Throw Joe Paterno under the bus

So the Paterno family is rejecting the Freeh Report, a document the production of which was headed by a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and which involved combing over literally millions of communications and hundreds of personal interviews to determine who knew what and when they knew it. Instead, the Paterno family, like O.J. Simpson, has vowed to launch their own investigation to find the real harborer of child rapists at Penn State.

I humbly suggest that the Paterno family needs to shut up and enjoy the proceeds of JoePa's ill-gotten estate. Or, even better, they should throw dear old dad under the bus (suggest: "We're horrified that Joe -- we won't even call him our father any more, but 'Mr. Paterno' -- allowed Jerry Sandusky to rape those children. We're shocked and saddened at the Freeh report and have nothing of substance to add to its almost certainly true and correct findings") and donate the Penn State contract settlement money to a charity that addresses child sexual abuse (suggest: "We've calculated that about $6 million in cash of Mr. Paterno's estate derives directly from his work at Penn State, and we are presenting a check today in that amount to RAINN, on the express condition that they do not name any funds, buildings, or legislative initiatives after Mr. Paterno. P.S. We are never speaking to the media again").

I mean, you are allowed to throw a family member under the bus, even your dad. When your dad protects, allows, and even enables child rape for years, you are allowed to throw him under the bus. You don't even have to wait until he dies.

Scaling up: Allentown School District versus Penn State

The Allentown (Penna.) School District has settled a lawsuit by agreeing to pay $825,000 to 4 plaintiffs who alleged that a 12-year-old boy sexually assaulted them at school, by getting them alone in bathrooms and then attacking them. The lawsuit asserts that the school's response to complaints about the boy, who leaders at the school knew had a troubled history, was "wholly inadequate" (WPVI-TV).

How much does that kind of settlement translate to the Penn State situation, where a predator with a known troubled history assaulted victims in bathrooms (Harrisburg Patriot-News)? How should it scale? Keep in mind that Jerry Sandusky was some 40 years older than his victims; his victims numbered 10 (at a minimum; that was the number in the criminal case); and Sandusky's rapes took place over years, if not decades, while the Allentown assaults spanned only a few months (PDF, p. 2).

The Allentown School District had an operating budget surplus of some $10 million in FY 2010-11 (PDF, see the school district's Finance Reports page); and its FY 2011-12 operating budget contemplates revenues of nearly $260 million (PDF). As I've mentioned before, Penn State has an endowment of over $1.5 billion (PDF); and its proposed FY 2012-13 operating budget contemplates general funds income of nearly $2 billion (PDF, see Schedules I and III).

How much should Penn State pay Sandusky's victims? How should Penn State scale up the Allentown School District's $825,000 for 4 victims to Sandusky's 10? Should it matter that there's a distinguishing factor here, that is, that the perpetrator in Allentown was another minor student, whereas Sandusky was an adult employee, or at least a colleague? Because that said, both institutions were mandatory reporters, whether literally or through the Clery Act, and both failed miserably in their legal duties -- not to mention their moral duties.

Somebody's "criminally negligent," but it ain't the parents

The Raw Story is having a field day with the unfortunate choice of words by conservative editor and pundit Kate O'Beirne of the National Review, who says,

My question is what poor excuse for a parent can't rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don't get why millions of school children qualify for school breakfasts unless we have a major wide spread problem with child neglect. If that's how many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems that are way bigger than -- that problem can't be solved with a school breakfast, because we have parents who are just [...] criminally negligent with respect to raising children.

O'Beirne is referring to the USDA's school breakfast program, which reimburses schools in cash for serving breakfasts to kids in need. Kids can get a free or reduced-price breakfast depending on where their family's income level lies on the federally-defined poverty scale. In fiscal 2009, of the 11.1 million kids who participated in the federal school breakfast program every day, 9.1 million got their breakfast for free or for a reduced price. The program cost $2.9 billion in 2009 (PDF).

By contrast, in 2009, the Department of Defense spent about $4.4 billion per month on the war in Afghanistan (PDF).

