Since it's passage in 1989, all Missouri County Prosecutors have refused to prosecute, and have instructed police officers not to take criminal reports of, violations of this law.
The Kansas Legislature recently turned down a law to allow paternity testing in cases where the payer is not the father.Man jailed for not supporting someone else's child2006 Article - 7 states with lawsPaternity Fraud Bill Provides Relief for Some Men - Florida2009 Article - 30 states with lawsMissouri governor signs bill allowing paternity challengesCitizens Against Paternity FraudParent Trap? Litigation Explodes Over Paternity Fraud
It should be noted that even though previously states didn't allow paternity testing once the man was paying child support, it was allowed in custody challenges the prove he had no right to the child. The drawback of that is the woman than forfeits her support claim, but than she can file a retroactive claim against the bio dad. None of what she gets from the bio dad is required to be paid back to the ex boyfriend or husband that not only supported the child, but also raised the child.
June 28th, 2009 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
On June 20th, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a press release describing a new "public service campaign...promoting fatherhood." The press release directs readers to the website www.fatherhood.gov, and breathlessly promises a public service announcement by none other than President Obama himself. Needless to say, that was an offer I couldn't refuse.
When I went to the site, I discovered it was the home of something called the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse. And, much as I would expect from a site with that name, I found pablum - the shallowest, most out-of-touch-with-reality ideas of fatherhood and the barriers to father involvement imaginable. Obama's 30-second PSA is skin-deep, essentially an exhortation to fathers to take their children to the zoo and help them with homework. Michelle Obama's message is no better.
The message is simple; fathers are good for children, therefore, responsible fathers will spend time with them and everyone will be better off. Surrounding this message on every side is the subtext of "responsibility," i.e. if a father isn't actively involved in his kid's life, he's at fault. He's just irresponsible and, if he cared about his child, he'd man up and do the right thing. In short, it's the standard narrative of male perfidy that omits all mention of family laws and court practices that doggedly separate fathers from children. And there's no mention of maternal gatekeeping that marginalizes fathers, sometimes from the first hours of a child's life.
But...
Look further on the site. Go to the library of publications and a whole new world opens before you. The publications the site links to aren't many and they're not up to date, but they paint an entirely different picture of fatherhood and the many barriers fathers face in trying to establish and maintain relationships with their children. There are scholarly publications on maternal gatekeeping, programs to enhance non-custodial parents' access to children, an article by Kathryn Edin about young, poor fathers and others.
In short, once a visitor to the site gets past the bumper-sticker phrases about responsible fatherhood, there's a lot of real information by (dare i say it?) responsible social scientists to be had.
And the juxtaposition of the two is mind-bending. It's the same thing we see every day. We know the truth; we read the massive amounts of social science that shows us the incontovertible fact that fathers strongly desire close relationships with their children, but are thwarted by a bewildering array of laws, policies and practices that seem to be based on a complete ignorance of well-established facts.
To listen to the president of the United States intone the mantra of responsible fatherhood, cheek-by-jowl with the real information about everything we do to prevent that very thing verges on the surreal. The site neatly, if inadvertently, catches the deeply contradictory nature of our public discourse and our public policies on fatherhood.
A powerful story from Jordan Monroe on NPR about Parental Alienation. Another example of how difficult it is for fathers to remain a part of their children’s lives in the face of mothers’ hostility and a family law system which too often acts as an angry mother’s enabler. His sad childhood remembrances also shed light on the way a child processes losing a mother or father after a divorce or separation.
Standing In My Father's Shoes
by Jordan Monroe - June 19, 2009
But after that day, my mother and grandmother didn't make it easy for my dad to see me. I remember asking myself all these questions: Where is he? Why doesn't he come pick me up? Doesn't he know where we are?
My grandmother made her opinions clear. She didn't like my father. "Your daddy ain't never done nothing for you," she would say whenever I mentioned his name. Well, he didn't give me anything for my birthday, I thought. Maybe she was right.
