As easy as it is for us to take speech for granted, we all in our hearts know that the faculty of speech is a wonder for the fact that it happens at all. That’s why parents usually start losing it when their child hasn’t started speaking at the right age. Nothing about a speech [...]

Take the case of Temple Grandin, the courageous autism survivor who has a movie based on her life coming out on HBO soon, with Claire Danes in it. According to the story, with a lifetime of sensitive care from her family, she has improved, learned how to be grow out of disturbing behavior like constantly [...]

Alzheimer’s is a really frightening disease, not just for the way it can reduce a normal functioning person into practically a zombie, but also for how easy it seems to fall victim to it. There are perhaps 5 million Alzheimer’s patients in America. About half of them, have just been diagnosed. Anyone who is in [...]

Children snoring is normal when they do so infrequently. Children who are between one and nine are known to snore. Studies show that three to twelve percent of them snore. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is normal.
Obstructive sleep apnea or OSA is a serious medical disorder. Constant snoring can be a harbinger of this [...]

Simon Romero of the New York Times reported from Bogota, Columbia, Thursday on the surprise turn in the case of Lori Berenson, the young American woman (now with “baking skills”) convicted in 1996 of aiding the violent Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a Marxist terrorist group in Peru. She’s now out on parole in Peru, and Romero’s story and headline suggested that maybe everyone should just get over it: “Over 14 Years, an American Inmate and Peru Itself Found Ways to Transform.”

When Lori Berenson was jailed in Peru on terrorism charges over 14 years ago, she was a fiery young leftist from New York enmeshed in a shadowy Marxist rebel group, stunning a war-weary nation with her clenched fists and defiant statements in support of revolution.

Now that Ms. Berenson, 40, has been granted parole from a women’s prison in Lima, Peru’s capital, both she and the nation that imprisoned her have changed in significant ways. Though her past still looms large, prison officials and fellow inmates now talk about her baking skills, her teaching music to cellmates and her devotion to her 1-year-old son, Salvador.

Resentment still festers over Ms. Berenson’s role in that violence, a sentiment that will be hard to avoid given that she has been ordered to remain in Peru while on parole.

Nearly 70,000 people died in 20 years of war with the nation’s rebels. And while Ms. Berenson maintains her innocence in connection with the terrorism charges, a Peruvian tribunal convicted her in 2001 of collaborating with the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement by renting a safe house and scouting for the group in preparation for a foiled plot to take members of Peru’s Congress hostage.

“What indignation,” said Peru’s vice president, Luis Giampietri, after hearing of the plan for her release. “The laws here are applied with a double standard.”

Ms. Berenson, while having mellowed somewhat during her long years in prison, holds a different view, contending that the Peruvian authorities violated her right to a fair trial during closed military proceedings in 1996, and then deprived her of due process rights in another civilian trial in 2001 when she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Romero glosses over the fact that Berenson has never denied being part of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and is not apologizing for her affiliation today. In a TV appearance before her trial Berenson shouted: “There are no criminal terrorists in the M.R.T.A.; it is a revolutionary movement!”

Romero noted that “Ms. Berenson does not hide her leftist convictions” and quoted her mother saying “I don’t think she’d be a Tea Partier.” (Of course not: Tea Partiers aren’t violent.) Romero then complained of the stigma around Bersenon, who has been “branded” a terrorist in Peru’s newspapers. Imagine that.

But many challenges await as well. Television crews descended on her neighbors-to-be in Lima, some of whom expressed disgust at the prospect of living near a “terrorist,” as she is still branded in Lima’s newspapers. As part of her parole, she must report every 30 days to discuss her work experiences and cannot consume alcohol. She is also expected to be barred from leaving Peru until 2015, when her sentence expires.

Has it dawned on the MSM that the only thing that would have carried any weight today would have been Joe Sestak unequivocally stating that he wasn’t offered the Sec. of the Navy job?  He didn’t.  Sure, Pres. Obama’s mouthpiece issued a denial.  But if there was any way under heaven that the White House could have strong-armed Sestak into flatly stating that no one offered him the Navy post, it would have happened. It didn’t.

Instead, all Sestak says is that Pres. Clinton offered him some measly advisory board position, which he rejected.  And indeed, Sestak tells a reporter that Clinton told him that "Rahm Emanuel" had mentioned the possibility of an advisory board position.  So we know Emanuel was in the mix. Sestak is quoted as saying that he only had "one phone call" with Pres. Clinton.  But he never said he didn’t subsequently hear from Emanuel or some other senior Obama aide.

Sestak’s statement in no way excludes the possibility that Emanuel or someone else in the White House subsequently sweetened the deal with the Secretary of the Navy job offer.  

On today’s Hardball, Andrea Mitchell dismissed the notion that there Clinton might have gone back to Sestak with a better offer: "I doubt that very much" she opined. Mitchell could be right: it could be hard to turn a former president into a bag man on such a seedy level.  But when will someone in the media put the simple question to Sestak: OK, so you turned down Clinton’s advisory board offer.  Did he or anyone else ever offer you another job?

“Eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration removing regulations” has made it so “now the oil industry is too big to regulate,” former Time magazine Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Margaret Carlson fretted on Friday’s Political Capital show on Bloomberg TV.

Defending Barack Obama against the notion the gulf oil disaster is “Obama’s Katrina,” Carlson, a columnist for Bloomberg News, argued on the weekly Friday night program hosted by Al Hunt:

The government is prepared for natural disasters, as in Katrina, if government is willing to act – which it wasn’t in Katrina. Corporate disasters are another matter. The government doesn’t have the equipment or the expertise. They can only oversee it.