My point, and I do have one, is two-fold. One, obviously, reimbursing a school to the tune of $1.50 per hot breakfast served is not a very large expense. A program that costs, on a yearly basis, less than the cost of waging war for three weeks is not something the elimination of which will do much to reduce the federal deficit. And of course it's penny-wise, pound-foolish to make nutrition even harder to obtain for kids who are at-risk socioeconomically and academically in the first place, when it's well known that the better a kid eats, the better she'll do in school (click to page 2). So advocating for the end of federally funded free and reduced-fee lunches is just stupid on two levels: the savings wouldn't amount to anything significant, and it would create further academic and disciplinary problems among disadvantaged kids and the teachers and the other students around them.

My second point, though, is that, um, to tell the truth, I don't 100% disagree with O'Beirne's point -- very, very badly expressed -- that parents should give their kids breakfast, and it's not that hard. Now, I don't think it's "criminal" or "negligent." Rather, I think it's a lack of good old-fashioned home economics education. Because you know what, a breakfast of oatmeal and a banana is cheap and nutritious. Bananas are regularly 69 cents a pound and a paperboard canister of generic old-fashioned oats can be had for about $4.00. I don't mean a box of packets of pre-sweetened, flavored, instant oats; or a tin can of imported Irish oats; or a sack of organic, gluten-free, hippie-friendly oats; or paper cups of express-instant oatmeal. I mean a paperboard can of store-brand, non-instant, old-fashioned oats.

So if bananas are 69 cents per pound, and one banana weighs about a quarter pound; and if you use 1/2 cup of oatmeal from a $4.00 canister that holds about 7 cups of oatmeal; then you have a breakfast that costs about 18 cents plus 29 cents, or less than 50 cents per kid. Plus the cost of water and cooking energy, which is not completely negligible, but which adds at most a nickel to the calculus.

It's not the world's best breakfast. A growing kid wants and needs more than a half-cup (before cooking) of oatmeal and a single banana; most kids need some protein, like milk or yogurt or an egg or something, or else they'll get hungry long before lunchtime. But if you don't have much money, this is a cheap way to get calories and nutrition into a kid in the morning.

A destitute household may not have a microwave oven. But very, very few households are so desperate that they have no stove, whether gas or electric, or no electric at all for a crockpot (you can get a new one for $15) or a plug-in electric kettle (they start at about $15). I'm not saying that households that desperate don't exist in the U.S.; I'm saying that this kind of household needs more than a blog post on home economics.

And, no, I don't live in a blasted-out neighborhood in North Philadelphia, or an out-of-the-way hamlet in Appalachia with no jobs, tax base, or public services. We have heat in the winter and A/C in the summer; my daughter has her own room and her own bed; and I have the education and the skills to fill my pantry with cheap, nutritious foods acquired in bulk when they go on sale. I have a reliable safety net with my friends and family, and my ex-husband hasn't missed a support payment yet. So I can be accused of having a huge blind spot to the realities of feeding the kids when there is zero, and I mean zero, money in the house, and it's another week before the assistance check arrives. But I hope I'm not in the same place as the law professor who told me, when I was passed over for summer funding for a public-interest internship, that she knew where I was coming from because, she explained, she had briefly been a social worker in New York City. (I confess I lost my temper and asked her less than tactfully if she would like to tell my daughter that we'd be having spaghetti again for dinner that night, and probably for the rest of the summer as well.)

But in the end, calling parents "criminally negligent" doesn't help the debate. Ad hominem attacks deflect from the real point, which I presume -- but can't be sure because her comment was so stupid and inflammatory -- for O'Beirne was federal fiscal responsibility. And I want to stand by my real point that you can feed your family cheaply and nutritiously, if you educate yourself, avoid convenience and junk foods, and equip your kitchen with some basic tools. But when rich people call poor people "criminally negligent," people like The Raw Story get their panties in a twist about the wrong problem. It isn't rich people hating poor people. That is a problem, but it's not going to go away when websites fan the class-war flames by posting unflattering photos and quotes from Rush Limbaugh. The important problem is that statistic up there, which is, holy crap, over 11 million children in the U.S. use the school breakfast program. That is more than 1 in 10 American kids (Census.gov). And let me tell you, that's not just "urban" kids or immigrant "anchor babies."