What I didn't know then is that I would come to understand my father when I became a dad. My longtime girlfriend and I had a baby when we were young: I was 21 years old. A few years later, we separated. I went from kissing my daughter goodnight and being woken by her jumping on me in the morning, to dropping her off at her mom's house and giving her goodnight kisses over the phone
My daughter's mother seems to resent me the same way my grandmother resented my father. When I started noticing my daughter developing a bad attitude toward me, I heard my grandmother's voice in my ear: "Your daddy ain't never done nothing for you."
Standing in my father's shoes, I was able to see things more clearly. My grandmother's opinion about my dad was just that — her opinion. And it was shaped by her own dysfunctional relationship with her father.
I'm determined to redefine fatherhood in my family. My daughter adores me, and her love isn't based on what she thinks a father should be, it's based on what her father has been — there for her.
When we spend a weekend together, she often says, "I love you." But it's the look she gives me that eternally confesses her feelings. I look at my father the same way now that I know he was thinking about me all those years we were apart. I no longer see a man who did nothing for me my whole life, but a man who has always loved me.
After all, he's my father; just as I am hers.
A study ordered under the Clinton Administration, and conducted by the US Depy of Health & Human Services was to demostrate that non-custodial fathers did not care to be involved with their children. The study titled, "Survue of Absentee Parents" was to be a fifty state study. After just five states were done, preliminary results were reported that 60% of non-custodial father filed enforcement actions wuth the courts to see their children within six months of receiving their visitation orders. But, within five years, ended up losing all contact with the children.
As a result of these preliminary results, funding for the remainder of the study was withdrawn. (See the letter at the end of the preliminary results report)
"I salute the commitment to fatherhood evidenced by Jeffery Johnson and the other organizers of the 2009 National Rally for Responsible Fatherhood, and I salute Obama for his involvement. However, there’s an obvious omission both in the rally and the article: many fathers, including African-American dads, are not able to play a meaningful role in their children’s lives because of the children’s mothers’ interference and the indifference and/or hostility of the family law system."
Time Magazine
By Margot Roosevelt - Sunday, Nov. 11, 2003
The Pickens Plan: For those who would like to become an active participant in a solution for our nations energy needs I urge you to join with T.Boone Pickens in his quest for a cleaner planet through alternative energy.
Also see Green Wave Energy: Green Wave was founded by Mark Holmes and was formulated for viable alternative energy solutions. Green Wave Energy is promoting state-of-the-art energy-saving products and services throughout the country.
Green Wave Energy understands alternative energy technology will become “main stream” when
Call 949.645.1701 for information on how Green Wave Energy can help you save the planet.
Alternative EnergySource: David Apperson
url: http://veterans.barackobama.com/page/community/tag/alternative-energy
To view this blog post with music and Barack Obama messages taped on his podcast in the past access this link
By Daniel Kurtzman, About.com
"They say I need to be seasoned; they say I need to be stewed. They say, 'We need to boil all the hope out of him -- like us -- and then he'll be ready.'" (Watch video
********************************
'Eye Without A Face' by Mark Bellinghaus, Copyright 2008
Life is all about signs...seeing the signs....understanding the signs...acting upon the signs
--Mark Bellinghaus
Extract & Photo caption/description posted on OUR MARILYN BLOG - you can find the entire blog article here: blog.ourmarilyn.com/2008/08/31/marilyn-monroe-would-have-voted-f .. and also here: my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/markbellinghaus/gG5W75 Ella Fitzgerald & Marilyn Monroe, in 1955 (above) and in 1962, (below), the year Marilyn Monroe passed away. In 1955, when racism was still a big issue in the United States of America, Ella Fitzgerald became the first African-American to perform at the Mocambo, after Marilyn Monroe had lobbied the owner for the booking. The booking was instrumental in Fitzgerald's career. Marilyn would promise the owner that she would appear every night (and be on time), and this way also fill the house--and she did, she was there every night, and she filled the house and: she was always on time! Their close friendship lasted for many years and Ella would sing Marilyn Monroe's famous 'My Heart Belongs To Daddy' in honor of her wonderful friend Marilyn Monroe, who died almost 34 years before she passed on in 1996, at age 79. Barack Obama Quotes: 'They say I need to be seasoned; they say I need to be stewed. They say, 'We need to boil all the hope out of him -- like us -- and then he'll be ready.' 'I have nothing to hide, I enjoy being myself. I'm not going to change who I am just because it's Halloween." -appearing as himself on Saturday Night Live as part of a skit that featured Hillary Clinton dressed as a witch at a Halloween party * 'It's like I was shot out of a cannon. I'm so overexposed that I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse.' 'Hillary is not the first politician in Washington to declare 'Mission Accomplished' a little too soon.' Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to President John F. Kennedy, who was a Democrat
