate to clean it up. Even more so when it’s to clean it out of the car seat, the crack of the backseat, and the seatbelt.

I suppose I should be thankful that I’ve had to deal with more vomit than blood but is it too much to ask to not have to deal with either one?

So how could I not try out Grand Theft Auto 4? And how could I not see what Eli thought of it?

Technorati Tags: grand theft auto 4, video game, review, not the kind of sandbox he usually plays in

Overall: a completely surreal and fun weekend.

Technorati Tags: roflcon, it’s full of weird

As you can imagine, a lot of parents thought she was nuts. Her son could have been abducted! It wasn’t safe!

Being a parent means having sudden, unexpected moments of panic when your child drops a heavy weight on his head or stuffs undoubtedly poisonous plant leaves in her mouth. Really, it’s a wonder we don’t lock ourselves and our kids inside and never venture out, except then radon would kill us.

There are, of course, a bunch of products that play on those fears. You want to baby-proof your home, and looking at everything you could buy you might think it’s possible, but you can’t, short of removing all plants, books, sharp corners, and electricity. You can make your home reasonably safe, but true baby-proofing short of putting your kid in a giant hamster ball is unachievable.

Even once you’ve given up on making your child perfectly safe, how do you decide what’s reasonable? For instance, what about SafetyTats, temporary tattoos with your cell phone on them? The company’s very tag line is, “just in case.” At first I didn’t see the need for them — Eli is quite capable of telling sales clerks that he’s lost. But what if we were in an amusement park, where Eli or Liza could get very, very lost and it could be hard to track us down? What if I had a non-verbal or autistic child?

Overall I decide what’s reasonable to worry about by how likely it is to happen. That’s one reason why I don’t even worry about anyone abducting Eli or Liza. In 2004, The Today Show claimed that 58,000 children go missing each year. According to US Census data, there were 72 million children under the age of 18 in 2000. That works out to an abduction rate of 80 per 100,000 children. However, the 58,000 number covers all “non-family abductions”. There’s more to it than meets the eye, as the STATS.org report explained.

But in such cases, as the media rarely notes, 90 percent of “abductees” return home within 24 hours. The vast majority are teenagers running away with friends or romantic partners and over 99 percent are returned alive and uninjured. (Although many teen girls are involved with sexual activity during the time when they are “missing,” the statistics do not distinguish between voluntary and coerced sex because if the girl is under-age and the male is not, she is not considered capable of consent. The majority of the “missing children” covered by this statistic (65%) are female and 59% are aged 15-17.)

This time [in 2006], Today was more conservative in its estimate, claiming that only 5,000 children go missing each year. While this is an improvement over 58,000, the implication is still that there are 5,000 stereotypical kidnappings, in which a stranger or acquaintance abducts a child to hold for ransom or abuse and kill him or her. According to the Justice Department, there are only about 115 such incidents each year.

115 a year works out to be less than 1/5 of a child per 100,000 kids. For comparison, in 2003 the leading cause of death for children was unintentional injury, at a rate of 1,000 or more per 100,000 children, spiking to 15,000 per 100,000 for kids over the age of 15. More than half of those unintentional injury deaths come from moving vehicle accidents. Even if you accept the inflated rate of 80 abductions per 100,000 children, that rate is still beaten out by homicide, suicide, heart disease, and even the flu.

If I’m going to live my life, I only have so much time to worry and plan for contingencies. Given that, I think I’ll make sure Eli and Liza’s car seats are buckled in correctly and that they get their flu shots.