You know what, I'll bite anyway. Kate O'Beirne, on what insane planet do you live where it is "criminally negligent" to make sure your children get fed? When your fridge is empty, when it takes two buses and a trolley to get to a decent supermarket, when your child's father hasn't made a support payment in years, and when it's another ten days to your loan disbursement or your paycheck or your TANF or SSI check, how do you feed your kids? If you're smart and lucky like me, your kid gets spaghetti for dinner every day for half a month, because I stocked up last time the generic spaghetti went on super discount, and I live in a home where I got the big cabinet in the marital property split and I don't have to worry about break-ins. But if I'd sent my daughter to get free breakfast from the city that summer, that would have made me a "criminally negligent" parent? What an abhorrent opinion. It's another case of poor people being damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Anyway, the rich people kind of got what they wanted. According to the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 pays for expanded access to the USDA breakfast program by cutting food stamp benefits by $59 per month. That's a lot of oatmeal and bananas.

Friday jukebox (early): Paul Simon

If the terrorists and shoe bombers and air cargo package bombers aren't using little kids as mules, then why is the TSA insisting on molesting children before letting them board ordinary commercial flights home from Disney World with their parents?



The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
These are the days of miracle and wonder

Finally! A trial for a Gitmo detainee: the Canadian child

Yay! The Obama administration is finally taking a Gitmo detainee to trial! Oh, wait, it's the brainwashed child soldier (and Canadian citizen) Omar Khadr. You remember him. When he was a young child, his father took him to Afghanistan, where he brainwashed him into fighting for al-Qaeda. After a firefight in eastern Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15, Khadr was found huddled in a bunker out of which someone tossed a grenade at some American soldiers. One of the soldiers was killed. The others identified Khadr as the grenade-thrower. So Khadr was shipped off to Gitmo, where he's remained the facility's youngest prisoner.

After seven-odd years of sitting in a cage, and about 18 months after his trial was supposed to start, he's going before a judge, "probably . . .  the first full military commission trial under President Obama" (Washington Post).

UPDATE: Father in latest DHS travesty case suicides in jail

The father of Charlenny Ferreira has suicided in county jail rather than face his fate in prison as the father of a girl who was sexually abused, beaten until she had a broken hip, and finally killed by blows to the torso that broke her ribs, which, left untreated, led to a collapsed lung and death by pneumonia.

The girl's stepmother, who has stated that Charleeni limped because she "had recently gained weight," is still in jail.

The newspapers don't seem to agree how to spell her name. The Inky reports "Charleeni"; the Metro reports "Charlenny"; the Daily News reports "Charlenni." (The criminal docket summaries I found don't include her name at all.) That the media can't get her name right makes the story even more pathetic.

How does Anne Marie Ambrose sleep at night? Why hasn't she discontinued DHS's deadly scheme of outsourcing its family supervision work to outside contractors? How many more Philadelphia children are going to die these miserable deaths?

DHS fails another girl, who dies after years of horrific abuse

Philadelphia's Department of Human Services has failed, again, to help a girl who had been reported to them. This time, it was Charlenni Ferreira, a 10-year-old dead of an untreated lung infection, whose body showed signs of years of physical and sexual abuse, including "a gash on her head that had been covered with a hair weave" and other "severe head trauma, bruising of her back, leg and torso, a recent fractured hip bone and injuries."

Her neighbors said she walked funny -- that is, the few times they saw her outside her house. Police are calling her injuries evidence of "years of horrific, tortuous abuse," including sexual assaults and clear indications of severe beatings.

Where was DHS? A school nurse reported Charlenni multiple times to DHS, but the DHS pediatrician didn't think that Charlenni's funny walk, multiple bruises, and swollen face indicated abuse. DHS sent one of its private contractors to check up, but they closed her case.

Sound familiar? DHS's trained-monkey outside contractor failed Charlenni during 2006, the same year Danieal Kelly was found starved to death and covered in bedsores after DHS outside contractor MultiEthnic Behavioral Health falsified documents saying that they had, in fact, checked up on her and that she was, in fact, thriving. This time, a group of trained monkeys called Family Preservation, a family support services program by Congreso, are the ones who closed Charlenni's case after a mere 3 months of investigation.