As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm going to be a father sometime next March. Due to my disability, I can no longer work, so the title of "stay-at-home dad" has been thrust upon me. My wife and I had agreed long before I became disabled that whenever we decided to have children, whichever of us was making the least would put our career on hold to stay home with the kids. Of course, at the time, I was making quite a bit more, so it was pretty much accepted and expected that it would be my wife staying home. It wasn't that I didn't want to stay home with the kids, but I guess it did feel a bit more "natural" that mom would be the one at home with the kids.
Life, as always, has many ways to throw you a curveball, and, as usual, it threw one at us. It wasn't a pleasant curveball, to be certain. I'd also said that I wanted to be able to retire early some day too. I just never intended it to be like this.
Now with the baby on the way, I've been doing what any responsible parent does with their first child - getting prepared. I've been hitting the internet to see how other stay-at-home dads handle the experience.
What I found not only was unnerving, but quite frankly, it pissed me off. It doesn't have much to do with the election, but it does have a lot to do with the cultural atmosphere of America today.
Last Sunday, my father and I drove down to Union, MO, to go fishing. Since I had been thinking about the Friday night presidential debate all weekend, a political discussion in the car was inevitable.
I informed my dad that his thoughts on Barack Obama were, in fact, false. I told him that Obama is not Muslim and several of the quotes my dad received in emails about Obama were twisted, mutilated, and taken completely out of context.
My dad is an insurance agent and basically talks to senior citizens day after day about their health care, their children, and occasionally their personal lives (if they're willing to share any information, my dad is not, in any way, invasive).
Most of the senior citizens he has talked to are very strict, conservative Republicans. Unfortunately, I believe that their opinions have affected my father's vote. My dad didn't see the presidential debate on Friday night, so he still supports McCain. He hasn't really done any research whatsoever on either of the candidates, he's just seen several commercials and has obviously accepted the propaganda thrown at him by senior citizens.
Anyway, before we went fishing, my dad had a brief discussion about Obama with Shirley, the lake owner. Shirley told my father that Obama was going to take guns away from hunters, whether they had a license or not. I didn't want to interrupt the conversation, but I couldn't believe my ears.
Luckily, today I sent my dad the interview between Barack Obama and Field & Stream. Hopefully Obama's views on gun control will sway my dad's opinion on the upcoming election.
By Sydney H. Schanberg
This article appeared in the October 6, 2008 edition of The Nation.
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.
Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as McCain has made his military service and POW history the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War have also turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.
The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a Special Forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington and even sworn testimony by two defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number--probably hundreds--of the US prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.
The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible. The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally produced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate "Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs." The chair was John Kerry, but McCain, as a POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.
Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or tried to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi Politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in the 1990s. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the Politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting reparations from Washington.
Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. Finally, in a February 1, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid. The North Vietnamese, though, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored (it never was). Hanoi thus held back prisoners--just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. France later paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.
Two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, secretaries of defense under Nixon, said in a public session and under oath that they based their conclusions on strong intelligence data--letters, eyewitness reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the issue: "I think that as of now that I can come to no other conclusion...some were left behind."