And by the way, you know in a natural disaster government has an agency. We don’t have an agency. What we had was eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration removing regulations. Now the oil industry is too big to regulate.

Her confusingly-titled May 27 column for Bloomberg, “That Damn Leak Can’t Blame Obama for Katrina,” begins: “Big government? Bring it on, to borrow the words of our previous commander-in-chief.”

Well hallelujah!

After 8 months of being in a silent lockdown mode on the subject of whether the White House offered the Democrat Senate candidate from Colorado, Andrew Romanoff (photo), a job if he would remove himself from the primary race, the Denver Post has finally gotten around to reporting on it again following their initial September story. By strange "coincidence" the Post’s sudden willingness to once again broach this subject happened just hours after their bizarre silence on this topic was pointed out by various blogs on the web including the NewsBusters blog of your humble correspondent yesterday.

The first Denver Post mention in 8 months of this allegation comes from the blog of staff writer Michael Booth who sounds irritated with Republicans for even focusing on this situation:

Republicans trying hard to make Joe Sestak’s job-trading allegations stick are dragging Colorado Senate challenger Andrew Romanoff into the argument.

Much of their ammunition comes straight from a Denver Post article last September by Washington correspondent Michael Riley. The Post article cited top Democratic sources saying the Obama administration “suggested a place for Romanoff might be found” in the executive branch. The implication was that the job would be available if Romanoff dropped any challenge to appointed Sen. Michael Bennet for the Colorado Democratic primary. 

Yes Michael. The Denver Post did break the story…and then went into lockdown mode on this subject for months until yesterday, hours AFTER their reticence to report about it was pointed out in the blogosphere. 

And now my favorite line from the Booth blog:

 Romanoff today declined to comment on the issue.

A much better story in the Denver Post about the Romanoff job offer allegation came hours later in an opinion piece from columnist David Harsanyi:

You might be able to ignore Sestak, but another similar story makes the plot far more plausible.

None of this is exactly shocking stuff — but I was actually slightly surprised to find out that job offers of this variety were illegal. Yet, it is one thing for an administration to "urge" someone to make room for a preferred candidate and quite another for it to use its power to offer (or even discuss) a taxpayer-funded position as a payoff.

Don’t take my word for it. Axelrod says it’s a breach of law.

So welcome back, Denver Post, to reporting on the Romanoff job offer story…even if you had to be reluctantly dragged into doing so by the folks in the blogosphere.

The June 7 Time magazine cover blared, “Why Being Pope Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry,” and the article explored the sexual abuse that has occurred in the Catholic Church and how the church might overcome the scandal. But the authors, Jeff Israely and Howard Chua-Eoan, left little doubt that they viewed Pope Benedict XVI as already guilty in the sexual abuse scandal.

The article tried to build that case. The pair wrote, “Over the past two months, the Pope has led the Holy See’s shift from silence and denial to calls to face the enemies from within the church. What is still missing, however, is any mention of the Holy Father’s alleged role in the scandal.” The story was very one-sided – filled with abuse victims and critics of the church, but included virtually no experts defending the pope or the Catholicism.

Israely and Chua-Eoan presumably based their article in part on a New York Times report alleging that as archbishop, Benedict protected the church over children by transferring priests when abuse occurred in the United States, Germany, and Ireland. Another Times article accused Pope Benedict XVI of allowing priests to remain in Wisconsin after they abused deaf boys, although this is report has been strongly questioned.

Continuing to negatively portray Pope Benedict XVI, they wrote, “Ratzinger, both in his role as the local bishop in Munich from 1977 to 1981 and as the overseer of universal doctrine in Rome, was very much part of a system that had badly underestimated and in some cases enabled the rot of clergy abuse that spread through the church in the past half-century.”

It didn’t stop there. Israely and Chua-Eoan claimed that the Pope “mismanaged the assignment of an accused pedophile priest under his charge.” They also wrote that as archbishop, he “personally authorized the transfer of an abusive priest.”

They did manage to acknowledge that some of Pope Benedict’s policies have caused a “decline in new incidents of clerical sex abuse.” The piece also ignored the impact of Catholic doctrine on the whole crisis since Catholics view confession and forgiveness for sins as a sacrament. The article also left out the secular push to return molesters to their previous roles, assuming that psychiatric treatment had cured them.

None of that mattered to Israely and Chua-Eoan.To them, Pope Benedict XVI is clearly not innocent until proven guilty.

The authors also suggested how the pope could repair the church. They recommended he give a mea culpa, an “acceptance of personal guilt.” The pope did apologize for the sexual abuse in Ireland, but that wasn’t good enough for Time. The article complained he only apologized for the “errors committed by the hierarchy” and not for himself.

A penance was also suggested. But they sneered, “But what kind of penance would a pope with fingerprints on the controversy have to perform?”

While they did credit the Pope for meeting with victims and answering reporter’s questions, it was clear he was supposed to do more. Israely and Chua-Eoan explained, “The pope has yet to address this period of his career explicitly. But if he is to satisfy victims and their families, he will have to do so one day.”

The authors, however, couldn’t resist sarcastically asking if, “Or is this just a more effective public relations strategy?”

Israely and Chua-Eoan did make it known they didn’t just blame Pope Benedict’s for the crisis – it was the church’s structure too. They explained, “The Catholic Church believes it is Christ’s representative on earth, with all the sinlessness and omnipotent authority of its Savior. The statesmen of the church have always known that to preserve that authority, the realm of the Popes could not simply be an otherworldly City of God.”
The Time story was just the latest of many media attacks on both the pope and the Catholic church. During Holy Week, the broadcast networks featured 26 stories about Pope Benedict’s assumed role and 69 percent of the stories assumed that he was guilty.

Your thoughts?