We're 3 years past Danieal Kelly's death. Why hasn't DHS gotten their act together yet? How much money are they pouring into these outside contractors, who clearly do no work at all? Who the hell is the pediatrician who decided that Charlenni wasn't being abused, and where is he or she practicing? How many more children are going to die on DHS's and that pediatrician's watch?

The real "death panels" are in Alaska

The real "death panels" and long waits for care are in Sarah Palin's Alaska:

A particularly alarming finding concerns deaths of adults in the programs. In one 2 1/2 year stretch, 227 adults already getting services died while waiting for a nurse to reassess their needs. Another 27 died waiting for their initial assessment, to see if they qualified for help.

The programs at issue provide in-home help for thousands of Alaskans with the basics of life, from medication to meals. The goal is to help people stay in their own homes rather than go into nursing homes or other institutions.

The services are paid for by Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor and the disabled, and overseen by the state Division of Senior and Disabilities Services. Individuals qualify based on income and need. Private contractors do most of the work. The programs cost about $250 million this year, with the federal government currently paying 61 percent of the bill.

In other words, while Governor Palin wasn't busy vetoing funds for programs that shelter runaway teens, her state government was funneling federal money to independent contractors who sat on their asses while low-income sick and elderly Alaskans got poorer, sicker, and older -- and died on her watch.

Reminds me of the Danieal Kelly child neglect case here in Philly: federal, state, and city funding for addressing child abuse and neglect is distributed to 3d-party contractors through DHS. DHS doesn't take care of children; they only administer the money and draw up rules and regulations that they don't enforce against the contractors until enough kids die that the mayor takes notice. Why various cities and states continue with this model is beyond my comprehension.

Friday jukebox: Bob Dorough

Friday morning meditative. I find it works best for me if I quit watching after the line, "The past, the present, and the future," and listen with my eyes closed:



That said, I only just now noticed that when he sings, "Faith and Hope and Charity," the woman who pops up as "Hope" is African-American.

invitation to a bar mitzvah

I just got an invitation to the bar mitzvah of the son of a good friend of mine. The ceremony is being held in a Christian church.

I think my head just exploded.

I mean, mazel tov and stuff. But, um.

Mini photo-essay: two kids sharing

I've seen this linked to in a couple of other blogs, and I thought I'd pass it along:

Two young communistskids share an Obama-Biden sign at an election night celebration.

The GOP's most famous high-school dropout (for today)

Brendan notes that Bristol Palin's fiancé, Levi Johnston of Wasilla, Alaska, has dropped out of high school to start an electrician apprenticeship in the oil industry:

Is this the kind of message McPalin wants to give the kids of America? That it’s OK to get pregnant as a teenager and OK to drop out of school? That’s the message of hopelessness and despair I associate with the rap music the Republicans always seem to be criticizing...

I'm likewise curious to understand how it's better for him to take off for an apprenticeship in the north fields, leaving Bristol Palin at home alone with the baby. Of course she'll get family support, but baby will miss out on having dad around, and dad will miss out on baby's early nurturing and development. I don't know what Alaska GED and teenage parenthood programs are like, though. Maybe there's no real option for him to stay in Wasilla and get his GED while actually co-parenting his child. But I did find an AP interview with at least part of the answer; it seems to indicate that Johnston is not planning on getting his GED.

Also, in addition to Brendan's point about the message that the McCain-Palin campaign is sending here, there's a point buried at the bottom of the article, in sort of a "isn't that cute?" type of coda:

What about Johnston's politics?

The young man said he wasn't an expert on politics by any stretch. Asked about Barack Obama, he replied: "I don't know anything about him. He seems like a good guy. I like him."

Johnston [who is 18] didn't register in time to vote, according to the Mat-Su Division of Elections Office in Wasilla. But he's still rooting for John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Relevant issues in Palin's candidacy

The Palin family dramas and medical histories are not relevant to whether Sarah Palin has a good enough head on her shoulders to be Vice-President of the United States. Rather, the following items are actually relevant:

• Her campaign speech was written ahead of time for her. Now, we all know that politicians don't write their own speeches, or if they do they have very good co-authors or editors. What's important here is that, not only did she not write her own speech, the speech that was written for her seems to have been prepared before McCain picked her. The one that the campaign pre-wrote for the candidate was "too masculine." There's a serious implication here, and not just that she wasn't the obvious choice. The bigger implication is that McCain was way out in left field making the choice on his own, maybe even on the spur of the moment. Looks as though McCain, and only McCain, thinks she's a good choice. Is it a good idea for only the Presidential candidate to have confidence in his back-up? Is this the kind of maverick decision-making the nation ever needs? Since when is reasoned deliberation a bad thing?
  