Furthermore, over the years, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) received more than 1,600 firsthand reports of sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 secondhand accounts. Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed "credible" in the agents' reports. Some of the witnesses were given lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these witness reports. Yet the DIA, after reviewing them all, concluded that they "do not constitute evidence" that men were still alive.
There is also evidence that in the first months of Reagan's presidency, the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being held by Hanoi. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush, CIA director William Casey and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee on June 23, 1992.
Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors, and no information was released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert Caldwell, obtained the portion of the testimony relating to the ransom offer and wrote about it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen testified. He said he told Reagan that "it would be worth the president going along and let's have the negotiation." When his testimony appeared in the Union-Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel, this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story, saying his memory had played tricks on him.
But the story didn't end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981. The Senate POW committee voted not to subpoena him to testify.
On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee's public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.
The devices were primarily motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. But they also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground--a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang--could manually enter data into the sensor, which were regularly collected electronically by US planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge from the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors--as US pilots had been trained to do--"no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US POW/MIAs who were lost in Laos." Alfond added, says the transcript: "This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE."
McCain, whose POW status made him the committee's most powerful member, attended that hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel's work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of "denigrating" his "patriotism." The bullying had its effect--she began to cry.
After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned and stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don't know anything about those 20 POWs.
The committee's final report, issued in January 1993, began with a forty-three-page executive summary--the only section that drew the mainstream press's attention. It said that only "a small number" of POWs could have been left behind in 1973. But the document's remaining 1,180 pages were quite different. Sprinkled throughout are findings that contradict and disprove the conclusions of the whitewashed summary. This insertion of critical evidence that committee leaders had downplayed and dismissed was the work of a committee staff that had opposed and finally rebelled against the cover-up.
Pages 207-209 of the report, for example, contain major revelations of what were either massive intelligence failures or bad intentions. These pages say that until the committee brought up the subject in 1992, no branch of the intelligence community that dealt with analysis of satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the distress signals US forces were trained to use in Vietnam--nor had they ever been tasked to look for such signals from possible prisoners on the ground.
In a personal briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me privately that as it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners, those prisoners became not only useless as bargaining chips but also a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men--those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture--were eventually executed. My own research has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few--if any--are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing was conducted "off the record," but because the evidence from my reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)
For many reasons, including the absence of a constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans' groups, very few Americans are aware of McCain's role not only in keeping the subject out of public view but in denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been alone in this hide-the-scandal campaign. The Arizona senator has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon's and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief and National Security Adviser, among many others (including Dick Cheney, who was George H.W. Bush's defense secretary).
An early and critical attempt by McCain to conceal evidence involved 1990 legislation called the Truth bill, which started in the House. A brief and simple document, the bill would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence said that the "head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency."
Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus by McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later a new measure, the McCain bill, suddenly appeared. It created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge--only the records that revealed no POW secrets. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today.
McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which was strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties against "any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person." A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and report the incidents to the Pentagon.
McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That's an odd argument to make. Were staffers only "willing to work" if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.
McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the work of the "bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists." He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as "hoaxers," "charlatans," "conspiracy theorists" and "dime-store Rambos." Family members who have personally pressed McCain to end the secrecy have been treated to his legendary temper. In 1996 he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.
The only explanation McCain has ever offered for his leadership on legislation that seals POW information is that he believes the release of such information would only stir up fresh grief for the families of those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the scores of POW families I've met over the years, only a few have said they want the books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest say that not knowing is exactly what grieves them.
It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo--to try to break down other prisoners--and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed a school and other civilian targets. The Pentagon has copies of the confessions but will not release them. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a nonredacted copy of McCain's debriefing when he returned from captivity, which is classified but can be made public by McCain.
In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his propaganda value (his high-ranking father, Rear Adm. John S. McCain II, was then the commander of US forces in the Pacific). Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide. Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace."
McCain still didn't know the answer when his father died in 1981. He got his answer eighteen years later. In his 1999 memoir, the senator writes, "I only recently learned that the tape...had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father."