• When is Bristol Palin's birthday? When is the birthday of the father of her pregnancy? What's Alaska's rule on statutory rape? How come I haven't heard these questions asked yet? Is someone afraid to do the math?
  
• While the Palin family is pledging their "love and support" for Bristol and her unexpected blessing, Sarah Palin line-item vetoed over one-fifth of the funding for the Alaska branch of the Catholic organization Covenant House and its programs for unmarried pregnant minors. Passage House provides shelter and other help to pregnant teens who don't have the love and support of their family and the men who got them pregnant. Not sure if the funding cuts indicate whether Sarah Palin dislikes Catholics, or simply that she's a hypocrite who handles teenage pregnancy differently depending on whether the pregnant girl is someone she knows. (Setting aside the issue of giving state money to religious charities aside because, of course, if that were her actual justification, she would cut 100% of Covenant House Alaska's state support.) The image below is from the WaPo article linked to above and shows Palin's initials over the cut to Covenant House funding:
  

That, my friends, in black and white is what Sarah Palin truly thinks about unwed pregnant girls.

What to say to an unmarried pregnant minor woman

The following are polite, acceptable statements to a minor woman who you've just found out is pregnant:

• Congratulations!
• Best wishes for an easy labor.
• Has your [insert name of close female relative or good friend] set a date for the baby shower?
• I'm so glad you still have health insurance through your [insert name of parent]!
• Do you have a copy of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn yet? It's totally better than What to Expect. Let it be my gift to you.
  
• I've just subscribed you to hipMama magazine.
• Does your high school have a daycare? You know you have a right to graduate with your class, right?

And that's about it. Unless you also want to quote Allison Crews (1982-2005):

Girls like me have raised presidents. We've raised messiahs and musicians, writers and settlers. Girls like me won't compromise, and we won't fail.

Chinese girl lip-sychs singing in the opening ceremonies, and I'm OK with that

A lot of people are righteously angered that the little girl singing in the Olympics' opening ceremonies was actually lip-synching, because, according to officials, the real vocalist is not as cute.

You know what? That wasn't a terrible thing. It's show business. It happens all the time. The most "egregious" case is probably Marni Nixon, soprano and musical film star extraordinaire. Actors who have lip-synched to her voice include Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Natalie Wood, Deborah Kerr (at least twice), and Margaret O'Brien. Most of the time, she wasn't even credited.

Where's the outrage?

Oh, yeah, there is none, because it's show business. Both of these Chinese girls had their unique talents -- one is adorable and can skillfully lip-synch, and the other has a beautiful voice -- and the talents were put together for the show. Likewise, Audrey Hepburn could fake a Cockney accent just fine, but she couldn't sing her way out of a paper bag, as we all learned in Breakfast at Tiffany's. So, like the Chinese singer, Marni Nixon took one for the team (and a paycheck) by singing Hepburn's part in My Fair Lady. Nixon was and still is an accomplished actress on her own, as she demonstrated earlier this year by playing Professor Higgins's mother in a touring production of My Fair Lady.

Although, the conventional wisdom is that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences snubbed Hepburn for even a nomination for Best Actress as Eliza once word got around that she hadn't sung a single note herself in the film. But the scandal, if I may use that word to describe the situation, wasn't that Hepburn didn't sing her own songs. The problem was that Nixon's performance hadn't been credited. People were upset that the wool had been pulled over their eyes, not that Nixon had been considered too ugly to perform the role on-screen.

I think it's the same thing here. The issue isn't that the girl everybody saw wasn't truly singing. The only real issue is that nobody was upfront about it.

You know what was really worse, though -- when that little girl sang the French national anthem at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville. She was six or something, a sweet tiny little girl, and here's my professional translation of some of the relevant lines of La Marseillaise:

The bloody flag of tyranny has been raised against us! (Contre nous de la tyrannie / l'Étendard sanglant est levé.)