Does this hint at explanations for McCain's efforts to bury information about prisoners or other disturbing pieces of the Vietnam War? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing rekindles his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions. But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of someone's mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: if American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that's something the American public ought to know about.
I am proud to say my grandmother's blog 85andchange.com is off to a roaring start! She has made two posts already, is working on her third, and is toying around with the idea of making a video that we can post to her blog and to You Tube. People seem to have gravitated to her site to find out more about this 85 year old blogging grandmother and they seem encouraged by her message of change. Her site has already receieved almost 500 hits!! UNBELIEVABLE!! So... the point is... the message is spreading. And even an old lady who isn't very mobile has found a way to reach out and pass on her hopes and dreams and a positive message of change to hundreds of people who may not have otherwise taken the time to listen to someone her age. Please circulate a link to her site to anyone you think could benefit from reading the words of a woman who has been around a while and who has some words of wisdom to pass along. Go Granny Gobama!!
85andchange.com
DC FESTIVAL 2008Having recently attended the 2008 DC festival, including the F4J march to the White House, I am full of vision and inspired to send this message to parents and the critics of our cause.The most obvios factor that many critics of parent's rights fail to recognize is that other civil rights movements, such as those for blacks, women, gays, etc. represented a distinct social group who were fighting against discrimination in society, and thier success was achieved in large degree through valient efforts of the legal communtiy in securing those rights across our nations courts.http://www.familycourtreports.com/serendipity/archives/525-DCFESTIVAL2008.COM-Fathers-4-Justice-March-Its-not-about-the-choir-anymore!.htmlDC2008 included representation from a variety of groups from non- custodial mothers, to parents and victems of DCF/CPS, survivors of parental alienation, and in no small measure F4J and a variety of father's rights orgainzations.What outsiders fail to recognize is that we are united under the same goal of parental rights, and our representation includes all class and groups of people working together under the same cause to uphold parental rights. People of all ages, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social, economic and educational diversity are counted amoung our membership.What the legal community fails to realize is that they themselves are the problem that we are trying to redress. Parental Advocates of all variety are not seeking the courts to resolvediscrimination in society as in notable civil rights movements in the past. It is the courts themselves that are the problem. We are parents who have been criminalized by corrupt courts and scheming shysters and other fiendish ghouls in the child custody industry who trample our rights in order to feed off of the carnaged of destroyed families and parents desperate to see thier own children.We are parents who have been harassed and harried, scorned and villified, bankrupted and inflicted the worst of legal harassment and deliberate emotional distress by lawyers and judges who deny even the existance of the most fundamental liberty interest, which is the custody, care andcompanionship with one's own child.Despite decades of repeated pleas in the most humble and revert respect, we are still without rights in the courts of our nation which was built upon the principals of liberty that we profess.
We are the victems of endless fraud without redress, as the court itself conducts the orchestra of fraud in thier despotic fiefdoms of child custody industries. We are the victems of extrinsic fraud not on, but by, the courts, with endless pointless hearings that serve only to line the pockets of the actors in this absurd kabuki circus.Despite the relentless efforts of the vampires and vultures of custody courts to shame and denegrate us, we stand in defiance, and have never submited to thier tyranny and oppression. Despite the demogoguery, and hysteria of thier witch hunts which they conceal behind the viel of tattered mantras such as 'best interests' we are greater than our oppressors. Despite thier efforts to impoverish and bankrupt us with daunting legal and visitation fees, extortionate child support fees based on a fantasy of imputed income and pointless mandatory expert, counseling and evaluation fees which line the pockets of our oppressors - we are more noble than our bloated andvillanous masters.Jesus, who's mercy is without limit and who's justice flows as rivers, who loved all people, and above all the innocent children, Jesus who was also persecuted, shamed and taunted, striped naked and beaten and suffered the torment, ridicule and scorn of wicked judges of his time, I pray that you will now give courage to all parents that suffer the loss of children by cruel courts, and mean and vile scoundrals who torment our people. Take courage all parents and rise up now together, united and take back what is ours already, it only having been stolen by the corrupt and unjust.When ordinary law abiding citizens are criminalized, victemized and relentlessly harassed by a fundamentally dysfunctional child custody system we represent the small tip of the iceberg exposing the fundamentally corrupt judiciary and legal system which has lost the last shred of any integrity that it pretends to retain when it denies parents the absolute, inviolate, sacred, and God given rights to the care of thier children over the destructive interference of corrupt and dysfuntional government. And we are also the tip of the spear that will take down that corrupt system.To the corrupt scheming lawyers and judges, counselors, and quacks who bargain and sell ou children like animals, grubbing for thier extortionate fees and fraudulent funding. To those traitors of liberty who bully and bribe, in thier slick suits, and new cars and posh offices bought bymangling vague laws to steal our children from us, for greed and profit, I say: Beware. Beware the thing that is coming. Beware the risen people who will take what you would not give.