[Our enemies] are coming among us to disembowel our children and our families! (Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras / Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes.)

I drink your milkshake! I drink it up! (Qu'un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons.)

And that's just the first verse and refrain. Some of these lines are sung twice!

(Actually, I lied about that last line I quoted. The more correct English is, "May our neatly plowed fields slurp up the impure blood of our enemies.")

Where helicopter parenting begins

Katie Allison Granju, author of Attachment Parenting, on exposing your kid to germs and letting her get hurt every once in a while:

[R]egular, old, everyday germs are good for kids. So is regular, old dirt, disappointment, boredom, frustration, conflict, and the occasional playground accident. All of these help children to develop their own coping skills, creative and spiritual core, and sense of self.

When parents micromanage children's lives, overly investing themselves in their kids, everyone loses. Mothers and fathers lose themselves in their roles as parents, while kids never find themselves.

Yesterday's Stepford Wives are today's helicopter parents.

Though, unlike Granju, I don't regularly hang with anyone who would buy a stroller from Bugaboo ($760) or Peg Pérego ($400) or Maclaren, where parenting is a "lifestyle" ($200). We went through three strollers with my daughter. One was a hand-me-down and the other two were $15 consignment-shop specials. The last one wore out about the same time my daughter grew too big to ride in it.

Speaking of which, I live near a well-known historical area here in Philadelphia, so on some days I see literally hundreds of tourists -- and some of 'em have kids who are so big for their strollers that they're folded into them like frogs. I guess when I was a kid on vacation I complained as loudly as the next kid about having to walk around all the time, but c'mon! Kid turns 3 or 4, and kid can leave the stroller behind!

My point, and I do have one, is two-fold. First, I wish I had enough money that I could drop several hundred dollars on a childcare accessory that I would use for 3 to 4 years per child. If I did, my daughter's college fund (not to mention my IRA) would be much larger than it is at the moment. And second, I want to make it clear that I don't actually want my daughter to break her other arm when we go up to the mountains again later this month for vacation. Last year's tumble out of the apple tree was enough.

Accountability at Philadelphia DHS; with luck, 34 South 11th Street will follow

"If you are not prepared to take the action that needs to be taken, if you cannot keep up and stay on top of things, then you should leave this city government right now. We don't need you, and we don't want you."

Today, Mayor Michael Nutter announced that as of yesterday he's suspended 7 employees, all management-level, at DHS. The suspensions follow resignations and criminal charges arising from the Danieal Kelly case (do not read).

I don't think a lot of public employees in Philadelphia know what accountability means. I've worked at Family Court at 34 South 11th Street, and I've worked at City Hall. I use SEPTA buses and subways daily in town, and I use the regional rail to get to various suburban destinations a couple of times per month. Whatever kind of active dysfunction that could possibly exist in an organization, you find it in Philadelphia city government and the other regional authorities here. Whether Peter Principle, nepotism, institutional inertia, turf wars, resentment at other workers who make you look bad because they simply do their job while you sit on your ass and collect your paycheck and health insurance -- it's all here, often in combination in a single office.

No one ever gets fired, and a negative evaluation of a worker means nothing. Letters to SEPTA customer service must be placed in a specially designated circular file, for all the change they effect. Ticket agents are still rude and still can't do math.

And I hope you never have to try to get a Protection from Abuse order in Philadelphia. First, you go to 34 S. 11th St., where the security guards are unintelligible (or inexplicably rude when they are intelligible). You navigate a warren of corridors with misleading signage to find the correct waiting room, which smells of cigarettes because city workers smoke in their cubes behind the security door. You wait your turn and then fill out the form with a largely unhelpful and unsympathetic city employee -- note that a lot of women come in with limps and fresh bruises -- and then you wait. You wait hours for the paperwork to be transferred to the judge down the hall. In the meantime, the clerks smoke more cigarettes and the judge goes to lunch. If you leave, you may miss getting your paperwork back, and you'll have to start the entire process over again. If you stay, you can't eat, because no food or drink is allowed in the waiting room. Note also that a lot of women, along with their limps and bruises, must bring their children along with them. There's no nursery; the bathroom by the elevators is filthy and outdated; and you can't have food with you.

When you get your paperwork back, though, you don't have a Protection from Abuse order. You have to serve the papers on the person you're taking the order out on, so that he knows to come to court for the hearing where you're pleading for the actual order. Got that? You've been beaten up, and now you have to go find the abuser and personally serve papers on him.

Philadelphia is the only major city in the country that requires you to do that. Everywhere else, either you get the order right away because your bruises and your story are plausible enough, or you can serve the abuser by mail or the sheriff will serve him for you.

Why is there no electronic transfer of paperwork between the clerks and the judges? Why is there no judge or master seated 24/7 to hold hearings immediately? Why is there no nursery? Why is no food allowed in the waiting room? If food can't be allowed, why not have a cafeteria or vending machines? Why do abused women have to serve papers on their abusers in person?

Nothing at 34 S. 11th St. has changed in decades because there's been no accountability in Philadelphia city government. And the clerks and judges there don't want people to know how horrible the situation is, to the point where they won't let law students help abused women fill out their petitions for Protection from Abuse orders. Students are allowed only to give out information about shelters and agencies and listen to horror stories. And court employees come over to the student table and "test" the students by asking, for example, if it's possible to get a Protection from Abuse order against a rowdy neighbor. (Answer: no, you go next door to get a restraining order.)

Family Court at 34 S. 11th St.: Outdated facility, turf wars between departments, resentment at workers who actually do their job, and institutional inertia against improvement and change. Plus abject fear that people outside the building will find out how bad the situation is. It can't possibly be a surprise that DHS was -- and is -- any different.

I say "is" because yesterday's suspensions came from the mayor, when they should have come from DHS Commissioner Anne Marie Ambrose on the day she was hired. Ambrose wept during the grand jury indictment press conference. That's sweet. But what was she doing in June and July? She should have been firing people left and right. She should have fired every last person who was involved in Danieal Kelly's file.

Disney's kidding me, right?

Next year, Disney will be releasing an animated musical version of the old fairy tale "The Frog Prince." The company's original plan was to (1) use the title The Frog Princess; (2) make the girl an African-American servant to a young white woman; (3) name the girl "Maddy"; and (4) set the film in 1920s New Orleans.

First of all, recall that the girl in Walter Crane's "The Frog Prince" was a king's daughter. She was the youngest of three daughters, and she was the most beautiful. While the Brothers Grimm don't include siblings, in both versions, it wasn't the princess who had frog-body-image issues. But Disney, which apparently has been living under a rock since Song of the South, the intervening year of 1964, and Condoleezza Rice's becoming Secretary of freaking State, modernized and improved the story by making the girl a black chambermaid and using the working title of The Frog Princess.

Imagine pitching that with a straight face. She's a servant, see, and she's Disney's first African-American princess. It worked for Cinderella, right? An evil stepmother keeping her stepdaughter from going to the ball is just the same as a young white American woman ordering around her black servant, right? It's not like we're setting this during the antebellum era or anything.

So someone fussed that the girl's name, "Maddy," was too close to "Mammy," and now she'll be named "Tiana." Someone else must have fussed that, in the source story, the girl starts as an actual princess, not a servant, so now rumor has it that Tiana will, in fact, be a princess. Only she'll be from another country, since we don't have titled nobility here.

Query why Disney imports royalty for its version of the story, rather than make Tiana the daughter of a wealthy Creole family in New Orleans. Or why not put our heroine in the Harlem Renaissance? (Though, of course, using the word heroine begs the question of whether Disney ever creates heroines, as opposed to princesses.)

Don't get me wrong. It's great that Disney, for the first time in its 85-year history, is giving the princess role to an African-American girl. I mean, leaving the issue of the character's anorexic-Barbie proportions for another day, it's nice to see the studio recognize the largest ethnic minority in the country, now that they've portrayed brunette, blonde, redhead, auburn, American Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern princesses. And then, when they've strayed into non-princess stories, they've gone with dysfunctional Hawai'ian sisters without parents, orphaned witches, and, and, well, I was going to reference The Emperor's New Groove, but not only does it have only a vague ancient Incan setting, but also it's about a prince, not a princess. I'm left wondering how many other ethnicities Disney was afraid to snub before they decided it was time to give an African-American girl a tiara.