YES WE CAN. CHANGE.
I’ve been active in political and issue campaigns for the last 20 years, but everything changed for me two years ago, when I became a father of Rosie.
We didn’t enter into the possibility of parenthood lightly. Rosie would be born, after all, into a world wracked by multiple wars and severe climate changes, in a country drowning in debt, disasters and despair. To consciously attempt to bring a child into such a world requires one to believe that a better, restored, more peaceful and humane world is possible. Such hope, someone once said, is a job requirement of parenthood. So is action.
The feeling of love that opens wide when a child is born surely is a force more powerful than any other. I know this is true for mothers and fathers everywhere. We all share a deep desire, fueled by that love, for our children to be safe, healthy and able to fulfill their potential. So when I see or read an account of a child killed or maimed by a bomb in Iraq, or dying tragically of a preventable disease in Africa, I can comprehend the enormity of their parents’ sorrow.
Shortly after Rosie was born, I started to hear talk of Barack Obama running for President. The more I listened, the more I heard words that spoke to my concerns, and hopes, as a father -- words like these, delivered in a foreign policy address in Chicago in October, 2007:
I'm running for the presidency of the United States of America so that together we can do the hard work to seek a new dawn of peace and prosperity for our children, and for the children of the world.
If our country provides education or health care to a child, we will likely earn the gratitude of their parents for life. If, on the other hand, we kill a child (the Iraq War has killed tens of thousands of children), we create sorrow, anger and increase the odds that our children and we will be the target of revenge. To prove this, imagine that the roles of American and Iraqis were reversed, that your child has been helped or harmed by the benevolence or violence of a more powerful country. Compassion and generosity would do more to "win" the "war on Terrorism" than bombing and killing ever will. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "you can kill the hater, but you can't kill the hate."
The solution? Here is a suggestion from Sen. Obama, given as part of his “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia:
In the end, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
It turns out that the answer, the Golden Rule, is the same as it ever was. It’s just that now the stakes are higher than ever.
So here’s a call to all you mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles to join together in doing unto ALL children, as we would have their parents do unto our children. Let us raise our children to see all children as part of their global family; as friends to meet, not enemies to fear or kill. Let us demand that our governments pursue peace, and use money saved from war to take care of all children and our planet. Let us demand that the United States join with virtually every other country of the world, including Iraq and Iran, in providing paid maternal leave for new mothers!
In the most recent issue of Time magazine, Barack Obama wrote an essay titled “Changing Hearts and Minds, in which he said:
We can’t just talk about “family values.” We actually have to stand up for policies that value families.
Amen. It’s time to redefine family values indeed. Let’s start by electing Barack Obama, a father whose policies would actually value families for a change.
John Friedrich, A Father for Obama
p.s. I’m hosting a “Families for Obama” Rally (and play date for Obama-kids) at the Children’s Museum of Denver on Tuesday, August 26th . For more information, or to RSVP, please visit:
Maya Soetoro-Ng, Barack's younger half-sister, was in Florida last week talking to women voters about Barack. Maya attended a “Women For Obama” reception at a downtown restaurant in Tampa last Thursday night. She spoke about what is was like growing up with Barack, how much he is a family man and revealed his softer side.Here's what some of the local press had to say about Maya and the event...