If nothing else, imagine the economic opportunity loss in the past 10-odd years since the characters have been marketed as a group of princesses!

Apparently, the next princess movies scheduled to come down the Disney pipeline are Rapunzel and then some Scottish tale. No Latino or -- forgive me -- Jewish princesses in sight.

One last point. Disney also changed the film's title to The Princess and the Frog, because apparently The Frog Princess -- and remember, in the source story, it was never the princess who was turned into a frog -- is offensive to the French. Is it just me, or is that only offensive to the French if you think the French are too stupid to understand that the word frog in this context is referring to a fairly tale first published by Crane in 1874 -- and the Brothers Grimm in 1812? The French know the story as well as we do, after all. France, being right next to Germany, has had access to German literature since long before a German invented the printing press. They call it "Le Prince grenouille," and it's so commonly recognized a title that someone's even named their hotel after it.

But I digress. Dig the teaser trailer for The Princess and the Frog:




Jumping Jehosaphat on a pogo stick -- that firefly! It's the toothless love child of Jiminy Cricket and Uncle Remus! This is "respect and sensitivity"?

Grand jury indictment of 9 after gruesome child neglect death in Philly

Do yourself a favor and do not read yesterday's grand jury indictment (263-page PDF with pictures). It's a case about the parents and social services workers of a 14-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who was found dead, starved, covered with bedsores, and probably eyebrow-waxed, in a windowless bedroom during a 2006 heatwave in Philadelphia.

Honestly, how many more kids have to die under the watch of DHS and its trained monkey subcontractor, MultiEthnic Behavioral Health, before the organizations are keel-hauled and replaced? Poor Joshua!

Telling 13-year-old girls to wax their faces is not OK

When Rush Limbaugh called 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton the "White House dog," it was not classy.

When John McCain called 18-year-old Chelsea Clinton "ugly" in 1998, it was not classy.

When April Winchell gives Lourdes Ciccone Leon, a 13-year-old adolescent, a hard time for having bushy eyebrows and some hair on her upper lip, it's not classy. I mean, pick on Lourdes's mother, Madonna, all you want. She's an entertainer, she's a celebrity, she continues to seek celebrity, and she works out so much that the veins on her arms bulge out freakishly. She'll turn 50 this year, so it's fair to needle her about dressing as if she's still 25.

But her daughter Lourdes is 13, and she's gotten double-whammy of southern European genetics. Until she gets older and decides to depilate a little bit -- and who knows, maybe she'll choose to go natural -- she's a kid who's got dark, thick, and very, very noticeable Mediterranean hair. Does Winchell think Lourdes doesn't already know that?

I have only half the Mediterranean genes that Lourdes does (one of my parents is northern European, the other, wop), and I started going crazy self-conscious over what I thought was the world's biggest unibrow . . . at age 13. Like most American girls, I've had body issues since adolescence that persist in one form or another to this day. No young teen girl needs yet another jackass promoting unhealthy, unrealistic, patriarchal standards of beauty.

Not to mention the dogpile in the blog post's comment section: dozens of basement-dwelling, undersexed men picking on a girl and telling her to get her face waxed.

Winchell defends her hateful post in the comment section by saying that it's Madonna's fault, because she "allow[s] her to be photographed in public over and over again" and she "insist[s] on putting her on display in the media." There's no mention of the paparazzi's hand in Lourdes's being photographed over and over again. Instead, April's conclusion is that Madonna is failing in her duties as a mother because she does not "deal with the facial hair." So Madonna would be a better mom if she made Lourdes wax, shave, or bleach her face before she left the house? A 13-year-old girl? Or maybe the answer is to never let Lourdes leave the house at all, since stepping out the door means displaying her to the public. That's it! Children of celebrities, according to Winchell, leaving their homes constitutes displaying themselves to the media.

Apparently, if celebrities insist on letting their children exit the house from time to time, they must be waxed, shaved, bleached, primped, and made up as if they were going to be on the cover of Redbook. (Or, in Lourdes's case, Highlights for Children.) But in any event, I fail to understand how not taking 13-year-old Lourdes to a salon for a waxing makes Madonna a bad parent.