From the Tampa Tribune:
Barack Obama is a dedicated feminist who "lives surrounded by women," his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, told a mostly female crowd at a Women For Obama event in downtown Tampa on Thursday. Soetoro-Ng told the crowd that Obama helped rear her and now is rearing two daughters. "Those girls are what make him a feminist," she said. ..."I want to focus a little bit on women because that's one of the reasons I'm here is to remind women that he is their advocate," she told the crowd. "I want to tell you about some of the strong women in our lives. "I really want you to be able to get to know the man." She did that largely by telling family stories. Her older brother "really was the man in our lives" after their parents divorced, when the two were growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, she said. She said he taught her to ride a bicycle, made her practice harder math problems and start an exercise program, took her on college visits and even gave her her first women's health book - "Our Bodies, Ourselves," a 1973 guide that came out of the women's movement and focused on female sexuality, health and hygiene. When she was older, she said, he scrutinized her dates. "He definitely gave them a hard time. He definitely counseled me on which to discard and which to keep." She said Obama approved of the man she married. "I don't think I could have otherwise." Soetoro-Ng is the daughter of Obama's mother and her second husband, an Indonesian, and the only other child of their mother. Obama has other half-siblings from his father, a Kenyan who went back to Africa after leaving Obama and his mother. When Obama grew older, she said, he went to Africa to reacquaint himself with his father, "a really important journey for him." She told the crowd he "dared to love his father despite his father's imperfections," and wrote about it in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father."
From the St. Petersburg Times:
Maya Soetoro-Ng leaves no doubt she's a proud kid sister. ...She says he's a feminist, who bought her the first women's health/sex ed book she ever read, Our Bodies, Ourselves. And he helped her "figure out which boys to discard." Joined by state Sen. Arthenia Joyner and former state Democratic Party executive director Ana Cruz, both Clinton-turned-Obama supporters, Soetoro-Ng talked to the crowd as if it were composed of her closest girlfriends. "I'm giving up all his secrets, because I just have to," said Soetoro-Ng, 37, launching into a story that offered a rare glimpse of Obama's interaction with his daughters. She explained how the Obama family spent the Fourth of July, Obama's daughter Malia's 10th birthday, at a Montana motel. Malia teased him about spending her birthday on the campaign trail. And at one point, Obama started to tear up, because he noticed how his daughter had sprouted up, tall and lean. "He's not a soft man, but they touch him so," said Soetoro-Ng, who is married and has a 4-year-old daughter. ...She talked about how she struggled with the absence of her own father and learned from watching Obama struggle with a similar absence from his. She said it was important for Obama to visit his father in Kenya and "to dare to love his father in spite of his father's imperfections." "He came back. Wrote a book. Moved on. No lingering bitterness," Soetoro-Ng said with a hint of jealousy in her deep, rich voice. "He doesn't have issues, my brother." He taught her how to ride a bike. He encouraged her to exercise. He urged her to work on math problems more appropriate for grades above her. He took her to neighborhoods "I never would have ever gone to otherwise." He helped her get her first job, teaching swimming. "He helped me to be a better version of myself and to push myself and he really did such a good job of combining high expectations with compassion and support, and I feel like that's what he's doing for the country," she said. Soetoro-Ng teaches world culture and U.S. history at La Pietra, a high school for girls in Honolulu. She also teaches at the University of Hawaii's College of Education. This is her first visit to Florida. She said its mugginess reminded her of Hawaii. In an interview before the speech, Soetoro-Ng acknowledged that she was trying to help her brother resolve any perceptions that he has a problem with women. "I want to invite people who formerly supported Hillary Clinton into the dialogue and reassure them of the fact that Barack is going to be a very strong advocate for women in the years to come," she said. "It's a matter of getting to know him and his policies better. In this case, familiarity will breed love."
